Chapter Text
A bright blue sigil assembles itself on a worn down office floor. As the final line binds itself to the rest, the air roars to life, forming a rift in reality itself. The rift spreads haltingly, allowing a woman to step through.
Amelia Watson lands back in her office with a bit of a stumble. The cramped, dark space usually felt cozy, but currently felt alien and weird. The rumble of magic couldn’t be heard beyond the walls, although running water certainly could be.
Amelia wants to be happy about this, she really does, but something is pressing on her brain, making her stomach turn.
They’d saved the world–well, a world. Someone else’s world. She’d managed to turn over every stone, find the source of every calamity, and even prevent most of them. They’d won! So what was it niggling so insistently in the depths of her mind?
Growling, she tosses her stupid ornate cape and rugged, overfull backpack onto the floor, stomps over to her old, familiar couch, and forces her eyes to close.
—
Jyonathan Watson sits by a lake, fiddling with her Eye of Wisdom. She’d come out all this way to perhaps find a gift for her dear husband and had come up with nothing but some cool frogs. She was fond of the amphibians, yes, but one couldn’t imagine a courageous hero would.
She harrumps. The frogs croak.
“Oh my, do I hearest a maiden in distress over here? Is someone, mayhaps, beset by the frightening beast known as… boredom?”
Gohnathan G comes sailing off his horse, landing in a heap at Jyonathan’s side. He uses his tail as a crutch rolling up to his knees, smiling brightly. “My pearl! I have come to save you! You seem ill at ease here! Mayhaps you’d enjoy a ride upon my noble steed instead?”
Distantly, a horse whinnies, somehow derisively.
Jyonathan sets her croaking companions down, rolling her eyes exaggeratedly. “Truly, only you would manage to fall off your horse and, yet, be so gallant, dear husband!” She takes to her feet, tucking her seeing glass away and offering a hand to Gohnathan. “Shall we, then?”
“Certainly we shall, my pearl!”
Gohnathan’s fingers glide over Jyonathan’s palm, seizing her hand and offering yet another crooked smile. He opens his mouth braggadociously and–
—
Amelia Watson jolts up with a start, nearly hurling herself from the couch. Her eyes sting and some word, some phrase burns at the tip of her tongue. She has nothing.
The room is silent. She is alone.
She considers reaching for her phone and dialing for anyone that had been party to that same ridiculous quest. She pushes the phone off her end table instead. She knows how that would end.
Any time she’d approached her merry band for some sort of help in sorting herself out, she received the same response. Long, guilty gazes cast far to the distance. Shaking, wringing hands fidgeting with a cloak. Condescending, hollow words of no substance.
No one had any idea of what she had been talking about, evidently. It was her rekindled detective nature clashing with the magical oddness of the world around them. Nothing to overly concern herself with.
Bullshit. Far and away. Utter bullshit that they were attempting to sell to the premier bullshitter on not one, but several fucking planets and timelines.
She chucks a throw pillow at a wall, dislodging some sort of framed memorabilia she couldn’t be bothered to care about right now.
She rolls off the couch directly onto the floor flailing around like a child. Nothing dislodges the ache in her head. There may be only one way to handle this. She gets to her feet and goes to sit back at her desk.
Amelia Watson is going to write down everything she remembers. Any fragment, any bit, any dangling thread. All of it.
—
This whole gambling hall was a racket, Jyonathan decides. Her bets were reasonable and calculated. She has roughly nine books she penned purely to contain the math that went into this whole scheme. And yet, she kept losing.
Her dear husband had given her today’s allowance and she’d already lost a third of it! All she’d wanted was to place one bet to add to her gold pouch and then blow the whole thing on Gohnathan.
Jyonathan clenches her fists and forces her watering eyes down to the floor. Her husband would and did do everything he could for her and she was barely able to reciprocate. No one would purchase her Redstone and she clearly had no talent for gambling.
Behind her, the final phase of the cannon finishes. The yellows have it. She unclenches her fist. The battered scrap of paper certainly said “yellow” at some point, but the bookie was going to have to accept it regardless.
Jyonathan lets out a sigh and smiles. She can’t wa–
—
Amelia bolts up at her desk. There it was again. Something she couldn’t grasp that was making her heart twist and threaten to shatter.
It was in Libestal, something she’d left behind there unintentionally. Someone? That makes the ache in her head flare up a little more.
She has everything she could possibly recall set to paper in a rambling, twisting scrawl helter skelter across the largest sheets of paper she found stuck in her desk. Every person, animal, Libestan, and Stain accounted for; except, of course, whoever she couldn’t remember.
She buries her face in her hands and then rubs them up and down like she’s trying to catch her skin on fire. A strangled groan escapes her throat as she casts her eyes around the room once more. They land on her cloak and backpack– Libestan items.
She considers ripping them apart thread by thread to extract whatever magic danced within, as if that would be any help now. She snatches them up and hurls them onto her desk, sending pens and books skittering off the side.
Amelia sits back down and reaches for the cloak until she notices the spilled out contents of her bag.
A large cluster of glowing coral, several heavy archaic keys, a variety of hats, and… a box? She snags the thing from the pile.
The box fits in the palm of Amelia’s hand. A little thing with an oddly shaped lid wrapped in an uneven bow. The material is a faded white color with blotches here and there, as if its creator had spent an excessive time fiddling with it.
Her heart hammers in her chest. Her fingers quaver as she reaches out to tug at the bow. It comes apart with little fanfare. Amelia gently grips the lid and lifts it revealing… her hairpin?
Well, it certainly resembles her hairpin. The round lens seems a little more octagonal than normal, the gear’s teeth are rugged and unique to one another, and the whole thing is something of a tarnished brass color.
She places the box carefully on the desk and holds the pin with both hands. She had lost it at some point, hadn’t she? No one had mentioned it, though. Libestal was massive and turbulent–it could have gotten away from her anywhere. Who would ha–
—
Jyonathan Watson reflects on the many choices that led her to this precarious situation. Adventuring in the Stain-filled lands on your own was never a good idea.
That said, well, something had just called to her. Jyonathan had barely discovered but a thread of something lurking out there before she’d already mounted her horse and taken off.
This thread had pulled her into a frankly ridiculously huge ambush of Stains. Her Revelation was doing a good enough job of keeping the Stains back, complemented by her trusty sword. Yet, Jyonathan couldn’t use her Revelation ad nauseam and they were quickly circling in on her.
An arrow sails within inches of her left temple as she stumbles out of its path, directly into the range of a mid-sized Stain, sword already mid downward swing. Jyonathan screws her eyes shut and braces for the impact.
Somewhere, there’s a roar. “NO!”
Jyonathan hears something hurtled through the air landing heavily next to her, exactly… where the Stain is? Her eyes pop open and she whips her head around to see Gohnathan, his massive gauntlets pressed into the Stain’s chest.
He slams them down again, sending out a violent shockwave that clears the encroaching crowd in an instant. He punches the Stain in what one would call its face. He punches it again. And again. And again. And again. The Stain has long disintegrated. He punches again.
Jyonathan throws herself around Gohnathan’s shoulders, pulling against him.
“Dear husband! Gohnathan! It’s okay, I’m okay!” She squeezes him tightly, laying her head down on his shoulder. “You’ve saved me. I’m alright now. You don’t have to continue.”
Gohnathan’s clenched gauntlets vibrate with rage as he pulls them away from the floor. He can barely speak as he gazes into Jyonathan’s eyes. “Oh, my dear pearl, I beg you. Please don’t ever run along on your own like this again. I could not bear losing you. Please.”
Jyonathan cups his cheeks gently, leaning her forehead into his. “I know, I know. I truly apologize for scaring you, dear husband. I promise I shall be more careful, okay?” She tilts her head back a little, smiling and stroking his face.
Gohnathan lets out a rattling exhale, looking down in relief. Something on the floor catches his eyes. He points with the massive finger of a gauntlet. “Oh, my pearl…”
Jyonathan follows the finger to see the smashed remnants of her… hairpin?
Amelia’s voice catches in her throat as her eyes roam over it endlessly. She slowly forces her gaze back up at Gohnathan.
Gohnathan?
No, that’s not right.
That’s not Gohnathan that’s–
—
Tears race down Amelia’s cheeks as she clutches her head and screams. Her legs give out, knees slamming into the floor as her skull threatens to shatter under her skin.
Her hand shoots out, blindly slamming down onto her desk over and over until she finds it–her watch. She forces her eyes open and inputs her destination through the agony. Her final scream is cut off as the watch comes to life, spiriting her away.