Lucky Rabbit

Monday through Thursday passed in a mostly-happy blur. Now that they had Soot, they were able to tell the aunts they didn’t need a ride any more, though they conveniently failed to mention that they didn’t have a carriage to go with the horse. Pandy returned to her flying commute, and Soot seemed happy enough to carry Isidor through the city. By the third day, the boy reported that he thought his steed knew the way better than he did himself.

Deliveries continued to arrive at the house, and the funds that had seemed almost excessive to Pandy dwindled down to around a thousand gold and stayed there. Most of the interior was repaired by now, though the library still smelled of mold and neglect, because whatever magic allowed Pandy to create new shelves and a comfy couch didn’t extend to repairing the books. Someday, she would have to find a way to get some of them to Beeswick, to see if the librarian had any way to fix them.

Then Friday came, and after lunch Pandy, together with Augustus, Thaniel, Geraldine, Abbington, and their elementals piled into a carriage and headed north into the Nature Preserve that bordered the northwestern corner of the city. The grounds of Falconet and Condor butted up against the Preserve, though Kestrel was a bit further south, closer to the western border than the north.

In Gacha Love, this was where Clara and the boys stumbled into their first dungeon, during a Small Group exercise gone awry. It was during that event that they all worked together for the first time, with Edgar and Kaden both lowering their guard a bit when around their lovely new classmate. Of course, thanks to the way the in-game map emphasized locations the player had already unlocked and distances were more suggestions than hard rules, all Pandy really knew about the location was that it lay almost directly north of Condor.

Pandy and Augustus sat side-by-side on the carriage bench, staring at a map as the carriage itself bounced over what could only generously be called a road, and less generously was a pair of unevenly cleared animal trails. “So here?” Augustus asked, pointing at a spot on the map which was, indeed, almost directly north of Condor.

Pandy frowned at it, letting out an ignominious squeaking sound as her rear end lifted from the bench when they went over a particularly large bump. “Somewhere… around there… but-” she said, breaking off as the carriage came to a rather abrupt halt. This was followed by a thud, then some footsteps crunching in the crisp autumn leaves.

Sir Bailey threw open the door and peered inside. Focusing on Augustus, she said, “We’re at the border. The Dragon’s spell ends here, and so does this g-” She stopped, glancing at the kids, then cleared her throat and said, “This lovely trail we’ve been following. I don’t think even enchanted wheels are going to hold up much longer.”

Thaniel sat up. He and the others had been unsuccessfully attempting to play a card game since they got tired of staring out at the unchanging scenery. “You mean we get to explore now?”

Augustus chuckled. “Indeed we do.” He held the map out to Sir Bailey, who pointed out their current location. Augustus compared this to where Pandy thought the dungeon was, nodding in satisfaction before standing up. “Let us be off, then.”

Pandy shifted back to Bunny form, both because she wanted to conserve her time as a human and because the spell Sir Bailey had mentioned was the one Professor Beeswick cast to conceal her exact location from the Shadow Exchange. The moment she took Ms. Wellington’s form outside the boundaries of that spell, anyone who had some of Alexandra Well’s blood could potentially track her down. They had no idea if anyone was actually looking anymore, but according to the Dragon, Pandy had three hours at most before someone could pinpoint her location well enough to send Apparitions after her.

Unfortunately, her view was mostly obstructed by brush and roots from the ground, so Augustus was forced to carry her in order to allow her a better perspective. This would not, in fact, have been a problem at all except that being held against his warm chest was Very Distracting, and Pandy had to keep an eye out for- She stiffened, her ears going straight up as she caught sight of something just at the edge of her wide range of vision.

During the event in Gacha Love, each boy had a Moment with Clara. Bastian found a patch of edible mushrooms, but Pandy couldn’t tell a poisonous toadstool from the kind of mushrooms she’d seen in the grocery store a thousand times, so that one didn’t help. Kaden pointed out the approaching cumulonimbus clouds and hoped that they didn’t presage a storm. But Edgar and, yes, Dorian’s brief scenes should actually come in handy.

Standing on her hind legs, Pandy placed one forepaw on Augustus’s shoulder and used the other to point toward a pair of crossed trees down a trail to their right. She’d seen a surprising number of trees that leaned toward each other since they’d entered the forest, but high overhead, a tattered and faded ribbon fluttered in the branches, marking these as the same trees Edgar had pointed out in the game.

As legend had it, a pair of lovers used to sneak away and meet in this place. For whatever reason – Edgar hadn’t been clear on the details, but Pandy assumed their families hadn’t approved for some reason – they eventually parted ways, but each left a token of their love in this place so that the other could see it and know they always wished it could have been otherwise.

This romanticism was far out of character for Edgar, however, and he quickly added that a powerful Nature elemental was born from this doomed love, and rampaged through the area until one of the original lovers came and formed a contract with it, which only led to other people attempting to replicate the process so they could acquire their own elemental.

“False love is worse than none at all,” he finished, looking disdainfully up at the dangling ribbon and setting the stage for his future claims that he would rather die alone than marry to please others. He was the only one of the boys who never used the words “I love you,” even when proposing to Clara. In his very-Edgar way, he simply said he found the idea of marrying her less objectionable than any other woman, and he was grateful she had entered his life. He was also the only one willing to leave everything behind and run away with her if his family disapproved though, and that spoke more loudly than any protestation of adoration.

The group stopped, with Geraldine gratefully leaning against the trunk of the beribboned tree. Pandy braced herself on Augustus’s shoulder and squinted into the foliage. This truly had been Dorian’s time to shine. Even Pandy had to admit that, if only because now that she was here, she couldn’t see the next step, though she knew it had to be right under her nose, but Dorian had spotted it right away.

Giving up, she hopped down to the slightly crunchy grass and thought, <Cast Shifting Faces.>

Shifting Faces successful.

04:21:16 remaining today.

Up she popped, and began waving her hands around in the air between two trees. “There’s an illusion here somewhere,” she told the group. “It covers a tower, so it should be pretty obvious if we touch it. In my… Someone noticed that the exact same trees were copied in two different places, so there’ll probably be a duplicate-”

“There!” It was Thaniel, and he was pointing to what looked like an entirely innocuous rock. At least, it seemed innocuous until she looked just past a nearby tree and saw an identical rock innocently nestled beneath a bush that looked just like the bush the first rock huddled under. After that, more and more copies of objects seemed to pop out at her, and each of the children began excitedly pointing out things they’d noticed as well. Even Miss Cupcakes and Brook got into it, with the kitten-cat puffed up and stalking toward a pair of matching leaves, while the capybara nosed at a matched pair of shrubberies.

Augustus waved them all back, walking forward to place his hand on a tree. Apparently that one didn’t seem strange in any way, because he touched the identical one that stood several feet further away. This time his hand vanished slightly beneath the surface, in much the same way Pandy’s finger did if she tried to poke the apparent bridge of her nose.

After that, it was fairly easy to find the circumference of the tower. Pandy and Augustus paced it out, then the kids and animals encircled it, trailing fingers over the wall, always keeping two of the others in sight. Once again, it was Thaniel who discovered the wooden door, and when Pandy hurried to his side, his little face practically glowed with excitement.

“How do we get in?” he demanded, rapping his fist against the wooden door they could feel but not see. A distant knocking sound reached them, but it seemed to be coming from some indeterminate location, not right under Thaniel’s hand.

“Ah, I don’t… actually know,” Pandy admitted, feeling her cheeks heat. “In- When I learned about this, someone used a sword covered in ice to shatter the spell.” She remembered the way the air had shimmered, a powerful gust of wind pouring out through the crack that traveled up the side of the tower. It was a very short cut-scene, no more than three seconds long, but even Pandy had to admit that Dorian looked cool, holding up his sword with his cape billowing out behind him.

Augustus hummed thoughtfully. “You said it’s an Air dungeon?” She nodded, and he tapped the fingers of one hand rhythmically against the opposite arm. “That makes sense. Air is weak against Ice – the cold suppresses wind movement. But the next best thing is Air versus Air. Zephra?”

He reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out a pinch of small golden granules. The little whirlwind appeared and swept them up, shivering in what Pandy could only interpret as great enthusiasm. When the tiny yellow lumps were all gone, Zephra circled Augustus’s head, swirling his hair into disarray as the children giggled.

With a sigh, the chancellor removed his glasses and tucked them into his pocket before reaching out with unerring fingers and snatching a wriggling puff of air from the… well, air. How one bit of sentient gas could be separated from the surrounding non-sentient gas, Pandy had no idea, but there it was, and Zephra was somehow both adorable and exquisite.

“I need you to find the weak point of this spell,” Augustus told her, and she wriggled, making his hair lift away from his head. Ignoring it, he said, “A full fifty grains if you do.”

That did it. Zephra twisted out of his grasp, somehow expanding to become much larger. The air was abruptly more present as it wrapped around the tower, poking and prodding at whatever made the tall building appear to be neither tall nor a building. They all waited with bated breath – only partially because it felt like someone had just sucked a good part of the oxygen out of the surrounding air – until Zephra let out the most piercing whistle Pandy had ever heard. Everyone clapped hands – or paws – over their ears, and then, just as in Gacha Love, the spell shattered, revealing the smooth stone tower and releasing a massive gust of wind.

Augustus reached out and snagged Thaniel as the small boy nearly tumbled over, and Abbington and Pandy did the same for Geraldine, whose full skirts caught the gale like a sail. Miss Cupcakes dug her claws into the skirt and hung off of it as the wind flowed past, lifting the small cat’s rear paws from the ground so she flew like a flag from a ship’s mast.

When the wind stopped, everyone was disheveled and breathless, but the tower stood revealed in all its glory. Except that it wasn’t glory, exactly, because while Pandy happened to know that the building was five stories tall – which was two stories taller than any other building she’d encountered in this world – it was also far from intact.

If Avington House showed signs of neglect and decay, this building was one step up from derelict. There were actual holes in the walls where stones had fallen loose, and if it had had windows, she was certain none of them would have held unbroken glass. It was perhaps good then that, other than the wooden door and the holes, the walls were solid from ground to roof.

“We’re s’posed to go in there?” Thaniel asked, eyeing it with great suspicion. The look Abbington gave Pandy wasn’t doubtful, just flat-out disbelieving, and Geraldine had her hands on her hips as she stared straight up. Even Augustus looked less than certain about proceeding.

“It’ll be fine,” Pandy told them, placing her hand against the door and pushing it open.

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