Denise Cartland

Four Deaths Four Killers 19-09 (Heretical Edge 2)

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Okay, yeah, that was obviously a lot to get dumped on us on top of everything else that we were dealing with at that moment. I felt myself physically reel backwards, before looking quickly to the four Aspects who had accompanied us into this place. “Guys? What’s he talking about?” Even as I asked that, my gaze was snapping right back to where Amm–Theodore(?) was still standing. Part of me wouldn’t–couldn’t believe that this wasn’t some sort of trick. Ammon was right there, he was inside Denny’s mind. Of course he was, of course. She had his memories. Having the boy’s mind as well, his personality locked in this–but he said he wasn’t actually–what? 

Letters spoke for the others, staring that way as well with an unblinking gaze. “I promise, we didn’t know anything about this. We thought it was just Ammon’s bad memories that were locked up in this place. That’s what it’s for.” 

A–Theodore spoke again, his eyes glancing away while he seemed to shrink in on himself a little. “That’s the whole reason I’m here. I am one of his bad memories. The worst memory. I’m what he used to be before our father changed us. I’m what he was, or maybe what he could’ve been. And the piece of him that our father locked away, so he could create… him. But part of him still remembered who he was. He hated me, hated those memories. Or maybe he loved me. I… I’m not sure. Maybe it was both. But I am his worst memory, that’s why I’m locked up here.” His voice was soft, resigned. 

This was so much to take in. Just staring at the boy like that, I had to force myself to unclench my fist. My nails had left marks on the palm of my hand. And I couldn’t take my eyes off him. God, what–what was I supposed to do with this? What was I supposed to do with him? Was he really the–for lack of a better term, ‘good’ part of Ammon? Was he Ammon’s good personality that had been suppressed and locked away by Fossor? Or was this some sort of trick? When it came to Ammon, I felt incredibly paranoid about any evil ‘games’ he might have been playing. I really could not have put it past him to try something like this, just to fuck with us. Or rather, just to fuck with me. 

While I was thinking about that, the boy spoke up once more. “There’s something I know. Something I remember from when he died–when we died. I can’t say it out loud because it’s dangerous, and I don’t know how… how it’ll react in here. Maybe it won’t do anything because we’re all in her head. But you know why I can’t say it.” 

Oh. Oh yeah, I did know what he was talking about. He remembered the fact that Professor Dare hadn’t been affected by his power, and what that had to mean. He was the one who had ended up with that memory. Was he trying to give me some proof that he wasn’t evil, that he really was what he claimed to be? Would the real Ammon, the one I knew, have thought things through like that? Or would he just have blurted it out for fun to see what happened? I wasn’t sure. I just–I didn’t know. There was no way to know. Not right now, not like this. So what could–

“Flick.” That was Marina, speaking firmly as she tore her gaze off the boy to focus on me. “This isn’t the time to work all this out. We have to find Denny.” 

Of course, she was right. Dealing with the whole Theodore situation was going to have to wait. Whatever else was going on, we had to get Denny the hell out of this haunted mansion. The other stuff could wait until we had her out in the main– wait. “Is she even in here? Is she here, or did everyone just see–um, him in the windows? How good of a look did they get?” 

Before the others could answer that, Theodore spoke again. “She’s here. In this place, I mean. I–I can help you find her.” The offer came a bit hesitantly. But it didn’t sound like he was reluctant. It was more like he was afraid we would throw the offer back in his face. “If… if you want, I think I know where she went.” 

Right, this could still be a trap, of course. But something told me it wasn’t. Maybe I was just being stupidly naïve. Either way, we had to do something, and wandering around this enormous place completely blind was taking too long.

While all that was working its way through my mind, Walker spoke up. “Look, if he wants to help, let him help. If it’s a trick or whatever, we’ll deal with it. We don’t have time to stand around debating this whole thing all day. She’s in trouble. So can we get a move on or what?” 

Pushing all those other thoughts out of my mind, I nodded. “She’s right, we need to find Denny. So if you know where she might be… Theodore, lead the way. We’ll be right behind you.” And yes, I had more than one reason for deliberately pointing out that we would be following him. It might’ve made some level of sense to give him some benefit of the doubt in the moment, but I wasn’t going to be stupid about it. We still couldn’t be completely sure what his deal was. 

Theodore, visibly and audibly swallowing, stepped out of the doorway he had been standing in, and slowly began to walk past the six of us. His voice was a soft murmur. “This way. I think she’s downstairs. Very, very far downstairs.”

So, we followed him. Things got worse rather than better as we kept going.  The images were even more horrific and consistent, often shoving themselves right in our faces so we couldn’t ignore them. And it wasn’t just images, but sound as well. We heard the screams, the sick sound of bones breaking, even the horrifyingly slick sound of blades carving through flesh. We saw it, heard it, and smelled it. Even though they were ‘just’ holographic images in front of us, or played along the walls and windows, we could actually smell the blood and rotting flesh. It made my stomach churn and my heart ache. 

But then I realized the truth. The images weren’t worse just because we were getting closer to Denny. They were worse because of who we were with. What we had been seeing and experiencing before were just shadows of what these were. The main point of all this was to torture Theodore. The holograms were so much more realistic now because we were with him. He was the target, the one the images, the sounds, the smells were focused on. Even if everything he’d said was true, and he was really the ‘good’ part of Ammon, he was still being tormented by the memories of everything the other side of him had done. If this was true, then he was a little boy who was being viciously tortured by memories of things he’d had no control over.

Fuck, fuck. This whole place, all of it was just–it was wrong. We had to get the hell out of this mansion, as fast as possible. But first, we had to find Denny.

And find her, we did. Though it required following Theodore all the way down into the lower subbasement of the mansion. We tracked down heavy wooden stairs into what amounted to a dirt pit with cement walls, and found the girl in question huddled in a corner with her knees drawn to her chest. There was a line around her, a half circle from one corner wall to the other, with Denny curled up behind it. The line glowed a bit with what seemed like magical power, and I could see the ghost images that we had been subjected to all around her. They didn’t cross the line. Apparently they couldn’t. I wasn’t sure how that worked or how Denny had figured it out. Maybe it was just because this was her mind and she controlled it, to some extent anyway. 

Theodore, who stepped back out of the way and half-disappeared into the thick shadows, spoke in that soft, tentative voice. “They’re here for me, but she’s close enough for them.” 

“Flak?” I immediately announced while glancing that way. 

She, in turn, nodded and sent a burst of fire that actually dissolved the various ghost images. With the way clear, all of us ran to Denny. Marina was first, though she stopped short of the line. Somehow, it felt wrong to cross it. Even if it didn’t affect us, the girl had put it up as a bit of protection. Instead, Marina took a knee in front of her. “Denny, Denny, it’s us. It’s Marina. It’s okay, you’re okay. I…” She hesitated with her hand partway outstretched, still not crossing the line the girl had drawn. “Denny, are you alright?” 

For her part, the younger girl drew her knees to her chest and shook her head rapidly. “Have to go away. Have to be gone. Can’t be outside. Can’t be there. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I can’t let him out.”

The line slowly dissolved, disappearing as she dropped her gaze with obvious shame, unwilling to look at us. Immediately, Marina reached out to pull the girl up, dropping beside her so she could wrap both arms around Denny. “No, no. It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s alright. You saved Dakota. You saved her, Denny.” 

Nodding, I put myself on the other side of the girl, taking her hand with mine. “She’s right, Denny. We know what happened. You stopped Perrsnile. You stopped him. We know all of that. We know he was the bad guy. You saved Dakota. It’s okay. No one blames you for that. He was a monster and you stopped him.” 

“I killed him.” That was her soft, pained reply. “I know I had to. I know. But…” Her eyes closed, and I saw a tear slide its way down her cheek as she admitted in a hoarse, horrified voice. “I liked it. I enjoyed it. I wanted to see him die more. He was afraid, and I… I watched him die and I…” more tears came, her eyes squeezing even more tightly shut. “I loved it. I loved seeing how scared he was. It was Ammon. It was that part of him. I wanted to kill again.” 

“I’m sorry.” That was Theodore. The boy had come forward, and slowly sat down a few feet away from us, still on the edge of the line. 

Denny, looking up, gasped a little and reflexively recoiled while blurting a half-panicked, “Get away fro–wait.” She stopped then. “You… you’re not him. You look like him, but you’re not. I can tell you’re not.” 

There was a brief pause before Theodore wrapped both arms around his stomach and hunched in on himself protectively. I could see the shudder that ran through his small form. “I think… I think when you get down to it, I’m his… his guilt. I’m the part of him that was locked away, the part that felt bad about… about all of it. The part he was trying to find.” His eyes had been closed, but they opened as he looked up to stare at the girl, and I could see the tears there. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for… for what we did to you. But you’re not this.” His gaze turned to look at the nearest of the horrific images playing out nearby. “You didn’t do that. You didn’t do any of it. Please, stop torturing yourself with it. You didn’t do that stuff. You aren’t that person.” 

“Neither are you.” That was Marina, suddenly speaking firmly. “Neither of you are the person responsible for any of those things. You aren’t him. So you don’t need to be locked up in here either. Nobody does. This place should be burned to the ground. But… failing that, no one should be inside.” 

Swallowing as a myriad of thoughts ran through me, I glanced up. “Walker,” I murmured, “we need to get out of here. All of us.” 

The gray-skinned girl gave a little nod, then made a sharp gesture with her hand. Shadows enveloped us that time, until we were all back outside the mansion, in the middle of the carnival grounds. The six of us, along with Denny and Theodore.

“You knew the other versions of you were here, didn’t you?” Marina quietly noted, still squeezing Denny closer to herself. “You made this carnival for them.” 

“I had a dream about going to the carnival,” came the hoarse whisper, “just before the other dreams, before I found out about Ammon and all of that. It was a really good dream. It was so… realistic. I dreamed that I was… older, just a couple years. I was at the carnival for a school trip, with my friends. There were four of us and… and they were my best friends in the world. We spent all day at the carnival and it was my favorite day ever. We won these big teddy bear things and they had these little top hats. We had those Dippin Dots ice cream and it was–we were sharing the–” She cut herself off, taking a deep, shuddering breath. 

“I thought it was so weird, having a dream that was that real. It was like a memory, but it couldn’t be, because I was older in the dream. Now… now I guess we know why. But whatever the… the reason, it was so vivid. Then when… when I felt everyone in my head, I wanted… them to be somewhere nice. They deserve to be somewhere nice. Even if I had to lock myself up. Then I remembered the carnival, so I… I made it.” 

I still had no idea how she had managed something like this, or exactly how the whole ‘creating alternate personalities based off a combination of some form of herself and pieces of the Alters Ammon had killed’ thing worked, or… a lot of it. But it was right in front of us. Clearly, it happened. 

“You deserve to be somewhere nice too.” That wasn’t Marina or me, it was Letters. She stood alongside Flak, Bang-bang, and Walker. In that moment, Bijou joined them, as did Peanut, landing on Letters’ shoulder. Loudpound, the taller, sort of Orcish Denny, moved up behind the others. Even the wooden/Relukun-like Aspect I’d caught a brief glimpse of earlier, whose name was apparently Butternut, was there. Soon, the rest of the Aspects had formed a circle around us. At a glance, there were somewhere around twenty of them. And they were all echoing the sentiment that Denny deserved to be happy. 

“And you definitely don’t need to lock yourself up in there,” Marina added, with a glance toward the haunted mansion. “No one deserves to be in there.” She gave a quick glance toward Theodore, who was standing a bit apart from everyone else. “No one.” 

There was a moment of quiet, as Denny stared at the ground, then looked up and took in all of her Aspects. “Thank you. I… really did want this place to be fun for you.” She took a breath and let it out before looking over to Marina and me. “I won’t go back in the mansion. But… but I don’t think I’m ready to go back out… there again yet. The things I… I felt when I killed him, I can’t–I can’t go out there right now. Not yet. But… the others can.” 

“You mean us?” Walker put in. 

“All of you,” Denny confirmed. “And me too, sometimes. I mean, later. I made you. Or… something made you. I don’t know, exactly. But you’re here. You’re real. You’re people too. You deserve to walk around in the outside world. We can share. We can take turns. Maybe if I just take turns it won’t be so hard.”

Oh boy was there a lot I wanted to say to that. I felt like this was far out of my league. Denny needed a psychologist. Maybe we could get one inside here to–right, yeah. That was going to be a whole thing. But on the other hand, she was right that if all these Aspects were real personalities and all, they did deserve to have their own chance ‘outside,’ as it were. 

The Aspects were all talking amongst themselves about what it would be like to go outside. Some seemed eager, others uncertain but willing, and a few made it clear that they had no desire whatsoever to do it. 

“Maybe I can help you,” Theodore put in, clearly hesitantly. “I mean, if you want to talk about… about what happened, about our memories. Maybe that would help?” 

“I think it would help both of you to talk about them,” I managed. Sure, the idea of Denny getting help from someone who looked like the boy who had killed her–yeah, the whole thing was fucked up beyond belief. But if this was really a part of Ammon that wasn’t evil, the part Fossor had suppressed or… or whatever, then they might just be the only two who really understood each other and what they were going through. 

“I’d like that,” Denny was saying, while staring at him. Her voice was just as hesitant as his, yet she had clearly thought it through. “I have… questions about a lot of things.” 

“We can stay in here and talk about all of that,” Theodore offered, squirming a little uncertainly. “While the others go outside.” 

“Outside,” Jordan, the water-focused Aspect with the blue skin/scales and trident put in. “We can really go outside?” 

“We… have to be fair about it,” Denny murmured thoughtfully. “So… you go outside with the hall pass. Like the restroom at school.” As she said that, a white plastic thing about eight or nine inches long, four inches wide, and thin like a bookmark appeared in her hand. The words ‘Hall Pass’ were written in cursive purple letters across the front, and there was sparkly glitter on it. 

“One at a time,” she announced, before holding it out. “You can give it to each other, but you can’t take it without permission. You have to share.” There was a moment of uncertainty among the Aspects, but in the end, Walker took it. She, after all, had been the one to bring us in here in the first place. Well, Bijou had asked for our help to start with, but she was still a bit skittish about the idea. So Walker would go first. 

“Denny,” Marina started. 

The other girl interrupted. “It’s okay. I just… I’d like to be in my carnival for awhile, with my new friends.” She glanced toward Theodore with a hesitant smile before turning back to us as the smile faded a bit. “I can’t go out there. I’m not ready. Tell Dakota I’ll be watching. And she can come in here and visit. Just have–have Walker bring her.” 

This… hooboy, this whole situation was really confusing. But I had no idea what to do or say about it. Obviously, Denny needed help beyond what either Marina or I could give her. Not because she wanted to share her body with the other Aspects, that was understandable. But her reluctance to go outside at all, I felt like someone should talk with her about that. Someone who was better at it than me. When you added in the whole Theodore thing, it was… eesh.

Instead of getting into all that, however, I leaned over to embrace the girl. “You have Walker pull us in to talk to you a lot, okay? And Dakota’s gonna want to hop in and see this place too.” 

Marina expressed the same sentiment while embracing her as well. Both of us made her promise to have us and others visit her. Finally, we all stood up. The rest of the Aspects closed ranks around Denny, clearly protecting her. 

Turning to Theodore, I hesitated once more. “I don’t know–I don’t know what to say to you. Not right now.” 

“That’s okay,” he murmured with a self-conscious squirm. “I don’t know what to say either. I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything. If… I know it’s a lot, but if you ever want to talk again, you know where I’ll be.” 

I paused, then nodded. There wasn’t a lot I could say to that, but there was one thing. Reaching out, I forced my hand to stop trembling before putting it on his shoulder. As he looked up at me, I took a moment to find my voice. “I’m glad you aren’t in the haunted house anymore. Just… just stay away from those memories, okay? You belong out here, where you can… where you and everyone else can help each other.”

He nodded solemnly at that, looking like he had no idea how to respond. Which was fair, since I had no idea what else to say just then. At least I didn’t have to figure it out right away. He would be in here, and if I wanted to talk to him again, well, I could. 

Yeah, this situation was fucked up, to say the least. But we were just going to have to deal with that. Just like every other fucked up situation in my life. 

With the other Aspects clustered around Denny and ready to help her, Walker remained standing near the two of us. The gray-skinned girl cracked her neck, then glanced to Marina and me while clutching the hall pass in one hand. “Ready to go back outside?” 

Before either of us could answer, I felt that twisting, shifting sensation. And just like that, we were gone once more. 

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Four Deaths Four Killers 19-06 (Heretical Edge 2)

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The elevator doors opened once more, as I kept the blade of my staff raised and pointed toward Gliner’s throat. “Move,” I ordered. “And don’t try anything. I really wanna kill you right now, so you probably shouldn’t give me any excuse.” 

The six-eyed man, for his part, slowly backed off the elevator with his hands raised. Marina had his pistols already, but that didn’t mean the man wouldn’t have other weapons hidden away in a pocket-dimension thing that I couldn’t sense through. I was watching him like a hawk as we moved together into the room. His voice was careful. “Look, I don’t know what you think is happening right now or what you’re trying to do, but–” 

“What? What happened?” That was Archibold, straightening up from where he had been examining a nearby wall of the empty room where we had left him and Perrsnile a minute earlier. “Weren’t you going to the server room? I–” He stopped then, upon noticing the way I was keeping my staff pointed at his partner. “What?” 

“Ahem,” Perrsnile’s ghost intoned with a clear note of surprise. “I believe we may have missed something.” 

“Yeah, you did,” I agreed. “We all missed it, for way too long. But we were just on the elevator, and I figured it out. Just a few mistakes our friend here made. He would’ve gotten away with it otherwise.” With that note, I pressed the blade of my staff tight enough into his throat to draw a little bit of blood as the blue-scaled man grimaced. “Sit down,” I snarled, anger filling my voice. “I think it’s time we had a little talk about everything you’ve been up to. Then you can tell us where the girls are right now. And why you really did all this. I’m sure your partner would be very interested in finding out too, assuming he didn’t already know.”

“Already know what?” Archibold demanded. He hadn’t gone so far as to try to physically intervene, but I knew it was a near thing. Seeing a Heretic pointing a bladed staff at the man obviously made him a little jumpy. Fortunately, he was standing down, confused enough about why this was happening to keep watching. “You can’t honestly think that he was behind this.” 

A soft chuckle escaped me as I gave a faux-casual shrug. “He did almost get away with it. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even have caught it at all if he hadn’t gotten cocky.” My gaze went back to the man in question then, as I snapped, “I said, ‘sit down!’” 

He sat, most of his assortment of eyes darting around the room while the two in the center focused on me. “Look, you’ve lost your mind. Whatever you think you’ve figured out, you’re wrong. I didn’t have anything to do with this. I killed Ausesh, yes. Because she is the one who–” 

“Yeah, nice try,” I interrupted. “You’ve been loudly blaming her this entire time, just to draw attention away from yourself. But here’s the thing, it’s not gonna work anymore. Now stay right there.” To Ausesh, I added, “Can you move up on this side?” My hand gestured toward a spot to the man’s right and slightly behind him. “If you see him start to try anything, let me know. And uhh, Perrsnile, you watch the other side.” My hand gestured to a spot behind the sitting man and to his left. “Both of you keep your eyes on him. Let me know if he moves at all, even an inch. If he doesn’t want to tell us the truth on his own, we’ll see how well a certain spell can pry it out of this son of a bitch.” 

“Ahh, well, if you think that’s best.” Moving to the spot I had indicated, Perrsnile added, “Are you quite certain about this? I would not have seen Mr. Gliner as being capable of anything like this.” 

“He’s a mercenary,” I pointed out while taking a step back. “He probably got paid for it.” Even as I said that, my hand was reaching down to touch the floor. An intricate runic symbol appeared there, before I moved my hand slightly to the left to create another. “Paid a lot, most likely. I just wonder if it was before you guys started here, or if someone got to him afterward.” 

Archibold looked like he wanted to approach, but a look from Marina kept him rooted to the spot. “He is my partner, my– I would have known if he was corrupt, if he was doing something like this. You are not making any sense.” 

As my gaze passed over him, I took a few steps to one side while leaning down to create another series of symbols around the seated man. “You’re saying you didn’t know anything about it?” With those words, I rose and put my back to him to look straight at Gliner. “Didn’t share your new fortune with your partner, huh? Why, did selling a bunch of children into slavery not pay enough for two?” 

I could feel Archibold‘s eyes on my back, staring intently before he spoke carefully. “Maybe you could tell me why you’re so convinced that my partner was responsible for all this?” His voice was even and calm, but I could hear a bit of emotion behind it. As much as they had been at odds about whether Ausesh or Valdean had been responsible, the two men were still very close.

Giving Gliner a long, hard look, I rose and moved to the next spot so I could make another set of runes and slowly empower them. “Fine, I’ll start, since you’re not in the mood to. I started to work it out when we got here and there was nobody. See, Perrsnile–” I nodded absently to the ghost man while moving to make another rune. “He told us that if there’s another elevator in the area where yours is going, it’ll alert you. It didn’t say anything, so there was no elevator here, even when we started on our way from the server room. They never came to this room.” 

Archibold gave a slow, uncertain nod. “Yes, it seems to me like we covered that. They must have gone to another room first. Wasn’t that why you were going up to the server room again in the first place? You’re supposed to be checking to see where the bad guys are right now.” 

“That’ll only work if they’re somewhere that isn’t supposed to have ongoing life support,” I pointed out idly. “And if they didn’t manage to get into the system to alter one of the other rooms not to give any reports. After all, we already know that’s possible.”  

By that point, my slow movement around the seated man brought me directly behind him, as I carefully made another rune and added, “Besides, there’s no reason to go chasing those people when we have the real bad guy right here in front of me, is there?” 

Marina, who had paced around to the other side of the room, abruptly blurted, “Can we just find out where the girls are, please? I really don’t feel like playing games with this right now.” Her voice cracked a little bit, another reminder of just how much this was affecting her. She was really upset about not being there when Dakota and Denny had been in trouble. It was obvious she was blaming herself. And if anything permanent happened to them, if we didn’t find them soon, I really didn’t want to think about how she would take that. 

To be honest, I didn’t want to think about how I would take it either. We needed answers, and we needed them right now. Fortunately, that’s what this was all about. To that end, I rose a bit from my crouch while nodding. “Don’t worry, we’re gonna find the girls, I promise. Nothing else is going to happen to them.” 

With that, I paced back around to the front, studying my spellwork on the way. It was as good as I could make it. Others would’ve done better, of course. But they weren’t here right now. This was the best we could do. So, I took a breath before letting it out. “It’s been real fun, running around this vault like clueless headless chickens. But right now, I’d say it’s time we get some real answers from the person responsible for all this. Wouldn’t you say… Perrsnile?” 

As I said those words, the spell I had put together came to life. An assortment of blue, green, and purple energy rays sprang out from those runes. They wrapped not around the kneeling man in the center, but around the ghost of Perrsnile himself, who jerked in surprise before the powerful magic brought him up short and made him freeze. “Whaaaaat?!” His blurted word came as his eyes snapped toward me. 

“You can move now, buddy,” I told Gliner casually. “Sorry about the cut. Had to sell it.” To Perrsnile, I added, “Yeah, see, when I said I figured it out, I really did figure it out.” Turning, I showed him my back, where I had used my inscription power to paint, ‘This is a trick, the real bad guy is Perrsnile’ when I had turned it toward Archibold a minute earlier. That was why he had stared so intently at my back before responding. 

That done, I turned back to the small ghost man. “I could’ve held you with my power, but I wasn’t completely sure you wouldn’t be able to pull anything. Not considering how sneaky you’ve been so far. I figured it’d be better if I had this necromancy spell to keep you trapped. But I needed you to stand still while I put it together, without knowing anything was wrong. Hence that little production we just put on. You were so distracted trying to figure out why I was suddenly blaming Gliner here, and making a show of watching to make sure he didn’t try to escape, that you didn’t pay attention to the actual runes I was putting down.” 

“And you sure as hell didn’t pay any attention to me,” Marina put in from where she had maneuvered herself, “while I was over here erasing the spell you started to put down while we were gone.” 

“She means the spell you were doing to open that little gate to the outside. Which is why you had us come down here, isn’t it?” I prompted. “You know, because no living creature can get out that way. That’s what Ausesh kept saying. But a dead one, like you? Give you another few minutes and you could’ve been out of here, no problem. Which would’ve left us trapped in this place. You probably figured we’d assume you were absorbed by the orichalcum in the walls or whatever. Except the walls aren’t made of that stuff down here. Neither is the floor. Hence why I could put that spell down that’s keeping you trapped. You figured you could just waltz out of here and we’d never figure out who the real bad guy was. That or we would figure it out, but you’d be long gone by the time we escaped this place. It’s a big world out there.” 

The small, in more than one way, man opened and shut his mouth a couple times before his head shook. “I don’t know what has gotten into you, dear girl, but I did not harm those children.” 

“One, don’t call me ‘dear girl,’” I retorted. “The guy who used to call me that… well, I’d say you don’t want to end up like him, but you’re already a piece of shit who’s dead, so…you’re basically twinsies, really. And two, I know you didn’t hurt them. But you did hurt the other kids. And Mophse.” 

“Ahh, what exactly is happening?” Archibold asked with a raised hand. “I’m still confused. Are you saying that Perrsnile here was responsible for everything? How would that even be possible? You possessed him, didn’t you?” 

A very small smirk found its way to my face. “Sure, and he had the same fake memories as everyone else. It’s where that little toy of his came in. Back when we first went up to find someone who could help with the server thing, he was playing with this little circuit board thing. My guess, that’s what he used to restore his memories after we were done. He tapped into that memory adjusting system somehow, the one Ausesh told us about. He changed everyone’s memories, including his own, just before the interrogations. Then he probably had that little device he was playing with automatically restore them later. On a timer, or maybe when it detected something else, or whatever. The point is, he changed his memories while we were interrogating them. I don’t think he knew exactly how we’d get the answers, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He wanted to look innocent, so he made himself innocent. That way, he would’ve passed any magic lie detector test, any ability, any… anything. He looked innocent because he erased all his memories of being guilty. Or, well, he gave himself the same fake memories of being ‘guilty’ that everyone else had. He blended in with the rest of the crowd. Then he got his memories back, and when we came looking for someone to help with the server, that was his best chance to both figure out how much we knew, and get a way out of here.” 

The man started to say something, but I cut him off. “He’s a maintenance worker. I mean, he was, up on spaceships. He’s so small, he used to crawl around behind all the systems and get into areas no one else could. He did the same thing here. Maybe because Valdean asked him to help, maybe just on his own. Either way, he found out about the memory erasing program. Whatever drove him to it, I dunno. But he used that to sell the children in this place to those people from the outside, then erased everyone’s memory about them ever existing. It was the perfect crime and get-rich-easily scheme. Remember that really distorted video we watched? It looked like one of the kids wasn’t in a cage. He was just standing away from the adults. We thought it was just because they were using him as a prop, an example or whatever, but it wasn’t. The ‘kid’ was Perrsnile. The adult figures were his clients, the people paying him. They were standing apart because it was customers on one side, child-selling piece of shit on the other. That partner they were talking about, that was probably someone he knew from his time on one of those spaceships. My guess is they were smugglers or pirates. That’s probably how he had contacts for selling children into slavery in the first place. Things went bad, maybe because his buddies realized he was a piece of shit. Whatever it was, he ended up here somehow. Valdean probably didn’t know about his history. Or he just saw the best in him. Seems like the sort of guy he was.”

Marina took over while I silently fumed. “So, this is what really happened. This piece of shit here was making plenty of money off selling the children in this place. Then those two,” she nodded toward Archibold and Gliner, “found out that the stock of supplies for children kept being used. So they asked their friend, Mophse, about it. When Perrsnile found out, he ambushed Mophse in the sauna. Choked him from behind while he was sitting down. Probably came in through the vent there too. Got him off balance, just–” She stopped, folding her arms tightly while looking away, anger visible across her face. 

“And from there, we already know what happened,” I noted. 

“I assumed the villain was Valdean, and killed him,” Archibold quietly agreed, rocking backward on his heels at the realization of what he had done. 

Gliner, meanwhile, opened and shut his mouth before grimacing as he slowly turned to look at Ausesh’s ghost. “And I assumed the villain was you… and killed you.” 

“Yes, well, that was a mistake,” she retorted dryly, before looking at me. “What on Earth made you jump to these conclusions?” 

“I would like to know that as well,” Perrsnile put in, “given how wildly incorrect they are.” 

My eyes rolled a bit at the denial. “First of all, you were obviously lying about not remembering these guys.” I waved a hand toward the trio who should have been erased from his memory. “When we all got on the elevator to come down here a few minutes ago, you made a point of gesturing for Ausesh to move out of the middle so Archibold could stand there. Because you remembered that he gets sick if he doesn’t. You were trying so hard to come off as a gentle, nice old man that you forgot that wasn’t something you should’ve known about.” 

While the little man absorbed that mistake, I went on. “Anyway, when all that was going down, Denny and Dakota set off the alarm spell and my taboo power to try to warn us. According to Perrsnile, the girls were standing by the elevator when someone came in, grabbed them, then killed him on the other side of the room while his back was turned. He literally said he heard a sound, then something grabbed him before he could even turn around. They stabbed him, dropped him, and he heard them say the thing about taking them to Beta Cargo while he was in the middle of dying. Except we already know that’s not how it went. The girls had time to set off the alarm spell and start to use my taboo power to warn me. Dakota said, ‘killer’s bletherskate ahhh.’ Bletherskate was my taboo word, and I get one more on either side of that. She was trying to tell me something about the killer. Probably that they figured out it was him somehow. 

“Either way, they had time to do all that, even though he said all he heard was ‘a sound’ before he was grabbed and stabbed. And the whole time he was dying, he conveniently heard them talk about where they were going, but still claimed he didn’t hear Dakota give the taboo warning. Probably because he didn’t know what it meant, so he had no idea I could actually hear those words.”

Letting the others absorb all that, since I hadn’t had time to explain my reasoning before, I took a couple breaths to calm myself. Swallowing hard, I pushed on. “Beyond that, when we were on the elevator going from the rooms where Ausesh and these guys were living, the elevator didn’t warn us about there being another car in the way then either. So, according to Perrsnile’s story, these bad guys came in out of nowhere, captured the girls, stabbed him and left him to die, then took Sitter with them too on their way out and just left.” 

My voice turned firm. This was the most important part, the bit that had given it away for me. “There is no physical way that happened. We were literally already on the elevator and moving toward the server room when that alarm spell went off and I heard Dakota. If there was another elevator in the way at any point in that time, our elevator would have told us. It didn’t, so there wasn’t. When we got in the elevator and started toward the server room, everything in there was fine. We know exactly when things went wrong in there, because Dakota set off my taboo power when it happened. We know the second there was a problem, and we were on the elevator going to that room. It never warned us about another elevator in the way, so there never was one, period. There was never another elevator in the way from the time we started, all the way to when we actually arrived. Never. It wasn’t there. There was no elevator, no other group.”

Archibold shook his head. “Then who were the other villains? Who killed him?” 

“There were no other villains,” I replied flatly. “Just him. My guess, the girls figured out he was the bad guy, somehow. They set off the alarm and Dakota started to say that thing to me, but he did something. Probably hit her. That’s why she cried out.” 

“But who… ah,” Ausesh started. “The other girl.” 

“Denny,” I finished for her, nodding while looking straight at Perrsnile. “She’s the one who killed you, wasn’t she? You hurt her friend, and she lashed out. She punched right through your chest. You were the bad guy all along, and she ended you. She’s the one who killed you, to save her friend, and herself.”

“So that’s what happened this whole time,” Marina murmured. “Perrsnile killed Mophse because he was looking into the missing kids, Archibold killed Valdean because he thought Valdean killed Mophse, Gliner killed Ausesh because he thought she killed Mophse… and… and Denny killed Perrsnile.” 

“But where are the girls now?” Gliner quickly put in. “And Sitter? If there were no other villains, then–” 

“There’s only one option,” I replied. “It’s weird, but… well, they clearly didn’t go anywhere. You know what they say about eliminating the impossible. If they didn’t leave that room, they must still be in there. Come on.” Giving Perrsnile a dark look, I added, “He’s not going anywhere for awhile. Not with that spell holding him. This is more important.” With that, I turned to go back onto the elevator. Despite my words, Ausesh and Archibold volunteered to stay behind and watch him while keeping in contact with me through the whole Necromancy thing, just in case. Meanwhile, Marina and Gliner accompanied me as we took the elevator back to the server room. As soon as we arrived, I took several long steps in, passing the area I’d stood in before. Marina was right behind me. Within another couple steps, I felt it. My item sense kicked in, and I quickly turned to run to the far corner before kneeling down. My hands moved, finding three invisible forms lying there. Sitter was the easiest to identify, with his hard metal body. When I touched him, the invisibility faded away. The same thing happened as I touched the other two forms to reveal Dakota and then Denny there. Sitter and Dakota remained unconscious. When I touched the last girl, however, her eyes opened to meet mine. 

“H-help,” she managed in a voice that cracked a bit from terror and desperation. “Please help.” 

Marina dropped down on the other side of the girl, catching her hand. “Denny, it’s okay. We’re right here. What happened?” 

“Inside,” came the response. “Need help… inside.” 

“Inside where?” I asked, confused. “Who needs help?” 

Denny’s eyes met mine, as she whispered. “Inside. Please… help.” 

Before either of us could respond, there was a flash of energy that enveloped Marina and me. And then we were gone. 

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Four Deaths Four Killers 19-02 (Heretical Edge 2)

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Right, so the good news here was that we actually knew what the note in Mophse’s shoe had been about. The bad news was that we still had no idea why he would have something like that, or exactly what the specs were supposed to be used for. It had something to do with the wiring inside the computer, but why? Why did he have it, what was the wiring supposed to do, and why did someone kill him for it? Assuming that was why he was killed. It was the best guess we had at the moment, and at least gave us somewhere to start. 

Taking all that in and thinking about it for a minute, I exhaled. “Okay, so we know all of this has something to do with the computer. Which makes sense, because we know they did something to it, or Sitter wouldn’t have been knocked out when he tried to access it. They left a trap, and they could only have done that extra knowledge about how to mess with it. So the wiring note had to be important. That’s why he had it and… maybe why they killed him?” My voice trailed off uncertainly as I tried to make sense of that.  

Dakota hesitated before raising a hand tentatively. “Do you think maybe he was working with them and figured out those wiring things, but then he changed his mind so they killed him to get it?” 

“Well hold on,” Marina put in quickly. “If they killed him to get the wiring notes, why were they still in his shoe? Obviously, they managed to do what they needed to do, because they got into the computer. But they didn’t get the notes from him.”

Sesh tapped the wall a few times thoughtfully before starting with, “Maybe he had another copy and they found that? Or maybe he already helped them get into the computer system, then he changed his mind after that and was going to confess what was going on, so they killed him but didn’t realize the note was still in his shoe.”

“Or,” Denny added quietly, “he never switched sides, but they didn’t want to pay him, or thought he was a loose end or something, so they killed him anyway. He’s not necessarily a completely innocent victim, you know?” She sounded and looked guilty for even pointing that out, squirming uncomfortably. “I–I’m just saying, I don’t mean he was definitely bad. I mean–” 

Reaching out, I squeezed her shoulder before nodding. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. We’ve gotta keep an open mind. We don’t know exactly why he was killed, and definitely don’t know whose side he was on at the end. But we are at least pretty sure it has to do with those wiring notes. It’s just too bad we can’t wake Sitter up and ask exactly what these different bits are for. Cuz I don’t know about you guys, but it’s pretty Greek to me. Wait, I could probably understand Greek better than this.” 

Denny held up the binder. “We could use this to try to figure it out. I mean, the diagrams match, so all we have to do is read the book and figure out what they’re for.”

Marina turned to look back through the doorway to the auditorium. “Yeah, we can do that. And maybe we could also find someone in there who knows about this stuff. I mean, it’s probably not one of them, right? We already know there’s three people missing, and probably somewhere else in this facility. So, you know, there’s no real reason for whoever was responsible for this to be one of the people who is still in this room.” She looked at me then. “Besides, you’ve already gone through their heads and they were all screwed up by the memory adjustment. Why would our bad guys do that to themselves if they had a plan beyond just ‘kill him and get away with it?’ Which, I guess that could be their plan, but the missing three people seem like… you know, they have to be related.” 

I hesitated briefly, thinking about that before giving a little nod. “I guess that does make sense. They probably wouldn’t leave themselves in this room with the main group when we already know they have a way to be somewhere else. Probably looking for a way out, or for a way to take over this place completely.”

Sesh showed her teeth. “I bet they weren’t ready for us to be here. Err, mainly you guys.” She looked back and forth between Marina and me. “Having a couple Bosch Heretics probably really screwed up their plans. Maybe they’re regrouping and trying to figure out what to do about you. Us. All of us.” 

She had a point, but I still grimaced a little at the thought that there were mysterious murderers somewhere else in this facility plotting out how to kill us. Plus, they had– “The computer room. Yeah, I put that alarm spell in there, but still. I don’t trust whoever’s responsible for this not to find a way around that. We need to get back there and–shit, we can’t leave the people in there either. If they’re all innocent and those guys show up…” 

“Find someone who can help you with the tech stuff,” Sesh put in. “Take ‘em down there with you. I can stay up here and watch over these guys. If anything happens, I’ll use that emergency alert thing to warn you about it. Or that convenient taboo spell. Besides,” she added while we were thinking about that, “the people in there might be nice, but they’re not totally helpless. I’m pretty sure whoever’s responsible for this doesn’t want to start a head-on fight with everyone. Or, you know, they wouldn’t’ve been such sneaky cowards about it so far.” 

Again, she was right. So, while I still felt the pressing urgency to get back to that computer room, Marina, Sesh, and I headed into the auditorium once more, while leaving Dakota and Denny in the elevator with Sitter’s body. Marina did the talking once we had their attention, asking if there were any computer and electronics experts in the group who would be willing to help us down in the server room.

It took a little discussion, and we ended up with our volunteer, a small, older looking man with a long white beard and dark purple skin. He couldn’t have been taller than about three feet, and his eyes were big enough to take up half his face. They were also bright neon green, and had almost no white to them. Just enormous emerald marbles in the middle of his head. Back when I had been possessing people to check them for being the killer, he had introduced himself as Perrsnile. And yeah, I did recall that he did a lot of work with electronic stuff.  In fact, before he was recruited to come into this place, he had been the primary electronics expert on board a small cargo vessel. His diminutive size meant he could get into a lot of very tight spaces easier than people who were bigger. And he had incredibly nimble fingers, which he absently showed off by flipping this tiny circuit board thing back and forth between them the way some people could do with a coin. His species, known as that Uusnar, largely made their living off being craftsmen, their dexterity and steady hands known throughout the universe. He would definitely be able to help with this. At least, I hoped he would. We could use the break.

Before we left Sesh there, I took a second to make sure she had the emergency alert coin, and knew how to use it, along with knowing my taboo word. The two of us had a quick conversation about what to do if something happened, and I did my best to answer a couple questions from the audience. Not that I actually had much in the way of answers for them just yet, but I did tell them that we had reason to believe the person or persons responsible for this whole thing were not in this room with them. Which seemed to help take a lot of the tension out, thankfully. I just hoped I wasn’t making a mistake by saying that much. Maybe I shouldn’t have. If there really was a bad guy in here and we had missed them, or if the bad guys were somehow monitoring this room, maybe it would’ve been better if they didn’t know how much we did? 

In the end, I shook those thoughts off. I’d made my decision and was sticking with it. Telling these people they probably didn’t have to be afraid of each other was the right way to go. So, I made Sesh promise one last time to sound the alert if there was any trouble, then left. 

On the way through the backstage area to the elevator, Marina and I warned our new recruit about what he was about to see. It felt like a bad idea to let this guy see the unconscious and dark Sitter without giving him any advance warning. He might justifiably freak out a bit, especially given what we’d already told these people about what was going on. And hey, maybe he could actually do something about the unconscious robot thing too.

The small man exclaimed in alarm when we told him about what happened to Sitter, vanishing that little circuit board into a pocket before twisting his hands around anxiously as he asked questions about exactly what the robot had been plugged into and what happened leading up to that. When he saw Sitter himself, Perrsnile went right past Denny and Dakota with barely more than a quick hello. In moments, he had pulled the robot down to a lying position on the floor and was looking him over intently. “Oh dear, oh no, oh dear, no no no. This is not good at all. No good whatsoever.” Clearly fretting as he twisted his fingers around together, he looked over to me. “I need to get inside our friend here and see what damage has been done, but I can’t do that without tools.” 

We all exchanged looks before Marina started with, “Let’s get down to the computer room so we can make sure our… not-friends aren’t in there causing trouble already. Then you can check on him. Here.” She reached into her pocket, arm going much deeper than it should have before she pulled out a small red folded packet and opened it to show him a variety of small tools inside. “Would this help?”

“Yes, yes!” The man blurted excitedly. He reached out to take the packet of tools and looked through it. “I thought you weren’t a handyman. Handywoman?” He paused to consider shaking his head. “I thought you didn’t work with these things, Miss Marina.” 

“I don’t,” she replied, “but I’ve been around people who do, and it pays to be prepared if they need to work.” 

“I take it those aren’t the only tools you’ve got,” I guessed. 

Sure enough, Marina blushed a little before confirming, “I have medical supplies, games, art stuff, basically everything I could think of that might be useful at any point.” She grimaced visibly. “So now that I say that, you know we’re about to run into a situation that I don’t have anything for just so I look dumb for saying that.” 

“Don’t worry,” I assured her while starting to reach out to hit the buttons to send us back to the computer room. It was just the opposite of the way I’d brought us up here to begin with. Still, I had to stop and think before each button press. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it.” 

Once I was done and the elevator started moving, Perrsnile tilted his head as though listening before giving a bright smile. “Good, nothing is in the way.” 

“Wait, what do you mean?” I asked, blinking at him. 

“If there was another elevator car in the location you requested,” he explained, “the system would have alerted you with a short chime, like this.” He made a chirp-like sound. “That would mean the elevator would be slower because it had to move the other car out of the way. If it did this…” He made a buzzer sound. “… that would mean the elevator car that is in the way has been locked down and can’t be moved.” 

“Huh, good to know.” Taking that in, I turned my attention to Dakota and Denny and added, “When we get there, I want you guys to stay with Marina and Perrsnile while he works. If we can figure out which areas have the sensors blocked off, I’ll head down there and see what I can find.” 

“Not by yourself!” Dakota immediately blurted, eyes widening dramatically. 

Denny agreed with a violent shake of her head. “You can’t go by yourself, Flick. What if there are really bad people down there? There’s three of them, and they already killed two people.” 

“Yeah,” Dakota put in, “and one of them was an old retired Heretic. He had to have a lot of powers too, Flick. But they still took him by surprise. You can’t go down there alone.” 

Marina nodded. “They have a point. We shouldn’t let anyone go off by themselves.” For a moment, she looked conflicted, clearly not wanting to leave these two alone either. Powerful or not, they were still kids. But then, they would be with our new friend here, at least. Even if he definitely wasn’t the stand up and fight sort of person. He was even more of a civilian than Denny and Dakota. If something went wrong and a fight broke out, they would probably be the ones protecting him. 

The two of us exchanged silent looks while we tried to decide how to deal with that, before Marina gave a soft sigh and decisive nod. With that, she took an emergency alert coin of her own and put it in Dakota‘s hand. “I’ll go with Flick. If anyone comes to you guys, you set this off.“

Exhaling, I tried to offer them a reassuring smile. “Between that and the alarm spell I put up, that should be enough.” Plus, they knew the taboo word thing just like Sesh. Thinking about that as the elevator doors opened, I stopped the others from getting off. Then I carefully reached around and touched the enchanted stone I had left there, triggering the extra bit of magic I’d left on it to pause the alarm until I was ready for it to be active again. 

From there, Marina and I carefully entered the room first, with our weapons ready just in case we had unexpected visitors after all. I was pretty sure we wouldn’t, given the alarm had still been active, but still. It paid to be careful. Especially given what these guys had accomplished so far. 

A quick check-through confirmed that the computer room was as empty as we’d left it, and nothing seemed out of place. So, we went back to the elevator to tell the others to come on in. I carried Sitter and laid him down on the floor before looking at our new friend. “Would you mind looking in the system to try to figure out which parts of the vault are being blocked off before you do anything else? We uhh, we need some idea of where to search.” 

Dakota’s hand shot into the air. “Are you gonna be okay? I mean, um, when Sitter plugged into the system, it knocked him out.” She cast a worried glance to the silent, dark robot before looking back that way. “I really don’t want that to happen to you.” 

“Now don’t you worry, ahh, Miss,” Perrsnile assured her while giving what was probably a put-on smile meant to make her feel better. “I may not be all up there with the swords and the guns and the heeyawing, but I can fix a broken computer with the best of them, and I know how to watch for traps. Seems to me our friend Sitter here wasn’t aware that would even be an issue, so he probably wasn’t keeping his eyes open for it. And I dare bet anything they left behind was meant to stop a robot, not a determined little Uusnar. But I will need both your help, okay?” 

They both agreed, and I gave the man a grateful nod. He winked at me before turning to the nearby computer and cracking his knuckles. “Now then, let’s see what we can find here.”

With that, he went to work, typing rapidly. I watched as line after line of code sailed past on the screen too quickly for me to even hope to pay attention to what was happening. A part of me felt anxious about what this guy might be doing when none of us could follow his work, but then, I had been in his head. I’d seen his desire to help, his love for the others in there, his earnest hope that they would be allowed to stay in the vault. He had a lot of memories about spending time with Valdean, and from every memory I’d looked at while I was in his head, he really loved the man like a brother. He was devastated about his death, and wanted to find out who was responsible. Yes, all of that could’ve been faked, given we knew their memories had been tampered with. But I had to hope that it wasn’t. Otherwise I would fall into a deep pit of paranoia. It was like we said earlier, we had every reason to believe that the bad guys were not in that room. There were three missing, and they had to be the ones responsible for all this.

So, I pushed down that paranoia and let the man work. Thankfully, it wasn’t long before he pushed away from the screen and turned to look at me. “Okay then, Miss Flick, I know what areas are being blocked from the sensors. Here.” Even as he said that, one of the nearby parts of the server was spitting out a few sheets of paper. I hadn’t even been aware that there was a printer there. He took them, showing me what looked like a set of blueprints on the first page. It was a floor plan. “The rooms that are blocked off are all connected. This is the floorplan here. And this–” He went to the next page, showing a list of buttons to press in the elevator. “This is how you get there. The second set is how you get back here from there, and the third is how to get to the auditorium from there.” 

“Hey, thanks.” Taking the papers, I offered him a smile before swallowing. “Now umm, can you see what you can do for Sitter here? And, you know, maybe a bit of what they were doing with those wiring instructions? I know it’s asking a lot–” 

“It’s no trouble at all, Miss Flick,” he assured me. “I want to find the neuthfah responsible for–” He stopped abruptly, grimacing with a look at Dakota and Denny. “Pardon the language, please. I… I will help in any way I can.” 

I thanked him again profusely for that, and for everything else, before tugging Denny and Dakota away for a moment. “You guys gonna be okay here? You know what to do if anyone starts to come in, right?” 

Denny gave a quick nod. “Introduce myself and tell them to lay down and not move or do anything.” 

Dakota added, “And then set off the alarm spell and let you know what’s going on. You know, just to be sure.” 

Marina confirmed that before putting in, “Be careful, okay? We’ll lock the doors behind us.” 

They all agreed to be very careful, before Marina and I went over the papers once more. Apparently the areas that were blocked off were known as ‘Storage Wing Z61.’ From what Perrsnile could tell us, some of those rooms were meant to hold extra parts for the vault, some contained baby supplies for a dozen or more different species, and others had more general equipment. The point was, Valdean had been prepared for this place to last for centuries without having to go out to the regular world, and part of that included having a boatload of extra supplies. 

With that in mind, I straightened up, looking toward Marina. “Alright, babe. You ready? 

“Let’s go see if our missing killers are playing with the baby toys.” 

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Four Deaths Four Killers 19-01 (Heretical Edge 2)

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Okay, now we really had trouble. Our robot guide, who had been helping us figure out how to deal with all this and was the one who knew all the people in here, let alone how to get around the vault, was… off. I was going to hope he wasn’t permanently dead and instead just shut down somehow, but either way this was pretty bad. If he was down forever, could we even get out of this place? And regardless, without Sitter’s help,  how were we supposed to do anything in here? Hell, he was the main reason any of the guests were even listening to us, and while I didn’t doubt that we could force the issue if we had to, I really didn’t want it to come to that. No, we had to be more diplomatic than that, or this whole situation would spiral completely out of control. Not to mention the fact that these people deserved better than that. 

The three of us were all crouched around his fallen form, Dakota’s hand on his head. She looked at me, grimacing. “What do you think happened to him?” 

“Maybe it was a trap inside the system,” I guessed, glancing to the spot where Sitter had been plugged in. “You know, like a virus or something. Whoever was responsible for this whole thing might’ve figured he would look through the system like that and left a little thing to shut him down. And uhh, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not exactly a robotics expert.” Not for the first time, I muttered, “I wish Avalon was here. Or Columbus. Or–” Shaking off all the thoughts of people it would be nice to have with us, I sighed. “I dunno, I think we’re on our own here unless we can find someone else in the vault who can do something with him. And even then–” 

“Even then they might not be someone we can trust, or who will listen to us,” Dakota finished. “So what’re we supposed to do now? How do we um… do anything?” She glanced toward Denny. “If we talked to people and you used your power to find out if any of them could fix him, then–” 

“No.” Denny quickly shook her head, blanching visibly. “I–I can’t, I’m sorry. I can’t use that power again, not like that. I don’t… like taking their free will–I don’t want t–I’m sorry.” She was visibly cringing, looking like she might be sick. “I know it’s not a big deal. I know, I know. But even doing it a little bit makes me think of all the times he did it. The memories, they get stronger in my head whenever I use that power and I can’t just–I can see the people he… I–” She cut herself off, folding her arms against her stomach while looking like she was desperately fighting back the urge to either cry or throw up. Or both. 

Dakota shifted over, putting an arm around the other girl. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s okay,” she murmured. “We’ll find another way. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Don’t worry about it.” 

“She’s right,” I quickly agreed, taking Denny’s hand and squeezing it. “We’ll just have to talk to people and find someone who can help. Then watch them. Or just do this without Sitter until we catch the person responsible. Or maybe it was Sitter and this is a trick, you know? I can’t be the only person who remembers how often the butler is responsible for the murders.” I offered a weak, hesitant smile before it faded. “I just mean–yeah.” 

“Well, he was the one to freeze everyone else,” Denny hesitantly pointed out. “Plus, Valdean didn’t show him that note, remember? And if he disappears right now and leaves us like… without any help or whatever, he makes it harder for us to investigate. Maybe he has another body he jumped into, or maybe he’s just inside the computer system itself.” She shrugged uncertainly. “It uhh, it could just be paranoia, but we don’t know anything about him. Maybe he’s a robot who went bad. That’s a thing that happens in movies and stuff..”

My mouth opened, then shut as I considered. In the end, Dakota spoke up before I could. “Sure, uhh, yeah, maybe. But umm, you know, how would he, umm… how did he adjust everyone’s memory if that’s what happened? Robots can’t use magic.” 

“But they can use technology,” Denny reminded her. “And a lot of Valdean’s tech stuff looks like magic or does magic-type stuff. Remember, like, this whole place, being in a pocket dimension, the time-freeze, it’s all technology-based, not magic. Maybe Valdean created a memory adjustment gizmo too? One that Sitter’s been using.” 

“Okay, you have a point there,” I admitted. “But still, I don’t think we should lean too hard on ‘Sitter’s the evil one’ just because we can make that fit. He could just as easily be a victim. I…” Grimacing, I looked down at his still, silent, dark form. “If he really is hurt, we’ll feel like shit if we make him our prime suspect. I–we’ll look into it, just in case. But let’s keep an open mind.” 

“What do we do next?” Dakota asked. “I mean, while we’re keeping open minds, how do we actually find any answers? So far we haven’t been doing a very bang-up job, and that was while we had help. Now that he’s… umm… not helping for whatever reason, what’re we supposed to do?”  

“We need to talk to Sesh and Marina,” I pointed out. “First to tell them what happened, and also to find out if they got anything out of talking to the guests.” My expression twisted into one of uncertainty, as I sighed. “Yeah, I know it’s not very likely, but we still need to get on the same page. I just–wish we had anything useful on any of these pages.” My last words came out as a grumble, while I squinted around the room at all the computer stuff. 

Denny raised a hand, tentatively pointing out, “We did find that USB thing in the location tracking computer. They’ve gotta be using that to hide where they are, right?” Her expression fell then. “Too bad we can’t ask Sitter to figure out what areas it’s being used to mask right now.” 

“Yeah, that would be useful,” I agreed, “but I guess we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” Then I looked at Dakota. “Hang on, you found that instruction manual for this thing. Maybe we could use that to figure out what rooms are being given air and light and all that.” 

The girl looked down at the thick binder she had set on the floor nearby. “Um, maybe. It kinda looks like he wanted people to be able to understand it if anything umm… went wrong. But it’s still pretty complicated. We need Sesh and Marina to look at it too.”

I nodded, looking back at the dark mouth-lights of Sitter before quietly murmuring, “Yeah, like I said, we need to exchange notes with them. But on the other hand, I’m a little afraid to leave this place. What if there’s information in here and one of the three missing people comes in while we’re gone and erases it? I–hang on.” For a brief moment, I considered the emergency alert spell, but I didn’t want Marina and Sesh to think that we were in immediate danger. Especially while they were talking to the other guests. Freaking those people out even more than they already were was probably a bad idea. We had to keep everyone as calm as possible if we were going to maintain any semblance of order and not let the vault devolve into total chaos.

So, instead of doing anything with that, I rose from the floor and moved over to the doorway leading into this place. Once there, I plucked a stone from my pocket. Holding the thing in the palm of my hand, I used my image inscription power to mark the thing with a spell that I’d learned from Shyel. “There,” I announced after triggering it and setting the stone down on the floor just out of sight from someone coming through. Then I waited for a second to see if the orichalcum walls would drain the thing. But apparently as long as I wasn’t putting the spell directly on the walls themselves, it was safe. Probably because Valdean hadn’t wanted to stop people from using magic entirely. 

Once I was assured that my spell looked as though it would stay, I nodded firmly. “Right then. Now, as soon as we leave, the next person to come in here will set off an alert on this coin that I’ll keep with me.” Holding that up as well as well so they could see it, I added, “There shouldn’t be anyone else coming into this place except for us. So if that alert goes off and we’re not the ones coming in here–” 

“It’s probably the bad guy,” Dakota finished. “Or bad guys. Why do you think there’s three missing people?” 

My head shook. “I’m not sure, but we’ll be sure to ask them as soon as we figure out where they are.” Walking over, I bent down and picked up Sitter’s body. No way was I going to leave him here. If he really was the murderer in all this, leaving his body lying around for him to use again was a bad idea anyway. And even if he wasn’t, letting one of the actual bad guys find it and do whatever with him was a bad idea too. So no, he was coming with us. Luckily, I had enough strength boosts that hoisting him into my arms and carrying the deadweight robot figure wasn’t that hard.

Once we were actually back on the elevator, Denny abruptly made a sound of confusion deep in her throat. “Um, how are we supposed to move this thing? Do uhh, do we have any idea which of these buttons takes us back to the auditorium?” As she asked that, the girl was studying the control panel in front of her with clear bewilderment. 

“I do,” I confirmed. As the other two looked at me, I propped Sitter’s body up in the corner before turning back that way. “I was watching the buttons he was pressing every time we got in this thing. Figured it might be a good idea just in case things went wrong or we had to do it ourselves. Uh, hang on, I think I’ve got the right idea, anyway.” Now that I’d claimed that, I really hoped I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself. So, I exhaled before closing my eyes briefly to focus on what I’d seen our robot companion do. First, I raised one finger to touch the button with what looked like two squiggly lines sort of pointing toward one another. The moment I hit it, the door of the elevator slid shut. Right, so far I was one for one. That was a good record. 

From the corner of my eye as I squinted at the buttons, I saw Denny and Dakota take each other’s hands. Even with the door properly shut as it was supposed to be, it seemed like they weren’t exactly one hundred percent confident in my ability to work this elevator for some reason. Which, well, that was fair. Considering this thing moved like the Willy Wonka elevator, moving forwards and backwards and sideways and–yeah. I could see why this situation might make them a little nervous. I was pretty nervous too, but I had to pretend that I knew exactly what I was doing. 

Which once again led me back to that same question from before. Was that what my mom and the other adults were doing all the time? Were they just pretending to know what was going on or how to handle everything? Was all of adulthood just faking your way through things and hoping the entire situation didn’t blow up in a way you couldn’t deal with? Because I had really been looking forward to the moment in my life where I would officially feel like an adult who knew what was going on and could teach others. The idea that might not actually happen, that the entire world–no, the entire universe was just an assortment of people who had lived long enough to sufficiently pretend that they knew what was going on was just… terrifying, really. 

Realizing the other two were starting to get even more nervous as they watched me just stand there, I shook off those thoughts, gave them a smile that was as encouraging as I could manage, and focused on the buttons once more. After watching Sitter work this thing a few times, I had a general idea of how it worked. At least I hoped I did. First, there were four arrow-type buttons. The up arrow meant ‘go up one level’, the down meant to go down a level, the left button directed the elevator to go left one track, and the right button–well, obviously made it go right one track. You were supposed to hit those in the exact order to get to the track you wanted to go to from where you were. For example, if the specific track you wanted was three tracks right, one track up, then one track left, you hit right three times, then up once, then left once. From there, you were supposed to hit the number buttons to get to the exact right room that you wanted on that specific track. 

Thinking intently, I tried to remember the sequence that Sitter had hit on our way down here from the auditorium. All I had to do was reverse that. Hit right where he had hit left, up where he had hit down, and so on. 

I was also trying hard not to think about how screwed it seemed like we were if the simple act of using the elevator was such a big deal. Seriously, how were we supposed to handle this situation when I was considering simply closing the doors of this thing such a triumph? We were in trouble, there was no doubt about it. We didn’t have Sitter helping anymore, and we were completely cut off from any outside assistance. All we had was a bunch of freaked out guests who we couldn’t be absolutely sure were trustworthy, and each other. Marina, Dakota, Denny, Fathsteth’s daughter whom I had only barely met, and me. Yeah, this whole situation could spiral out of control very quickly. 

But hey, at least I remembered the right buttons. At least, I was pretty sure I did. Squaring my shoulders, I just reached out to hit them in what I believed was the right sequence. First each of the opposite arrow buttons from what Sitter had hit to bring us down here, then the same number that I remembered him hitting when he’d taken us to the auditorium to begin with. 

The doors shut, and we were on our way. I crossed my fingers, looking at the other two before coughing once as I saw that they were both doing the same. “I uhh, see, easy-peasy.” I hoped the juxtaposition of me saying that while openly holding up my hands so they could see my crossed fingers was more amusing than terrifying. 

Thankfully, in the end I turned out to be right. The elevator took us through several floors and different tracks, before the doors opened in front of the entrance to the auditorium. Seeing that in front of us, I let out a breath of relief and barely resisted the urge to sag sideways. “And that’s how we do it. We’re here. You uhh, yeah, you guys stay right here with him. Shout if anything happens, I’m gonna go get the others.” I definitely didn’t want to carry his limp and dark body into that room in front of all the guests. Something told me they probably wouldn’t react that well. 

So, leaving the other two there to watch over him, I stepped out. The small hallway was shaped like a U, with the elevator at the bottom of that letter. Moving to the left side led to the audience entrances, while moving to the right led to the backstage area. I moved right, heading through those back rooms and over the stage itself until I could see the main auditorium. The guests were all out there, whispering together in small groups throughout the room about what was going on, what was going to happen to them now that Valdean was gone, and so on. 

Everyone noticed me, of course. All the conversations stopped quickly when they saw that I was there, and I winced a little before focusing on where I could see Sesh and Marina. “Uh, sorry for the interruption, guys. We’ll have some more food brought in as soon as we can, I promise. And like I said before, you don’t have to worry about us. We’ll figure this out and those of you who want to stay, I’m sure Valdean would’ve wanted you to. Sitter can definitely help with that. But uhh, that’s all detail stuff. We’ll get to it. In the meantime, I need to borrow my friends there for just a minute, if you don’t mind.” I tried to keep my voice as calm and casual as possible. From some of the looks I was getting, it wasn’t a complete success. Still, at least no one was openly panicking just yet. 

The other two excused themselves from the conversations they had been having, and came up to join me on the stage. Keeping my voice low, I asked if they had any idea, after spending more time with these people, who we should put in charge for the moment. 

Exchanging a look with Sesh, Marina offered, “I think Jammi could probably do it. She volunteered to be possessed first, after all. And she’s sort of… mothering in a way?” 

Sesh nodded. “Yeah, maybe her and that guy over there.” She nodded toward a short, gray-skinned figure with large red eyes and no visible mouth. “His name’s–” 

“Isolin, I remember,” I confirmed. “He’s a Peusen.” It sounded a bit like ‘poison’ but more like ‘pwahson.’ “Yeah, I think you’re right, he was pretty level-headed when I was… possessing him. Okay, let’s leave them in charge.” 

So, I called those two up and asked them to look after the others and keep everyone calm, promising that we would explain what was going on as soon as we could. The Guhlben woman seemed nervous about the whole situation, but readily agreed to help take care of her fellow guests. And Isolin, ‘speaking’ by making words appear holographically in the air, agreed as well. He could also make solid holographic shapes appear with that same power. 

Hoping everyone would be okay in here for a few minutes, I took Sesh and Marina out to the elevator. On the way, I finally explained what we found, and what happened to Sitter.  

“Wait, hold on, he just shut off after plugging into that system?” Sesh demanded. “That’s not–” She stopped as we reached the elevator itself so she could see the robot in question. “Uhh, that’s not good.” 

“Tell us about it,” Dakota promptly piped up, her face flushing a little immediately afterward. “I mean, uhh, yeah. He still won’t wake up. And I’ve been looking through this manual for the computer system, but it’s really confusing.” She waved the binder helplessly. 

“May I see that?” Marina asked curiously. When the other girl handed it to her, she flipped through it a bit, starting to shake her head. “You’re right, this is pretty–hang on.” 

“What’d you find?” Sesh asked, turning away from where she had been squinting intently at Sitter’s face. “Please say it’s something useful.” 

“The note,” Marina quickly replied, looking back to me. “Can I see the note that was in Mophse’s shoe?” 

Unsure of where she was going with that, I obliged by taking out the folded paper and handing it over to her. “Sure, you think that can help translate whatever language this is?” 

She was quiet for a moment, simply holding the note in one hand while ripping through the binder with the other. Then she shook her head, voice quiet. “It’s not a language.” Clearing her throat, she looked up at the rest of us and repeated, “It’s not a language. Look. The letters–I mean what we thought were letters. It’s actually wiring inside the computer system. See? Like this bit right here, it looks like that letter Q with the tail on both sides and the circle in the middle. It wasn’t a letter at all. None of them are. They’re all different shapes of the wiring inside that system. This note isn’t a sentence, it’s like… a series of diagrams of the computer interior.”

She was right, I realized after making a few other comparisons. “Wait, so Mophse was walking around with a piece of paper that had a bunch of different images of the wiring inside the computer system in his pocket, along with a date for two days after he was killed? I mean, no wonder Valdean didn’t need to ask Sitter what language it was. There was no language at all, just wiring specs. But why? Why would he have that at all?

“And more importantly, are those specs the reason someone killed him?” 

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

Growth 18-15 (Heretical Edge 2)

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

“Okay, wait, wait,” Marina piped up with obvious confusion. “What exactly are we saying here? That three people are missing entirely? I mean, he did say two-hundred-and-eighty-seven before, then suddenly it was two-hundred-and-eighty-four. But… but how could three people just completely disappear from his memory like that? Wait, do you remember saying that?” Her focus turned to Sitter himself. “Do you know why you went from eighty-seven to eighty-four?” 

There was a brief pause as the robot seemed to consider the question before his head shook. “I do recall it, of course. Now that it has been pointed out, the discrepancy is readily apparent. But no, I cannot say why the difference exists. My memory right now says that there are two-hundred-and-eighty-four guests. Yet the idea that I could have, as biologicals might say, misspoken before, is quite impossible. I must have seen the guest population as being two-hundred-and-eighty-seven at that time. Which can only mean that my memory has been adjusted between the time that I first announced the number of guests, and the next time.”

“Which was after we let down the time-lock,” I pointed out. “You told us one number, then turned off the lock so they could move again, and suddenly the number adjusted by three.” 

Dakota piped up quickly. “So those three must’ve done something to change his memories.” 

My head was slowly nodding. “Yeah, I mean they had to have. I dunno why, maybe all three of them were involved in the murders. Easiest way to hide would be to make you forget they exist. But you said they couldn’t possibly get out of this place, right, Sitter?” 

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Until the murders are solved, there is no way to escape this vault. Even if they could breach the walls, it would not lead them anywhere, as we are in a pocket reality. Only once the murderer is identified will the knowledge of how to turn off the lockdown enter my programming. And even if they were aware of how to do that themselves, which is quite impossible on its own, I would detect the moment the procedure began. It has not.” 

“Which probably means they don’t know how,” I agreed with a murmur. “But they did change your memory. And that–hang on. No one came around you. We know no one came up with a screwdriver and wrench or whatever to do some reprogramming while we were standing there.”

Making a noise in the back of her throat, Denny hesitantly spoke up. “Um, I… remember something from Ammon’s… uhh, memories. There was one time when he had to change some camera recordings so his dad wouldn’t find out what he was up to, but instead of going to each camera, he made a guy let him into the main server room to change just that.”

“Hey, yeah,” Dakota agreed, looking back to our robot guide. “Do you have a server somewhere that controls your programming and all that? It’s not all just inside this shell, right?” 

My head was already bobbing. “There has to be something like that. You keep saying that your programming will be updated with the knowledge of how to undo the lockdown once the murderer is caught. And since the man himself isn’t here anymore, that has to mean there’s another system somewhere waiting to update you with the new knowledge, right?” 

“Just like how whoever this was updated him with new memories of how many guests there are,” Sesh pointed out, giving a double-take that way as she showed her impressive rows of teeth. “Does that mean they’re in the special server room right now?” 

“There is another server room which runs every system in this vault,” Sitter confirmed. “It is also where my core programming is stored. I do not believe that anyone could access the important details, but… theoretically it is possible for someone to have infiltrated the room and make certain minor adjustments, such as the number of guests currently within the vault. That is something which changed semi-regularly, so it would not be particularly well-locked information.” 

“So let’s get down there,” Marina immediately put in. “Even if they’ve already left, there might be, you know, clues or something. Plus–wait, hang on.” She did a quick about-face to look back into the other room where the rest of the guests were all waiting. “No one in there brought up anyone being missing, right? Not in any interview or when you were looking through their memories.” 

“They didn’t,” I confirmed while shaking my head. “Which means whoever did this probably adjusted those memories when they made them each think they themselves were the murderer. We already knew they were pretty good at changing that sort of thing.” Belatedly, I added with a grimace. “Good enough to fool me, anyway. If Sariel was here, it’d be a different story.” 

Marina’s hand moved to my shoulder. “Hey, she’s also had, what, several thousand years worth of practice? Give you that much time and I’m pretty sure you could slam dunk your way through noticing and fixing those memory adjustments too. Err, wait, which is better, slam dunk or homerun? I’m not really that much of a sports person.” She paused briefly, then added, “Please tell me they’re not both from the same sport.” 

Smiling just a little, I gestured. “It’s the thought that counts. And yeah, you’re right, she has a bit of a head start. Right now we’re what we’ve got to work with. So let’s go down to that server room and see if we can figure out who those three missing people are.” 

Sesh gestured over her shoulder back toward the auditorium. “Maybe someone should stay here and talk to these guys? I know their memories have been screwed up, but if we point out that there’s a few missing, maybe it’ll trigger something. Whoever did this couldn’t have had that much time to make their adjustments perfect, you know? Ask the right questions and we might be able to poke enough holes in adjusted memories to make something important fall out.” 

Considering that briefly, I nodded. “Uh, yeah just be careful about it. They’re pretty delicate right now, what with finding out their friend was murdered and one of them could’ve done it.” 

“I’ll stay with her,” Marina announced. “We can talk to them, find out if anything pops up when they start thinking about missing guests. And yeah, we’ll be careful.” She hesitated, then looked toward Denny and Dakota. “Do you guys want to stay here, or–” 

“We’ll go with Flick and Sitter,” Denny immediately replied, her gaze snapping to me. “I mean, if that’s okay?” 

“Hey, sure thing.” I wasn’t sure how much of her immediate answer had to do with wanting to help me in the server room and how much had to do with not wanting to potentially have to use her power to interrogate the other guests. But either way, I wasn’t going to argue. They could help wherever they wanted to help. 

Dakota was nodding. “Yeah, Flick shouldn’t go off all on her own. Err, I mean, not that you’d be completely alone.” She looked toward the robot standing nearby. “But, that is–” 

“It is quite alright, Lady Dakota,” Sitter assured her. “You have only barely met me, and it has already been proven that my memories can be tampered with. While I still believe such adjustments would not be possible when it comes to my actual important, core programming, you can hardly be faulted for wishing to be more careful. Looking after one’s friends is important.”

Focusing on Marina and Sesh, I spoke up. “You guys be careful in here too, okay?” With that, I dug into my pocket and came out with a small, already enchanted coin, passing it toward the older girl. “Here’s an emergency alert spell. Anything happens, trigger it. I uh, assume you know how.” 

“Yeah, I’ve used them before,” Marina confirmed while tucking it away. “So you’ve got one of the opposite coins?” 

Nodding, I gestured to my pocket. “You set that one off and mine’ll start raising hell. And vice versa. We might not be able to communicate with the outside world, but we can at least let each other know if something goes wrong. And speaking of which…” I focused for a moment. “Okay, I set my taboo word as bletherskate. If you say that word, I’ll see your face and hear one word before it and one word after that. You could say, ‘need bletherskate help’ and I’ll hear all three words. It’s not a lot, but between that and the alarm spell, we should be okay.” That all explained, I paused before adding,  “Be careful in there, guys.” 

“You too,” Marina insisted before looking at Dakota and Denny. “All of you be careful.” The girl reached out, tugging me by the arm to take a few steps away before lowering her voice. “Take care of them, okay? They both want to help, but just… just be careful.”

I nodded, meeting her gaze. “I will. Believe me, I’m not about to let anything happen to them.”  

With that, Sesh and Marina went back into the auditorium to talk to the rest of the guests, while the three of us followed Sitter to the elevator. On the way, Dakota spoke up. “Do you really think there could be three extra people hiding somewhere in this place?”

“The entire facility is quite large,” Sitter replied while stepping onto the elevator and gesturing for us to join him. “I find it plausible that a trio of unknown beings could remain out of sight. Particularly if they have some way of identifying our location, such as a gift allowing them to sense others from a distance.” 

“I’ve got a sense like that myself,” I agreed while stepping onto the elevator with the others. “It doesn’t stretch very far, but maybe theirs does. Or they have really good hearing, or x-ray vision, or–” I coughed before waving a hand. “Let’s just say it’s not exactly a short list. There are a lot of different ways they could keep track of where we are. Hell, they might even be listening to us right now. To which, I would say–” From my pocket, I produced a different enchanted coin. This was the same privacy spell used so often last year, but not as much now. Still, I had plenty already prepared. Activating the spell, I tucked the coin away while continuing, “There, it’s not perfect, but this should keep them from understanding what we’re saying from now on. That way, if we do find something important, they won’t know about it. Unless whatever power they’re using is stronger than this privacy spell. Or they’re using some sort of visual thing to see what we’re doing. Or–” 

“It’s okay, Flick,” Dakota put in. “We just need to be careful, right? If they do know what we’re doing, we’ll uhh, have to make sure they can’t do anything about it. And keep our eyes open so we don’t get murdered too.” 

“Yeah, not getting murdered too is a good idea,” I agreed with a grimace. “So, you’re right, let’s keep our eyes open and make sure they don’t catch us with our pants down. We know there’s three of them out there, wherever and whoever they are. Sitter, I don’t suppose going back over all your memories shows any… conflicts that would explain three missing people? Or at least imply their existence?” 

There was a brief pause as his head slowly turned to me, those mouth lights shifting to a soft blue. “I have indeed been going over memories. I believe you are correct, there are several missing people who should have been there. Putting together the amount of food consumed, chairs and other furniture used, time taken to clean, chores assigned, and more all implies the presence of at least two to three more people. I cannot, however, narrow it to more detail than that. Not yet, in any case. Given more time, I may be able to determine more information through exact dietary and medical needs.” 

Reaching out to squeeze the robot’s shoulder in a gesture that was probably completely pointless given the whole ‘robot’ thing to begin with, I replied, “Well, good luck. And here’s hoping it’s that easy. I mean, not that that sounds easy, but… more information is good.” 

“Yeah,” Denny put in quickly. “If you can figure out what type of people we’re dealing with, maybe that’ll tell us how they’re hiding. And if we know how they’re hiding–” 

“Maybe we can find them!” Dakota finished. She and the other girl high-fived then, before both sobered as she turned back to me. “Do you think they’re all trying to get out of here? I mean, did they all kill Valdean Ecclestone together, or are they just friends, or…” 

“I dunno,” I replied with a helpless shrug. “All I know is three of them are missing and it can’t be a coincidence. It has to be connected to the murders. So we find them, and we’ll probably be able to find our answers.”  

“I’m glad,” Denny murmured while the elevator rose up one level before starting to slide backwards on its way to our destination. “I mean, I’m glad it wasn’t one of the people in there. I liked them.” 

“That’s a good point,” I agreed. “They were all nice. If we can find out and prove that the real murderer is one of… or all of these three, it–well, it won’t be good, but at least we can tell the others that they’re all innocent. But uh, that’s probably getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s focus on getting to this server room to see if they left any clues behind.”

Almost as soon as I said that, the elevator stopped and Sitter announced that we were there. As the doors opened, we found ourselves facing a fourteen by fourteen foot room with one large black computer server running down the middle, leaving only about a foot of space between it and either end wall. The server reached almost all the way up to the ten foot high ceiling, and stood two feet wide. Beyond that, there was a desk in one back corner of the room with an actual computer terminal on it. Probably connected to the main server.

Taking all that in, I made a face. “You know, it’s just now occurring to me to wish that we had someone with real technical expertise in here with us. I mean, my dad might think I’m a genius because I know how to set up an ad blocker on his browser, but somehow I don’t think that’s gonna help right here.”

Denny gave a slow nod. “Uh huh, and even if I wanted to use the you-know-what power, it doesn’t work on computers. See, I’m pretty useless.”

Dakota gestured. “Hey, my thing is all about using plants. This isn’t a plant. But I’m still gonna try to help. Besides, we’ve got Sitter.” Her hand reached out to pat the robot on the back. “He can probably take care of any technical stuff, right?”

Mouth lights shifting to green, Sitter confirmed, “Yes, Lady Dakota. I will begin searching the server for any record of tampering or access. This will take several minutes.” He immediately stepped over not to the actual computer terminal, but the server itself. His hand rose and some sort of plug in jack extended from his palm before finding its way into an outlet there. Then his mouth lights began to cycle through every color imaginable as he worked. 

”Okay,” I started while turning back to the other two, “why don’t we look around here? It doesn’t look like there’s much room for them to have left anything behind, but you never know. They might’ve dropped something, or touched something, or whatever.”

So, the three of us spread out to search every corner of this small room. Just as I had expected, however, there didn’t seem to be anything worth finding. The place was pretty pristine. There were no secret coded notes, or a hat with convenient hairs in it, or a glass we could get fingerprints off of, or anything like that. If I hadn’t heard all about actual investigations from my dad over the years, I would’ve been surprised that crime dramas had been lying to me. 

But that was the thing. If I knew one thing from all the talks I had with my dad about his own experiences, it was that no crime was perfect. The problem with trying to pull off the perfect crime was that you only had to make one mistake. Touch the wrong thing at the wrong time, forget one of the lies you told to someone, leave something sitting where you shouldn’t, or anything like that. There were too many ways for someone to screw up. And it only had to happen once for your entire intricate plan to come unraveled. 

That’s what we were looking for, the one mistake. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like they’d made an obvious one here in the server room. At least, not at first. The three of us had given the whole place a once-over with no luck, and I was just about to tell Dakota and Denny that it looked like we were going to have to hope that Sitter came up with something. Except, just as I was turning to do that, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. One of the glass doors for the various shelving units that made up the entire server was very slightly ajar. It was incredibly easy to miss, given you had to stand at the right spot and look at it from the right angle to even notice that the glass door wasn’t shut and locked like the rest of them. Squinting that way, I leaned closer and gave it a slight poke with my finger. The door slid open, revealing the assortment of networked machines humming away behind it. 

“Flick?” Dakota asked, stepping closer along with Denny. “What is it?” 

“Someone left this open,” I murmured, giving both of them a look before turning my attention that way. “Something tells me it wasn’t Sitter. Let’s see…” With that, I leaned in, gaze sliding over the equipment in front of me. Not that I would’ve known if anything was out of place, but still. Someone had clearly been messing with this area recently. 

Leaning in close to me while I was helplessly studying the complicated assortment of computer pieces, Denny pointed. “Hey, look. That’s probably not supposed to be there.” 

My eyes focused on what she was gesturing to. A USB drive, sort of. It looked like a somewhat thick pen with the connector sticking out of one end and into the back of one of the bits of machinery. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but she was right, it didn’t look like it belonged there. 

“Yeah, that’s probably something new,” I agreed, hesitating. “But what’s it for?” 

“Location tracking,” Dakota announced. When we both looked that way, she held up a thick binder with an assortment of notes in it. “It was under the computer over there. It’s like an instruction manual or something. There’s a diagram of the server for a repair person to use, and this spot says it’s for location tracking in the vault. There’s no cameras, but he still keeps track of what rooms have people in them and how many.” 

“That makes sense,” I murmured. “I mean, the system probably turns off lights, oxygen, temperature control, stuff like that in rooms where no one is. Even if he gave them privacy by not spying on what they’re saying or doing, he still has the system monitor which rooms are occupied in order to save power or whatever else.” 

“So these guys put something in that system?” Denny asked before her expression twisted a bit. “Probably so no one would know where they were.” 

“Exactly,” I agreed. “It’s gotta be blocking the system from noticing that it’s giving power and light somewhere that’s supposed to be empty. So do we just yank it out?” 

“Wait,” Denny quickly put in. “If you do that, they might know we found it. Or maybe the system will shut off the air and stuff in that area. They might be bad, but–” 

I was already nodding. “But we don’t want to just kill them like that. Especially before we know the truth about what’s going on and why.” 

Dakota leaned in closer to stare at that little device for another moment before tentatively asking, “Do you think Sitter can do something with it? Maybe he can figure out what areas it’s blocking, so we can find them.” 

“Yeah, maybe,” I agreed before turning that way. “Hey, Sitter! We found something, do you have any idea how much longer your thing will take?” 

There was no response, so I walked that way, seeing the robot standing there, still plugged in. “Uh, sorry to interrupt, but–” My hand reached out to touch his arm. But when I did so, he literally tipped over. His attachment came out of the computer, and his entire body collapsed to the floor with a startlingly loud clang right in front of me. 

Jumping back in surprise, I found myself standing next to Dakota and Denny, who had come running up to see what was going on. Together, the three of us stared. Sitter was just lying there on the ground, his body completely motionless. His mouth lights were completely off. It was like he had been shut down entirely. 

“Well,” I finally managed, “that can’t be good.” 

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Growth 18-14 (Heretical Edge 2)

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Nothing. There was nothing useful in any of these peoples’ memories about the murders. Or, more to the point, there was too much. Every single one of them knew exactly how they had done it. They had detailed (relatively speaking) memories of the entire process, their plans, how they had carried them out, their guilt over the whole thing, and so forth. They confessed everything to the others and let me access their memories so I could see for myself. All of them were cooperative, and none of it helped. 

Despite the number of people involved, there were actually only about ten different overall stories. It was like whoever had done this spell or whatever it was had only been able to come up with so many different scenarios, and then pasted those into the minds of these people. One per person. Before long, I didn’t even need to watch the whole memory, I just saw which one it was, checked for anything extra, and moved on. 

None of these people knew who had done this to them. They had no memory of any spell like this, or of anyone else performing any suspicious magic at all. Which also blew my mind, because this couldn’t have been a small spell. This was replacing the memories of almost three hundred people. Okay, it was more about adding a memory and modifying a bit, but still, that made it even more complicated in some ways. The idea that no one had seen anything involving that, no one had come across a spell–okay maybe the person did it in one of their private rooms. That was very possible. But still, it didn’t really help us here at all. For all we knew, the killer really was someone inside this room and they had simply erased their memories of it. Maybe Sariel could have sniffed out the right one, but I wasn’t that skilled with this stuff. And we couldn’t get out of here to get help from her. According to Sitter, the system absolutely would not allow us to leave until the right murderer was found. I had no idea how that worked, or how this Valdean guy had managed to set up something like that. All I knew was that Sitter was apparently incapable of overriding his own programming and he had been given very strict instructions about how this had to go. It wasn’t even just instructions, apparently. The answer for how to unlock the facility and allow us to leave was buried in his system and he couldn’t even access it until he was convinced the murders had been properly solved and the killer caught. Even if he wanted to go against his programming, he couldn’t. He physically didn’t know how to tell the system to let us leave, and wouldn’t until after we found the murderer. He literally could not access that information within himself. 

So, we had to solve this whole thing in a way that satisfied him. Though right now, all we had was hundreds of people with a few different stories shared between them. Maybe one of those stories was correct. Maybe I had literally talked to, and possessed, the person responsible for all this, and had seen the actual reason this happened. Maybe one of those ten scenarios was the real one. It seemed like it would be a good way to hide. If we dismissed every version of these stories, we might be dismissing the real answer. But there was no real way to check. Other than running through more of their memories, and I felt like I’d done everything I could on that front. There were holes in the stories, but everyone had those sorts of holes, the details that didn’t match up entirely, the faces that were faded when I looked too closely, that sort of thing. I managed to get pretty quick at simply checking those spots of the memory to see if the person in question knew anything more than the others, but always came up empty. Which, to put it mildly, was unhelpful. 

So, now I was taking a break. It had taken a couple hours to get through everyone, and now they were all having iced tea and sandwiches that Sitter had brought in. Not that many of them were eating that much. They all seemed subdued, talking very quietly amongst themselves about what was going to happen now, and who could have been responsible. I saw a few scared, anxious looks around, and a few people who clearly had their own suspects and kept staring back and forth at one another. There was actually less of that than I would have thought, a testament to how much work Valdean had put into creating a real community here. But still, there was some. 

Finishing my own sandwich while perched on the edge of one of the chairs that Sitter had provided up here on the stage, I glanced to where Marina, Sesh, Dakota, and Denny were sitting with their own food. “I don’t know, guys. I think we need to search their rooms for the murder weapons. Even then, they could have used magic to disguise or destroy them. Though something tells me they probably wouldn’t get rid of a gun that could help them get out of trouble. If it could kill a Heretic, it could probably help them out against a lot of other people in here who might try to stop them.” 

“They might still have the weapons on them, in a hidden pocket or bag, or be able to summon them,” Sesh pointed out. “Magic complicates things that way, you know?” 

“Yeah, I’m not exactly shocked by that statement,” I muttered. “But, after going through all their heads, I think it’s safe to say that if they do have the gun or the ability to summon it, they don’t know about it right now. No one in this audience remembers anything about what they did with the weapons they supposedly used. Which just proves those are fake memories all over again, as if we needed another reminder.” 

“I’m really sorry I couldn’t help,” Denny put in after taking a deep gulp from her iced tea glass. “I mean, I’m sorry I couldn’t get the right answer that easily. But I can still help. We both can, right?” She looked to Dakota. 

Dakota’s head bobbed quickly. “Yeah, of course. Maybe we can’t flick a magic button—” She stopped, glancing to me with a tiny smile. “Flick a magic button.” 

“Haha,” I retorted. “Not the worst use of my name I’ve heard.” 

The younger girl’s smile actually widened just a little. She seemed more comfortable here, shifting a bit in her seat before continuing. “We can’t–uhh, snap our fingers and get the answer, but we’ll help search. We talked to those guys, we–um, we didn’t really get anywhere, but we tried.” 

“And trying is all any of us can do,” Marina assured them. “You guys are doing just fine. Better than most. And I don’t just mean your age. A lot of people would have fallen apart by now. Or be making the situation harder.” 

“She’s right,” I agreed. “And hey, I couldn’t get the answer with either of my instant buttons either. I can possess everyone in this room to dig through their memories, and I can summon the ghosts of the dead. Neither of those helped. So don’t worry, we’re all batting zero right now. But that just means we have to get a little more creative instead of relying on cheating. We take this whole thing one step at a time. And right now, I think the next step is to search their rooms. Which…” I groaned a bit. “That’s gonna take awhile too. And we should figure out what’s going on with these guys first. Not to mention get their permission. Or at least tell them what we’re doing. I’m not… I mean we don’t exactly have legal procedures in this place, but still.”

“If we’re going to be better than the Crossroads system of just killing everyone, we have to really be better,” Marina put in quietly. “I know we can’t afford to like, say ‘okay then’ if they tell us they don’t want us to look through their things, but we should at least let them come with.”  

Sesh nodded, showing her impressive array of teeth. “I mean, that’s not a bad idea anyway. It gets them away from the rest of the crowd if we need to… you know, restrain them. Or worse.” 

“Well, so far, it seems like Denny’s power works on them,” I pointed out. “As soon as we find the person, she can just tell them to stand still and not hurt anyone, or whatever. Uh, right?” 

Denny gulped, but nodded. “I can use the power for that, yes. If it means telling a bad guy to stand still and not hurt anybody, I can definitely do that.”

Raising her hand, Dakota hesitated before asking, “But won’t it take a long time to keep going back and forth from here to all the rooms with one of those elevators?”    

“Right,” I agreed. “Maybe we should take groups at a time. Like ten or so. But who’s staying here with these guys? I mean, we shouldn’t leave them here alone and unsupervised. If the murderer is among them, bad things could happen.”

“Ahem.” That was Sitter, who had been standing on the far side of the stage. I wasn’t sure how good his hearing was, but apparently the answer was ‘pretty good’, because he turned to face us and came closer. “I am more than willing to watch over my residents, and capable of protecting them from any harm.” There was a brief pause before his mouth lights dimmed to a dull yellow. “Any harm I am aware of,” he added more quietly. 

“I’ll stay too,” Sesh informed us with a shrug. “You know, keep ‘em company, talk to people, whatever. You guys are probably better at the detective thing than me. I can at least keep everyone in here occupied. I’m sure they wanna hear stories about what’s been going on in the outside world, you know?” 

“Right,” I murmured, “that’s sort of the other big thing we need to tell people.” Grimacing briefly, I looked around at the others. Denny, Dakota, Sesh, and Marina all looked back at me. They knew what was coming, and we were all uncertain how it was going to play out. These people finding out that their leader and benefactor had been murdered was bad enough already, but talking to them about how they had been frozen for decades, that the world outside had kept going and… yeah. 

But, I wasn’t going to push that off on anyone else. Hard as it was, I had to be the one who broke the news to them. So, telling the others to hang on a minute, I stepped back to the front of the stage and cleared my throat. “Excuse me.” 

Now I had their attention again. Every single one of those nearly three hundred people were focused on me, clearly hoping I would have real answers for them. Too bad I was just about to make things even more confusing instead. That thought ran through my mind briefly before I shook it off, took a deep breath, and started. “There’s another thing we need to tell you. I’m sure you’re all aware that the original… murder scene was shut down and time-locked in order to preserve the evidence until people could get here to check it out.” 

Barely a couple seconds had passed after I said that before one of the crowd, a green-scaled reptilian humanoid with three eyes across his head and a crocodile-like snout raised a hand and asked, “How long?” His voice was loud enough to echo through the room, drawing everyone’s attention. “How long have we been time-locked?” His gaze was focused on me, even as a murmur started up. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? After Valdean was killed, they didn’t lock down a single room. They locked down the entire vault. So what Earth year is it now?” 

Oh boy. Seeing everyone staring my way as they whispered in confusion at one another, I grimaced inwardly before answering. “Okay, yes, the vault has been time-locked. It’s 2019 right now. January, 2019.” 

Well, that had the expected result. Everyone was suddenly talking at once. They wanted to know why it took so long, where the hell we had been, what happened to their families and people they knew outside, how various sports teams had done, whether the world actually survived past 2012 in a couple cases, if the Seosten had taken over and that was how I had these powers, and more that I couldn’t actually catch. It had instantly descended into total verbal chaos.  

Obviously, I couldn’t blame them. If I had to think about how I would feel to find out that I had been frozen for a couple decades while the whole world went on outside without me, I… I really had no idea how the hell I would react to that. Even if I had some of my family and friends with me, knowing that the others had gone on for that long, that the world itself had continued while I was… yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t blame them at all. It was a lot to take in, especially on top of what they had already been told. Even more so when you added in that we were also telling them there was a murderer among them. A murderer among their friends, the people they had spent so much time with in here and were obviously incredibly close to. 

Yeah, no wonder they were freaking out a bit. I was actually surprised they’d been holding it together this long, to be honest. We were dumping an awful lot on the group. So, I let them react for a minute, rather than immediately try to quiet them down. They deserved the chance to get some of that out, even if I really didn’t have the answers they wanted to hear. And, of course, this whole thing was made worse because now they weren’t nameless faces. I had been in their heads. I had seen some of their thoughts and experienced their memories. Sure, it was all jumbled for me and hadn’t had time to settle in my brain yet, but still. Every time I focused on one of them, I knew their name. They weren’t strangers, not really. I could still hear the pain and confusion that had been in each of their thoughts as they believed they could have been the murderer, that they could have been responsible for killing two close friends. Every single one of them was dealing with a lot right now. Too much, really. 

Finally, before things spiraled too far, I spoke up again. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry we don’t have all the answers for you. We’re working on it. I can tell you why it took so long for us to get here.” That started to quiet them as they focused on me, so I continued by giving them all a quick rundown of what had happened with the Rebellion itself being erased, and how that had clearly erased knowledge of what was going on here. Then the man who was actually told had died before the eraser was undone. Finally, I explained how us showing up had essentially been an accident. 

“So how long would we have just sat here if you didn’t show up?” one of the women demanded. 

I looked to Sitter, who promptly answered, “If not interrupted by the arrival of some Crossroads Heretic at some point, the time-lock could have continued for up to another one hundred and twelve years before our power supplies would have necessitated releasing it.”

If I’d thought things were loud before with a lot of questions and people talking over one another, it was nothing compared to what happened then. Everyone was talking at once. The mere thought that if we hadn’t happened to practically trip over them, they would’ve been stuck here for another hundred and twelve years, not getting out until close to the year 2150? Needless to say, it drew a reaction. Though through that, there were other people who were insisting that if one of them was a killer, it was the right move. Which just made them start talking about which of them it could be again, and things devolved into even more shouting. This obviously wasn’t getting anyone anywhere. And if I didn’t step up and stop it, the situation was going to get even worse. 

“We’re going to figure this out!” I called over the sound of their rising voices. “And as soon as we do, I promise, you’ll be free to leave the vault, or stay, or do whatever you wish. We just… we need to find answers, and once we do, we’ll give those answers to you. I just need you guys to wait here for awhile. We’re going to check out the rooms of this place, and we’d like to take a small group of you with us while we look into your apartments, so you can watch and talk to us about what you think is going on. You’ll all have a chance.” 

“And what if we don’t want you to look through our apartments and private things?” That was the purple slime-like figure from earlier. They had stretched themselves up to a full eight feet in height to draw attention to themselves. “We mean, you’re Heretics. Boschers. How do we know you won’t just plant something to make one of us look guilty and call it a day?” 

I hesitated, trying to find the right words. But even as my mouth opened to say something, Marina spoke up instead. “Because we’re not like them! If we were anything like the people you’re afraid of, you wouldn’t have to worry about us framing any of you. Because… because we’d just kill everyone in here. The loyalist Boschers, they wouldn’t care about making you look evil, because they already believe you are and they don’t need any proof one way or the other. If we were anything like them, we’d just come in here and kill all of you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to be that blunt about it, but that’s the truth. We’re here and we want to help. We want to solve this, find the real killer, and help the rest of you do… whatever you choose to do after that.” 

“She’s right,” I confirmed, nodding that way. “We really do want to help. We want to find the real killer, and get answers about what really happened and why. I promise, we’re here to put things right, and that includes making sure you’re all safe. So please, can we get ten of you… let’s say you ten right there, to come with us? We’ll just go take a look at your rooms, talk to each of you in person again, and work our way through everyone. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find out the truth this way. Then we can all move on and talk about what’s next for all of you. What you all choose to do.” 

There was a bit more uncertain murmuring, but we had mostly gotten through to them. The ten people I had pointed out gathered up toward one side of the stage, and Marina, Dakota, Denny, and I joined them. Sesh and Sitter stayed behind to talk to the rest of the assembled group. Hopefully they would be able to find out something on their own by getting more of those people to talk. 

Meanwhile, Marina led the way out of the auditorium, while the ten people I had chosen trailed after her. Dakota, Denny, and I brought up the rear. It gave me a chance to look this group over. The slime figure was part of it, as was the Rakshasa male they had been shouting over before as both had tried to take the blame for being the murderer. The Rakshasa guy was called Padda. Meanwhile, the slime figure’s name, or as close as we could get to it in English, was Meshk. They went by they pronouns because they were actually a colony of beings, thousands of tiny slime-like figures barely a few inches across when stretched out, who joined together to form the larger collective body known as Meshk. Possessing them had been… a real experience, to say the least. I had actually only been possessing one part of the colony, but they were mentally connected to every other part, so it was basically the same thing. 

In any case, we headed out together and let our first group take us to each of their rooms in turn. Unfortunately, none of the ten had anything inside their rooms that screamed ‘murderer.’ As far as we could find, the weapons weren’t hidden anywhere, and talking to this smaller group didn’t reveal any extra grudges or clues or anything. They really had no idea who among them could be the killer. It seemed like basically everyone in this place, well, might not be best friends, but at least basically got along. 

We even, with their permission, had Denny use her power to have them show us any hidden or secret places inside their rooms. There were a few, even a couple with weapons hidden, but nothing like what we were looking for. And they all had valid reasons to keep stuff like that put away out of sight. They wanted to be able to protect themselves if the time came. 

So, those ten were a bust. As were the remainder. Over yet another next couple hours, we checked each and every guest’s room, taking the elevator (we had to use a larger one in a few cases) throughout the facility. I learned an awful lot about what comforts they all enjoyed, how they liked to sleep, and so on, but nothing about the murderer. There was just… nothing. I liked all these people just fine, and whoever the real killer was, I was going to be disappointed. 

Part of the problem was that there were just too many suspects. We couldn’t zero in on just a few that easily, because any of the nearly three hundred people could have been the killer. We just… had no direction. Right now, we were stuck just pulling in as much information as we could, and then we’d have to sort it out later. Thankfully, I had been taking notes on a notebook that Sitter had scrounged up for me. The notes were basically a mess, but at least I could sort of keep track of what I was finding out. I had the names of everyone in the place along with a few bits jotted beneath each one, and lines connecting them to others when there were (minor) grudges or friendships. 

Finally, after the last group had been brought back to the auditorium to rejoin their companions, I stood by the doorway with the others. “That’s it? That’s everyone?” 

Sitter, who had joined us, gave a short nod. His mouth lights turned faint blue. “Yes. You have now visited the rooms of each and every one of our two-hundred and eighty-four guests.” 

“Yeah, well–wait, what did you say?” I turned that way, frowning. 

Sitter’s mouth lights turned a slightly brighter blue as his head tilted. “I said–” Then I heard what was clearly a recording of his voice from a few moments earlier, as it included the crowd noise from the room nearby. “You have now visited the rooms of each and every one of our two-hundred and eighty-four guests.” 

“Dudes, what’s going on?” Sesh asked as she jogged up. “I’ve got everyone in here playing games, but they’re getting pretty antsy.” 

Holding up a hand, I thought quickly before asking, “Sitter, can you play back exactly what you said awhile ago, just when we were about to have me start possessing people? It was right after Jammi volunteered to be the first one. Denny said these people must really care about each other, and you said something about community spirit. What was that whole thing?” 

Again, Sitter played back an obvious recording from that moment. “Master Valdean attempted to foster a strong community spirit. We have activities designed to create lasting friendships, even a sense of family. That is what we are here, family. Which is what makes these murders so difficult to understand. There were arguments, yes. With two hundred and eighty-four guests, how could there not be? But in the end, everyone loved Master Valdean for bringing them here. If they wished to leave, they could have at any time. They were not prisoners.”

Dakota hesitantly spoke up. “What’s wrong? Did something–did you notice something?” 

“Um, maybe.” Taking a breath, I focused on the robot. “One more. Can you play back the recording of exactly what you said while we were still in Valdean’s room, after you told us that the rest of the vault was on time-lock? You said you didn’t expect it to take this long for us to show up, then I asked how long everything had been like that. Can you play back your exact response?” 

Again, the robot obliged, and we heard his voice from earlier. “Every other room is, yes. Those areas, and my own chambers, lie beyond this room. Each individual’s chambers, and all of this facility’s two-hundred and eighty-seven guests themselves, have been time-locked for decades now. My decision to lock them down came in the late-nineteen nineties, just after my master’s murder and a couple of years after the first death.” 

“I don’t–wait,” Sesh blurted. “Did he say–” 

“Two hundred and eighty-seven,” I confirmed while rocking back on my heels. “When we were in the room, before he turned off the time-lock, he said there were two hundred and eighty-seven guests. Now, ever since he unlocked things, he’s been saying two hundred and eighty-four. And that’s how many we’ve talked to, it’s how many are in this room, it’s how many people we checked out, how many I possessed, how many–trust me, that’s everyone in here. Two hundred and eighty-four.

“So where, exactly, are the other three?” 

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Growth 18-13 (Heretical Edge 2)

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“Okay, did… did we just step into the largest murder conspiracy ever?” Marina managed to be the first one of us who found her voice after we were all struck dumb by the completely baffling array of hands raised before us. 

That was the thing. The fact that there were so many hands raised appeared to be baffling not only to us, but from the look of things, to the audience themselves as well. The assembled group were all standing there with their hands raised while looking around at one another and talking all at once. They were arguing with one another, demanding explanations, denying those explanations, crying in guilt, confusion, or disbelief, and just plain raising a commotion that was getting louder with every passing second. 

“Uh, Denny, I think you can tell them to put their hands down now,” I whispered, still reeling from this turn of events. They had all been part of these murders? That didn’t even make sense. The sheer–how? 

“Oh, r-right.” Clearly just as taken aback as the rest of us, Denny quickly told everyone they could put their hands down, but still not to hurt anyone. That didn’t stop the arguing spreading through the room, however. If anything, it just got louder as people turned to one another and started loudly demanding and/or desperately pleading that they stop lying and covering for them. 

I focused on one pair, a Rakshasa male and a purple slime-like creature, both shouting over one another to insist that they themselves were the killer, not the other person. A few feet past them, a Guhlben (one of the enormous, obese beings who stood ten feet tall and several feet wide) female in a very pretty dress was tightly gripping the shoulders of a pair of much smaller Satyrs while sobbing hysterically in between insisting that they shouldn’t take the fall for her. The Satyrs, meanwhile, were each shouting back at her that they were the one responsible, then looking at one another to blurt that no the other one wasn’t, they themselves were. 

And so on and so forth it went throughout the entire audience. Everyone was confessing to the murder and insisting that the other people weren’t responsible, it was only them. And the more they argued, the louder the arguing got. Not to mention the crying. A few of them shouted in our direction that the Heretics should take them, and leave the others alone. Which only made their friends loudly and frantically insist that they were the murderer. And it all just got louder from there. 

Finally, an earsplitting whistle filled the air, carrying on for a few seconds as it drowned out everyone and got their attention. It was Marina, standing up at the edge of the stage. She kept up the whistle until the whole audience finally turned to face us once more, quieting down for the moment. Which just left us standing there facing an audience of confessed murderers who were clearly just as confused about this entire situation as we were. 

“Okay,” Sesh announced dully while we stared around the room at all that. “I’m just gonna say it, this is pretty fucking weird.” 

“You’re right about that,” Marina agreed, her gaze shifting first toward Denny and Dakota, who were standing together looking baffled, then to Sesh and me. “What’re we gonna do now?” 

My mouth opened, then I stopped and glanced toward Sitter. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s going on here? I mean, without going into too much detail, these guys should’ve only been able to tell the truth when Denny asked if they were responsible for those deaths. They can’t all be responsible. Especially since they’re arguing with each other about it. That’s impossible.” 

“Maybe the power isn’t working anymore?” Denny offered hesitantly. She sounded rather conflicted about the possibility, glancing down at her own hands as though there would be answers in her palms. “Maybe it broke.” 

“I’m pretty sure if it broke, they wouldn’t have raised their hands at all,” Dakota pointed out. “Or only some of them would’ve. Not… not all of them.” Frowning in confusion, she glanced to the audience, who were starting to murmur amongst themselves once more, clearly desperate to go back to arguing about which of them would be taking the blame for these murders. 

Sitter, for his part, simply shook his head while those mouth lights shifted to a light amber. “I confess, Lady Flick, I am quite at a loss. It cannot possibly be all of them, and yet if, as you say, they would be incapable of lying in response to Lady Denny’s question, then the only answer is that–” 

“They all believe they were the ones responsible,” I finished for him, squinting a bit as I turned back to the audience. “Okay, umm… uh, don’t worry, people! We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, and uhh, and no one’s gonna go killing anybody else. We’ll figure this out.” 

God, this was weird. It felt weird. Why was I the one talking to these people? I was just a kid, there should be an adult here to talk to the audience, work all this out, and… and handle it. Yes, I’d been through a lot. I’d had to handle a lot. A hell of a lot, really. And yet somehow, being right here, talking to people and trying to calm them down like this felt like far more of an ‘adult thing’ than actually fighting in life and death battles did. Was it just because I was accustomed to the fighting part? Standing here, talking as though I had any sort of authority whatsoever, it just… it just felt awkward. It felt like they could all see through me, like everyone standing out there could see that I was just a confused little girl who had no idea what I was doing. 

“Flick.” Dakota’s voice was a whisper as she touched my arm. “It’s okay, you know? We can handle this.” 

It was like she knew me. She had known in a glance that I had been mentally spiraling right there. Managing a shaky smile, I nodded and straightened up a bit. I was acting like I had some level of authority because we were the ones who were here. So we had to handle it. There weren’t any adults here. 

No, that wasn’t right either. There were adults. I was one of them. So was Marina. Sesh too, I was pretty sure. We had to step up, take control of the situation, and figure this out. 

And then it struck me. As I stood in front of that audience of people staring at me for direction and answers, I realized why this, of all things, had made me instinctively look for an adult more than much more dangerous and life-threatening situations. Being on a spaceship flying into battle, facing down a horrifying Necromancer who had abducted my mother, dealing with a psychopathic Seosten cunt who wanted to rip my face off and kill my friends, none of that had any connection to my childhood self. It was all so utterly removed from anything the young me would have been involved with that it was like we were two entirely different people. 

But this? Yes, the details were completely absurd and removed from Bystander Flick’s reality, of course. But the more general part, that was a different story. Really, what was this? Remove the supernatural and alien aspects, remove all magic and extra-dimensional stuff, and it was a mystery. It was a mystery like the ones I had often gotten involved with back in Laramie Falls. Okay, not really like those, given my childhood mysteries didn’t tend to run all the way to one murder, let alone two. Still, though, that was what I did back then. I butt my nose into things, as more than one person from back then would’ve said. This situation right here wasn’t about fighting for my life, or about saving the world, or a desperate struggle for survival. It wasn’t about any of that. 

It was about a mystery. And in all of my old mysteries, I’d always had an adult to fall back on, an adult to point at the bad guy. I’d had a safety net, someone who could step in and take charge when the time came. But here, now, it was just us. We were the adults. I was eighteen years old. 

So how long would it be before I stopped feeling like I was faking the whole adult thing and started to actually believe I was one? When would the switch activate that made me feel like the adult I was supposed to be? 

Shaking that off as the thoughts rushed through my mind in a quick moment, I focused on the audience. “Right, so here’s the thing. You all think you were responsible for these murders, and obviously you can’t all be. Wait, hang on. I’m just gonna check something real quick.” Turning to Denny, I whispered what I wanted her to ask next. 

“Um, okay.” Looking hesitant, the younger girl cleared her throat before trying again. “My name is Denise, would everyone who believes they are solely responsible for the murder of Valdean Ecclestone or Mophse Kanter, without any help from anyone else, raise your hand? And if you do not believe you’re responsible, don’t raise your hand.” 

As expected (yet still baffling) by that point, every person in that audience promptly did so. Their hands shot up in the air like they were popping out of a jack-in-the-box. And of course, all of them immediately turned to argue with their neighbors, their friends. 

Before that could get out of control again, I loudly spoke up once more. “Okay! Okay, I think it’s obvious that this is impossible. You all believe you murdered these guys, and that you each did so alone. Clearly that’s not a thing. So it’s magic. It has to be magic. Someone… I think someone must’ve used a spell to make each of you think you were the killer. So just calm down, alright? At least ninety-nine percent of you are not the bad guy here, someone just used magic to make you think you were. And we’re gonna figure this out.” 

If I expected that to calm them down, I was sorely mistaken. Everyone started talking at once again. Some were arguing that I was wrong, they really were the killer and had to be stopped before they hurt someone else, while others were demanding to know who could’ve put that sort of spell on them, pointing fingers one way or another to others in the group. It remained one big chaotic mess. 

“Hey!” Sesh shouted loud enough to be heard over all the arguing. As everyone turned that way, she added, “You all want to find out who really murdered those two, right? You wanna know who the bad guy is, who killed your friends and put a spell on the rest of you to blame yourselves for it?” When everyone out there gave murmurs and nods of agreement with that, she gestured. “Well, we’re trying to help with that. But you’ve gotta calm down for a minute. Stop shouting all at once, dudes. You’re not helping anything.” 

Coughing, I nodded along with that. “She’s right, we need to take this one bit at a time. If everyone would please sit down, we’ll try something else.” 

“Who are you?” one of the guests demanded. He, and everyone else, were already starting to resume their seats amidst more confused muttering. When he put voice to that particular question, all of them focused on me. “You’re a Heretic, right? One of the rebels? We heard something about rebels.” 

Oh boy, was that a complicated question. “That’s… a lot to get into,” I replied slowly. “My name is Flick Chambers. And yeah, I’m part of the Heretic rebellion. This is Sesh. These two are Denny and Dakota, as you heard. The girl over there with the great whistle is Marina. We’re here to help. There’s a lot more we need to get into, but first we need to find out exactly what happened here. So, for that, I’m gonna ask for a volunteer. Do all of you know who the Seosten are?” There was a general confirmation of that amongst the group, so I continued. “I have a Seosten’s power to possess people. Which means I can read your mind and see your memories. I want to do that, with each of you, one at a time. I want to see what you remember about what happened and compare all of your… versions.” I could see them getting nervous, shifting in their seats and looking at one another. “But I’ll only do it with your permission. And I’ll only be looking for stuff revolving around the murders, that’s all. Everything else is your business. This is just about finding out who… who killed Valdean and Mophse.” I felt a twinge of guilt about saying that so bluntly to people who had only just found out about the death of their benefactor, someone they clearly cared about a lot given their reactions throughout all this, but I really had no idea how else to phrase it. We had to find answers as quickly and efficiently as possible, before this situation spiraled out of control. If this whole group panicked, everything would get worse. I had to sound like I knew what I was doing. I had to be matter-of-fact and in control. That’s what these people needed right now. Even if I was faking it the entire time, they had to think I was calm and collected. They needed blunt, because they needed to believe this was something I could handle.

Pausing to let that settle in for a moment, I exchanged a glance with the others before speaking again. “Does anyone want to volunteer to be first? My friends here can walk through and talk to the rest of you about what you think happened in the meantime.” 

To my relief, after a few seconds of uncertainty, the Guhlben woman raised her hand while rising to her full height. “I ahh, I would like to submit myself for evaluation, madam,” she announced in a rather posh voice. “If as it turns out, the guilt I feel over those dreadful murders is mere sorcerous chicanary, I shall be greatly relieved.” 

She made her way around the assembled group, having been at the back of the room due to being one of the biggest people there. I heard and saw several of them murmur encouragement to her, belief that she wasn’t the killer, urging her to let them go first instead, and so on. 

“These people really care about each other, don’t they?” Denny murmured behind me. 

“Master Valdean attempted to foster a strong community spirit,” Sitter noted with pride in his voice, his mouth lights shifting to a bright green briefly before fading to a softer shade. “We have activities designed to create lasting friendships, even a sense of family. That is what we are here, family. Which is what makes these murders so difficult to understand. There were arguments, yes. With two hundred and eighty-four guests, how could there not be? But in the end, everyone loved Master Valdean for bringing them here. If they wished to leave, they could have at any time. They were not prisoners.”

“Sir Sitter is absolutely correct right there,” the Guhlben woman announced, having approached the front of the stage by that point. She was still standing on the audience floor, yet she was so tall that she was still looking down toward me. “We are all family here. Granted, it’s a large family and we may not all be best friends. But we are family. Thinking about what I did to poor Mophse… and Valdean, I just–” She had started to tear up before catching herself. “But ah, if those… if those awful memories aren’t true, I would be very happy to hear it.” 

Offering her as reassuring of a smile as I could, I replied, “Well, that’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of right now, Miss umm…?” 

“Oh dear me,” she blurted, sounding positively scandalized. “I am so sorry. How awfully rude. I am Jamnikrah, but my friends here most often call me Jammi. Or Aunt Jammi. It’s… I can’t yet say that it’s a pleasure to meet you, given the terrible circumstances, but you all seem quite pleasant.” She added that with a little wave toward Dakota and Denny, both of whom waved back to her seemingly reflexively. 

“Okay, Miss Jammi,” I replied while continuing to offer that hopefully at least somewhat reassuring smile, “if it’s okay with you, I’ll just do that possession thing real quick. Be in and out, promise.” While saying that, I raised my hand that way. I didn’t reach out to touch her fully. Better that that be her decision, so it wouldn’t feel like I was taking her control away just as I was… sort of taking her control away.  

There was a moment of hesitation, understandable given what she was opening herself up to, before the large woman carefully raised her hand and touched it against mine. “If there’s something in my memories that can tell you who killed those two, please find it.” 

“I will.” Trying to sound confident when I said that, I glanced toward the others. “You guys talk to everyone here, try to get them organized into some sort of line or something, and see what they can tell you before I get to them. With so many people, this is gonna take awhile.” And with that, I focused on the possession power, disappearing into the Guhlben woman. 

Right, now I was inside her. I could feel her surface emotions and thoughts. She was terrified that she had been the one to kill the nice man who had been so kind and understanding to her, who had taught her so much of how she enjoyed presenting herself. He had seen past her species’ innate… size and helped her to feel proud of who she was and what she looked like. He gave her this pretty dress, and others like it. He taught her how to style her hair, and watched fashion shows with her. He didn’t judge and dismiss her. He took time with her, listened to her thoughts on the books they read, even offered feedback on her own short stories. She loved the man. Not in a romantic sense but more of a mix between a brother and a father. The news that he had been murdered had sent her reeling–no. She’d known he was dead, because she killed him. 

It was that confusing sudden turn that brought me up short. That wasn’t right. None of it was. One second she was reeling in horror from the revelation that this man who had been so important to her was dead, and the next, she was thinking about how she’d had no choice but to kill him. 

Needless to say, I dove a bit deeper into that and focused on her memories revolving first around Mophse’s murder. It was an accident. The man had found out that she had once unknowingly been part of the muscle for a group whose actions had led to the death of Valdean’s close friend. She’d only recently (at the time) realized who this friend was while talking to their host in his apartment area. Realizing that Mophse had overheard her talking to herself about it shortly afterward, she was terrified that he was going to tell Valdean and the man would kick her out of this place for the past transgression, that he would never forgive her. She found him in the sauna and tried to reason with him. He argued that Valdean would understand, that it was worse to keep things secret. She insisted the man could never know. The argument rose to the level of a fight before either of them knew it was happening. She kept telling him to just promise to be quiet about it. She was behind him, pulling the man back against her. He was yanking her hair, reaching up and back to shove his fingers in her eyes. She grabbed for a towel and wrapped it over his mouth while half-blinded by his grasping fingers. Bellowing and straining, she tried to yank the towel tightly in his mouth just so he would have to be quiet for a second and listen to her. 

But it wasn’t his mouth. She realized that too late. The towel was around his throat, and he… and he… died before she understood what she was doing. 

As for Valdean, that had been even more of an accident, a mistake. He’d unexpectedly called for her to see him in the kitchen, and she became paranoid that he knew what she’d done before. She took the pistol, long-squirreled away in her belongings, in the panicked hope that if he wanted her to die, she could protect herself. When she went into the kitchen, seeing Valdean with his back to her as he casually got food out of the fridge, she realized it had to be safe. But when she tried to put the gun away before he noticed, it accidentally went off. 

Yeah, there were holes in that whole thing. I noticed right away. For one, when I went digging deeper for this gang she had supposedly run with, leading to the death of Valdean’s friend, there were very few memories. They all turned blank and vague after that first quick glance. Not to mention the fact that she was too tall to have choked him from a downward position that way the body actually looked like. 

Oh, and there was the fact that she had no memory of changing everyone else’s memories. Which, yes, could have been because she had changed her own memories as well and erased those ones. For that matter, she could have specifically implanted easily disproven memories in her own head in order to look innocent, a sort of double-bluff. It would make sense for anyone who was trying to hide themselves. I really wished Sariel was here to do this stuff. Or even Tabbris. They would’ve been a hell of a lot better at sifting through these minds and finding buried or hidden memories than I was. 

But I was who we had. So, I gave another quick look through those relevant bits before thanking the woman. Then I emerged. 

“Are you okay?” Marina asked. She was standing nearby, with an assortment of people she had been talking to. The others were spread through the room. They were clearly still getting organized. 

I started to answer, then realized she wasn’t really asking me. Her focus was on Jammi. 

“Oh, I… I am ashamed, but well,” the woman assured her. 

“You shouldn’t be ashamed,” I informed her. “I’m pretty sure those memories are planted. There’s a lot of inconsistencies.” With a sigh, I looked out over the assembled group. If they all had altered memories like that, digging through and finding anything useful this way was going to be a nightmare. And yet, it was the quickest way I could think of. I just had to keep at it, going through memory after memory, thought after thought, until something big popped out. Or, more likely, until a bunch of small things popped out and we put them together like a giant puzzle. There were almost three hundred people here. This was going to take hours. 

“You know,” I murmured mostly to myself while looking out at the crowd and thinking about just how long this was going to take, “I think I know why detectives on TV are always drinking so much coffee.” 

“Is it so they have an excuse to run to the bathroom a lot and freak out in private about all the horrible stuff they’re hearing where nobody can see them?” Dakota piped up while she and Denny came closer. 

My mouth opened, then shut, as I let my head tilt slightly. “Okay, two reasons. But come on, we’ve got a lot of people to talk to.

“And something tells me none of these memories are going to be pleasant to sit through.” 

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

Growth 18-12 (Heretical Edge 2)

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

A/N – There was a special commissioned interlude posted yesterday focusing on the 10 main prisoners of Gehenna. If you haven’t seen that yet, you can find it right here

The first murder, the one that wasn’t Valdean himself, had apparently taken place in one of the sauna rooms. As the elevator doors opened after another thirty-second trip, we found ourselves at one end of a hallway. The entire way down the corridor, on the right-hand side, were an assortment of doors, which apparently led to changing rooms for various sexes and species body types. Sitter led us through one of those locker rooms, which looked basically like any other though meant for only ten people at most, and with oversized benches and lockers that were clearly meant for beings averaging ten feet tall. 

“What about cameras in this place?” I asked as we were moving through the room. “I don’t suppose it’s as easy as checking those?” 

“Master Valdean did not put cameras in the vault,” came the answer. “He did not want his guests to feel as though they were being spied on.” 

The rest of us exchanged glances at that. It was understandable, of course. But boy would it have helped right now.

“This is the one that poor Sir Mophse used,” the robot informed us a moment later, gesturing to one of the large lockers. “That is where he left his clothes, wallet, and watch. Master Valdean took the items out and examined them, but found nothing of interest. He put the items back so any future investigator could see them as they were.” His mouth lights shifted from light green to blue as he regarded us. “I suppose that would be all of you. Would you like to see his belongings, or visit the body itself first?” 

Basically every single one of us blurted some equivalent of, “Let’s see his belongings.” Apparently despite our brave words about wanting to solve these murders, none of us were exactly eager to go and look at the body. Which might have seemed weird coming from some of us who had caused plenty of death already, but still. It just felt like there was a difference between killing someone in the heat of battle, mostly to protect ourselves or others, and seeing someone who had been coldly murdered. I especially didn’t like the idea of taking Dakota and Denny in a place like that. Not with their own histories. The second one of them said they didn’t want to be there anymore, I was planning on pulling them out. Hell, I felt guilty about even taking them this far. But they wanted to help, and it felt like telling them no would have made things worse. Besides, both of them had… well, some form of experience, even if it was second-hand in Denny’s case, with the whole murder thing. There might be something in one of the scenes that they noticed. 

So, we all stood there and watched as Sitter input the code for the locker and tugged it open. Then we looked through the contents. As promised, it was just a pair of pants, a shirt, shoes, and underwear, along with a watch. There was nothing especially unique about them, aside from the fact that they were all meant for a man several feet taller than a normal human. We searched through the pockets and checked the wallet and watch for anything, but it was all just normal stuff. Comically oversized stuff, but normal other than that. He had some sort of identification card that was basically the size of a full sheet of paper. Turning that over, I focused first on his face. He looked like a goofy, friendly guy with slightly too big ears and a narrow face. His skin was light pink, with bright yellow eyes. And he had this silly smile. It sort of reminded me of Wyatt for some reason, which just… made me feel even worse about the fact that he was dead and I’d never get the chance to know him. Which was probably silly, to ascribe that much emotion to a picture, but there it was. It also made me even less excited to go in and see his body. 

His name was listed as Mophse Kanter. He was apparently ninety-four Earth years old (it literally said Earth years), and next to that was a second number listed as seventy-five. 

“What’s this mean?” I asked curiously, holding that up and pointing to the second number. 

Sitter leaned in close to see what I meant, then his mouth lights turned bright purple. “Aha. Well, Lady Flick, the second number on those identification cards refers to what the age of majority for that species would be. The ahh, age of maturation. I believe in ordinary humans these days it is considered to be eighteen?” 

That made me do a double-take. “You mean this guy was seventy-five before he was considered an adult, and he died at ninety-four? That’s like a human dying when they’re twenty years old. How long does his species normally live? The ahh–” I checked the card for the species name. “Olleypha?” 

Holding those giant pants up in front of herself (covering her entire body in the process), Denny absently replied, “Average lifespan is four hundred and fifty years.” Then she stopped, lowering the pants so we could see her confused face as her head tilted. “Wait, how did I know that?” 

“Ahem, you are quite correct, Lady Denny,” Sitter assured her. He sounded curious too. “I do not know why you are able to answer the question, but yes, the average lifespan of an Olleypha is four hundred and fifty years here on Earth or on comparable worlds. They live slightly shorter lives on their own homeworld due to various environmental factors.” 

Dakota was staring at Denny, offering a hesitant, “Those have to be memories from you-know-who, right?” 

Denny, in turn, visibly flinched. “I–I didn’t learn it from anywhere else. I don’t even remember hearing the name of these guys, or seeing them before. But as soon as you asked how long they lived, I just… wait.” She reached out, taking the oversized ID before squinting at it intently. “Oh. Oh, I remember. There was an Olleypha who was in charge of this sporting goods store and I wan–I mean, I mean he wanted–Ammon wanted–” She stopped short, throwing the ID back to me before turning away with a visibly sick expression. Dakota moved to embrace her from the side and the two took a few steps to the side. Marina joined them, tugging the two further away to sit by one of the large benches to talk quietly. They were gonna need a minute. 

Okay, so she had clearly gotten a memory of Ammon doing something horrific to one of these Olleypha people. Something told me my little brother wasn’t exactly short on victims. That would probably happen more than once. Which was just… just another reason to hate Fossor. 

Sighing heavily, I turned to the others just as Sesh quietly spoke up. “What’s this?” She had apparently found a folded up piece of paper in the man’s enormous shoe. Unfolding it to its full, nearly two-foot-wide size, she showed us what it said. First, there was a short sentence in some language I couldn’t understand. Largely because half the letters just looked like completely random shapes. And the ones that did resemble the alphabet I was accustomed to had unfamiliar additions, like a capital Q that had a tail on both sides and a smaller circle in the middle. I was pretty sure it wasn’t any Earth language. Below that sentence was a date and time that actually were written in English. March thirteenth, four-thirty pm.

Sitter regarded that before promptly replying, “Assuming this was meant to be the same year as Sir Mophse’s death, that date would have been two days afterward.” 

“Can you read the rest of it?” I asked, focusing on the unfamiliar language once more. “It’s probably Olleyphan language, or whatever they call it.” 

Sitter, however, shook his head. “I assure you, I am quite fluent with all forty-three still-living languages from the Olleyphan homeworld. This bears no resemblance to any of them. Nor am I capable of deciphering it using any of the remaining five thousand, four hundred, and eighty-two languages that were programmed into me. I have no idea what this could mean.” 

“I wish Avalon was here,” I muttered, “She’s got that language deciphering power from that guy on the prison world.”

Sesh was grimacing. “So hold on, he had a note in his shoe with a sentence in a language that even the super-translating robot dude can’t understand, and a listed date for two days after he was murdered. Wait, did Valdean find that note?” 

“He should’ve,” I murmured. “You said he took that stuff out and examined all of it, and that paper wasn’t exactly hard to find. Did he show it to you? You know, so you could try to decipher it then?” 

“No, Ladies Sesh and Flick,” came the simple response. “Master Valdean never requested that I attempt to decipher that note, nor did I witness him find it. But he did not search the belongings in my presence. He wished for me to attend to the still-living guests at the time, and assure them that everything would be fine. You are correct, however. I believe he would have had to locate the note with only a cursory examination. As I said, he put everything back the way he found it for any future investigation.”

Taking that in, I brought back a bit on my heels thoughtfully. “Doesn’t it seem like he’d want his robot assistant, who speaks over five thousand languages, to see if he could read what’s on that note? Unless–” 

“Unless he already knew what it said,” Sesh abruptly put in, showing her teeth. “But how would he know what it said if Sitter here doesn’t understand it? He’s the one who programmed you, right?” 

“Which would mean he speaks it but deliberately didn’t program you with the knowledge,” Marina added. She had come back with both other girls, who were standing slightly behind her. “Why would he do that unless it was something he didn’t want you to know?” 

“It does seem a little odd that he’d program that many languages into you without adding this one,” I tentatively agreed, looking at Sitter directly. “Either he didn’t understand it and chose not to–wait, we’re being dumb.” My head shook. “He programmed you, so he’d know exactly what languages you understand. If he could tell this was a language he didn’t program into you, of course he wouldn’t ask you to decipher it.” 

“That would follow logically,” Sitter confirmed, before adding, “Except I will say that he was not the only one to program languages into me. He did not speak all of them himself, and thus had much of that outsourced to others. My language database was transferred through three dozen experts in order to be prepared to assist with the needs of any guest who might have entered our facility.” 

Marina shook her head with a glance my way. “It was a good thought, anyway.” 

A heavy exhale escaped me. “Right, good thought. Except now we’re back to, ‘he could have asked Sitter to translate but didn’t, so he either knew what it said already, or he chose not to let his robot assistant see the note for some reason.’” 

We didn’t get anything else useful out of searching the locker or his belongings. So we took the note and identification card with us while reluctantly heading to see the actual crime scene. Sitter led us to a doorway at the back of the room, leading to a separate hall parallel opposite from the first one. On the far side of the hall was a large set of double doors leading into a pool area. Or rather, pools. The doors were opened, and I could see six different varying sized swimming pools. The smallest was only about ten feet long and a few feet deep, the next one up was slightly over Olympic-sized, and they got bigger from there. The largest one would have been the equivalent of that second size for someone as tall as Mophse himself. Needless to say, the room itself was gigantic, stretching off into the distance. If Valdean had gone to this much trouble to have different-sized swimming pools for his guests, wow. This place was clearly meant to be comfortable for a lot of varyingly-shaped people. It was impressive, to say the least. 

But that wasn’t our destination, so we just took a moment to look that way before continuing on down the hall. There were more doors further on, all of different sizes as well. These led to places like the saunas. Three of those had holographic symbols projected over the doors. Numbers, it looked like. 

Seeing my attention turn that way, Sitter explained, “These are the saunas which were occupied when I established the time-lock. The numbers are how many are inside.” 

“They’re not gonna be hurt, are they?” Sesh quickly asked. “I mean, that time-lock you’re talking about won’t let them be umm… you know, how you’re not supposed to spend too much time in the heat like that?” She flinched visibly with a quiet, “Dad killed someone like that before. He made me watch.” 

Well, that was nice and horrifying. I felt my stomach twist in disgust while Sitter shook his head. “I assure you, Lady Sesh, the timer-lock freezes everything within the room, including any physical effects. When it is released, it will be as if no time has passed. Aside from all the time that has passed.” His head cocked a bit, like he was considering the words he’d just said, before focusing once more. “This way. Sir Mophse was relaxing in the furthest sauna that would accommodate one of his size.” 

Yeah, I definitely wasn’t eager to see this. And from the look of the others, neither were they. Dakota and Denny were lagging behind a lot, while Marina kept pace with them. She had tried to tell both that they didn’t need to come along for this, but they insisted. There was clearly a lot of hesitation and fear, yet also firm insistence. They didn’t want to do this, but they were going to anyway. They both wanted to help figure this out. If anything, learning more about Mophse and seeing his face on that ID card had just made them even more determined. 

As for the murder scene itself, I had certainly seen far more graphic deaths. I’d caused far more graphic deaths. When Sitter shut off the time-lock using some sort of wi-fi-like connection he had to the main computer and opened the large door, I just saw the man’s body lying there on an oversized bench on the opposite side of the room. He was wearing bright orange swim trunks that clashed horribly with his pink skin. And yet, somehow that just made him seem even more innocent. For a moment, it looked like he was just sleeping. Then I saw the way his throat was partially collapsed. It looked like someone had wrapped something around it to choke the man, crushing his trachea in the process before leaving the body there. 

Swallowing hard, I stepped inside and moved to look down at his face. Even in death, he looked like a fun, goofy guy. It made me clench my hand tightly. Who could have done this? Valdean had taken these people in and cared for them. He protected them and gave them this whole place to live and relax in. Who would have murdered Mophse at all, let alone like this? This hadn’t been simple. He wasn’t poisoned and someone didn’t shoot him in the head or even stab him. This seemed personal. This meant that someone had come up behind, wrapped something around his throat, and held it until he died. He would have been thrashing, kicking, fighting to get free or to plead for his life. Whoever had done this had clearly been unaffected by all that. This person was a stone-cold murderer. 

With a soft sigh, I closed my eyes and reached out with my Necromancy. For over a minute, I tried to sense any ghost at all, but ended up with nothing. There was no sign of Mophse’s spirit, or anyone else’s.

Dakota silently stepped closer once I told the others I had nothing, staring down at the body from just beside me. I could see the emotions twisting their way through her expression. She was clearly lost in memories of her own family’s night of terror and violence. Finally, she spoke in a soft voice. “They were shorter than him. The… the way the throat’s collapsed, it’s pulled down. Whoever was behind him held the thing up around his throat and pulled back and down on it. It’s–” She blanched, folding her arms tightly across her stomach before quickly turning toward Marina as the older girl came up behind her to embrace the girl tightly. She couldn’t say anything else. 

Denny, meanwhile, stepped up on my other side, staring at the body as well. “I think he trusted the person. Look, there’s two towels on the rack over there.” She pointed that way. “One of them looks like it’s big enough for him, but the other one’s smaller, more human-sized. And they’re a little bit apart. Not like one guy taking two towels, more like two guys with separate towels.”

She was right, of course. Two towels, one clearly meant for Mophse himself and the other meant for a human-sized person. Taking that in, I murmured, “And if he was sitting in a sauna with a person like this, it was someone he knew.” My gaze turned to nod in agreement with Denny’s assessment. “It was someone he trusted.” 

Sesh, meanwhile, had stepped that way to run her finger close to the very edge of the smaller towel, without actually touching it. “Can we get like umm, DNA or whatever off this? Maybe whoever it was had it wrapped around themselves. It could tell us who they were. Or at the very least, which species they are.”

Unfortunately, Sitter scanned the towel before shaking his head. His mouth lights dimmed to a very soft orange. “I am sorry, the towel is clean aside from Mophse’s own fingerprints. It seems he was the only one who touched it since it was taken from the clean supplies at the far end of this corridor.” 

“Probably grabbed the towel for his friend,” I muttered. “The friend who killed him.”

Well, that certainly didn’t do a lot for the mood. We also didn’t find anything else of interest for the moment. And we all wanted to get out of that room. Not that our next destination was going to be that much better. Planning to come back and check the place out again later, we went to see the body of Valdean himself. 

As Sitter had told us before, that took us to one of the kitchens. Apparently there were three of them, and this was the smallest. It was the one the guests had used the most when they were just getting something for themselves. Even then, however, the room was about three times the size of the kitchen I’d had back at my family’s house in Laramie Falls. There were four different stoves and five microwaves. 

Oh, and the body, of course. Valdean was lying on the floor in front of the enormous silver refrigerator, on his side. Unlike the clear choking wounds of the other body, he had a single gunshot in the back of the head. From the sight of that, as well as the tray of food scattered along the floor, it looked like he had been getting a midnight snack or something when someone stepped up behind him and just… shot him. It was far less personal. Maybe they didn’t want to take the time it would require to actually choke him out? Or maybe they were afraid an old Heretic would be able to survive that and even beat them. Speaking of which–

“Did he have any powers that would’ve told him someone was behind him?” I piped up. “Or, uh, you know, should’ve let him survive being shot in the head by a normal gun?” 

“It’s not a normal gunshot,” Sesh informed me. She had already stepped over to kneel next to the body, staring at the wound intently. “This is from some sort of powerful laser. Probably bypassed any defenses he had.” Her voice softened. “Dad used those sometimes.” 

“Indeed,” Sitter confirmed. “Though Master Valdean would have been aware of someone behind him, he likely would not have seen them as a threat. Even after the murder of poor Mophse, Master Valdean remained quite fond of all his guests. It tore him up to think that one of them could have been Mophse’s killer. He spent a long time attempting to find out if anyone had somehow broken inside. Which, of course, should have been quite impossible. And yet… he wanted to believe that was the answer.” 

Right, even after this poor guy had dealt with the murder of one of his guests by another guest, he still tried to believe in them. And what had been his reward for that? Being shot in the back of the head. 

Once again, I tried to reach out for any ghosts, especially Valdean’s. But just like the other room, there was nothing. If there had been any spirits here, they were gone by now.

Denny was staring down at the body, clenching her hands tightly. Her voice was quiet, yet firm. “Can we talk to the guests now? I want to find out which one of them did this.” 

She was angry, I realized. She had taken in everything we did, learned everything we did, and now she was mad. She wanted to find out who could have betrayed an obvious friend like Mophse, and a nice guy like Valdean, who had taken them all in and cared for them. 

So, Sitter turned off the time-lock in every room, and sent a message summoning everyone to the main meeting hall. He made sure to keep the doors leading other places locked and closed off, funneling the whole population of this private vault that way. As far as we knew, none of them would have any idea that this much time had passed. That was going to be a pretty big bomb to drop. 

In any case, we took the elevator to the grand meeting room ourselves. It was a theater, basically, and our path took us to the stage itself. Which left our little group standing there next to Sitter, facing an audience of what had to be two or three hundred beings of all shapes, sizes, and colors. I saw some of the same sort of species I had previous experiences with, but also a lot that I didn’t. This was… this was a lot of very unique people, all sitting in chairs that had clearly been carefully designed for them. 

They were also all talking amongst themselves, very confused. Especially when they saw us. That prompted a few shouts about Heretics, and a couple of the larger people moved to cover the others, clearly protecting them. 

“It’s okay!” I called quickly. “It’s okay, we’re not here to hurt anyone! You’re okay, you’re–” Fuck, I couldn’t say they were safe. Not with an unknown murderer wandering around among them. We really should have planned for this. I’d forgotten what it was like for people who didn’t know the Rebellion was a thing. Or at least didn’t know much about it.

At least these people had spent time around another Boscher. They seemed to accept that easily enough. Which, to be fair, there probably weren’t many loyalist Boschers who would bother to reassure them before going straight to the attempted murder. 

Either way, a few shouted out questions about who we were and where Valdean was. Which made me grimace. 

Finally, Sitter made a microphone rise from the bottom of the stage, speaking up in front of it so his voice was projected throughout the room. I also heard it echoed moments later from speakers along the walls in various other languages so they would all understand. “Friends! I am… I have arrived with an assortment of terrible news. First and foremost, I am sorry to say that our founder and benefactor, Valdean Ecclestone, has… been murdered.” 

Okay, I would’ve chosen to be a bit less blunt about it, personally. Needless to say, that started a huge uproar with most people leaving their seats, shouting questions, and basically demanding to know what had happened. Looking to Denny, I whispered, “Now, before they have a chance to leave or do anything drastic.” 

She looked hesitant, of course, but quickly moved that way. Sitter promptly stepped out of the way, as everyone in the room stared at her. Several hundred sets of eyes all staring at her. It had to be a lot of pressure. 

And yet, Denny’s voice sounded remarkably clear as she spoke into the microphone. “H-Hello. My name is Denise. If you had anything to do with the murder of Valdean Ecclestone or Mophse Kanter, please do nothing to harm anyone or try to leave the room, and raise your hand.”

I was prepared to get no reaction, in case the person responsible wasn’t actually here. I was also prepared to see one person raise their hand against their will, giving away the truth. What I was not prepared for, however, was what actually happened. 

Every single person in the audience raised their hand. 

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Growth 18-11 (Heretical Edge 2)

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Leaving the room we’d started in, that Valdean Ecclestone guy’s quarters apparently, led to a large elevator. It was more like one of those freight versions used to transport cargo up and down somewhere than a normal office building type. Rather than having solid walls, there were bars all around us so we could see out. Ahead of us was the doorway into the room we had just come from. Behind us was a tunnel just wide enough for the elevator itself. To the left and right, as well as above, were the bronze-gold metal walls of the main vault structure. 

According to our new robot friend, Sitter, the elevator didn’t just go up and down. It also went forwards and backwards and sideways along an elaborate track system. Basically, the entire underground vault consisted of chambers that were separated by that thick metal. And the stuff wasn’t even normal metal. It was meant to ensure the privacy and safety of those within, so it was impossible to phase through, or even use vision powers to look through. Even ghosts couldn’t pass through it properly. Not that I had actually brought any ghosts along with me to check, which was another oversight that I should probably have been yelled at for. But in my defense, I hadn’t expected to be sent to a pocket dimension where I wouldn’t be able to contact the ghosts I left up on the Starstation. Even my increased necromancy power couldn’t reach them from here.

In any case, Sitter called the metal the walls were made out of orichalcum, apparently named by Valdean based on the old myths. Valdean had created the alloy himself, which made me even more curious about just how brilliant the old guy had been. Either way, this orichalcum was very strong in addition to preventing phasing and other powers from reaching through it.

“So what stops someone from using magic to go through it?” Marina asked as we stood in the large elevator. We hadn’t actually gone anywhere yet, as Sitter had been explaining what the bronze-gold metal on the walls beyond the elevator’s cage-like walls was. She was brushing her finger along one part of it while her mouth quirked a little at the sensation. Given I’d already done the same, I knew what she was feeling just then. There was a sort of low-level electric-like current constantly running through the metal. It was a little bit like very slight static electricity. 

“I am so glad you asked!” Sitter chirped. He really did seem to enjoy explaining things. “You see, this particular alloy naturally absorbs any magical power put into it, in order to strengthen and reinforce itself. Ah, in other words, you could draw the runes for your spells upon it. But the moment you attempted to empower those runes with actual magical energy, the metal would absorb that power so that the spell was never actually cast. The walls themselves devour that power quite voraciously, and become even more difficult to break through in the process. And I believe you already experienced the other side of this defense. The walls automatically erase anything written on them.” 

Marina and I exchanged a look, as the older girl quietly spoke up. “It um, it sounds like this whole place could be used as a prison as much as a vacation home. Every chamber is separated from the others, it’s in a pocket reality so even if they do get out they can’t go anywhere, and even the walls are made of stuff that traps them and blocks them from using magic to get through or even see into the rest of this place.” She sounded hesitant, like she felt a little bad about pointing out the obvious negative ways a vault like this could be used. 

“Oh, no, no, no.” Sitter started before pausing to reconsider. “Well, yes, I suppose you are quite correct. Master Valdean’s creations could be used to entrap people. But he truly desired to protect them, to keep them safe from the others of his–your–from others who would kill them. They were always, always to be free to leave if they desired. Unfortunately, the… murders have put certain protective protocols into place which supercede that. We must determine who the killer is before anyone may leave. But once that’s done, anyone inside may come and go as they please! That…” He paused, his mouth lights dimming to a very soft yellow. “That was Master Valdean’s intention. Only to help and protect the people he had done so much harm to in the past. He wished to use his gifts for good.” A note of sadness for his creator’s final fate had crossed into the robot’s voice, as he slumped just a little bit. 

“It’s okay,” Dakota quickly put in while standing next to Denny. “We believe you. I mean, we believe that Valdean wanted to use this place to help people. Right?” 

I nodded. “Right. We’re just saying, someone else could’ve used this place for… uh, worse purposes. I know he was the second one to die instead of the first, but he still could’ve been the main target. Like I said before, it could’ve been about someone finding out that he intended to help the Rebellion and they got nervous. Or it could’ve been about wanting to turn this place into a prison. We don’t know enough yet.” 

“Why…” Denny started to speak up, only to fall silent when everyone looked at her. Flushing slightly under the attention, she clearly forced herself to continue a bit hesitantly. “Why would they kill the other guy first, though? I mean, if it was about Valdean.” 

“We need to find out more about that first murder,” Sesh noted while folding her arms with a thoughtful look. “About who the victim was, where they were when it happened, what was going on, everything.” Seeing us stare at her, she shrugged. “What? I’ve read detective stories before. Even played this short campaign in a game called Bubblegumshoe, which–err, never mind, not the point. Anyway, we need to find out more, right?”  

“Of course, of course,” Sitter confirmed. “I will take you there and tell you everything I can about the crimes and those who live here. But first, as I recall, you wished to send a message to the outside world?” 

Marina gave me a quick glance while nodding. “Yeah, we need to let our people out there know that we’re okay. Well,” she paused before adding, “as okay as we can be while trapped in a pocket dimension with a murderer on the loose.” 

“If they try to murder any of us,” I pointed out, “they’re in for a big surprise. We’re all pretty good at not being murdered.” 

“I bet Valdean was too,” Denny muttered under her breath, seeming to only belatedly realize she’d said that out loud. Her eyes widened as she glanced up at me, quickly starting to apologize. 

“No, it’s okay, you’ve got a point,” I agreed. “We need to keep our eyes open and be careful. But hey, with any luck, we can solve this mystery as soon as we get to the rooms where they were murdered. I might be able to just summon their ghosts and ask who killed them.” 

“You are a Necromancer?” Sitter focused his attention on me, sounding quite interested. “Yes, yes, excellent. Perhaps this long-festered crime may be brought to light after all. Are you–would you be prepared to attempt such a thing soon?” 

“Just point me at the rooms where the murders happened,” I confirmed. “If there’s anything left of their ghosts, I can summon them. But uhh, there’s a decent chance there isn’t anything. After all, it’s been decades. The um, energy might’ve dissipated by now. They might’ve moved on. But it’s possible.” My shoulders rose in a shrug. “Guess we’ll find out either way, huh?” 

“Could you find out who the killer is?” Dakota was asking Denny, gaze focused on her friend. “I mean, if you talk to each of them individually and… use your–” 

“I can’t,” she quickly put in, head shaking as her body seemed to physically recoil at the idea. “I can’t use that power to make them tell the truth. If I–if I do anything with it, if I use it, he’ll know. His memories will know. They’ll come back, they’ll try to–” 

“Easy, it’s okay,” I interrupted, reaching out to touch the girl’s shoulder while trying to keep my voice as calm and reassuring as possible. “No one’s gonna force you to use that power, Denny, I promise. If you don’t feel comfortable trying, it’s okay. We understand.”

Giving a visibly and audibly heavy sigh, Denny offered a weak, “I’m sorry. I– know it sounds dumb. I know he’s dead and gone and he can’t control me. But if I use his power, if I force people to do something they don’t want to do, if I take control of them, it feels like… it feels dangerous. It feels bad.” 

Dakota put an arm around the other girl, squeezing firmly. “It’s like Flick said, nobody’s gonna force you to use it. Maybe umm, maybe you could ask people if they agree to have it done, so they can clear their names? You know, then it’s more of a volunteer thing.” 

Marina nodded. “And the ones who don’t agree, maybe they have valid reasons for that. They don’t have to trust us. But they’re the ones we can focus on more. Anyone who agrees to have you use that power could clear their name.” 

“I can possess people too,” I noted. “Get into their memories that way. Anyone who agrees to that, we could clear them pretty quick and move on to people who won’t agree. Abigail would say they have the right to not have people combing through their memories if they don’t want it. Or to be mind-controlled into answering.” 

Denny still looked quite hesitant about the whole thing, but swallowed hard before agreeing. “Maybe if… if they agree to it.” 

“Really?” Sesh was blinking back and forth between us. “I mean, I get it, sure. Just seems like it’d be really easy to just get everyone in one room and say, ‘Hey, raise your hand if you killed these people.’ It could be done and over with in two seconds. Sure, they’ve got rights and manipulating people is bad. Trust me, I get that. My dad’s a giant piece of shit and I don’t wanna be anything like him. But don’t the dead people and the innocent ones in here have rights too? It’s not like ‘raise your hand if you murdered these people’ is gonna hurt them. I–” She stopped abruptly, blanching. “I–I’m sorry. I’m not trying to guilt trip you or anything, I swear. I understand why you’d be hesitant about it. I’m just…” 

“Put them in a room,” Denny very quietly murmured. When everyone turned to her, she closed her eyes briefly before straightening up. “She’s right. If I say… if I say ‘If you’re the person who killed these people, raise your hand,’ then the only person it’s affecting is that person. And that person deserves to be made to raise their hand, at least. Right? We could solve it really fast that way. If it turns out to be that easy. I mean, we might as well try.”

For a moment, I exchanged a look with Marina before turning back to the other girl. “If you’re sure you’re comfortable with that. No one wants to force you to use your power.” 

Sesh was nodding hurriedly. “Yeah, totally. I’m sorry I said anything. I mean, I still believe it, but–” 

“It’s okay,” Denny insisted, though she was trembling a little bit. “I can do it. Just–I just need a minute to um, to be ready.” 

“Sure,” Marina gently assured her, “take all the time you need. We can go send the message about being okay first. Then we can look at the crime scenes. If Flick can contact their ghosts, we might not need you to do anything at all.” 

“Exactly,” I agreed. “We’ll send the message, then check for the ghosts. If we can’t find any, then we’ll… talk to everyone else and you can test them.” 

“Please make it be everyone at once,” Denny quickly put in. “I don’t want to use the power over and over again. Just one time, all together in one room.” She still sounded hesitant about doing this whole thing at all, but determined to at least try, no matter how hard it was for her. Clearly the idea of intentionally using her inherited power at all, even for something like this, was hard for her. Which, given my own hesitation about the whole necromancy thing despite everything I already knew about it, I couldn’t really blame her too much for. We both really needed to accept that it wasn’t the power that was evil. 

Well, I mostly had. It just still wasn’t my first instinct to use it, even after all this time. I had to work on that. Having Fossor and Manakel’s necromancy was a strength that I really needed to exercise more. I had to get better at it. Not just in training, but in everyday life. I needed to make it second-nature. 

Meanwhile, Sitter seemed to consider Denny’s words for a moment before giving a short nod. “Of course. I will unlock the time stop and request that everyone proceed to the main theater for an important meeting. That should be a large enough space to greet and test everyone.” 

First, of course, we needed to let everyone outside know we weren’t being murdered or tortured or anything. And then see the murder scenes, so I could check them for ghosts. Which was really just such a wonderful thought. I definitely couldn’t wait. 

Soon, Sitter was manipulating the control panel that rose from the floor near the exit, and the elevator began sliding backwards away from the door into Valdean’s main chambers. I could hear the mechanical whirring as the thing moved almost like a subway car, over what seemed to be actual tracks. It continued on for about ten feet that way, before stopping. Through the bars to the left and right, I could see more tunnels, as well as closed doors set up against the walls on either side. The elevator could roll in either direction to slide into position in front of any of them.  

Or it could go up like a normal elevator, given the ceiling was open right here as well. And that was exactly what it did. The whole thing just rose past several other tunnels that forked off in various directions. We went up about four levels, then moved left past several more doors and tunnels before settling on one leading backwards once more. For the next couple of minutes, the elevator snaked its way through the maze of tunnels before finally stopping in front of a simple metal door with no apparent handle.

“The communications room,” Sitter informed us, just as the door slid open with an almost silent whoosh. It revealed not some high-tech command center or anything, but a cozy-looking den-like space. There was a fireplace with an actual fire in it, wood flooring, a series of shelves full of various books, a comfortable-looking armchair and couch set in front of the fireplace, and a simple wooden table with an old rotary phone sitting on it. 

As a group, we filed off the elevator, then stopped and stared at the phone, as well as everything around it. Marina was the first to find her voice. “So um, do we just pick up the phone and dial? Does this thing get an outside line?”

Offering a bright blue-glowy light smile, Sitter shook his head. “I’m afraid that with the lockdown in effect, it’s not quite that simple or efficient. Whichever of you would like to do the speaking should sit in the chair and pick up the phone. Think very intently about who you would like to contact, then hold the phone to your ear. You will see the person appear in the flames there, and be able to speak to them. But I can only give you about thirty seconds worth of communication, at most, before the system will adjust and block this avenue. Master Valdean was quite thorough and insistent when it came to locking out communications, though I do believe he always intended to unlock them much sooner than this. He was simply angry at perceived abandonment.” 

“Because he didn’t know everyone’s memories around the rebellion had been erased, and everything about this place got caught up in that,” Marina muttered before looking at me. “I think it should be you.” 

Denny, standing out of the way near Dakota, nodded quickly. “Y-yeah, you should be the one who… umm… calls?” Her voice near the end rose into an uncertain, questioning tone. “But if you can only talk to one person, who?” 

No one else seemed to be objecting to me being the one who did it, so I moved to sit in the chair while thinking about that question. My first instinct was to talk to Tabbris, or even Avalon, who had to be freaking out right now. But I had a feeling I should make it an adult, just to be on the safe side about people listening to them. “Uhh… I’m not exactly sure who they’ve talked to yet. But I know one guy who deserves to know we’re okay and who they’ll listen to.” 

Decided, I picked up the ancient-looking rotary phone, holding it up to my ear while thinking very hard about my father. I pictured his face, his voice, everything about him. Meanwhile, Sitter had moved to a corner of the room, opening up a hidden panel there to reveal a bunch of wires and switches. He was doing some sort of complicated work there, temporarily bypassing the block, apparently. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to explain what was going on. 

I felt a very slight electric jolt from the phone. It didn’t hurt at all, though I wasn’t sure how much of that was because it wouldn’t have hurt anyway and how much was the power that gave me protection against electricity. Either way, the fire ahead of me flickered briefly, before resolving into a hologram-like image of my father from the shoulders up. He looked stressed and was in the middle of a sentence. “– to both of their–” Abruptly, he jerked, eyes widening. “Felicity?!” 

“Hi, Dad,” I quickly started, “I don’t have time to explain, just thirty seconds, so listen.” In as fast of a rush as I could manage while still being comprehensible, I gave him the gist of the situation. I told him the names of Valdean Ecclestone and Ashby Banks. I told him about this whole pocket dimension vault system and why it was here, and about the murders. I also told him that we had to solve those murders before the system would unlock and let us out, but that we weren’t in immediate danger. 

Dad was silent through all of that, clearly taking my warning that I only had about thirty seconds seriously. He absorbed everything while apparently keeping a mental count, then simply said, “Be careful. I love–” 

Then he was gone, the flames returning to normal. Sitter’s mouth-lights shifted to dull orange as he turned away from the opening in the wall, his hands full of wires that he had apparently been working with. “I am very sorry. That is the best I could do.” 

“It’s okay,” I assured him. “At least we’ve got the message out. Now let’s check these uhh, murder rooms.” I grimaced at how flippant that sounded. “I mean… yeah. Let’s go.” 

So, we piled back onto the elevator. As the doors closed, Dakota looked at me. “Do, um, do you think your dad can take care of things out there?” 

“Unfortunately, he has a fair bit of practice when it comes to dealing with me disappearing unexpectedly,” I replied before putting a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry about this, Dakota. You too, Denny. We were supposed to just give you guys a fun afternoon and then…” Grimacing, I glanced around the moving elevator. “Then we ended up here.” 

“It’s… it’s okay.” That was Denny, clearly hesitant to say anything. “I mean, if… if we can stop a murderer, that’s good, right? I think I’d rather stop a murderer than just hang out watching a movie or whatever. I can’t stop Ammon. I couldn’t save myself from him, or anyone else he killed. You guys did that. But maybe I can help stop a different murderer.” She stopped, considering that briefly before giving a firm nod. “I want to do that. I want to stop this person from hurting anyone else.” 

“Me too.” Dakota sounded just as certain, straightening up. “I can’t like… make the murderer reveal himself or anything, but I’m here. I want to help. Um, somehow.” 

Looking back and forth between them, I found myself smiling a little. “Well, in that case, maybe we can all be happy that we ended up here after all.” 

“Let’s just hope everyone involved can all say the same thing when this is over,” Sesh muttered quietly, turning to glance down the tunnel the elevator was taking us through. Then she amended, “Well, maybe not everyone.

“I’d be just fine with the murderer being very upset that we showed up.” 

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