Iz was sitting on her bed. She had, not quite a black eye, but an unpleasant orange bruise on the corner of it.

“Oh my god, Iz, are you—what the hell happened?”

“Huh? Um…” She looked off into the distance. “I… Yeah, I went and saw Nesr Wald to confirm Roc’s story about the footprints. They’re not impossible to fake, but it would take a lot of work, and Nesr Wald didn’t see the point since the footprints didn’t match anyone, definitely not Roc. And they didn’t even seem like Unkmirean-style boots. So… it was kinda weird, right?”

“Iz, I’m asking about your bruise.”

“Oh, that, yeah.” Her voice was still quiet and distant. “We had another altercation.”

“God, Iz—” She sat down and pulled the other girl into a hug. “Why didn’t you ask us to come with you? After what happened last time?”

“I don’t know. I was just caught up in everything, and—I wasn’t planning to antagonize him this time, or anything. I thought it would be fine if I was just polite, but he, I don’t know. Maybe I was too deferential, ’cause he, like, he got really…” She gestured awkwardly to the upper half of her torso. “Anyway, I kinda knocked him off, and he elbowed me or something—”

“Oh, fuck.” Myra rubbed one of her eyes, processing what Iz was saying. “Yeah, he was—he was like the last time. With Shera. I tried to, uh, redirect his attention so you would all be safer, but it really wasn’t my most successful idea…”

She shook her head. “You didn’t think to warn me about that?”

“I thought I did?” Didn’t I? “I told Shera. You were there on the train!”

“There was a lot of information on the train—Look, it’s fine, Myra.” Myra knew it wasn’t.

◆

Myra could only apologize for failing to properly convey the dangers. They had to put it aside, though, because things started to happen soon after that. The Unkmirean generals showed up to hire the murk bogs’ services, which were accepted with the same enthusiasm and fanfare as Myra remembered. This prompted the girls, for a time, to focus back on some of the big-picture questions.

“What d-d’you know about Unkmirean politics?” Shera started.

Myra cracked her knuckles. “Not a whole lot, honestly. Almost everything I know is from the imperial side… Emperor Raine’s been trying to subjugate it for as long as I can remember. Unkmire is rich in lumber and has a deep magical tradition, much of which remains inscrutable to outsiders to this day. He probably wants to mine for all its secrets.” Myra thought of the Klein bottle. “But he hasn’t been very successful, for reasons I don’t understand.”

“Raine is a one-trick pony,” Iz cut in, her voice hard. “Everything he wants, he gets by holding the Common Library over someone’s head. Unkmire doesn’t bite on that. They don’t need it.”

“H-he’s at a military disadvantage, too,” Shera added. “He doesn’t have a clue how to operate in these forests. Nobody does, except the Unkmireans.”

Iz coughed. “Yeah. That, too. Though speaking of the military… There’s these tensions with Briktone.”

“You’re talking about all these tensions with the pirates and the trade routes? What about them?”

“Well… the whole thing kind of reminds me of the shit with Quistil and Dakteria.”

Myra had to think back to history class for that one. “That’s where Quistil capitulated everything to the empire in exchange for overpowering Dakteria,” Myra said. “You think this could be something similar? Unkmire wants help against Briktone?” Myra didn’t know much about it, other than that the actions of Quistil’s government had been obscenely unpopular amongst the population, and everyone involved was practically thrown out of the country. The only winner was, as always, Kurtwell Raine.

“It would shock me if Briktone relations weren’t a factor. I’m sure word of the summit has reached Briktone already, so if they think there’s a chance that Unkmire is about to collaborate with the empire, they’re probably not happy about that. And I can’t help but notice that the Sage of Seafaring is at the summit…”

◆

When they were finally ready to take a crack at the vault, Myra made a show of thinking hard about the Klein Bottle security layer for about fifteen minutes, then solved it. Then she did the same thing for the gargoyle layer. (She thought it would be fun to prank Iz by pretending she’d solved it ‘properly,’ but her friend just dismissed the whole thing as ‘incomprehensible pseudo-math garbage.’)

Then they got to the giant combination lock, where Myra had gotten stuck. Rather than stay around to inspect it, though, Roc suggested they leave immediately and inform Geel of their progress. “We’ll let the crypto-cracking team take care of this,” he said confidently.

“… Yinz have a crypto-cracking team?” Shera asked.

The crypto-cracking team was a three-man band, three of the tallest murk bogs members. Not one of them appeared to be a mage; their weapons of choice included a large metal bat, a crowbar, and a pair of bronze knuckles. They seemed genuinely pleased to meet the girls.

“Mother of hen! Two of those layers in one day?” Knuckles said, loud and impressed. “You lot are right geniuses!”

“Well, it’s, uh, our job,” Myra said as modestly as she could.

“I guess that means it’s time we do ours!” he said. “You all take a well-deserved break, you hear?” He gave her a friendly pat on the back as he walked by.

Laughing and chattering, the group strode away from the platform.

“Myra,” Iz hissed when they were gone, her face frozen in horror. “They’re going to go torture someone for the lock combination!”

“Wait, that doesn’t make sense,” Myra said. “Why couldn’t they do that for the other layers?”

“I don’t know, maybe the Briktone agency gave them a heads up about this lock or someth—it doesn’t matter! What do you think they’re going to do with that baseball bat?”

“Maybe they can use the bat to like… amplify the internal vibrations inside the crystal lock?”

Iz sighed. “Sure. I guess they could be doing that.”

“Well,” Myra said uncomfortably. “It’s like we were talking about the other day. There’s no consequences to anything, right? If they hurt someone, it’ll be, uh—”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Right,” she said, with a tone of surrender. “I get it.”

“Hey!” Geel said, walking over. “Don’t mean to interrupt your stimulating speculation, but we got a few maintenance requests that built up while you all were away. Seems like you all are free to take care of it, yeah?”

“I’ll get on it,” Myra said.

The girls split their tasks, and as Myra wandered off towards the weapons shed for a couple of rune inspections, she considered that idea. No consequences. And she thought about what that really meant.

◆

With the unexpected lull in vault-breaking, it was a good time for Iz to make due on her intent to go to Ealichburgh to look at the lock. The plan was for her to contact Myra if she found anything of note, but that didn’t happen; she returned uneventfully with a bundle of notes in her arms. And it wasn’t a moment too soon, honestly. Covering for her absence had been more awkward than Myra anticipated.

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on in that door,” Iz said, though it was the same kind of tone she’d use when she said she didn’t know what the hell was going on in her homework, a problem that usually resolved itself. “But given that I didn’t really get a chance to sit through elemental composition this time, it was a tall order. I bet you know more about the subject than me at this point.”

“I dunno,” Myra said, wielding the bluntest vaguery she knew in order to dodge having to admit she was too intimidated by the subject to take a crack at it in 13 loops. “In an earlier loop, you told me it was kind of like an art. Maybe we should just forget about all these aural… tensor products or whatever they are, and just… think about what it means, conceptually, to combine the ‘information’ and ‘vacuum’ elements…?”

Shera opened her mouth, but Iz spoke first. “Anyway, that’s not all I got on that, but I dug up what I was looking for on Dr. Geel Hattuck. Er, you all might wanna sit down for this.”

Shera carefully sat down, while Myra levitated herself to the ground.

“Okay, so… nobody could prove anything and nobody talks about it anymore. But a bunch of Hattuck’s old colleagues believe he’s behind The Feral Child of Falmiir Village.”

Shera slowly put her hand to her mouth. Myra shivered.

Oh god.

The feral child incident…

It was… Myra nearly wretched just thinking about it. It was a long time ago, but everybody knew the story.

The whole thing must have started thirty or forty years ago, by Myra’s understanding, when a small village in a remote part of Halnya had been destroyed in a flood. There had allegedly been no survivors, but the husk of the village—which was called Falmiir—remained in the form of its scattered, half-destroyed huts.

Years later, it gained a reputation for being haunted. Anyone who visited said they heard strange sounds, like someone walking just out of sight, and they reported that stuff they set down would disappear or move.

The first incident to gain widespread attention was an actual death, where a journalist died in what looked like an elaborate freak accident involving a lamp. A year later, a group of teenagers went to the village on a dare; when they returned, they claimed that something had ‘hunted’ them, prompting them to leave immediately by unanimous decision. Finally, two years after that, a group of ‘occult hunters’ went to investigate and all died, seemingly having killed each other in a cycle, prompting a flurry of insane theories.

Eventually, the authorities unraveled the complex mechanisms that had been employed in the multiple deaths, and they even captured the culprit—though the individual seemed to be incapable of communicating with them or understanding the situation of his arrest.

The whole truth of the matter came out when the research paper was published.

The Feral Child of Falmiir Village: A Case Study in the Significance of Linguistics to Psychological Development.

The paper had been published anonymously, sent out for peer review alongside the likes of n=50 double-blind studies testing color perception among university volunteers. The paper described, in detail, how the author had rescued a toddler from the flood and took it upon themselves to raise them for an experiment. A sick, twisted experiment to see if a human raised in isolation, with no language skills, could learn other kinds of ‘intelligence,’ problem-solving, spatial reasoning, puzzles and engineering… and the implementation of death trap games.

The paper was freely available still, in fact. When Myra was in primary school, people would always dare each other to go check it out from the library, and then there were ridiculous rumors that if you tried to read it, you’d be cursed…

That was just kids making stuff up, obviously. The events in Falmiir, though, were very real.

“Oh god…” she muttered, still shivering. “He’s such a pain to deal with, but I never imagined… Fuck. I didn’t even know they had a suspect at all.”

“Wait, th-that whole thing, it was before we were even alive,” Shera said. “Geel Hattuck only disappeared until 13 years ago.”

“Well, that might not even be connected.” Iz sighed. “If he is the villain in that story, nobody could prove anything. He got off scot-free and kept his job for around a decade after the incident. Eventually, people started critically reexamining his early notable work for unrelated reasons… Originally, the guy rose to prominence in academic psychology through a series of experiments that he claimed illuminated ‘asshole behavior.’ That work was well-respected for a while, but eventually, the consensus started to look less favorably on his work. The perspective became that his experiments didn’t prove very much other than that he, personally, was an asshole. It kinda kicked off the whole ‘replication crisis’ in psychology.” Iz referred to the phenomenon where the entire field of research psychology had started looking inward and realized most of their foundational experiments were unrepeatable garbage. “And… that was shortly before he disappeared.”

She’d been talking for a while, so she took a deep breath. “That’s his legacy, that we learned about in psych class. The ‘feral child’ part of it, Professor Loakley says, is just speculation, but the people Geel worked with wayyy back in the day were absolutely convinced he was invo—”

She was interrupted by the crunch of a boot on the ground.

“What are you ladies talking about back here?”

It was the gruff voice of Nesr Wald. Hands at his hips, he was looking at them with a cautious gaze of tense suspicion.

“We’re just shooting the breeze,” Myra said.

“You’re shooting the what now?”

“Oh, sorry, idiom. Uhh, we’re just talking about gossip from back home.”

He shifted his attention to Iz. “Where have you been, girl?”

“I had to restock some parts,” she lied.

Nesr Wald grunted with some ambiguous meaning.

“Do you need anything?” Myra asked. “If you’re trying to insinuate we’ve been slacking, I’ll have you know we’ve finished all our tasks for the day.”

“I’m not insinuating anything,” he said. “I just think you lot have been awfully suspicious, haven’t you, always chatting about where nobody can hear you. I got a report you were heard questioning the crypto team’s methods the other day.”

“We were just curious,” Iz said. “We don’t have a problem with their methods.”

“Questioning. What’s to question? You know what kind of organization we are.” He spat on the ground. “Can’t understand why we hired a bunch of naive brats like you all.”

Myra didn’t even respond, since it seemed he was barely even talking to them at that point, instead turning to walk away.

“Irresponsible, I don’t even know what he was thinking… and now I have to deal with…” Mid-stride, he put his pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, and his head exploded into pieces. The bang was ear-shattering, and blood and bone and brain matter launched every which way, spraying the girls’ clothes, their hair, and of course their faces. Iz let out a scream, not like she had before, this one shrill and loud, and Myra was sure she’d hurt her own vocal cords. Shera shouted something incomprehensible. For Myra’s part, she didn’t scream, but she did start to feel very faint, and her vision started to blur. Logically, there must have been a thunk of some sort when Nesr Wald hit the ground, but Myra never processed it.

They stood there in shock.

Geel was the first to arrive. Chrysji was shortly behind him, and then a few others. Geel looked nothing like she had ever seen him, the wry smirk nowhere to be seen, his face hard as a rock.

“We were ar-arguing about something pointless,” Myra said, trying to keep her breath under control. “And then he did the fake g-gun-to-his-head thing—but he—I don’t kn-know.”

“Maintaining those enchantments is your responsibility, is it not?” Geel said coldly.

“I—I did all the inspections!” Myra cried.

Chrysji didn’t waste any time inspecting the pistol herself. “The enchantment’s not even on,” Chrysji said. “Look.” She held the pistol out so they could all see the safety lever. “What a—damn idiot.” There was a quiver in her voice—not much, but more emotion than Myra could remember seeing from the woman. She ran a hand through her hair.

Geel took the pistol, looked at it for a bit, then tossed it over the edge of the platform. “Nothing for it, then.” And to the girls’ shock, he kicked the dead man’s body with enormous force, sending it rolling off the edge too, letting it crunch against the branches as it went, down, down, down. Thunk, thunk, thunk.

“You know how it goes,” he said solemnly. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Everyone!” He projected his voice to reach the entire platform. “To the Well!”