The hatch doors swing open and Hood and Hy-Jinx find themselves staring, through falling rain, at two watchmen who are clearly expecting them. One, a tall, well built but anxious looking man, holds a long pike like weapon before him, whilst the other, a slightly older, less fit and dopey looking one is leaning against a thin iron pole that he has driven into the ground, atop which hangs a brightly shining lantern, illuminating the falling rain and the environs of the yard in which they are standing.

“There they are Troy - didn’t I tell you?” the tall one says, licking his lips nervously, and slowly adjusting his body position in case of attack.

“You did Bilge, you did. ‘Patience and they’ll come to you’ is what you rightly said,” responds Troy, “though the wisdom of that in this weather is yet to be ascertained. Still, you called it right, I’ll give you that,” he says, the rain running in rivulets down his waxed coat, an uninterested look on his face that suggests he’s about to ask what time he can go home.

“Out you come, nice and easy,” says Bilge, clearly the leader of the two, the long weapon he holds separating him from Hy-Jinx and keeping her away at a safe distance. “There we go, nice and slow, no need to rush. It may be raining but we’ve all been wet before ain’t we?”

“Boy am I happy to see you! You are sight for sore eyes, let me tell you,” says Hy-Jinx smiling as she emerges from the hatchway, her left hand by her side, fingers in the eye sockets of Madeleine’s mask, her right hand brushing the front of her tunic and trousers, as if dusting them off. Hy-Jinx looks around and takes in the sight before her whilst at the same time, carefully watching the colour palettes of the two men in an attempt to ascertain exactly how to play them.

“Easy there missy, let’s not go rocking the apples. Back up against the wall there,” Bilge motions with a flick of the pike,” before continuing, “and let your little friend out. There he is.” Hood emerges slowly into the rainy night, his hands raised in the air at shoulder level.

The yard in which they have stepped into is relatively large, being the same area again as the footprint of the shop building, and where they stand is a mixture of grass tufts, water and mud. Whilst the shop is made of stone, the yard’s boundary wall, in which a large pair of open wooden gates are fixed, is made of small thin red bricks. On this side of the gates an area of cobbles leads directly to a set of doors at the rear of the shop that we heard the guards break down a few minutes ago, and as Hy-Jinx and Hood glance down the run of the shop wall, having emerged as they have in the north-east corner of the yard, they can just about make out a stoved-in splintered mess of a door, along with flickering lights, which come from not only the doorway but from a variety of windows both at ground level and higher up, indicating that there are guards still searching the shop. Rain pours off the roof in tearing sheets that patter the ground where they stand.

"Now, you both look like you’ve got some interesting things with you there now, doesn’t it?” says Bilge, having already noticed the mask Hy-Jinx is carrying and seeing that Hood is wearing a satchel on his back. “Why don’t you put your little bag down there where I can see it,” he says to Hood, “and you, what’s that? Some kind of party mask? I think I’d like that on the floor too. One can never be too careful, can one?”

Hy-Jinx considers the question and remembers with glee a strange encounter that she had in Menacil once that would make for an excellent example of exactly what Bilge is talking about. “No siree, that’s for sure,” she responds, “I once had a run in with a muleteer and a monkey and I tell you what, by the end of that encounter I’d…”

Bilge cuts Hy-Jinx’s anecdote short with a raising of the pike blade to her throat. “The party mask missy. On the ground.”

"This? Oh this, this isn’t a party mask, and no I won’t put it down,” says Hy-Jinx shaking her head, stepping back and cradling the mask protectively to her chest, attempting to stimulate colours of curiosity within Bilge…

“And why’s that then? Tell you what, I’m not interested”

…but everything she has tried so far has seemingly been to no avail. She sees how her words begin to swirl colours within Bilge but almost immediately the swirling stops and he returns to a stable kind of dark blue.

“Put it down on the ground before I have to resort to more ungentlemanly forms of persuasion.”

“Well, if you’re a gentleman, you should have said, and I would have explained more clearly. I can’t put it down because she’s my sister,” Hy-Jinx says smiling, enjoying deliberately making up outrageous comments which have no rational basis. Again colours swirl - the blue tending to rosiness - Hy-Jinx can see that Bilge is almost enjoying the interaction. Which begs the question ‘Why?’.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Your sister ay? You’ll be telling me you're twins next.” Bilge, considering what he said continues, “though I guess you’re too young to be twin. Anyway, why not be a good little girl and put the mask on the ground before I…”

“You know, I think I know you! I think your twin sister introduced us once.”

“Who Mable?”

“Yeah, how’s she doing, I haven’t seen her in ages,”

“What the! Troy did you see that?” Bilge quickly glances at Troy, then fixes his attention back to Hy-Jinx, “Tell me I ain’t going mad!”

“See what?”

“What she just did there. She’s trying to con me, thinks she can get inside my head.”

But I have got inside your head, Hy-Jinx thinks to herself, by the very fact that you’re now wondering whether you should just keep your mouth shut in case I extract any more information from you.

Troy’s eyes narrow suspiciously “Here Bilge, I thought she was supposed to be blind.”

“She is ain’t she?”

“Not the way she’s looking at you through them glasses she ain’t”

“And how’s she looking at me?

“Like she’s calculating something.”

“Hmm. Well, what does it matter? These are the two that went in, and these are the two that ‘av come out. Blind or not she’s at the end of a stick with a blade to ‘er throat.”

“S’pose. Just thought I’d mention it is all. Attention to detail an’ all that. Here, shouldn’t I call the others.”

“Nah,” laughs Bilge, “Let ‘em waste their time, I told them not to bother. What did I say?”

“Patience and they’ll come to you.”

“Exactly, and here they are. And what d’you know, the rain’s let up. How could this evening get any better, I ask you?”

As this interaction plays out, Hood is still to take his satchel from his back and is humorously remembering a similar interaction beneath the bell tower when Hy-Jinx started playing mind games with Clem and Carlisle. Clearly she has been manipulating their attention from the get go.

Hy-Jinx is fascinated by the way in which Bilge has his emotions firmly under control, even though his attention can be relatively easily manipulated. Smiling to herself, the world maintains it’s bright and rosy outlook, but as she becomes somewhat more happy with the fact that she had successfully surmised that Bilge had a twin sister, the brightness seems to intensify somewhat but mainly it would seem about the mask that she holds to her chest, but also from a patch of grassy soil on the ground, a patch which looks strangely ‘mask’ shaped. Puzzled, the world dims somewhat and the the brightnesses fade. Puzzled now even more the whole world begins to darken. Damn it! Thinks Hy-Jinx, frustrated at her dimming vision which now vanishes completely. She closes her eyes and breaths slowly. “Does anyone know any jokes?” she asks in an attempt to change her emotions back to being cheerful, a question that in-itself elicits the correct response as she considers the circumstances, and begins giggling to herself. The world brightens around her. “I’m sorry, I’ll put the mask down,” she says obediently, stepping slowly forward and placing the mask on the ground where she believed she had seen the ‘bright patch’.

“Well well well, simple compliance, and how easy was that? Now, you too!” Bilge indicates for Hood to put his satchel down, but as he does, the mask seems to jerk somewhat as if there is something living trapped beneath, trying to push the mask away.

Seeing the movement Bilge steps back instinctively, whilst Troy leans curiously forward from the neck, his body still leaning against the iron lantern rod.

The mask jerks again and then slowly begins to rise, the earth beneath it seemingly being pulled up with its motion. Hy-Jinx looks at Hood, who looks at Hy-Jinx and just shrugs slightly and shakes his head, as if to say ‘it’s not me’.

Earth, mud, grass, and the occasional root and small stone coalesce and bind themselves into the shambling form of a masked humanoid, and with its arms outstretched and flailing, it shudders unstably forward towards the two guardsmen, who begin screaming at the sight. Although both screaming, both hold their ground in a manner of speaking. Bilge bends his knees and adopts a fighting stance with his pike, whilst Troy, with one hand on the iron lantern pole, just runs round and round, clearly freaking out but not knowing what to do, his movement causing the lantern to sway violently back and forth, causing the whole light and shadowscape of the yard to heave and yaw.

As the monstrosity approaches, Bilge, with a swift slice of his pike, removes from it an arm, which drops as a muddy lump at its feet and remains there as nothing more than mud. Slowly, however, as the creature backs off slightly, swaying as if drunk, its missing limb begins to regrow from the stump as if some invisible sculptor was teasing out clay. Bilge, unperturbed, takes careful aim, and thrusts his pike into the chest of the creature, but as he does so, the chest opens, literally as a cavity, and the pike just passes straight through. The creature grasps the pike with primitive hands, shoves it forwards, and then pulls it back sharply, to have the affect of throwing Bilge backwards onto his back, and removing the pike from Bilge’s surprised hands. In so doing, however, it seems that the weight of the pike is too much for the creature and the whole agglomeration disintegrates, the mask falling to the ground.

With the shouting of Bilge and Troy, the guards and one watchwoman within the building rush to the broken doorway and stumble out into the yard, just in time to hear Hy-Jinx jubilantly shouting “Run!” to Hood, as she scoops up the mask from the ground and, taking one of Hood’s hands, pulls him along behind her, racing as fast as she can through the yard gates and into the alley beyond.