Lucky Rabbit

The first thing Pandy did was make a bunline for the book on the table, reading the title before turning to the bookmarked page. The book was called An Inquiry into the Origins of Dark Elementals, and the page was thick with tiny notes scribbled into the margins. She squinted at the text, then the notes, seeing phrases like ‘retroactively contaminate observational records’ and ‘convergent expression of high-density Dark magic aggregation’, and quickly closed it again. Professor Beeswick probably had a copy, and it would have to be enough to know that Bryan was reading it.

She went around the room, scanning the other books that were jammed onto the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. None looked particularly worn, as if it had been read over and over, nor did any of them open a convenient hidden door when she tugged on them. All had titles similar to the first one, though there were also a few books on the other elements, each carefully filed in their own sections.

After that, she checked the bathroom, which was pretty much exactly what she expected. The toilet looked a bit more modern than the pull-chain version at Avington House, but otherwise it was all quite similar. Belatedly, she wondered if this house also had elementals tied to it, and if so, if they might be watching and laughing at her as she fumbled around. But no, Lian had said there were only nine other elemental houses in Knightmere, so surely this couldn’t be one of them.

<There aren’t even any windows or vents or anything I could crawl through. How do they get air in here?> she thought to Keros, glad that she at least wasn’t entirely alone in this place.

What?

I’m trying to finish my last set of Ambrosia Bursts.

I had to loosen my toga when I got back from the sandbox world.

Well, all right, so Keros wasn’t that much better than being alone. <Do you recognize anything? I haven’t actually played Gacha Love in…> How long had it been now? Those first few weeks or months had simply flown by, one sweet summer day flowing into the next. <A long time.>

Nothing.

This wasn’t a location in Gacha Love.

I can’t feel my magic here at all.

Oh, that was right. It had been so long since Pandy had really been away from a person or place from the game that she’d almost forgotten that Keros’s magic didn’t work anywhere else. She had actually thought about that when she came up with this plan, but somewhere along the way the thought just faded away again. It wasn’t like she was going to change her mind just because she might have to use Corruption Points instead of Mana while she was here, and she had a decent number of points to use. At least, she did as long as she didn’t run into any more Corruption Point-stealing elementals.

<Wait,> she thought. < I was able to cast Spark without Corruption Points in the carriage. Doesn’t that mean that either Leo or Lady Ruth was in Gacha Love somewhere?>

One of them must have made an appearance in the game, yes.

Can you use magic around Bryan? 

<Of course I…> She trailed off, because she hadn’t actually tried. If she’d even thought about it, she would have assumed she could, because obviously Killian’s father had been mentioned in Gacha Love, but there was still the possibility that the person sleeping in the other room wasn’t Bryan Conroy. Not that she was going to go back in there and test the theory right now, but when she returned – if her ruse with the simulacrum wasn’t discovered and she got a chance – she would definitely have to cast something innocuous and see if it worked.

That was a problem for Future Pandy, however, so she spun on her heel, looking around the room once more. If there were any vents in the walls, they’d been covered by bookshelves, and without knowing where they were, she wasn’t going to start moving shelves to find them.

<I’m going to have to go past the Bound,> she said, feeling her body tense up at the very idea. After having the maybe-Tenebron-maybe-Echowretch suck out a bunch of her Corruption Points, she wasn’t exactly excited at the idea of two more elementals who might very well see her as a tasty snack. Why couldn’t they be like Duskins? The little balls of shadow-stuff were actually kind of cute when they weren’t animating giant spiders. Only one of them had ever taken some of her points without asking, and then they’d made it up to her by bringing her presents.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Even if you use Shield of Darkness, I suspect they’ll sense you.

They definitely noticed you earlier.

Yes, she’d noticed them noticing. But what choice did she have? She could stay here and ‘sleep’ until Bryan took her off for a supervised project that she almost certainly didn’t want to help with, even if she could. Or she could take this opportunity to do exactly what she’d come here for, and try to find out who the bad guys actually were.

Pandy took two reluctant steps toward the door before her feet simply stopped. She did not want to go out there. In fact, she had a very bad feeling that if she did, something might happen that was worse than her having to abort the mission early and run. She needed to find another way. And if she’d learned one thing in this new life, it was that there was one simple way to change her perspective.

<Cancel Chifting Faces,> she thought, and the room expanded as she shrank. Once she was entirely furry once again, she began to hop, making another slow circuit of the room.

As Thaniel had once noted, his father was tall. Not extremely tall, but definitely around the six-foot mark, even with his stooped shoulders and perpetually defeated slump. Like other tall people, he put the things he used most often up high. For the most part, that wasn’t going to matter to Pandy, but it did mean that while the upper shelves were packed so full of books that she’d had to tug fairly hard when she was checking for book-activated secret doors, the bottom shelves still had some space available.

Hopping as close to the door as she dared, Pandy paced out the layout of the house-bits she’d seen so far. The front door was here, and both Lord Shadow and Bryan came from the right. But Bryan had taken Pandy to the left, then turned right to enter this suite. That explained why there were no windows. These rooms were probably in the middle-ish of the house, with no outside access. Excellent for a prisoner you didn’t want to escape, but also didn’t want to feel entirely prisoner-like.

<The bathroom and bedroom are on the left,> she thought ‘out loud’ to Keros, <and the hall is behind me, but that’s not an option. That leaves right and straight ahead. But right will probably take me back to the entry hall, and there might be guards or more Bound there.>

Straight then, but as you mentioned, there are no openings.

How do you plan to proceed?

Pandy would have grinned if her bunny mouth didn’t make it so difficult. <I’m a rabbit. I’m going to dig.>

She could practically feel Keros’s incredulity oozing through their connection, but she ignored it, just hopping over to the bookshelf straight ahead of her. No, probably best to get as far from the bedroom as possible. There was bound to be some noise involved, and she didn’t want to wake Bryan.

Shifting back to human shape, she pushed the books on the bottom shelf of the right-hand bookcase. She had to move a couple to the neighboring shelf, but once she’d created a small, relatively inconspicuous gap, she changed back to Bunny and thoughtfully eyed the wooden ‘wall’ formed by the back of the bookshelf.

Because spells would cost Corruption Points, she wanted to avoid them as much as possible. That left skills; specifically Bite and Scratch. While Pandy hadn’t been able to spend much time leveling her skills over the past few days, Bite had reached level twenty-five, and Scratch was finally level twenty. She’d also gotten one extra Strength for breaking the level twenty threshold, and she wasn’t even sure how to feel about it. On the one hand, more Strength was good in situations like, say, this one, but not so much when she might accidentally squish someone by hugging too hard.

Another thing she’d noticed since reaching level twenty in Scratch was that her claws seemed to be much sharper. Not that they looked any different, but when she’d tried to practice on one of the battered tables in her secret lab, she’d ended up with a pile of kindling almost without trying. Fortunately, the claws seemed to be normal when she wasn’t using the skill, so she didn’t put holes in the floor as she hopped or slice up Thaniel or Augustus when they held her, but they still kind of made her nervous.

Right now though, sharp was good. Sharp was helpful. Sharp might even be quiet. Poking out a single toe, she pressed the tip of the pale claw against the back of the bookshelf and thought, <Scratch.>

Scratch successful.

One hundred seventy-four more uses remain before level 21.

Her claw dug straight down, slicing cleanly through the wood, then into the bottom of the bookcase, creating a claw-width gap. There was a kind of squeaking sound, more like fingernails on a chalkboard than a saw through wood, but that was all. Still, Pandy turned, huddling next to one of Bryan’s tomes as she watched and listened for any sign of movement.

After twenty or thirty seconds of silence, she did it again, this time slicing with a little less enthusiasm. It wouldn’t do to cut the shelf in half and have the whole thing fall on top of her. Not that it would do her any permanent damage, but it would definitely wake up The Father. Two more cuts and she was able to poke the claw through and pull out a square of wood about five inches on each side. It wasn’t a big hole, but Pandy wasn’t a big rabbit, so it should be fine.

It took a bit longer to get through the wall, thanks to the fact that small rabbits had short arms, and she had to reach through the bookshelf to get to the plaster and lathe beyond. No drywall in this world, so she couldn’t just score the wall and push a piece out as she’d learned to do during a brief stint at a construction company. She’d actually kind of enjoyed that job, but who knew concrete set so quickly, or that it was alkaline enough to cause chemical burns?

Shaking off the memory, she kept cutting until she was left with a few squares and a pitch-black hole. She briefly considered eating the hunk of wood and wall, which would get rid of the evidence more effectively than anything else she could think of, but decided against it mainly because they both looked like they would taste disgusting. Finally, she just slid them into the narrow gap between shelf and wall and hoped it would take at least a day for someone to notice the damage. Only then did she hop into the small, dark hole.

Pandy almost immediately ran into what felt like cobwebs, but since she couldn’t see, she couldn’t be sure. She had excellent low-light vision, for whatever reason, but total darkness was still total darkness. Spark obviously wasn’t an option, especially after what happened in the carriage, but even Radiant Presence seemed like too much. It had been getting brighter and brighter with each level, and if there was even a tiny crack in the wall, her light would definitely give her away. She was getting better at controlling the light level, but whenever she lost focus, it tended to flare up again.

There were a lot of new and unpleasant smells and feelings associated with making her way through the walls of a probably-very-old house in absolute blackness, but the lack of vision seemed to sharpen her hearing, because she soon found that she was picking up even the tiniest of sounds. That, for instance, was definitely a mouse squeaking. Several mice. Mice who undoubtedly would not be pleased to find a strange rabbit in their home. Well, that was fair enough. This wasn’t exactly Pandy’s favorite experience ever, either.

As she went, she realized that she’d actually expected to hear people talking, just like in shows where people found spy-holes or vents that allowed the conspirators to be overheard. It was, however, long after midnight, and the only human noises her sensitive ears picked up were snores. She moved away from those, desperately trying to keep track of the turns she made whenever she came to a dead end. She needed to be able to make it back, after all.

Finally, when Pandy had just about decided that this was a terrible idea and she was either going to have to go back or burst through the wall like the Cool-Drink Man, she smelled something different. Not mouse droppings or dust or wood or…whatever some of those other smells were, but something she had only smelled once before, in a very specific location, and would never forget.

Formaldehyde; or rather, whatever the Avingtons had used to pickle their test subjects. Somewhere out there was a lab, and somehow she doubted this one was abandoned.

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