Location: Drox Fraternity House -- The City of Thorinn, Aetheria
Seele balked momentarily at the stack Taasha slid to them, but quick enough that hesitation was snuffed. She and Alex had offered to help, they wouldn’t back down now that it was needed. That wasn’t the Drox way and it wasn’t hers, either.
Still,
missing persons. This was serious, more serious than any mundane errand she’d ever run for the fraternity. She decided to quell the urge to theorize, and instead listened while Taasha explained the situation, absently flipping through the pages. Reports, testimonials, witness statements that were too short to be first-hand. She blanched when she came to the names.
These were people she knew.
no one’s … coming …Not well, really, not like her current party. But some she knew from around the fraternity, others she had met in guild halls or in the training grounds. Some she had even run dungeons with. These were, at least in part, skilled wayfarers who had taken on some of Pariah’s tougher content and come out on the other side. And they’d all gone missing? Many of the denizens she knew as well, simple, pleasant characters mostly, but others among the list were higher up in the fraternity’s chain of command. She wondered if some of these denizens could even be replaced.
“It’s a lot, isn’t it? Anyway, whatever you decide I hope you are more successful than the others. Personally, it’s a bit foreboding, hm?”“Certainly,” she said, still browsing. Now that Taasha was finished, Seele went ahead and dabbled with her options.
There was a clear and rising bias in the disappearances for wayfarers since the glitch. Unfortunately that didn’t tell her much about the denizens, except that their disappearances were simple happenstance, which she doubted, or that whatever was behind the disappearances had shifted its focus away from them.
Taasha had said investigators found no leads or connections, but already Seele was seeing a plain pattern between victims—victims? That seemed too pessimistic. Casters and thieves. The explanation for the thieves was simple if bleak, but the casters? The stereotype would have been that they were easier to get the best of compared to someone martial like, say, Alja, or Graves, but anyone who had been in Pariah for more than a few minutes would know that even a novice pyromancer or middling thaumaturge could be explosively dangerous. You’d have a better chance with healers and supports, sure, but there wasn’t really a way to know one sort of caster from another until you actually saw them in action.
Or, perhaps, if you already knew who they were.
No connection amongst the disappeared except for the fact that they were all in Thorinn. That didn’t say much about them, but it might just say a bit more about the perpetrator. The theories that came to her then were darker, more sinister, and made her queasy, though perhaps that was the effects of her friend’s fatigue-charm wearing away. Not a pleasing thought, either.
… missy it’s late …Seele gathered the most relevant, useful papers pertaining to the wayfarers who had gone missing after the glitch. It saddened her that there wasn’t much to go on for helping the missing denizens, but hopefully the two vanishings were related, and finding one group would also lead them to the other. Still, even cutting down on the amount, it was a lot of work for two people.
It was a lot less work for eight.
Seele shot the tired attendant an undaunted smile.
“Don’t you worry, we’ll get right to the bottom of this, and have those people back in no time!” she said, stuffing some of the papers away within the manifold layers of her robe, and handing others to Alex.
“Make sure you’re not walking around alone, alright Taasha? You’re a peach, this whole hall would just fall apart without you.” With that, she whirled on heels to Alex, then nodded back towards the way they’d come.
“We’ve got our case then. Lets head back to the tavern, see if we can’t rope in some extra hands to help us out, ah?”As the pair left the fraternity hall behind, Seele thumbed at the pages in her robes. For the first time in days, her mind felt like it was actually working again, and working
fast. How long that would last, she didn’t know, so while the spark was there she cupped it, held it close, stoked it as best she could.
Already plans were forming.
