Several hours before the teens with attitude crash the party…

The night went by with a somewhat more subdued ending than Joey had been expecting, and they spent it preparing for an outcome they hoped wouldn’t come to pass: a war with the Talons.

Eventually, exhaustion took its toll, and Kyle insisted they all get some rest for at least a few hours. She resisted at first but finally agreed to rest. It wasn’t welcoming sleep, either.

All she could think about was that strange feeling she’d seen Drenar before she’d ever seen him in the yearbook, and Julia she knew she’d seen before. But she couldn’t remember where! She always remembered things like this!

Sleep did take hold at some point, and after rushing through the morning preparation, the first thing they’d done was to go into the botany lab and put a dangerous Mandroga plant out of commission. Kyle barely avoided getting a leg chomped on by the dangerous specimen. After much swearing and brushing himself off, they’d shoved the plant into a steel cage at the far end of the lab, locked it, and left that problem to be dealt with later. Joey scoured every inch of the floor and vent and found the dust trail disturbed. But there’s no other evidence. She finds more spilled mana primer in the area, and it’s slightly fresher–a few hours later than the first spill. They must have repacked the mana in the botany wing, to be moved elsewhere. With optic camo, there are several areas they could access without a dedicated ID badge.

“C’mon, why are we sleuthing this still?” Kyle protests after a short period. “We need to come up with a proactive measure. We could waste hours, or even days trying to find this guy.”

“We have a list of suspects, and we’ve narrowed it down,” Joey insists with measured patience. Her chemical survey is giving odd readings on the latest sample. Almost like a contaminant. She pulls open her field guide and looks for the cross-reaction. It takes but a moment, and she narrows her eyes at the surprising answer. “Murkvine.”

“You’re saying I need to chill out? Yeah, no thanks, my college days are behind me,” Kyle states before crossing his arms.

“No, not that. He stepped in murkvine. Raw, living murkvine, there’s an alchemical trace that is normally not present in the processed stuff. You know, the refined stuff that is all the rage with the rich, mighty…and chemically inebriated crowd,” she adds with a sarcastic drawl.

“So, he’s a dope fiend?” Kyle poses, then snaps his fingers. “Or, maybe he’s been through the botanical garden outside. There’s no murkvine in this lab, so he must have picked it up nearby!”

“How do you know exactly where it is, anyway?” Joey presses. Kyle purses his lips and is…stroking his beard, again. She’s going to hate the answer he gives.

“A…friend of mine partakes on a recreational level,” he says after a few seconds and fidgets with his watch. Joey sighs and rolls her eyes.

“You know that’ll get you fired, Kyle, if you’re harvesting this stuff for less than dubious means.”

“Hey, it’s not for me, and he’s got a rare medical condition–super early onset arthritis. You might be the alchemical prodigy, but I can still post-process a few reagents for practical use, and not burn down the lab in the process.” She sees red when he mentions this, and takes a menacing step towards him. This is a moment of sheer recklessness she is not going to let go.

"Kyle, let me be clear. My lab is like a temple to me. It is immaculate. It is sacred to me. And you just told me, without thinking of consequences, that you’ve been using my side of the lab to make magical dope?!”

She’s probably more forceful than she should be, but this has been a rough week thus far. Kyle was probably hoping that her piercing lavender eyes would burn a hole through his skull before she finished laying into him. “If we live through this, I’m gonna kill you, Kyle. Painfully. In ways that only I have intimate knowledge of. You do not mess with my lab!” she practically screams.

“Hey, I used my side of the lab. And I thoroughly cleaned every bit of it. Look, we’re burning daylight here, if you think this is a lead worth pursuing, then we should do it right now.” Kyle’s face twists into anxiety. “Are we sure this is the guy, and not some other random technician?”

Joey points at the growling murder plant locked away, trying to bite at the steel bars and whimpering when it proves too hard to bite into. “Name some other bold fool who would want to tangle with the Mandroga!” Kyle raises a hand and tries to utter something short-sighted, then thinks better of it.

“Point taken.” They practically jog to the outside of Asqualia, and the distorted sunlight from the lake hovering above them is high above. It’s about late morning now. Kyle directs her to the botanical garden that had been set up for alchemical harvests, with fences to keep away the local wildlife. It's such a surreal picture, with the sun dancing under the waves of the lake like some kind of optical illusion, and there’s a slight blue hue to everything around them. Long rolling green grass blankets the area, before terminating at the bedrock of the lake somewhere above, and the caverns to the far side of the area. Several waterfalls ‘loop’ water descending from the lake, then pump it back upwards, for a very impressive visual flair. Murmions, or small, birdlike cows, scatter away in their presence. It’s just as well, they’re rude little critters. They have a habit of storing rocks in a gizzard pouch, regurgitating them, and spitting the rocks at maximum velocity.

It’s quite painful. She hadn’t hesitated to douse the offender in alchemical foam to immobilize it before taking some feathers for samples one previous time.

Kyle opens the padlock to the gated area, pushes it open, and guides her through the rows. She pulls Kyle’s arm when she sees relatively fresh footprints in the dirt path. “Kyle, what shoe size do you wear?”

“Size eight?” She looks at the prints and measures them, before taking a photo. There are two sets of footprints right here. Kyle points to a murkvine, which is a nasty, noxious-smelling tangle of vines with thorns in them. Of course, when properly processed, they could be used to extract a powerful painkiller, or a mild hallucinogenic compound, or ‘Vine’ as most people called it, that could be used for a high.

“Yeah, look. Someone crushed one of the vines underfoot,” he points out. She’s already in motion. She measures the shoe size. It’s a moderate indentation, about size ten, and from a work boot. She compares it to the work boots she’d examined in storage that the maintenance workers wore. The tread pattern is almost identical, accounting for the variability of foot pressure.

“Yep, the maintenance guy was here alright. But why did he come here?” she ponders aloud. She glances around, is there anything around here that would prove useful to them? None of these plants had any uses in anything truly dangerous like incendiary potential, or poisons. Most of them are basic reagents for regen potions, and other assistive potions used to make someone slightly faster or purge toxins.

Then again, with some fertilizer, fuel, and a few other household ingredients, they could build a bomb out here. There’s also pentane magicite, ezine spartifor, pyromethanine–and she shudders because getting a Valencian to cough that stuff up is beyond gross–and there are plenty of ways to build bombs out here. She winces–why does she have so many detonator chemicals memorized?

Great. My inner arsonist wants out. It’s a rather silly thought that she immediately dismisses. Her sweeping gaze finally latches onto something. She points to an old storage shed that’s adjacent to the perimeter wall of stone.

“Yeah, think we should take a look?” Kyle proposes, and she affirms it with a sharp tip of her chin. They walk over, and see that it’s padlocked. The key does not match the one they have for the botany garden. “Hmm. I thought they used the same key,” he mutters.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“C’mon, this is a basic lock Kyle! Use your skills!” She’s not going to wait around, and pulls out a small bottle and very carefully adds a nozzle to the top before breaking the seal. “You know what, never mind. I’m not going to waste time waiting.” she sprays the U-shaped hoop, and the metal starts crackling and sizzling. Kyle takes a few cautious steps back, looking nervous.

“You brought acid? Acid that chews through a one-inch padlock like it’s butter?” He looks at her warily.

“Yeah. It was either that, or I was going to watch you try to smack your hammer against the lock fruitlessly.” He pouts at her foxlike grin. The metal looks thoroughly worn away, and she hits the lock with a shovel lying nearby. The hoop shackle instantly breaks and falls to the ground, and she swings the latch open. “Well, you coming?” she asks with confidence.

“You are so remarkably sexy when you’re solving problems,” he replies dreamily.

“Kyle? I’m still holding a bottle of acid that can melt a hole through all my worldly problems,” she suggests with vitriol. His happy moment instantly vaporizes.

“Oh, this is why we broke up,” he replies sadly before heading inside and flicking on a light switch in the shed. It’s stuffed full of fairly mundane gardening equipment, and extra bags of fertilizer, shears, shovels, rakes, and planters filled with items no one had bothered to sort and turned into a junk drawer.

“No, you know why we broke up.” Joey doesn’t even want to bother discussing this right now and tries to kill the conversation. “Let’s focus on finding something in here that doesn’t match.” She pulls open a series of drawers at a workbench, without much success. Dirty gloves, twine for staking vines, and a few loose bolts, for some reason.

“I don’t. You just broke it off with me after you had an anxiety attack.”

“I…had a moment of realization,” she said distantly. He looks incensed at this deflection.

“No, you watched your best friend get doused in alchemical silver, she involuntarily transformed into her wargen form, and it was all captured on film by a bunch of bastards who were laughing and humiliating her. She quit school out of utter humiliation, and because of threats from other students. Those instigators all walked off without so much as a disciplinary hearing.” She grits her teeth when she looks up from her search, and he’s got his serious face on. “You were worried you were next. And you were worried what they’d do to me if they knew we were a couple.”

“No one knew–”

“People had their suspicions, Joey. I mean you do a fantastic job being a vanilla human–I mean um, you are a fantastic person," he adds as she scoffs. "But, your athletics made a few people scratch their heads. Normal humans can't jump two meters high. Plus I think your psionics start imprinting on people the more you listen in--I can almost feel it when you do it."

"Missing the point, Kyle," she says irritably.

"You completely freaked out when those same miserable cretins took it to the next level and put out a giant headline in the school paper labeled ‘monster in our midst’. Avani couldn’t bear to attend a school filled with people who hated her for what she was.” He isn’t letting this go, and it pisses her off.

“Can you just…stop? I don’t want to talk about this now, we’ve got bigger things to do than dwell on the past, Kyle.”

“No, that's the problem. We never resolved it. I know you think you’re a genius who can solve any problem, and you absolutely can. But you never asked me what my thoughts on the matter were." He gestures to her. "Look, Joey, you might not realize it because you're preoccupied with perception, or committed to your work, but you're a knockout hit by any measure. You’re amazing at what you do, and despite your outward personality of a slightly OCD madwoman who only keeps the bare minimum of friends, you've got a lot more depth to yourself than most people know, and appreciate.”

“And what’s that, exactly?” He’s going on about this, and she’s the one trying to figure out what these saboteurs are up to! He has zero priority sense!

“You're the first Kitsune to probably ever graduate at the top of her class in London. You're kind, you're dependable, and while I get you fear the world because people suck and don't like Kitsune for any number of stupid or bigoted reasons, you keep pressing on. Maybe you and I couldn't make it work, but I’d tip my hat to the prospective guy of the future who can keep up with you. I mean seriously, what were they going to do, bully me around? They already did that. I’d have taken it–”

That’s it. She’s done listening to this. He needs to focus, now. And a harsh dose of her reality should do it this time.

“Kyle, you are so naive!” she shouts. “You think it would have stopped with that? Do you think they’d just leave us alone if they ever found out what I was? No. It would have gotten worse. So much worse. People already think it's a free license to harass, intimidate, bully, or just murder a Kitsune, because hey, we're subhuman, right?”

“Joey, that’s not what I–”

No, it’s not what he meant, but she needs to vent like she hasn’t been able to in years. “Do you just not get why I have to hide? We will always be sub-tier! It's been the story for four thousand years of history, nothing has changed! We’re still just viewed as mind thieves and vermin!” She’s just shy of tears, and it’s taking her all to not let him see that. Maybe she’s trying to get him to focus too hard, and now it’s backfiring because she’s hated how the Conclave did nothing for her people. “Yeah Kyle, I didn’t want that for you, so I’m sorry for thinking about your well-being, you damn fool.”

“Was that the reason?” he asks softly, his hands limply going by his side. “Was that the only reason? Do you think it’s so impossible to change people’s perceptions? Do you think this wellspring of hatred is going to exist forever, and that the Conclave will just continue to turn a blind eye to the underserved magical species in perpetuity? It won’t. But it won’t go away, unless people fight against it, and prove them wrong about all those stigmas and lies."

“You are such a fool, Kyle,” she said bitterly. “You know what it’s like, worrying about the day when everyone finds out what I am? It’s like a pending execution. People will pick apart my every accomplishment, thinking I must have bewitched people or picked through their mind like it was a display case of the finest bits of knowledge to be stolen. There’s no fighting against that perception. The best I can do is make my mark, and then leave a note when I’m dead and buried that hey, surprise, I was never human!”

“No, that’s foolish. You can only change the narrative when you’re alive and in the moment, Josephine. And you aren’t alone. You don’t have to be alone all the time.”

“You know, that's another thing. You bring all this up now, right when we’re in the middle of a crisis, like you couldn’t have waited a couple of days!” she shoots back angrily. “Who’s going to have my back, you?”

“Not just me. It could be a lot of other people, Joey. and I mean that. But if this doesn’t go well, there’s a good chance that–” he starts to say it, but he hesitates. “Look, all I’m saying is, you need to start thinking beyond the next crisis. And I’m really hoping Drenar, and Nick, and everyone else on that team of misfits comes through with a plan of their own. Because what we’re up against potentially, you can’t let fear control your future actions.”

She hates that he was bringing this up now, and she’s glaring at him like it’s his fault they were in this mess. "I am thinking beyond the next crisis, Kyle. But you really suck at not leaving things be. We broke up because you were pushing me for something I was not ready for. And I get your intentions. I really do. But you just don't take a hint when hard reality hits you in the face sometimes." She feels like she just scolded a puppy for peeing on the carpet, and his face droops.

"So you're just going to hide your whole life? Really? That's the way you want to live? Well, that option sucks. You deserve far better than that." There's an awkward silence between them for a few seconds, and she really wants to lay into him, but she also can see the logic behind his words.

If this went badly…if the Talons broke in…a lot of people could get hurt, or killed. "Are you done?" she asks quietly. He nods, but that weariness is still draped on his face. "Got that out of your system?"

"Yeah, I'm good. I'm not an unstoppable alchemist with willpower the strength of mage steel, Joey. I just needed to say that so that you know, you do have people you can rely on." She turns so that she can keep digging through this dirty, dingy shack, looking for clues that probably don't exist.

Damn you Kyle. You think I don't want all of that? To just be free to be myself, and stop pretending to be something I'm not? She slams a drawer closed in frustration, and the drawer bounces back open, and hits her shin.

"Ow, damn it!" She swore, leaned down, and rubbed the offended limb. Kyle just sighs and shakes his head. Well, that was a regrettable decision, she thinks acidly.

Wait. What is that? Something catches her eye, there's a slightly loose board just under the bench, and she can make out a faint light emanating from underneath. "Kyle, get me a pry bar, shovel, anything. There's something here." He hands her the trench shovel they’d left outside the door, and she gets the edge under the board, and pries up with little effort. Both of them peer in, and Kyle offers his flashlight. His reaction is quite muted.

"Uh, Joey? Why is there a working arcanlink hidden under the floorboards of a dingy shack?"