...empt to become more?
-Theseus fires one more time. CTA-026-A's face is completely unrecognisable-
CTA-026-A: What will you be when I'm gone? Will you even exist when I've gone?
-CTA-026-A crumbles into dust. Vanishing-
AUTOMATED MESSAGE
CTA-026 is not a known anomaly. Automated systems have designated this file for deletion within a twenty-four hour period from all servers.
The Minotaur read through the book, tracing it's hooves through the pages. It closed the book shut - 'CTA-026' - and placed it back on the shelf next to an infinite lines of bookcase of every other possible version of CTA-026 that will ever exist. For that was just one universe, the 288485858th Universe.
It walked through, it traced it's hooves on each book, feeling the stories emulating from them. A universe where CTA-026 was an illogical house that teleported across the planet, another where it was a genetic experiment that led to the second coming, another where it was a time travelling train, another where it was a school building and controls the perceptions of the people who enter it.
It moved away from those bookcases and stepped through planes of reality to find the receptionist area. A skinless figure in a white scale-y hood was circling the hands of a human waiting to leave.
"Is it giving you trouble?" The Minotaur asked, ready to erase the skinless receptionist if need be. "No. But thank you." Theseus said, pulling his hands away as a Ouroboros symbol was now tattooed on his palm.
"And using this I can travel?" Theseus asked, making sure. "It maps you as above stories. You can travel to every universe, every plane, every dimension, even the stories in them. You could travel into one of the comic books, and the comic book in that comic book, and the movie in that, and the novella in that. Infinity." The Minotaur explained.
"So, you lied? About the whole 'what will you be now that I'm gone thing'." Theseus asked, looking up past The Minotaur's purple cloak and to it's face. "Your story was a means to an end. So I could become this." The Minotaur explained.
"And create the library. Pulled your own library and increased it to be this, right?" Theseus pointed out. "The library would've come around without me. I believe it created me so I could create it." The Minotaur theorised, recalling back to time ago. Once upon time he had explored creation, searched through all the 'biggest libraries in the universe'; The Library of Babel, the Plume Coteries' Library, etc.
Maybe he was just in an unseen part of those libraries, maybe every library was one in the same. Who knew.
"So why did you save me?" Theseus asked. "You were a plot device for me to get here. In the final moments before I became this, I saw everything you could've been, everything you will be. You didn't deserve to end like that." The Minotaur admitted, saving Theseus from that universe was last minute. Or more like last second. Millesecond. Picosecond.
"So you're giving me infinity as an apology? Allowing me to explore the infinite multiverse?" Theseus asked, looking to the gates. They were huge, the doors were going into the clouds, maybe even as tall as all the bookshelves. They looked like the gates to Heaven.
"I'm giving you infinity because it is what you want." The Minotaur said, simply. "Maybe you will return one day. Maybe tomorrow, maybe so long into the future nobody even remembers numbers used to exist because they lost meaning. Maybe never. Infinity is big." The Minotaur continued, raising it's hoove up as the gates unlocked, echoing thoughout the library (And across the multiverse, right to the furthest edges, to the furthest branches of Aether).
"Can I die?" Theseus questioned, he couldn't decide if it would be better if he could or couldn't. "Everyone dies." The Minotaur said, turning back and walking into the bookshelves.
Theseus turned back to the gates. He looked at it all. Infinity. Every possibility of every idea. He stepped through and fell. Maybe he was Lucifer, or Beelzebub. Maybe he would forget who he was and one day take the form of a Minotaur and wind up right back here.
Theseus fell. And he didn't know if he'd stop. The Minotaur walked through the bookshelves, and it didn't know if it would stop.