“Come on people! It’s already been a week, and we’re running on a deadline here!” shouted Abhi as he directed his fellow researchers as they scrambled between the scanning machine and a packet of notes. “How long does it take to install a simple upgrade?”

  “It’s only been a week since we found these tier 5 runes!” shouted Helen. “We’re still wrapping our heads around them.”

  “She’s right, it’s going to take some time,” added another man. Unlike the other two researchers, he wore a plain white lab coat. His voice came out muffled, with his head jammed inside the side panel of the large device. “We barely understand how to track the tier 5 rune magic that was used to summon those kids out of the other weaker rituals being conducted in parallel.”

  “Excuse me, Abhi, perhaps I could be of some help?” asked Arla as she came up from behind the group with her hands clasped together.

  “Then bring in more runeheads!” shouted the Indian man, his knuckles turning red as he clenched his fists. “Who knows how many of those kids are dead by now?!”

  “Perhaps a runic researcher in training could offer an outsider perspective?” asked the blue-robed sorceress, her eyes narrowing as she gave the group a cheshire grin. “Do you have a spare copy of those notes I could look at?”

  “Not now, Arla. We’re doing something important,” growled Helen.

  “I asked Abhi,” she replied with a sneer. “And I’m an important part of this group, that’s why you brought me on! Give me those notes and I can help.”

  “Arla,” slowly said the man in question.

  “You keep putting me down, but you don’t know how knowledgeable I am!” she continued haughtily.

  “Arla…”

  “I was King Reginald’s court wizard, I graduated at the top of my class at the Valenloft Kingdom’s premier mage academy! I think I’ve had enough of you treating me like some sort of child.”

  “Arla!” shouted Abhi.

  “What?!” she shouted back.

  “You’re getting in the way. Stop it and go back to your tent.”

  “Sure, but maybe I can read those notes if you have a copy?”

  “No Arla, those are classified. We can’t introduce that level of knowledge to a World like this. Go away, we have lives to save.”

  “…oh,” she replied weakly. “Sure, I’ll go.”

  The sorceress slowly shuffled away, leaving the frantic researchers behind her.

 

---

 

  As night fell and the newly upgraded machine purred as it continued its search anew, the men and women of TOAL retired to their tents with hearts full of hope. All except one.

  “Hey Arla, sorry about earlier today,” whispered Abhi as he slowly opened the flap to her tent. “It might be TOAL policy to not share any of our knowledge on rune magic, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give you something equally impressive!”

  The researcher stuck his head into her temporary domicile while clutching a large book, a bright and hopeful smile plastered across his face. “I’ve got a biology textbook that I’m sure you’re going to love! Aspects of the fundamental units of life and its formation and application in macro-scale organisms! Trust me, it’s much simpler than the title suggests. Arla?”

  The Indian man looked around the tent before realizing it was empty and making his way back to the operations center. Perhaps the sorceress wanted to find a way to prove her worth like she did that morning?

  As Abhi entered the second largest tent in base camp, he too found it empty, without a single soul patrolling its rough concrete floor.

  “Hello, Arla?” he asked in a controlled voice, loud enough to be heard by anyone inside but not so much as to wake any of his sleeping compatriots up. “Are you here?”

  “Ugh…” came a pained voice from further in.

  The researcher briefly paused before running towards the sound. He quickly found its source, a soldier lying on the ground while clutching his head.

  “Are you alright?” asked Abhi, carefully easing the armored man into a sitting position. “What happened?”

  “I think I got ambushed,” he replied, trying his best to hold back a wave of nausea. “Some kind of knockout spell.”

  “Take it easy, take it easy. How did you get hit with something like that? Shouldn’t your armor be warded against those kinds of crowd control spells?” The researcher took a moment to look over his armor, and confirmed that it still retained its arcane defenses.

  “I don’t know,” the soldier shrugged. “One moment, I was standing guard over those notes from headquarters, and the next, I’m waking up in your arms.”

  “Don’t get too comfy in them,” joked Abhi. “Haha-” he paused halfway through his chuckle. Once he made sure the soldier was fully supported by the wooden crate he was leaning on, the researcher jerked upwards and looked at the safe the notes were kept in.

  The steel door was wide open, the combination having been correctly input, with nothing to be found inside. Immediately, the pieces began to fall into place and Abhi’s face began to scrunch up in a painful wince. “Fu…”

 

---

 

  “I can’t believe it, I trusted her, and this is how she repays us!” shouted Abhi as he paced across the rough concrete floor. “How could something like this happen?!”

  “I think you mean, ‘how could something like this not happen?’” replied a baggy-eyed Helen as she sipped on a cup of hot, black coffee. The plain brew tasted just like she sounded. “Of course Artyom was right about her, and you’re apparently the only one here who couldn’t see it.”

  “So what if I missed the signs?” replied the Indian man with a glare. “She still deserved that second chance when she came to us, and no real harm was done. Phillips is alive, and Claire already gave him a clean bill of health.”

  “Our notes were stolen.”

  “We’ve already got what we needed out of them. The machine’s been upgraded and it should find the kids in no time, after which we can get the hell out of here.”

  “What if she figures out how to reverse engineer the summoning ritual with those notes? It might take years, but she could potentially bring over even more Earthers and ruin their lives!”

  “She… dammit!” Abhi shouted as his shoulders began to sag. “I just wanted to give the people in this World a chance at being better. Even if it is a Gilded World, not everyone has to be an asshole! Everyone deserves a second chance. She surrendered herself to us and asked for one, so why shouldn’t we give her one?”

  Helen let out a weary sigh, gripping her drink tightly enough to let more of its warmth flow into her hands. “I get you, man. I think I do.” The woman looked back up at him with a gaze filled with both understanding and frustration. “But you should’ve been more careful. Giving someone a second chance doesn’t mean leaving yourself vulnerable, and we could’ve prepared ourselves for the inevitable.”

  “Shit, you’re right. I’m sorry. I… wait, we?”

  “Yeah,” Helen shrugged. “All I did was complain the entire time. I could’ve at least insisted Arla have some guards accompany her wherever she went, or maybe have her magic dampened, and this might not have happened.”

  “Who knows? Coming up with a sleep spell that gets around our defenses takes a lot of skill, I don’t even know if any of those measures would’ve helped. But for now, we’ve got something more important we need to deal with. So until we save those kids, that sorceress is someone else’s problem.”

 

---

 

  “So remind me why this sorceress is my problem?” asked Ashley into her flip phone.

  “Because she’s in possession of classified information,” replied Khethiwe. “And I’d rather our army not bother with a surprise summoning portal in a few months when she inevitably figures it out. Intel says that she was able to crack the magical defenses on our soldiers’ armor in a few days, so she isn’t to be underestimated.”

  “Sure, but why is this my problem specifically? I mean, don’t you think this is the perfect job for Lionel? I mean, he’d probably be all ‘Ugh, a hand in kindness, like totally shat upon, we will have revenge!’”

  “Was that a haiku?” asked the spymaster. “I never expected something so artful out of you!”

  “Oh, I’ll show you ‘artful’ when I get back. How’d you like my skin to glow 7 different colors at once?”

  “I said artful, not tacky; don’t forget you’re still a spy. Report back to me once you’ve finished your mission,” Khethiwe concluded as she hung up.

  Ashley put away her phone and regarded the document in her hand, a tax report pilfered from King Reggie’s archives. Apparently, TOAL’s spies were able to discover a particular financial discrepancy that Valenloft’s best accountants missed. A portion of the nation’s income was diverted for several years under a particular pseudonym and funneled into the construction of a wizard’s tower in a secluded village. This mage “Orlo” had very peculiar tastes.

  The agent looked up from the report at the tower in question. Built of a bright gray stone, the five storey monolith towered over the humble wattle and daub buildings that surrounded it at a distance, grassy plains filling in the rest of the in-between space.

  “So you’ve come here for the tower, eh?” asked a feminine voice.

  Ashley quickly turned to face the newcomer, her hand reflexively reaching to the dagger sheathed to her side. Finding herself face to face with a considerably older woman dressed in modest linen, the agent settled her stance and let her arm fall back to her side.

  “We’ve been getting quite a number of tourists since it was completed, mostly from other nearby villages, but even a couple from town! Who would ever expect city folk of all people to come here? Haha!”

  “That’s right,” nodded Ashley, adjusting the weight that hung on her back. “Is it really that big of a deal? It honestly just looks like a giant rock to me.”

  “Well do you have rocks this big back home?” asked the lady in a haughty tone. “Only the capital and a few other large cities do, but none of them are anywhere near here!”

  “You’re really proud of it, aren’t you?”

  “Of course! It brings all sorts of new people our way, and they inevitably stay at my husband’s inn, buy supplies from the general store, perhaps even have their horses reshoed at the blacksmith’s. All three of us have grown considerably since that tower was built, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!”

  “I see… perhaps I’ll be stopping by all of those places later today.”

  “I’ll make sure you get a discount at the inn for being such a wonderful conversation partner,” the woman replied with a wink.

  “...thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “It’s no problem at all! I expect you to keep the rest of the inn entertained as well as you are doing for me right now. See you tonight!”

  “Yeah, see you.”

  Ashley sighed and steeled her nerves as she began walking towards the tower. She had a job to do after all.