Big Trouble

by Andrew Seiple

  “Cylvania. And there’s some, but they all live together in one village and I’ve never been there. It’s one of the farming villages that the wars missed. They stayed out of it and farmed and paid their taxes.”

  “That sounds like halvens, all right,” Chase nodded. “We like our peace and quiet. Well, most of us.”

  “This must be rough for you, then. I’m sorry,” Renny said.

  “Not your fault. Well, not much. Well, you didn’t know how it would work out,” Chase clarified. “And no, it’s okay. If I survive this... if I survive this, I think I needed this. I needed something big to get me out of the hole I’d been planted into.”

  “We’re kind of in a hole right now,” Renny said, looking around at the carved corridors, still striated with places where the masons had left the natural stone alone. The few lanterns down this way guttered and flickered, leaving large pools of shadow. Somewhere water dripped... they were well away from the river; it was somewhere back and above a level, but the entire place was stone, after all. And where there was stone, water found a way through.

  “No. More of a metaphorical hole. A personal hole.” She frowned. “No, that just sounds dirty. It’s like... I didn’t choose to be where I was; my parents decided it for me, and they chose this because their parents decided it for them, and so on, and so back. Who decided it first? Why should I have to live up to what they chose? I didn’t have any say in it then. Why should I follow their lead now?”

  Renny put his muzzle down and seemed to be pondering the point. “I’m not disagreeing with you,” he said, finally. “But if I were, I’d make the argument that those old people managed to have offspring that survived until today by taking the path that they took. So that’s something to consider.”

  “Sure, if I wanted to marry young, pop out babies, and die in the same village I was born in. I don’t want to follow their path. Their path is babies. Babies are yuck.”

  “Could you follow that path without babies?”

  “Not without a lot of people having serious talks with me, and every one of my relatives getting sterner and sterner about it. Their path means that everyone has their nose in everyone else’s business and tries to get everyone else to be like they are. Which doesn’t work if you’re a man who likes men, or a woman who wants to do something that isn’t the usual women’s stuff.” Chase sighed. “They’d find little ways to make my life hell until I gave in and popped out a few brats that I’d have to take care of for decades or more. And a husband. I don’t want a husband.”

  Renny considered it and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Look, I don’t have to get married if I don’t want—” she stopped. “You don’t care, do you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no, I mean it in a good way. You say ‘okay’ like it’s none of your business. And it isn’t, is it?” She smiled. It was such a relief! She’d become the queen teen gossipmonger of Bothernot out of self-defense, mainly. Because the system the halvens had built wouldn’t leave you alone, so you were best off taking it on by any means necessary.

  “No, it’s not really my business. My friends are my business, and they’re alive now, so I’m a lot happier about that.” Chase felt Renny’s tail wag, just a bit, where it was curled around her side.

  Then he went on. “But they’re charmed or something and I’m trying to figure out what to do about that. And so far I’m not coming up with much.”

  “I can help with that, when I see them,” Chase said. “I’ve got a skill that’s perfect for figuring out what’s happening there. And maybe a skill that’ll fix that, depending on what it is. But...” she sighed and glanced down the steps. “First we need to get past this. Foresight,” Chase intoned, and sent her ghostly self running down the stairs.

  Ghostly Chase reached the bottom unharmed, turned, and shrugged.

  Chase stared for a moment in disbelief, until the tight band in her chest became too much to ignore. She ran down the stairs, fighting to keep her balance, and got to the bottom of them, puffing and panting. It’s a good thing I just refilled my stamina. That was tiring.

  Then she straightened up, and stared at what was before her. A large wooden door stood open at the end of the short corridor, its bar lying to the side.

  The plaque on the door was gold on black enamel, and declared two words to the world;

  IL CIARLATANO

  “The Charlatan,” Chase said, staring up at the plaque, then over to the darkness beyond the door.

  “I wonder if they’re still in there,” Renny whispered through the hole in the jacket.

  “I’m not sure. The door’s open, and I’m pretty sure this is a prisoner’s cell, so I don’t see why he... or she, would be. Though there were six guards along this route for a reason...” Chase rubbed the side of her head in indecision. “Honestly if we’re this close and talking with the door open, and this Charlatan’s as dangerous as Dijornos, then they probably know we’re here. We might as well go in and see if anyone’s home.”

  But just to make sure, she chanted “Foresight.”

  Ghostly Chase walked in. Seconds passed, then she strolled out again, shrugging.

  “Probably clear,” Chase said and picked her way around the door, with as much caution as she could give the task.

  She was not prepared for what she found inside.

  Lush furnishings filled the circular room which had red-and-white vertically-striped walls. The floor was covered with soft, silvery carpet so deep that Chase’s feet literally disappeared into it. The softest-looking bed that Chase had ever seen sat against one wall, curved to fit the curvature of the room. A writing desk loomed nearby, covered with neatly arranged ink bottles, books, and stacks of papers folded to either side.

  Across from the bed, a velvet-padded bench stood in front of something Chase had only seen in pictures; an enormous pipe organ, with pipes feeding back into the wall, and keys worn from obvious use.

  And on the wall were racks full of tall hats, red jackets, and white trousers. All familiar looking clothes, Chase realized.

  “This is Thomasi’s room!” She blurted. “He’s the Charlatan. Ah, okay. That makes sense. He’s a Grifter, so they’d call him a fancy word for a liar.”

  “I wonder what Vaffanculo was called,” Renny said, then squirmed free of her jacket. Chase covered her mouth to keep from laughing. He was tickling her!

  Then she remembered the corpses they’d passed at the start of this, and why they were down here in the first place. And she managed to keep silent, as Renny dropped to the ground, and stood up on his hind legs. His fuzzy head trained left and right. “Do you think there’s something here to help us?”

  “Maybe.” Chase rubbed her scalp. “There’s got to be a reason why they were guarding this side of things. It’s not him because we know he’s gone, out in the woods. So there’s got to be something else. Maybe in here, or maybe one of those doors we passed.”

  “I’ll search under the bed.”

  “Dibs on the desk, then,” Chase said. She eyed the books with a greedy gaze, sighing internally. There was never enough time to read interesting books! Climbing up onto the chair, she began pulling down the books first and flipping through them.

  “An atlas of Western Disland,” she muttered, flipping through it. It seemed old. She couldn’t find Laraggiungere in it. Nor Bothernot. As she turned pages, ancient glue gave way, and the old maps pulled loose from the spine.

  Cylvania DID get a mention, on one of the larger maps. The text below the name listed it as the gateway to the east, and the only safe path through some nasty mountains. No mention of golems anywhere.

  “Not useful,” Chase decided with a sigh and replaced it. Then she reconsidered, staring at the jumble of pages, sitting crookedly on the unglued binding. She couldn’t use it, but Renny might be able to use this to go home, Chase thought, and put it to the side as she replaced the book.

  The rest of the books turned out to be full of songs and musical notes, an
d Chase shook her head as she put them back. She’d never learned to read music, and she’d never unlocked the Bard job, so these seemed of little use to her. “Jinkies might be able to get some use from them, but not me.”

  “What’s that?” Renny said from right behind her, and Chase managed to keep from falling out of the chair, barely. She did knock most of the papers to the ground as she scrambled and cursed under her breath as she watched them go.

  “Sorry,” Renny said, and started to gather them up, scampering around, swiping them out of the air with his little black paws. “Did you find anything?”

  “No.” Chase took one of the papers from Renny’s paws and looked it over. “Names. Just names. Some of them are pretty weird, but they all look like names.”

  Renny flipped through a pawful of papers, glass eyes winking in the light as he scanned them. “Oh! Here’s Dijornos’ name. And a bunch of other people. The top of the sheet says... Warring Pizzas?”

  “What? Let me see that.”

  She confirmed that it said “Warring Pizzas,” and neither Chase nor Renny could say what that was supposed to mean.

  About a third of the sheets shared similar styles... they all had a word or some combination of words up top, and a list of names below. A few of the words said things like “Fairy Godfathers” and “Holy Sea,” but others were titled nonsensical things like “Guineapiggers,” or “Roamin Around.”

  “Oh!” Chase said, spotting one particular name in the lists.

  Speranza, the woman who planned to enslave her father, was on one of them. The name of her list was “DameVincis.”

  “Here,” Chase said, putting all the lists in her pack, along with the map. “What about the other papers?”

  “Music, it looks like.” Renny showed her more notes, and those line things that they sat on. “I’m not a bard, sorry.”

  “Eh, it looks more like that was his hobby.” Chase considered. “There are a lot of them, and I don’t know if any of them are important, so we should probably leave them here.”

  “What about the books?”

  Chase shrugged and touched them one by one. “An old atlas. Music, music... more music.”

  “What about the one under the shelf?”

  “Music.” Chase tapped it again.

  “No, I mean the small one above your hand.”

  “What?” Chase bent over and squinted. “Well I’ll be...”

  There was a tiny black book, small enough to fit in her dress pocket, back in a little nook that kept it out of sight. “You have sharp eyes,” Chase complimented Renny as she fished it out.

  “It’s at the right angle for me to see it.” But Renny smiled a bit, probably from the compliment.

  Chase opened it and frowned, then hauled it over to where the light was brightest. “This one is all handwritten. And the letters are absolutely tiny.”

  “I can help with that. Phantasm.” Renny pulled out, of all things, a magnifying glass.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You don’t want to know. I’ll hold it. You read.”

  And after a minute, the enormity of what they’d found struck her. “This is his diary!”

  “I think if it’s a man’s book they call it a journal. Or possibly memoirs.”

  “Do they? What’s the difference?”

  “A man is writing it?” Renny shrugged. “I never really understood why it needs to be different. That gender stuff is hard for most golems to get. There’s a lot of little weird things to remember.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being a golem,” Chase said, tugging his paw over so the magnifying glass lined up again. “Then I could worry less about how girls are supposed to act and more about being me. Now let’s see here...”

  Day 1466

  “What? No, this can’t be right. This is the first entry.”

  Then she read on and understood a bit more clearly.

  Day 1466

  I have consumed my previous journal. Lacking fire of a natural sort, and with no desire to raise suspicion among my watchers, I have picked the small book to pieces and eaten it, bit by bit. The upside is that Generica Online has no indigestion debuff. The downside is that after a particular point, it substituted the nausea debuff instead. I do not enjoy vomiting, but the consequences are less dire than letting my true thoughts be found by my captors.

  I’ve finally been forced to eat my own words, and my, were they ever disgusting. Some divine force is definitely screwing with me.

  On the upside, constantly writing for days on end has unlocked the scribe job, which allows me to use smaller calligraphy. I should be able to make this journal last much, much longer than the last.

  Which is fortunate, because I do not know when I may receive a replacement. My friend, who shall remain nameless, will have difficulty bringing anything to my cell after the last escape attempt. I fear that my impatience only served to increase my hardship. For now, I must appear mournful, and give every sign of cooperation. I shall write out more of my experiences and turn them over to my captors. Where they shall go from there, I do not know. I expect that witch Zenobia to pass them on to my true enemy.

  To OUR true enemy. I must remember that I am not alone in this.

  In any case, I will make use of this journal more sparingly, to try and make it last. I shall not be writing down individual days anymore, unless they are marked by significant matters.

  Day 1471...

  Chase looked up from the magnifying glass. “There’s a lot to unpack, here,” she told Renny. “But I’m not sure how much of it is useful right now.”

  “He ate a book.”

  “And there’s someone called Zenobia who’s important here.”

  “Yeah, a Witch. Aren’t they supposed to eat babies?”

  “I think... I think he might have just been cursing her. He wrote ‘witch’ in lower case. Job titles are capitalized. That’s what I learned from Mother Bloom, anyway.”

  Chase flipped through the rest of the book as she spoke. Every page for the first three quarters of the tiny book was jam-packed with letters. But then she hit empty space. “He didn’t finish all of it out. Which means...” she strove to recall the detective books she’d read. There had been one or two in the trunk, less interesting than Jinkies’ adventures. “Which means that the last entry might have something useful. That’s how it worked in Snog Groggerson: Orc Detective.”

  Day 6290

  Dijornos has done the impossible and captured some adventurers. Speranza is charming the poor bastards as I write this. Then, if all goes to plan, they’ll fight their way to us and let us out.

  Hopefully from that point on I’ll have a clear shot at walking out of here. Otherwise I’ll have to pray that the secret cache is where my friend says it is... and that the keys to the confiscation room are there.

  She’s stopped singing. The charm has taken.

  Time to prepare.

  “Thank you Snog,” Chase whispered.

  “This sounds useful,” Renny said. “But where is this secret cache?”

  Chase blinked, as she realized the problem. “Oh. Oh no. He probably talks about it somewhere back here.” She riffled the pages back to the start of the journal. Crabbed handwriting filled every inch of paper. “We’d have to read until we found it.”

  “Well, we’d better get started then,” Renny said, holding the magnifying glass closer.

  “No. No, that won’t work,” Chase said, feeling her heart sink. “We’d need to read through the whole book page by page until we found it, and that could take anywhere from the first page to the last. This... we need to be smart about this.”

  Then a faint hope rose. “Unless... well, it’s worth a shot.” She cleared her throat. “I’m an Oracle of a god, chosen by him, and my luck is really, REALLY good. So, I should be able to open this book exactly to the page I need, and learn where this secret cache is!”

  She opened the book.

  Renny leaned over with the magnifying glass.
<
br />   “Okay so I’m not THAT lucky,” Chase said with a sigh.

  “It’s all right,” Renny patted her hand with his free paw. “Do we need the magnifying glass anymore?”

  The halven girl shook her head, slowly. “No. As much as I hate it, we just don’t have time to read through every entry. Even if he’s only putting one every few days, the numbers are too far apart. That’s... years. They have to be. Vaffanculo’s going to attack in a matter of hours, at best. And I’m not sure how long Dad really has.” Chase thumped her hand on the ground. “If only we had a way to search this book quickly!”

  “I wish Dracosnack was here.”

  “Who?”

  Renny stuck his paw behind his back, and when he pulled it out again the magnifying glass was gone. “My friend. I grew up with him. He was an animated toy once and fought for Princess Cecelia. She tracked him down and rebuilt him and made him a golem. Well, Threadbare did, anyway.”

  “And this makes him able to search books more efficiently?”

  “No. But he loved books. We were friends because of that... I mean we were friends anyway because it was right to be good to our classmates, but we both loved reading. He took the Librarian job because of it, and one of the skills let him skim books very quickly.”

  “That is precisely what we need here. It’s a pity you didn’t follow in his footsteps.”

  “Well...” Renny hesitated. “I do have that job unlocked.”

  “Ah, that’s a pity. If only—” she stopped and whipped her head around to stare at him so quickly that she almost hurt her neck. “You have it available? Take it!”

  “I’m not sure if I should. Jobs are a big commitment, and until I get back to my guild master, I can’t change them around.”

  “Renny,” Chase started, hearing her own voice rise in frustration and anger. She got ahold of herself and shook her head. “Renny,” she said in a calmer voice, “do you want to save your friends?”