Chapter Text
Going back to the lobby was awkward. Mostly because Adaine’s parents were still there. They refused to sit down, and her father was glaring disdainfully at them. Gorgug avoided the eye contact, but Riz glared directly back at them for a full five minutes without blinking until Mr. Abernant finally got uncomfortable and looked away.
Gorgug really hoped they wouldn’t be here long. He’d gotten enough rest that he could maybe pull together a couple of first level spells, but his eyelids felt heavy from two sudden awakenings and his stomach was twisting from nerves.
“Kiddo?” Gorgug felt a tap at his shoulder, looking down at his own father sitting next to him. “Can we talk to you?”
He glanced to Mom, who was nodding in sober agreement. Oh, they wanted a serious conversation about something.
“Right now?” Gorgug asked.
“We can go to the van,” Dad said, and Gorgug looked back at Riz, who was still keeping his eyes firmly locked on the Abernant parents.
“I… I don’t want to leave Riz here by himself,” he eventually said. He could sense the flower he’d given Adaine, still in the direction he expected it to be. But Riz didn’t have his, had left his apartment in too much of a hurry the previous night to remember. They’d lost one friend, they just nearly lost another, Gorgug didn’t want to take any chances.
“I’m not going anywhere while they’re still here,” Riz snarled in a low voice, his narrowed eyes making no secret of who he was referring to. “Not while Adaine’s still here.”
Gorgug shrugged helplessly back at his parents, and his father sighed. “Alright. Later,”
He nodded, starting to bite at his thumb. What would his parents want to talk about so urgently? Great, now he was worried about that too. They didn’t seem mad or upset, but something was bothering them. For the next half hour, he kept trying to sneak glances out of the corner of his eye.
At some point the Abernants left the building, giving them hope that maybe they were giving up, but they returned a short while later, muttering about crystal calls and Sending spells and spending another few minutes berating the cop at the front desk about how there would be consequences for this injustice.
An attack on a diplomat’s family was an attack on the entire nation, Mrs. Abernant said in an icy voice.
Gorgug thought of the prophecy, the one that called for a war between the realms, and he shuddered. Hopefully she was just exaggerating.
It took nearly forty five minutes before Riz got a text from his mom telling them all to go around the back of the station. When they got there, Sklonda met them with Adaine, safe and sound. Adaine was holding a recyclable coffee cup that seemed half full of something, and she was looking down at the ground, but she wasn’t in handcuffs.
“Is everything okay?” Gorgug asked, while Riz circled around Adaine as if to check whether she’d somehow gained more injuries while she’d been out of their sight.
“We’ve got her statement. Unless her parents decide to press charges for the property damage, which they’d be very hard pressed to do without also charging Aelwyn, there’s no other reason to keep her in custody.”
“What about Aelwyn?” Riz asked. “Are you booking her? Are you sending people to look for the palimpsest?”
“With Adaine’s formal accusation of attempted kidnapping and linking it to the other missing girl cases, yes and yes.” Sklonda sighed. “How successful it is will really depend on whether her parents’ threats are bluffs or not. So I’ll just try to do the best I can before that shoe drops. This may actually be one of the best leads we’ve got right now. At the very least I can be more confident that Fig wasn’t taken on school property after all, if Adaine’s sister was the one doing the dirty work,”
She looked back at Adaine with an apologetic expression. “I’m afraid your home is currently a crime scene, so you won’t be able to get back into it for a little while.”
“I don’t care,” Adaine murmured. “I’ve got my sword and Boggy.”
“It’s not like we’re going to school today after this,” Riz said. Sklonda’s mouth pressed into a thin line, but ultimately she didn’t refute it. Gorgug chanced a look at his parents, and somehow they looked even more troubled, but they didn’t say anything either.
“Alright. Get somewhere safe. Wilma, Digby, if you could please just make sure Riz actually eats something-”
“ Mom,”
“Of course, Sklonda,” Wilma said, smiling tightly. “Let’s get going, kids.”
Gorgug slid over to stand next to Adaine. He left a couple of inches between them, but when Adaine shuffled a little closer so their shoulders touched, he put an arm around her instead, Riz on her other side.
When they got to the van, Gorgug was the last one to climb in, only remembering when the door slid shut that his parents had wanted to talk about something. Sure enough, the moment there was the clicking of the door closing properly, both of his parents were turning around in the front seats and looking back at them.
“Um…” Gorgug hesitated. They still didn’t look angry. It was a very rare day he’d seen his parents angry, but it was unmistakable. But there was still something on their faces that he couldn’t describe, and it was unsettling. “Is something wrong?”
“That palimpsest that you kids gave to us,” Dad began, and Gorgug felt the blood drain from his face. “That one with a soul inside.”
To his right, Gorgug could sense the other two stiffening up, coming to the same realisation a few seconds after he did.
“You kiddos do know who’s in it, don’t you?” Dad continued. “It’s one of the missing girls.”
None of them answered, which was probably answer enough, because neither of his parents said anything for a long, guilt-stricken moment.
Gorgug could identify the emotion on their faces now. Another he scarcely saw.
Disappointment. Abject, wretched, utter disappointment.
“Yeah,” he finally whispered, dropping his gaze to the ground.
“That’s what your sister was trying to put you in?” Mom turned towards Adaine, who nodded minutely, almost as tense as she’d been when Gorgug had found her earlier that night. Mom’s expression softened a bit, but then she looked back at Gorgug, who wilted.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“We-” Gorgug hesitated.
“Because you’d want to pass her off to the police,” Riz piped up, firm and full of conviction.
“You’re darn right that’s what we’d’ve done!” Dad barely raised his voice, but Gorgug winced anyway. “This was never a school assignment, was it?”
Another long bout of silence.
“We’ve been trying to find all of them,” Gorgug stammered.
“We had to make sure she didn’t fall back into the bad guy’s hands!” Riz protested.
“What about your mother? Surely she would’ve been better to take care of it-”
“She would’ve had to tell people, and then Sam could’ve gotten stolen back, there were cops among the Harvestmen, we couldn’t trust the precinct,” Riz was kneeling on his seat now, getting a few extra inches of height, leaning forward and bearing the brunt of pleading their case in the face of Adaine’s stiff silence and Gorgug’s cowed mumbling. “You guys were the only ones we could trust with her,”
“But not enough to tell us the truth.”
Riz’s tail twitched, before his entire body drooped a little. “...you would’ve given her up.”
His parents focused on Riz for long enough that Gorgug didn’t feel the full weight of their dismay on him. Next to him, Adaine was stiff as a board and staring directly at the console, so he slipped one of his hands into hers and squeezed it once. Almost immediately, she was squeezing back nearly hard enough to cut off the circulation of blood.
“It was Fig’s idea. To not really trust anyone,” Riz said.
“Are you just saying that because she’s not here to defend herself?” Mom asked.
“No, no, he’s telling the truth,” Gorgug said. “But- we all agreed. We didn’t want anything else to happen to her. We thought that after you got her out-”
“Gorgug, her family and friends have been missing her for months,” Mom reached a hand out to brush it against Gorgug’s knee, eyes wide and brimming with tears. “ Months. And we’ve had her this whole time? They deserved to know she was safe! We could’ve found someone with the actual expertise to get her out!”
“How would you kids feel if you found out someone had been holding onto Fig without telling anyone?” Dad added. Gorgug sunk back into his seat. He knew the answer to that question.
Riz looked more unapologetic, but obviously uneasy. Nearly a full minute passed of silence, before he finally spoke again. “So what now?”
Gorgug couldn’t bring himself to look up, guessing his parents were having a silent conversation through their eyes. He was getting so grounded.
Dad was the one who spoke. “We’re taking you all home. You’re all going to get a couple more hours of sleep, we’ll make you breakfast, and then we’re having a conversation. We can’t… I can’t believe this, which girl do we have?”
“...Sam Nightingale,” Riz said hollowly.
“Right. We can’t just hide Sam in our home. We need a better plan,”
The van ride home was deathly silent. Gorgug rubbed circles into the back of Adaine’s hand and Riz seemed to be doing his best to sink so deeply into his seat he disappeared entirely. The sky was starting to lighten by the time they got back to the tree, and Gorgug avoided looking his parents in the eye, focusing instead on steering Adaine back to the couch.
Riz went to go to his previous spot on the back of it, only for Gorgug’s mother to remind him that “ all of you are getting some sleep,” and he was not about to start arguing with one of his friend’s parents, sliding down to join Adaine and curling on top of her with a blanket between them instead, like a protective second blanket.
Neither of them closed their eyes, but none of them said anything about it. Gorgug just dropped one of his spare blankets on top of Riz before going back to his own spot, lying down on his stomach and trying to think of anything but his parents’ disappointment and the fact that if they didn’t want this entire mess to get infinitely more tangled they needed to figure something out.
For a few minutes, his parents bustled around the bottom level of the tree, pointedly locking the doors and drawing the blinds so no one could look in. Then they went back upstairs. Unlike before, Gorgug found it surprisingly easy to slip back into sleep, only stirring when he heard a hissed whisper.
“Gorgug?”
“Yeah?” he whispered back, shuffling around so he could see Riz and Adaine’s faces. “Wha time is it?”
“Nearly six. I figure your parents might be up soon,” Riz had sat up again, looking like he hadn’t slept at all, though Adaine remained lying down, her eyes half-closed, idly picking at the band-aids around her fingers.
“I’m sorry they’re upset,” Gorgug said.
“It’s fine, Gorgug,” Riz said. “It was… probably inevitable.”
“Still…” Gorgug rolled over onto his back, looking up at the ceiling. “Do you think we should’ve told them it was Sam straight away?”
“No,” Riz answered immediately. “They would’ve passed her on to the police and the Harvestmen cops could’ve stolen her back straight away. This way, we knew she was safe.”
But no one else did. Gorgug couldn’t stop thinking about what his dad had asked him. About what he would do if it had been Fig, hidden away in someone’s home for months while he’d been worried sick. Tried to imagine Sam’s friends and family wondering all that time.
“And if we give Sam to the cops now, we can get accused of being part of it,” Riz continued on. “If we have to explain ourselves, we either lie, which goes up in smoke if they organise a Zone of Truth, or we tell them we killed Johnny Spells. Who they’re already investigating.”
“So we’re fucked,” Adaine mumbled.
Gorgug grimaced. How could it all go wrong so quickly?
If only Fig hadn’t gone missing. She lived so far away from school, she could’ve been taken from basically anywhere in town. Hopefully Riz’s mom would be able to find something out from Aelwyn. Being able to rule out the school as the kidnapping place after Johnny died was at least something…
“We just need to convince Gorgug’s parents to stay quiet about it,” Riz didn’t sound confident in that plan. “Do you think that’s doable, Gorgug?”
He didn’t answer, something catching in the back of his mind.
What had Riz’s mom said about being able to rule something out?
Gorgug sat up all at once. “Your mom didn’t know if Fig was kidnapped at school or not.”
The words spilled out of him, brain working faster than he could keep up with, forging connections before he understood the picture was happening here. But something was happening here.
“Huh?” Riz tilted his head.
It snapped into place in his memory. The talk about who had seen Fig last, where she’d been. The crystal cameras.
“Biz said Fig left the school,” he said. “He said the police had already seen it.”
A moment passed, and Gorgug looked at Riz, whose eyes were slowly widening. “But my mom is the only one on that case. She would’ve been the one…”
“She hasn’t been able to rule out that Fig left the school. If she’d seen that footage, she should’ve been able to.”
Biz lied.
Kristen had only been able to sleep in fits and starts ever since she and Fabian had been woken up by the barrage of texts from Riz telling them to lock the doors and stick together and that Adaine had been attacked in her own home?
She’d burst Fabian’s door down in a panic only to find that he’d slept through all the messages, and nearly skewered her in the face with a Fire Bolt for her troubles. But after he’d found out what was going on, he’d promptly dragged mattresses into his room, grabbed Zayn for good measure, and all three of them had spent the rest of the night within the safety of the greatest Alarm spells Fabian could do with the spell slots he had left for the day.
Riz had given them a few updates since, mostly along the lines of reassuring them that Adaine was fine, they were all together at Gorgug’s house, and they’d figure something out in the morning. Kristen had assumed that would mean they’d all ditch school and spend the day at the Thistlespring tree coming up with an action plan.
She hadn’t expected a series of messages telling them to get to Aguefort now and break into the AV room. With a passcode from Gorgug on how to get in and access the computers.
Kristen: why? ?? ?
Gorgug: either biz lied to me or rizs mom is lying to us and i know which one i believe more
Riz: we need to see the footage of Fig on the first day of school
Riz: my mom didnt pick up so i sent her a text but i havent heard back yet
Riz: wed meet up with you but gorgugs parents are threatening us
Gorgug: with breakfast and a serious conversation not like harm
Gorgug: also they know about sam so ummm thats a problem
Gorgug: also also adaine asked if you can grab her spare clothes and jacket from her locker
“ What?” Fabian asked, looking down at his own crystal as they were driven to Aguefort barely a few minutes past six. Zayn was with them. He claimed he didn’t know anything to do with Biz potentially being involved with anything, but he’d already told them he’d been kept out of a lot of the details.
A few cars were already in the staff parking lot, so Fabian winced as he used his only fourth level of the day to cover all three of them with Invisibility, hands on shoulders to keep track of each other. The locks on the front doors had already been taken down by the custodians for teachers arriving early, so all they needed to do was slip through, stopping by Adaine’s locker first to pick up her clothes, then heading to the AV room.
Gorgug’s passcode got them through the front door, which was already more sophisticated than Kristen would’ve expected. The bonkers setup of all the crystal cameras was just as bizarre and creepy as they had felt the only other time she’d seen them, way back near the beginning of the year.
“Okay, let’s find that recording,” Fabian said. “Spread out, we’re looking for the eighth.”
There were multiple computers in the room, so Kristen made sure the door was closed shut behind them before picking one. Gorgug had said that they were all supposed to have the same passcode so all AV Club members could use them. Apparently he and the other two members of the club had just respected the ‘no one but Biz, some faculty and the police’ rule up until now.
So it was just a matter of finding the computer that held the recordings. The first computer Kristen found seemed useless, so she went to another.
This one contained a folder labelled ‘Security Files’, within which were dozens of other folders labelled by dates. “Guys! I think I found it!”
Finding the eighth, Kristen clicked again. Instead of more folders, this time there were just plain files, organised by location.
“Try the front of the school. That’s where we’d probably see Fig if she left,” Fabian suggested.
They quickly realised the file covered the entire school day. After fiddling with it until they found what they guessed to be approximately the first bell, Fabian did the maths to work out when the end of the day would likely be so they could skip ahead to it, hoping to spot Fig amongst the crowd of students leaving to head home.
Kristen found the mark, skipped to it and found… static. Nothing at all.
“Huh? Is it a glitch?”
“Try skipping around it, see when we find an image again,” Zayn said. So Kristen bounced back and forth until she found an image. Eventually she did, about fifteen minutes before what they estimated to be the end of the school day. Then again, more than half an hour after the end of the school day. A whole forty five minutes of unaccounted for time, wiped away.
The exact forty five minutes they needed.
“What the hells…” Fabian whispered. “Did he delete footage?”
“So we really don’t know if Fig left the school or not,” Kristen said.
“Okay, let’s find Moondaughter’s classroom and see if we can follow her after she leaves that,” Fabian said. They were keeping their invisibility up for their later escape so Kristen couldn’t see them, but she could sense both him and Zayn leaning over her shoulders, watching intently.
It took a few minutes for them to find the right camera for Moondaughter’s classroom, though thankfully they already knew that she’d told Riz’s mom they’d actually been in the classroom that day and not out in the woods or something. Still, every second they were flicking through cameras was another second that someone could walk in. Maybe Biz liked coming to school early to set up, or one of the teachers checked that the cameras were all functional. They needed to hurry.
Once they found it, they skipped to the end of the second last period, beginning to see druids wander out of class.
“There!” Fabian declared, just in case any of them somehow missed Fig’s unmistakable horns and braids.
Kristen sucked in a breath when she saw her, for the first time in nearly two weeks. Expressions were hard to read from the graininess of the camera, but Fig seemed thoughtful, before plastering on a smile as Moondaughter said something, catching her attention.
They talked for a couple of moments, Fig slowly inching away, before she waved and darted off, apparently before Moondaughter was finished speaking. Soon she was off camera, and they scrambled to find the right one that showed where she went next.
It was a frantic scavenger hunt, keeping track of time stamps and rushing through all the different dream crystals to follow Fig’s path throughout the school. Thankfully, she was just walking rather than climbing the walls and hiding in the rafters or whatever rogues would do sometimes, though she didn’t seem to have much direction, taking turns seemingly at random.
Until another student walked into frame, and Fig stopped as if she’d been called out to, turning to face her.
“Who’s that?” Kristen asked, squinting to get a closer look.
“Penelope Everpetal,” Fabian said. “...Sam’s friend.”
“What’s she doing talking to Fig?” Zayn asked.
“We’ve had some conversations with her before, earlier in the school year. But- wait, where are they going now?”
More camera following, trailing Fig and now Penelope down the corridors. Fig seemed to be leading, looking over her shoulder in a way she hadn’t been when she’d been wandering the halls before, and then they both ducked into a bathroom.
There weren’t any surveillance crystals in the bathroom, so they resolved to simply let the footage play at a slightly increased speed, waiting for Fig to reemerge.
Penelope did, after about five minutes. She looked to either side of her, before flicking hair over her shoulder and leaving.
Fig didn’t.
Not after five minutes, not after ten.
A couple of other students entered and left as if nothing was amiss. Kristen felt her heart skip a beat. She sped the footage up, all the way to the end of the day and then an hour after. Fig never came out.
“Holy shit, it’s Penelope,” Fabian said, voice shifting from shocked to anger. “It’s her!”
“We have to tell the others,” Kristen pushed the chair she was sitting in back, hitting one of them and hearing Zayn grunt. “We need to tell Riz’s mom!”
As if summoned, Kristen felt her crystal buzz, hear the faint sounds of Fabian’s doing the same. But none of them could look at it while invisible. They had to go now.
They slipped out as easily as they came in, trying to leave nothing disturbed. Once they were far enough away from the school, Fabian dropped the Invisibility, and Kristen immediately pulled out her crystal.
Riz: mom says she went to the school and they showed her the footage of the front of the school but the crystals were down for maintenance at the time fig vanished so she couldnt be certain when she was kidnapped
Gorgug: but biz DEFINITELY told me that she left campus on the cameras
Riz: the fucker LIED
Riz: we have to FIND HIM
Fabian: NO ITS FUCKING PENELOPE
Fabian: SHE FOLLOWED FIG INTO A BATHROOM AND CAME OUT WITHOUT HER
Gorgug: oh no
Gorgug: what do we do
Fabian: where would she be? what are we going to do?
Riz: get all the missing girls back
Kristen: so are we going to school? confronting her there in front of everyone?
Riz: no fuck that lets sneak into her house and find the palimpsests
Gorgug: adaine says her sister mightve warned penelope that things are going wrong if shes the one she was working with she could be hiding them
Riz: okay so Yes then we can confront her and make her tell us where they are
Kristen: ur mom could take care of her right??? If we just tell her about penelope right now she can go arrest her??
Riz: and if penelopes been warned and been able to hide them then mom will have to go through the footage herself as proof to detain her and she could send the palimpsests ANYWHERE in the meantime
Riz: she might already be doing that we need to track down NOW
Gorgug: but umm my parents dont want us to go anywhere because of sam
Kristen: can’t we just hand sam over to riz’s mom too????
Riz: yeah but then we have to explain where we got sams palimpsest and who we killed to get it
Riz: and my mom cant protect us if we actually confess to doing murder and then we cant help anyone
Fabian: it was self defense
Riz: unfortunately we did fully steal johnnys car first so we kinda lose those grounds
Fabian: well whats the point of having a cop for a mom then
Riz: hEY??? Shes not a MIRACLe WORKER??? Or CORRUPT???
Fabian: maybe she should get a little corrupt if itll help us out im just saying
Kristen: me fabian and zayn cant go track down penelope by OURSELVES!!! shes a senior??? ?
Riz: absolutely not we are NOT going into a fight split up again WE ARE NOT
Gorgug: how about you guys come here and we make a plan to find penelope TOGETHER
Gorgug: also strength in numbers because my parents are sad i lied to them and its stressing me out
Gorgug: also also i only slept enough to get like half my spells so if kristen can come over and heal adaine some more thatd be great
Kristen: we’re on our way tell adaine i said hi
The curtains were drawn when they finally arrived at the Thistlespring tree, and the door remained locked shut until they were right on the doorstep. Gorgug pulled them inside with a relieved sigh. Straight away, Kristen beelined for Adaine, squeezing her way around everyone else standing around in the cramped living room to get to her and hug her tight.
Adaine always hugged a little awkwardly, never quite sure what to do with her hands, and right now she was even more subdued than usual. “Hey, Kristen,”
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re okay,” Kristen said at the same time as she cast a Cure Wounds, then a second just for good measure.
Once she was done, she pulled back, putting her hands on Adaine’s shoulders and fixing her with a solemn expression. “I am here for you girl. Welcome to the probably homeless club,”
Adaine made a face, before quickly smoothing it over. “...umm,”
Kristen squinted. “You’re not gonna keep living with your sister after she attacked you, right? While your parents are trying to get her out of jail?”
“Oh gods no, not if I can help it,” Adaine said immediately. “It’s just… weird to think about.”
Kristen nodded, giving Adaine another squeezing hug. “It’s okay. Cathilda does really good late night hot chocolates when you feel like crying about it,”
“Oh, are you inviting Adaine to live at my house?” Fabian looked up from where he, Gorgug and Riz had been having what seemed to be a hushed conversation about what they were supposed to do about Penelope, Biz, and Sam’s palimpsest.
Adaine suddenly looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Um… I guess… if you’ll have me.”
Fabian glanced around the Thistlespring tree, pursing his lips slightly. Kristen, however, was not afraid to jump in. “Of course! It’s the only place that makes sense. Gorgug and Riz’s places are too small, and it would be super weird if she stayed with Fig’s mom right now?”
She grabbed one of Adaine’s arms and hugged it tight, giving Fabian the most pleading and convincing look she could muster. Fabian just turned his judgemental gaze on her instead before huffing and looking away. “ Obviously, I’m not just going to leave you on someone’s couch. No offense, Gorgug’s parents, you’re both very hospitable and generous,”
“None taken,” Wilma said from over at the table where they’d been conspicuously pretending to ignore all six of them in favour of a plate of pancakes. “It gets cramped in here pretty quick!”
“Although,” Digby cleared his throat. “Now that you kids are all here. We can have a discussion about the lies you told us.”
Kristen felt the heat of disappointed parents in full force, shifting uncomfortably on her feet. Zayn seemed to be the only one fully immune, standing stoically while the rest of them either avoided eye contact entirely or looked frantically at each other, hoping someone else would step up and speak on their behalf.
Should they tell them about Penelope? Maybe they’d just get even more determined to put a stop to all of this. Kristen had always thought Gorgug’s parents had been pretty cool, which somehow made it worse. She’d always hated disappointing her own parents, but now she’d gone and actually done it on top of burning down their church so it wasn’t like she could sink any lower on that front. But the Thistlespring’s had always been so cheerful and kind and welcoming and now they were upset at them.
“Now,” Wilma cleared her throat to catch their attention. “We know you adventuring students are expected to get up to a certain degree of shenanigans,”
Kristen saw Riz and Fabian both open their mouths before closing them again, second guessing whatever they were about to say. Maybe because of the firm tone of Wilma’s voice, or maybe because it wasn’t quite as ‘we’re shutting this down and handing Sam over to the police and that’s it’ as they might’ve expected.
“And we know the missing girls are incredibly important to you,” she continued. “But what makes us most upset is that you involved us without fully informing us of what we were doing. If we’d known the actual stakes, there are projects we could’ve delayed, jobs we could’ve declined to get that girl out of that palimpsest faster.”
“You said you’d have passed her off to the police,” Gorgug said hesitantly, shoulders slouched and eyes on the ground.
The Thistlesprings looked at their son almost helplessly, before Digby spoke. “We- that probably would’ve been our first instinct, yes. Okay. Right now, we just really want to understand this situation,”
“We couldn’t tell anyone because we didn’t know who was responsible,” Riz spoke up. “We didn’t go to the police because someone could’ve been in on it, and there were cult members on the police, so we were right.”
The Thistlespring’s nodded slowly, seeming to accept that. Kristen hugged herself with her arms. Every second they argued about this was another second Penelope could be hiding Fig and the others even deeper, even further away. That Biz could be erasing more evidence.
“It was still ongoing, girls were still going missing, we- we were trying to stay under the radar. We didn’t want you to be in danger,” Riz continued.
Digby tilted his head like he didn’t quite fully believe that last part. “Well, we appreciate that sentiment, but Wilma and I are plenty capable of defending ourselves without being adventurers.”
“But this isn’t just one guy doing evil things,” Gorgug said. “It’s a whole conspiracy. We didn’t even know that at the time, but… if they’d known you have Sam, that you were trying to get her out, something awful could’ve happened.”
Kristen bit her lip. “...how close are you to getting her out?”
Wilma and Digby both looked at her, and Kristen saw the pained hesitation in their faces, answer enough even before they spoke.
“We’re… not,” Wilma said. “The crystal is incompatible with everything we have, none of our equipment can handle reading and processing the contents of a full, sentient soul. And we are not willing to take chances with her. We’ve been trying to reverse engineer it for a solution but… it would take at least another couple of weeks, even if we worked on nothing else. Just from the safety tests.”
“What about the thing Gorgug’s god gave him?” Kristen asked. “Is that finished?”
Now Gorgug winced. Oh. He hadn’t told his parents about that either. Oops.
“...yeah. Last night.” he finally said. “I was going to tell you guys about it today but then all this happened.”
“What thing?” Wilma asked, and Gorgug shrugged.
“I don’t know. Vulcan gave me the blueprints, but didn’t tell me how to use it or what it’s for. I’d asked for help to find Fig…”
“Go get it, Gorgug, we can take a look at it.” Gorgug mutely nodded, retreating up the tree and leaving the rest of them down there. Kristen pressed her thumbs into her skin, biting her lip. She noticed Riz burying his nose in his crystal next to him, and a few moments later felt the buzz of a message.
She pulled hers out as casually as she could, angling it so Adaine could see too.
Riz: we need to track down penelopes house we cant waste time here
Riz: i dont give a shit if we get arrested for killing johnny or holding sam or whatever anymore we need to find the others
“Miss Jones might be at school by now,” Adaine whispered to her. “She could access the records.”
Kristen: adaine says miss jones could get us her address
Kristen passed Adaine her crystal so she could punch in Miss Jones’ email, apparently not knowing her crystal number by heart. She didn’t see the whole email, but saw a lot of capital letters and pleas that this was serious, please dont ask questions right now we’re super close to finding antiope just trust me and marking it with every urgent notification she could.
By the time they’d done that, Gorgug was back down with his fully completed device. It was just as strange at the blueprints had made it look like it would be. Gorgug passed it to his parents and then stepped back to be with the rest of them, stuffing his hands in his pockets.
“...strange,” Digby said, turning it over before handing it to Wilma.
“Wait, Digby, look at this connector,” Wilma pointed something out, and Kristen perked up.
“You know what it is?”
“Well it looks like a giant hard drive of some kind. A very rudimentary hard drive that’s mostly metal with some arcanotech hastily slapped on,” Wilma looked up at them. “But this connector, the part that supposed to plug into something, it’s unique. Incompatible to almost every device out there.”
Kristen’s shoulders slumped. “So you don’t know what it’s for?”
Digby shook his head, but his eyes actually seemed to be lighting up. “No, but that’s not it, it’s unique but we recognise it. We took a job that called for an old-school computer tower that required a port for this exact shape, it was very important to be that shape,”
Her mouth dropped open. Everyone else froze.
“ What?”
“Who? Who gave you that job?” Riz asked, but Gorgug already seemed to have an answer.
“Biz Glitterdew.”
“No. The arcade, actually,” Digby said.
Gorgug’s face paled even more. “Biz always tried to invite me to the arcade,”
“Oh my gosh,” Kristen whispered.
Adaine lightly nudged her with an elbow, angling her crystal. Miss Jones had replied with an address. Along with an urgent request for more details, but they ignored that. Kristen caught the eye of the others, gesturing to the email.
“We have to go,” Fabian said suddenly. “We don’t have any time to waste,”
“Wait,” Wilma stood up from her chair, ready to protest.
“Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Thistlespring, but we can’t,” Fabian said, snapping his fingers to summon a Mage Hand. Gorgug’s device was plucked out of Wilma’s hands, the gnome seemingly too surprised to resist it, and brought to Fabian. “Time is of the essence, and we have missing girls to rescue,”
“I’m sorry I lied!” Gorgug exclaimed. “We’re just trying to find them, we’re going to!”
“No, no, kids,” Digby said. “Just wait, we can sort this out, you three are not ready to go chasing after-”
“Just keep Sam safe for us, please, ” Riz has already flung open the door and started marching out. Kristen found Adaine’s hand somewhere in the crowd and squeezed it tight, following Riz out and pulling her along.
“Oh, dang it, kids!” That was the last thing Kristen heard before Gorgug, the last one out, closed the door behind him.
“I’m getting grounded for
life,”