Chapter Text
For some reason, when Junior Year had finished, Riz had tricked himself into believing that the extracurricular load would be lower when he was a senior.
Well, he was clearly wrong, because it’s worse.
Much worse.
And alright, maybe that speaks more to his own work-life imbalance than any external forces, but he’s always been a hard worker, and there’s no way he’s letting any chance of a scholarship slip his grasp. Some of the clubs are even fun — he’s grown attached to Gertie and the ever-growing list of nemeses that the Apiarist’s Club has, debate team is right up his alley, and Soil Club? He’s sure that knowledge will come in handy… someday.
Out of all of them, though, the Programming Club is one of the few that he’s managed to apply to his day-to-day life. Namely as a tool in solving mysteries; he long whizzed past the tasks that they were supposed to be doing, the problems and logical solutions right up his alley. Riz has never been much of an inventor, but he finds a certain sort of catharsis in finding new ways to modify arcanotech from afar, or, on occasion, break into a file that he needs for a case. It’s not exactly lockpicking, but the excitement he gets from successfully breaking into someplace he’s not supposed to be is, unfortunately, quite the high.
After school, though, his brain is abuzz with the earlier conversation with Kristen and Adaine. So, he does some digging. Riz starts by looking into some of the books that Adaine took from the library, and was courteous enough to lend him. Most of it seems to be the typical required reading for a final year Wizard student, but there are more advanced books, too; namely several advanced tomes on chronomancy. Honestly, if Adaine doesn’t get a scholarship, Riz will be surprised, judging by how some of the theoretical concepts here take several rereads for him to even make a semblance of sense of. Then again, he’s only dabbled in being an Arcane Trickster, so he doesn’t have a strong baseline to compare.
Interestingly, it’s the books on curses and magical maladies that prove the most insightful. At first, he’s not certain why Adaine threw it in with the other books — she told him that she just picked it up as a light read when she tossed it over to him, but as Riz thumbs through the pages that she’s put tabs in… there’s a clear theme. Namely, in the fact that she’s bookmarking ailments to do with headaches, brain fog and sudden, sharply painful nosebleeds.
Riz scans through the pages, furrows his brow, and types a hasty string of words into Fantasy Google.
The webpage you’re looking for has been filtered out by the school administration system.
Well. Shit. He’s not surprised, though it still amazes him how they’re trained for life or death situations, but the school filters out anything with the words blood in it (extra disconcerting considering they play a sport with the word in the name), and he leans back in his chair, swiveling around slightly. “Hey, UNIT?” he calls out, and the modron student looks up at him affirmatively. “Do you know how to bypass the school’s web blocker?”
UNIT responds with a string of clicks and whirrs in Modron that although Riz can’t translate perfectly, can roughly grasp the sentiment of exchange.
Riz sighs, crossing his arms. “What do you need?”
More clicks and beeps — this time, unfortunately, Riz knows exactly what they mean. He presses his fingers to the bridge of his glasses. “You want me to go talk to Gorgug Thistlespring for you.”
Several beeps in the affirmative.
“UNIT, I don’t even know the guy that well, and I thought you two were on good terms, relatively speaking? Didn’t he give you a... cowboy hat?”
What follows is a fairly long-winded explanation that Riz can barely keep pace with (only some very loose knowledge of Morse Code is saving him, thankfully, as the languages share some strong similarities), but he gets the final gist of do you want me to bypass the system for you or not?
“Alright, alright, gods — I’ll see what I can do, okay?” UNIT whirrs happily, but Riz interjects, “And I get the whole ‘situationship’ situation is messy, but, dude. If I have to be anyone else’s middleman I’m going to lose it, alright?” UNIT gives a hum in response, and, after a moment, Riz receives an email from UNIT with the necessary information. Riz shoots him a reluctant smile and a thumbs up, then gets to work on his research. But first— “And, uh. Just to clarify, you haven’t been having any headaches lately, right? Nosebleeds?” Then he winces as UNIT responds with a firm no. “Yeah, I — stupid question.”
Still, it’s more than odd that he, President Applebees, and Adaine have all been sharing the same symptoms, and the book on ailments more than proves it. He scrolls through the forums, finding nothing really worth digging into; most of them seem to be willing to claim that either the headaches are life-threatening medical conditions that would’ve had him in the hospital weeks ago, or are simply due to lack of sleep. He does, unfortunately, have to consider that latter one. It isn’t fun to consider.
Somewhere towards the bottom of the page, though, he finds something that catches his eye. It’s a small article from an anonymous user on the untreated curses forum, simply titled “can headaches be caused by arcane interference???”
The article itself is poorly written, winds around the point far too much as the user seems to think every aspect of their small-town drama and the rumours building up in it is relevant, but, ultimately, there’s nuggets that line up. The brain fog, the distortion of memories, the sharp, sudden pain that’s acutely different from any that he’s used to. He has to consider it, and his finger hovers over the save button.
“Hey, nerds — which one of you knows how to trace an account?”
The girl who kicks open the door has spiky bangs and hair in twin braids, a leather jacket torn to the hells and back, and one fishnet stocking on her left ankle. There’s a sort of glee she takes in kicking the door open, though Riz is immediately scanning her. She seems far too familiar, and she grins, looking over and meeting his gaze—
They’re running through the halls of the school when Riz finally sees a corner they can duck behind. He doesn’t hesitate before pulling Fig along with him, and shushing her as they take a moment to breathe, exhausted from the chase. Ears twitching, he stays low and keeps an eye out for any sign of movement that isn’t from them. When all the noise he can pick up on is their own hearts pounding, Riz hisses, “Why the hell did you come back here, knowing full well that there were constructs after you?”
“I left a notebook in my locker!” Fig hisses back, matching his fanged expression and tail lash. There’s no threat behind it — never is, between the two of them — but it does convey a good sense of urgency and irritation, of that sort of shared feral instinct that both of them can relate to repressing for so long.
“And you thought it was a good idea to go and get it back in the middle of summer? When no one’s around to watch us get absolutely destroyed by these things? You might be the dropout, but I do still have a grade point average to keep up, Fig!"
Fig rolls her eyes, fixing the strands of hair that have come loose from her braid. “I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble if you hadn’t followed me!”
“You wouldn’t be alive if I hadn’t followed you—”
The sound of mechanical pincers trodding down the hallway towards them forces them to both stop arguing and just stew in silence (and, admittedly, the absurdity of the situation). Then, quietly, Fig adds: “Y’know, I could probably Dimension Door us out to the front lawn from here.”
“You’d better.”
The sharp pain clears, and Riz finds himself staring at the girl, before realising that the few other students in the club are looking at him expectantly. “Back up a moment,” he winces, holding out a hand as though gesturing to wait. “What do you need?”
The tiefling teen’s eyes dart to the others, and she crosses her arms, kicking the door shut and leaning against it. “Can we, uh… discuss this with less folks around?”
Riz’s mind immediately jumps to try and find a reason why. She doesn’t seem especially familiar, though she already has the energy of a spitfire wrapped up in a leather jacket, and Riz can only assume that means trouble. It’s odd, though, seeing someone in school that he doesn’t recognise. Not at all. And yet… there’s something he can’t place about her that seems oddly familiar.
Thankfully, though, the question of who this girl is is answered when Shellford, finally looking up from his computer, turns his head slowly and goes, “Woah. Are you… Fig Faeth? Like… the rockstar?”
“Good to know that some people still know who I am,” she says, flashing a fanged, devilish grin. Right. He’s heard of Fig Faeth in passing, mainly through the occasional conversation with bard kids trying to spread the hottest gossip in the music scene to anyone who’d listen. He’s about 90% certain, as Shellford speaks, that that’s why Riz recognises her. “But,” she continues, “I’m not here to give out autographs. So. Can we…”
“Right. Right,” Riz says, finding the words again. “I mean, we’re sort of in the middle of some work here—”
Fig climbs onto the chair facing opposite him, and moves so she can glimpse Riz’s monitor, head upside down. “And researching magical maladies on Fantasy Reddit is work? I mean, I’d be more than happy to pay you,” she suggests. “If that’s what you need; just work with me here.”
He sighs. “I don’t even know if I’ll be able to help you with whatever it is that you need.”
“Trace an account,” Fig remarks, and Riz just silently returns to his research. He's more than fine with skirting the line of the law, but this is clearly not his problem. She huffs, sitting back in the seat. Riz expects that that’s that, that she’ll get bored eventually (and truly, between the headaches and the worse insomnia than usual, he is all out of care to help others out), but as he clicks through the webpages, he sees Fig leaning to the left, staring at him expectantly.
His patience lasts about five minutes before it wears thin. “Do you have to do that?”
“Nope,” she says, popping the ‘p’. “I’ll leave you alone if you help me out, though.”
Riz thunks his head onto the keyboard lightly, distantly aware that he’s probably accidentally redirected the site to somewhere completely random. “Fine,” he mutters, words coming out slightly muffled.
“Great!”
“There’s a smaller computer room if you need more privacy, but this has to be quick,” he emphasises. “I have class in ten minutes, and you…”
“Dropped out,” she says with a smile.
“Then why in the hells are you—” Riz shakes his head, dismissing Fig’s words as they walk into the room that’s sometimes decked out for the AV club, but mostly gets used as a computer room in the day-to-day. He sits, and Fig perches herself on a desk. “Alright, so you need an account… traced,” he begins, desperately wanting to ask why but slightly scared of the answer. He holds his hand out expectantly.
“What?”
“Your crystal.”
Fig looks hesitant, but Riz raises his eyebrows and she rolls her eyes, unlocking it and handing it over. “The account should be recently viewed,” Fig remarks, then, a few clicks later: “There.”
“Solstice Aberdeen?” he frowns, the name ringing a scarily loud alarm.
He instinctively reaches for his briefcase to check his clueboard, but Fig just leads him to the followers page, muttering, “Look.” And Riz does. He checks; then checks again to make sure that he’s seeing this right.
“Right,” he says when he’s taken a moment to scan through every account. “So these are all ghost accounts. None of them have any real description, profile picture, and have one post maximum — I can probably search through deleted posts, but it’s more likely that someone made a burner account.” He looks up. “And you’re sure that this is a real person’s account?”
“Uh, yeah,” Fig scoffs. “I ran into her yesterday, talking about the wonders of how Helio was going to save her. She even made a post about some trip she was taking, though it’s long deleted now.”
Well. Shit.
The earlier conversation with Kristen Applebees comes flooding back as he remembers what the cleric was saying about people in the church going away. Numbers dwindling, several Aguefort students away — “Solstice was one of the names,” he whispers under his breath, and Fig’s ears twitch.
“What?”
“Don't bother,” Riz replies, already taking down a pen and beginning to jot notes down in shorthand so he doesn’t forget them. “But if you want me to verify if this account is real, which it really doesn’t seem to be… I’m going to need another source. Do you have an address? A number?”
“I have a number,” she says reluctantly. “I’ve tried sending messages, but none of them have gone through; I mean, I wouldn’t have sent the messages, but with all… this —” Fig gestures to the crystal — “I wanted to double check.” Then, hesitantly: “Do you think I’m just being paranoid?”
“Do you want to just be paranoid?” he responds tartly, already setting up the terminal to trace the signal. I mean, he’s always been considered to be paranoid, and so far, it’s saved his life more than he could imagine. So it can’t be that bad a thing. Especially not when his own mind’s racing at a thousand miles an hour.
“I want to know the truth,” Fig says. “Paranoid or not.”
Riz hums, plugging in the number. “Then this should help.”
The system takes a moment to boot up, but when it does, the strings of encrypted information begin to appear, and Fig leans in, eyes wide.
That anticipation is quickly shattered when the system proceeds to take an ungodly amount of time to load.
Fig waits for a good three minutes, at least, but she clearly loses interest, eventually culminating in her exclaiming, “How old is this system?”
“Hey now. We’re trying to do something I haven’t had much practice with, and the system is, uh, hardly optimal, so let’s just give it a minute.”
“I thought you were meant to be good at this!”
“Comparatively to some others, sure!” Riz chews on the inside of his cheek. “But that doesn’t mean it won’t take time—”
She sighs. “Well, can you do anything to speed it up?”
“If I press anything now, then the whole program resets.”
Fig raises an eyebrow, reaching for the keyboard, and Riz knocks her hand aside. “Seriously.”
“Alright then, since you’re the investigator—”
“Don’t be condescending about it, I’m taking time out of my day because I’m curious, though maybe I should have headed back to rogue class—”
They continue sniping at each other, but before he can explain how he is, in fact, a licensed private investigator and has some credibility, despite Fig's skepticism, the tiefling shoves him and, jumping off of the desk, goes: “Dude.”
“What?” Riz mutters, exasperated.
“It’s done,” she says, nudging him, and he whirls around. It is, in fact, done, loaded in the few minutes that they were distracted.
“Holy shit,” he laughs slightly, “I wasn’t actually expecting that to work as well as it did.” He browses through the data; it’s a lot, since he’s compiled all traceable information without any real filtering system and most of it is encrypted anyway, but he’s familiar enough with what to look out for. He offers Fig a brief explanation, who seems shockingly interested in his explanation, or at least more than he would expect. She seems to pick it up quickly, too, which is useful as it means less questions distracting him from doing the necessary work. Finally, Riz copies over the information and—
"That's everything?"
“Everything relevant,” Riz says with a tilt of his head. “Date of creation of the account, encrypted versions of deleted posts, old contacts, blocked numbers… And associated details — including the crystal number and I.P address when created.” He frowns. “Except.”
"If there's another twenty minute wait time, I am genuinely going to leave right now."
“Except for the fact that the crystal number registered here’s not the one you gave me,” he says, holding up the piece of scrap paper Fig wrote out against the results. “So either the crystal she was using to sign up was a burner one, or… It wasn’t created by her at all.” He picks at his nailbeds slightly as he carefully dances around coming to the other, very unfortunate, conclusion. That Kristen was wrong, and something is happening to these students.
“And the other detail? The I.P address?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?"
“There's not much I can do if the details surrounding it are corrupted — actually, a lot of this is corrupted,” Riz says, scrolling through and pointing out where the code scrambles, and decryption of any kind failed. “A few of the accounts in her followers, too — it’s bullshit, but… it’s not unintentional bullshit. Clearly, whoever made this burner account doesn’t want their location to be found. And clearly, they know what happened to Solstice Aberdeen.” He hesitates. "Are you sure that you haven't blocked all of these numbers? Because I was looking through the data briefly, and, uh, there are a lot."
“No,” Fig says, too quickly for Riz to not notice. "I mean, I know some of these,” she admits, and Riz doesn’t miss the way her fingers linger over a contact with a very blurry photo of a small, beaming elven girl in a glittering red dress which she quickly scrolls past. “But these…” She frowns. “They’ve been deleted for a while. I figured they were spam, or megafans that sort of blurred the line between creator and fan a bit too hard-”
“What?” Riz glances over her shoulder at the list of blocked accounts. Sure enough, Fig finds herself with not only an astounding number of blocked contacts (perhaps befitting of a rockstar), but several with entirely deleted profiles. “...The blocked accounts," he says when his brain finally catches up with the information. "I can probably see if they’re traceable, get some work done if you send them my way-”
"That, uh - might not be the best idea. It's all the junk in there," she blurts out, "some people are just, like, wild, and not in the fun, rock and roll sort of way, y'know? Best we let bygones be bygones," she says with a grin, "and I'm not the kind to get hung up on an odd number or two."
"You got hung up on this odd account."
"That's different!"
"How?" Riz says. "Look - you don't have to send me the entire list. But if there are any deleted accounts, just... let me know?"
Leaning back in her chair, Fig hesitates: then holds out a hand. "It's a deal, then."
Making a deal with an archdevil on a Wednesday afternoon. Not exactly Riz's usual haunts, but at this point? He's starting to accept the absurdity as the universe throws it at him.
Fig looks slightly surprised as he actually takes her handshake, but then flashes a fanged grin and makes for the exit. "Well, Riz, this was a hell of a meeting, but I can't say it wasn't fun."
"I can't say it was," Riz mutters under his breath as he considers the work that needs to be done. When he realises that Fig was very much in earshot of that, he rolls his eyes and adds a: "Joking. Obviously."
"Aw, c'mon! A little bit of breaking and entering into a campus destined to kill me? Some light hacking? A high crime rate keeps an adventure school thriving."
"And now I have even more reason to work myself into an early grave."
She snorts. "Yeah, you have fun with that - I'm going out through the window before anyone knows I was even here."
With a sudden burst of clarity as Riz watches Fig head for the window, Riz remembers to ask: “Solstice was an Aguefort student, wasn’t she?” Fig nods. “Do you know what track she would’ve been on? I mean, obviously you haven’t seen her since middle school, but if I’m lucky, I can ask around.”
“She was a Galicaea worshipper for a long time, actually,” Fig says, tilting her head to the side. “I mean, I never really got on with most Galicaea worshippers, her and my goddess sort of have all-mighty goddess drama, but last I saw her, she was walking into the cathedral of Sol. So I’d guess she’s a Cleric, though, like I said —” she gestures to their surroundings as though vaguely summarising the madness of the world — “all bets are off.”
Riz files that away mentally. Then: “Hold on, your goddess?”
“Long story,” Fig says, rubbing the back of her neck, “Which would be easier to explain if I could fucking hear from her!” she says, glaring up at some unseen force so intensely that it makes Riz look up too, only to realise that she’s staring at the flat ceiling tiles.
As Riz makes to leave, he distantly ponders whether or not shouting at your gods when they refuse to listen is a normal activity, or whether he's just met some extremely odd individuals back-to-back in the span of two days.
He makes it about a foot out the door before someone grabs him by the back of the neck.