Lucky Rabbit

Pandy absolutely should spend most of the time she had left on Shifting Faces checking in on Isidor and Eleanor, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. Not yet. Her head was spinning, and she needed to think. So, rather than going back out and tracking down the two children, she procrastinated.

First, she flipped open the Faithful Foundation book, and saw that she’d been correct in her guess that Nyssa’s Loyalty had increased… by a lot. 

NYSSA - Apparition

Condition: 98.6%

Cost to Repair: 194 LF/3871 Mana/387 CP

Loyalty: 91%

Better yet, that brought the Mana needed to completely fix the Apparition down to the point where Pandy could finish it off in a week if she put in at least five hundred and fifty Mana every day. That was good, because she would get level ten of Shifting Faces in a bit under two weeks, and Pandy had Plans. But the really surprising thing was Nox’s entry.

NOX - Apparition

Condition: 39%

Cost to Repair: 5586 LF/280473 Mana/28047 CP

Loyalty: 51%

Apparently the way to Nox’s heart was through Nyssa. It made sense that bringing Nyssa’s Condition up would cause her Loyalty to jump, and Pandy had hoped she might see some improvement in Nox’s as well, but this was beyond her expectations. He was over fifty percent, which felt significant for some reason, even though it was just another round number and she still had a long way to go. Apparently it wasn’t enough for him to give her a hint on how to figure out the Avington mystery, though.

Unless, of course, talking about the original Pandora had been the hint. But what possible help could it be to know that another woman named Pandora had married into what had probably been Thaniel and Lian’s family more than a hundred years ago? That was taking coincidence a bit too far, even for someone who once had a family of skinks and thirteen goldfish land on her head at the same moment she stepped on an abandoned whoopie cushion, causing her to trip and fall onto the man who had just hired her as a waitress at a very fancy restaurant. Sadly, that hadn’t been Pandy’s shortest time holding a position, but it was up there.

Frustrated, Pandy grabbed the Avington House book and stuffed it under her arm before charging back down the stairs. Now that she’d had the idea of making the lab into a Secret Grinding Room, she just couldn’t get it out of her head, and she needed to move.

As quickly as she could, she sent the long shelving units and most of the tables into the book. It turned out there were only ten or twelve shelves, and they must have been built in place, because startling amounts of space opened up each time the book sucked one down. With no one to watch her inhuman speed and no danger of attack, she didn’t bother holding back, instead charging back and forth through the room so quickly that dust swirled up in her wake. Once only the caskets, desk, and three tables remained – the ones that showed the least amount of staining on their wide wooden surfaces – she tossed the book over her shoulder and thought, <Cancel Shifting Faces.>

All right. She had a bit less than thirty minutes left on that spell, but Pandy was about to do some leveling on the others. A long Hop took her to the top of the closest table, then she jumped off of it, casting Wings of Glory as soon as her paws left the table.

Wings of Glory successful.

-13 LF

Three more uses to reach level 7.

A quick Minor Heal took care of the damage as Pandy flew across the room, her wings just brushing the beams supporting the floor overhead. She cast Spark in the middle of the room, following it with Shield of Darkness before deliberately turning so she brushed against the brilliant flame hanging in midair. Her Shield broke, and she landed awkwardly, momentarily confused by the shift from hazy darkness to light. That was something she needed to work on, and so she did.

Hop, Wings of Glory, Minor Heal, Spark, Shield of Darkness, over and over, criss-crossing through the room until it was filled with hot, hovering flames. Soon enough, Shield of Darkness didn’t have enough darkness to work with, and she had to Stop, Drop, and Roll in order to put out her fur when it caught fire, but that just got her another Minor Heal, so she barely even noticed except to stop including Spark and Shield in the cycle.

Wings of Glory reached level seven, giving her a point of Agility and reducing the damage she took when her wings sprouted to only eleven points. She barely even noticed any blood dripping to the floor or spraying into the air as she flapped. Hop hit level twenty-one, bringing her Agility up another point, and she noticed a subtle difference in the speed and accuracy with which she could land and change angles in order to Hop again.

Then she thought of something, and her pattern broke, her body taking over as her mind worked. Hop from a wall, Wings of Glory to the far side of the room, Minor Heal, bounce off the wall, canceling her wings and bringing her into another Hop, until she was hopping and gliding like a wild ball in a pinball machine, ricocheting without thought from every surface, allowing her to think while her body was on autopilot.

The nobles in West Altheric were so prone to marrying within their own social group that they had to have a special registry to prevent accidentally marrying their own half-siblings or close cousins. This had apparently been going on since the country was founded, and probably back when it was just known as Altheric. That meant Eleanor and Kaden probably had a dozen different lines of descent leading back to Nora, which in turn said that Queen Louisa still wasn’t in the clear.

Moreover, it meant that the connection between the Avingtons and the Conroys, which Pandy had been so convinced held the key to everything, was almost certainly a red herring. Pandy had the same name as one of the last ‘good’ Avingtons, and so Nox had been reminded of prior-Pandora. That was the sum total of the meaning in his comment.

But.

But that put her back in the exact same place as she had been that morning, and there was still something niggling at the corner of her mind. Pandy twisted in midair, folding her wings so she shot forward, spinning like an arrow launched from a bow. She bounced off a table, the ceiling, back to the wall, dismissed her wings, summoned them again, healed, hopped, flew, healed. She almost ran out of Mana, smacked into the wall rather than gliding away from it, and hopped on.

What had Nox said? Was it Nox? No, it was Philip Avington, in his too-short letter that left out all the details that would have helped her put this together. ‘Long ago, our ancestor, General Preston Avington, stole something that did not belong to him.’ What? What did the general – or rather, King Lawrence’s cousin – steal? How did that help Nora ‘bring an end to the war’?

Whatever it was, it was buried with him, but now his body was less than ten feet from Pandy… no, twenty… no, six… Anyway, the body was here, and there was nothing on him. Nothing except burial clothes and a necklace that could be given to Kaden in exchange for a full ten points of Affection. Why? What was it about a necklace the player could literally buy for a dollar and ninety-nine cents during the New Years sale that made Kaden so happy?

Pandy landed lightly, shifting back to her human shape between one step and the next. She was already reaching for the lid of the coffin when she looked up and said, “I’m not taking anything. I just need to see.”

There was no doubt the occupant was General Avington. If the paintings and statue weren’t recognizable enough, Nox’s portrayal of the first Lord Avington had been spot on. She avoided looking at the sunken face, stopping her breath as she leaned in, her hands behind her back like a child who’d been told not to touch anything. A white beard covered part of the medallion that hung from the heavy chain around General Avington’s neck, but not so much that she felt any urge to reach out and shift the wiry hair.

Some kind of text had been carved around the edges of the medal, but Pandy couldn’t read it. Whatever language it was in wasn’t the one Keros’s magic translated into English for her. She’d have to bring some paper down here and copy it for Augustus and Professor Beeswick, but for right now, she focused on the other odd thing about the otherwise unremarkable flat metal circle.

There were prongs set into the middle of the pendant dangling among the general’s face fuzz, but they were empty. Each prong was bent outward at the same precise angle, indicating that whatever had been set there had been deliberately removed. Pandy frowned, staring at it. Had it been empty in Gacha Love? She thought so, but there weren’t any closeup images of it. It was either a favored gift for Kaden or vendor trash, depending on whether you were wooing the prince.

The general’s beard was a pale silver, much like the color of Nyssa’s hair now that she actually looked like a person, and not a ten-year-old’s artistic interpretation of a human. His shirt was a snowy white beneath a deep blue uniform coat that was in remarkably good condition for something that had been buried more than a century ago. Against the silver and white and the gold of the medal itself, a small clump of dull brown fibers stood out, caught on one of the splayed prongs.

It could have been anything. Burlap, something from when the general was prepared for burial, a chunk of some fabric that had been thrown over his body at some point in the last one hundred and fifty-odd years. But the prickling of the tip of Pandy’s nose where it nearly touched the nubby little clump of threads told her it might also be something else.

Kivit. It was the right color, and none of the threads were smooth, instead growing thicker and thinner at random, with pokey little bits protruding from the thickest parts. But what would General Avington wear around his neck that someone else might feel the need to wrap in kivit, which was explicitly meant to block Dark magic?

According to poor Lord Philip, something had been buried with the general, something Philip felt the need to specifically mention. The Avingtons had tried but failed to restore their glory, up to and including digging up their revered ancestor in an attempt to regain it. Giles Avington knew his children weren’t worthy, so he set a test for them.

Who was supposed to be the arbiter of that test? Nox? He was certainly here, and he administered the test, but was he the judge as well? As human as elementals sometimes seemed, even Professor Beeswick had moments when he didn’t quite pass. Would Giles leave the final decision in the hands – or hand-adjacent appendages – of an Apparition? Or would he reach out to his sister, a woman even Nox respected, and give her something for safekeeping? Something he didn’t think his own descendants were worthy of?

Pandy stepped backward, feeling a bone-deep cold envelop her backside as she did so. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, something like dipping her toe into a cold pool on a blistering hot day, but she shuddered and spun, her shoulder striking the coffin as she did so. It tipped, and to Pandy’s horror, General Avington’s body moved. His chin fell forward, his mouth dropped open, and for a moment, she thought his eyes would open, staring into hers.

None of that happened, but his coffin did tip to the left, striking the next coffin hard enough to pop off the lid. It clattered to the ground, revealing an interior lined with fine, stiff cloth that looked like paper. Pandy had just long enough to register that it was otherwise empty, before it tipped and struck the final coffin – the small one with the broken lid. Pandy lunged for the coffins, but only managed to catch hold of General Avington’s corpse before everything came down with a clatter.

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