Lord Darius’s gaze swept over the ranks of assembled adventurers. He had called for a whole five of them, and three had shown up. The Rank A alchemist wanted to be disappointed, but when it came to the adventuring sorts, this was better than the usual. “I suppose you are all wondering why I called you here today.”
“If that’s what you call wondering what kind of misery you’re going to inflict on us, then sure.” Arthur leaned on his staff. “If it’s as awful as last time, I quit.”
Darius knew that wasn’t true. Arthur was somehow both the most and least promising of his five—what was the word for them—students? Yes, that was it. He did forget what they were for, at times. Regardless, the archmage of the group was like an ordinary slime. Soft and pathetic, yet better at stubbornly clinging on no matter what you hit it with.
But before the alchemist could continue, one of the other three that had shown up opened her mouth. “Says the guy who, apparently, scored fifty pounds of copper just for snitching on me.” Liliana glared daggers at Arthur.
And here they go, Darius thought. Moments like these were one of the few things that made this whole disgusting business worth his time. The third member in attendance, and Liliana’s effective babysitter, watched on in his own thinly veiled amusement. Darius winked at Andric, who just shook his head in his own bemused disappointment.
“Okay, first of all, he was totally going to reveal it no matter what, so I didn’t actually ‘snitch.’ And, second,“ Arthur raised two fingers for emphasis, “I may have gotten that copper, yes. And do you know how I received it? In a single blasted fifty pound block! That he left on my blasted doorstep! I had to go get my own cart just to haul it to the bank. I’m surprised someone didn’t just stab me along the way and make off with it.”
Lord Darius had forgotten about that. It had been a month or so, and he’d been busy between then and now. That being said, hearing Arthur’s opinion on it was a real treat.
It was also a distraction. “Alright, children, enough.’ The alchemist clapped his hands together. “There were supposed to be five of you here this afternoon, but I suppose the three of you will have to make up for the failings of your peers.”
“Uh, with all due respect, Sir, Millie is in Blossomfell and Sean is tied up in some secret Church business,” Andric said.
“Oh.” Darius frowned. “Well half of that is convenient, because that’s where we’re about to go.”
And, as if on cue, one of the alchemist’s carriages rattled around the drive and parked itself at the edge of the courtyard. Hopping down from the driver’s bench came Mister Donovan, Lord Darius’s informal estate manager—among other miscellaneous and sometimes clandestine roles.
“Hey, kiddos! Ready for another adventure? Hopefully you won’t drag back a higher demon, this time.”
Lord Darius had to hold in a groan. Saying that the ‘secret’ of what he’d unintentionally brought back to Verdanport with his students was poorly kept would be a gross understatement. At this point, so much as calling it a secret bordered on dishonesty. Nevertheless, that did nothing to excuse Donovan from openly jesting about the matter.
They were going to have a discussion about this later.
“Wait just a moment,” Arthur said, pointing his staff between the alchemist and the waiting carriage. “We’re leaving now?”
“Well, yes.” Lord Darius’s brow furrowed. “Why wouldn’t we? I plan for us to arrive by sunrise.”
Now all three of them froze in shock and something else—suspicion. “Okay, now hold on.” Lily glanced at the archmage standing an awkward distance to the side of her and Andric. “I hate to agree with Archie over here, but, uh, there’s no way it will take that long. And why do we need to be there so early anyway?”
It was at this point that their Rank A mentor lost his patience for petty squabbles and complaints. He was a wealthy and influential man, he was their mentor, and that meant he knew better than them. Also, he had business to attend to. He need to check in on Stella and the shop there, as well as squeezing in another field exercise. The various guilds, while generally lenient about independent study, did adhere to strict requirements on tasks the children needed to participate in. He had forgotten to deal with that for the past three weeks, which meant they had a bit of a hard deadline.
“We need to be there at sunrise because I said so. Now get on the cart. I don’t imagine any of you are keen on failing to meet apprenticeship deadlines.”
“Carriage,” Liliana corrected. “I think I recall someone insisting it was a carriage.” Lord Darius didn’t remember that, but it was clear she was mocking either him or Mister Donovan for something in the past. “Also, are you seriously rushing this because you forgot to make us do anything until now?”
“Yes. I am. Now get on the carriage.”
_____
“So,” Stella said, “here’s the plan.”
Zoe listened intently. The two of them were crouched on the roof of the town hall. After donning their disguises—Zoe back in the appearance of ‘Olivia’—they’d gone to an adjacent and overpriced cafe. Then they went to the restroom, crawled through a window, and dropped over the wall into the closed-off yard area behind the government building.
From there, Stella wielded a vine of ivy like a grappling hook to latch onto the edge of the roof. Alongside her knack for selling things and brewing illegal ‘medicines,’ the other demon had abilities that let her manipulate the plants more directly. Zoe needed to find out more about her new comrade’s skillset, and sooner rather than later.
From there, Zoe allowed herself to be carried in the shopkeeper’s arms while they rode up like secret agents. Truth be told, climbing the brickwork would have been easier for both of them. The reason for doing it the fancy way was to make it quick and to allow Zoe to shroud them both in shadows with the help of mirage. On top of binding the shadow element to her Perception, the boost that came with her advancement to Rank E rendered the stealth skill shockingly effective.
Zoe also got a couple benefits from the whole ordeal.
Lesser Disguise has reached level 5!
Mirage has reached level 6!
Small gains they may be, but small gains added up.
Now that they were up on the roof and mostly out of sight, Stella began to lay out her plan. To Zoe’s frustration, the shopkeeper wouldn’t give her any details until now. She didn’t even know they were going to climb on top of the town hall until they had already dropped down over the wall and swam their way through a dense hedge.
Stella cited Zoe’s ‘impulsive and immature nature’ as the younger, weaker, and more recently arrived demon. When Zoe protested these false and disparaging accusations, Stella asked her what she’d done with the book. The answer—it probably burned up along with the rest of her house.
Stella then pointed out her explicit order to not set the book on fire, sell it, eat it, or hit people with it. Zoe argued back that she obviously did not intend for her house to burn down—and really, it was the Inquisitor’s fault and not her own. She neglected to mention that she might still have the book if she’d stored it in her inventory instead of hitting Marceus with it.
“I imagine you’ve discovered you can get Mayor Stokes to do favorable things for you by paying him in private.” Zoe had, in fact, discovered that. “Well,” Stella continued, “unlike what you might be used to, that’s not normal among humans. Well, sort of. It’s a known thing and it still happens all the time, but it happens a lot less frequently. Humans call that corruption, and in many places you’ll have a surprisingly hard time getting anyone to do it.”
It took a hitherto unheard of amount of self-control for Zoe to maintain a straight face. The shopkeeper’s continued assumption that Zoe was an ordinary, scrappy little imp who’d only just wandered into human civilization was becoming funny enough that she now had no intention of correcting her.
“So what this means for us is that he’s going to have a lot of documents we can use to figure out who’s involved with the cult, where their stuff is, and what they’re up to.” With that said, Stella withdrew a crowbar and a glass vial from the enchanted amulet hanging close to her neck.
They moved over to a small, attic window. Zoe watched with curiosity as Stella applied a viscous, clear liquid to the edges of the dirty glass. Where it made contact, the pane turned white and brittle-looking over the course of several seconds.
Zoe eyed the bottle the substance was stored in. I guess that’s not actually made of glass, then.
Once the whole perimeter was treated, Stella sunk the prongs of the crowbar through the edge and wrenched the whole thing off. It made a disgusting squeaky and crunchy sound, making Zoe’s skin crawl.
Stella was the first one to enter. She did so backwards, keeping hold of the removed windowpane as she did so. Once inside, she took the pane with her, setting it down gently. Zoe followed after her.
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The attic they found themselves in looked like an attic. It was hot, dark, stuffy, and had some lame-looking boxes and tarps scattered among the beams and whatnot. Zoe wondered if there was anything up here that made their secret agent act necessary.
“So what’s the plan? Are we going to saw our way through the ceiling and drop down into some secret, off-limits archive?” Zoe hoped so. Stella had successfully wet her appetite for an intricate, high-tech heist.
“No, because if there is such a thing, I have no idea where it is.” The shopkeeper dashed Zoe’s hopes and ambitions with the indifferent callousness of a retail manager. “I’m going to find our way into the top level and snoop around in the various offices. You’ll be there to be a lookout and distract anyone who might show up.”
Something there didn’t add up, so Zoe ran the plan back over in her mind. “Wait, if that’s the plan, couldn’t we have just walked through the front? They already let me go upstairs to wait to see him. Like, we could have just done that and have you run off to go snooping.”
The other demon cleared her throat. “Technically yes. However, there are more complex issues to consider that I don’t have time to explain to you right now.”
Zoe’s eyes narrowed. “You only did the whole cafe bathroom to rooftop thing because you wanted to feel cool, didn’t you.”
“Uh, no, definitely not.” Stella was not a good enough liar to fool Zoe. “I would never waste time and resources doing something as juvenile as that.”
"Of course you wouldn’t,” Zoe said. She would never do something like that either. “Anyway, how do we actually get down from here? Is there a trapdoor or something?”
The sequence of surprise, uncertainty, and then embarrassment that flashed across Stella’s face told Zoe everything she needed to know. Neither of them said a word as both started to prod around the floorboards for a way through.
Most of the attic space was taken up by exposed rafters that lacked a proper walking surface, leaving a central aisle of proper flooring. Since the window they’d entered through was close to the center lengthwise, they could conveniently speed up the search by going opposite directions.
Come on, there has to be a way in and out somewhere. You never seal off an attic completely, even if you don’t intend for it to serve double for storage space.
Zoe knew at least a thing or two about architecture—perhaps even as many as three—and that was one of them. There was also the fact that it was being used for storage space, given the assorted crates, tarps, rolls, and hard to identify furniture pieces.
It was near the end of the building that something changed beneath Zoe’s feet. She paused. The boards themselves were the same. Could I have imagined it? No. Trust the gut. You didn’t put nearly two hundred points in Perception just to ignore it when you get the tingles.
Walking back and forth a couple of times, Zoe tried to pin down what specifically caused the difference. So much as articulating what she was feeling proved challenging. And she was feeling it—suspicious that she might have been picking up on some quiet sound, Zoe focused her Perception on pushing her hearing to an increased limit. Doing so proved that it had to be something else. Any ideas, Lilith?
“Hmm? Oh, I see.” The other demon living in Zoe’s mindscape manifested a convincing illusion beside her. This time, Lilith copied Zoe’s current appearance in detail, forgoing the cartoonish miniature for a live action carbon copy. To Zoe’s amusement, it was a copy of her current disguise as Olivia, not Zoe’s true appearance.
“I don’t know. We already share our senses, because I am you and you are me and—ah!” Zoe had to slap her doppelganger on the back of the head to snap her out of the creepy broken record speech. It was something that hadn’t happened in a while, but always made Zoe uncomfortable. The ability to ‘touch’ Lilith also became useful in this situation. The apparition was ordinarily totally intangible, but it seemed they had a limited ability to interact with each other when needed.
“Okay, as I was saying, we share our own senses, so I’m feeling the same thing you are. Maybe you should try getting down and feeling it with our hands?”
Zoe took the suggestion. It seemed to be a good suggestion, because she was quick to realize something. It feels colder than the rest of the floor. Maybe a little damp, too.
A rather loud whisper drew Zoe’s attention to Stella on the other side of the attic. “Hey! Found something over here!”
Shrugging, Zoe got up and made her way over to where the shopkeeper was crouched over a trap door. There was a crude metal hook sticking out that looked like it was intended to fulfill the role of a handle. “I found something too,” Zoe said as she knelt beside it, “but I think this is a bit more useful than what I found, which was a cold patch of the floor.”
Stella pulled open the hatch. From below, they were greeted by a ragged, off-white carpet. After poking her head through and back up, Stella dropped down. Zoe followed, making sure that the trapdoor would close above her. She accomplished this by only keeping it open enough to slip through, all while keeping her fingers on the edge until she dropped and pulled it down.
It worked. Zoe’s landing was graceful and quiet, and the entrance to the attic slammed shut above them. Both demons cringed at the comparatively loud bang. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the best idea.
If anyone heard, they didn’t make a fuss about it. The third floor hallway wasn’t much to speak of—hell, it even reminded Zoe of a drab, cubicle-infected office high-rise typical of twenty first century Earth. She was surprised to find that thought deeply unnerving.
“Have you ever been up here before?” Stella asked. Zoe shook her head. She’d only been up to the second floor. “I haven’t either. I suspect most of the recent and interesting things will be on the same floor as the main office, but we might as well see what they even keep up here.”
Shrugging, Zoe mimed them splitting up to cover opposite ends again. Nodding her approval, Stella went in the direction of the main stairwell. That left the random armchair and window at the other end for Zoe. The hallway was mostly just a row of plain, numbered doors, so Zoe started by opening each one as she went along.
It took all of four doors for Zoe to stop and skip to the end. Every one of them was the same—a nearly empty record closet. The first one had a single shelf of decrepit papers—a substantial step up from the subsequent three, which had nothing.
Zoe was just about ready to turn back when she felt a chill brush her skin. This end of the hall was in the same direction she’d explored the attic, she realized, and the unnatural cold was here as well. Unnatural.
Zoe turned the word over in her mind. It didn’t feel like a regular draft from a poorly insulated section of an old building. No—it was something closer to nearing that part of a supermarket where they stored the milk, cheese, packaged meat, and the like. Zoe wouldn’t put it past this world to have the enchantment version of a refrigeration. But why would you have a giant walk-in freezer behind a random door at the end of the empty third floor that you don’t use? Zoe frowned. I hereby declare this as officially suspicious.
The door was locked, which confirmed that someone didn’t want her to see what was inside.
“That is generally why one locks things, yes.”
There was a decision to make here. Also, there was a smaller issue Zoe had to address. Shut up, Lilith.
Now that Zoe had addressed the secondary issue, she could focus on the primary one—figuring out if she could get through the door with a method other than brute force. Two ideas came to mind.
Flesh Manipulation!
The first was to abuse one of her underused skills in the reverse of the way she did during her eventful first encounter with Sasha. This time, she was trying to pick a lock rather than jam it. This reversal made the task more difficult, as did a lack of conveniently placed dead bodies.
Guess I’ll just flatten out my own finger and wriggle it in. I mean, that sounds horrifying, but it also sounds better than ripping a chunk of meat off my arm and letting it regenerate.
Soft footsteps approached from behind. “Come on, I don’t think we’re going to find anything up here.”
“Nah,” Zoe replied without turning to face Stella, “I bet all the rooms you checked had nothing but ancient civic records with zero importance, yeah?”
“Yes, which is why you should stop bothering with whatever you’re doing and come help me snoop out the real offices.”
“Mhm.” It took a bit of effort to coax the tip of a finger into a thin, flat ribbon, but Zoe managed. It might have been easier if she had normal fingers and not her pitch black, rock-hard claws. Interestingly, though, so-called ‘demonite’ counted as flesh for her purposes. “Hey, look at this!”
Zoe shoved the mutilated digit in Stella’s face, causing the other demon to recoil in the way only possible when hit with primordial disgust. “The hell did you do to yourself?”
“Gave myself two whole levels in my flesh manipulation skill, that’s what.” Specifically, Zoe bumped it from a pathetic level two all the way to a lackluster level 4. “Also, I made myself a lockpick.” A moment later, she giggled. “Ha, get it! I made myself a lockpick! My own body, I mean.”
Stella didn’t look amused, which made Zoe feel sorry for her.
“Okay. Well as I was saying, it’s already later than I hoped, so we should get going.”
“Nah.” Zoe returned her attention to the lock. “This is where the good stuff is, trust me. Whatever’s hidden behind this one is going to be super useful and also extremely disturbing.”
Stella didn’t sound convinced, but Zoe didn’t care. She knew she was right. She just needed a few seconds—or maybe a little bit more—to prove herself. Come on, get in there. No! Don’t go all flaccid wet-noodle on me!
A flaw in her brilliant biotechnological innovation was that the floppy flesh ribbon was, well, floppy. It was claw material that she’d made soft, not muscle or even the kind of tissue that could inflate with blood. She would have to move it with more flesh magic. That’s fine, though.
Flesh Manipulation!
With new aid in the form of her skill, Zoe penetrated the lock with ease. There we go. Now we just have to wriggle around and hope to find the magic spot.
A few pokes and prods, a few tense seconds of an irritated shopkeeper breathing down her neck—and the lock clicked open, which the system chose as the moment to recognize her efforts.
Flesh Manipulation has reached level 5!
“Ha! See? I knew I could do it.” Zoe’s eyes flicked from her abomination of a finger back to the door, which had swung open to reveal the room beyond. “Oh, look, I told you so. Damn, that really is disturbing.”
Zoe was right about it not being a random draft-prone corner of the building. On the contrary, the room was well insulated with thick padding, including pieces attached to the door. It was even colder inside, but the most eye-catching feature was the bloated, pallid, and preserved demon corpse that looked alarmingly similar to Zoe.
You know, if I were bloated and dead. The pallid part wasn’t much of a difference, come to think of it.
“You know, I’m starting to think there’s something wrong with us,” Lilith remarked. “I don’t think any part of that is how you’re supposed to react to this scene.”
That was probably correct, but it was hardly relevant. Zoe shared a glance with Stella, who was the first to speak anything aloud. “So. Why exactly does it, uh…”
“Look like me?” Zoe finished for her. Stella nodded while Zoe stepped inside to get a closer look. “No idea. Oh, motherfucker!” Zoe scooted back. “It fucking moved!”
Stella grabbed Zoe by the shoulders and spun her around. “I don’t think it moved. I think you’re in shock.”
Her eyes trailed past Zoe’s, and widened. “Oh shit.”
“What?”
“I think it just moved.”
