“-father would kill me! Grind me up into dust and stardust! By the great star, just be safe, can you please just do that for a few pitching weeks?”

Marcolo finished with a sigh, one filled with frustration beyond measure.

“Don’t leave this room, alright? You’re already covered with bruises; it must look like I’m beating you, for the Star’s sake. And you’re liable to fall down the stairs at this rate…”

He shut the door behind himself, and I immediately dropped my repentant act to give the door a salute.

“Aye aye, captain.”

Don’t ‘aye aye, captain’ if you’re planning on disobeying him immediately.

“It’s not immediate.” I gestured towards the open window. “I’ll be waiting for night. Would be a shame to get interrogated in the middle of everything.”

Even if there weren’t the guards to worry about, I probably would’ve waited for the night anyway. I was planning on doing a thorough analysis around the house after all, and standing around haunted houses all day was a good way to get people to think you were a drug dealer, or worse, a dumb teenager. My current version of Saphry was extraordinarily intelligent, so I couldn’t have people thinking that.

There was also the fact that I’d gotten very little actual sleep last night. Most of the moonlight was spent reading through that book looking for anything useful, and what sleep I had gotten was hard won on the floor beside the bed.

I had my morals after all.

So today would be best spent resting up and flipping the bird to any semblance of a sleep schedule.

He really seemed pissed off this time. Gideon noted. I’d advise avoiding angering him any more.

“Kind of hard to do that when he wants me to do the opposite of what I need to do.” I jumped onto the bed and rolled onto my back. “Do you think he was born with a stick up his ass, or was it artificial?”

His job is to make sure you survive. It’s understandable that he’s worried when you randomly show up covered in bruises. And cuts.

I cringed.

“I suppose ‘papercut from falling asleep on a book’ is a little hard to swallow, isn’t it?”

When it’s on the neck, yes.

Marcolo had a hard week hadn’t he? Despite my jokes, I could understand why he acted like he did, especially as he didn’t know where these wounds were coming from. Well, knowing where they came from would probably make him even more distressed, but never mind that.

Still, Marcolo wasn’t stupid. When he picked me up from the Belvan’s, he’d led me down the back alleys and side streets instead of walking down the main avenue and had me walk with the cloak’s hood raised, obviously aware of the disturbance last night and the resulting manhunt. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was involved, as Summarkans with silvery hair weren’t exactly foreign to Verol, but it felt like he’d wanted to avoid an interrogation from the guards anyway.

“There’s not much I can do about that.” I admitted. “But I’ll try to lie low when I can.”

Good. While it’d be funny, I’d hate to see him escalate to some more physical punishment…

“Yeah, that-” I frowned. “Wait, that wouldn’t be funny at all. Are you some kind of sadist?”

Only when it happens to you.

“Some friend you are.” I yawned. “Get the curtain will ya? There’s a lot to do tonight.”

Aye aye, captain.

…

“Alright, so he won’t be drawn out by pelting the house with rocks. Next up is-”

Why was that even on your list?

“-is testing the window.” I tapped the journal I held open. “What do you mean? Not having to fight the thing would be so much easier.”

But if it didn’t come out for us until we entered its hallway last time, why would it investigate rocks?

“It’s all in the scientific process, Dr. Gid.” I clicked my tongue. “It wouldn’t be stupid if it somehow worked.”

Somehow? So you didn’t think it was going to work either?

I ignored him and returned my gaze to the house in front of me. Even in the daylight it had been an intimidating structure, but the moonlight really brought out the haunted house flavour, sending it straight into terrifying. The bricks were steeped in shadow, the planks etched in foul portent. The air itself was colder around the building, and held onto the dust that wafted around with some horrible fascination, leading to a coughing fit every couple minutes. Even the protective glyphs, now flickering uncontrollably, brought ruin into my heart when I glanced upon them, their light now a mocking farce that seemed to drain even the surrounding houses of their vigour. This building was possessed by a demon, the sights and texture of which was felt in every square foot.

Still, if I were to recover those books I would need to overcome that, and dwelling on how spooky the house was wasn’t going to get me any further along.

I eyed the window on the second story, supposedly the one that led into the last room. It was one of the only places where the boards held up, with only a few thin cracks between them. The plan for this one was to see if I could just banish the demon’s ‘soul stone’ through the window, so it didn’t really need to be open anyway. And unfortunately for me, the stones of the first story looked perfectly climbable, so it was probably worth a test.

I slipped the journal into my coat pocket as I grabbed the most promising handhold. After a second though, I stopped to look back at the drake.

“Ehh, would you help push me up?”

Even well rested, I still wasn’t sure if Saphry was capable of climbing something like this. I’d done stuff like it plenty of times back on Earth, but with these poor excuses of muscles and the poor climbing display after the first raid…

Seriously? Gideon looked at the wall. Even after that episode with the rope?

“It’s different.” I began to haul myself up, while Gideon dutifully pushed me up from below, flapping his wings like a madman. ”Ropes are harder to climb than walls like this.”

We could always get… He stopped for a second to push harder. …Auro and see if she can do this. She seems like she’s strong enough.

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“In the best case scenario, we banish this thing without Auro ever coming by.” I nodded towards the whole of the house. “I really don’t want to put her in any more danger than we have to. Which, as of right now, is none.”

She seems… to get herself in quite a bit of… danger by herself. Gideon huffed. Nothing like… Andril and Fredrick had warned when they came to see you.

Wait, that was weird, wasn’t it? They’d sort of implied that both Auro and that other guy…. Justeo I think he was, had fallen into depression or shell shock. I hadn’t met Justeo again, but from what I had seen of Auro so far however, she was nothing like that. In fact, she seemed way more outgoing than she had back in the caves, like she was searching out something, same as me. It was almost like she had a personality swap.

A peculiar thought crossed my mind as I grabbed the next brick.

“Hey Gid, what do you think of Auro?”

Hmm? Gideon thought for a moment. Helpful? Obsessive towards magic, same as you. Kind of awkward.

Obsessive towards magic, suddenly disregarding the law to break into libraries, awkward? All of those, except the last one obviously, reminded me of a certain snowy mage.

I reached up and grabbed another stone.

It wasn’t possible that… Auro was another world hopper, right?

There was no way, right? It would be way too much of a coincidence, for all three of us to appear at the exact same time, in the same city. And even then, we’d gotten here by drinking a potion from the grimoire, and not on any special date or time. What were the chances that she’d drunk the same potion at the same time? Very little, I would think.

But still, if I were to go by the social norm of Verol, Auro was very strange. So was Breale of course, but I felt like in her case it was explainable by upbringing and had been consistent every time I met her. Auro though? She’d grown up with a posh ducal family out in Minua. There was no reason for her to suddenly be ignoring laws and social conventions in an attempt to learn magic. And if she was from Elys, she’d have to hide it for the rest of her life in Verol. For me, these pointed towards her being a world hopper.

Hurry… up. Gideon thought. I’m not… that strong.

I kept climbing, hauling myself up and over the stone bricks making up the first floor and perching myself against a broken plank.

Did she know I was one then? Surely she’d be having the same memory dumps as I had, so she’d know how abnormal I was probably acting as well.

“Shit.”

What’s… wrong?

“Nothing, sorry.”

I really hadn’t been as careful as I should’ve been, had I? I’d always known I wasn’t an amazing actor, but even then I’d let my guard down around Auro. To be fair, Auro was a pretty disarming person, but that wasn’t any excuse for my poor performance. Around Andril too, now that I thought about it. I’d have to put more effort into being ‘ladylike’ if I wanted to remain free of suspicion.

I frowned as I grabbed the next plank.

I’d injured Saphry’s life already, hadn’t I? For [fuck’s] sake, even Marcolo probably hated her now. And hadn’t Saphry had a crush on Andril? I’d gone and screwed the pooch on that, hadn’t I? There wasn’t a bone of feminine charm in my body! God in heaven, I was a failure at this-

I grabbed onto empty air, and immediately felt my balance leave me.

“[Fuck]!”

Damn it!

My body tumbled backwards over the drake, and I closed my eyes in the half second I fell, awaiting the ground below.

But I never hit it, instead falling into something fleshy and soft, the opposite of the cobbles I had expected. Opening my eyes, I found that I was staring into the face of a familiar swordsman, hanging in his arms like a princess. For a moment I just stared at him, not understanding why the hell he was here. Gideon flapped down behind him onto a nearby fence post, looking mightily pissed.

“Hi?”

“Are you alright?” Fredrick asked. “I heard rocks being thrown, and came around to find you climbing a wall. What were you doing?”

Ah, hadn’t one of his tasks been to search a couple of key houses west of the library tonight? I’d completely forgotten about all that after what happened the night before. This must’ve been one of the suspicious ones, though it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. It probably used to belong to one of the Temoif members. Or my rock throwing was just louder than I thought it was.

Internally, I sighed. This one wasn’t even my atrocious luck, this was just stupidity on my part, which was remarkably more irritating. And to be literally ‘caught’ in such an embarrassing situation…

“Eh, can you put me down?” I looked away, thinking that his face was perhaps a little too close.

“After you start explaining yourself.”

Honestly. I debated just spinning like a top and struggling just to spite him, but I didn’t really see that going very well with the difference in strength between us. Nor would I be able to run away if I even got down. Maybe I could blast him with a souped up ‘spark’? That would definitely open a whole different can of worms though… No, an explanation would be the easiest way out, but what to tell him? It couldn't be the whole truth, for that was pretty incriminating, especially after what Andril had said to me. I didn’t know Fredrick’s stance on the magic law, but with how close he was to Andril I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the exact same. And while transmutation wasn’t considered ‘magic’ I doubted he would be happy to know that I knew a banishment spell.

What to do, what to do…

“Saphry, you weigh little more than a Brepolese falcon. I can stand here all night. Or perhaps take you back home to Marcolo, I doubt he knows about this.”

“Fine, fine, fine.” I found a good brick to stare at, away from Fredrick. “So you know about the library’s lending policy? So it turns out these books I…”

…

“So you knew there was a demon?” Frederick asked. “And you still decided to do this?”

“Come on, it’s not that bad.”

You know, these plans seemed a lot less crazy if you knew the context I couldn’t say. Why couldn’t everyone just trust me when I said it was fine? I hadn’t even mentioned the magic nor the breaking and entering, so I hadn’t broken any laws in that explanation! Though I was reasonably sure he suspected it. Not that he should have any scruples with breaking and entering.

“I’m not sure you quite understand how dangerous a demon is.”

“I wasn’t really planning on fighting it right now.” I leaned against the wall of the haunted house, making sure to keep a few metres between us. “I was just gonna steal the books back.”

Well, in reality the plan was to banish it real quick through the window and leave, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Though seeing how quickly that specific plan had fallen apart I wasn’t sure it would’ve worked anyway. Maybe with a ladder.

“Of course.” Frederick said. “I completely believe that.”

Huh. I got the exact same response when I was trying to get a bank loan for the lab back on Earth. Was I really that shifty looking? Or was it what I said…

“So, you were scouting out houses around here?” I asked, trying to change the subject. “What even for?”

“Good question.” Frederick crossed his arms. “Though it was explained at the meeting yesterday.”

“Excuse me if I started tuning out after the fourth time I was told I couldn’t do anything.” I rolled my eyes. “A bunch of Summarkaphobes, if you ask me.”

“What? Why do you say that?”

“It’s the hair colour right?” I said. “‘Too distinctive’, despite how many others I see walking around outside…”

Fredrick chuckled for a moment.

“I can’t say the hair doesn’t influence it, but that’s not the reason Andril thought that.”

Then… what the hell did that even mean? Or was Andril just trying to be polite about the sexism? You know what, I was really starting to miss when I didn’t have to care about stuff like this. It’s the reason I always worked alone, or only with Gideon. At least he wasn’t cryptic.

“Never mind that.” Fredrick waved it away. “As for what I was looking for? Not much, not from these houses. It was mostly to see if I could catch anyone going in or out, to see if we were missing any secret meetings between the Temoif, or if they had any members we didn’t know about.”

“So you weren’t going to break into each one?” I was almost a little disappointed.

Wait, was I a criminal? Surely only criminals get excited about such things…

“Oh course not. Violating someone’s home is a little different to investigating their warehouses. Though I probably would’ve walked inside this one if you hadn’t told me about the demon.”

“How does that help find anything about the assassination though? Is one of these Lord Agos’s house?”

I hadn’t really thought about it yesterday during the meeting, but it was hard to see how stalking the Temoif members could contribute to a conviction. Surely we’d want to be a little more forward now, right? Or was the plan now to uncover the plot Lord Agos had planned for the end of this month?

“Any knowledge is useful, Saphry, even the mudanities.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, but surely there is something more we could do right?”

Fredrick looked for a moment like he wanted to agree, glancing towards the house behind me.

“Taneri is an experienced captain of the guard. He’s defended the Evendal’s from many threats, even back in the rebellion.” He finally said. “If he believes that this information could lead to an arrest, I’m nowhere nearly as qualified to dispute him. He’s done the job for twenty years now, at this point.”

“So you also think it’s a little useless.” I nodded to myself.

Even if Fredrick had enough tact and respect for this Taneri fellow to not question it, I’d only met the man once and I hadn’t been impressed thus far. And I was never known for my large amount of tact.

“I never said that.”

An idea started to form in my mind as he confirmed it, and I glanced at his sword for a few seconds. Maybe being caught here wasn’t such a bad situation after all.

“Hey… Can your sword cut through everything?”

For one of the first times since I had met him, Fredrick looked confused, blindsided by that seemingly random question.

“Err, yes? Just about everything once I enchant it.”

Was only thaumaturgy banned for the nobility? It was either that or this world had a really backwards view on what was magic or not. I’d have to scold Auro later for misleading me so much.

“Then how about helping me with something?” I grinned.

“With what…” Fredrick sighed as he realised what I was suggesting. “No. How are you still thinking about that?”

“Come on, help a friend out!”

“By the star, I could still inform Marcolo, you know that right?”

“And be a little snitch?” I shook my head sadly. “Come on Fred, isn’t helping the Astrians in the Maverick family creed or something?”

He paused momentarily. “We’re sworn to defend the Astrians… which would be best served by turning you in to Marcolo.”

“I’ll just sneak out again.” I warned. “Until I can get those books, this demon is going to be a constant, deadly threat for this poor Astrian.”

He just stared at me with a face that just screamed ‘Really?’, but I kept it up. Now that he knew I wanted these books after all, even banishing it in secret would look suspicious. That wasn’t to say I would give up if he said no, but outing myself as a magic caster wouldn’t be the most preferable option here.

“Fine. But only if you’ll do one little thing for me.”