Chapter Text
Aelwyn is nothing if not prepared. Like every test she’s ever taken and every spell she’s ever cast, Aelwyn is smart, Aelwyn is ready, Aelwyn is adaptable. She will never, ever be caught off guard without a contingency plan. There will always be a backup.
At the house party, right after Ostentatia disappears in a flurry of light and fractals, Adaine appears, and panic floods her chest because she’s not supposed to be here ; the surprise and the fury and the I can’t let her tell rises in her, and on instinct, on violent impulse, Aelwyn pulls her maiden sister into a crystal palimpsest.
Adaine feels her entire form dissolved and reconstituted, loosely, and she is surrounded by jagged crystal and mirror, and when she realizes what’s happened (and that she’s alone) she is so, so scared. Her spells won’t work and she’s pulling at walls that cut her fingers and smear with her blood the more she struggles with them, when she tries to smash them, in desperation; she is yelling for her party, yelling for her sister, both to let her out. Her breathing is getting heavy. I’m going to fucking kill my sister, she thinks.
The walls of the palimpsest are diamond-shaped mirrors, cracked and slightly crooked from whatever jailbreaking they had to do to it. They refract the image (and the anger and the fear) of Adaine a million times over like some kind of hellish funhouse mirror cage, but she’s not having fun, she’s furious, and her blood is on the walls.
Riz watches Adaine disappear in front of him. (This won’t be the last time.)
A million recalculations fire off in his head. Two things are immediate. First: he cannot take Aelwyn alone. Second: he has to do something.
He aims a bullet straight for her head, but all he does is crack the orange abjuration circles that are swirling around her. He dives out of the way as she curses him out and slings a spell at him, and then she casts another one and she’s gone. She’s gone and she took their most versatile spellcaster with her. She’s gone and she took Adaine and Ostentatia with her. She’s gone, and Adaine is another missing girl.
Riz tears off to get help. And he kind of hates it, because Aelwyn is getting away, he needs to go after her and stay on her tail before they lose her and getting the others is wasted time, but there is no fucking way he can take her by himself. He races downstairs, snatches Kristen from almost-smooching an Earth elemental that smashes into the floor where she was a moment ago, and goes careening into the yard.
Fig is (was) having a great time.
She and Gorgug have a gig here. Yeah, it’s at a house party populated by snotty Hudol boys, but beginnings are hardly ever spectacular. And it’s precisely the sort of beginnings that rockers like them get. Grungy basements, smoke-filled clubs--she’s got this. They’re gonna be great.
But then the chord she strikes loses its grit. It mellows out, goes smooth, and she hears something whisper off her bass strings like the last dredges of smoke from a blown-out candle, and her stomach drops when she realizes that not only does she recognize this from when they’d found Johnny Spells, but she recognizes who it’s from.
Save me.
Right as she turns to Gorgug to say something, Riz comes running.
Fabian is riding around desperately on the Hangman, with Fig on the back who is improvising some sonar-type thing on her bass to try and find Aelwyn. Riz is sitting in her backpack with his gun out and his eyes and ears sharp. They’re not finding anything, but Fabian refuses to just let her get away with this. She can’t get away with this. She took their friend, and she’s evil, and she needs to go down. (It’s a bummer he couldn’t get kisses, but Adaine’s safety comes first. Why do they always have to be evil?)
Kristen and Gorgug stayed behind at the house. They don’t fit on the Hangman, so they’ve convinced the Hudol boys to look for Aelwyn and tell them where she is if they see her while they help clean up the elementals, who are now pretty focused on killing them. They don’t hold up well to over thirty decently-leveled spellcasters, though.
With that over with, the search for Aelwyn goes on; the Hudol boys aren’t really convinced that she has done something terrible and needs to be taken down (fucking prep school nerds), because she is so cool and important and smart that she could never, Kristen thinks bitterly. But they do want to know where their hot, powerful, and popular wizard who was supplying all the (fake) hot girls and hard drugs went. Without her, it’s kind of just a sad sausage fest circlejerk, and even Kristen knows that for these kinds of people, going home early from what was supposed to be a rager of a party is really fucking lame.
Even with all these spellcasters with See Invisibility and Blink and Locate Creature and Scrying, they can’t find anything. The only thing that comes up is a powerful chronomancy from Detect Magic that none of them can place. It makes Kristen want to wring their weak little necks, though it’s not their fault; Aelwyn is crazy powerful, and she can’t say that she’s surprised to find out that she’s completely evaded them.
The emotional whiplash from talking about coming out with a hot cheerleader to hurry the fuck up our friend just got kidnapped and she’s in danger and we don’t know what they’re going to do to her had her reeling at first, before the battle-focus came in. But it’s been two hours now, and she and Gorgug are sitting on the curb of Seacaster Manor waiting for the rest of the Bad Kids to arrive, and she’s just… stewing, and upset, and feeling really nervous and overall bad. This was supposed to be a party. She was gonna pour out her beers and open up to pretty girls about her feelings. Adaine...
When Fabian pulls up and Riz hops out of Fig’s bag, the three of them looking for some kind of answer, Gorgug just gives them a sad look and Kristen shakes her head.
The guilt creeps up Riz’s throat. He wants something to shoot, and imagines Aelwyn’s head getting blown clean off her shoulders.
Aelwyn is adaptable. Aelwyn is adaptable. Aelwyn is adaptable. She always knows what to do when something goes unexpectedly, and she can always come back from a bad situation. (“Unexpectedly,” because she cannot afford to be “wrong.”)
The headstart she has would be meager if not for the watch. Again, that violent impulse: she clicks for a full twelve hours on herself and herself only before she can even think, and when everything stops, she does too. Just for a minute.
She needs to figure out what to do now.
From the rooftop, Aelwyn surveys the scene. She thinks.
The original plan was to nab Ostentatia, murder as many of the Adaine’s friends as possible, and then get the hell out of dodge. But then Adaine caught her, and Aelwyn trapped her, and now everything went downhill and now they’re here. She curses; yet again her sister has proven herself a terrible thorn in her side.
She wasn’t supposed to follow her. She was supposed to stay out of it, and then it would have been fine.
Aelwyn should’ve stuck to the original plan and just Teleported out if things got too hot, which she doubts; they’re all a bunch of fucking stupid freshmen. Freshmen who have come dangerously close to unraveling everything that she’s been working towards, but freshmen. But she’s here now, alone in a time stop, and now she has to make do.
Her thoughts are flying. She can do this. She can make something good out of this.
The Harvestmen have gone rogue and with them their plot to start a war, but Aelwyn can surely spin something now that she’s got her sister.
Yeah. Yeah. She’s got something. She’s going to go home, and she is going to spread rumors and conspiracies of her sister’s disappearance; surely Fallinel would like to know why their ambassador’s daughter has disappeared, the Elven oracle, all while things have been quite tense around Elmville lately. The oracle dies at sea and the very next, who happens to be on Solesian soil, goes missing; why wouldn’t that raise suspicion? Then she’ll hide to ramp up the tension and make things worse. One child is bad enough, but both? Perhaps Fallinel may be concerned enough to do something about it, if she whispers the right things to the right ears.
This is assuming she can spend any time waiting. Adaine’s friends are surely on her ass now that they not only know her direct involvement but also she is in possession of one of their party members. She might have to get out of town right away.
She can still make that work.
If she goes missing, then the police are going to investigate, and she can’t leave behind any trace that she was anything but the most golden a child could be. No one can find out she did this, least of all her parents. No one can ever find out.
Aelwyn casts Fly on herself and hops off of the roof. She has twelve hours.
She’s gonna go clean her room.