CHAPTER 23 DISTRACTION
As Warren and Garus sprinted back to Vinwood that left Penny, Karif, Jalen, and myself to make sure none of the demons from the village ran away before we were ready to kill them. We all collectively just stood there awkwardly looking at each other. I hadn’t really talked to the younger investigator, so I wasn’t sure about his personality. A bigger problem was that both of our designated leaders had left so the group didn’t really have anyone to turn to that could say ‘this is what we do next.’
After a few moments of awkward staring I let out a deep sigh and sat down.
“So, does anyone have any ideas? Karif? I’m open to any ideas you might have as well, Jalen.” I said from my seat on the floor.
I caressed the part of my shoulder that would’ve connected to the rest of my arm. It felt so strange to just be missing my arm. 25 years I’d had that thing and all of a sudden it just pops off and gets disintegrated.
Penny sat down next to me. “Are you going to be able to heal it?”
“Not sure. If I had the actual limb that’d be one thing, but my healing skills don’t extend to regeneration. At least not yet, maybe in the future.” I gave a light shrug. It sucked, but I didn’t really regret it. I was disappointed but not terribly upset.
“Well, let's start with heading back to the town. We can go back to the inn and keep an eye on the town from there and plan our next move.”
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“Alright, so what’s the plan?” I asked as I sat down on the bed.
“Do we even need to do anything?” Jalen asked, “We could just sit here and wait. As long as we don’t provoke them they more than likely won’t do anything.”
“And if they figure out that their cave group got massacred, what then?” Karif rebutted. “We can’t sit around and wait for them to figure it out, we need to actively prevent anything from happening.”
“I agree with Karif. We should take a better safe than sorry approach to this. The more we do to prevent them from acting out the better and the more time we can give Warren and Garrus to return back with help.” I said from my comfy spot on the bed.
These were very nice beds.
“Alright so how are we going to do this? We need to keep them from being suspicious of us.”
“That’s easy,” Penny interjected, “We just go around asking them to talk to us like we did before. From their point of view we haven’t figured anything out yet.”
“That… That’s a good idea. Actually that’s probably the best idea we could do.” Karif said in agreement.
I had to agree with Penny, this was probably our best option. It was also just exceedingly simple and didn’t require anything extra other than wasting time being annoying to the locals.
“Sounds like this is our plan. We’ll split up into two groups again, I’ll go with Jale-”
“No.” Penny said, interrupting me. “I’m going with you.” Penny’s voice had that level of finality to it that women sometimes got where you knew they weren’t going to entertain any other outcome.
I frowned slightly while glancing to my side where she was sitting. I opened my mouth to say something, but just sighed and decided to let it go before looking back to Karif and Jalen.
“Well, you heard her. I guess I’m going with her, you two will manage well enough I hope. We’ll meet back up at the inn in two hours. Nobody here should be strong enough to threaten any of us, more specifically any of you but be careful regardless. Any questions before we head back out there?”
I looked at each of them, they each shook their heads in turn.
“Awesome, let’s get to it.”
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Penny had said she wanted to take point on talking to everyone. I let her do whatever she wanted, I was never a fan of talking to strangers anyways so this worked out great for me.
Our run through of the village worked about as well as it did last time, except we spent more time on each house trying to get people to show up, half to make it seem like we were genuinely trying to get information and half trying to make sure we had enough houses to last the rest of the day.
As usual though, no one actually spoke to us, everyone ignored us and just pretended we didn’t exist. At first it had really pissed me off that everyone had ignored us. Now I was completely fine with it. If they wanted to ignore us that was perfectly fine, even when they tried to walk by us and go about their day we would just stand directly in front of them and keep trying to harass them. We did this for a full two hours before we went back to the inn.
Karif and Jalen were already there waiting for us and they both seemed to be in a bad mood.
“What’s up? Why do you both look so angry?” I asked as we got closer.
“Jalen has very specific ideas on how he wants to go about doing this and he doesn’t like it that I disagree with him.” Karif said in a curt voice.
“Listen guys, it doesn’t matter how we do this, we just need to work together. We need to set aside our differences if we’re going to get through this alive.” I said trying to placate him.
“Everyone has ways they want to do things and what they think is best, but there’s really not a best way to handle this, or rather every way is the best way as long as it gets handled. Which is all that’s important right now. So why don’t you guys take turns doing it your way.”
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They both let out a sigh, “You’re right Alex, it doesn’t matter which way we do this we just need to get it done. Let’s head back out there.” Karif said, standing up and walking off with Jalen.
I leaned over to Penny, “This is why I wanted to go with Jalen. He’s part of a different group and I would’ve been able to more easily handle altercations than other people.”
“I, quite frankly, don’t give a shit. Come on, let’s get going.” Penny said, spinning around and walking off as well.
I frowned slightly again, what the hell was going on with her? She was always a brusque person for the short time I’ve known her, but this seemed to be a bit outside the ordinary even for her.
I sighed, “Even after three sisters, I still just don’t understand their attitudes half the time.”
I jogged after her to catch up. We walked down the road heading to the last house we left off on to continue our quest of delaying as much as possible. As we walked several guards approached us from the other direction.
“You there!’ One of them shouted as they got closer. Penny and I stopped where we were and waited for them to come to us.
“Are you the ones going around harassing the townsfolk?” the guardswoman asked in a stern voice.
“I wouldn’t say harassing, we’re just trying to get information on the incidents that’s happening around here. Kinda hard to do if people aren’t coming forward.” Penny replied casually.
“Irrelevant, if you want to conduct your investigation or whatever it is you’re doing, you’re free to do so. But if the people don’t want to talk with you, you’re in no position to try and force anything out of them.”
“That’s what I’m saying, if they don’t speak we move on, but we still have to at least try to talk to them, it’s not our fault if they misconstrued the situation to you.” Penny said folding her arms.
“That’s… fine.” The woman replied in a curt voice, “Just be sure to not go overboard with it, the people around here don’t take kindly to strangers getting all up in their business.”
“Sure thing, officer.” Penny waved her hand dismissively.
The lady gave her a stink eye, but turned and walked away with her fellow guardsman. We waited until they were a decent bit away before we continued on.
“They’re onto us.” Penny whispered to me.
“Mmmmm… Well it’s not like we can just stop, we’ll keep going for the rest of our timeframe and then meet up with the other two and figure… Huh.”
“What’s wrong?” Penny said with a slight frown.
“Other two. That doesn’t seem wrong to you at all?”
“No…?”
“Penny. Where’s George?”
“Oh.”
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George really liked his party members. But they weren’t the smartest a lot of the time. And it was even more difficult to communicate difficult topics with them given the fact that he was a mute. Which is why he just had to go on his mission solo. Maybe one of them would figure it out, it was a tossup between Karif or Alex in his mind. Karif had a knack for reading between the lines, Alex just seemed to be hyper aware of things happening immediately around him. Sometimes, other times he seemed a bit dense, like with Penny.
George shook his head to refocus on his task, he couldn’t be getting distracted, otherwise there could be big problems. George silently crept through the bushes as best as he could. This wasn’t his territory of abilities, normally this sort of stuff would be left to Penny, but with how oblivious the rest of the group was to the problem at hand he was the only one who noticed.
There had been a cave of demons so close to the village, the village was supposedly full of demons and yet there wasn’t a single sign of supplies being moved from the village to the cave or vice versa. So where had they gotten all the supplies from then? That’s what George was trying to figure out now, and it was why he was currently tailing a demon through the forest.
Hopefully this demon would lead him to what he suspected would be another encampment of demons. He’d currently been trailing him for three miles already, so it shouldn’t be much further.
The demon continued to lead George further and further into the forest, the trees grew thick around him covering the sky and casting an oppressive darkness around him. George didn’t like this, but he had to find out where this camp was before backing out.
It wasn’t much longer before he came across what he had been looking for, and it was so much worse than he had expected. This wasn’t just a camp. George needed to hurry back, he couldn’t let the others attack the village. Otherwise the whole region may fall.
The demons had a whole army hiding out in the forest.
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Penny and I rushed through the town and quickly managed to find Karif and Jalen.
“What’s wrong? We still have another hour and a half before we’re supposed to meet back up.” Karif said.
“George is missing, he’s been missing since we left the cave.” Penny replied.
Karif stopped and I could see the gears turning as he tried to place the last time he’d seen George and finally realizing that he hasn’t been with us the entire time.
“Well, let’s hurry up and go find him. He could be in trouble.”
We collectively ran together, we had to keep a slower pace so that Karif could keep up with us, but it didn’t take us long to get back to the cave.
We split up again to search through the entire cave, but didn’t manage to find George, or anything else really. I was running my sensory skills but didn’t manage to see anything I didn’t already know about.
We looked outside the surrounding area of the cave but didn’t manage to find anything there either. We spent over an hour looking for George before meeting back up at the cave entrance.
“Well shit.” Penny said.
“Agreed.” Karif said in turn.
“I say we go back to the village and beat the shit out of some of the demons there and find out where they took George.” Penny said, vitriol practically dripping off her words.
“I don’t think we should provoke them, but I do think we should start with going back to the village and planning out our next move.” Karif said, trying to placate her.
I didn’t have a better suggestion at the moment, so I agreed with Karif on this one.
We collectively began walking back to the village. It wasn’t long before we made it back to the village and moved towards the inn and walked back inside. The barkeep was standing at the… Well the bar, cleaning glasses. He looked up when he saw us come in and grunted gesturing to the stairs.
“Your friend is upstairs, third room on the right.”
We all instantly made a break for the stairs at his words, we quickly climbed them, hurtling down the hallway and slammed the door open.
George was casually sitting down on the bed with a cup of what looked like tea, casually sipping on it before looking at us and raising an eyebrow.