The Typewriter:
Referred to alternatively as the Goddess of Stories, the Library, or Story. She was born when the first story was told, and in her opinion everything has been downhill since then. She utterly loathes the progression of storytelling formats, interpreting each one as being more constricting to her person. Oral storytelling was flexible, she was free, the stories changed a bit every time it was retold. The same was true of theatrical performances, except instead of constantly morphing over time, most performances deviated from a single set script. Novels lacked this, they were always the same story, and television really crossed the line, leaving not even room for interpreting a character's appearance. She loved humanity in those early days, the ways they sang and danced. She wants them to be like that again, she justifies her desire to bring humankind back to their beautiful infancy by declaring that they've been corrupted, that their tendency toward modernization is destroying the world, and destroying each other. A lot of it is just that she misses her brother, the God of Art, who time and redefinition has seen growing distant from her.
She is the Library, the entire complex is her physical body, and it is constantly changing and shifting at her whim. The Typewriter is something like a mouth, through which she communicates with the Blacksuits, who she created to be her servants and attendants, barely seeing them as people. In the modern day she finds herself struggling between her love and nostalgia for what humanity was, and her hatred of the beasts she sees them as now. She seeks to keep the Blacksuits opressed for utilitarian reasons, but also to make them feek as opressed as humanity's advancement has made her feel.
Murmur:
The current head librarian and servant of the Story Goddess. He is eternally bound to the will of a typewriter bell that sounds through the corridors, leading him to his next task. Like all of his brethren, he is programmed to show little emotion and dedicate himself exclusively to his work, his story is long, and as mundane as reading the dictionary. Unlike his brethren, he is truly enamored by his work, he craves the monotony of the predictable clockwork of the library, the silent contemplation of shelving books and keeping records. He is flawed on one account, a slight feeling of sympathy for the one creature in his long life he has seen defy the library. A fondness for the martyr.
His magic item is the Lamp of Truth, which allows him to easily navigate the shifting halls of the Library.
Astaroth:
The second in command of the Library. Her story is nearly as long as Murmur's and almost as bland, if not for the fact that it were marginally more tense, just a bit more aggressive in tone. Her mind is filled with an unwavering loyalty to the library, an unmistakable sense of loathing for those around her, and the impression that she thinks she could run this library better. Stricter, more efficient. Her tenseness makes her twitchy, quick to anger, and harsh in punishing her inferiors. Her anger and paranoia makes her more alike to the Martyr than she would like to admit. She has an obsession with the Typewriter beyond simple pragmatic loyalty, almost closer to lust.
Her magic item is Chekhov's Gun. Her tendency to stick to the background contributes to her power in the long run.
Bifrons:
The former head librarian, preceding Murmur. He aged out of his role, and was delegated to the Castouts, where he now wanders. He is set on working to organize it for the good of all the suffering workers within it. He sneakily pilfers goods from around the library utilizing his Keys of Janus. He makes the best of the situation he is in, but is truly quite miserable because of it. He yearns for the days he spent at the top of the library, watching over his inferiors. He hopes that perhaps someday his goddess will notice all the work he's put into organizing and leading the Castouts and return him to his rightful place at her side.
Slate:
The mythologized leader of the Blanks. Of course, she is not an actual leader, and that's not her actual name, and she's probably not even a real person, just an idealized fiction representing the purest possible Blank, one who ceased to live upon birth, never having made an actual decision to do so, and having just not come to life like the other Blacksuits did. She's the idea of a stillborn Blacksuit, still standing still all these years later, her outfit bleached white by the passing time, leaving her perfectly pure and blank.
Sepulchre:
Known also as Jack Ketch by the Typewriter, and called the Reaper Man by the Martyr. A manifestation of the Library's fears. He is death, the end times, the apocalypse. Humans always see him when they look into the future. People live in constant fear of the day the doomsday clock strikes midnight. Surely it is sometime soon, looming just up ahead. He lives on the edges of society, seen only in the corner of the eye, known only by the ominous prophecies he leaves littered about the library, promising that his arrival should be soon. And yet, it never comes. He is said to have been present when the Martyr was killed, and when the Blood War was lost. He is consistently described as a figure in black robes wearing an executioner's hood and a noose around his neck. What most don't realize is that in spite of his ominous appearance, he is just as terrified of the end as everyone else. As a being representing expectation of the end, the eventuality of the end actually arriving is just as much a death sentence for him as it is for anyone else.
The Head Office:
The resting place of the head librarian and their chosen staff. Typically manifests as a great clocktower, with the librarian themself residing in an office at the very top.
The Stacks:
The vast bulk of the Library. Stacks and stacks of bookshelves that can reach a mile in the sky and many miles across, but are often also collected into narrow halls and small rooms. Whatever the case, this is what one thinks of when they think of a Library. It varies in style from ornate wooden shelves and great marble halls, but the rooms are all similarly ornate, and the books spledidly cared for, courtesy of the Blacksuits.
The Archives:
The deeper recesses of the Library, on the border of the Unwritten. These sections are typically tended to by the Castout, and the books here are often older and more obscure. These sections aren't as well maintained, and tend to be quite dusty or eaten away at by the Unwritten. They are also where the Library tends to keep her older artifacts- The Book, the Scroll, all items that at once point represented her motuh the way the Typewriter does now, but which are now reduced in power, though not exhausted of it.
The Frontlines:
The area along the shores of the Sea of Words where the Blacksuits prepared to fight against the Red Gentry in the Blood War. The shattered shells of the betrayers are still scattered about here.
The Birthplace:
A reconstruction of the Library's earliest memories. All she remembers is the warm cave, the campfire, the pictures on the wall, and the singing and dancing of the first people. She remembers it so clearly, like it was the most beautiful thing she ever witnessed. The Typewriter comes here to be alone, free from her attendants. One could easily take advantage of this alone time to sneak through her halls unnoticed.
Architecture:
The architecture of the Library varies greatly, and has fluctuated much over the millennia. However, most recently it tends toward warm colors and being made of ornately carved wood, though some areas still encapsulate the earlier Greek aesthetics of the Library some centuries ago.
Currency:
The Blacksuits tend to not meddle with any sorts of currency, as their eternal devotion to Story leaves them with little time to worry about purchasing personal comforts. However, some of the younger and less restricted Blacksuits have been known to trade flowers and books in exchange for magical items.
Government:
The Blacksuit government is a total theocracy, following the will of the Story God as expressed through the Typewriter, which is entrusted to the eldest Blacksuit to have not begun breaking free of the Library's control. Those who are closer to the Library are watched more dilligently, whilst the younger and less respected Blacksuits can afford more lee-way in their actions. They tend to organize like bees, very little is needed in the way of lower authorities and proper hierarhcial organization. Their collective magic allows them to communicate pertinent information effortlessly. Every Blacksuit knows what the Typewriter expects of them.
Legal System:
There is only one punishment, banishment. Those who step out of line, even just a little bit, and are caught by someone who cares, are at risk of being thrown to the Castouts.
Social Norms:
Silence is typically expected. Being seen as drones, the Blacksuits are not anticipated to have anything worth saying that cannot be subtly and efficiently communicated through their shared magic. This is quite stifling for most, though some do manage to find comfort in the silence.
Holidays:
The Exchange:
This day celebrates the intersection of the Story God with the Art God. While briefly united, the story god and art god exchange raw materials. Story gives away thousands of copies of stories, and the art god gives away thousands of artificial bodies. Upon their realms separation, the art god fills his own bodies with these stories to create his minions, and the story god creates the next generation of black suits by filling the received bodies with the stories she has penned. This method produces different kinds of servants for each, the servants of art tend to have more varied bodies and clothing, but their stories are stagnant and their character static. The servants of Story have relatively unvaried bodies, all of them consisting of plastic shells with limited variation in body shape, but their stories develop over time, and their character changes via experience. The celebration part of this consists of a great ball dance between the black suits and the servants of art, wherein the typewriter which serves as the mouth of story and the canvas which serves as the mouth of art are brought together to commune for the duration of the exchange. Due to the unpredictable nature of these dimensional intersections, the celebration doesn't have a consistent date, and the scale of the exchange depends on how long it's been since the one before it.
The Last Sacrifice:
During the martyr's lifetime the holiday celebrated the penning of a new sacrifice story intended to better humanity at large. The martyr is placed into a precarious situation recreating the story told about him, and the black suits perform a sacrificial ritual where he is killed or maimed in a way identical to the story. The entire crowd of black suits are assigned to either mourn or heckle him as he is killed, with some elder members being assigned to play specific named characters in the story. Past examples include: the Martyr being boiled in a pot, speared to a cross, having his liver torn out of him, and having his body torn into many pieces. The holiday is always called The Last Sacrifice for hope that it will be the one that finally leads to the edification of humanity, rendering future sacrifices unnecessary. Following the death of the Martyr, the Story God has been working to create a replacement character that would reinstate this holiday, rather than being someone people would be united in support of, this new creation will be someone for humanity to unite against.
Subfactions:
The Castout:
A division of the black suits, primarily consisting of the damaged and elderly. See, the bodies of the people who inhabit the library are merely containers for the great scroll which details their life story. As they age, the scrolls grow longer and longer, and will eventually begin overflowing their body. As the pain of their bursting plastic shell and the inconvenience of their very substance spilling out of them causes their work to become more difficult to perform, they are relegated to the further reaches of the library, out of sight and with no support but their brethren. These folks are all in different phases of disillusionment with their typewriter god, some convinced they can still win back her favor and return to their former station if they just work hard enough, whilst others have completely given up on their work and live in lethargy and despair. Some of the more noble of them have committed themselves to creating a support network for each other, allowing them to more comfortably work on.
The Blank:
Some members of the Red Gentry and the Blacksuits have come to the conclusion that since the effects of aging are a result of one's story outgrowing their shell, then they can completely prevent the process by living as mundane a life as possible, so that there is no story worth adding onto their manuscript. Ultimately, the process of adopting this mindset and making the requisite changes is something of a story in and of itself, but there are some for whom this has been rumored to work. These Blank idols are all said to have entered states of semi-permanent hibernation as a result of this. The spinning of one's story through their body is akin to their heartbeat, by halting their story, these people's hearts have ceased to beat, leaving them completely unable to move or act until disturbed by the actions of another upon them initiating an event in their story that restores them to life. Essentially, one may only live eternally by refusing to live at all. The members of this ideology who are the most enthusiastic, but typically the least committed to it, often choose to adopt new garb, ditching blacks and reds for a pure white outfit, symbolizing their refusal to taint the pages of their story with ink of any color. This symbolic act is, in and of itself, an advancement of their story. The purest blank is one who does so by complete accident, without ever having considered making a conscious decision to end their story.