CHAPTER 27: Funds and Mental
In Shaydon, a paper-strewn office sits high amongst the clouds, viewing everything below it as a light-smudged sea of temptations and city living. The room itself is plainly furnished— any extravagance taking part only on the torn scraps of paper in the form of words and slapdash doodles and ideas. A shayd sits face-down on his desk, resting his eye for a brief moment, knowing that no matter how much he may wish it, rest will never truly come to him. As he sits, time finally seems to melt away. Could this finally be it? That sweet release of deformation that all of his ilk undergo when they encounter the silken mistress of sleep? He finds himself waist-deep in a pool of serenity, dipping deeper into its clutches as—
BANG!
“Loth, Wake up!”
The shayd’s eye squints at the sight he has been subjected to for the length of his entire professional career, an unearned office, half-finished ideas melting into one another, and of course, some irritating lout barking orders at him. This particular one was Egred, Shaydon’s treasurer, his most signifying feature being the fact that the hood on his cloak ended not with a point (or several), but a bundle held together with a thick rope of golden silk.
“This had better be important Egred. I had finally gotten five minutes to myself.” He groaned as he rubbed his temples.
“Do you SEE what they’re DOING?! The Seven have practically gone MAD with…” The intruder’s face twisted with anger as he wrestled the next word from his unseen mouth. “Generosity. They’re throwing every glittering coin of mine into the hands of every Mot, Kicd, and Yerrj they see fit!”
“So the old-timers got some raises, big whoop.” Loth said, slumping over to a large machine and pulling the handle of the tap attached to it. “I just hope some of it ends up going my way for once.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” Egred scowled. “And you know this is about more than just raises. I heard from Lusa that that fiend Eyve is promising Rawth’s soldiers 1000 star for each pound of elemental cores they bring back.”
Egred tapped the side of Loth’s desk in frustration, facing away from him as he filled a cup with the contents of the machine.
“I despise it with every fiber of my being. Every coin out there, clattering throughout the pockets of those infidels, not lining the interior of my bank, all it brews is more trouble, I tell you!”
“Give it a rest, would you?” Loth griped as he took a sip of the machine’s bitter contents. “You know how the economy works. Everything ends up going back to you, one way or another.”
“This is different” Egret hissed. “Whenever I invest, I know where the money’s going to end up. I know the process, the people— the reliability of said processes and people. You don’t get to be treasurer without knowing exactly what’s going to be spent and what it’ll be spent on.”
Loth arced his head skyward, frustrated.
“Look, I’m already up to my neck in running stuff to keep the public away from… whatever Eyve and Ven were up to. I really don’t have time for this.”
“That’s just it! We don’t know a blasted thing about this venture. Experiments?! Fusions!? Where’s the profit margin? What’s the demand?” Egred babbled obliviously. “I’m not going to sit idly by while star is just being thrown at this. I worked for this position, I usurped that damned philanthropist, I earned thi-” Egred soon found himself cut off by Loth, grasping his arms around his shoulders and shaking him violently.
“SHUT UP, will you? SHUT UP. I DON’T CARE ABOUT-” Loth suddenly snapped back to normalcy, releasing Egred from his grasp and dusting him off. He took a deep breath before uttering his next words.
“If I run some more commercials tonight, getting people to, I dunno, buy stuff, will you promise to leave me alone?”
Egred collected himself from the sudden outburst, straightening himself at the proposition.
“Now that is an offer I won’t refuse.” He slunk out of the door, satisfied with the arrangement. “Take care!” He left, receiving a joyless wave from Loth as he took another sip from his cup.
“Alright, let’s see what I’m working with today…” He muttered, grabbing three darts from a bowl on his desk and closing his eye. He blindly flung them across the room, returning vision to his eye shortly after he was sure they had all landed.
“Let’s see here…”
“Big…”
“Recoil…”
“Plank…”
Loth pondered the words provided to him by the darts.
“Alright, let’s see here, we could have some… people, I guess, recoiling in fear at some… Big plank? Nonono, that won’t work… Or maybe we could do an ad for something hardware related… Hmm…”
The puzzle before him was twisted, just like Loth’s own fate. One thing was for certain, however: After this idea was deciphered, pitched, and produced, it would end up exactly like every other thing this esteemed member of The Seven had ever created; lost and forgotten, proclaimed old news to be buried under the next brilliant idea his darts could come up with. It was a cruel fate, but one that earned him a place of power, regardless. After all, a mind can be as feeble or as powerful as what it’s fed, and deprivation was second nature to one such as Loth.
CHAPTER 28: The Web
“Maybe Thead was onto something.” Panted Vino, climbing up the stairs of Hope’s temple yet again. “This right here? This would make anyone go crazy.” The sun was beginning to set upon the trio, the light of day beginning to hide itself precariously behind the fractured wall that circumnavigated the city. Orsel knelt onto the steps of the temple, clutching his crookshank for balance.
“I know it’s in poor taste, but I have to side with Vino here. If I have to climb up this flight of stairs one more time today, I’m going to see to it that Hope’s theory comes true!”
“Hush up, now.” Jake scolded, leading the two ingrates. “A bit of a workout shouldn’t be an issue for either of you, and secondly-” He wiped his brow, flinging some mud off onto the indents of stone lining the stairs. “Don’t even joke about that stuff! This poor grandess has been mourning her people for almost twenty years now!” Orsel and Vino looked away from Jake in shame as they climbed to catch up with him.
“… These stairs are still a pain, though.”
Eventually, they reached Hope’s door, Jacob greeting it with a thunderous knock.
“Hope, we want to talk!” He commanded. There was no answer from within.
“Welp, she’s not here. Let’s go.” Orsel proclaimed, turning around only to be grabbed by Jacob.
“That didn’t stop you last night, come on.” Jake opened the door to find Hope, as was becoming standard now, hunched over and clutching a stack of papers. She looked legitimately surprised to see the intruders, and blipped towards the door to shut it.
“Don’t come in! It’s not ready yet!” She begged, and hanging right behind her was a tapestry of pictures and documents, suspended from the ceiling and interconnected with colored string.
“Orsel told us you have an…” Vino looked around at the labyrinthine collection of documents. “… Interesting theory to share with us.”
“I’m just trying to organize everything. I know I’m right about this. I’ve seen the entire world move on from here in this temple. If I can ask one thing from you three besides keeping my presence a secret, at least let it be a chance to explain all of this.”
Vino stepped forwards and began to rummage through Hope’s findings.
“Well, maybe we can help you put some of this together. Where does this go?” He held up a folder labeled “MAW’S DIGGIN’S”
“That goes over there, in the shell company pile.” Hope directed, fastening a sheet of paper with a drawing of an air elemental on it to a clip. “You wouldn’t believe how many places Shaydon has its hands in.” Upon seeing Vino continue to help out, Orsel and Jacob decided to do the same, sorting through the papers, and helping the grandess piece it together.
“So, Miss Hope, what would you say is your biggest piece of evidence right now?” Jacob asked, flitting through a stack of documents.
“Well, at the moment, I’d probably say you guys.”
“And how exactly is that?” Orsel inquired
“Well, uncouth experiments normally aren’t out of Shaydon’s territory,” She explained, “But the fact that they went to great lengths to get a group of subjects such as yourselves speaks plenty about how desperate they are to get an edge against everyone else.”
“Great lengths?” Orsel asked, unraveling a ball of blue string. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on.” Hope chuckled. “I mean, last I heard, flauna and terrians aren’t exactly native to Shaydon. Also, the fact that there were other elementals being tested on means that they’re getting these people from somewhere. I mean, Jacob, how did you find yourself captured?” Jake frowned as his index claw began to slice through the newspaper he was holding.
“They hauled me out of my own home like a damn piece of furniture.”
“See! Proof! They’re sending out raiding parties, using outside contacts— like these here— to track down likely candidates for their testing!”
Jake looked back over at Hope, slamming the newspaper onto a nearby table
“Wait, you telling me that I was scoped out for this? By someone back home?”
“Hey, it’s only a theory— I mean, a theory with a lot of proof. Look at these disappearances! A good chunk of them are from people I’ve seen causing problems around their respective homelands.”
Jacob looked more intently at the rows of faces that hung behind him, where Hope was pointing to. He pointed at a picture of a water elemental and turned over to Vino.
“Ain’t this Pa’ja? That aquean we met in the cell three down from us?” Vino walked over, squinting his eyes and tilting his head at Jake’s subject.
“He does look a bit familiar. His hair was parted the other way, though, if I remember correctly.”
“Cut me some slack.” Hope grumbled. “I’m not good at portraits.”
“Hey, look!” Vino grabbed a slip of paper from the chandelier of missing persons. “This ignis, Grada! She was in the cell at the end of the wall. I know those eyes anywhere.”
“A decent amount of these do line up.” Jake concluded. “I mean, I’m not too good with names and faces, but I definitely remember some of these folks.” Meanwhile, Orsel found the newfound evidence more than marginally imposing.
“Alright, so Shaydon’s research and development looks like it’s doing something shifty. Granted, it is awful that innocent lives are being treated like this, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a full-fledged war coming, right?”
“Well, to quote one of Thead’s old friends, ‘the seeds of conflict are best sown in odd places.’” Hope walked up to the dangling web of files that Vino had recently contributed to. ”Around five years ago, these organizations have started popping up throughout Crux, each of them up to no good in their own unique ways.” She flitted through the contents, performing split-second showcases of hand-drawn logos. “Some of them are just groups of troublemakers, while others are full-fledged guilds and companies, all of them given heaps of star from seemingly nowhere.”
“And how, pray tell, do you make the connection from that to Shaydon?” Orsel accused. “Who’s to say they didn’t just pull themselves up on their own or get a loan from someplace?”
“Well, I—” Hope cleared her throat. “Alright, look. I don’t have any actual way of seeing how they got their funds, I mean, being able to see anything that goes on at night would help— BUT! Look at the things these people are doing!” She handed out folders to the three with detailed observations. “Every one of these places has been causing nothing but problems for the larger populations around them. No offense to you, Orsel, but if you don’t think there’s a hint of Shaydon behind this stuff, then I don’t know what to tell you.”
A moment was spent while the trio perused their respective documents. Vino’s folder, labeled “CERULEAN FLAME”, noticeably piqued his interest, his eyes widening at some of the passages he read over.
“Let’s see here… entertainment club… influx of members… Some not leaving…large quantities of star… yadda yadda…mass shutdown…”
Orsel’s folder had “WORD OF GOL” emblazoned on its face. He was hesitant to read it, but he at least had to give Hope’s claims an honest chance. Within the folder were pages upon pages of essays detailing a large shift in a far-off nation, wherein a religious following worshiping a deity named “Gol” had now divided into two major subsects, the Stalwart and the Quasi. One of which doing much more successful, and somehow more profitably, than the other. As was the case with the homemade missing persons files, there were some visual aids provided by Hope herself littered amongst the ancient pages. There were a couple prominent figures often seen, such as a stony-looking earth elemental by the name of Tekorix, and a handful of misshapen members of the Quasi that seemed to pop up more than once. Alongside the profiles, however, there were also hand-drawn scenes of what Orsel assumed were events Hope had seen through the dayfinder. Suffice to say, these were not drawn very well, but they clearly depicted enforcers of the stalwart committing acts of violence and other unfair acts on the quasi. There were around a dozen of these, but as he thumbed through the art, one of them managed to catch his eye.
It was a small stone elemental, a child, sitting in a pile of rubble. He looked upset, lost, like he didn’t belong and didn’t completely understand why. In that child’s sad, scribbled eyes, Orsel felt a twinge in his core, something familiar deep within his memories that he had yet to comprehend, a feeling he could only describe as homesickness.
If there was any proof, insignificantly small as it may be, that Shaydon was behind some of these doings, that lonely, three-armed child was it. It was the cruel and unforgiving world he had been raised in his whole life that had somehow seeped outside the walls of Shaydon and into the life of this undeserving stranger. Granted, this was only a feeling rather than a concrete fact, but the fact such a feeling in him was invoked in the first place at least commanded some respect.
Orsel looked over at Jake, who took his silent contemplation of the notes in a violently different way. He was holding the “MAW’S DIGGIN’S” folder that Vino had hung up on the shell corporation strings not too long ago, and Orsel could tell that Jacob was not enjoying what he was reading. His eyes flared in anger as they darted across the words, unseen to the others, as he slightly crunched the paper between his massive claws. He had flipped one more page, and his eye twitched in fury as he grumbled and flung the paper onto the floor.
“Alright, I’m convinced.” He uttered, clenching his fists. “But what are we gonna do about all this?”
“Slow down, Jake.” Vino interrupted. “While this evidence is quite well-put together— Thank you for that, Ms. Hope— we still need something a bit more… concrete to know that Shaydon is planning something larger than, from the looks of it, general trouble.”
Hope’s response to the claim was nonexistent, her eyes locked on something seemingly a thousand miles away.
“Do you have anything else like this?” He continued, holding his folder outwards to her. Abruptly, Hope ran over to the open door and slammed it shut.
“Stay quiet.” She commanded, taking down her hung-up evidence and hastily shoving them into their old piles.
“Look, all I’m asking for is a bit more data.” Continued Vino. “An investigation such as this should—”
“We have company.” Hope explained.