Meanwhile, the Concept of your little buddy Willis had continued hiding deep within its own core, while the outside bits had continued tangling with The Professor, pulsing veins probing for weakness in the bookworm's conceptual parameters. Finding not one vulnerable vaguery in the enemy's thickly reinforced definition, the Willis-concept could only stall the fearsome foe as it sapped the life-juices from the library's weaker denizens and adjacent perception zones, every tendril modifying its personal interpretation of "blood" as necessary to invigorate its sub-core with whatever might "pump" through the system of a giant walking Satirical Juxtaposition or a ravenous swarm of Glaring Anachronisms. The Professor could sever a hundred of the thirsty tendrils, only for the Willis-Concept to sprout twice as many as it reduced an Inappropriate Romantic Subplot to a wilted husk.
This autonomous mass reaping of life at least ensured a certain walking optical organ was well protected from the many deadly horrors he wasn't so personally acquainted with as he clambered and brachiated his way through the multiplying forest of whipping vessels, burbling and babbling up a storm with every step. Isaac's frantic gibberish was, in spirit, sort of like an emotionally heartfelt "I know you're still in there, remember who you are" routine, but he wasn't actually a thing possessed of cognition processes so tritely familiar to your mental processes (or even mine, to be perfectly frank), so it actually didn't quite mean anything like that, but it fulfilled an equivalent narrative purpose, which we all know to be the most important and dignified kind of purpose anyway. The actual meaning of the sounds would have been as lost on Willis as it must remain lost on the rest of you, but that spirit of it was what could still trickle its way through conceptual barriers to the buried root of what we know as Willis, and was at the very least what currently kept our preferred version of him from all but dissolving away. It just wasn't enough to pull him back out of his little funk; not yet anyway.
Events currently brewing elsewhere in the library were likely to tip the scales of this precarious situation, but until then, Willis was simply too busy taking his little all-consuming cosmic force of destruction break. He was a well meaning enough kid, but if you want this narration's opinion, you should probably have a long talk with his mother about teaching him a few boundaries, if you ever get the chance.
