Lillene

Enjoy!

Kaasi-of-Haunted-Glen watched the video recording of the two anomalies who destroyed the Human Defence Force research facility in New York City. The local who identified them was definitely correct to call them anomalies. It was too bad he was dead; someone who could find people like that with no more instruction than “locate anomalies using this poorly understood thing called a MANIC” would be useful. Even if it was simply luck, luck could be very important in a task like Kaasi’s.

It was good luck that she now knew about the two women and better luck that they didn’t seem to have cared to interfere after leaving other than to kill their abductors. Kaasi was fairly certain the culprit was the pretty girl in the colorful dress; she was the one that was upset. 

She was also the one who stole the MANIC, which was hugely helpful. Who’d have thought that every single one of them would have a way to track them built in? It wasn’t even something she’d asked them to add; it was there from the beginning. The girl Kaasi thought of as Colorful really liked to travel, too; up until about six months ago, when that MANIC disappeared entirely, she’d seen it in cities across the entire planet.

The other girl, the one in black, was calm through the whole thing. Kaasi hated having to guess who did what, but the camera hadn’t recorded any sound. She was probably the one who’d opened the cages; an earth or stone mage of some kind, probably, since she’d attacked the rock rather than the metal. That made her the less important of the two, even though she was oddly easier to find even though she didn’t have a MANIC they could trace. 

They’d found her by the standard method of looking. Miss Black (whose name seemed to match her wardrobe) was a delver; she operated out of the Adventurers’ Guild, though she didn’t seem to have a stable party. Her only other regular habit was visiting the movies. She was clearly the local; Colorful must have been visiting. 

Kaasi still didn’t have a Tier for the women. What she did know was that they were locals; neither used a translation spell and they both spoke idiomatic English. Colorful seemed to speak the languages of the other countries she visited, which didn’t help narrow down her origin, but one of the reports on Miss Black said that she was definitely American by her accent. It wasn’t obvious exactly where in the country she was from, but the informant was confident she was from the United States.

Kaasi wanted to know who taught her her mana control. She knew what the MANIC was actually measuring, after all, even if the locals didn’t. It was more useful as a training aid than for Tier measurement, but Kaasi was happy to let the misunderstanding stand. She wasn’t here to help the population, after all.

There were a handful of other people around with similarly aberrant readings; while most weren’t as extreme as Colorful and Miss Black, they had unusually good mana control for their Tiers. Unsurprisingly, they often seemed to know each other. A lot of them seemed to cluster around the Adventurers’ Guild, so Kaasi had the Human Defense Force keep an eye on the place. It was easy enough to justify; their backer might be famous but he definitely wasn’t human, and a lot of other nonhumans seemed to frequent the place.

Kaasi didn’t know what to think of the green people who went by the name Legion. Most of them had verifiable Earth backgrounds and the overall story made sense; she knew of Lyka and kidnapping people so that they could experiment on strangers instead of citizens was definitely something she could believe the Church of Aeons would do. The weird thing was that “Serenity rescued them.” That didn’t make any sense. For now, all she could do was gather information, but Legion’s story was already written up for the report she’d deliver in a little under six years when she could contact the outside universe again.

But then, Serenity’s existence didn’t make sense. Where did a skilled mage, much less a mage/fighter, come from prior to integration? She’d learned some things from his Earthling’s Guide, things that worked but she’d never learned. He couldn’t have come out of nowhere!

He was supposedly a human originally, too. Humans didn’t just turn into half-dragons!

No, he had to have been hiding. From what Kaasi could tell, that was actually fairly common on this mixed-up planet; bloodlines were common instead of rare and there were a lot of stories about people finding out they were actually mixedbloods instead of humans. Kaasi didn’t believe most of them. Despite that, this wasn’t her first integration; she knew just how bonkers Earth was. Worlds also didn’t go up five Tiers in four years. 

It was a prime world to bring into the fold of the Human Empire, but that required tracking down the anomalies. So far, Kaasi had found more than twenty, which was an abnormally high number for a single agent, but the local culture made finding them easy. People wanted to stand out, which meant she could easily determine who the actual important anomalies were. It wasn’t always the strongest; that was a mistake a lot of people made. Instead, it was usually the people who were really specialized in something.

Miss Black didn’t seem to be one of those people. Colorful, on the other hand, was; anyone who could kill someone at a distance that she’d only met once was worth watching, even with no other information about her. Kaasi was keeping tabs on Miss Black anyway; it was good tradecraft since she couldn’t be certain who actually held the power in the pair and because the friends of powerful people were worth knowing something about.

Kaasi reviewed the video one more time. It still didn’t show anything new, so she looked up at the man she “worked for.” This was one of the parts of her job that was definitely not lucky; there was always someone like Landon Carter around. “I don’t see anything new, Mr. Carter. A stone mage and some kind of heart-stopping mage. Maybe poison or something? It looked like she killed them all by getting angry, so it could be a Skill.”

He was an anomaly, too, but not the dangerous kind. He was Tier Five like Kaasi, but it wasn’t an earned Tier Five; he was a hollow shell. The only thing dangerous about him was the fact that he existed, which meant someone unknown on this World knew how to artificially inflate Tiers. It was terrible for peoples’ future growth, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t create an army that could handle a lot more than it should be able to in the short term. That made this job a double benefit; she got to keep an eye on a possible threat while developing the Human Defense Force into a tool that would bring Earth into the Human Empire.

“We can’t have people like that walking around. If we can recruit her … that might be worth a try, but we’ll have to be ready to deal with her if things go wrong. We have time.” Landon talked to himself a lot. It was useful but also annoying. “I don’t care about an Earth mage, so we should just take that piece off the board. Disappearing in a dungeon is about as clean as it gets, and she likes to hop groups. Do we have a good delving group available to handle her?”

Kaasi shook her head. The receptionist at the Adventurers’ Guild was exactly the sort of anomaly she hated: weak in combat but perfectly positioned to ruin any plans that came near her. “There’s that qualification period before they recommend a group as a good pickup group for individuals. Every time we get a full group in the Guild, they get marked as poor for individuals, and Miss Black never picks those.” One of the groups they’d encouraged to join the Guild had managed to qualify to take on pairs, but that was as low as it went. “We’d need to get someone close to Miss Black, and she makes that difficult.”

“Do we have her home address?” Landon’s thought process was obvious. This wouldn’t be the first problem he removed with a burglary that “accidentally” happened when the occupant was home. Kaasi wasn’t certain who he’d get to handle it. She’d thought that particular method was retired when his last assassin deliberately got himself arrested about a year earlier.

Come to think of it, the man did it by threatening the Adventurers’ Guild. Kaasi had no idea why he’d thought it was a good idea; if there was anywhere in this oddly unarmed area that would have people with the ability to fight, the Adventurers’ Guild was it.

It didn’t matter anyway; the plan wasn’t possible. Kaasi shook her head. “She has a room at the Adventurers’ Guild. I’m not sure she has another home. The only place she goes regularly other than dungeons is to the movies; she sees every new film when it comes out, as far as I can tell.”

Landon snorted. “I’m not going after her in a movie theater. That’s far too likely to miss her. Guild’s also out. Are you sure there aren’t any restaurants she likes or anything?”

Why was he paying so much attention to Miss Black? “Is she important in some way I don’t know? Why aren’t you trying to get her to help go after Colorful?”

“Colorful?” Landon laughed. “I like that. As for why … have they even been in contact? I thought you said Miss Black doesn’t even have a phone.”

“They have to have met up somehow,” Kaasi pointed out. “We know Colorful’s visited Miss Black since the escape; they were seen together at the movies a couple of times.”

“We don’t have the people to keep watching her,” Landon muttered, “And I can’t afford to hire any more. Recruiting isn’t going that well…” He gave a long sigh, then glanced over at Kaasi. “What Tier are you?”

Kaasi deliberately looked down, as if she were a little ashamed of what she was about to say. “Two.”

She wanted to give the impression that she was at the bottom of Tier Two. The Tier itself was respectable; more than half of the adult population was in Tier Two these days. Most hadn’t filled out their attributes the way the Earthling’s Guide recommended, and anyone in Tier Three definitely hadn’t. Even so, being at the bottom of Tier Two was not the position of an active delver; if they picked combat Paths and devoted themselves to them, active delvers were at least midway through the process of filling out their Tier Two attributes.

It was, of course, a complete lie. She was a high-end Tier Five; theoretically, one more Path would fill out the attributes she was going for if it had the correct distribution. It probably wouldn’t; she’d almost certainly lose some of the attributes of her next Path the same way she’d lost some from this one and from most of her late-Tier Paths. That was normal; as long as she was close enough, she could make it up in the next Tier.

“How do you feel about doing some delving, maybe making a new friend?” The smile on Landon’s face made it clear that “friend” wasn’t the right word. “Victim” was closer.

Lillene

This chapter feels like a first draft to me. It gets the information across but it’s a bit more info dump-y than I wanted. I’m not sure how to fix it right now, so the answer is to move on and come back and fix it in the rewrite/edit. It will have had plenty of time to cool off then and I’ll have other stuff around it that should make it easier to weave the info in.