Helga's Quest for Satisfaction

Helga took a deep breath and opened her eyes.

The book was still there.

She had been staring at it for hours, waiting to see if it would disappear when she blinked.

It didn't.

A smile flickered across her face as she turned away from the shelf and sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall.

"Oh my god," she whispered to herself, "I'm not crazy!"

Her smile widened, and then she began to laugh.

She laughed for a long time, until she was out of breath, and then she laughed some more.

She started to cry with laughter, for no reason at all except that it felt so good to laugh like this again; not since the days before it all went wrong.

She shook her head, trying to stop laughing but unable to do so.

Then someone spoke behind her: "Are you alright?"

Helga froze mid-laugh, her mouth still open in a silent gasp, and slowly turned around on the floor to look up at the man who had just spoken to her. He was standing in the aisle between two shelves of books, looking down at her with an expression of concern on his face. His gaze flicked from her face to the book in his hands, which was obviously what he had been reading before he'd noticed that she was sitting on the floor laughing hysterically next to a bookcase in his library. Then he looked back at her again. "Uh... are you okay?" he asked uncertainly.

Helga forced herself to stop laughing long enough to answer him: "Y-yes." She swallowed nervously and tried again: "Yes... I'm fine." Her voice broke halfway through the word 'fine', and she began giggling again as tears leaked from her eyes.

The man winced and glanced over his shoulder at the other patrons in the library as though worried that they might notice Helga's state too; but all of them were either engrossed in their own activities or absorbed in their reading, and none of them seemed to have paid any attention to Helga's outburst at all. As far as they knew, nothing unusual had happened at all; but he looked back down at Helga anyway before turning and walking away up toward one of the librarians' desks where he could ask someone else if they knew what was wrong with this woman who had just wandered into his library while loudly laughing like a lunatic while sitting on the floor next to an old book that nobody ever read anymore because it wasn't even relevant anymore.

Helga watched him go with a mixture of fear and relief: fear because she realized that she couldn't let anybody else see this book if they didn't already know about it... or anything about it really... but also relief because he hadn't seemed inclined toward violence, which meant that she probably wasn't going to be beaten senseless by him when he inevitably returned with police officers or something else equally awful who would take away what was hers after beating her senseless themselves or something equally awful like that!

She jumped up quickly and ducked out of sight between two rows of bookshelves on either side of the aisle where she'd been sitting when he approached her; then she crouched down behind one of them just as another patron walked past carrying a large stack of books toward one of the study tables near where Helga had been sitting before she'd started shrieking like a madwoman about whatever insanity had overtaken her mind today; apparently now it was old books as well!

She listened carefully for footsteps heading back toward where she'd been sitting before deciding after a moment that whoever had seen or heard her must have already left by now because there was no sign of them anywhere nearby anymore; then she peered around the edge of one side of the bookshelf with one eye just far enough around it to see where everyone was without anyone being able to see how close she was standing to those shelves; and then she waited impatiently for several minutes while scanning through every movement within her range of vision until finally noticing once again a man approaching from behind where she had been previously sitting on the floor while laughing like some kind of deranged lunatic. He looked around cautiously once more before stepping up into view beside the row of bookshelves near where Helga stood watching him intently; then he reached up onto one shelf beside him and slid out an old leatherbound volume with gold lettering embossed across its cover that said "Reichhaltigeren Vorrat". He pulled another old book off another shelf beneath it and handed both volumes down toward someone else standing at the end of another aisle nearby; then he withdrew from view behind those shelves once more after glancing around quickly once more just in case anyone had seen him handing out these ancient texts for free instead of charging money for them as would be normal for such works in such a place as this!

Helga smiled broadly -- even laughing hysterically like that hadn't