I ignored Vivi as I finished up my plate in record time and told her that I wanted to spend some time alone. She looked offended but I wasn’t worried about that. After basically running out of the room and taking a look around, there were a few people heading towards the outside. I turned the opposite direction, deeper into the building and, on a hunch, headed down the paths that were directly opposite the sections that had other people in them.

I saw a door open and I shoved myself against a pillar. I heard it close and lock. Footsteps heading further away from me. I peeked my head out and saw Jon walking down the hall. Suspenders back in place.

I continued following him as he unlocked one door after another. He spun a few times and I managed to get behind a pillar or back around the corner before he caught me. That was, until he spun abruptly without stopping first. He stared hard and I waved, “Hey! Jon right? I’m kind of lost. Can you show me back to my room?”

He pocketed something that looked somewhat… familiar. A tasseled key. He grumbled as he glared and walked past me, “You know it’s a bad habit to follow people in the apocalypse.”

“I wasn’t following you, I got lost and only just saw you.” The blatant lie made me want to itch my scalp. I ignored it successfully.

“Isn’t Vivi supposed to be guiding you around here?”

I shrugged, “She said she had to do something, how the hell is this place so large?”

“It’s not so bad once you get used to it. Here’s your room.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

How’d he know where my room was? Before he walked away I tried something out.

“Oh hey, I think I lost my key, can you unlock it for me?”

He pocketed both hands, “No, sorry can’t help you. Maybe Vivi can help you look for it.”

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I decided to not return to my room just yet and headed outside to wander the grounds. Still not understanding how the dimensions worked in this place and cursing the renaissance architects’ seemingly infinitely confusing cleverness, I found my way to the llama pen.

Animals not realizing that people were listening for the win, again.

“Who’d you make a deal with? Maybe I can-”

It whirled on me and spat. I blocked it with my shield.

“Rude fucker, aren’t you?

It spat again and I blocked again.

“Fence doesn’t seem high enough to keep you out. Didn’t know you were so weak. No better than an alpaca.”

Spit. Block.

“Why don’t you?”

Me and animals, in a clear and honest openly hostile relationship. This was so us. I missed this. I shrugged and picked up a rock. I pitched it at the llama’s head. He dodged and, in response, he blew another lug of spit my way which I dodged in turn.

“I fucking hate animals.”

I nodded as I slowly approached.

I saw it working its mouth, I raised my hand in a placating motion, “Relax relax, I’m sorry dude, I’m not here to fight.”

It eyed me and relaxed a bit. As quick as I could I hawked and blew a loogie at it. It landed on the llama’s fur and his head slowly turned down to look at the glob of snot and spit sitting pretty on its nice clean coat. Then it slowly looked back up at me. Its eyes were wide in shock.

“Sup bitch.”

The llama flew into a rage and I jumped back away from the fence. It was frothing itself into a fury as the wooden fence creaked and groaned.

It started to calm and its head was bowed as it huffed in great furious breaths, mouth frothing. I hawked another, this one landed on its face, just under its eye. The silence was deafening. A wide, shit-eating grin spread across my face.

“What are you gonna do about it?”

The cursed creature settled, still. Very still.

Damn, this llama had some admirable self control. I was kind of hoping that it would attack and give me an excuse to blow it away. No such luck.

“Well, cya.”

I waved and walked away and a loog’ from it caught me on the back of the head. I froze and my shotgun snapped shut with a click. I heard snippets of conversation as a group of people came out from the building.

Damn. A llama with a plan. I didn’t like that. There was also only one person I could think of that was potentially working with the vile thing.

I kept a wide circle around the pen as I decided to take a lap around the building from the outside. It took roughly 20 minutes or so before the llama pen appeared again. Which didn’t make sense. I mean, it was a big estate, but not hallway after hallway big. It was definitely larger on the inside than it was on the outside and I don’t care what renaissance bullshit was given as a reason.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

I had no idea what that meant. What I did know was that I didn’t like it. I don’t like things I didn’t understand and there was a lot of shit going on here that I didn’t understand. Some of it though, some of it I was starting to get.

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I felt like I was drifting, responding to too many things outside of my expertise. I wasn’t really an ‘inspector le’frenchguy’, I was ‘Tom’ and I was way over my head. Way way over. All this fancy shit was complicating it too. What I needed to do was spend some time getting an Order of Operations together.

I came back to my room at some point during the later half of the day, but before I could shut my door there was someone… standing there? A young woman, it seemed like she was just over the age where people would get whisked away, though she looked somewhat older than that. Rough years, or whatever. I felt Salt of the Earth trigger finally and it was a somewhat familiar feeling that I had missed in my last, overly salted, wine-soaked days. It was a weird feeling, a flush of warmth and both the taste of salt on my tongue and a sudden craving for the mineral. A little too on the nose if you ask me. No one had asked me.

“Can I help you?”

“Are… are you trying to figure out who is killing people?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, because people are dying and you’re going around asking questions.”

I hesitated for a second, then nodded. Yeah sure, that was fair enough. I studied her, bit mousy looking, light brown hair, a lot lighter than Duck’s, faint natural curls like Duck’s…. And now I’m sad. Damn.

“Well, what do you want?”

“I… I think I can help. Maybe.”

I sighed, then cut myself off as she deflated, “What’s your name?”

“Meredith.”

She could barely answer as her eyes darted back and forth down the hallway. Her sketchiness was sketching me out. I stepped back and waved an arm behind me, “Well, come on in.” I figured since she’s the first person to trigger my ‘Salt-Sense’, name-in-progress, in this place, she was probably alright.

After all, it triggered from people who were ‘good for Ontiveros’ and since I was Oath-bound to find ‘good people’ for Ontiveros… Well, someone wouldn’t be a good fit for Ontiveros if they were planning on harming the guy charged with doing good stuff for Ontiveros. Right? Right, that makes sense.

She timidly looked past me, into the room.

“Well? Come on then, I don’t have all day.”

She walked in a few tentative steps and I gently pushed her the rest of the way inside as I locked the door, leaving the key in the lock as always, then pushed a bunch of crap, aka furniture, behind it. For some reason, she didn’t take me barricading my door as a good sign.

“Sit anywhere-”

“What happened?”

“Someone tried to kill me last night. Or two nights ago, time kind of blends here.”

Her eyes widened, “And they didn’t succeed?”

I gave her a look, “Obviously not.”

“Did you… see who it was?”

“Well, I didn’t kill anyone at breakfast the day after, so no, I didn’t.”

I probably shouldn’t have been telling her this much, but I had to trust someone. No. This was dumb regardless, because what I actually, really, truly needed was an Order of Ops.

“Hey listen, it should be safe in here, just uh… don’t sit in front of any windows. I’m taking a bath.”

“Like now?”

“Well yeah, like now. I’m not inviting you to look or propositioning you at all, but I’m taking a fucking bath.”

I started dropping equipment, then thought better as I moved it all inside and laid it next to the mega tub. I debated on whether or not to fully strip, but settled on wrapping a towel around my waist, at least until I got under the water. I mean, it was the fucking apocalypse, I was supposed to care about being modest when statistically a vast majority of the people I knew are dead, and of those that survived, likely a majority of those were going to die soon anyways.

A bit jarring, especially having been an insurance agent, you always cared what others thought. Your clients, your boss, the principal of the firm, your coworkers, your case managers. To varying degrees obviously, but all the same, you cared. It mattered.

All that had proved to just be bullshit. Well, the ability to know when people were likely full of shit was helpful, I guess, though, even just in my office, I wasn’t the best at doing that. Some could tell if a client was full of shit from the second they met them. It always took me a little bit longer, though I would eventually get the niggling feeling on my bullshit detector.

Long way of saying that I was kind of tired of giving a shit about other people’s feelings. Everybody is in the apocalypse together and I’m not NOT going to take a luxurious spa day just because someone tried to kill me last… on a prior night and some strange woman just came into my room.

I leaned my shotgun against the outside of the shower as I rinsed off in a hot shower for maybe a little longer than I should have, then moved my way to the tub, which had finished filling with water, as cold as I could make it. I remembered to move my shotgun from the shower to a ledge next to the tub before I jumped in, then moved back to the shower to heat up again before plunging into the tub a second time. I turned the hot water tap on as I sat in the freezing water.

So. Order of Operations. No, first I need to order my thoughts.

I was exhausted and I still had to do Order of Operations before talking to this Salty chick, whoever she was. Truly, being trapped in my car alone surrounded by wolves was easier than this. At least simpler. Shit, at this point even the zombies didn’t feel so bad. I did feel a deep sense of relief at not seeing more damn asterisks next to my Feats. That had been pissing me off.

I was edging closer to mass killing by dint of sheer frustration. That… seemed like a slippery slope though. Best to avoid it altogether, at least for now, even in the dim corner of my mind where Dark Affinity kept encouraging me as it insisted that it was the easiest path. Was it an 'it'? Or was that just the dark corner of my own mind? Uncomfortable thoughts go bye-bye.

What do I know?

Someone attacked me... last night? Fuck I really needed to remember this shit. It was two nights ago… I think. Wait, I had made an Order of Operations. I had to stop drinking so much, I wasn’t able to keep track of anything between the hangover that seemed to have taken a somewhat persistent hold over me. The 'Sun-buff' had done miracles but the hangover felt like a sticky one.

Was that person the ‘murderer’ or was it someone else? I vaguely remembered the sound of heels echoing down the hall afterwards. If it was a woman, how did they force a big guy into a vat? Regarding my own drowning attempt, I was surprised that they abandoned the attempt as quickly as they did, though my own burgeoning ‘combat prowess’ was okay with being flattered. I closed my eyes and laid back as I unraveled my memories. I checked my watch and before I could process the time I was hit by a sense of deja vu from the action.

My first day had another unknown visitor before the ‘attempt’. Someone had been trying to get into the parlor when I was napping before I had been officially woken up for… the whole llama-gate situation. Fuck I still needed to kill that thing.

Back to the memory, I was careful with it. I didn’t want to clutch at it too hard and have it slip between my fingers or have it dissipate with too loose of a grip. All I remembered was ‘apologies’, or something like that. I was pretty sure it was in a male voice… Vague though, I could be wrong. Hmmmm. Okay then, now I was getting somewhere. Was that an earlier attempt? Why would someone try to enter the parlor I was resting in without knocking first? Like someone using your hidden key to enter your house, it could be a friend, but you shouldn't expect it to be.

Morrigan couldn’t directly lie to me, but the more I thought about that, the less I was reassured by that. I mean, I was a pretty honest guy… I mean, yeah, let’s go with that. But what was my point?

Right, even being a relatively honest individual, I still had two tiers of promises. I didn’t think I was as clever or as generally-shithead-sneaky as these people, and even I was well aware that you could lie while still ‘telling the truth’. Things just weren’t adding up for it to be true.

If it doesn’t make sense, it’s bullshit.

Someone with Water Affinity had tried to kill me my first night and someone else had tried to come into the parlor I was napping in before I was woken up around 6pm on that first day. Was it the same person as the one who attacked me? Why wouldn’t they have used their Affinity then? No, different people, though who said they wouldn’t have been working together? Maybe it being specifically a Water Affinity attack was more of an opportunistic thing?