Lillene

Enjoy!

Serenity quietly closed the door behind him as he left the reunited pair to their mutual apology session. He didn’t think either of them really had anything to apologize for, but it seemed to make them happy. He shouldn’t judge.

His next stop was a place he hadn’t been in quite a while: Rissa’s house. It was one of the sites the buyer working for Apollyon had tried to acquire and it was the reason Russ knew someone was trying to rent it; clearly it was worth checking the land to see if there was something he’d missed. It wasn’t at a nexus; it wasn’t even on a ley line. The attempt to purchase it indicated that it should be, so what was he missing?

He couldn’t tell from the ritual pattern if it was supposed to have a ley line or not. If there was supposed to be one, it was probably one of the small curlicues that branched off another ley line before rejoining it, though Serenity wasn’t certain which one it would be.

The fact that all but one of the other homes Apollyon was trying to purchase had tiny nodes that crossed part of the land didn’t make it any easier to figure out. There was nothing innately special about Rissa’s home as far as Serenity could tell; it was just a house. 

Serenity didn’t have time to figure it out, because the moment he showed up at the house, Red bounded out to meet him. It surprised Serenity enough to sonder if he’d missed a ward somewhere, but Red’s words reassured him.

“Serenity! You’re finally here! Russ told me you’d be coming. You haven’t been waiting long, have you?” Red didn’t wait for Serenity to answer; instead, she grabbed his hand and physically tugged him towards the front door. Serenity wouldn’t have gone anywhere if he resisted, but he didn’t see any point in that. “Russ thought you might be able to help; I still can’t get any spells to work if the Voice isn’t holding my hand and that’s just annoying. I can’t tell what it’s doing differently but I thought maybe you could help. Russ said not to bother you about the enchanting issue but I think that maybe if I figure out the spell issue I can fix that myself. Oh! Did you see the new stuff they’ve found on A’Atla? Most of it’s not very practical, but the enchanting’s really interesting; I can see how it evolved into what I usually use. It’s really different from…”

Serenity let Red’s words wash over him. She was excitable but overall a fun person. Serenity knew he was just as capable of getting lost in projects as she was; he was quieter about it, that was all. Hopefully she’d been working on something interesting, preferably something other than the fragments from A’Atla. Serenity had had enough of A’Atla for the month.

As it turned out, Red’s issue with spells was easy to figure out and hard to fix. She was sending essence as well as mana into the spell structure and it wasn’t made for that; it was made to support a pure mana input. They needed to either completely recreate the spell to handle a mixed input or get Red to figure out how to add mana instead of magic.

After a few hours of trying, Serenity was beginning to think that redoing the spell would be easier. An hour later, he was certain it would be. The problem was that if they redid the spell, Red would have to learn to build her own and she wouldn’t be able to take advantage of what other people had already created. She also wouldn’t be able to start with the Voice-provided spells when she wanted to make her own.

After three more hours and a break for dinner, Serenity thought Red was making progress. The next step was practice, so Serenity left Red to it and headed home. Somewhere in the middle of the whirlwind that was Red, he’d forgotten why he showed up in the first place.

Serenity arrived back at Rissa’s house early the next morning. This time, he greeted Red but pushed her eagerness for more practice off with an admonition that she needed to practice and he needed to search for whatever their opponent was looking for. Serenity avoided Apollyon’s name; it was highly unlikely to get his attention, but it was an easy precaution to take.

It took hours before Serenity found a slight resonance in the back yard. Once he had that clue, it was a simple matter to narrow down the location. For all that it was simple, it wasn’t fast; the method he had to use was imprecise, the magical equivalent of shouting then listening for a faint echo in order to find a small sound-reflective surface. Once he was close, he had to dig.

What he found was something that looked like an eight inch long nearly clear quartz crystal buried in the ground. At some point in the past, it had fractured. It definitely wasn’t World Core crystal or dungeon crystal; it wasn’t even the crystal of an inactive Node. As far as Serenity could tell, it was just quartz, even if it did react to magical movement in the area.

Serenity rather strongly suspected that he was looking at the reason a ley line didn’t pass through the area; this was likely a broken anchor, the opposite of what Gaia had suggested he try at the northwestern ley line. She’d suggested using a stronger crystal, but that only made sense; this had to have been a very weak nexus. A quartz crystal this large had to be hard to find, but it was probably still far easier than locating World Core crystal. Serenity guessed that dungeon cores were probably artificial, since dungeons themselves seemed to be related to the Voice, so there might not be many options better than quartz.

Not that Serenity was an enchanter. There could be a dozen better materials and he wouldn’t know; how could he?

The funny thing was that it was right next to an old cable that ran through the ground. From the outside, Serenity couldn’t be certain what it was, but his first guess was coax. The crystal had probably been broken when a homeowner decided to subscribe to cable television, decades before. It was such a mundane reason for the crystal to be broken that he couldn’t help but laugh.

Was part of the reason Apollyon wanted the land because he wanted to repair the pattern before he tried to use it? In that case, it might well be possible to catch him while he did that rather than waiting until he tried to trigger the ritual. That would be safer, which was definitely worth considering.

Serenity needed to check out the other locations. If the other one without a nexus also had a broken crystal, he could probably conclude that Apollyon wanted to repair them. He’d need to find out what time frame the “rental” was supposed to happen in; if Apollyon was flexible for some of them and not others, it would be useful information.

He’d ask Russ to look into that. Serenity was better suited to examining the magical structure then talking to people. Russ would probably get Brown or Quincy to handle it anyway.

Should he head to the other location without a nexus next or one of the ones with an intact nexus? Maybe he should just go for the broken one to make sure it was something similar? 

No, he needed to check them all. The ones with nexuses probably wouldn’t tell him anything about Apollyon’s intentions, but he might miss something if he didn’t see them. More importantly, he needed to understand how to move a ley line and they might help with that. Gaia’s instructions were incomplete at best; seeing how Apollyon did it should help. 

The closest address was one of the ones where Legion had found a nexus; that seemed like a place to start. Serenity didn’t want to walk all over someone’s property without their permission, that was just asking for trouble. He’d have to see what he could find out from the street. If he couldn’t figure it out from there, he’d have to think about what to do, but the alternative seemed pretty obvious. No one was going to notice a Sovereign of Potential after dark. 

The house was small and poorly maintained. The lawn was recently mowed, but the house itself needed a new coat of paint to replace where it had clearly peeled and the roof had three different colors of shingle. It looked old and tired, like it had seen better days. Serenity had to check to be certain, but it wasn’t the house of the man who died; that was the other house without a nexus.

Now that he thought about it, he would want to monitor that one; someone would notice if Rissa’s house suddenly had a ley line running over it, but the odds were that no one would notice if an unoccupied house did. There also wouldn’t be anyone there to see someone coming into the yard to replace a broken crystal. It wasn’t the next-closest house, but Serenity would still check it once he finished up here.

Serenity was feeling out the nexus, trying to guess where the center was and use that to locate the crystal that was probably its anchor, when he smelled a faint scent of demon. It was weak, like it was a long way away, but he was still inside the SUV with Janice. That probably had something to do with it. Serenity opened his door and was hit by a far stronger scent.

He looked around to locate the origin, but it wasn’ obvious. There were a few people outside nearby; two were doing yard work, while one seemed to be watching the neighborhood. A ways down the street, there was a young woman walking a small dog; in the other direction, an older man was slowly jogging down the street. 

The slight wind came from the direction of the woman with the dog, so Serenity moved that way. As he did, the scent grew stronger; it was still clearly demon, but it wasn’t Apollyon or anything like him. Instead, it smelled weak, maybe even helpless; something to be protected rather than something to be fought. 

“Excuse me, ma’am?” Serenity wasn’t certain how to get her attention. He wasn’t even sure exactly what he wanted to ask.

The woman swung around and the scent strengthened, making it clear that the scent was indeed coming from her. More specifically, it was coming from a cloth strip she had slung across her body. A small head poked out of the cloth strip. It was less than an inch across, with giant black eyes and a short muzzle covered in silvery fur. A pair of round ears on the top of the head made it look almost surprised, but then it twitched them forward and sniffed the air with a slight wrinkle of its snout. It started to struggle in the cloth strip, almost like it wanted to get out, but it didn’t seem to actually get anywhere.

The woman jumped slightly then glared down at the struggling demon. Despite her expression, her tone of voice was not angry at all; if Serenity had to guess how she felt, he’d say she was amused by the creature. “Mischief! You know I can’t let you out here.” 

When the demon continued to try to free itself, she looked up at Serenity. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but I have to go; I don’t want Mischief getting loose.”

Lillene

Was it lucky that Serenity crossed this woman’s path while she had the demon on her or was it bad luck that he didn’t see one earlier?

Tyche probably knows the answer to that question.