Chapter Text
Someone’s left a note in Riz Gukgak’s office again, and if he doesn’t get to the bottom of it soon, he’s going to lose his mind.
When he wakes up, it’s with a yawn, a rustle of papers, and a thought cutting through the fog that Oh, shit. He fell asleep at his desk again. Riz scrambles out of his chair, the immediate back pain that shoots through him enough to prove his thoughts correct, then sighs, rubbing sleep from his eyes before beginning to get his day in order. He shuffles the papers — college application drafts — into order, he fixes some glaring issues with his personal statement that he didn’t notice the previous night, and most importantly, he saves a coffee mug from taking a lethal dive off the side of his desk. Taking a sip of his coffee and grimacing at the cold, Riz wanders over to the nearest mirror, sweeping up the jacket that he threw over the back of his chair.
It’s been a long night, and he looks like hell. Riz rolls his sleeves up, tries valiantly to run a brush through his hair, and, changing into something less crumpled but equally uncomfortable (professional, his brain reminds him, this is the look of a professional), throws the jacket back on.
It’s then that he notices a weight in his pocket that wasn’t there before. Scrambling to pull it out of his pocket, his fingers close around a small piece of torn, lined paper. The handwriting is small, the words elegantly scrawled with ink that’s freshly-dried — it’s all too familiar to Riz, and yet all the same, he can make neither head nor tail of it.
1300.202.84.
Every note, gradually accumulating over the last few days, has followed a similar format. They appear around four in the morning, just as he passes out, and they always have the numbers on them. He’s tried everything to figure out the source — staying up late, setting up cameras in his office; hell, Riz has even considered teaching himself Divination magic, until he cracked open one page of a textbook and realised that teaching himself Scrying in the span of a week or even a month with nothing except for some old ink and torn paper to go off of was, quite frankly, a terrible idea. So, Riz reverts back to basics. Makes a clueboard.
And alright, maybe it doesn’t matter that much, not in Senior Year, when Riz is struggling to stay on top of all of the mandatory work he’s doing, let alone all the reminders he might scribble down. And other students lose notes all the time, slip into others’ briefcases by accident — that’s the obvious answer.
Riz would be a lousy detective if he took the obvious answer, so he sticks the note right onto his clueboard.
The evidence: Firstly, they’re not written by anyone in his rogue class. Rogues, in general, don’t tend to leave cryptic notes in anything other than Thieves’ Cant to each other (why alter a system that already works perfectly well?), and if this was yet another puzzle set up by the faculty, Riz was almost certain he would have heard Kipperlily Copperbitch gloating about her leads by now, and how she’d somehow managed to pull ahead even balancing community service and literal hell.
Secondly, these notes aren’t random. They appear like clockwork, every time he seems to close his eyes or look away for even a moment at this desk. The numbers follow a rather formulaic sequence, and he’s certain that parts of it represent times, dates, anything along those lines. He’s good with numbers; if it was just the numbers, sorting through those would be a breeze.
No, what really confuses Riz Gukgak is the personal reminders scrawled underneath them.
First there’s 1200.106.76, simply reading — Stock up on Owl Feathers.
On 1315.803.19 — 750mg.0900/500mg.1300.
1746.603.21 — Pick up painkillers + meds.
The rest follow in a similar fashion, and it’s the mundanity of them that gets Riz. These are personal reminders, if anything. And yet the question remains; why are they getting to him?
He doesn’t get to think on it much longer, though, as a loud knock on the door snaps him out of his theorising. There’s a brief moment of panic, a sense of paranoia that causes him to reach into his pocket — but it’s just his mom’s voice that rings out. “Riz, sweetheart? You’re going to be — ah.”
She opens the door, and her eyes immediately fall on the crime scene that is his desk, now made even worse by a night of uneasy sleep. Riz knows that she can put the pieces together. Still, she asks first, and there’s a weary smile to her voice as she says, “You didn’t come back to your room last night, did you?”
Riz offers her a sheepish grin. “Oh, you know how these things go, mom. I had a lot to work on, between my paper and additional homework, and then I realised that my personal statement really has to hit, so one hour turned into two, and that turned into…” He gestures vaguely with his hands as he begins to shovel what he needs for the day into his briefcase. “...This. But it’s — it’s all good now, and I did get some sleep!”
Sklonda raises an eyebrow. “I did!” Riz stresses, holding up his arms to prove his innocence — and winces as it causes a muscle he didn’t even know existed to undergo the five stages of atrophy.
“You should set up a more comfortable place to sleep, at least.”
“I know, mom, I know, it’s just — I didn’t mean to fall asleep, it… happened. I mean, it’s an improvement from Junior Year, at least. I’m actually sleeping, for one, and for another —”
“Riz, sweetheart, you know you can talk to me if you’re hurting again, right?”
“What?”
His mom just sighs, adopting the sort of expression that he’s learned, over the last eighteen years, is usually followed either by bad news, or by a deep conversation of some kind that will have him itching to run out of the room. “You were barely present at dinner last night, and the night before that, too. Are you sure this doesn’t have anything to do with the nosebleeds coming back?”
Riz winces. “No, mom, it’s — it’s a lot of things, but not that.” And it’s not a lie; the nosebleeds, and the near-constant headaches that accompany them, haven’t been at the forefront of his mind.
He’s had migraines his whole life. It’s a side effect of being a chronic insomniac, caffeine addict and simply predisposed to these types of pain. The pain’s more intense sometimes, sure, but it’s not noticeable. And after a visit to the school nurse, the nosebleeds were deemed perfectly normal, too. Still, something compels him to lie when he says, “I haven’t had one for a week.”
Sklonda looks at him, the kind of look she reserves for when she’s scrutinising every inch of a particularly complex case. Riz tends to get the same look; it’s how he knows that she’s either taken his lie at face value, or isn’t able to make it out as true or false. “Well,” she continues, “while I’d love to stay and unpack whatever the hell you were studying to make this place look like a bomb hit it, it’s your office, and you’ve seen how mine looks after some law cases, so… I can’t exactly throw stones.” She plants a quick kiss on the top of his forehead, and then adds, “And try grabbing some breakfast from the fridge if you can. I need to head to work early — are you good to make your own way to school?”
The familiarity of the routine helps settle whatever remains of Riz’s jitters, and he offers a grin. “It’s all good,” he affirms, and his mom’s shoulders relax slightly, before she says her quick goodbyes and hurries off, leaving Riz alone in his office.
It’s almost enough to make him forget about the notes at all.
Riz wanders the halls of the Aguefort Adventuring Academy feeling like a ghost.
Fall has fully kicked in, and with the steep temperature drop, there’s a cold wind floating through the hallways that’s got everyone slightly wired. He pays vague attention to the conversations as he passes, but it’s nothing out of the norm; just adventuring parties discussing their plans for the future, while he drifts past them all. Riz has always been good at keeping his head down. Too good, some would say, but it makes him a pretty damn excellent investigator, even if it comes at the cost of having an adventuring party to lean on. He works hard, gets the grades, and stays out of the way of anyone looking for trouble. Rinse and repeat. There’s nothing else to it; there hasn’t been for the last four years, as far as he knows.
Still, keeping an ear out simultaneously for anyone who sounds like they might know something about the cryptic messages on his desk, and for any Bloodrush jocks looking for a punching bag is a lot, and by the time he actually ducks around the corner and pushes open the door to the library? It’s an active effort to keep his tail from lashing out in irritation.
It doesn’t help that the library, for some reason, is packed. He picks his way through groups of students, muttering apologies as he cranes to get a look at the bookshelves that he’s searching for. A free period might mean time to socialise for most, but these days, Riz just uses it to study.
Not that he’d be up for much socialising anyway. Not with his head feeling like it’s had several holes blown in it. Again.
Most of the other students in the library, at least, are seniors, which makes sense, given the steady approach of midterms and the cost that usually exerts on the student body. It doesn’t help that Principal Aguefort is gone, again. Stopping more cataclysmic Time Quangles, whatever that means. And with a teacher that tends to spend her time smoking weed in cemeteries instead of showing up to class, it’s no surprise that Riz spots more than a few Rogue students on the way in.
He eventually finds the shelf he’s looking for, in the upper area of the library — here, up the spiral staircase, the steady order of the system collapses, especially towards the back, where he’s certain the only creatures actually looking for books are the rats and, well. Himself. Running his fingers over the spines, Riz reads the labels to try and find the correct book amidst the mess that is the decimal —
Wait.
Hold on.
Eyes lighting up, Riz scrambles for his briefcase, climbing down and pulling out the miniature clueboard that Penny gifted him for his birthday years ago, when he was caught trying to shove a canvas close to his own height into his briefcase. He carefully detaches three of the notes from the red tacks, and covers the first part of the number. “Holy shit,” Riz mutters with a laugh, before scrambling to find the correct text.
The problems arise the minute he actually gets to the correct areas of the library. 200-300, Arcane History, is one he frequents for papers, which makes it all the more obvious that book 263.72 is missing. Then, several books that would be in the Arcane Sciences section, in the 700-800 range — all gone, with clear gaps where they’ve been taken out. The pattern continues, and every time it does, Riz becomes more and more frustrated. Clearly, whoever’s been taking these books isn’t just an intruder, but also, apparently, a nerd who can’t return their books. He sighs when he reaches the final display (empty), before turning tail and heading towards the desk.
“I need to access the archives,” Riz says when he approaches, folding his arms and leaning them on the table. “Please?” Ms. Dimweather gives him a once over — she’s seen him come in enough times to know that this is par for the course, and Riz is always diving headfirst into something out of his depth — and slides him the access card. He grins, despite the exhaustion clearly on his face from all of the running around, thanks her, and immediately hurries off to access the archives before the bell rings for next period and there’s another mad rush of students.
The actual system itself finally got digitised about a year ago, and Riz is eternally grateful for that as he digs through files that are somewhat organised, as opposed to haphazardly sorted in whatever fashion Aguefort thought would be the most absurd. He checks from about a month ago, clicking on every student’s log that could realistically have the missing books, scours everything for details…
He finds them at the top of the second page.
O’Shaughnessy, Adaine. 4/10/87, 13:00 — “Chronomancy Through Time”, 202.84.
At the sight of the name, Riz frowns. Adaine O’Shaughnessy is a name that he shouldn’t recognise, that he doesn’t recognise, other than a vague link to the school guidance counsellor. Judging by all the Chronomancy books and divination magic, he’d take a wild guess and say that she’s a wizard, and there’s several books on laws surrounding adventuring in Bastion City — another BCU applicant, his mind supplies.. But something about the name keeps drawing him back. Adaine O’Shaugnessy. He blinks—
“Cassandra, these prices are expensive — did you know that a three-room apartment costs nearly a hundred gold pieces a week?”
Adaine looks up at him from her position, situated on the couch with a book, and frowns. “Why are you even looking at apartment costs anyway? We don’t have to worry about that for another year, and you know Fabian’s planning to help with the costs anyway —”
“It’s still useful to learn these things,” Riz mutters, crossing his arms. “Besides, aren’t you curious?”
“Yeah, well, you can find out in a quieter manner — I’m trying to study.”
Riz balls up a piece of paper and tosses it at her, but Adaine doesn’t even look up from her book, just deflecting it back with a mage hand at him. It hits—
—Riz stands outside the wizarding classroom, checking his watch and counting down the minutes. When the class finishes, he doesn’t hesitate in ducking through the crowd, murmuring several apologies, until he sees a flash of denim and a wolf pin, and immediately locks his attention onto the scroll the girl’s scribbling something down in.
It’s the same handwriting.
“Adaine?” Riz calls out, and the girl looks up at him, startling. He was right, then — then again, elven wizards with interests in lycanthropy and that exact handwriting are few and far between.
She winces, and for a moment, he swears he sees pain flash across her face. “Who in the hells are you?”
“Someone who’s been getting sent your notes for a week. And I want to know why.”
For the fifteenth time in the day, Fig tosses a ball of paper across the room and resists the urge to scream.
The last few weeks have been a hell of a time. It wasn’t enough to finally find an apartment away from home, it wasn’t enough to get a message from her tour manager saying that they were cancelling abruptly — now she has writer’s block.
It’s not like it hasn’t happened before, but it’s the most intense it’s been in a while. Every time she opens up a new notepad, her head swims with fog and vague, milky-white semblances of memories and thoughts. Half of the crumpled up pieces of paper are barely coherent. The other half don’t even have words on them. And there’s at least five that she’s folded into little origami basses.
So Fig decides, as usual, that she needs to get out of this apartment and go for a smoke.
Downtown Elmville is quiet this evening, unusually so — she watches the lights go up in houses as the sun goes down from her usual spot, perched on the steps outside of her apartment. From here, she can make out most of the town, even as far as the Aguefort Academy. Not that it matters to Fig, these days. She’s seventeen, freshly dropped out of high school, and her music career was looking up —
Well, not if she can’t write this damn album. But things were looking up. She has to keep telling herself that, or she might have to face the consequences of what she’s done.
Fig could’ve sworn she had a plan, before all this went down. Didn’t she want to—
She snuffs the cigarette out and continues walking. There’s a sort of joy she’s learnt over the last few months in exploring the town with the freedom of independence — as a kid, she would make a game out of memorising each back alley and corner, trying to find the quickest route back to her house from the center of town. The quickest route back to her new apartment is a small alley between Scale Street and Briarwood Lane, and she uses it now, hoping to find… Something. Ice cream would be nice.
There’s only one real problem with her plan: Basrar’s is closed.
“Shit,” she mutters, staring at the large front sign flipped to ‘CLOSED’, and the slightly smaller flyer advertising job opportunities. She eyes the flyer hesitantly. She doesn’t need money that badly. She’s earned enough from her last few album sales. But what Fig does need is something to do with her time.
She tears the flyer down, slips it into her jacket pocket, and continues wandering.
There’s gotta be another ice cream place in this town. How does she not know if there’s another ice cream place around? Getting turned around yet again, Fig somehow finds herself in the middle of the most Helioic part of town.
Great, Fig thinks, as the few passersby shoot her a scathing look. And to be fair, she probably does signify some sort of trouble to them — she’s got a blazing anarchy symbol on her forehead, bright red combat boots, and while she doesn’t wear her heart on her sleeve, she does wear several patches insinuating that the devil is alive and well in Elmville. She half considers heading back to her apartment, as much as she dreads it, but decides instead to perch on the stone railing between the bridge and the water and look around town. Maybe there’s good gig opportunities around?
She doesn’t get that far before she hears someone call out her name.
“Figueroth?”
She stiffens, turns — and finds herself face-to-face with a ghost. The girl is tall, brown hair perfectly styled in curls, in a way that the old Fig would have been jealous of her for, but now, she just watches her with wariness. “Solstice Chamberlain,” she says with a tense smile. “Wasn’t expecting to run into you here.”
“Well, hey, girl, I wasn’t expecting to run into you either,” she laughs, “not in this part of town, anyway. Doesn’t seem your, uh, usual style, based on what I’ve heard about you in the last few years. How are you?”
In the last few years. Fig feels the bile rise in her throat, as it always does in the few moments where she allows herself to dwell on the years before high school. Even if she dropped out of high school, at least that was a lot better.
…Or at least she thinks it was, with all the memories of it tactically darting out of reach.
“Yeah, well, it’s a nice area to take a wander in,” she says, and if she flashes her fangs in her grin, she isn’t going to apologise for it. “Especially when you’re not afraid about any of the people in it cutting you off.”
That, at least, causes the girl to drop the smile slightly. Fig watches the flashes of emotion on Solstice’s face with a slight tilt of her head — anger and outrage, first, which quickly fade into a calm, more somber sort of acceptance as she steels herself, and finally… A tightness in her jaw, and a notable shift in her posture as she turns her face ever-so-slightly away from Fig. “Look, Figueroth—”
“Just Fig now.”
“I — Fig — I’m sorry. For how the other girls — for how I — treated you after that.”
At that, Fig just crosses her arms and folds herself into her jacket (and honestly, this is feeling more like Lost Sad Puppy mode than German Shepherd mode right now, get it together, girl), and mutters, “It’s alright. I moved on eventually, didn’t I?” — at that, her tone lifts slightly “—and honestly. Water under the quite literal bridge.”
At that, Solstice’s expression brightens, and she squeezes Fig’s hands, despite the tiefling recoiling slightly. “I’m so glad. I mean really,” she continues, “I was so heartbroken to see you in a state like that, especially finding out that your real dad was a devil—”
Ah. There’s that bile again.
Fig immediately shoots Solstice a look, and the other girl, at least, seems to take notice of it. “I mean,” she amends, “not that that’s a reflection on you, it’s just — It’s been hard,” she responds eventually. “These last few months. There’s been a lot happening in the town, and the church… It’s made a real change in my life.” She trails off, and Fig, for a brief moment, spots something akin to wariness in her eyes. But it’s quickly forgotten as her eyes widen, and she adds an excited, “Oh! I almost forgot — I want you to have my number,” she says, pulling out a piece of paper from her pocket.
“I can guarantee you that you do not,” Fig murmurs under her breath.
“It’s just — we’re always looking for new members, these days. And you look… Well, you look a little bit lost, to be honest.”
What Fig says out loud is, “Is that where you’re headed now? The church? In the dead of night?” What Fig doesn’t say out loud is that in the moonlight, Solstice looks just as lost as she claims that Fig is.
At that, Solstice’s expression shifts to the side. “I — it’s not usually open at nighttimes, but I thought it might be worth checking.”
Fig hums, and throws her feet off the railing, leaping to the ground. “Yeah, alright. Well, I’ll just be headed back to my apartment then—”
“Fig.” When she looks at Solstice, she catches a glimpse of that same expression again, eyes wide and gleaming silvery in the moonlight. “Take care of yourself, okay?”
Blinking, Fig nods. “I — okay. Yeah. You too, I guess.”
When Fig makes to leave, she can’t help but cast a glance back, watching Solstice slip into the cathedral of Sol quietly, with only a creak of the doors. And for some odd reason, watching the girl slip into the cathedral has her remember—
Kristen winces as Fig tightens the tie around their neck, squirming every step of the process. “Hold still.”
“I am holding still! It’s not my fault I have to go to this stupid event!”
“I mean,” Fig says with a tilt of her head, “it kind of is? I didn’t force you to try and reconnect with your shitty family. Besides,” she says, looking at the people heading into the church looking at them in a mix of bewilderment and scandal, “I thought you wanted to do this? Because, if you don’t, just give me the word and I’ll—”
“I do,” Kristen stresses, holding out her hand for a hair tie. Their hair’s too short to be put in a proper ponytail these days, but they succeed in doing a simple half-up, half-down look. “Want to go, that is. It’s just — did we have to pick an outfit that I haven’t worn since freshman year prom?”
“Like if you showed up in your usual bright yellow attire, your parents wouldn’t both have a heart attack,” Fig adds with a roll of her eyes. Kristen shoves her slightly, and Fig pats her on the back, shoving her lightly towards the church in retribution. “But seriously. If you need to get the hell out of there…”
“German Shepherd mode. Got it!” Kristen says, and with a pair of finger guns, slips into the church.
Fig’s vision clears, and she stumbles as she catches the drops of blood in the palm of her hand. “Ah, shit—”
Gods. She hasn’t had a nosebleed since she was a kid, and, fussing to try and find tissues in one of her many pockets, whatever fleeting hallucination she had quickly fades from all thought. It’s only after the fact that Fig realises she’s still holding the phone number that Solstice gave her.
Then she crumples the piece of paper in her other hand, tucks it in her pocket, heads back to her apartment, and forgets all about it.
In her dreams, Kristen Applebees has been straying.
She’s in the woods, again. They’re a familiar sight, though she can’t for the life of her understand when or why she’s been in woods this dark and twisted. Her reason tells her that they’re likely just a manifestation of her imagination, of the darkness that rests inside all of them.
Her gut tells her that she’s seen these woods before — and heard the voice that seems to be taunting her.
Sometimes, it calls her directly, addressing her by her first name, ringing out clearly through the woods. Other times, it comes in fleeting murmurs through the trees, in snippets of words that she recognises as religious prayers — but not her religious prayers. Not the ones she’s supposed to have learned, supposed to carry with her everywhere she goes, through every forest she wanders.
And, from time to time, she’ll hear her own voice — and with it, flashes of a life she’s never lived. Tonight is one of those nights.
“I want to know who she is—”
“Gorgug, I died again!”
“Everything’s been a promise for the afterlife, and I don’t even think that’s coming.”
“I might be in love with a woman, and that’s crazy!”
“Why do bad things happen to good people?”
That last one is by far the most prevalent among these… Visions, hallucinations, whatever she should call them. Amidst all the words, it rings out the clearest — maybe because it’s something that’s always lurked in her mind, or maybe because it’s one of the only things Kristen tends to remember when she wakes up.
Running for what feels like hours, a weary Kristen finally stumbles to a stop in the woods, finding herself backed into a clearing surrounded by dense, dark thickets. “Just — tell me what you want, okay? Please,” she begs, voice breaking slightly. “I can’t — I’m a good person, this — oh gods, is this hell?” Her eyes widen at the thought, and while there are a million different reasons why it doesn’t make sense, that idea still settles deep in her chest.
So Kristen closes her eyes, and calls out for Helio, like she always has. Carry me to safety, she thinks, and for a brief moment, light sparks behind her eyelids —
But when they flutter open, she’s still standing in the woods. And through the woods, she can see a dim, purple glow gradually brightening; and a figure that flashes from that faint glow into a formless, skeletal being.
“Please, god, just say something—”
“Kristen,” she hears the voice call out — the tone may not be malicious, necessarily, but Kristen still can’t trust any force that holds this much power over her dreams. The trees part, and she faintly recognises that the light this being emits is dimmer than usual. Maybe that’s a good thing. “Kristen, you have to find your—”
She startles awake with sweat pooling on her brow, hands trembling and mind feverish. Her sheets have been strewn around in her nightmare — she instinctively reaches for the bedside lamp, flicking it on and sitting there for a moment, huddled by the light. When she can breathe properly, she closes her eyes and sends out a quick prayer to Helio.
Hey, uh, Helio? It’s me again. I, uh — it’s been happening again. The nightmares. I know you aren’t able to share any of your divine wisdom, and you’re probably still mad at me for straying for so long, but… I’d appreciate a sign. A flicker of warmth.
Kristen tries for a long time to get back to sleep, but the lamplight keeps her awake. Maybe, considering the state of her mind, that’s a good thing.