A Demon's Arithmetic

[The Mathemagician]

Changing this from a solo quest to a quest that is...OPEN!

Fire in the house, run boys, run.
The devil's in the house of the rising sun.
-Charlie Daniels

The sun lay low and red over Scara Brae. It stretched over the City of Scara Brae, touching the merchant ships and vessels with rays of crimson light. It poured through Arask Pass awkwardly, leaving deep and dark shadows. Even the sun seemed to avoid that place. The Sun even passed over the dreaded Hooligan's Grotto and Goblin Cove, for even creatures with hearts of darkness need light occasionally. Some wonder if the sun resents this duty. The way that it must provide equally to all, no matter their merit. Perhaps this celestial vengeance is why those with grim and evil hearts tend to avoid the light. Such beings tend to come out at night, and who knows what mischief they may create in those hours where they are free from the watchful eye of the sun?

Such evil thoughts, however, were far from the mind of Alphred Tillman as he walked lazily down the winding road between the City and Valeena Lake. Not one to wax on philosophically in most circumstances, in this particular instance especially such discourse was not the topic of his mind's reverie. Deep reverie, however, did indeed consume Alphred as he walked down that beaten road. He was considering the solution to a problem that he had come up against recently. For whatever reason, the figures simply were not dancing in his mind as they usually did. That was why he was on this fool's trip to the Lake, after all. Peace and quiet. Perhaps they would help him get past this mental block that clouded his vision. He kicked a rock off the dirt road idly, glancing around at the stately trees that lined the path. Distracted from his work by sheer frustration, Alphred wondered if he would reach the Lake before nightfall. If he did not, that would mean another night sleeping on the unfriendly ground. Alphred hated sleeping on the ground. His pace quickened at the unpleasant thought.

Occasionally, however, Alphred could not keep himself from stopping to write down a particularly interesting idea. In these cases, he would halt right in the middle of the pathway, and a glazed expression would come over his face. He snapped his black-gloved fingers in the proper handsign, and in front of him appeared a thin blue shimmering screen. This screen was barely a paper's thickness, and it was a square or so in diameter. Alphred scratched furiously at its surface with his fingertips. His metal-capped gloved fingers left glowing white marks upon the screen's surface. Slowly there appeared numbers, letters, and equations of all sorts. The formulas coalesced into strange and complicated mathematics, one where numbers became replaced with letters, and where letters slowly became replaced with archaic runes. After only a few minutes, however, Alphred would wave his hand through the screen in frustration. Blocked again! Nothing he could do seemed to produce the correct the results. His mouth grim and unsmiling, the brown-tuniced man turned back to the road.

Finally, Alphred came within sight of the houses that lay around the Lake. He hurried now, black hair rustling in the wind, eager to get to his lodgings by the end of the day. It was nearly night time, but he still could see the vague movements of a few human shapes through the trees. When he turned the bend in the path and was confronted with the full sight of Valeena Lake, however, Alphred stopped and stared. The lake was a rosy pink color at this time of day. Its surface glimmered with sparkling light, broken only slightly by subtle patterns of ripples that played across the surface. Small waves lapped against the thick white sand of the beach, leaving wet lines stretching all around the surface. Not too far in the distance, Alphred could see the river that ran down from Brokenthorn Forest feeding into the lake. Something about the scene, however, seemed markedly off to Alphred. There was something subtly wrong. Then, the Mathemagician realized just what it was. Incredibly, the beach was almost deserted on this most beautiful of days! Alphred would have expected large crowds of tourists to be around, but instead there was only one or two couples walking by the water's edge. They looked slightly worried to Alphred, and he wondered why.

Slightly nervous after this unsettling realization, Alphred nonetheless made his way toward's the beach's edge. He stood there examining the scenery for several minutes, lost in the landscape. He was not one to be overcome by such things, and romantic feelings rarely (if ever) enveloped his heart, but in this one instance it seemed that not even the coldest of villains could have resisted being moved. Beautiful, was his only thought. While mere moments ago he had been caught up in formulas and algebras, now Alphred was thinking much more poetic thoughts. Well, poetic for him. Beautiful, was about the most complex description he could come up with. Soon, however, he was woken out of this misty haze of reflection and dragged back to the real world. A hand clamped down on his shoulder, and Alphred whirled around, frightened by the sudden movement.

"Oh!" A rather deep voice exclaimed. "I'm sorry Alphred, I didn't mean to scare you."

"Errr, that's quite all right." Alphred mumbled. He now recognized the origin of the voice as his cousin, Maxwell. His cousin was a thick, strongly built man with the specifically muscled physique of one who exercises for pleasure rather than out of need. Max was a large man, proud of his masculinity and his thick black mustache. Alphred held him in slight contempt, he thought that Max was stuck in perpetual boyhood, but on this instance it would do well to be polite. After all, Max was to be his host during this brief vacation. Alphred thought that there was something off about his cousin's face on this day though. Normally confident and ostentatious, Max appeared to be nervous and off-kilter. Once again, Alphred had the distinct feeling that something was not quite right. He couldn't put his finger on it, but...

"Yes, yes. Glad to see you, Al." Max said brusquely. Some of his old confidence appeared to return. Alphred hatedbeing called Al. "Well, enough chit-chat! Our cabin's off this way. Nice modest little place, it is."

Alphred allowed himself to be lead silently to one of the wooden buildings lining the lake's edge. It turned out to be quite the opposite of nice, modest, and little. Max's cabin was nearly twice the size of all the surrounding ones. It was covered with a distasteful lime-green and orange paint coating. Several small plaster columns were set out in the front, a clear and horrible attempt at mimicking more cultured and tasteful structures. Alphred was revolted. He said nothing, though, as he was led inside.

Inside, Alphred found the decorations to be equally distasteful. Overly expensive pieces of equally tasteless furniture lined the walls. In one corner, seemingly a part of the furniture, was Max's wife. She was a slight woman in her earlier twenties, a good ten years younger than Max. She said nothing at all when the two men entered and remained focused on her sewing. Alphred and Max were, however, greeted by another woman of smaller stature.

Much smaller stature. This was Max's seven year old daughter, a flat-faced freckled girl with long black hair. She grinned exposing...Alphred guessed it...a mouthful of missing teeth. Alphred constantly got the impression that all children were in fact the same creature, replicated over and over, and only to be replaced with an individual once adulthood was reached. He smiled awkwardly at the girl.

"Hallo Cuzzin Ally." The girl said. Alphred very nearly physically winced. So many things were wrong with that statement. Max, perhaps detecting his visitor's discomfort, immediately shooed off the girl and lead Alphred to his quarters in the back room. Along the way and once inside the room, Max belaboured Alphred with boorish talk. Alphred simply ignored him, nodding occasionally and smiling. Eventually he managed to get his cousin to leave the room and, after shutting the small wooden door, Alphred laid on the smmall mattress and slept at last...

[The Mathemagician]

Alphred lay on reclined wooden chair he had dragged out to the beach, facing the lake. He was on the far side of the body of water from the cabins, closer to Brokenthorn than to human civilization, entirely an intentional move. Early that morning, before anyone at the camps awoke, he had dragged the chair out in hopes of a more restful place than the company of his cousins. The lake's surface was serene and blue, and still could have been considered beautiful, but Alphred did not even notice it on this day. He was caught up entirely in his own work. The blue screen hovered in front of it, and he scribbled upon it with his fingertips quickly. The surface of the screen constantly shifted, one time showing a graph, one time showing a calculation Alphred had made the day before, and so on and so forth. Judging by Alphred's expression, it could be assumed that things were progressing little better than they had been before, despite the lack of distractions. He was attempting to solve the "wind magic problem." Wind was such an unpredictable and irrational element though, that for some reason it eluded his mathematics and equations. So far though, he could not so much as make a leaf float an inch in the air.

That lack of distractions, however, was not made to last. Alphred soon noted a figure approaching him, skirting around the edge of the lake. As the figure got closer, he realized with horror that it was Max. What could his cousin possibly be doing now? Why would he approach his cousin when it was evident that he was working? And, most importantly, How could Alphred get him to go away?

When the large man drew nearer, Max noted that he looked fairly strange. He had run all the way from the cabin, and it was evident. His face was twisted and stricken with grief and wracked with pain. Tears dripped down from his face and stained his nice white shirt that he had spent an entire conversation talking to Alphred about. It was all the Mathemagician could do not to laugh out loud at him. What a thoroughly ridiculous sight he was. Alphred felt slightly bad for thinking such callous thoughts, but only slightly bad.

"Al." Max began, bending over and taking deep breaths. Alphred still thought he looked ridiculous. "Listen, it's not safe here, you've got to come back with me to camp."

"Not safe?" Alphred said, incredulous. What was his cousin talking about? Valeena Lake was probably the most peaceful place on the island.

Max eyed the forest warily and looked uncomfortable. "Look, I can't really explain here. Let's go." He turned away and started off along the edge of the lake, not even watching to see if Alphred was following him.

Alphred shrugged, wiped his screen away, and followed Max. He had to walk at a brisk pace to keep up, and soon he was lagging a few feet behind. Max constantly glanced suspiciously towards the forest, and occasionally he would let out a throughly pitiable sob. All and all, it was not exactly how Alphred had expected to start his day. Soon enough though, the pair was back at the cluster of small wooden houses. There stood a small crowd of all the various tourists and wealthy nobles that happened to be residing here for the time being. The mob was muttering nervously, and Alphred's nagging feeling that something was not quite right had turned into an emotional typhoon of sheer wrongness. They all appeared to be looking at one man, who was clad in a chainmail vest and had some sort of a polearm. He was speaking loudly.

"Now, my friends, please. There is no need to worry! This situation will be handled, I assure you." The man said firmly. The crowd did not look particularly reassured.

Oh boy, thought Alphred. A politician! The man certainly did have the aura of a leader, for better or for worse. Alphred found himself wondering why he had assumed this ad hoc position. And where had he got that chainmail? It certainly made him look authoritative. Not for the first time that day, Alphred wondered what exactly was going on.

"I'm sorry, but for the time of being I must institute mandatory house arrest on all denizens..." The politician continued. Alphred stopped listening there. House arrest! That meant...no! Visions of being cooped inside a house with his overly-loud cousin and his annoying daughter floated through Alphred's mind like a night mare. He would never get any work done if that were to happen. It simply could not be allowed.

"Excuse me," Alphred said, with unusual bravado. "But what exactly makes such an extreme measure as house arrest necessary?" The eyes of the crowd turned to watch him, and his face flushed with embarrassment.

"Pardon my cousin, will you? He hasn't been around. He doesn't know about-" Came Max's voice from somewhere outside of the realm of Alphred's vision. The "leader" walked over to Alphred and glanced at him appraisingly.

"No, no, it is no problem at all. Allow me to explain, friend." He said genially. There it was again. Calling everyone 'friend.' A clear symptom of the ambition disease. "Now, you see, there have been some rather strange goings on this past week or so. Children have been disappearing from the shores of the lake at night. For a couple of days there was a pause, and we thought it was over, but then last night another child disappeared."

Alphred had a sinking feeling. It didn't take mathematics to guess who that was. Visions of a teary eyed Max plagued him, and he knew. Suddenly Alphred felt terrible for the things he had thought about his cousin that morning.

"Now, I might ask you with all possible respect, why you have appeared so suddenly and recently?" The leader said suspiciously. Alphred's sorrow for Max was replaced with indignation and rage.

"I, sir, am a mathematician! I have come here to pursue my studies. I have only just arrived yesterday, so I fear that your assumptions are entirely unfounded."

Max backed him up, and Alphred felt unusually happy with his cousin. "Hrrrm, yes, indeed. Al is just here studying that Mathemagic of his. Trying to come up with a way to predict the future, he is."

"Well, actually, I disbanded that project some time ago. Right now I'm working on-" Alphred began, partly in self-defense. His attempt at Arithmancy, predicting the future by numbers, had not gone terribly well. Perhaps in the future he would resume it, but clearly Max's information was outdated. The politican, however, seemed interested.

"Say then, friend, do you think you could be of help to us? Throw together some fancy equations, help us solve the kidnappings and whatnot?" he asked. The man's tone was jovial, but his eyes were cold as he stared at Alphred. The broad smile on his lips could not have felt less genuine on a corpse.

"Errr, well," Alphred hesitated.

"I'm sure you aren't on the side of the kidnappers, are you? It would be most unfortunate if they found out they had an accomplice."

Alphred froze. This was unfortunate. He cursed himself for ever telling Max of Arithmancy in that letter he sent him. It had been boasting, plain and simple, and look at the situation it had now got him in to. There seemed to be no choice. Either be fed to the mob, or become a tool of this demagogue. The Mathemagician sighed. So much for peace and quiet.

"Yes, well, I'll see what I can do."

[Alydia Ettermire]

Alydia walked away from Scara Brae city toward Valeena lake, light breeze caressing her long black tresses and ruffling her voluminous red coat. The gravel on the path crunched beneath her boots with a murmur of trepidation, and the city of Scara Brae grew smaller behind her with every step. She'd come to the tiny island kingdom with the intent of stealing the spire of the castle, and had written her local boys that she was coming - well, minus Dex. He'd fallen off the face of the planet; no one knew where he was. Still, her information gatherer, Lore I. Lei had written back telling her they'd have to meet up...but her remaining muscle man, Vim N. Brawn had written a letter pleading with her to come help him.

The normally stoic and unflappable Vim had been so flustered and desperate in his message that Aly could only vaguely gather that something had happened to his eight year old daughter, Estelle. The only things that could happen to a child where her skills might be applicable were...disturbing, so she hurried down the well-worn path where the verdant foliage left sunlight to dapple through in tentative spots. Every step brought her closer to Valeena Lake, Vim's home. Estelle's mother had left him and the child when she was a toddler, and the little girl encompassed his whole world. The only reason Vim had agreed to work with her was because his daughter had taken to her so quickly.

Alydia's boys had become her family from the day she left Ettermire's police force. Their happiness and safety, and that of their families (if they had families) were so high priority for her that she'd drop everything if one of them needed her. And so her original goal was at the very back of her mind, at least until she heard what Vim needed.

When Aly arrived at Valeena Lake, she saw a crowd gathered to listen to a central figure in shining chain mail. Vim's hulking figure slouched toward the middle of the pack, so Aly leaned against a tree to listen, pulling her hat down securely over one eye out of habit.

The tone of the conversation was very grim indeed, something between a serial kidnapper and a pied piper...all the area's children gone without a trace. And with the normally erect, quietly proud Vim hunched over like a man defeated...

Oh no... Alydia's mind searched through her vast detective experience to remember what a child's rate of survival was when they were kidnapped. It seemed to her that the first eight hours were crucial, and after that it was more likely that the child was going to be found dead...if ever at all. If Estelle had gone missing the same day or the night before Aly had received Vim's letter, she'd been missing three days. More likely it was four...and that made little Estelle's chances very slim.

That wasn't something Vim would need to hear.

When the crowd converged on a young man, some math guy or something, Aly descended on Vim, putting a gloved hand on his shoulder. Relief flooded his face when he saw her. "Aly," he started in his soft spoken drawl, "Aly, I lost Estelle. Four days ago, just gone. You...please...I need you to help me find her."

Aly nodded. "I'll see if Lore knows anything, and I'll start looking as well. I won't...leave you without answers."

Vim's face crumpled at those words, and his head dipped, sending his uncombed brown hair into his hazel eyes. "She's dead, isn't she? My little girl."

Aly shook her head, patting Vim on the arm to try and soothe him. "Most kidnapped children, in my experience, don't have much time. But there's no guarantee that Estelle's in any condition worse than scared and missing for you. I need you to stay positive and think of anything that might be helpful, all right? Anything."

Vim kicked at the dirt, running a calloused hand over his mouth and goatee. "I...I don't know, Aly. All the kids are missing lately, one right after another. We need...at the very least, we need it to stop."

[The Mathemagician]

Despite Alphred’s reluctant acceptance, the mob refused to dissipate. Standing now at their center, with the politician-man next to him and Max off to the side, Alphred felt that they were looking expectant of him to do something. As if he could do anything! Such a complicated Arithmatic spell would take weeks, no, months to weave. By that time, of course, the variables would have changed so much as to render the original calculation useless. Not to mention that once the children were gone for such an extended period of time, it didn’t seem likely that they would ever return. Still, there seemed to be no options in this situation. He would at least have to make it seem like he was accomplishing something.

“Well, ummm, how do I…” Alphred mumbled, unsure of how to begin. Then he had an idea. “How many have gone missing again?”

“Fourteen.” Max said quietly. The leader nodded in agreement.

“Well then,” Alphred said. “Were it a smaller group, I would say that it was more likely that they were just all drowning than being kidnapped, but I suppose that’s statistically improbable with such a large group.”

The Mathemagician made a handsign and caused his magical screen to appear. There was a collective gasp from the crowd. Unfamiliar magic, hmmm? Well, that at least meant that no one would be calling him off of this little charade.

“Look, if you consider the various time progressing variables of each child,” Alphred said, sketching vague figures on the screen. His voice assumed the confident ‘Explaining Maths’ tone he enjoyed using so much. “Then if you run them through even a basic Aetherian Arithmatic Progression Table, it’s easy to see that the odds of all of them being returned are remarkably small. Errrm, on the order of one or two percent, perhaps, for such a large group.”

The collected parents and sight-seers did not seem to be terribly happy with this news. Alphred frowned. Perhaps he was attempting a fallacious approach? This much that he had given was in fact the truth. It was fairly simple to see that this task was probably impossible. That is, if the task was returning every child unharmed. Alphred had seen some data a few years back about missing persons. He didn’t remember it specifically, but he knew it hadn’t been good. And the longer things went on…

Still, something had to be done. The group was getting restless, impatient. Clearly they didn’t want accurate news, they wanted the news they wished to hear. Which obviously was good news. Well, Alphred could give them that as well. He sighed.

“Of course, I suppose things could be different if you factor in a good strategy-”

“Like what?” came a gruff voice, interrupting him in the middle of his sentence. That seemed to be happening disturbingly frequently recently and Alphred didn’t quite appreciate it. He looked around for a minute but couldn’t see the owner of the voice.

“Down here.” it came again. Alphred looked down. Sure enough, there was a swarthy and grim looking dwarf whose face was nearly entirely covered, with the exclusion of two tiny eyes, by a massive beard. Odd how those creatures enjoyed their facial hair so much. It was a cultural anomaly; Alphred would have to attempt to explain it someday.

“Well,” Alphred stumbled. He hadn’t really thought of that. Why was all of this his business anyway? Sure, he felt bad for his cousin and all these people. By no stretch of the imagination though was he some sort of crime-solver. Such an idea was ridiculous! So why, oh why, on his peaceful vacation had his life been commandeered to fit such a purpose?

“Uhhh.” Alphred said. Once again, the crowd looked expectant. He was far from a natural leader, that was for sure. The man in chainmail, oddly enough, seemed perfectly content to sit back and smile while Alphred made a fool of himself.

“Something…I don’t know. Look, I, well, I just got here…” Alphred stumbled, visibly upset now. “I suppose something to catch the perpetrator would be, errr, prudent…?”

“Brilliant. Really, really, brilliant.” the dwarf said sarcastically. Alphred was growing to dislike him rather a lot already. “Our plan to catch the kidnapper, clearly, will be to catch the kidnapper.”

“It’s good we have geniuses like this fellow around, eh?”

[Alydia Ettermire]

Hearing the math man bumble around an explanation and Progression Tables and other such nonsense was almost painful. Whatever he thought he was doing, he wasn't solving crimes, or even helping. The more hope a parent had for their child's safe return, yes, the more it hurt when they were disappointed, but the more help they were when the inspector was looking for the child.

"If it's fourteen children missing, then it is unlikely that even the majority of them will come to much immediate harm." Alydia's voice was loud, clear, and authoritative. It reined in the crowd and brought their attention to her...so she might as well give them her credentials and start getting useful information.

"What do you mean, unlikely? How do you know? Are you the kidnapper?" A slender woman, face gaunt with worry and eyes puffy from tears craned her head to get a look at the Drow woman whose garb fairly reeked of mystery - and mystery was ill intent, in these dark days.

Vim hurried to defend her. "She's a friend of mine, I asked her to come when Estelle -"

"I am Detective Alydia Ettermire," Aly interrupted, drawing attention back to herself. "Formerly of the Ettermire Police. I have fifty years' experience in tracking down and apprehending criminals. I have worked on kidnappings before." Not as often as murders...but kidnappers often became murderers.

"Then what will happen to our children? Why is this happening?" The crowd became almost a riot of questions, layered one on top of the other, so dense that Alydia couldn't have hoped to answer any of them. She raised one hand abruptly, signaling for silence, and the crowd gave it to her only gradually and grudgingly.

"While there is a chance that your children have been taken to be slaughtered -" Once more the crowd broke out riotously; the sheer anger that someone dared mention the possibility of the area's children being killed was an overwhelming force, but Aly wasn't having any of it. "SILENCE. I will help you, but the more time you all spend yelling at me, the lower your chances of recovering your children become."

In an instant, the din of worried and angry parents died down into hushed murmurs, and an instant later a grave stillness washed over the crowd. Alydia took a moment to level her gaze at everyone, making sure that each member of the crowd looked her in the eye before she continued. She made sure to keep her voice calm, her tone confident, and to never give the tension that hung in the air a chance to break.

"As I was saying, there is a possibility that your children have been taken to be killed, but in my experience, the chances of it happening like this are very slim. You'd have seen a child vanish, then another one months to years later. There would be a gradual escalation, and the killer wouldn't feel safe in this area. You'd have heard of other children vanishing from neighboring areas in the same manner, and from what I understand, there isn't enough time. If there is news of this kind, tell me now. If it is isolated, though, it's more likely that the children have been stolen to be sold elsewhere as slaves. Child slavery is common in some parts of Fallien and Kebiras, and rumored to happen in Kachuck, and the healthier they are, the more they're worth."

Alydia paused there to let that message sink in for the worried parents. "If children are vanishing as recently as last night, that means a good percentage of them are probably still in Scara Brae. I need a time line. I need to know how long ago the first child disappeared. I need to know who saw them last and where and at what time. I need to know what their relationship to you was, how old they are, and what they're like."

She pulled a pen and pad out of her coat to take notes. "And I need you to do it calmly."

[The Mathemagician]

Who was this woman? Well, Detective Alydia Ettermire, apparently. Why was she here though? It seemed odd for some fancy mainland detective to be way out here in Scara Brae. That other man who was next to her, he said he was her friend or something. It didn’t particularly matter to Alphred though. He was out of the limelight, and that was above all else a good thing. The crowd’s frustration, once turned towards the bumbling mathemagician, now seemed to be channeled upon the Detective. Except…it didn’t feel like just frustration any more. There was something more to it. If Alphred knew people a bit better, he would have been able to read that emotion easily. Hope.

Authority figures do tend to inspire hope and calm in people. This strange looking foreigner was indeed doing just that, once she had finished telling how it was possible all the children were going to die! There is one other major feature of authority figures though. They inspire competition.

“Excuse me, Detective.” the man in chainmail called out, shoving his way through the crowd. “I’m so glad that you’re here to help.”His voice indicated that he very clearly was not glad that she was helping. Silence flew across the people, covering their mouths one by one. They parted slightly, leaving a path between the two figures. Alphred stood by helplessly, watching.

“Name’s Lou. Lou Dwin, to be precise. I’m the local law enforcement official around here.” he said, more than a little pompously.

“Awww Lou,” called out a man from the edge of the crowd. “You ain’t no detective! You just put on that fancy suite your grandfather wore in the war and started…”

A burning glare from Lou shut the man up immediately.

“Well, as I was saying.” Lou continued. “We have things quite under control, my friend. I don’t think it really will be necessary for you to get involved actually. Not at all, really. And besides, those numbers really aren’t for foreigners…”

The crowd mumbled, unsure at this development. Why was he stopping her from helping? Collectively, the societal beast shuffled its feet nervously. Alphred thought it was interesting how they behaved like one large organism in this big group. He even found himself getting caught up in the crowd’s emotions, to some extent. Perhaps a greater extent than he realized.

“Why are you withholding information from her, huh?” shouted someone from behind Lou. The lawman turned around to find, oddly enough…Alphred of all people! Alphred was feeling a bit light headed, and more than a little odd. He rather disliked this ‘Lou’ character, for one. Shifty fellow. What’s more though, despite his inability to relate to people, Alphred was not a heartless person. Seeing the parents’ reaction to the detective had perhaps struck a chord within him. Besides, hadn’t he said that he would help them?

“Any mathematician worth his numbers knows, if your information’s not complete, you’ve got a…well, a problem.”

Lou looked stunned.

“Errr, well.” he said. For once, it was not Alphred doing the stammering. The mathemagician was rather pleased with himself.

“Though I’m half sure they are all dead by now anyway…” Alphred began to conclude smugly. Suddenly though, the crowd which once had been feeling sympathetic to the man standing up to Lou turned on him, shouting in rage and fear. Whoops, that had been a mistake. Despite this, Lou must have seen the writing on the wall about Alphred and he red-hat-wearing detective at this point, evidenced by what he did next.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Listen, this is a man of my investigation! I won’t have you shouting at him. This woman too!”

A man of his investigation? Well, Lou had turned that situation around rather nicely, putting himself back on top when moments ago Alphred had been putting him in his place! Clearly the chainmail man had seen that the public opinion towards the odd red-wearing woman was fairly positive, and he had chosen to conscript her right alongside Alphred. Alphred felt like a fool for slipping up like that.

“Listen Miss Ettermire. Here’s all we know.” Lou began, and the crowd hushed down once more. “Sixteen days ago, little girl named Louisa Mayers goes missing. Night after that, so does her brother. Night after that, kid in the cabin next door to theirs. Every day the same, one more missing. I myself and a few others started to poke around, found nothing. Then, two days ago, nothing. We thought it stopped. Until Max’s little gal goes missing.”

Alphred pulled his screen back out, inspired by the woman’s notebook, and began to write these facts down. Now he really was committed to help these people, no matter his original reluctance.

“Nothing I heard of in any of the towns nearby. Nothing anywhere else but here. Every kid that went missing went during nighttime. Only in the houses around the lake, too. All the kids, they’re less than ten years old I guess. Hey, Max, how old is your girl?”

“Seven and a…half.” Max said, still quietly. Alphred had preferred when he was sobbing.

“Yeah. Anything else you need to know…Detective?” Lou asked all kinds of venom in that last word. His question was answered by a woman in the crowd, however.

She shouted out, “What do we do now?”

It was a question on all of their minds.

[Alydia Ettermire]

Lou telling her that everything was in control when it obviously wasn't irked Aly...but then him turning around and thinking he could conscript her...oh no. That didn't sit well with her at all. No one conscripted Alydia Ettermire; she worked as she saw fit.

"I want to make one thing very clear, Lou Dwin." Talking to Lou didn't even take her entire focus; while she spoke she flipped a page in her notebook, scribbling furiously.

"Fourteen children going missing over a period of two weeks is not 'quite' under control, and if any of the children have perished it will be because of your play-acting at law enforcement and refusal to call in professionals. There are people even in Scara Brae that specialize in finding missing persons. Most of them work hardest when the safety of young children is involved. This is my investigation now, and if you want to remain on it, you are doing as I say."

There was some murmuring in the crowd; they knew Lou a lot better than this foreigner, but the foreigner was showing signs of something they'd never seen before in conjunction with this case: competence.

Alydia ripped the sheet of paper out of her notebook and handed it to Vim. "You know where to take this." The giant of a man nodded and started hurrying off to the city. He knew exactly where he was going with the note.

"Now, I need you -" she pointed her pen at Lou, "to take two young bachelors and search the neighboring forest. Look for broken twigs and branches, and a slightly to moderately worn path. Criminals are creatures of habit, he'll have taken the children over the same path each time."

Lou glared at her, he didn't appreciate being usurped in such a manner, but he took two young men and headed out to comb the forest.

"I need everyone else to go home. I'm going to visit everyone whose child disappeared, in turn. I want to hear what happened from your mouths. I need to know everything, it doesn't matter if it's of even the slightest significance. I'll also need to see their rooms. Go on. I'll be at the Mayers' house in a few minutes."

The crowd dissipated, going each to their own homes, and Aly turned to Alphred, leveling her bright blue eye at the unremarkable mathematician. "These people need hope. They need to think that somehow their children are all right and will be returned to them safe and sound. Saying that they're probably dead is going to be counter productive. At this late date...the likelihood of them being alive is small, but I need everyone as calm as possible as long as possible. Come with me, but stop saying things designed to incite panic."

That said, she turned to begin her investigation.


~*~*~

As evening fell, Vim sat at his dining room table, watching Aly cook a dinner he didn't really want but that she insisted he needed. "Lore says he hasn't heard anything about children being moved around, although he said he'd look." He leaned on the table, putting his head in his hands. "Who could have...? They're only children. Not even ten."

"Younger than ten makes sense for the slave trade theory," Aly told him, setting plates on the small pine table. "Once children hit puberty, they start losing value until they're in their late teens to early twenties." She sat down across from him. "Whoever this kidnapper is...he's a member of the community. There was no sign of struggle in any room, none of the parents were wakened -"

"Shouldn't've gone to sleep," mumbled Vim, poking at the food on his plate. "I knew it could have happened...I just..."

"Stop blaming yourself, Vim. It isn't going to help. The kidnapper is someone you know. Someone the children trust, maybe an authority figure. If the children have been moved out of the country, they will be found. Lore will have sent word to everyone else by now, they'll be watching for them. And I'm not giving up until the children are found."

"Thanks, Aly."

A hint of a smile touched Alydia's red lips. "No one messes with my boys and gets away with it."

A silence hung in the tiny house for a few minutes while they tried to eat. It was desperate and forlorn, a silence Aly heard only when she worked on missing persons cases. It was Vim who broke the silence.

"Hey Aly...why'd you tell them you're a detective? You haven't been since...five years..."

"I was a detective for fifty years. Half a decade doesn't make me forget all I know. Besides...who are they more likely to trust? A seasoned detective, or a callow thief?" That closed the matter, and Vim went back to poking at his food.

I'm not nearly callow enough, though, if they bought the detective line. I need to stop playing the hero and get back to stealing stuff.

[The Mathemagician]

The detective’s telling off of Lou was impressive indeed to Alphred. He felt more than a little relieved as she spoke. This wasn’t his fight to fight. He wasn’t even a detective. This wasn’t his job. Getting into spats with an overly pompous, ostentatious, vacation-ruining, strutting peacock of a wannabe detective really was not his job. Bravo to her for putting him down. When the drow turned on him though, he was more than a little surprised. What had he done wrong? He’d just told the people the truth. What else was he supposed to do? Lie, like Lou? All odds were that the children never were going to return. As it always did, the purpose of deception entirely escaped him.

Still, as the crowd dissipated, he began to understand a bit of what the woman was talking about. These people were nervous, angry, fearful, any sort of negative emotion you possibly could think of you could pin down upon them. If someone were to incite this...a few words spoken here, a brick thrown there, word of mouth…it didn’t take much to make a mob out of otherwise ordinary and sane people. They were a dangerous factor in and of themselves.

The rest of the day Alphred spent back at the side of the lake. His screen before him, the mathemagician sketched out table after table and calculation after calculation, all to no avail. The simple truth was that Arithmancy was not developed enough for him to make any half decent predictions with. Someday, maybe, but as of now he simply was useless. While he had resented Lou’s forcing him to join up, now that he had a choice it felt as though he once again had no option in a different sort of way. The children and the parents…not to mention his own cousin, they all needed help. If Alphred could possibly offer it to them, wasn’t it his duty to do so? His own cousin! The force of that realization hadn’t quite hit him yet. He dared not venture back to Max’s house though. For a minute at about lunchtime he’d been in there, and the place had felt like a graveyard. Excusing himself, he’d left quickly.

It is a graveyard, he thought with unusual morbidity. Normally Alphred liked the quiet, but that was a far more sinister kind of silence, unfriendly and morbid. No, it was far better here on the silent beach, the sun plunging towards the horizon, all the families holed up in their little dwellings. There didn’t seem to be any danger to his person, at least. He was an adult. Still, the longer this went on the more chaotic the situation could become. For a few minutes he considered returning to Scara Brae, turning his back on the whole problem. It wasn’t his life, it wasn’t his kids, and there were perfectly capable people he was sure could handle everything on their own. What good could he do?

The face of Max’s irritating little daughter, however, refused to stop plaguing his mind. He delved back into his calculations, wondering all the time what he hoped to achieve and why he was working at this problem, but nonetheless carrying on. After a few more minutes, the top layer of a slice of hours of his life, he grumbled to himself and gave up. The screen vanished with a wave of his hand and he stood up. Useless! That’s what he was.

He stumbled back towards the cabins in the dim light. It had been longer than he had originally though since the events of that morning, apparently. He kicked at a small round stone, attempting to send it into the lake, and missed entirely.

As he walked past cabin after cabin, he looked (perhaps a bit amorally) at the windows. The curious thing about them was that they were all, without exception, closed. Hmmm. That was a false statement, actually. Looking ahead, Alphred could see dim light shining out of one. He stepped forwards hesitantly, peeking in curiously. He could see two figures in the light. One was a tall broad man Alphred recognized vaguely from the scene at the lake. The other…was the red-coated woman! Spontaneously, Alphred decided that he simply must talk to her. He stepped forwards onto the porch and opened their door, letting a cascade of light flow in from inside. His foot hovered the doorstep, and he was moments away from letting himself in and sitting down at the dinner table. Then, rather suddenly, he remembered his manners, the rules of society, and all those other unimportant things. Alphred blushed.

“Oh, uhhh,” he said, blinking. “I was just wondering, y’know, if I could…help out, a little? I mean, well, you did say earlier…”

At a loss for words, Alphred simply decided to shut his mouth.

[Olivan]

And it was accomplished.

When his eyelids finally parted wide, breaking the locks on a caged world of unconsciousness, his eyeballs were treated to a sight that imbued a dual set of sentiments within his being. Darkness. One side of the emotional coin graciously ushered in joy, enthusiasm, and gratefulness, while the other side just as eagerly presented gloom, which rendered fear, paranoia, and anxiety. These were the offerings of a twisted and horrid dichotomy, where the causes of such a dilemma were linked between a precarious and frightening past, and a hopeful yet uncertain future.

Olivan gingerly lifted himself off of leafy grounds with the sturdy aid of what felt like a tree. Intense headaches had greeted him at the precise moment that he reached a full stand. From a sore, fresh, and open wound atop his head was where warm blood cascaded down the side of the boy’s face, obviously proving to be the source of the headache. Each drop of the crimson fluid that ran off his peach fuzzed chin stirred up cloudy memories that had turned lucid the more unmerciful his cranial throbbing became. It was during these pulsating sensations that he begun recalling the detailed events that consequently led to the unsettling position that he was now in. “I can’t believe I’m alive…..” The teenager could barely make any utterance without his head serving him further agony, almost as if attempting to coerce him to remain still until the proper rest that he needed to recover was acquired. Yet like the rebel serf he wished he was, he ignored the commands of his master….his better mental judgment, and trudged forward through unknown and unfamiliar territory.

Unfamiliar territory

The odd noise that the moist leaves beneath his feet made were really the first sign. But with each dark and shadowy tree that he stumbled upon, it became quite clear that this hard working serf was no longer in Alerar or even Salvar for that matter. The engines, the propellers, the stench of factories, trains, crowded marketplaces and the clamorous sounds of intertwining daily drow and Salvarian life had long fled the human slave’s ears. Joy, enthusiasm, and gratefulness were indeed present. However, fear, paranoia, and anxiety were right there to clash with their rivals.

When Olivan thought about his last conscious moment, he cringed. Stone-faced warriors clad in barbaric armor had thought nothing of tossing his slim body down some fifty feet from an airship into dark woods. Had it not been for the dense tree line of the forests, the high foliage and their supporting branches would’ve never buffered the boy’s fall, thus allowing him to survive and awake from his state insensibility. Consciousness, although it was certainly a heavenly gift, it also forced Olivan to dwell upon his shortcomings.

“I couldn’t…….save…her.” The thought alone was more tormenting than any physical injury. Heroes never failed to protect the ones that they treasured. The very bodies that their hearts beat so diligently for never hesitated in sacrificing themselves if it meant that their loved ones got to live yet another day free of calamity’s clutches. These were the fruits of pure and selfless character. Sadly though, Olivan had not yet achieved such traits. Many things infiltrated his mind back then when he saw her in the hands of those armored soldiers. Tears crawling down her face like quiet streams with eyes that did not need the assistance of the mouth to cry out for help. Olivan understood the silent plea, yet froze up. When he wanted to lunge forward he couldn’t. When he wanted to take her from their grasps, he couldn’t. The only thing he could do was watch in utter bewilderment and shackling angst.

Olivan came to a flowing river that he’d heard in the distance for quite some time now. It cut through a clearing in the forest, which reflected the moonlight that’d been banished in deeper woods due to the thick and tightly interlaced boughs high above. St. Donomar kneeled down, cupping the water so as to apply it to his head wound in some attempt to clean it. The cooling feeling aided in his comfort, but he knew that to wrap it afterward was in his best interest considering that doing so was the next best option to disinfecting it. His one and only shirt unfortunately would have to provide that function.

With the bleeding somewhat stopped, the Salvarian native slipped his coat back on and continued forward in a direction he knew not the end of. His ears had to become his eyes and upon hearing favorable sounds, he would move closer in that direction. This tactic proved to be of use, for as he moved forward, he heard the voices of men communicating with one another.

Unsure whether to consider them friend or foe, the Salvic serf quickly hid behind a tree. It was difficult to determine the full details of their attire, but from what his ears could gather, it seemed as if one of them wore light armor of some kind. Having heard the clanking of armored plates all too often on the chilly grounds of Tyraxen Ein’s fiefdom, Olivan had procured a skill of sorts in being able to identify to a certain degree different armor types by sound alone.

“Chain mail……?” Further patience and silence not only revealed that, but also that this particular individual was irate with some woman whom he deemed not worthy of having the audacity to challenge him in the way that she did. St. Donomar hadn’t the slightest idea what the man was referring to, but he figured that with indignation of this calibur, it would be best if he created significant distance between him and the advancing party. Yet no more than five steps in the opposite direction had young Olivan already alerted the men of another presence other than their own in the forest.

“Someone else is here.” They stated. The serf tried to remain still, but the group showed their knowledge of the woods and its inhabitants, deducing that the generated sound originated from a man and not a beast. The closer they approached, the more panicked Olivan became. Terrified, the boy instinctively did what any prey in the lair of a predator would do.

Run.

In these moments of desperation, escaping imminent danger was all that he could think about. “Got to get away!” If one of the pursuers wore armor then they most likely had weapon equipped. Olivan hadn’t the chance to observe the men in great detail to confirm this suspicion, but at this point, he didn’t care in the slightest to. Regrettably, this desire of his would not be fulfilled for streams of the pale moonlight piercing through the trees exposed his location. “Someone is running! Catch him!” Ordered the fellow donning the chain mail. His counterparts acted instantly on his commands, transforming their firm, cautious walking to full on, all out sprinting. Olivan wasn’t nearly fast enough to escape these stout men, showing yet again in his life that athleticism was not one of his strong suits.

Once apprehended, St. Donomar’s arms were effortlessly snatched, bounded, and held against his back. His body was now parallel to the dirt, with an amalgamation of leaves, grass, and other earthen debris pressing against his tightly pursed lips, as if seeking to breach the fleshly barrier and gain access to his mouth. Attempting to struggle free was an option, but for what? He was already defeated mentally and the fact that he’d been bested physically with great ease could not have been denied.

It was challenging for Olivan to hear clearly with one ear pressed toward the ground and the other covered by a strong hand that was applying overall head pressure. Nevertheless, chatter regarding children, kidnappings, and suspects slipped through the spaces between the capturer’s fingers, reaching the serf’s ear albeit in sound bites. Unfortunately, what the Salvarian didn’t hear was that he had been linked to all of it. The only gestures that followed were a sinister grin and a fierce strike to the back of his neck. And with that, Olivan had yet again been readmitted to the realm of unconsciousness.

[Alydia Ettermire]

Both Aly and Vim looked up at the abrupt entrance of the math boy from earlier in the day, the one who had done his level best to incite panic. For a moment Aly considered sending him away, brushing him off like a bit of dust and proceeding to investigate without him. But...on rare occasions with the Ettermire police, statisticians had been employed to narrow their search parameters.

Alydia tilted her head from side to side, sizing the young - well, no. He looked only slightly younger than Vim, and Vim was approaching middle age. He just had that air of naivete that made him look young. Her visible blue eye traveled over him, the matte black bowl-cut hair, the bland face, plebeian clothing...but if he was half as good at statistics as he was at saying the wrong thing at the wrong time...

"I might just have a job for you." Alydia pushed her plate to the side, standing up with a fluid grace. Her boots sounded softly on the pine floor as she walked across the room to take a map from the rough-hewn desk on the far side of the den. A quick check told her it was the right one, and she motioned Alphred to come closer.

"The kidnapper will be someone from this community, not likely someone new, someone the children - and their parents - trust. Since none of the adult community members have unexplained absences, and the children have not been noted leaving the country, they will probably be somewhere nearby. If they were carried on foot, the kidnapper wouldn't be able to take them far and still be back by morning to be accounted for." She drew a circle around the village at a distance of five miles.

"They won't be found within this range; it's too close. But they also won't be found outside of this range - it's just too far for a man to walk two ways." She drew another circle, this time at a distance of eight miles. "Horse tracks would be too noticeable, so it's unlikely he took them on horse back. Within this range, what are the most likely areas to hide a large number of hostages securely?"

She slid the map over to Alphred, then looked around the living room. It was a cozy little place; colorful rugs were rolled over the floor to provide padding for a little girl's falls and to cushion her during her silly moments, the couch was a massive piece of furniture that took up most of a wall, but it would be comfortable enough to sink into and sleep on - as children often did. The floor was clear of tables on which a child might bang her knee or hit her head, but not clear of toys; stuffed animals and wooden dolls were scattered helter-skelter over the rugs. Vim might pick up after his daughter when shew as home...but now that she was gone, he hadn't touched anything of hers. To pick up the toys, in his parent's mind, would be to give up on finding her. Leave the mess, and it's like the child hasn't gone.

With a soft sigh, Alydia bent down and picked up a little cloth version of Fallien's karuku-tal from the floor. It was a toy she'd sent the child herself after a successful heist in the desert nation. It wasn't just for Vim's sake that she'd search for Estelle. The little girl was like her niece, it was for her own sake as well that the child needed to be found alive.

Another, heavier knock came at the door. "Detective Ettermire, we found the culprit."

The men who had dragged Olivan from the forest held up the unconscious boy, and Aly raised an eyebrow. Those clothes were from Salvar. And he was much too young to fit her profile; a teenage boy wouldn't typically associate with young non-familial children. He wouldn't be able to get them out of bed. Still...follow all leads...

"Do you know this boy?"

"No," answered the man from under a shaggy mop of dark blond hair. "We just found him wondering the woods."

Fools. Incompetent... Aly stepped closer, looking at the boy's injuries. "Did you do this to him?"

"No, he was like that when we found him."

Alydia almost told them that this wasn't their suspect, and that they were fools...but...

"We'll take him into custody from here. Go tell everyone the kidnapper has been caught, and that we will be interrogating him to find the location of the missing children."

The men nodded, handing the kid to Vim and heading out to do as they were told. Aly shut the heavy wooden door behind them.

"Aly, you don't think he...I mean, he's just a kid himself."

"No, Vim, this isn't the kidnapper. This child is from Salvar. Let's patch him up..." she looked at the bloody mess that had been remitted into her care. "...poor thing. I wonder what his story is..."

Vim got some clean water to start cleaning the teenage boy's wounds. "Then why tell them to tell everyone that he has been found?"

"Because it will make the real suspect think he's gotten away with it. He'll feel safe, get careless, and we'll have him."

[Olivan]

He was in darkness again. But had he not just shattered the manacles of this prodigious prison a short while ago? Indeed he’d surely fled the black world of insensibility! The moon light, leaves, soil, and trees were the evidence along with a head wound, which came escorted by acute pain. Such natural landmarks drove down mental stakes prohibiting the boy from being ensnared in a false reality. Although confident in what he’d certainly experienced, none of it could explain the phenomenon behind his current somber incarceration. However, amidst the sable milieu, warmth filled him. The Salvic serf hadn’t the faintest notion as to where the source of this comforting feeling was coming from, but with the quick passing of time, it only increased.

Are you alright….?

The question baffled him. Did someone else share his cup of misery within these lightless confinements? Seeking to learn more, Olivan responded. “I’m fine! I’m fine! But why is this happening to me? Why am I here!? Who are you!?” Most definitely a mouthful of inquires, but such was the materialized rambling of a desperate, horrified, and anxious mind.

What are you….talking about?

It was then that he was released from the dark world. With eyes wide open, he quickly scanned his environment, expecting to find himself in the grasp of the men from the forest. But such a nightmare had not come to fruition. Instead, being released into the world of consciousness set him before a man whose well-built figure intimidated Olivan. It also didn’t aid his nerves that his back rested upon the cushions of a rather old looking and completely alien couch. “Who....who are you!?” In his terror, the serf rolled off of the sofa and retreated to the oaken walls of the foreign domicile. The physical exercise of standing up after a period of unconsciousness proved yet again to be just as agonizing as the first time he tried it within the dark woods. However, he did not let his discomfort bring him back to his knees.

“My name is Vim Brawn and you were talking in your sleep. Not too long ago, you.....”

“Stop right there,” Olivan exclaimed, extending his thin arm as if it had given additional power and authority to his command. The hulking individual halted his advances, raising both hands slightly in the air in an attempt to present himself as an amicable entity. St. Donomar gazed at Vim sharply, displaying no sign of trust for this man in any way, shape, or form. Expecting the physically dominant man to break through this wall of cordiality though, Olivan never took his peripheral focus off of the wax candles that illuminated and heated the area. “If he rushes forward, I can at least take out the candles and use the darkness to my advantage.”

Olivan still remained motionless, never removing his sights from the figure. He waited for the individual’s frustration to boil over and unlock his true nature, but that never occurred. Instead, Vim sighed, sat down on the couch, and finally lowered his hands.

“Look, I can only imagine what you’ve gone through, but being on edge isn’t going to get you anywhere. How about we just talk? You can start out by telling me your name.”

As uneasy as the Salvarian was, he ultimately knew that if Vim had truly sought to inflict harm on him, then it would’ve already been done. Not to mention, his wound had been bandaged and cleaned, which of course was something that was beyond illogical in the circle of any hostile party. Therefore, Olivan slid down against the wall until his backside met the floor. Crossing his arms over his knees, his head sunk low with dispirited eyes staring off into space.

“My name is Olivan St. Donomar and I...shouldn’t………..be alive.”

[Alydia Ettermire]

Watching the mathematician struggle to narrow the range only seemed to wreck his concentration and make him unreliable; Alydia was starting to doubt he'd be any use at all. While he did that, she sat down in one of Vim's plush chairs and did some thinking of her own. The night off didn't make any sense. It would have if the kidnapper had meant to use it as a chance to escape with his hostages or move them, but Lore would have heard rumors of any such movement. ESPECIALLY if they'd set sail. If it had been some ritual sacrifice, then why had the other child vanished? None of it made any sense.

Alydia bit her lip, tapping her gloved fingers on her cheek. Otherwise, she was still, pondering hard from beneath the brim of her huge fedora. She didn't know who the kidnapper was, so she didn't know his motive. Her motive? A teacher, perhaps? No, that didn't make sense. The teacher in the small lakeside community had lost two of her own children, and had been neither suspiciously calm or overly distraught at the disappearances. And the size of the older boys in the group...

It's a man. Children aren't stupid, once they figure out they're being tricked, they struggle. He has to be big enough to subdue and move them.

So the suspect was a man, either native to the town or who had been there long enough to have the trust of the people. He was likely an authority figure, and likely in the investigation somehow.

Perhaps... Her eyebrows drew closer together, and her eyes narrowed beneath them. That was a very serious accusation...she'd need proof.

The Salvaran boy's awakening provided a welcome distraction, and Alydia watched Vim struggle to gain his trust. At the boy's dour pronunciation, the large man looked at the red-coated thief for guidance, but she was already standing up.

"Nonsense, child. Come and eat something, and tell me what happened to you."

She put a hand under the teen's arm, gently lifting him up so she could guide him to the kitchen and to the food still in the pan from dinner. She'd made enough so that if Vim decided he actually was hungry, he could eat...but had only served him a little, so that he could pick at it to appease her.

[Olivan]

Olivan sat down slowly in the wicker chair, wincing as he fought to take command of his equilibrium. Wounds to the head that he'd previously acquired had been properly treated and bandaged, but the pain of his injuries had not given up hope, desperately seeking to inflict as much discomfort on the Salvarian boy as they possibly could until the remedies once applied by Vim vanquished all agony. The smell of freshly cooked food did aid in the healing process however, even if only from an emotional standpoint. Aromas alien to the average cauldron of a Salvarian serf’s abode had congregated here in this humble kitchen. Black pans and pots caked with grease harbored a mouth-watering variety. Chicken breast, drumsticks, and rice were the main courses, with a few fruits off to the side of the counter in case anyone wanted to snack on them. Though the amount of available food paled in comparison to that which he recalled the St. Donomar chefs preparing for his family, it was still much more than he was accustomed to on the slave grounds.

The drow woman had served him an appropriate amount, setting the plate in front of him carefully. The tenderness in which she did it put a slight smile on Olivan’s face, as the small gesture made him feel more at home. Staring at two legs, one breast, a lump of rice, and an orange, St. Donomar almost instinctively tore at the edible items with the speed and force of a wild animal. Yet thoughts of reason and rationality invaded. “You are not in the wilderness anymore….” Immediately, the tenseness in his fingers vanished, and with the utmost of human civility, the teenager took up the knife and fork beside him and commenced working on the chicken.

The ambiance was a relatively silent one, with the sound of the crickets dominating the airwaves with their low tone and faint chatter. Nervous green eyes lifted up from the plate of food, glancing at the crimson clothed woman, who seemed to wait patiently as Olivan worked through his meal. “It’s not….nonsense,” The serf intuitively shifted to the drow tongue as he masticated his food, a habit that staunchly reared its head when in the presence of a dark elf. “When you’ve been beaten, bruised, tossed out of a flying airship only to be beaten and bruised some more, and then knocked out….then death should certainly come to you. But even if none of that ever happened…..even if not a hair on my head was touched, I would still be suffering this pain.” Olivan paused as an anxious left hand set the knife down and clasped the cup of water north of his plate.

“I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t do a single thing…..to save her. Armored men seized her and I was too weak to do anything….I just…”

Fragmented speech was the forerunner to watery film blurring the vision of the teary eyed teenager. Eyes that were once set on the dark elven woman veered downward in dejection, showing his thrashed spirit lucidly. This had been the first time that he’d really thought back to and vocalized what had occurred in Alerar, and how he was unable to save Opheliah. Emotions coated in sadness were on the verge of seizing him entirely, but in the presence of this woman, he held back.

With elbows rested on the table, each fist clutched the fork and knife tightly, while a clenched jaw held the advancing tears at bay. As much as he hated to admit it, he still possessed lessons taught by his father that upheld the foolish notion that men weren’t supposed to cry in front of women. Gentlemen were destined to provide the shoulder for ladies to wail, and they were never to display weakness by doing that which was reserved for the opposite sex. He wanted to let all of that go, but the barricade against that floodgate was much too difficult to break at this point in time. So he held firm.

Setting his eyes on the dark elf once again, a look of puzzlement captured his countenance. “Say….what is a drow woman like yourself doing here in Scara Brae?” Olivan wiped stray tears from his cheeks with the back of his wrists. The sudden inquiry posed to the woman altered his mood somewhat, as it caused the boy to shift his attention from his most recent and unfortunate experience. “You carry an Alerarian accent so I take it you’re as foreign as I am. But from one foreigner to another, there are some strange men lurking the forests. They assaulted me and if you’re not careful, they will assault you too.”

Olivan hoped that his words of warning would keep this woman safe. Though hands of evil touched the girl that he cared most for, the serf saw no reason why that same fate had to fall upon the drow.

[Alydia Ettermire]

Alydia watched the ravenous teenager wolf down his food and wondered if she hadn't served him too much. If his system was too badly deprived of nutrients, if it had been too long since he had last eaten, then too much so fast was more likely to kill him than any beating he'd received. She'd been about to tell him to slow down when he checked himself.

Hopefully it's simply that he is an adolescent human male that hasn't eaten since breakfast...

The detective turned thief turned (temporarily) detective watched the boy from beneath the wide brim of her hat while he blubbered through his fragmented explanation of why he didn't deserve to be alive. The boy had a classic case of survivor's guilt; he was here, alive and safe, and a person close to him, that he'd felt responsible for was gone. It wasn't his fault; he was a child, powerless.

So says the woman who agonizes over grown men she hasn't heard from in months. She knew she'd feel the same way if anything happened to any of her boys.

Olivan composed himself suddenly to warn her about the scout parties, and Alydia nodded.

"What happened to you was quite unfortunate. Those men were out looking for a kidnapper. Here lately fourteen young children from this little lakeside town have vanished, including Vim's daughter. I used to be a detective in Ettermire, and when Estelle went missing, Vim wrote to me asking me to come help in the investigation. Right now the townsfolk are suspicious of the unfamiliar...and it isn't often a Salvaran child wanders into the woods near here."

She stood up to go back and kick the mathematician out; he was scribbling furiously and his body language told her he was getting flustered. He was useless. On her way, she gently ran her gloved fingers through the youth's hair. "It's all right to cry sometimes, dalhar. You've been through a lot and you're a long way from home."

She left Olivan to finish his meal while she ousted Alphred, and then settled down with Vim to figure out where a good place to hide a bunch of children might be within the range of her search.

[Olivan]

Under the dark and nearly starless sky, Orchid sat on the porch of her cabin, fidgeting as the horrid sounds of shrieks and shrills bombarded her eardrums. The peaceful milieu of a quiet night had always been a sanctuary to the woman, a panacea alleviating the anxiety and stress of the day. Yet with what had transpired over the past several weeks, a once serene environment came under siege by panic and hysteria. Initially, the terror was a phenomenon that’d invaded the lives of her surrounding neighbors. However, the same grief that’d destroyed the tranquility of nearby denizens was the same enemy that had advanced onto her territory, bypassing the log exterior and wreaking havoc. The storm of dread left its seeds of sadness with the only difference being that Orchid was now the one receiving them. No longer did the devil creep towards someone else’s doorstep. She’d been locked on and targeted, and the hands of evil acquired their game.

A puffed and dampened face exhibited the somber aftermath. “She’s gone….my baby is really gone!” The nightmarish event that’d happened seven days ago was on replay, with the stop button permanently jammed. A routine peek in her daughter’s room had been the action that revealed her absence. There was no scream, nor any sign of struggle. Sage was just gone. Though the experience was similar to what’d happened to other parents, Orchid questioned sometimes if her own child was a victim of this madness. She wasn’t always the best mother that she could’ve been, so the notion that perhaps her bright ten year old could’ve ran away was not out of the realm of possibility.

Twitching fingers withdrew a match from a coat pocket that contained several other miscellaneous items. The small flame sparked the cigarette that dangled between her glossed lips, yet inhaling the smoke did not ease her nerves like it normally did. It was getting worse. With each day that passed, hope dwindled. Thankfully, Vim’s companion had descended upon the scene to provide competent aid, but even this predicament might’ve been a task too tough to handle.

“Vim…..” Her heart beat faster. He was the first person that accepted her into the community. Many of the other inhabitants, particularly the elderly ones found it distasteful that a single mother was with child but without husband. They cared not to learn the details of such a situation, but rather opted to stand from afar and judge. Vim was also raising his daughter on his own, so the connection was natural. Not to mention, Estelle and Sage established a friendship that only grew stronger as each day went by.

“Still up…..he must wreck too.” Orchid saw that candlelight still burned, illuminating his house. Therefore, she lifted herself off the porch and walked over to Vim’s residence. Three knocks and a brief pause merited no response, so she tried again.

* *

“Is someone going to get that?” Olivan had finished his meal when the sudden knock broke the silence of the home. Finding it rude to open the door of a guest’s abode, he waited. However, the drow and Vim had not responded. “Maybe they didn’t hear it.” Reluctantly, the Salvarian approached the door, wrapping wiry thin fingers around the knob. But when he swung it open, his eyes widened in astonishment.

“O…Orchid!?”

The woman emulated the teenager’s bewilderment.

“B….Brother…!?”

[Alydia Ettermire]

Aly and Vim had narrowed the search down to the two most likely areas for a kidnapper to hide a large group of children: a small, abandoned quarry seven miles out, and a cavern system five and a bit miles out. She and Vim had been deep in discussion about the pros and cons of each location, despite the fact that the topic was uncomfortably close to the haggard man picking his brains for anything that might be useful.

The two locations were almost in opposite directions of each other; if they chose wrong and the kidnapper moved the children tonight, Alydia would have to leave immediately on a global manhunt, and her chances of recovering all, or even most of the children were less than ten percent. The pressure to choose right was immense...there were no more children in the right age range along the borders of the lake. If anything was going to happen to the children, it would either be that night or the next.

They didn't notice the raps on the door amidst their discussion; the townsfolk were supposed to be leaving Alydia alone so that she could carry out her investigation. Each moment was precious, even vital, and Aly had specifically told the parents that if they came and interrupted her while she was trying to work, they risked the lives of their children.

She ignored the second set of knocks, keeping her eyes fixed on the map. Which location was most likely to secure frightened children during the day when the kidnapper had to be back in the town?

The creak of the door opening and the two shocked exclamations of siblings reunited by happenstance wrested the thief's attention away from her investigation and back toward the two humans. The female's name was Orchid. Her missing daughter, age ten, was named Sage. Sage had vanished a mere three days before Estelle, in the same way as all of the other children, and Vim had mentioned her in passing as being a friend of his.

Friend or not, it was time for the distractions to cease.

"Vim." She called her attention back to the hulking man, who had risen reflexively when Orchid entered his house, and when she was sure she had his attention, she looked up at him, giving him a gesture that told him to deal with Orchid as quickly as he could.

"Get horses."

Vim's dark eyebrows raised. "You've figured out where...?"

"I will have by the time you're back." Alydia's eyes turned back to the map, and Vim nodded, walking over to Orchid and putting his hand on her shoulder.

"Orchid, honey, now's really not the best time for you to be here. " He spoke in his soft, easy drawl, trying to reassure the distraught mother even as he was directing her away from her best chance to get her baby back. "You should go on home and wait for me and Aly to get back. She's real good at figuring these sorts of things out. So we'll go out and with any luck be back before mornin' with Sage and Estelle and all those other little ones. Maybe you can show your brother your house." Even though Aly had told him to get Orchid out of her business, Vim wasn't about to manhandle her out the door, so he just gave her a look with his gentle hazel eyes and went off to find a couple of horses he and Aly could use.

Alydia herself was no longer paying any mind to the St. Donomar siblings. The quarry seemed like a good spot. There was a river flowing nearby, which would be ideal, both for a fresh water source to keep a valuable cargo alive and as a medium for moving said cargo with little chance of being caught. But it was also open, and near enough to a major road that a big group of children calling for help would certainly be heard.

The cave was desolate, even if it was a bit close to be an ideal hiding spot. But there were also no sources of water, unless there was an underground stream. That meant the kidnapper - or worse, kidnappers - would have to bring fresh water daily. If there were multiple kidnappers, then...

Then it's already too late. Assuming it's just one, then the cavern is the most likely place. So that is where we shall go.

At this point, Aly would have given her right arm to have the missing Dex Rous with them. It would be much easier to run this in a team of three, but Dex was gone to Thayne knew where, and so it would just be her and Vim, running the most important heist of their lives to date.

[Olivan]

Fingers twiddled frantically amidst the quiet atmosphere of Orchid’s residence. Olivan and his sister had left Vim’s place some twenty minutes ago per his suggestion. The eyes of the massive man provided insights to a tired and anxious soul that desperately desired to devote all of its time and energy to figuring out the mystery behind the missing children. Olivan wasted no further time while there and opted to depart on command although not before deeply thanking Alydia and Vim for everything that they had done for him. However, he found that he was more nervous around his own flesh and blood than he was around complete strangers, especially when he had learned of Sage’s kidnapping.

“It..It’s been so long,” The young teenager’s fingers did no cease in moving frantically. He could barely make eye contact with his eldest sister. “Why did you leave the family?”

Orchid took a deep breath as she rocked back and forth on her living room chair. It'd been ten years since she'd seen her brother. Though older, she smiled seeing how he still looked the same. “I suppose mother and father are the same as they’ve always been. You want to know why I left?” The brunette woman reached behind her and grabbed a picture frame from the windowsill. “Sage, of course. When I told mother and father that I was pregnant, they threw a fit. But not because of the hardships that I would have to face….no…they were upset simply because of how horrible it looked for them to have an unwed daughter carrying a child around. I couldn’t in good conscience raise a child in that kind of environment. So I ran away.”

A slight smile crossed Olivan’s face as he listened to his sister. “It’s funny how the start of our paths were entirely different, but the final destination is the same,” Orchid listened intently to her brother, waiting for him to explain himself further. “Mother and Father sold me into slavery three years ago because showing kindness to others apparently didn’t fit the image of our family. Since that time, my life has been….challenging to say the least.”

As those words left the Olivan’s mouth, Orchid had an expression of sheer horror. “S…Slavery? They’ve stooped so low as to subject one of their own children to slavery?” The Salvarian slave’s sibling sparked another cigarette out of fierce indignation. “I’m so glad I left when I did. If I had to witness my youngest brother being ousted from our home and dragged down the road in shackles, I would’ve killed mother and father.”

“Well….it is good you fled then. An action like that wouldn’t have allowed us to see each other right here and now.” Olivan smiled at his older sister and watched as she did the same. A tender hug revealed to the serf the level of pain that his sister was experiencing. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, no doubt a trait that she inherited from their mother who did the same exact thing when enduring trying times. Olivan wanted to say something, but found not the words to comfort Orchid with. He knew that he had to do whatever was within his power to save his niece. Yet with what he went through in Alerar, he wasn’t entirely confident that he would be able to help in finding the missing children. Still, he tried to keep the small flame of hope burning since it was the only thing keeping him from plunging straight into despair.

[Alydia Ettermire]

A cool breeze caressed Alydia's cheek, stirred her hair and rustled her signature trench coat. She was standing outside Vim's house, on his small porch, waiting for him to return. A night that should have wrapped the little lakeside village in peace instead smothered it in tension, as bereaved and worried parents struggled through one more night without their babies.

The stars shone down from an inky blue sky, casting pinpricks of light that never reached the ground. The gibbous moon above only provided a little more light for human vision. What little illumination there was fought to reach the ground through a marbled tapestry of clouds.

Had she been a human, or even an Elf, Aly would have been nearly blind in the darkness of this dread night. Instead the landscape rose up before her eyes in brilliant violets and indigos, bushes and grass reveling in the cool of evening. Occasionally there would be an orange or yellow object; a thrush roosting with its chicks or a rabbit out grazing.

Ordinarily, the night would have been full of sounds: crickets preforming their shrill symphony, nightingales singing their sweet songs, owls calling to their mates and young. But the stress that fell over the town had pervaded nature, too; even the noisy cicadas were silent.

Finally, the rhythmic pounding of hooves on dirt reached her ears, and she looked to her right, from whence Vim came. He was already on a horse; the dark bay looked way too small for him, but bore his weight without complaint. The other was tacked up, and he led it quickly down the narrow street, giving it to Alydia the moment they reached her. It was only a matter of a minute for her to mount, arrange her coat, and take the reins. The mare beneath her snorted and took a step back, balking at the task of riding in the dark, and the Alerian woman took a moment to smooth its silky mane down on its white neck, soothing it.

"Let's go." She nudged the horse in the sides, setting it in motion.

On a normal heist, she'd have a light-hearted quip for her men. But this wasn't a normal heist.

It was much more important.

[Olivan]

As Olivan left his sister’s house, he thought about Orchid’s daughter. Never before had he laid eyes upon the child, but he could only imagine that if he did, the pain of this tragedy would only be amplified. Yet the tears that ran down his sister’s face provided more than enough emotional turmoil for Olivan to see. “I have to do something about this.” The boy clenched his fists as he walked through damp grass underneath the night sky. He’d already failed his first trial on the path of becoming the hero he wanted to be, however he told himself that he would not fail again.

Crossing through several houses, Olivan found his way back to Vim’s house.

“What the….leaving already!?” The Salvarian raced toward the two with arms flailing in the air. “Wait! Wait for me!” The horses had not fully broken out into a full sprint yet, so Olivan, with his average athleticism was able to run up and catch Alydia’s horse by several strands of its tail. But the power that resided in the powerful animal warded off Olivan’s weakness with ease. The steed’s quick acceleration was too large of an adjustment for the boy, causing him to let go of the tail strands before he could pull himself up. His face met dirt and his mouth spit out gravel. Such unfortunate circumstances though, were simply the product of the hard route Olivan traveled. He was left with no choice but to deal with them.

[Alydia Ettermire]

The horses were reluctant to move as fast as they were asked; it was late, it was dark, and they were used to working in the light. The memories their ancestors had passed on to them in the form of instincts told them that there were unseen horrors that dwelled in the dark, and those powerful memories made them balk for a moment despite the urgency of their riders, made them trot, then canter, when they were asked to race into the dense behemoth of the forest - an area they were familiar with by day.

Had they not hesitated, Olivan's frantic calls to wait for him would have simply faded into the night, his manic dash would have ended in a defeated trudge back to the strained safety of his sister's little house. Instead he managed to grab onto the tail of the moon-white mare that Alydia was steering into the forest, and the horse, a gentle girl used to working with children, stopped immediately at the tug to not kick the boy behind her.

The sudden stop nearly sent Aly flying over the horse's head, and she whirled around in the saddle, a rebuke on her lips. It was Vim who actually voiced it, having noticed that Aly was no longer with him.

"Boy, we have a bunch of kids to save and not a lot of time to do it. Are you out of your mind, stopping us like that? Go back to Orchid's house and -" The sharp lift of a gloved hand halted his diatribe mid-sentence.

"Yelling at him won't get us there any faster. You want to come, Olivan?" Alydia stared down at the Salvaran youth with a frosty blue eye, and at his nod, reached down to pull him up onto her horse. "Then I have a job for you. I'll tell you along the way."

Aly barely gave the lad a chance to get on the horse before wheeling her around and nudging her hard in the flanks, sending her into a canter. Vim followed close behind, straining his eyes to keep sight of the flaring flaps of his leader's coat and the banner-like tail of the ghostly mare she guided expertly through the darkness.

"There is at least one kidnapper. Possibly more." Aly had her voice raised so that Olivan could hear her explanations and instructions over the thundering hooves and snorting breaths of the horse they shared. "We think he's in a cavern about five miles away, with at least some of the children. There are two plans, depending on whether or not there are multiple kidnappers. If it's only one, then Vim will distract him while you and I get the children out. You will lead them out, I will make sure he doesn't follow. If there are many, then Vim and I will take them, and you get the children out. And when you have the children out of the caves, Olivan, start them on the way home as fast as their little legs will carry them. Put the youngest ones on the horses, as many as will fit, and have the older ones walk. Vim and I will make the arrest."

Or the kill, if that proves necessary.

Aly detested violence, and senseless death was anathema to her. Even worse was the thought of actually taking a life. But the man or men responsible for the taking of so many children, for all the horrors and fear they must have gone through...and, if they were dead, for their murders...that was unforgivable. Especially since one of those children belonged to one of her people. If she had to kill him, she would never look back on it with regret.

"If we were wrong, and the cave is empty, we'll regroup and search the other site, but we'll likely be too late, and I'll come up with another plan."

She spent the rest of the ride in a terse silence; she'd told Olivan everything he needed to know and Vim, although she hadn't discussed specifics with him, had worked closely enough with her for long enough to anticipate her moves and what he would need to do. He was the muscle, the brawn. Aly was the one with the eye for details, the one who would make sure no child was abandoned in the chaos of escape.

Finally the horses burst into a tiny clearing where there was a small entrance to the ground, barely big enough for Brawn to squeeze through. Aly pulled back on the reins, stopping her horse, and Vim leapt from his bay before it had even fully stopped. The horses stamped and blew, shaking off the sweat which had lathered on their necks, and the lithe Alerian hastened to tether them loosely to a tree. While she did that, she looked at Olivan.

"If you've lost your nerve, stay with the horses. Go in there and there is no turning back."

Without waiting for the boy's confirmation of determination or his last minute decision that he was too young to go in there and face possible death, Aly whirled around with her coat flowing in her wake. Instinctively, she pulled her hat down before sliding slid into the cave's mouth. Vim squeezed in close behind, ripping his shirt on the rough stone edges in his haste to save his little girl.

Within the cramped walls of the little cavern, even the small amount of light that the night sky had provided to the eyes of the humans was consumed by the blackness. Alydia made soft clicks with her tongue every few steps to guide the two humans onward in the dark, always in a distinct pattern so that they could follow her.

Underfoot was the steep, uneven surface of a water-worn stone floor, pebbles and small rocks threatened both to trip them at every step and to betray their whereabouts by clattering noisily every time they were disturbed. The air was rank with the musky smells of mold and mildew, and heavy with humidity that never got a chance to escape the interior.

But none of that was important once they got into the cavern. It started widening and leveling out, the sounds of water droplets splashing into puddles echoed hollowly throughout the chamber. But faintly, very faintly, there was also the deep growl of something large...and more faintly still were the soft hiccupping sobs of terrified children.

On one hand, Aly felt relieved. They could rescue some of them at the very least. On the other, she was terrified. There was definitely something in with them.

A glimmer of light came from another room, and just as they saw it, the growl turned into a roar, and the sobs turned into terrified screams. Vim immediately abandoned his careful tread and broke into a run, followed closely by Aly.

They burst into a torch-lit room, where at least a dozen children were scrambling away from a massive creature whose long twisted arms each grasped a little girl. The chain shirt it wore strained to cover the green barrel-chest, and a tattered pair of trousers clung to its thighs like a second skin. Its long tongue snaked out between its black, pointed teeth, and its yellow eyes gleamed with primal hunger.

"All you little children will make so fine a meal," he cackled. "And with all of you so nice and fat, my power shall grow, as well."

Vim let out a roar, charging into the demon that had the children with all the force of a raging bull, grappling with it and bashing its head into the ground, forcing him to let go of his intended victims. Aly reached up and grabbed a pair of torches, ripping them from their holders on the wall.

"This way, kids! Hurry!"

The youngsters didn't need to be told twice, and started stampeding for the exit. Among them, Aly was relieved to see the young girl she'd gone to all this trouble for. "Come on, Stell-stell! Run!"

She stood at the entrance to the chamber, a brilliant red beacon of hope to the children. But she only counted thirteen....and there had been fourteen missing. And although she wasn't watching the fight between the demon and Vim, she could tell that with the surprise gone, Vim was getting at least as good as he was giving.

[Olivan]

From the moment Alydia Ettermire issued to the children the command to flee, quick feet beat upon the dampened, craggy terrain in chaotic organization. Their key to freedom came in the form of two brightly burning torches that attracted the children like moths. Olivan found himself sprinting alongside of the youngsters as if he’d been apprehended and detained in these caverns as well. He’d seen a lot of things on the fief grounds of Salvar, but he’d never before seen a monster. Only within the confines of his wild imagination were beasts like what he’d just witnessed real.

Before he even realized it, the group had made it back to the mouth of the cave. The children breathed heavily for air due to the exhaustion and anxiety that came gift wrapped with the trial that they’d just underwent. “Is this everyone?” Olivan asked his drow companion, hoping that she would answer favorably and end this nightmare. But just before she could speak a single word, a young girl shot up from among the group. Her eyes were widened and her senses sharp like a mother deer sensing something wrong in the environment. “W..Where is Sage?”

The amalgamation of elated youth had their relief sapped instantly upon hearing the inquiry. Heads turned left and right with eyes scanning the ambiance in all directions in order to provide a positive answer. Yet while their eyes searched, their lips remained sealed. She was nowhere to be found.

Fear had now poisoned Olivan. How would he be able to face his sister if her daughter wasn’t found and brought back safely? “When was the last time that any of you had seen Sage!?” The Salvarian awaited some kind of answer from the gathered young one, but his ears were met with shrieking and crying. To settle down would be an impossible task to ask of them in all of their turmoil. Therefore, adrenaline mixed with fear of the unknown prompted Olivan to blindly dash back into the cave, but not before snatching a torch from Aly. All rationale escaped him, with his mind only set on finding his niece.

“Sage! Where are you!?” The serf screamed, as he ran in any direction he could. Eventually his panicked running led him back to where the monster and Vim were still fighting. However, amidst the roaring of the two, he heard the wailing of a little girl balled up in the corner of the area. Her wet face matched the picture that he’d seen in his sister’s house. “Sage, don’t worry….everything is going to be fine!” Olivan tried to sound as reassuring as possible, but there was no real conviction behind his statement. He was still terribly frightened, especially since the foul fiend seemed to have prevented Sage from escaping just by the way that him and Vim were positioned. Olivan in no way could match the brute strength that Alydia’s companion possessed, but he had to do something. Unfortunately, that something was yet another decision which lacked rationale. Taking his chances, the young teenager tried to dash passed the monster once its back was turned. But misjudging the fiend’s senses as well as arm length led to a back swipe that’d nearly crushed Olivan’s skull had the boy not ducked in time.

Having reached the girl, Olivan observed his position and truly understood why she couldn’t escape. The monster was somehow fighting with Vim all while keeping a sharp eye on his prey. St. Donomar found himself growing more anxious by the second. Everything was in Vim’s hands now. Either he was going to defeat his adversary, or the fiend would have quite the large meal on his plate.

[Alydia Ettermire]

Vim's strength was flagging. He was wrestling the demon with all of his strength, but he wasn't nearly powerful enough for the pulsating mass of green flesh. It was something else entirely, and though he'd done all he could to fight for his child's survival, he just didn't have it in him to withstand the brute force of the attack. His right side was a mass of pain, and blood frothed up to his lips as a result of the blow that had hit him directly. His head was spinning from a glancing blow, and his left arm hung uselessly at his side.

He'd been aware of Sage's presence, but had been unsuccessful in trying to draw the demon away from her so that she could flee. When Olivan rushed in to try and rescue her, the big man felt a rush of anger. What about the other children?

He gathered up his strength for one last attack, but a casual flick of the monster's wrist sent him skidding across the floor on his injured side, and the demon who walked in Lou's armor turned back to Olivan and Sage. A feral grin lit his face; maybe he was not eating fourteen children...but two children so closely related would still give his power a decent boost.

The crack of a whip in his ear made the demon whirl around to see who DARED challenge him now. Hadn't they seen him decimate their biggest, most powerful man? Didn't they see that he had the little runt of a boy cornered?

The challenger that met his gaze was a blazing scarlet wind. Her coat billowed around her from the wind her own movement made, and her hair streamed behind her. A single frost blue eye glared out at him from beneath the brim of a broad hat, and the demon snarled.

"You."

"Xas," she hissed. "Uns'aa." Alydia cracked her whip again, lashing the brute roughly across the ugly green face and starting to retreat, drawing him forward like a circus trainer might while taunting a tiger.

He came after her without hesitation. If not for her, the townsfolk would have blindly accepted his leadership and then they would have never had a chance of rescuing any of the children. He would have been free to do with them as he wanted, set up a more elaborate sacrifice, rather than rushing it for fear of interruption. Rather than being interrupted and potentially losing every last morsel. That was looking unlikely, but she had already stolen thirteen of his fourteen prizes, and he might not be able to reclaim them.

Rather than running for the exit, like a smart woman would have, Alydia backed up until she was touching the wall. The demon who had masqueraded as Lou Dwin let out a dry chuckle.

"Now you are a bug for me to squish," he told the woman whose face might have been carved of obsidian for the severity of its expression. He charged, building up speed to destroy her, but to his surprise, she reached out and touched the wall. A large chunk of it disappeared, and an instant later, right as he could feel his body brush against the brim of her hat, so did she.

He crashed full-tilt into the bare wall and reeled for a second, turning to look for his target. She was standing a few feet away, but before he could attack her again a huge gray mass filled his vision.

It was the last thing he ever saw.



Alydia Ettermire turned from the massive chunk of rock she'd just dropped to glare at Olivan, cracking her whip one last time for good measure and letting the sharp sound reverberate through the cave before stomping over to where Vim had managed to sit himself up. She didn't like the sound of his breathing, but he probably had enough time to get back to town and be attended by the physician. Probably.

"We'll get you help," she told the large man, hauling him to his feet and starting to direct him toward the exit. Despite the fact she was supporting him as much as she could manage, the big man had to bear most of his own weight.

"There should be men...soon...." he told her. "I told them...get a bunch of men...just in case....to come after us..."

She nodded. "Good thinking. Now...hush." She turned her glare on Olivan once more. "You. Bring the child and come with me."

She led them all out of the cave, where the other children, lost and frightened, were waiting in the dark, huddled around the two horses. After setting Vim down to rest and sending little Sage over to Stell-stell, she whirled on the Salvaran youth. The fact that he was just a child, only a handful of years older than some of those who had been taken, didn't even register in her mind. She had a Coronian lad only a scant year older than Olivan on her team, and he would have never done something so stupid when she told him to take the target and run.

"What did you hear, when I told you that after we had the children out, to take them directly back to town? Did you hear 'take them back to town if you feel like it, if your sister's child is among the rescues?' Did you hear 'that's just what I think, feel free not to listen?' Or, worse, did you hear 'Olivan, why don't you do whatever you feel like, regardless of the danger it might pose to the other children?' I told you to take the children back for a very real reason, dalhar. If, Thayne forbid, that monster had been able to kill both Vim and myself, do you know what he would have done?! He'd have snapped your neck and Sage's neck like TWIGS! And then he would have rushed off to collect the rest. I gave you instructions so that if the worst happened, the most lives would still be spared. NOT so that you could ignore them!"

It was a rare burst of temper from Alydia; usually she was so in control of the world that if one thing went wrong, she could pull any of a dozen little strings to make things right again. But this situation was different, it was far more delicate and had much higher stakes.

So she stood there, sides heaving to take in the angry pants of air sustaining the thief, glaring down at the boy who stood taller than she did.

"Well? What did you hear when I told you to take them back to town? SPEAK!"

Already she could hear the hoofbeats of many horses approaching, and even the rumble of a wagon. Vim's foresight had likely saved his life, since she wasn't sure she could have trusted the young St. Donomar to either get him back to town safely for emergency medical treatment or to keep track of fourteen young, frightened children.

[Alydia Ettermire]

I'm just gonna finish this one up.

The young man cringed beneath the withering look piercing him. He didn't have a good answer for her; when he didn't find his niece among the children he had panicked. What sort of a hero panicked and abandoned children? What kind of hero put his own flesh and blood over so many others?

Olivan wasn't a hero, not tonight, and his eyes fixed themselves on his feet. He had come only because he wanted to help. Instead he had messed everything up. Alydia had had to save him, again. He opened his mouth, and a hesitant sound came out, but he was interrupted by the men from Valeena Lake arriving.

"Louisa!" The lead man's voice was filled with both astonishment and relief as he laid eyes on his daughter, the first child to vanish. Other men, entering within seconds, called out to their children or the children of their siblings. More than half of the little ones were met by relatives, and the rest were piled into the wagon with the promise of seeing their parents soon.

Alydia turned away from Olivan abruptly. "Take Sage back to your sister. Use the white mare." She had been kind to the boy earlier, when he was just a little lost child. But her sympathy for and patience with him was gone. She walked away from him with her billowing coat trailing behind her. He could follow the convoy back easily enough, and if he failed to follow instructions this time and lost himself and Sage, it would be on his own head.

The thief walked back to her injured man, who was holding his daughter carefully, happy to have her back safely. Kneeling down beside the little girl, Aly ran a hand gently over her matted brown hair. The child was filthy and her eyes had sunken in from exhaustion, fear, and dehydration, but she'd be fine. All the children would be fine.

"Go with the other kids in the wagon, Stell-stell. I need to take your daddy back to town quickly. I'll get you when you get back to town."

She watched the little girl for a moment as she clung to her father and then let go, climbing into the wagon to be driven back to town. Aly helped Vim back to his feet and onto the large brown horse he'd ridden in. Jumping up in front of him, the red-coated thief - no...today, she had been a Detective - turned the horse around and started rushing them back to town. Vim was quite badly hurt, and Alydia needed to get him to a medic as soon as possible.

Behind them, the convoy got moving, carrying precious cargo back to anxious parents. With the exception of Estelle, all children who had relatives come to get them rode with them, and the children in the wagon were too excited to finally be free and on their way home to sit still.

At the very back, lagging behind, a Salvaran teenager and a young child rode back to town. A heaviness weighed on his soul. Why couldn't he do anything right? What would it take for him to become a hero?

[Alydia Ettermire]

Alydia had very nearly run that bay into the ground, rushing Vim to Valeena Lake and a healer. All along the way, the horse seemed to make it his mission to try to brush his rider off beneath low branches or by nearly stumbling over difficult footing. Had Aly been human and night-blind, he'd probably have succeeded. When they finally pulled into town, the poor beast was lathered in sweat and its breath came out in great, heavy pants.

Fortunately for both her and Vim, the news that the children might have been found had spread, and townsfolk were gathered in the streets with a mixture of hope or morbid curiosity. They didn't know which children had survived, which had been harmed, and which were all right.

Alydia hopped off the horse, and barely were her feet on the ground when she was surrounded by people, each one asking how the children were, which children had survived, and who had been responsible. The questions came one on top of the other, from all sides, and each person was shouting so that their question could be heard.

"ENOUGH! All of the children are all right. They are on their way and will be here shortly. The kidnapper was Lou Dwin, and he is dead. More urgently, Vim needs help."

As soon as the news hit the ears of worried relatives and neighbors, the tension that had been so heavy in the air shattered. The shouted questions turned to excited murmurs and relieved sobs, and more importantly, at least to Aly, a few men picked the injured Vim up from off the horse's back and carried him off to the local medic's house. With care, the big guy would probably survive.



~*~*~

It was nearly half an hour later when the wagon and men returned with the children, and except to pick up Estelle and take her home to feed her, Alydia kept herself aloof from the crowd. She would have taken the thanks of grateful parents graciously, but that wasn't what she wanted. What she wanted to do was just watch families embrace the children they'd thought they'd lost forever. That was the part that made it all worthwhile.

When she'd been a detective, the hardest cases had been the ones involving children. Child murders had been the second worst. At least with a body right there in front of them, the family could begin to cope with the loss and move on, even as a member of law enforcement hunted down the killer to bring to justice. It was the kidnappings that were the worst. Most kidnappings, if the children weren't found quickly, turned into murder. But as long as their child was gone, the family had a hope that they'd be reunited with their little one and a breathless fear that terrible things were happening and they'd never see them again.

That combination of hope and fear was paralyzing. Parents didn't know which way to turn, whether they should join the search themselves or if it was best to wait at home. Many would cling to little items treasured by their children, because that might be the very last part of them they had.

Aly knew that fear very well. It had been plaguing her since communications had been cut off from Raiaera, since Dex had gone missing, since darkness had once more reared its ugly head in the world and threatened all those she held dear.

In Vim's home, she drew a bath for Stell-stell so the little girl could clean up and then heated up dinner so the child could have a good meal for the first time in a week.

"Aunt Aly?" The little girl had come out of the bath with her light brown hair tousled, but now that she was clean, it was easy to see that aside from a few scrapes and bruises, she'd come through unscathed. It gave Aly an indescribable amount of relief to see that little freckled face with her father's hazel eyes again.

The Alerean Elf set a plate down on the table and sat down at the place next to it. "What is it, Stell-stell?"

The little girl hopped into the seat and poked at the food despondently. "Will my daddy be all right?"

Aly stood up, grabbed a hairbrush off the counter, and went to work on the little one's hair. "He'll be fine. He got a little beat up holding back the monster, but he's being taken care of now. He'll be back with you tomorrow, and your Uncle Lore is coming to help for a few days until your daddy is back on his feet."

Estelle made a face, wrinkling her nose. "Uncle Lore is boring and has a lot of rules."

Aly laughed. "That he does. He even has lots of rules for me...but it's just how he knows to deal with us. He loves us both very much, in his own way. You'll understand when you're older."

"People always say that, Aunt Aly! Always!"

"I know," the thief said with a small smile, working through the last snarl and starting to weave a loose braid into the girl's hair. "And I know it's frustrating. But it's also true. You learn a lot as you grow, get experience, and sometimes you don't even know that you are. And when you have learned, when you have that experience, then you'll understand. It's just not something that can be explained away. You can't understand it in here," she tapped the top of Estelle's head, "until you understand it in here." She reached down to tap over her heart.

"Love is a tricky thing like that, Stell-stell."

The girl pouted. "I wish you could stay with me. Or Uncle Dex. Uncle Dex has been gone a long time."

Aly gave a slight nod, sitting back down. "I know. And that's why I can't stay, because I would. But I have to find your Uncle Dex, as well as your Uncles Sintta and Kelvar, and your Aunt Hyanda."

"I have a lot of uncles and aunts I've never met."

"Yes, you have. Now, come on. Let's get you ready for bed, and I'll take you over to see your daddy first thing in the morning."


~*~*~

Dawn had barely broken over the tree tops with its bright, clear light when Aly was shaken awake by little hands. The little girl had hardly been able to sleep she was so excited to be able to spend time with her father, and wouldn't even take breakfast without him.

Estelle burst into the healer's house, throwing the door open so hard that it banged open like a gunshot.

A few of the children were in there as well, being treated for exhaustion and dehydration, and the door slamming open woke the parents that had stayed with them. Estelle didn't even notice, running over to her father's bed and jumping up into his open arms.

Alydia shut the door softly and watched. This was the one reunion she'd been most eager to see, the one that made it really worthwhile. The one that in her mind made this endeavor a success, and the one that, if it hadn't occurred, would have made it a failure. After months of frustration with the Raiaerans and Dex not communicating with her, this one moment with Vim's arms around his little girl felt like a breath of fresh air after an eternity of suffocating.

A hand was placed on her arm, and Aly glanced over to one of the mothers waiting for her son to recover. "Thank you. Thank you, so much. If you hadn't come..."

The thief reached over and patted the woman's hand. "You don't need to thank me. Seeing this," she motioned to encompass all the families in the room that had been reunited, healed. "This is why I did it. An end like this, in a case like this...it's the rare one that keeps people like me from giving up altogether when children go missing."

The woman nodded, then returned to her child's bedside.

Lore arrived shortly before morning was out, and when he did, Aly took to the road again, going to catch a boat to Salvar.

This mission was done. But she still had a greater mission ahead of her.

[Taskmienster]

A Demon’s Arithmetic: Sorry that it seems that a person would start it, and lose interest after a page… only to have another person pick it up and lose interest as well. Those kinda things erk me to no end. But, as many of us have done, we pick up where the thread was left off and soldier on! Good to see you back. I’m going to be giving commentary based on where I see it’s needed. If the Mathemagician or Olivian come back and would like commentary based on their personal additions to the thread they are more than welcome to ask away and I’d be happy to provide such. As it stands, most of my commentary, or lack thereof, is going to be directed at WitW… with a heavy eye aimed at the last couple posts as requested.


Continuity 7
Setting 6
Pacing 6.5
Dialogue 8
Action 6
Persona 6.5
Technique 6
Mechanics 8
Clarity 7
:: Said I wouldn’t say much for those other than WinW, but Math… some of the stuff you wrote went straight over my head. It’s so unique, that explanation on what any of it means – at times – would be muy helpful.
Wild Card 6

:: The last couple posts seemed to be rushed, as if you wanted to get it just out of the way. Though that is to be expected at times, and understood. I’ve done that more than enough times. However, it made the pacing of the thread change, not dramatically, but enough that it was a bit off-setting. Not a whole lot of advanced technique used, probably because the will to just get it out of the way was more important. Gramatically, it was very well written, though there seemed to be at least one run-on sentence that drew away from the pacing and the story itself at times. Other than that, not bad, the rust isn’t thick, lol.

Score: 67


Rewards:

Math: 640 exp | 100 gold
Olivian : 1000 exp | 150 gold
WinW : 2000 exp | 200 gold

[Taskmienster]

Exp and GP added.

As always, if you'd like to hit me up you're welcome to at any time.