Some entirely inappropriate number of steps later we went through open double-doors to a breakfast room that hosted tables of people eating pancakes with sausage and butter.
Wait, there was a fucking buffet? Awesome and I wasn’t going to kiss a kick-horse in the mouth- kick a kiss-horse?... Well, however that turn of phrase was supposed to go, no one was going to find me complaining about free and, more importantly, hot food.
We sat down with both Vivi and… Tracey? Vivi touched my shoulder and laughed softly, it was a nice giggle.
“I like your shirt.”
‘NEVER Underestimate the POWER of a WOMAN who has to PROTECT her KITTIES’
For fuck’s sake. I’d kill the cat-farm owner myself if she hadn’t already been dead and eaten. I had a brief fantasy of finding out that the consumed body hadn’t been hers and she was somehow still running around and we’d meet in some random place and I’d slowly feed her piece by piece to a horde of hungry ca… dogs! I’d be dogs, that’d be perf-
Dammit. Too much Tom. I flared the faint feeling that triggered when I used Heal Thyself, it touched a fraction of my restricted Affinity and the greasy feeling slowly cleared away a bit faster than I could have pushed it away without it. Strangely, there was some extra… greasy smoke in me, connecting with my own Dark Affinity. Probably had been thinking too much with the Affinity.
Annoyed, I hardly realized that I hadn’t grabbed any food.
As the ladies got up, I started to rise too. I wanted food. Before I got halfway out of my chair, Morrigan waved me back down, “The ladies will take care of us.”
I didn’t really like the fact that someone else would be touching my food, especially, ya know, when I just experienced an attempt on my life the night before, but what was I gonna do? Worst case, I got poisoned and I could cut or shoot someone then heal them up.
Bad! Bad Dark Affinity! I checked, nope. That thought was all me. It was a good idea to have in my back pocket… Just in case.
Assuming the Oath worked for Morrigan in a somewhat similar way it did for me, there probably wouldn’t be any poison… and they were back, rendering my whole introspection moot.
“Looks good.”
We dug in and I waited a beat for Morrigan to do so first, though I realized quickly enough that the ‘wait for the other person to eat the poisoned food/drink’ only worked if you shared from a common source. Salt of the Earth had my hand instinctively reach and grab the salt-shaker on the table as I added some to all of the food on my plate and casually pocketed the shaker. I was almost positive that no one noticed. No one said anything at least which was good enough.
Conversation flowed half-decently, scattered and awkward when the topic moved post-apocalypse and then resumed a natural flow easily enough when the conversation traveled to talk about our prior lives. I told them a bit about my past life as an insurance salesman.
I may have spruced it up with ‘celebrity and high net worth clients’, though, there had only been one ‘celebrity’ and Tracey was some old-money like Morrigan, though not as much and not as old. Vivi was from British Columbia and was Tracey’s friend/personal assistant and it seemed like that had translated to Morrigan’s personal assistant in the apocalypse. They all seemed… relatively relaxed about the entire world-as-we-knew-it-ending thing. I also found out that Morrigan’s first name was ‘Jeremy’, though he liked to go by ‘Morrigan’ here. My natural assumption was that it was to solidify his connection to Morrigan-Home, aka the vineyard itself.
I took the shaker out of my pocket to drop a shake of it into my refreshed glass of white breakfast wine.
“Are you adding sugar to your wine?”
“Salt?” I was pretty sure they weren’t keeping sugar in a salt-shaker. At least, I hoped they weren’t.
Morrigan and Tracey visibly recoiled and Vivi winced. That seemed suspicious. Were they demons afraid of salt or something?
“That’s gross.”
I blankly looked at Vivi. I just liked the taste of salt because it reminded me of Duck, but yeah… I mean, it kinda was though, wasn’t it? I guess she kind of had a point. The horrified looks tempered a bit, though they were doing so very slowly.
None of the three showed any sign of triggering the other aspect of Salt of the Earth so I shrugged, “New habit, never know when I’m going to be running for my life. Lots of sweating and not a lot of time to drink water when it happens.”
That seemed like a poor excuse, but it kind of wasn’t. I really didn’t want to get heatstroke again, that was a mini-miracle that I had survived the first time. So hydration was the name of the game and since I didn’t want to be peeing every 5 minutes, I would be using a lot of salt. I could give a shit about water-weight in the apocalypse. It was downright logical when you think of it like that. It also reminded me of Duck and I was desperately wishing for a friendly face. I bet seeing Duck right now would light up Salt of the Earth, a feeling like putting your tongue on a salt lick. Or so I assumed, I didn’t really know what to look for in that regard.
“Oh? You do a lot of running for your life? Figured you’d be doing more fighting.”
My eyes narrowed, Tracey. Bitch.
“Sometimes you gotta do both.”
“Huh, guess so.”
I tried to ignore it, but I wasn’t that cool.
“Oh yeah, what have you done? Hide behind Jeremy’s barrier?”
Her gaze turned from haughty to slightly hostile.
“We go out there. I go out there.” She stabbed a finger toward her chest at the last part.
“Well, let me tell you what, I didn’t have pancakes and sausage. Not much wine out there either.”
The conversation died for a bit then picked up occasionally. Both Tracey and I tried to force out some more casualness than I thought either of us were feeling at that particular moment. Though, maybe she should try being less of a pompous ass, that’d probably help.
I noticed only a few glances at my cup of salted wine. Weirdos, the lot of em.
It wrapped up when Morrigan… er, Jeremy stood up and plugged the rest of his wine with the statement, ‘waste not, want not.’
I finished my last remaining in lazy bites and then stood and grabbed my wine glass to bring with me… wherever.
“So, Master Morrigan, what’s on the docket for today? Any new murders?”
I took a sip of my wine.
“Today? No, but yesterday there was.”
I spit and coughed as that caught me a bit off guard. I guess they saved a body for me.Vivi and Tracey both took long pulls from their glasses.
“Well shit, alright, after you then.”
I left my salted wine on the table. Tastes like shit anyways.
----------------------------------------
More long, twisting hallways were highlighted by baroque-modern architecture, at least that’s what my underdeveloped fancy-sense was telling me. It sounded right enough. Not to mention the grotesque carvings adorned the walls with mythical beasts and demons. Those looked decidedly wrong. This place was giving me the heeby-jeebies, though it was difficult to tell what was my intuition and what was the early-AM buzz I was currently rocking.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He placed an antique key into a modern-looking lock before pushing on a large, mottled wooden door that let loose an ominous creak as they opened to reveal a dim interior.
The smell of rotten wood that had decayed a century ago hit me first, deep mildew that had died then settled into a rich wood, then complex layers of old wine seeped alongside, it was finished by the smell of fresh wood as rows of new barrels and old casks and shiny stainless steel tanks seamlessly blended together in an unsettling mix of old and new. Maybe I’m being fancy to describe something I didn’t like, but I took the extra moment to see why I hated it. I was also a bit loaded, so I got a bit fancy, deal with it.
Morrigan spun an ancient-looking key on an even more ancient and threadbare tassel around his finger before pocketing it.
“Is that a Skeleton Key?”
He started a bit, then turned as he closed the door behind us.
“Yes, how’d you guess?”
“Are there more of them?”
“There should be a second.”
“Who has it?”
He didn’t immediately answer as he walked in and clearly resting over the lip of a massive… wine barrel? Wine cauldron? No, mega-wine barrel. There was a man, unmoving, laying half over the lip. Morrigan indicated to the unmoving man with a wave of his hand.
“He had the other.”
I looked around, Vivi and Tracey had left at some point. Strange that I hadn’t even picked that up. Keeping with the theme of ‘Whatever’, I dismissed the thought.
I studied the body, it looked like… Well, it looked like a corpse that had been half soaking in a mega-wine barrel for a day. Pretty bloated, though not as much as I would have assumed. I climbed next to it and peeked inside, the wine was frozen solid.
“How’d the wine freeze?”
“...Tracey did that after we found the body.”
“Ice… Affinity?” I hadn’t even known that was a thing.
“Yes, does that relate to the investigation?”
“So the wine wasn’t frozen when you first found him?”
“No.”
He seemed disinterested in the entire question chain so I switched it up, “Who found the body?”
“Jon-”
“I haven’t met him.”
“No, I figured you would want to study the body before we called him here.”
I studied the body or at least tried to. The thing is, I wasn’t an actual detective, I was a ‘Clue’ detective. Very different.
“Who is this?”
“Westley.”
Not this shit again, “Who was he to you? Why do you think someone would want to kill him?”
“He was the general manager for the winery. He has worked for my family for years, we were fairly close, especially after the apocalypse landed. Though, to be honest, at one point I thought he might have been the Usurper.”
“Though, not any more.”
Morrigan nodded, “Well yes, truthfully before this I was having my doubts about that suspicion…”
“Why’s that?”
He raised his eyebrow and it took me a moment to realize that he thought I had been asking ‘how do you know he isn’t the Usurper’.
“I’m asking why you were having doubts about suspecting him.”
“Ah. Well, in short, he saved my life.”
“That’ll do it. What happened?”
“A patrol and I was quite wounded-”
“By what?”
He gave me a bit of a peeved look, “By a boar.”
“I bet those things are monsters now.”
He softly laughed, “Truly.”
I had been hoping it had been a human that had tried to kill Morrigan, though that was a dumb thought. If a human had tried to kill him and he was still alive, well obviously that person would be dead and I wouldn’t be here trying to solve this shit. So, his Quest was still active and Westley was obviously dead.
“No offense,” of course I was going to be offensive, “but it’s strange. You really don’t seem like a good judge of character especially when your life's on the line.”
Morrigan… laughed?
“Well, when you’re me, everyone’s a friend and everyone’s an enemy.”
“What's that mean?”
“Money and power simplify a lot of things, but not who your actual friends are. It’s also the apocalypse, how am I supposed to know who wants to kill me as compared to who wants to kill me because there lies some esoteric reward attached to the endeavor?”
Ugh, I hated how he talked. The faint British accent, the douchiness, the everything. Still…
“Fair.” That actually was a decent point. “How do you think he died?”
“I would say he drowned or passed out then drowned, the quantities of CO2 at the top of those barrels can get quite high, it can kill someone in a frighteningly short period of time-”
“But?”
“But, he himself would know that. Quite well in fact.”
“So, murder then.”
I studied the body, the clothing looked rumpled, but it was honestly hard to tell since the man had been soaking for who knew how long and his arms and part of his face were trapped in the frozen wine. The skin was blotchy and discolored, it was hard to tell what was a bruise potentially caused by a struggle and what was caused by being half frozen hanging over the lip of a water-tank for nearly a full day. I felt around his skull, no blunt wounds there or even blood. The back of his clothing was rumpled and a bit torn. I looked for, and didn’t find, any stab wounds or sharp tears in the clothing. Any tears were along the seams.
Now I was feeling the old EMT experience kicking in. I stood behind him and used my thumbs to follow his cervical spine, following it to his waist. No, definitely no trauma. Well dying was pretty traumatic but no impacts I could tell. I checked the ribs as a final confirmation. Nothing. Someone must have held him down in it.
I looked around the platform we were standing on in front of the steel cask. It was a pretty substantial ledge, but sneaking up on him and holding him down for a minute? I didn’t know if I bought that, the person would have to be pretty strong. It was curious why they didn’t bother just cracking him over the head and letting him drown that way.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday?”
“I didn’t want to scare you off.”
At that, I gave him a look, “You just had to show me the bathing facilities.”
He laughed good-naturedly, if a little shallowly.
“Are you just going to keep killing people until you find the Usurper?”
There might have been something on his face, but it was tough to tell. The guy had a great poker face, absolutely nonplussed about everything.
“Are you asking if I killed this man? I absolutely did not.”
“But you have killed someone?”
His face twitched, “Yes, the first person-”
“Is that counting the llama woman?”
“Well then, two presumably, if you’re going to credit me for that vile llama’s actions. Before this whole Usurper nonsense, there were also others, who wanted to seize the winery or were… serious impediments to everyone’s safety.”
“Are you planning on killing anyone else?”
He nodded and I tensed.
“The Usurper, when you find them. Perhaps others who threaten our little slice of paradise, I refuse to limit my options.”
I could definitely understand that last part, I was keeping all my options wide open. At least he was being honest. “So you aren’t just going to kill everyone and find out later?”
“Burning my castle before I sit on the throne isn’t my ideal course of action.”
Even if he just phrased that very weirdly, it did make sense. He had made a few guesses and was wrong, but now he doesn’t want to continue murdering loyal ‘subjects’ to weaken his ‘kingdom’ just to get one person. I didn’t like the fact that he seemed completely willing to murder actually loyal people on the barest suspicions of guilt.
A question had been bouncing in my head for a while now, “What obligations do you carry from our Oath?”
His face twitched, so minor I might have been imagining it except that my peripheral vision caught it and the fact that I wasn’t facing him directly must have given him some subconscious leeway.
“I cannot directly lie to you when in direct pursuit of your mission as granted by your Oath.”
I was hesitant to believe that outright, but that sense of external ‘Obligation’ reared up inside of me. That felt… right. Probably. I was getting really annoyed with ‘probably’ ‘maybe’ and ‘likely’, this shit had to do with my life and I couldn’t just look up a guide for it online.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t super reassured by the knowledge, my suspicious, conspiracy minded brain kept open the door to him being able to kill me. Even if he wasn’t going to lie to me about it first. ‘Maybe’, AGH.
“Are you planning on having me killed?”
“No.”
“So, did you kill this man?”
“I did not.”
“Why do you think he was killed?”
“Perhaps to get his skeleton key, perhaps on someone’s order, perhaps for some other nefarious reason. I couldn’t say for sure.”
“Did you try to kill me last night?” Damn, no flinch.
“Why would I?” I flattened my stare and he continued, “No, of course not. We have an Oath.”
“Did you send someone to try and kill me?”
“No.”
Well, we’ll see about that, but I felt the sense of it being the truth… Good enough. For now. I could keep asking a million permutations of questions, and maybe I should be, but that would seem… I don’t know, a bit ridiculous. Unseemly. Not detectivey.