Kay’s thoughts roiled as he and Eleniah followed Alahna even deeper into the palace, out of corridors decorated and ready for visitors and nobles to see and into interior passages that focused on utility over beauty. They passed by servants and workers who bowed and got out of the way, halls thronged with the manpower that ran the palace making way for quieter and less populated areas. With no real life experience to draw from, Kay’s ind went to fiction. The Thing came to mind first, followed by other works with the same theme. Throughout each of them, there was one overarching problem, one that Kay had to deal with here and now.
“Wait!”
Alahna froze in place before slowly turning to look at him. Her guards immediately shifted into a ready position, scanning the area for hostiles. They were in a narrow corridor, having left every other person they’d seen behind.
“What?”
“Have you found a way to tell who’s real and who’s a shapeshifter?” Kay asked, feeling mildly frantic.
Alahna frowned at him and gestured down the hallway. “It would be better if we talked about this in private. The room we’ve secured everything in is soundproof. I don’t want to go starting a panic in my home where people suspect each other of being fakes, that will only lead to rampant violence.”
“If you don’t have a way of testing for fakes, how do you know there isn’t an ambush waiting for you in this room you think is secure. How do I know that you’re really Queen Alahna and this isn’t an ambush to take out the one person who might be able to do something.”
Her frown became an angry glare. “I… Fuck, I can’t actually argue against that.” She reached up with one hand and brushed through her hair. “The fakes don’t seem to take people’s memories, so they can’t fool people the victim knows well, but you haven’t seen any of that so I could be lying. Shit!”
One of her guards took a step forward. “Your majesty-“
She silenced him with one raised hand and looked to Kay. “Working through the logic, if I was a fake it would have been just as easy to ambush you when you came to meet me earlier than it would be to lead you here. In fact, now that you know that there are shapeshifters about you’re on edge and ready for something to happen, so it would have been easier to attack you before this. Based on that, can you trust me enough to follow me to our destination? We’ll all be on the lookout for an attack and you can keep all of us in sight so we can’t surprise you. I’m hoping that letting you access the evidence we have will let you be able to tell who’s real and who’s fake.”
Kay surreptitiously drew blood from his veins and let is bead against his skin, forming a thing layer under his clothes that he could form into armor at a moments notice. “Alright.”
Alahna nodded and whirled back around, moving at a much faster pace down the hall. They quickly reached a closed door with two guards blocking access who moved to attention when they saw their queen.
“You two,” She said, “Open the door and step inside.”
They obeyed, almost bumping into two more guards immediately on the other side of the door.
Alahna waited for a moment, then ordered all four of them to stand against the wall and gestured for Kay to follow her in. It was obviously an out-of-the-way storage room repurposed to hold the evidence they’d found, which as Alahna had said wasn’t much. There was one lonely table with a glass tank holding black viscous looking goo that had Kay’s hairs standing on end as he looked at it.
“That’s all we have left of one of the fakes we found.” Alahna said as Kay slowly approached the fish tank esque container. “A few of the servants started acting strangely, so we started having them watched. Thought it was a standard blackmail or bribery scheme for information or potentially an assassination attempt. One of the people we were watching made their way into an area they weren’t allowed to go and when they were confronted they attacked. They were much more dangerous than the person they were pretending to be should have been and the guards on site were forced to go for fatal blows to defend themselves. When they died they melted into this…” She waved her hand at it, “Fluid. The first one didn’t even leave the fluid behind, it rapidly evaporated. The second one got caught in similar circumstances, but after they melted this remained behind instead of vanishing.”
Kay crouched down and stared at the fluid through the glass. It wasn’t as strong as when the giant proboscis thing had appeared at Avalon, but there was a generally similar feeling of instinctive distaste and a need to destroy, like an itch he needed to scratch and couldn’t quite reach. “Lauren.”
Lauren moved next to him and crouched down when he pointed. “Your majesty?”
“Do you feel that?”
“Yes, your majesty. It’s unpleasant but not overpowering.”
Kay glanced up at her armored face, “Take a walk around, see how it changes at a distance.” He flicked his eyes at the guards against the wall.
“Of course, your majesty.”
“Did they bleed this?” Kay asked Alahna.
“No, while they were fighting they took injuries like a normal person, including bleeding like normal. It was only after they died that they turned into this residue.”
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“So we can’t just cut people to see if they bleed red blood.” Kay reached into his Inventory and pulled out a small cup. Being incredibly careful not to touch the goop directly he caught a little bit of it. He pushed a drop of his blood out of his finger and let it fall into the cup. It sizzled as it made contact, and the gooey residue began to burn away. “That confirms twice over that this stuff is definitely eldritch.”
“My source confirmed it as such after we ran into them. We hadn’t received word of any of the incursions elsewhere in the world before so finding out that we needed to be looking for anything eldritch at all was a surprise, let alone finding it right in the middle of my palace posing as my people.”
“I wonder what kind it is,” Kay mused aloud as he let the sample he’d taken drop back into the tank.
“What do you mean, ‘what kind’?”
“’Eldritch’ is just a word. Depending on who you ask you might get different answers if you asked for a definition. The System defines it as anything from another reality that is inherently dangerous to this reality, but there’s a lot of possibilities that fall into that broad category. You’ve got monstrosities that want to consume all matter, concepts from a world beyond that don’t belong here replacing those that do, things that eat dreams, things that warp and twist living things around them, and more beyond those. Two of those I’ve run into, maybe three, but there’s more I’ve read about that are insane and terrifying. So what does this do? What is it that makes it dangerous to our world?” Kay stared at the goo. “Has anyone come into contact with this?”
“Some of it splattered on the guards that fought both shapeshifters. I’ve had them looked over by healers and watched, no one has expressed any symptoms or performed any strange behaviors.”
Kay turned to her with a slight frown. “Without a live shapeshifter to test on, I can’t absolutely guarantee anything, but I have a healing Skill that donates blood to people. Combined with the anti-eldritch properties in my blood, I can probably flush out any fakes among your people. The problem is getting anyone to agree.”
“Oh, that won’t be a problem. If my people need to cooperate to deal with this, they’ll cooperate. The real problem is testing people without letting word of why we’re doing it get out. We can’t have people randomly wondering if the person next to them is an otherworldly shapeshifter out to get them, they’ll panic and there will be violence everywhere. We also can’t let the fakes know that we can possibly find them, because as soon as they find out they’ll start attacking, moving their plans ahead, or doing something else we can’t even predict.”
“You’re more ahead of this than I’d expect.”
“Conspiracies are conspiracies, at their core there’s not a lot different from one to the other. Not knowing who our enemy is or what they want is a stumbling block, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals.” Alahna swept her gaze over the room. “My source has assured me that if you could demonstrate the ability you just did that you’re the real thing. Could you please go ahead and test everyone in here, including myself and your people? If we do that, we can pull my top people, the ones that I trust implicitly both in terms of running my government and in keeping their mouths shut, and start clearing them using those with us.”
“I’d have to cut you and send my blood into your body with a Skill.”
Alahna waved her hand at the four guards against the wall. “Start with them, then do my personal detail. Once they’ve all gone through it you can do me, then your own people.” She turned to glare at her bodyguards who were looking unhappy, but stopped and turned back to Kay. “Please.”
“Of course.” Kay glanced at Lauren who was standing off to the side after circling the room a few times, ending up by complete coincidence near the four guards who’d been watching over the room. She gave him the tiniest of shrugs.
Kay had each of the guards present an arm and made tiny incisions in them, sending trickles of blood into each of them with Blood Transfusion. None of them reacted and from what Kay could tell with his Skill they were all normal people with nothing eldritch in them. After those four guards were clear he tested Alahna’s detail, then Alahna herself. They all took it stoically and didn’t react. He finished with Eleniah, who had been standing silently by the door the whole time.
“You alright?”
“I’m fine,” She whispered back, “Just been thinking. From the eldritch research we’ve done, there are two options I can think of. Either people have been taken over and turned into something else, or they’re literally being replaced with shapeshifters. Alahna went directly to shapeshifters and you followed her idea, but there’s every chance the things that attacked when confronted aren’t shapeshifters, they’re the people they seem to be, just turned into something else. We should stay in groups and check our food and water.”
Alahna had moved closer, easily able to hear Eleniah’s whispering in the small room. “If they were the original people that had been taken over or changed or whatever, wouldn’t they have their original memories and be able to act less suspiciously? Taking them over would be useless if they don’t retain anything of who they were.”
“This is an alien… thing from another reality with a mindset completely unlike our own. It might not even have a mindset, it could be something animalistic that acts according to instinct.”
“I don’t believe that’s the case,” Alahna shook her head, “They acted intelligent, and not like they were mimicking behavior, they made actual smart decisions. The reason that they came to our attention in the first place is that they were asking questions about sensitive topics and trying to get into restricted areas. One of them managed to talk their way past the first layer of guards in order to get where they were when they eventually got confronted, another of the ones we suspect has been replaced has been actively working to frame another worker for document thefts we’ve been tracking. They’re working intelligently and toward a purpose.”
“That’s good information.” Kay finished threading blood into Eleniah’s arm and disconnected his Skill. “That lets us narrow down the possibilities into what you’ve already stated, but just giving us the conclusions without the background information is a good way to work us into a corner.”
“… You’re right, I apologize. I only remembered those details when the idea got brought up, but that helps no one. The first people we should clear should be my advisers and officials, but also investigators and spycatchers, they have all of the pertinent details and information that I might forget or not have even learned.”
“Good. We’ll need their help after we clear them, because I can assist with my Skills and racial abilities, but I’ve never run an investigation or tried to root out shapeshifters before, I have people for that.”
Alahna smiled. “Thankfully, so do I, and they’re very good at what they do. I’m very glad you came to help us, but I won’t be making you do everything on your own. A skilled investigator can definitely be assigned to help you, and a full support staff as necessary. We just have to make sure none of them have been replaced first.”