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“Did you know car rides used to have a small chance of being fatal?” Charya said. She claimed the seat next to me earlier, babbling and rambling on the way to the crime scene and on the way back.

We were a block or so away from the Maia Planetary Forces headquarters. Yet, the home stretch somehow felt a few years long already. Kelsey fell asleep in the back halfway through the return drive, face smushed against the window pane as she snored and fogged up the glass.

“Like, before cars became near sentient taxis, people had to completely control them aaaaaall the time,” she continued. Kelsey groaned and smacked her head against the window a few times. “So if you made a wrong turn, instead of the system kicking in and saving your dumb butt, you’d have two over-sized metal vehicles smashing into each other! From the way we’re sitting, I think a turn from thaaaaat car,” she pointed at the right side of the intersection ahead of us, “would totally kill me if it didn’t stop while we passed. Unless someone rammed into us from behind, which in that case, goodbye Kelsey! I hardly knew ye, and so from my humble perspective, you might as well have never existed at all.”

“Can we please just put on music next time?” Kelsey said, voice muffled from her current smushening predicament. “I’ll take ambient bathroom noises over this.”

“Aww, I’m so flattered!”

“That really wasn’t a fucking compliment on any level.”

“And I don’t care? You’re so silly.”

“Aha!” I said as I pulled into the MPF parking lot. “Now the real mission begins.”

As soon as the vehicle stopped, Kelsey leaped out as though we committed to a race that risked life and death, while Charya followed her. The woman’s pursuit only prompted Kelsey to pick up the pace. Not to be outdone, I joined the two in their little marathon back to the building.

To my delight, I noticed Ale’s car had pulled into the lot as well. He, Dori and Serena stood in a corner of the lobby, which now looked to be mostly emptied out due to the approaching evening hours.

“Hello!” Ale said and waved. “Your arrival is most fortuitous! A serendipitous arrival that happily coincides with our ever-busy schedules, like a worry that never leaves you, or a word on the tip of your tongue that never quite clears—wait, I don’t think my words apply, since we did plan this all in advance. Did I say anything? It’s awfully gusty in here, maybe we all need to share in some icy beverages and—no, no, warm! Warm. Warmth is nice.”

His smile stretched further across his face. “Someone please say something.”

“I trust you remember who leads here,” I said. “Thank you for the summary, but I believe any further explanations remains in my care.”

“Before we do,” Serena spoke up. She pointed towards the elevator, glancing at the entrance where a few people were talking. “We should go somewhere private. There’s still some stragglers, and you probably don’t wanna get into more trouble than you’re already in.”

“Trouble?” I said.

Serena snorted. “Uh, I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes, you did. You said something just now.”

“Or did I?”

Charya winked in Serena’s direction. “I like you already.”

A loud clicking sound caught my attention. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Kelsey smacking the elevator ‘up’ button over and over again. Next to her, Dori sleep-leaned against the wall.

We returned to the meeting room from before in good time. I quickly began to take notes regarding my own side of the investigation, though it didn’t take long before one of the others from the second team spoke up.

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“Okay before you arrest me for having this,” Ale began, pulling out a pendant, “I promise I just found this at the scene and I didn’t bring it in I hardly even used it I was just testing it and found out how illegal and dangerous it was so OF COURSE I had to recover it, you know I couldn’t possibly—“

As he rambled, I focused more on the object. The second I observed the white gem that shimmered so subtly, I dashed over and nabbed it from his hand. Luckily, he had a light grasp, so I snatched it with one smooth maneuver.

“…Oh,” he said, but didn’t put up much of a fight otherwise. Dori raised his hand in response.

“It makes magic-y crystal things,” he said.

“Light magic,” I chided him. “Not crystal magic. The presentation doesn’t mean anything when it comes to the element at play.”

“You’re not gonna give us a lecture, are you?” Kelsey said. “Just to cover my ass, the job description didn’t require any specific light magic knowledge, and I’m really fucking rusty on that front.”

“I know everything there is to know about it!” Charya put her hands behind her head, crossed her legs and smiled in Kelsey’s direction. “But, like, I’m kind of a genius, so it’s a given.”

“Ah, that’s good to know…” Ale said.

“No, that’s not needed,” I smacked my pen against the board to restore order. “This, along with this,” I took out the dagger and presented both to the group, “Are magical weapons of light. In the house of the victim I alone saw, such abominations appeared absent, but iconography dedicated to the dead god Xaviais, the light god, did show up there. All these victims seem to be involved in something that ties all these pieces of evidence together…”

“Uh—" Ale raised his hand again.

“We’re not in school, just talk,” Charya said. “Being all teacher’s pet is super childish.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“What is it?” I prompted him. After a moment, he pulled out his phone.

“You have the names, right?” he said, and started to type with a speed I’d never seen before. “I know one of them, but…maybe we could try looking into the victims more?”

“A background check?” I said. I paused and tapped my pen against the white board before jotting the names of the other two victims down. “There. It slipped my mind such a vast network of knowledge exists in our reach. Excellent work.”

He smiled. “Thank you!”

“Wooooow, search engines really do exist,” Charya said and wiped at her cheek as if removing a tear. “The beauty of the present day. Erna, the more you act like a fossil, the more dusty this room gets with your sheer presence!”

“You’re not funny,” Kelsey grumbled.

“But I am,” Dori said.

“Not you either.”

“Damn it.”

“Er…Society of Xaviais?” Ale said. He scrunched his nose up and kept typing. At his words, Serena looked between him and I. “The one that died in the apartment we were in. Their name is listed as a close associate. I suppose that would make sense, with all the light iconography they had.”

“Wait, those guys?” she said. She began to twirl one of her pigtails with her fingers. “I think I recognize that name. It’s a historical study society. The kind of people that want you to read old books and figure out how to access your city’s policy plans? Dunno why they’d be up to something shady…”

“A study society about the dead god Xaviais, but only one of the victim’s names is on their site,” Ale said. He kept a grip on his phone that got tighter over time. But the phone didn’t have legs to run? Nor did it try to escape his grasp. I think I’d understand phones even less if they could walk. “They say they do research on light magic in general along with community educational stuff, though it doesn’t look like it’s been maintained in years. Still, why have such horrible weapons if your objective is research? I doubt they had any legal excuse notes…if that even exists…”

“Why, indeed,” I said, though aimless chatter morphed into the group’s new preoccupation as the talked and blabbed between my pauses. “That is our next mystery to solve, if we’re to stop this unruly evil.”

The day grew late. Surely our light-themed killer would strike as soon as the darkness arrived to cover their tracks. We needed to pen our end to this murderous tale before such an outcome passed.

“Uh, Erna…”

I couldn’t imagine who would dare to take the lives of those innocent people.

“Erna!”

Such an evil soul, torturing and maiming people as if it they were problems only quelled by violence. How could anyone stand aside in the face of such—

“Ow!” My monologuing distracted me from the burning sensation prickling my hand. While my gloves provided some distraction, now they itched with such discomfort I dropped both the weapons I held.

They would had fallen, if they didn’t begin to float on their own.

An aura of light enveloped them both. Now that they were free of my grasp, it only grew brighter as the two weapons slowly merged. The pendant’s chain wrapped around the hilt of the dagger, and I knew deep down something terribly wrong was about to unfold.

I casted a shield of soul energy around the two weapons and barely suppressed a massive burst of light energy from shooting out and tearing us apart in seconds. The shield held for a mere few moments before it cracked under the pressure and unleashed a sharp-toothed maw of crystilare upon us all, one we were ill-prepared to handle.

Yet, my new allies were lucky. Lucky indeed they had a hero on their side.

(Yes, that hero was I).