Chapter Text
Lalli stood in the central radio room, feeling a little confused as to why he was here. Of course, a mage being called in here was a fairly frequent occurrence, but usually they relied on one of the handful that were in town full-time. The last time he'd been called on to purge the ghosts from a radio signal had been all the way back in Denmark, when Tuuri had been struggling to get in contact with Øresund base. He must have been quite out of practice, because the radio didn't sound unusually ghost-ridden to him at all.
It was puzzling that he couldn't place the origin of the odd, staccato beeping patterns and occasional mysterious words uttered by the station it was tuned to. It sounded like no language he had ever heard, and something was strange about it even besides that. He was not the most seasoned radio operator, but he felt the world around him as any mage did, and could more or less tell how far behind the sunset a signal had come from. It was more reliable than trying to tell the difference between most of the languages that came through to Finland, in his opinion. This station, though, did not fit his schema. It bothered him.
Virpi came in the door. This was another odd thing. She immediately made her way to him and smiled in a way he supposed was meant to be warm and friendly. "Lalli! You made it."
"Mm." Lalli didn't know why she was bothering to note this. She should know, after all the special work he'd been given in the summer before the one just gone, that if he was given orders he carried them out.
"I'm glad you arrived a little early. I want to know something, what do you make of this signal?"
Lalli thought about it. "It's weird."
"Besides that, Lalli."
"It's not from Sweden. Or Norway. Or Iceland or Denmark or here. I don't like it."
"Very good." This was another confusing reaction. He knew Virpi, as an administrator of all professions in Keuruu, was obliged to know what a mage could do. A mage knowing to look into the origin of a thing was very much what she should expect.
Virpi continued. "But do you know where it is from?"
Lalli thought some more. "No. It's weird. I can't tell how far west it is."
Virpi looked a little excited to make her next pronouncement. "That's because it isn't from the west. The skalds tell me that the language is from east of the old Finnish border."
That both made sense and didn't. "There's no people east of Finland. Everyone knows that."
"Just try. I want to know how well you can feel this signal."
The room fell silent as Lalli approached the radio and leaned in to the tiny speaker. He closed his eyes and could feel that Virpi was right. It felt weird because it was behind the sunrise, not the sunset. As his brain oriented itself around the new information, the sense of it spidered out through the mess of input like ice covering a pond, crystallising into a clear vision. He whispered into the radio, wheedling clarity out of it through the spiritual mess that stood between him and the signal's origin. When he straightened up again, everyone was looking at him. Virpi seemed expectant. "Got anything?"
"South-east. Far. A lot of trolls somewhere in between."
Virpi's excitement seemed to be growing. Lalli still didn't know why this was his job all of a sudden. "Could you tell exactly where?"
"Not from here. I said it was far."
"Could you follow it?"
"Yes. I would know when I was near. But not precisely till I was close."
He had hoped the distance involved would be the end of this discussion, but Virpi clapped her hands in glee. "That's exactly what I was hoping to hear. Alright, Lalli, we have some things to discuss. I have a very, very interesting opportunity for you."
Lalli really wasn't convinced he wanted an "interesting opportunity". What he wanted - not that anyone was asking - was to use his allegedly free evening to go eat dinner with Emil, and to maybe take a small hunting detour on his next night scouting, and later in the week to go ask Onni if he'd fixed his coat yet. None of these things would be "interesting" in the way he was sure Virpi meant it, and that was absolutely ideal. He knew that the optional-sounding phrasing of "opportunity" was very far from the truth of Virpi's intentions here, and resigned himself once again to the fact that what you want and what you get are usually not the same thing.
"Okay."
*
Lalli finally made it to the dinner he had planned, although by the time he arrived, Miri was piling washing up by the sink. "Emil, it's your turn. Remember to wash the outside of the pans as well this time."
Spearing a cold dumpling with his knife, Lalli ate it off with little bites. He waited for a gap in the conversation. Jaana was showing Sini a note the Icelandic guy from last summer had apparently left in her cupboard for her to find weeks after he left. Sini was wrinkling her nose at its contents, but was still somehow having a great time reading and pointing out sections for the two of them to laugh at. Emil was alternating between scrubbing bowls and attempting to find space for them in the over-stuffed drying cupboard, singing the hönni hönni, lätt att falla, aha hönni hönni of some cheery Swedish folk song to himself as he found more and more precarious niches for the crockery. Nobody paid much attention to Lalli at all as he finished his plate and began to just sit there, observing the people in the room interact. It was very much how he had intended on spending his evening. He was not happy with interrupting this, but the announcement would have to happen eventually.
"Emil. I saw Virpi today."
Emil turned around, wiping his hands on the front of his tunic and crossing his arms as he leaned back against the bench. "Oh?"
"She has new orders for me."
He looked so optimistic. It was kind of upsetting knowing how misguided that was. "Ooh, any more evenings off scouting?"
"Not really." Lalli really wasn't sure how to say this. "I'm being sent back to the Silent World. A long way in."
That was a conversation stopper. Everyone paused what they were doing. Jaana broke into their conversation. "Excuse me, what? You and who?"
"Just me. There are weird radio signals coming from the east. I need to check who's making them. There might be people out there."
"And how exactly are you going to communicate with anyone you find? You only speak Finnish." Jaana already seemed really quite annoyed by Virpi's plan, and Emil didn't look happy either.
"She said that on the other side of the old line they often spoke like the people in Saimaa do. I understand that." Whatever he'd heard in the radio was certainly nothing Lalli recognised, but Virpi had seemed very sure there would be something like Finnish spoken out there. She had reached the peak of her excitement when she began to outline her glorious vision of extending Finnish resources to any villages Lalli found, getting animated enough for her own hints of an eastern accent to show as she envisioned the beautiful details.
"That's why she picked you? Just assuming that whoever you find is still speaking that kind of Karelian?"
"No. It's because I've been to the Silent World before and can track a radio signal. But I think it's meant to help, maybe." Lalli didn't really appreciate the grilling. It wasn't like it was his plan.
Emil piped up. "Lalli, if you're going alone, how are we going to know if something happens?" He had clearly also settled on disagreeing with Virpi's orders.
Lalli just shrugged. "I don't know. I guess it's just like a really long scouting mission. You're just going to have to wait for me to get back." He could have predicted that Emil would make that face when he heard that. "I have an order."
The look on Emil's face was starting to get incredibly upsetting. Jaana continued to pick at the question. "Did the radio signal sound Karelian?"
"No."
"Do you know how far east it's coming from?"
"Far."
She sighed and looked at Emil, addressing him. "I think this sounds like a bad idea."
Emil was chewing his lip. "Lalli, I know you can survive out there. You're good at it. But this feels like a weird plan. I get why stealth is important, I remember what it's like out there, I just - all by yourself?"
Lalli shrugged again. Weird or not, it was what he'd been told to do. "I have to leave in a week."