 What is the Wanderer's Library? Most of you have probably heard of it, and know it's a library that the Serpent's Hand uses it, and we don't. And that's about it. The Wanderer's Library is a library containing almost every book ever written, and many that haven't been written yet, and many that will never be written. We've got some footage for this. Give me a second to queue it up. Alright, more than a second. Gonna keep talking. We won't be showing you the outside of the library because, as far as we know, no one has ever seen it. The library is a place outside space. Extradimensional is the technical term, though not very descriptive. The library isn't on our world, though it is connected to it. We reach it through ways. Ways are a network of basically magic portals that take you from one place to another. They're scattered around the world. The foundation contains a number of them, mostly classified as anomalous items. A few networks are classified as SCPs. The library is a nexus of ways. The largest one on Earth, a way that connects to the library is called a door, because they attach to doors within the library. Pretty simple. Using the ways isn't so simple. Okay, some of them are. Each has a trick to it, to make it work. Some of them you just need to be invited in. Others require some ritual. Sneeze on a shadow, recite a code word, befriend a fairy, follow your pet cat, kill a sheep, play the harmonica as you walk through the doorway. Sometimes these are called knocks. A way can be anything you can picture as a door, or anything like a door. A cave, an archway, the back of a truck. Technically, every shadow or mirror could be a way, just not a useful way. Some of them are just art pieces. I once used a picture of a door to enter the library back when I still could. Some of them are corridors between the stars. They're more common than you'd think, too. At least a few in every major city. We know the locations of a few, but we know that many more exist. If someone from the Foundation or the Global Occult Coalition tries to use ways, they either don't work or the library redirects them into dangerous places. Other planets, barren hostile lands, outer space. Someone reported that one literally opened into hell. You can take that for whatever you think it's worth. More commonly, though, they just funnel us into the library archives and make us into librarians. I'll explain that in a moment. We've got the footage working. The footage shows two men and one man walking through a forest. One woman wears a skimpy Godzilla costume. The other woman wears a full plate armor. The man is dressed in a red costume covered with plastic flames. So this is a fairly typical question. Oh, this particular way requires you to dress up as something you're not. So cosplaying. These are our agents, by the way. In plain clothes, I guess not. Plain clothes. Godzilla is Agent Jones. The knight is Agent Liu. The last one's here today, Agent Navarro. The one in the, um, flaming outfit. Say hi to everyone, Agent Navarro. You know you want to. The footage shows the three agents walking between two trees which have grown closely together. As they pass between the trees, they vanish into thin air. The footage cuts out. Anyway, these are three of our members of Sigma 3 who can access the library. Out of the entire foundation. Generally, only members of Sigma 3 can get into the library, and only some of them can at that. We think the library has some way of knowing who's going to use the library to target its patrons, and not just in the present, but in the future. Yeah, the library seems to have some limited ability to see the future. How? Your guess is as good as mine. This is, by the way, why Sigma 3 doesn't help the rest of the foundation contain people in the library. If they did that, they'd simply be kicked out. And then we'd lose our in to one of the most important anomalous locations in the world. The footage resumes. It shows Agent Jones, Liu, and Navarro. Now in ordinary clothing, standing in a huge hall, surrounded by massive shells of books going up, skyscraper high, too high to see the top. In the hallway are many tables and many people, well over a hundred, at least. As the footage plays on, it becomes obvious that not all the people in the lobby are human. One person passes in front of the camera, their faces blue and covered in spikes. A 30 foot tall walking carpet sits down at a nearby tail, with a book in each of its three tails. This is the main hall of the library. It's even bigger than it looks. This is actually a pretty empty day, usually there's at least a few hundred people around at any given time, and it can hold thousands just as comfortably. Spaces are deceiving in the library. For example, in the main hall it takes half a day to reach the back walls, yet the space you've crossed is at least the size of a continent. Oh, and that's just the main hall. The library has many wings. Some of them are small, only the size of a city. It just goes up from there. Some of them are actually built into forests, and some of them have their own skies. As the footage continues, Agent Navarro appears to try to converse with a robed humanoid figure. The figure has no mouth. Where its left hand should be, there's a chain connected to a glowing brass lantern. Uh, yes. That is a librarian. Yeah, that one has no mouth. This is because being a librarian is a punishment, usually. There are a few voluntary librarians and they look particularly strange, but we will be seeing those on this recording. The ones with no mounts are docents. They guide people through the library and enforce the rules of the library. They are scary as hell. Just one can take out one of our paramilitary squads all on its own. With ease. When they've been involved in containment breaches, which has been incredibly, incredibly rare, the damage has been massive. And they're not even the library's biggest defenses. The other two common librarians are archivists and pages. You can see some of the archivists in the background of this shot here. They're at the large desks to the left. They are attached to their chairs. They have no legs. And you can't see it from this angle, but they have no eyes. Don't need them to read, apparently. And something like a human spider scuttles across one of the shelves above Agent Liu's head. She doesn't seem startled. That's a page. They take care of the books more directly. I've never seen one touch the ground. All of these used to be people. Most of them were human. Now they're not. See, the library has rules. Don't damage books. Don't steal books. Return books on time. Don't damage the library. And don't harm those within the library. If you break the rules too egregiously, you are forcibly made into a librarian. And yes, a number of Foundation agents are trapped in the library right now, serving out sentences as librarians, given the nature of their offenses. If we're lucky, they'll get out in a few hundred years. Question in the back? No. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do for them. We don't even know which librarians they are. More questions. Alright, let's pause the footage. The footage pauses as Agent Jones appears to be flirting with a floating, regal-looking mermaid, surrounded by a stack of green books floating in orbs of water. Alright, more questions. You in the, um, shirt? Go ahead. Can we use Sigma 3 to retrieve books from the library? Um, no, not as such. First, the library already has its eye, metaphorically, I assume, on us. If we start making plans like that, even seriously start entertaining them, we might lose access to the library. We have to rely on whatever information can be filtered through our Sigma 3 agents, whatever they can film, copy down, etc. Believe me, that's better than nothing. Second, I haven't yet talked about library cards. To check out books to take them out of the library, you need to have a library card. The library gets a copy, and you get a copy. On that card is a magical signature that counts as your true name. For the majority of you who don't get the significance of that, we don't have time to get into the true naming business. But what that means is, anyone with that card can cast spells on you as if you're willing. They can do nearly anything to you if they're good enough, and the library certainly is. Library cards also confer the protection of the library, to a certain extent. Killing card holders is part of why the Global Occult Coalition got kicked out of the library. They were smart enough not to kill anyone in the library directly, though they did end up killing. Sorry, I digress. Point is, the Coalition used the library to monitor dissidents, and execute them once they left. And you can't cheat the library. I bring that up as another reminder. This is why Sigma 3 cannot, ever, help the rest of the Foundation contain anomalies using the library. We can get death cults and such like, because they're also targeting other library members, and because other library members are helping us do so. But even then, we have to be cautious. Let's keep going. The footage resumes. Navarro, Jones, and Liu head past more massive, endless shelves, and walk into an atrium. There's a coffee house set up in Congrushly on the edge of a field of wildflowers. People perch laptops atop stacks of books. Liu gestures animatedly at an empty blue couch that looks like it was designed for something much larger than a human, and probably with a different limb arrangement. Another question. Does the library have free wifi? Okay, I know you're joking, but the answer is actually yes. The library has almost anything you can think of. People can live their entire lives in the library. They typically don't, but it's possible. A massive, towering behemoth lumbar interview. Like a cross between a sauropod dinosaur and a kraken. Many eyes fix on each small humanoid in turn as it passes, blotting out whatever strange light source emanates from the top of the library atrium. Its eyes seem to fix for an especially long time on Jones, Navarro, and Liu, but then it passes onwards, vanishing through an archway that's much too small for it to fit under. And that is one of the library's bigger defenses. This one didn't appear when we invaded. Worse things did. It might be some kind of librarian. It might be something else. Who knows. They call it the Elephant God, even though it's not much like an elephant. The size I guess. The footage ends as the three foundation agents gawk at the monster's disappearing tails. And that's all we have for today. Keep in mind, all this is only a fraction of the library. The parts that can be easily accessed from Earth. The library has what they call archives, which include the inner workings of the library, as well as the wings library where the humanoids like us don't visit. None of the Sigma 3 agents who can get into the library have access to the archives. Library doesn't like us enough, but we have people working with us who can go there. A very few, mind you. The archives are not entered lately. They have a manticore in there. And the archives are where things really went sideways when the foundation forced their way into the library. The strange ways, the boiler rooms, the guards on the roots, the, I'm sorry, it's hard to talk about some aspects of this place without sounding like you're speaking fairy tale. Anyway, like I said, no one really knows what happened when the foundation tried to take the library. Alright, I really, really need a break. So let's all have dinner and then come back for our final discussion about magic. Find a file. To learn more about the SCP Foundation, subscribe to SCP Orientation Today and turn the notification bell on so you don't miss any of our videos.