The atmosphere in Crazy Xim's cafe was somewhat strained this morning.
Each of them had, of course, heard the news, and yet they had been drawn - as if trapped in the gravitational pull of an especially malignant black hole - to their familiar morning meeting.
Irek was on his second Mana Potion - and third migraine - pulsing out as much Good Cheer as he thought he could get in motion without pissing anyone off. He had long prided himself on being able to subtly alter the emotions of this little group without revealing his hand, but the trick to it was little and often.
He'd been keeping them on a fairly even keel for almost two bells now, and he was worried that familiarity was going to breed contempt.
The funny thing was, despite the fact that an event they had long dedicated themselves to bring about was coming to pass, nobody was actually feeling remotely happy. Nor, it turned out, did they have anything to talk about which wasn't concerned with planning the violent death of a certain High Priestess.
Irek met Hel's eyes and raised his eyebrows again. She gave a little shake of her head in response. It turned out that she didn't have many better ideas than he did. Well, wasn’t that wonderful. He felt a wobble in the emotional state of one of the two
It was like pouring water into a desert.
"What the fuck are we doing still here?" They all turned to Tenia who, to be fair, was pretty high on the list of them most likely to lose her shit first.
"We've met here every day for the last five years. I kind of think it would look pretty damn suspicious if, the morning after a brutal murder, a bunch of Level 40s with rather destructive classes suddenly stopped meeting for breakfast. What do you think?" Hel's voice was tight, and each of them surreptitiously refreshed their defensive Skills.
"What do you think happened?" asked Charl for the sixth time since they sat down.
Arwel and Erwal gave a strange screaming noise in reply that caused silence to fall amongst the rest of the patrons. Hel glanced towards Irek and indicated he needed to do his fucking job and ramp up the levels of chill. The last thing they needed was her sisters freaking out and stripping flesh from bones.
"Look, I'm just going to come out and say it. It wasn't me.” Tenia crossed her arms over her chest and sat back, glaring at the others.
Charl nodded. "Me neither."
Irek opened his arms wide. "Goes without saying.”
Hel was aware they were all looking at her and her sisters. “It's not quite that simple.”
That hardly smoothed out the growing tension.
"I could be wrong," the
"Well, first of all, why don't we all keep our fucking voices down. I hear the Security Service are pretty damn motivated to close this case.”
"Fair enough, Hel, But what do you mean ‘it's not that simple?’” It took a lot to get Charl's goat going, but there were signs that particular ruminant was off and running downhill.
"And stop fucking messing with our emotions!" Tenia pushed out a quick screech of Banshee towards Irek, which made the
Hel flicked a gust of wind towards Tenia, lifting her—and holding her—into the air while simultaneously catching Irek and putting him back on the righted chair.
"Let's all settle the fuck down."
If the group's antics near the window disturbed the rest of the patrons, they didn't show it. To be fair, a little light mayhem was hardly the sort of thing to cause comment in this particular establishment. Nevertheless, the charged scent of personal shields being raised wafted through the air.
Charl snarled and began to increase in size. Hel sucked all the oxygen out of his lungs and quickly returned him to his normal size, spluttering as he did so. She wagged her finger back and forth. "Stop it!"
There was a moment of tense silence.
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Tenia gave up struggling and hung sulkily, letting her power bleed from her hands. Irek dropped Good Cheer and began channeling Conciliation whilst Charl struggled to breathe, going increasingly red as his lungs refused to inflate. The
"Do you want me to explain, or do you want to be dicks?"
"To be honest," Irek said, increasing his output and taking yet another Mana potion, "it'd be great if we could do both."
"Well, boo-fucking-hoo." Hel released Charl's lungs and let Tenia fall, unceremoniously, back to the ground. "Let's try to remember who we are – or at least used to be - and keep the total fucking shambles to a minimum."
"For the one of us who appears to need to explain how she might have killed our target without mentioning it to the rest of us, you're being pretty punchy this morning." Tenia glowered.
"Look, as I said, it's not that simple.” She glanced at her sisters who continued to sit staring up at the Temple. "It was just before the tenth bell. I was locking up for the night as usual and-" she paused, flashing back to her blind panic of the night before- "well, I realised neither Arwel nor Erwel were in the house.”
They all turned to look at the
“Is it unusual for me to lose track of two beings who have the ability to drain the life force out of anyone they make physical contact with? Who I have had to give my personal assurance to the Council will not take another life in this city? Yeah, pretty fucking unusual.”
Irek pushed down on his active Skill a little more. As usual, though, he found that Hel was curiously resistant. In theory, someone of a similar level couldn't be able to push back in this way. However, he couldn't ever remember being able to affect her overmuch.
"So, what happened?" Charl had caught his breath and didn't seem to be holding any grudges over his brief suffocation.
“Well, I knew there was only going to be one place they could have gone. I mean," she jutted her chin towards them, "look at them!"
Her two sisters were staring idly out of the window, their eyes locked on the Third Floor of the Celestial Temple. "It's all they live for. And I use 'live’ in the broadest of all possible senses."
"So, you're saying they killed her?" Tenia’s voice dripped with skepticism.
Hel's eyes darkened, tempests swirling in their pupils. “I'm not sure at what stage in our relationship you decided you could speak to me in such a way. I would urge you to reconsider the advisability of your tone.”
There was a brief moment when Irek could feel Tenia preparing to make an issue of it, and he switched to his most powerful Skill, Mood Killer, which, in theory, should take the heat out of any situation.
"Tell your pet manipulator that if he doesn't get out of my head, I'm going to be visiting his dreams tonight, and then we will be having some fun." Tenia's eyes were fixed on Hel.
"Irek. Please." Hel's voice was soft, and with reluctance, he released his Skill. "Now, are we going to play nice, or do I need to remind you the difference between being a monster when asleep versus actually being a real and present one right here."
“To be fair, Hel, it sounds like it's you that's saying you fucked up," Charl chipped in. "Just tell us what happened."
Perhaps realising that when a
When the atmosphere calmed slightly, she continued, the hard-edge vanishing from her voice. “It wasn't hard to work out where the two of them had gone and I caught up with them just after they'd entered the Temple. "
"And the
"At that time of night, it was a skeleton staff, and, well, we all know how good my sisters are at getting in places they shouldn't. Anyway, they'd somehow baffled the Portal Stone and were slipping through to the Third Floor. I caught them both, but I was dragged through alongside them."
"And?" Tenia seemed to have forgotten her previous antagonism and was leaning forward in interest."
“She was still in there. I could hear her arguing with someone within her chamber.”
As she spoke, Hel was transported back to the night before, Anwel and Erwel straining against the leashes of air she had placed around them. She'd never truly struggled to control them before, but now - so close to their quarry - they were almost insane with fury. Hel had needed to pop a bubble of oxygen around them all to deaden the noise their snarling and wailing was causing.
She remembered that the light coming from beneath the High Priestess's door had cast a sinister glow around the rest of the floor, and the shadows cast by the
For a moment, Hel had considered letting them loose and adding her own power to the assault. This was an opportunity that surely would not occur again. In all their years of dogging d'Avec's steps, she had never stayed inside the Temple this late after the close of business. It was what had made it so impossible for her to waylay. For a glorious moment, she could see the end of their long vigil.
But then reality kicked in.
They'd planned this so carefully for a reason. Without Charl, Irek or Tenia, there would have been no realistic possibility of success. Even all working together, she put their chances at 50/50, but with only half the team, they were just going to be free XP.
"I have given you my answer," the voice of the High Priestess exploded out from behind the door. Hel could not make out to whom she was speaking and pulled quickly back on her sisters, dragging them back towards the Portal Stone.
“And you just left without doing anything?"
Hel ignored Tenia’s scorn. She was suddenly struck by something she hadn't registered at the time. There had been a dampness to the air on the Third Floor, which was wholly unusual around the high under the Priestess.
Had there been ... water coming from under her chamber door?
"What happened next, HeI?" Charl was leaning forward, the table creaking under his weight.
Hel put that thought away. "We got out of there as fast as we could. But I can tell you, Gianna d'Avec was hale and hearty just past the tenth bell."