Lucky Rabbit

Augustus’s eyes met Pandy’s as she spun, and she waved her paws reassuringly. She was fine. Or she would be fine. There was no way Daedalus and his cronies were prepared for everything she could do. But they still needed to know where the real Lian was, and if it was possible to get Bryan away safely, that would be good. Thaniel and Lian’s father still hadn’t looked up from his work, so he had to be spelled somehow. Probably by the redheaded Mind Mage, who Pandy liked less and less all the time. Then there was Keros, who just shouldn’t be here at all. No, they needed information, and it looked like it was time for a Villain Monologue.

The only acknowledgement Augustus gave was a slight relaxing of the corners of his mouth, but he focused on Daedalus. “It’s not even my elemental. Why should I care what happens to it?”

“Oh no,” Daedalus said, waggling his knife in admonishment. “This is Eurydice Haupe, current Lady Avington, and a Dark elementalist, even though you and she have somehow convinced your surprisingly credulous aunts that she’s a Light mage. I’d thought better of Lady Arabelle at least, though Lady Frances has always been too willing to see what she expects.”

He glanced at Miller, who gave Pandy a rough shake, setting her to swinging again. She made a not-particularly-convincing attempt to scratch the boy when she swung close to his arm, but he was holding his arm out in an arch so she couldn’t reach.

Looking back at Augustus, Daedalus said, “We know the Touchstone was in Avington House, likely on the necklace still on Preston Avington’s body.” He sneered. “Not long ago, your little girlfriend found and removed it. Why? Was it just pretty? Or did it call to her, the way it’s meant to do? She must be a true Avington with the Dark affinity, or the house wouldn’t have recognized her, and that makes her eligible to be ‘Zheraphon’s Champion’.”

There were the tiniest of air quotes audible in his voice when he said the last few words, and he flicked a glance at Lady Ruth, who was watching Pandy with eyes that were almost as ravenous as those of the Bound standing behind her. Daedalus’s lip curled in a sneer as he went on.

“Lian told us she had the stone, but you recognized it as the one belonging to Preston Avington, and hid it away for safekeeping.” At Augustus’s startled twitch, Daedalus gave a derisive laugh. “That’s right. The boy told us everything, in exchange for a promise to leave his brother alone. A promise we’ll keep… for now. We don’t need that magicless runt anyway. Not now that you’ve brought us this very helpful hare. We just have to find Ismara’s Touchstone and make Lian her Champion, this will all be over with a single blow.”

He thrust his knife forward, giving it a vicious and unnecessary twist in the air before drawing it back. Pandy was beginning to get an idea of what was going on, and she didn’t like it. She also didn’t like that a few of Daedalus’s words were sounding terribly familiar.

In Gacha Love, when Clara and her main Love Interest tracked Killian down, they found him standing over the body of the opposite Love Interest. Very rarely, if a player had the Affection of all four boys at or above one hundred points, the final victim would instead be one of the villainesses, though it was never explained exactly how the girl had come to be there, or why Killian chose her. He simply went on with his Villain Monologue with only minor changes to make it more generic.

The whole ‘I’d thought better of… always been too willing’ thing was straight out of Killian’s speech, though Pandy hadn’t recognized it at first. Of course, in the game it was in reference to the two absent love interests, who had also been helping with the investigation. But that nasty little ‘this will all be over with a single blow’ thing was pure Killian, and told Pandy at least part of what Keros’s magic had been up to. It needed to finish the story, so when it couldn’t turn Lian evil, it found a substitute villain instead.

Pandy started thrashing in earnest now. Yes, they needed to know where Lian was, but it sounded like he was safe enough, at least until they found Ismara’s stone and Champion-ified him. If they didn’t know Thaniel was a Light mage – good job, secret-keeping people! – then the only other Light mages available were Lian and Clara. It was at least vaguely possible that the bad guys either didn’t know about Clara, or had decided she wasn’t suitable for some other reason. That left Lian, who almost certainly had to be alive and relatively unharmed in order to play his part.

On the other hand, the mid-game battle between Killian, Clara, and her beau was a difficult one, usually requiring at least one gacha spin to either top up Clara’s Stamina or give her some other boost. Killian himself wasn’t all that difficult to defeat, but he had waves of Magical Minions, which meant that the enemies they could see probably weren’t the only ones there.

Seeing Pandy’s increasing agitation, Augustus’s brows drew together, but he didn’t change tactics. Daedalus was talking, and Augustus wanted information. “Why are you here then?” Augustus asked, his voice relaxed and conversational. Nothing to see here, no ma’am. Definitely not trying to get the egomaniac to spill the Plan.

The other man bared his teeth in a wild grin. “Because Queen Regent Louisa doesn’t think the rules apply to her. Ismara’s Touchstone was safe within the vaults of the palace, beyond even our reach, until she gave it away. It wasn’t ever supposed to leave the treasury, much less in the company of a Light mage, but she gave it to a descendant of Ismara’s first Champion. We knew the moment Grace Conroy took it, and we knew the stone had to be here. But we need two Touchstones and two Champions in order to win, and Zheraphon’s was lost. So we left Ismara’s here, in plain sight, until we were ready to take it.”

“Except you can’t find it, can you?” Augustus asked, sounding faintly amused.

“It’s here,” Daedalus spat, his own grin vanishing. “It’s here, and Bryan is going to tell us exactly where,” he said again, settling back into a jovial, superior tone. “Two stones, two Champions, one winner.” He gave the knife another practice twist, the words ‘one winner’ echoing in Pandy’s head. Another Killian-ism. It seemed Keros’s magic was still forcing this situation into the closest approximation of the one from the game it could manage. There were a lot of moving parts involved in this scene. How many of them could it control at once?

“What does Duke Benedict have to do with all of this?” Augustus asked.

Pandy thrashed. She knew the question of the Maybe Evil Duke’s involvement and the conspiracy to bring down Louisa and Kaden was important to Augustus, but they really needed to wrap this up. Besides, her ears were really starting to hurt, and she thought the left one felt a little loose.

Daedalus was happy enough to keep chatting, however. Apparently, he didn’t get to have enough Master to Minions Monologues, and of course the fact that his archetype, Killian the Villian, also became quite garrulous at this point probably helped.

Daedalus waved his knife dismissively. “Benedict was one of the Exchange’s first successes. It was long before my time, of course, but I gather that when that fool, Philip Avington, brought his family’s research to Louisa’s father,” he seemed to take far too much pleasure in saying the queen’s name without any kind of honorific, “he took the information to Prince Crawford, hoping to curry favor with him. Crawford’s son, Benedict, was – ah, Gus, you’ll see the humor in this – magicless. That lack of magic meant he would likely never marry, never have children, and Crawford’s line would end. So they used the Avingtons’ little trick to give Benedict Air magic, and here we are today.”

Half-turning, he focused on Pandy and Miller, whose arm was remarkably steady for someone who had been holding out even a few pounds of rabbit for several minutes now. Miller also hadn’t said anything this entire time, and Pandy finally realized that his face was oddly stiff, the eyes unfocused and glazed. Uh oh.

“Do you know what the trick is, Augustus?” Daedalus asked, far too cheerfully for Pandy’s comfort. “It turns out that magic is sourced primarily in the heart, but it can be found anywhere blood flows. That is, almost everywhere in the body, which is why it took so long to figure this out. It sounds like one of the Avingtons just went mad and started hauling people in and killing them in various ways, and stumbled over the trick almost on accident.”

He gestured with his knife, and Miller reached into his pocket with his free hand, removing a perfect oval crystal, about an inch in diameter. It wasn’t dark, though. Instead, it was perfectly clear, gleaming in the sunlight streaming in through the high, narrow windows.

“He reasoned that an essence stone reveals someone’s magic by allowing that magic to flow into it. But what if magic could be locked into the stone, at least until we’re ready for it to come out? Sometimes when someone is being tested, their magic can overwhelm an impure stone. When that happens, the person being tested is left weak and drained. So he just killed a few people while they fed their magic into a stone. It took a few tries to get the timing just right, but sure enough, without a living body to return to, the magic remained in the stone, for a little while at least. But when the magic all escaped, the stone would crumble to dust.”

He pointed the knife at the ring of powdered crystal. “That dust had some, ah, interesting properties of its own, but it couldn’t be used as a power source, so he ignored it. It built up in his lab until one day one of his victims attempted to escape, knocking over the barrel in which it was stored and covering her and the room in powdered essence stone. When he took her magic, he found that the stone didn’t degrade like the others. Unfortunately, it also couldn’t escape into the air, so instead it flowed into the nearest living vessel, which was him. His body had much the same reaction as an overloaded essence stone. I hear it was… messy.”

Miller crouched down, his hands moving with inhuman speed to pin Pandy to the floor, belly up. Very much like the way Killian’s final victim was found, actually. Miller set the stone on her stomach, and it flared into black-purple brilliance. This was rapidly reaching a point where even Pandy was starting to get just a wee bit nervous.

“It took years, but his successor finally realized that giving the recipient – that is, the person holding the knife – an empty crystal as well, allowed the magic to balance out without killing them. It’s still incredibly painful, however.” Daedalus grimaced, rubbing his own chest in a way Pandy recognized. She felt a shudder run through her. Who had he murdered to gain whatever power he now had?

“That was the point at which Philip Avington found the research. He made copies of all the books and placed himself in the hands of a ruthless and power-hungry man, receiving a just reward for his foolishness. But it has been decades since then, and further advancements have been made. Still, research had stalled until the Shadow Exchange discovered that a man who was both one of its greatest adversaries and one of the most brilliant minds of our time had made himself… vulnerable.”

This time Daedalus pointed at Bryan, who still crouched over the book, pen scratching away. Lady Ruth’s hand was on his shoulder as she whispered into his ear, though she never looked away from Pandy.

“Bryan asked one simple question: Why did a living person have to be involved at all? Of course, he hoped we would focus on those who were already dead, but Lord Shadow took it one step further. What if a Bound held the knife?”

Miller leaned over Pandy, raising his knife, and as he did, she could see a ragged, wet tear in the front of his black unitard. She shuddered, trying to squirm away, but his hand held her so tightly that she couldn’t escape without using a skill or spell. That would definitely break his grip, but it would also drop the whole tableau into chaos as Daedalus realized that things really weren’t going to go his way and called in his off-screen allies.

But even an undead Miller piloted by a Demon couldn’t do three things at once, so Pandy twisted enough to make the stone roll off her stomach. Hopefully it had to be in contact with her body in order to work. Miller lowered the knife so he could pick the stone up and replace it. Pandy repeated the twist and wiggle, and Daedalus clicked his tongue.

“You can spare her simply by telling us where Zheraphon’s Touchstone is, Gus.” Daedalus said as Augustus took a step toward Pandy and formerly-Miller. Daedalus settled into a defensive stance as he continued. “We need an Avington with Dark magic to be Zheraphon’s Champion, and your Eurydice could do it. Once Zheraphon has replaced Ismara-” Here, he didn’t quite roll his eyes. Pandy was beginning to get the feeling Daedalus wasn’t a True Believer. “And Benedict is king, there will be a purge of the nobility. Wouldn’t it be nice if you and she were among those who live to see the coming new age?”

Which would only happen if Zheraphon’s Champion – and nope, that definitely wasn’t going to be Pandy – killed Ismara’s Champion. Who would be Lian, if Daedalus and his backers had their way, but right now it might well be Thaniel. Though if the Champion had to be a Dark mage, maybe not? At least not unless or until the boy’s magic was fully changed to Dark. Either way, Pandy wasn’t killing them or anyone. Not that she was going to be Zhery-wery’s Champion. Just to be really clear.

Miller flipped Pandy over, placing her face down on top of the stone, rather than trying to balance the stone on her belly. If she’d had to breathe, he would have crushed that breath right out of her as a knee came down on her back, pinning her in place. The time was coming to act.

“If you kill her, you’ll be killing your own precious Champion. An Avington with Dark magic isn’t exactly easy to come by, you know. Besides, you don’t even have Zher- the other stone. How are you going to get a Champion for your side?” Augustus said, speaking for the first time since Daedalus really got rolling.

“Oh, no,” Daedalus replied as Miller shifted, leaning on Pandy even harder. He ignored Augsutus’s excellent second point and focused on the first. “You see, we have another candidate. They’re also an Avington, though they’re a Water elementalist. While magic does seem to have its own markers, much the way blood does, if we take Avington magic and combine it with Avington blood, we’re quite certain the Touchstone will accept them.” This time she could hear the eye-roll in his voice. He wasn’t on Team Zheraphon.

Miller shifted again, and Pandy gathered herself. It was time to stop playing rabbit-skin carpet and end this before somebody really did die. <Hop!> she thought, and it felt like her body exploded – a feeling she knew far too well at this point.

Usually when she Hopped, she had her paws under her, and the Hopping happened very naturally. This time, she was splayed out like a spatchcock chicken with a hundred and fifty-plus pounds of Bound on her back, and three pounds of rabbit required a whole lot of magic to move a mountain.

Fortunately, Pandy had a lot of magic. She went up, Miller went flying to the side – with a suspicious lack of gasping or yelling – and Keros’s hand moved, swiping away a broad swathe of the crystalline circle.