alexanderwales
patreon
This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 132, The Last Days I + Schedule update
🕑 Added 2022-08-31 16:18:04 +0000 UTCNext month I'll be going on a trip overseas to England, my second time leaving the country unless you count Canada. I think I'll be missing two chapters, though I'm going to a writing retreat and it's possible that I won't have to. My apologies for the schedule disruption, but last time I went on a vacation (that time to Florida) I got very little work done and just ended up burning through backlog, and I don't want to either crush myself trying to get backlog going, or commit to writing a lot of TUTBAD while abroad.
Secondarily, I also have a vacation planned to South Korea in mid-October, which will be my third time leaving the country, and I'm almost certainly going to miss chapters then too, I just don't know how many yet (since it'll depend on whether I can get backlog chapters built up).
Thanks for reading, sorry for the upcoming break in regularity.
~~~~
Verity slept at the cabin and missed most of the early morning excitement. There was chatter across the party channel, which she’d largely slept through, the words coming and going with some annoyance on her part, never touching her mind. She might have mumbles something. If asked, she might have been able to piece it together, but it was a blur.
She finally woke up around first bell, which was still fairly early for her, and asked whether people had been talking while she slept, which was when they’d filled her in on the missing persons cases, and all the things that had gone on during a handful of undone days — the short version, anyway. The longer version came from Mizuki.
“Alright,” said Mizuki once Verity was back in the house. “So far as I know, we’ve been through this day five times already. One of those was Alfric’s, the other four were his aunt Penelope, who I think one of us got in contact with because of the similarities with her daughter that went missing and the stuff over there. Lin and Kell both left notes, and both took things with them, but it’s pretty suspicious. It also happened before the witching hour, which seems like it’s specifically an anti-chrono measure. We’ve had eyes on the past, but it seems like the enemy knows that’s something that we can do, because it’s been foiled in a couple of different ways. We did manage to track Kell down right up to the point he touched a totally random rock in the woods and vanished, which didn’t help at all, and trying to track him backwards was super rough.”
“Alright,” said Verity. She was having morning tea with short biscuits and a dab of jam. “So at this point … you have chrononauts, who have already experienced the day, combing the deeper past using entads?”
“Yup,” said Mizuki. “It’s crazy the amount of stuff they have pointed at this problem. After her daughter Kali was abducted or ran away — much more ran away, I think — the disappearances in Liberfell kind of stopped, or the character of them changed, it was much more, uh, deniable, I guess. Young people who were just passing through and never ended up getting where they were going, people who weren’t missing right away, they were missing a week or a month later or something like that.”
“But Penelope was working on the problem,” said Verity. “Preparing?”
“Oh yeah,” said Mizuki. “And getting the government involved, to the extent they’re willing. She’s got a significant portion of Inter’s ability to watch the past, spending loads of money, some of it borrowed from relatives. It’s a really pretty rare ability, as is information gathering, but we’ve got lots of stuff. And the enemy is one step ahead.”
“You’re not worried about Kell?” asked Verity.
“Oh, I am,” said Mizuki. She cocked her head to the side. “Why?”
“You just seem … excited,” said Verity.
“I mean, he’s probably fine,” said Mizuki. “The Editors don’t seem like they would have let mind control slip in, and if they had, there’s no way that you’d use it to pick up relative nobodies, right? No offense to him.”
“You think they’re all okay, somewhere?” asked Verity.
“I’m hoping so. There’s something that we got from Vertex, I guess in one of the undone days, where apparently they’ve been having a few hiccups with their party channel,” said Mizuki. “Messages that were spoken and didn’t come across, I guess. That might be nothing, but it might also mean that someone was listening in, or blocking the ability to talk, or something like that. Which is another lead! But good luck trying to find one entad out of billions, even if it went through a shop, which it probably didn’t.”
“And everyone else is trying to do things that they haven't done before?” asked Verity.
“We’re going to do some pastwatch stuff, since a lot of the best entads need people positioned in a specific place at a specific time,” said Mizuki. “There are a few that work on specific items or whatever, but they’ve already been used, mostly. We watched Kell and Lin write their notes, apparently of their own free will. I mean, I didn’t watch it, but I was told that I watched it.”
“What do the notes say?” asked Verity.
“Kell just wanted to move on, I guess,” said Mizuki. For the first time, she seemed a little down. “I guess for him, he’d proven himself at wizard college, proven himself in Kiromo, proven himself by doing a bunch of dungeons solo, proven himself with Vertex, and it was just —” she let out a breath. “I don’t know. I read it this morning. I’m still trying to get my head around it. I guess I hadn’t realized he was that driven about things, or that he wanted to push on to greener pastures, whatever those might be.” She shrugged. “From the way Vertex tells it, he’s been talking about something like that for a while now, but he never said it to me.”
“Ah,” said Verity. “Sorry.”
“Nah, it is what it is,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “But the thing is, he didn’t say where he was going, which is incredibly rude, and didn’t even say that he couldn’t say where he was going. So why the mystery?”
“Yeah,” said Verity. “And should we really be hunting these people down?”
“I mean, of course,” said Mizuki. “That they’re doing this without anyone knowing where they’re going is — ah crud, you’re thinking about your parents.”
Verity nodded. “I left without saying where I was going,” she said. “I think there’s something nice about just … disappearing, not having to say where you’re going, making a clean break. If my parents weren’t rich, I’d have gotten away with it.”
“Kell had friends,” frowned Mizuki. “I mean, at least one friend, if you don’t count Vertex.”
“I think he might have tried to say goodbye,” said Verity. “We told you he came by when you were drunk off entad testing?”
“You did,” said Mizuki. She winced. “But I mean, I should have had more time, right? If he was offered some kind of deal — he took his mana stones with him, did I tell you that?”
“No,” said Verity. She felt as though Mizuki was perhaps not the best one to be giving a rundown, but she liked Mizuki, and personal affection went a long way.
“So that means he’s going to go be a wizard somewhere,” said Mizuki. “He’ll still be working, basically. It just feels like, I don’t know. Bad.” She frowned. “So when we do find him, I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”
“Do you think we’ll find him?” asked Verity.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ve got the Overguards on our side, right?”
“All of them?” asked Verity.
“No, not all of them,” said Mizuki. “This is probably the last day, the real day, actually, unless we can get more on loan. Which sucks, because that means that Alfric’s parents aren’t helping.” She frowned. “Apparently I used the ring to get in touch with Ria, and she came to help out, but let Penelope take the reset, and told Alfric that she wouldn’t be spending days on this unless there was a real need, so … I don’t know.”
“Sorry,” Verity offered. “I know that Kell was a good friend.”
“Is,” said Mizuki. “Kell is a good friend, just one who’s being an ass.”
“Right,” said Verity. “And you don’t think that, ah, maybe this has something to do with him maybe having an unrequited crush on you?”
Mizuki sighed and looked away. “It’s been mentioned.”
“Then I guess I don’t need to mention it,” said Verity.
Mizuki looked back at her. “Thanks.” She looked at Verity’s empty plate. “He didn’t say anything, in the letter, about me, though if you read between the lines … I mean we were friends, I don’t know what I was supposed to do, date someone I wasn’t really interested in dating?”
“I don’t think anyone is saying that,” said Verity.
“I mean, I guess we could have talked about it,” said Mizuki. “I could have said, ‘hey, I don’t know if you’re interested in dating me, but I definitely don’t feel that way about you’.” She chewed on a nail. “Maybe that would have been better?”
“I think he knew,” said Verity.
“I hope he knew, I mean he had girlfriends before,” said Mizuki. “But if I was into someone and they weren’t into me, I wouldn’t just … you know. Leave.”
“No?” asked Verity.
“Because of the house, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I really love this house.”
“So if you didn’t have the house … ?” asked Verity.
“I mean yeah, running away from all your problems?” asked Mizuki. “I can definitely see me doing that, as much as I love Pucklechurch. And I guess that’s the endgame for us, once we’ve mined out all the dungeons in the area.”
“No,” said Verity. “We’ve got the Commute Lute. We have a decade of dungeons, even at one a week.” She hadn’t actually done the math.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Right.”
“If we’re still doing dungeons,” said Verity. The conversation from the night before had rattled around in her head, as much as she’d tried to stop it. Hannah had said that sort of rumination was bad, that it was better to be mindful of thoughts and focus them elsewhere, but that was hard. What did you do after a bad performance? You reviewed it, noted the places where things went wrong, and thought about the proper way to do it. What did you do when you had a performance coming up? You practiced until you were too sore to go on, or until it came out perfect every time.
“I’d just not worry about that,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we’ll figure something out, I’ll fight Alfric if he tries to pull you off the party or whatever, it’ll be fine.”
Mizuki could sometimes be really bad at reassuring people.
“So, how can I help with Kell?” asked Verity.
“Pastwatching,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got a bit of a plan, you’ve got, ah, twenty minutes or so to get to the general store, which is where you’re going to follow Kell, three days ago.”
“Okay,” said Verity slowly.
“You’re going to have a little window frame, it’s pretty light,” said Mizuki. “You’re also going to have some glasses, which will let you hear silent things, like the window frame. So you just look through the frame, holding it up, watch Kell as he goes into the general store three days ago, then follow him around for the rest of the day, I guess, and hope that, uh, he talks about where he went and why, or better, that he has a meeting with a cloaked figure, or looks at a map, or whatever.”
“Alright,” said Verity. “If that’s how I can be of use. And everyone else is … ?”
“Alfric is at the site of the stone that teleported Kell,” said Mizuki. “His entad is a stake that gets driven into the ground and then, I guess, lets him see backward in time at one second per second? So like, he’s seeing the present, which is moving forward at a second a second, and he’s also seeing the past, which is moving backward at a second a second. He’s watching the present moving forward but also this kind of alternate present where time is running in reverse.”
“Uh huh,” said Verity. “So the upshot is … that he’s watching the forest, but also the forest but in reverse?”
“He says it’s super boring,” said Mizuki. “Which is why he picked it for himself. Isra is going wandering with the Commute Lute, expanding her senses as far as she can, scouting with birds, that kind of thing, just in case they’re within the uh,” she made a shape with her hand. “The spiral.”
“The spiral of hexes?” asked Verity.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “She took our map. She’s also talking to censusmasters, where possible. But she’s done this a few times, and is on the outer edge of the spiral, so,” she shrugged. “We probably won’t be seeing her today, except for at a late dinner. And then Hannah is off talking to clerics, which she volunteered to do and which doesn’t seem to be related to anything but Lin missing. I think she’s helping to get a replacement.”
“And what will you be doing, while I’m Kell-watching?” asked Verity.
“Touching stuff,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got an entad that works on paper, lets us see into the past, not wholly, just stuff that touched the paper. I’m flipping through a bunch of books, Kell’s and Lin’s. We already did the notes and got nothing from them. Did you want to trade?”
“No,” said Verity. “I’ll get going then.”
“Here,” said Mizuki. She waved a hand and the window frame appeared in front of her, which she caught. The frame was cedar, with plenty of embellishments, but two handholds that had clearly been added later and weren’t part of the entad proper. “And here.” She waved again, and the glasses appeared. They were half-moon spectacles, and looked fragile. Verity’s eyes were drawn to the ring on Mizuki’s finger, which had three small gems, two of them dull but the last shining. “Entad!” said Mizuki. “A loaner, but exactly the sort of thing that we really need, since it would let Alfric dynamically swap weapons, or let you swap lutes.”
Mizuki was still assuming that they were all going to do dungeons again together. It might very well have been that they’d already done their final dungeon as a team though, with a hundred lutes and a successful deployment of the Overguard Maneuver to show for it.
“Who am I reporting my findings to?” asked Verity as she stood from the table.
“We’re all meeting back here at the end of the day, for dinner,” said Mizuki. “Penelope will be here. But like I said, it’s probably the last time through the day, because we’ve done basically everything that we can, and a lot of what’s left is just scraps.”
Verity felt like raising an objection to that, particularly the idea of her day being the collection of ‘scraps’ that would probably amount to nothing, and if the day was scraps, then it felt like a reset might be justified. She was in no mood to complain about work though, not with the breakup of the party feeling like it was hanging over her head.
She took her plate to the kitchen and washed it, trying to be mindful of the time, then put on the glasses and grabbed the frame. She hadn’t been told whether it was fragile, or how fragile, and it was hard not to think of the glass in it as being liable to shatter at a moment’s notice.
Even now, the window was showing the past. It didn’t seem like it was quite three days, since through the window it was earlier in the morning. In the kitchen, the window into the past showed Mizuki cooking breakfast, and when Verity moved it around, she could see Alfric there, leaning against the counter, sneaking food when Mizuki wasn’t looking — or pretending to sneak food so that she could slap him on the back of his hand with her Anyspoon.
“I worry you don’t fear the spoon enough,” said Mizuki, and for a moment Verity was startled by the sound of her speaking. The window was giving a view into the past, and the glasses were giving sound to that image.
Verity set the window down, not wanting to see more. There was temptation, certainly, to keep watching this conversation that had happened without her, but she’d never had terribly strong voyeuristic tendencies.
This, of course, was what she would be doing with the rest of her day, but it was different with Kell, who wasn’t a friend, and when he would be in a public place.
Verity made sure she had her things in order. Since living in the woods, she’d taken to carrying a large bag like the one Mizuki often had, which she could stuff her things into. It was horribly unfashionable, and Verity liked it that way. A part of her itched for someone to say something mean about it, so she could tell them off, but that was the sort of thing that didn’t really happen in Pucklechurch. She thought about taking a lute, and decided against it, mostly because she knew that holding up the window all day was going to be a chore.
She warped into the center of Pucklechurch, which was relatively busy. It was a market day, and people were out shopping and chatting with each other. Verity suspected that half the reason market day existed was for the social aspects of it, as the sellers gathered together. Temple day was obviously the thing that brought most of the community together, but in a place like Pucklechurch, they’d take any excuse they could get.
The general store wasn’t far off from the warp, and Bethany was tidying up when Verity got there. Verity did almost no shopping, since Mizuki and Hannah took care of most of the food, and Isra took care of the rest. Verity’s primary contribution to the house was gardening, which she didn’t do all that much of, and a bit of needlework from time to time. None of that required buying things. The only time she really came into the general store was to use the travel wardrobe, which sat in one corner with a sign and payment bowl next to it, and she hadn’t done that in quite a bit.
“Verity!” said Bethany with a beaming smile. “It’s been ages.”
“It has,” nodded Verity. “Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be sorry,” said Bethany. “I’m just happy that you haven’t gotten around to using entads for all your needs. I heard that you struck out with the lutes?”
Verity blinked. “No?” It felt to her like they’d had an astounding haul.
“No foods, few consumables?” asked Bethany. “That’s just what I had heard.”
“Oh,” said Verity. “I suppose. Good storage, good travel. A bit of food actually, or at least liquids.” She looked around. The window was a foot across, held in her hands, and Bethany hadn’t asked about it. “Um, Kell was in here, in the morning, three days ago?”
Bethany nodded. “And you’re here to look for him through a window into the past.”
“Right,” said Verity, feeling flummoxed. “You talked to, ah, someone?”
“Xy,” said Bethany. “She came zooming through here at dawn. She’s always good for getting the news around, it’s one of her better features.”
“And it’s fine if I use this?” asked Verity, holding up the window.
“Of course,” nodded Bethany. “I would like to see though. Hopefully I didn’t say anything too foolish three days ago.”
Verity brought the window up and then after a moment of indecision, went to stand behind the counter with Bethany, which offered the best view of the general store. There were other people milling about, two women that Verity only vaguely knew, and Bethany, who was cleaning the counter.
“Was this before or after Kell came in?” asked Verity.
“Um,” said Bethany. “Before, I guess?” She was shoulder-to-shoulder with Verity, peering through. “No sound?”
“The glasses give me sound,” said Verity, tapping them.
“For some reason I thought you always wore those,” said Bethany. Her attention had been pulled from the window, and she was looking Verity over. “Those are new?”
“Borrowed,” said Verity, who was feeling flushed.
“They’re a really good look on you,” said Bethany.
“T-thanks,” said Verity.
“He’s here!” said Bethany, pointing at the window. “Or, there. Or was there. You know.”
Verity watched with the window propped up as Kell entered the store. She’d seen him two days ago, and he had been looking worse for the wear then, not physically, but emotionally. Seen through the window, he was holding his head high, with enviable posture, crisp clothes, and his wizard’s stuff looking imposing. He’d had a haircut recently, she realized, and didn’t think she’d noticed that when he’d come by the house.
Kell stopped to talk with Bethany for a bit, and Verity needed to rearrange to be able to see both of them, since the glasses didn’t seem to work to make sound if she wasn’t able to see the thing that was making the sound. Because the discussion was relatively innocuous, just Bethany complaining about being a bit sick that morning, Verity did some testing of the limits of the entad. She was thankful to find that she could still get sound if she was pointing the window at the back of someone’s head and didn’t need to ‘read their lips’.
“He likes to talk,” said Bethany, who was watching over Verity’s shoulder. “There’s nothing wrong with that, I like to talk too, it’s just something I noticed, if that helps.”
“It might,” said Verity, who was feeling diplomatic.
“I don’t think he missed Kiromo, I think he missed the feeling of Kiromo,” said Bethany, talking over the conversation she was having in the past with Kell. “He missed the adventure, maybe.”
“That was more or less what Mizuki thought,” said Verity. “I’m less sure, but I never really knew him.”
“Sorry, I’ll shut up,” said Bethany. “Though if there were anything interesting, I would probably already know about it, since I was there.”
“I don’t mind,” said Verity. “Mostly I think I’ll just be in sync with him, hoping that he goes somewhere revealing. But we’re sipping the dregs here, I think.”
“I guess you must always end up doing that, if you’re with a chrononaut,” said Bethany.
Verity wasn’t paying too much attention to the conversation between past-Bethany and Kell, especially as it was just idle chatter. He was asking her how married life was, and she was gushing about her husband. Maybe there was a touch of wistfulness in his voice when they talked about it, but it was hard to say, even when she was paying very close attention to his face.
Her eyes went to what he was actually buying, and there she found what seemed like it might be a clue. He had purchased Kiromon tea, lots of it, essentially a bulk purchase that would have lasted him months if he was drinking it every day. There were two large bottles of a Kiromon sauce as well.
“He was stocking up?” asked Verity, at almost the same moment past-Bethany was asking the same thing.
“He said not,” replied Bethany. “It’s not like he was buying crates of things, he’d have had to go to Basil for that.”
“Which I guess he might have,” said Verity. She watched as Kell paid. He had a piece of jewelry on his right hand, like half a brass knuckle or a ring that spanned two fingers, and when he paid, the money appeared on the counter from nowhere. The things he’d purchased likewise disappeared at his touch.
“Entads like that make me nervous,” said Bethany. “It would be far too easy to steal.”
“That’s why we can look into the past,” said Verity with a little laugh. “Shoplifters.” She looked through the window. “And he’s going, so I need to follow him, sorry.”
“Not at all, hope you figure something out!” said Bethany as Verity walked out through the front door, following Kell.
The window made her nervous. If she lost track of Kell, or wasn’t paying attention while something happened, that was that, there was no way of doing that aside from redoing the entire day. She was also tasked with doing this for who knew how many hours, and knew from experience that her fortitude and attention would wane, even with the occasional break while Kell was occupied.
Curiously, Kell went to the temple, which wasn’t where she had thought he would go at all, and given that he’d disappeared, she would have thought that someone would have mentioned it. He walked with confidence, humming slightly to himself. There was something pleasant about his hum, she thought, which surprised her, because she usually judged the casual music of others harshly. There was something very likable about Kell, even if he had run off. Maybe especially because he’d run off.
When Kell went to Lin’s alcove, Verity’s interest was piqued. Here was a connection between the two, and the question of why no one had mentioned it was answered almost as soon as it had been asked. The one person who could have mentioned it was gone too.
“Are you free to talk?” asked past-Kell.
“Of course,” replied past-Lin. “The same problems, or new ones?” He said it with a gentle smile.
“The same ones,” said Kell. He sat in a chair in the vestibule, as though he’d sat there a few times before. “Restlessness.”
“Have you spoken to Mizuki yet?” asked Lin.
Verity got the feeling that she shouldn’t be listening in, but there was a chance that the day would still be undone, and she resolved to listen only for long enough to know whether they were going to talk about — something that wasn’t this.
“She’s got a dungeon today,” said Kell. “I’ll come by their house later. But … I don’t think it’s about her, this feeling.”
“Wanderlust,” said Lin. “But it’s odd, for someone who’s traveled the world, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think it’s wanderlust either,” said Kell. “But I was never very good at digging deep inside and putting names to feelings. I definitely didn’t train for it.”
“That’s why clerics are here,” said Lin, nodding.
Verity had interacted with him only once or twice. She’d heard a few sermons from him, most of them stock lessons from Oeyr, God of Emergence. Her eyes went to Lin, and she tried to evaluate him as he’d been. He was nondescript, gentle, though perhaps a bit excitable when he was giving a sermon, in a way that Verity would admit she found preferable to clerical stoicism or recitation. Lin had close-cropped hair, ears that stuck out a bit, and kind eyes, which were his best feature. She had no idea how old he was, but she imagined he was in his thirties.
“I really did think that I would come back to Pucklechurch and just live my life,” said Kell. “There are plenty of opportunities for a wizard, especially one with big stones,” mana stones, in this case, though Verity didn’t imagine that the double meaning was entirely unappreciated, “I thought that I could work two or three hours a day, then have all the time in the world to myself, to just … be.”
“Many people don’t find that to their liking,” replied Lin. “Humans, we’re creatures that need more than that. Even if you could fill your day with work, that wouldn’t address all your needs. The need for culture, society, the need to build something, to create, to discuss, to have power, to grow, we have all these things within us, so many that they’re difficult to name, and they intersect each other in all these fascinating and frustrating ways.”
“And you don’t think there’s fulfillment to be found in running away,” said Kell.
“Let’s say that you’ve left Vertex behind, that you commit to Mizuki becoming a distant memory,” said Lin. “You leave it all, you take your entads with you, say your goodbyes — or don’t. What then? Where do you go?”
Kell shook his head. “You’re saying there’s no solution, that the problem is an emergent one.”
“I’m not really saying that,” replied Lin, voice mild. “I think, when someone comes to you with a problem, one of the things you can ask yourself is whether or not the solution they have in mind will actually fix things. And if they answer that yes, after sober consideration, it will fix their problem, great! But often the solutions we think of don’t strike at the roots — and of course I’m a cleric of Oeyr, I’ll always want to strike at the roots rather than the branches, it’s our way of seeing things. But I want you to consider where you would go, and what that would get you.”
“The world is small,” said Kell. “There’s so little that’s fresh and new.”
Lin shrugged. “I’ve been feeling that myself, of late. The dungeons don’t help?”
“There are enormous tomes on what the dungeons contain,” said Kell. “Sometimes you come across something that you’ve never seen, but my sense of wonder has been eroded. It’s the same with entads. I have a few good ones now, or ones that fit my needs, but it feels like I’m making the problems worse. It’s cool, for a bit, but it gets less cool with time.”
“It’s a patch of tar applied to the hull of the ship,” said Lin. “When what the ship needs is new wood.”
“But there is no new wood,” said Kell. “There’s wizardry, where I could slot myself into an established career, or at best become a researcher of some kind, and there are dungeons, where we’d largely be working from a script, all the more so as we gather up entads that reduce the need for problem-solving.”
“You need to talk with Mizuki,” said Lin. He leaned forward, and seemed to think that switching tracks was what was warranted.
“I do,” said Kell. “I will. Some of the feelings are, probably, because of that, and it’s like you said, all mixed up in my head.”
“I don’t mean to patronize, but you’re very young,” said Lin. “You’re also, from what I know, very intelligent and skilled, and have been rewarded in various ways for your good qualities. I think the quiet life was never going to suit you, it was just what you had thought your next adventure would be.”
Kell placed his hands on his knees, rubbing them for a moment. “How does it end though?” asked Kell. “If the need to go out and do something new is the branches, what are the roots?”
“Time helps,” said Lin. “But in my experience — I hate to say this, as I worry you’ll go do something ill-advised like trying to solo dungeons again — in my experience, there are always going to be unfulfilled needs. I imagine that would be true even with a wife and children, maybe more so. I’ve spoken with men in their fifties who feel the way you do, though perhaps less keenly.”
Kell sat back. “You know, I had kind of hoped that you would just give me the magic arrow that would drive right at the heart of my problems and solve them all.”
“Talk with Mizuki,” said Lin. “Once that’s done, one way or another —”
“It’ll be rejection,” said Kell.
“If you’re certain, then I have to trust you on that,” said Lin. “But it’s weighing on you, and one way or another, it won’t weigh on you anymore. Once that’s done, you can think harder about next steps, and how you might deal with those other longings.” He paused for a moment. “May I point out something I find curious?”
“Of course,” said Kell, though he sighed slightly. Whatever he’d hoped for from this conversation, he was clearly not getting it.
“When you talk of leaving, you never talk of Vertex being with you,” said Lin. “Aside from Mizuki, you say they’re as close of friends as you have. But your imagining is always that you’re no longer part of the party, and sometimes it’s as though you think you wouldn’t even say goodbye.”
“Huh,” said Kell. “I suppose you’re right. And they are friends, but they’re also co-workers, all with their own problems. I guess they came to the area because Lola was chasing Alfric, and if I put it to them, they might just as well go off somewhere else to mine out some other corner of the world. Maybe not Marsh though.”
Lin waved a hand. “What I find interesting is not the logistics, but the way, in your mind, that it was never an option.”
“I don’t really know,” said Kell.
“Think about it,” said Lin.
They said their pleasantries, then Kell went off, and for a moment, Verity almost forgot that she needed to follow Kell. It was uncomfortably intimate, a conversation that wasn’t meant for her, and she resolved not to talk about it with the others except in the abstract. She would definitely not talk about it with Mizuki. And if Kell or Lin ever came back, or were found, she would have to disclose it to them, she thought. It was the bit at the end that had seemed to be the most important to her, the way in which Kell was planning a trip of some sort but didn’t fully understand why it wouldn’t have included Vertex. He seemed as though he knew he was leaving, but didn’t know where he was going, or the particular circumstances.
That pointed to something, though Verity didn’t know what. She gave a brief version of what was said into the party channel, and they agreed that it was the most interesting thing that any of them had found thus far that hadn’t already been found in undone days.
Verity stuck by Kell for most of the rest of the day. He stayed around Pucklechurch, thankfully, eating at the Fig and Gristle for lunch and the Angry Plum for dinner. This meant that Verity needed to go to those places too, and eat there as well, though the offset in time of day meant that she was early to both. She shared a table with Kell, in a sense. A few times people came by to look through the window with her, largely in order to see themselves from three days earlier — most of them regulars — but this was a minor part of her day, and the window largely stayed pointed at Kell. The glasses made a gradual indent on her nose.
Kell visited the house four times, and each time, Verity went with him, knowing that they wouldn’t be there, that he wouldn’t see them. After the third time, he returned to the Fig and Gristle and began writing a letter. She read over his shoulder, trying her best to only skim and feeling ashamed that she was reading something that had been meant for Mizuki’s eyes. Kell was a surprisingly good writer. He had a command of details, and while he went long, to four pages, it didn’t meander in the way that she had thought it might have.
The fourth time he went to the house, he slipped the letter under the door, then turned as though to leave, then swore, turned back, and retrieved the letter by means of a magical spell that blew a gust of wind inside the house. Once the letter was in hand, he burnt it to a crisp and scattered the ashes.
This time, he didn’t go back to the taverns, he instead used his slingshot to send his amulet high into the air. He was gone not long after that, beyond Verity’s ability to follow, but his whereabouts were apparently known, more or less: he’d gone back to the house he was sharing with Vertex.
<We shouldn’t need the window there,> said Hannah. <Not unless he was meetin’ with someone right then and there. If Vertex didn’t notice anythin’, then it’s not likely we would either.>
<We’ll do it anyway,> said Alfric. <Due diligence.>
<Can someone take over for me?> asked Verity. <I’ve been holding this window most of the day, doing nothing but looking at Kell. People weren’t meant to be absorbed in things happening on the other side of a window.>
<I can take it, I just finished up my rock-watching,> said Alfric. <Which was a dead end, as expected.>
<Which way?> asked Mizuki.
<The rock disappeared with sparks and appeared with sparks,> said Alfric. <No sign of any person involved. Clearly at some point Kell was told when and where to go to find the rock, but it’s entirely possible that this was done in a way that would leave no evidence we can track. We know that he left the party late into the night last night, then went to where the rock was waiting for him. We can pretty conclusively say that whomever was responsible, they had significant entad support and were worried about chrononauts and probably knew that we’d try to look into the past. At this point, the window is our best bet, but that means we’re more or less out of options until tomorrow. Verity, I’ll grab the window and then head over to Liberfell, if we take it in shifts we can possibly just have full coverage on him to see when he went from not being sure to having a full plan of action.>
It seemed like a lot of effort for a boy who very much seemed to have left of his own accord, at least to Verity, but she could also admit that the level of resources and secrecy involved raised a few dozen red flags.
The party was briefly back together for dinner, then Alfric was off to Liberfell to keep watch. He suspected that this was fruitless, but in his words, you couldn’t let the enemy win just because you had a high estimation of their preparation and resources. It wasn’t entirely impossible that Kell had left without anyone visibly contacting him, but it did feel somewhat unlikely. The window would help them, he was fairly sure, and if it didn’t help them, they would try something else.
Alfric seemed sure that they would solve it eventually. Verity was considerably less certain.
They didn’t end up doing the post mortem, nor did they talk about the possibility that they might do some dungeons without her, either as an ‘experiment’ or otherwise. Hannah did talk to Verity, privately, but it was transparently a smoothing-over type of conversation, explaining Alfric’s reasoning and his emotional state. It did make Verity feel better, but the crux of it, that he didn’t want to see them all die on a regular basis, remained.
When she went to bed that night, she was thinking to herself about the nameless yearning that Kell had felt. It was possible that someone had influence over his mind, but she couldn’t imagine that it would be necessary. She felt the yearning too, not in the same way, where she needed adventure or power or newness and innovation, but a desire to escape. There was something twisting in her brain, a nameless need to get away, and though she felt it nowhere near as much as Kell had seemed to, she did feel it.
When she slept, it was fitful. When she woke, the monitoring of the past had turned up something new.
Comments
fbt
yikes, sure makes one wonder if Verity will be the next to scamper to parts unknown. Presumably not, but it sure reads a bit that way. Maybe just a bit of empathy for Kell as it slightly mirrors her own sitch, tho. And boy howdy did everyone (unintentionally) mishandle the convo's w/ V, although I suppose that's at least half due to her frame of mind.
