Anselm's POV
The 3 p.m. work of printing books was as meditative as cooking German cuisine in the tavern. 5 copies of one of Edgar Allan Poe's famous novels and 3 copies of a Shakespearean play were now in the shelves of a bookstore run by one my fellow death creatures as the Fahrenheit 451 fireman who took the last name of the original owner (Porto was the dead owner's last name).
The rest of the afternoon was spent on my duty as a Fahrenheit 451 fireman who used the flamethrower, not to destroy books, but to snuff out staged fires with the strange and cleverly made flame called Ultra-Blue Cold Flame to snuff out the orange flames.
Now, as a reward, at 8 p.m. and skipping dinner for this, I attended the nightly, festival-to-avoid-the-fear-of-the-dark street festival near my city home (had the Neoclassical style of architecture). There, Dirk Aubertin, a death creature as a fellow Fahrenheit 451 fireman from Aachen, waved his hand at me. "Hey, Anselm!" he said to me enthusiastically.
Dirk had a day job as a scribe in a Charlemagne-era scriptorium and a bus driver in the city.
He, like me, was also among the ones in here Mainz whose cries in the formerly charred museum after burning the books and the printing presses on display and killing the humans was so loud it vibrated the Gutenberg Museum floors and columns. Also like me, he adopted the last name from another dead human who had been a cleaner; but the difference is that the dead person was a cleaner in a medieval Carolingian scriptorium in Aachen here in Germany. Now since then, he was known as Dirk Aubertin.
Furthermore, when in that traditional and restored stone walls of the scriptorium, he wore his fireman suit while copying texts by hand, with a quill pen at some times on parchment and 16th century cotton paper, and on other times, with a ballpoint pen on modern spiral-bound and casebound notebooks, but he swapped it with an attire of a bus driver in his work shifts as a bus driver in Aachen, especially on weekdays. Plus, he was now a devout Protestant Christian in the Lutheran tradition and fervently attended Aachen's Lutheran parish every Sunday.
Now, tonight, we traversed the crowded streets together while purchasing ice cream, German pastries, and fries. "Hey, have you heard the Phoenix of Penance from our Spanish fire brethren?" Dirk asked. I looked at him. "Oh, I did. They said that Kal-sama had corrupted the number 451 and the profession as a fireman so bad they had turned their flamethrowers to each other to cleanse the darkness associated to them. And, this is what I found so unbelievable, the smoke from their eternal essence had become the Phoenix, before becoming the books that filled their homes and libraries."
"Yeah, ja, that one." Dirk laughed while holding his ice cream. "That was unbelievable, right? They even added a new, strange flame known as Ultra-Blue Cold Flames. That was a specially crafted fire that hungers the orange flames with the flames that is said to be colder than snow and as blue as a sapphire."
"Oh, that was something born out of desperation and a need to cleanse the things Kal had corrupted," I replied while munching on my fries. "I already used the Phoenix Self-Immolation method this morning before I hit the printing presses for my book order."
"Wow, me too as well!" Dirk responded while glancing at the clear night sky. "I also did that this noon in Aachen, and you know what I restored? 2 copies of a Carolingian manuscript. A Psycho-Pass Enforcer from Tokyo and a Censer from the Library Wars sector of Yokohama paid a premium for the shipping fee."
"Haha, worth every cent, I guess." I laughed.
Dirk also mentioned that he will copy a few books the next day after he had arrived back in Aachen as we leaned back on the wooden bench.