Lillene

Enjoy!

Russ nodded. Serenity couldn’t tell if he believed Mr. White or if he was just playing along, but Serenity thought Mr. White was probably telling what he knew. “Nothing about trying out for a cheer squad?”

Mr. White seemed to have to think about that for a minute. “Maybe? There was some afterschool thing she was interested in that she didn’t get into. It might have been cheerleading?” He bit his lip, then confided, “Her mom was happy about it, said she couldn’t really afford another distraction from her schooling.”

Russ nodded. “Makes sense; I know my daughter always wanted to pay attention to things other than school.”

Serenity wanted to defend Rissa, but he hadn’t known her then. When he thought about it, Russ might have a point; hadn’t Rissa started day trading while she was still in school? Serenity seemed to remember her saying something about that, that it’d started as a way to practice her foresight with her mother and eventually turned into her passion and then her job as she grew older.

Mr. White chuckled. “Can’t blame her, myself. I wasn’t exactly a straight-A student. I mean, I did well enough, but band was my passion, not schoolwork.”

Russ grinned. “I was more worried about other things, too.”

Serenity kept quiet; he was clearly the odd one out here. 

“So, is that all you wanted me for?” Mr. White glanced up at the clock in the room. “If it is, I really should get going.”

Russ shook his head. “Not quite. Do you have any idea where she might have gotten some material on demon summoning?”

“Demon summoning?” Mr. White sounded floored. Serenity’s first reaction was that Mr. White was completely surprised by the idea, but the librarian’s next words proved him wrong. “Is that what this is about, someone’s trying to get her in trouble? She was probably just reading ahead for this weekend’s game; she does that sometimes. She sounded pretty enthused last session. They’ve been working up to it for a few weeks now.”

“This weekend’s game?” Russ somehow managed to sound like he didn’t think this was a nonsensical answer. Summoning demons was not a game.

“Yeah, like D&D? It’s a homebrew d100 system, we’ve been playing it for years. I’m the GM at the moment; this year’s game has them investigating a cabal of evil wizards who have been trying to destroy the characters’ home city. They have a bunch of different groups; last week, they finally managed to storm the headquarters for the demon summoners and recover their library. Hazel Winterbourne - that’s Nat’s character - talked the others into trying a summoning themselves so they’d be able to send it against the storm elementalists and make them think the summoners are trying to pull a fast one. It really shouldn’t work, but it’s clever so I’ll probably make it partly work. Maybe the summoners and the elementalists had a rivalry in the greater cabal; that might work.” Mr. White frowned. “So, you see, it’s really not anything bad, just part of the game.”

Serenity managed not to facepalm. It sounded like Mr. White had collected real information on demons and demon summoning to use in a roleplaying game. That was somehow both ridiculous and terrifying at the same time. It was obviously unintentional, which made it even worse.

“You put a lot of work into this, it sounds like?” Russ made it sound more like a statement than a question.

Mr. White tilted his hand to one side, then the other. “Depends on the session. This one wasn’t too bad, really. I found a writeup of a bunch of demons online; when they decided they wanted to do the summoning, I picked up a few props. I like to add to the ambiance and the urns were definitely authentic-looking.”

Urns? He had to mean the vases. 

“Where did you find the information and urns? Was it the same place?” Russ made it sound like an ordinary, calm question, but Serenity couldn’t help but lean forward. He definitely wanted to know where there was real information on demons that Aide hadn’t found.

“Typhon Gaming, they’re a little niche but their miniatures are top notch. They specialize in monsters, rather than characters, but those are usually the interesting minis anyway.” 

Russ was unable to suppress his snort at Mr. White’s statement. “Of course they do.”

Mr. White grinned widely. “You mean because Typhon was the Father of Monsters? Yeah, that has to be the reason for the name. I can get you the website, but I generally just Google them.”

Russ shook his head. “No need. I think that’s all we need from you right now, but we’ll be in touch if we need more.”

“Great. Natalie isn’t in any trouble, is she?” Mr. White sounded a little anxious.

Russ shook his head. “No, but you should probably ask her where your urns went.”

Mr. White watched as they left. Even Serenity could tell that he seemed both puzzled and relieved, even though he didn’t say anything else.

“Is there anywhere else we need to go here?” Quincy broke the silence once they were all in the car.

Russ shook his head. “Drop Serenity and me off at the portal; you and Brown can follow with the evidence once you drop off the car. I don’t think there’s anything else here for us. Typhon Gaming’s the next thread we need to pull on. I hope it leads somewhere.”

“It’s not the first time we’ve seen real stuff end up in the hands of people who think it’s fake,” Quincy contributed. “This might be nothing more than that.”

Russ frowned. “True, but it’s getting to be entirely too much of a pattern here. This is what, the fourth time we’ve seen someone trying to pawn off Solomon vases as imitations? Most of the time, it’s the other way around.”

“Fifth,” Brown contributed. “The swap meet was the most egregious, but there were also the two antique stores, the garage sale, and the Ebay seller.”

“Right, I forgot about the Ebay guy.” Russ snorted again and shook his head. “Heck of a pattern. They’ve had most of what we recovered before we got to the enchanter. That reminds me; I need to have Rube check the ones we recovered earlier and see if they’re Solomon vases or the demon-summoning imitations. I still can’t tell.”

“It’s probably another dead end,” Quincy agreed, “But we still have to check it out.”

“I’m not sure it will be,” Serenity objected. “A dead end that is. Yeah, it’s funny that the Father of Monsters sells miniature monsters, but what if it’s the other way around? What if Typhon really is behind this?”

It was all starting to come together for Serenity. He’d had bits and pieces of it for a while, but they’d been disconnected and confusing. He still didn’t have the whole picture, but what he did have told him that there was probably only one major force behind the various attacks he’d suffered on Earth. Apollyon was behind Rissa’s curse; he was also behind the Night Fire and the attacks on A’Atla, where he’d eventually summoned a demon. 

More than that, Serenity had tasted his mana on the demon summoning residue. Apollyon was a demon lord of some sort; that meant there was a good chance he was behind the items that could summon demons. Those were tied to the Solomon vases, through both the imitated design and the fact that they’d found both styles hidden at Dean’s Enchanting.

The weakest connection seemed to be the connection to the distorted ley lines, since that was just the coincidence of the man trying to buy the houses having bought items from Dean the enchanter, but that wasn’t true either, was it? The demon summoning vases first turned up used in traps that targeted the people who wouldn’t sell.

Serenity knew he needed to keep the possibility of there being a group or even just coincidence in mind, but he didn’t think either scenario was likely except insofar as Apollyon would have people working for him. He didn’t yet know what Apollyon’s giant ley line ritual was for, but he had to believe that it was set up a long time ago; altering how ley lines ran couldn’t be simple and would surely cause notable consequences. Consequences that hadn’t happened in the time period Serenity knew about. 

That meant it had to be someone who’d been around for a long time, or at least someone who had their information; with what Russ had told Serenity, he doubted it was a large organization. Large organizations didn’t stay fully secret. One person could certainly manage it, at least if they weren’t the Final Reaper. He’d never really managed to be left alone, no matter how hard he tried.

The thing that was tickling Serenity’s mind now, however, was the name. Typhon was known as the Father of Monsters because he fathered a great number of them with Echidna, a name Serenity wouldn’t remember if he hadn’t researched it during the mess on A’Atla. At the same time, Typhon’s legends spoke of a battle between him and Zeus, possibly more than one, for the rule of the gods. It wasn’t too far off to see that as an alternate tale of the succession of A’Atla, highly altered by later storytellers; the stories already didn’t match up, after all. 

According to Psyche’s information, Apollyon was probably Cronus; unless the tale of Typhon being Cronus’s son was accurate, there was no real reason to believe this wasn’t just another case of multiple names. The mythology was confusing to begin with from the drift and retelling of thousands of years; the fact that multiple names actually seemed to be common among the “historical gods” didn’t help matters any.

Quinn gave Serenity a glance before she turned back to the road. “Myths come to life now? That seems a bit much.” It was clear she didn’t put much stock in his idea.

“Myths come from somewhere; you know that,” Russ gently chided Quinn. “Not that we can do much with that even if it is true. Brown, you can have Typhon Gaming investigated, right?”

“Already getting that going.” Brown’s head was down, looking at his phone. Serenity supposed he knew what Brown was doing, now; he’d assumed that he was doing something else with his phone.

As long as they were in for a decent drive, this was probably a good time to check out Typhon Gaming’s website; Serenity wanted to see what they had on offer. He didn’t really expect any huge clues to be sitting in plain sight, but he could be wrong.

Even a quick glance through their catalog told Serenity that there was something to the idea that Typhon Gaming knew something most people on Earth didn’t. First, the “demon summoning kit” that Mr White had ordered ($30 for “all the supplies required to recreate a near-authentic demon summoning experience!”) wasn’t the only suspicious package on order; there was an entire section of things that were billed as being “almost like” a real enchanted item or spell for use in a game. Serenity wondered how many of them were actually real; better yet, how many of them were actually what they said they were and how many were really some sort of hidden effect?

The entire miniatures section was also highly suspicious. Yes, it included miniatures of many of the monsters in Earth’s dungeons, but it also included monsters Serenity had never seen on Earth. It was true that he might have just not heard about many of them, but what were the odds that there would be something called a kitil that looked like a giant yellow-and-green bird with a spiked beak? Even if it had appeared on Earth, Serenity wasn’t certain how people would have come up with its name in Bridge.

Lillene

Aide is probably feeling a bit sheepish right now, but why would he have been looking at a gaming store as possibly selling real things? How would it even tell the difference?