Ezra had accidentally explained the situation to the assistant head of his department (he had accidentally explained a lot of things lately), and she had agreed to let him switch to a night shift until he found a solution, provided he wasn't working on anything that had the potential to go catastrophically wrong while he was alone in the Department of Mysteries at midnight. This meant he had his afternoons free to keep digging into the problem, after using his mornings to try and sleep where he could.

He'd been at the library for a while now, but he'd only really been awake for half of it. He was skimming the third chapter of Smirke's Outward Presentations of Internal Magical Maladies when the librarian approached. He followed her finger to the title she indicated with a frown.

"It wasn't a very useful one, anyway," he admitted. Much of the specific research was interesting, but the conclusion he seemed to be working towards was flawed — Ezra knew from experience that curses could be very real without having a physical manifestation, which Smirke thought was a necessity even if it was a slow development. That, or — well, he suspected that if Smirke had studied him, he would have simply come to the conclusion that Ezra was mad. It wasn't that far-fetched.

"Have you read all of these?" he asked curiously. Librarians read a good deal, he was sure, but this was... something of a niche interest area.

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