Chapter 83 - Visits²
The day after the Cabal’s attack, Scarlett was once more walking down the mansion’s hallways to receive another sudden guest.
There were a lot of them lately.
And while this wasn’t exactly the best time for receiving visitors, she couldn’t just ignore this person, either.
Things around the mansion were a complete mess right now. Scarlett was thankful she turned out to be the Cabal Adepts’ primary target, and that most of the staff had made it through relatively unharmed. Two guards had gotten some nasty head injuries, but Rosa had managed to fix them up to a level where they would recover after a week’s rest.
In comparison, Garside’s injury from fighting Riya was pretty severe. Rosa had done what she could during the night, and now during the morning, but apparently the healing took even more than usual out of the old man, and the injury had reached all the way down to the bones. He would still make it, but for now, his left arm was out of commission and he would have to spend some time recovering. Scarlett was going to look into if there were any other forms of treatment available as well later on.
The mansion itself also hadn’t fared well from the assault. The chief victim had been the courtyard, where the fountain and surrounding stonework had been wrecked, and all the flowerbeds either burnt or trampled down. In addition, the building faces facing the courtyard sustained a good amount of damage, as well as some hallways in the east wing where Garside and Fynn had fought the Cabal Adepts.
Frankly, just the thought of the costs of repairing all this in a mansion like this sent shivers down her spine. This place was bound to be more valuable than anything else the Hartford family had in its possession. Evelyne was sure to have a fit when she learned of it as well.
Scarlett would have to double down on her efforts to make up for the costs.
It wasn’t as if she could send a receipt to the Hallowed Cabal for the damages.
Though she should probably count herself lucky that she was still walking around like this. In order to get the Hallowed Cabal to agree to a deal with her, she’d made a pretty large gamble. Namely, that The Angler Man was currently in his slumber.
The Angler Man was old. Far too old to still be breathing. As a consequence of how he was maintaining his life, he sometimes had to go into slumbers for extended periods. In the game, this would sometimes happen at the start or end of certain questlines and usually lasted a month or so. Scarlett had heard he sometimes slumbered for much longer periods, though that was probably before the game started.
One thing she hadn’t known was that he would be in one of his slumbers this early in the timeline. That was why it had been a gamble. But it would fit with what she’d seen, and was the alternative that was most advantageous to her current situation. The Hallowed Cabal usually wouldn’t hesitate in acting against people like her, because they could always get any information they wanted with The Angler Man’s help. But if he was in a slumber, they couldn’t rely on that option. So if a situation were to appear where they needed certain information from her, they would either have to kidnap her and bank on being able to force the information out of her, or compromise and make a deal to guarantee that they got what they wanted.