Their familiar call and response made, instantly the tension in the room spiked upward.

“An innocent bystander…? Pah!” Delilah had the impression that Commissioner Arrietti intended to spit in disbelief at her words, but then suddenly realized he was in a police room and forcefully suppressed the impulse. She saw him swallow and couldn’t resist giggling to know that she had forced him to swallow his own spit.

Trembling slightly, the Commissioner raised one of the folders and waved it in front of Delilah’s face. “Speaking of our… history, do you still have nothing to say about this particular open case… where a mysterious assailant installed renegade, temporary runes on Kharon’s new police headquarters sky island and had the piece of land fly off and ground itself in a swamp. And since the malicious vandalism wasn’t discovered until the next morning, the first floor had flooded with mud.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Delilah kept her expression even.

“Or this!” Commissioner Arrietti picked another file up at random. The shaking of his shoulders had intensified as he scanned the name and identification number of the file and recognition flashed in his eyes. “Four years ago, when the student body of Kharon Academy had voted to create a new mascot… and somehow, someone broke into the supposedly secure Academy voting boxes and stuffed them with the suggestion… that my own face, drawn by some hack of a caricature artist into a leering grin, should be the school mascot…?”

“Isn’t the break-in just speculation?” Delilah asked. “I heard that they could find no evidence of tampering-”

“The number of votes for my face as Kharon Academy mascot exceeded the number of enrolled students by a factor of ten!” Commissioner Arrieti bellowed and slammed the file back down on the metal table.

Delilah bowed slightly to him. “Wow, I had no idea you were so popular.”

The Commissioner pressed his lips together and picked up another folder. This one was the thickest of the folders on the table and he held it reverently with both hands. “And this… this travesty, where some impetuous little girl used a very complex illusion Skill to replace the bowling pins in my first frame with live chickens-!”

Delilah clucked sympathetically. “I can’t believe you would throw a bowling ball empowered by an image at helpless chickens. I heard the whole Interzone Bowling League Championship had to be delayed to clean up the mess. Oh, did killing them all count as a strike?”

“You-!” Commissioner Arrietti pounded his fists against the metal table.

But this show of force didn’t even cause Delilah to bat an eye. She actually quite liked how easy this man was to goad. She leaned back in her chair and puffed up like a contented toad. “But Commissioner, aren’t you too easily engaging in speculation? Didn’t you fail to find any evidence linking me to these completely normal circumstances? Perhaps they were all just accidents.”

“I might have lacked evidence before, but this time, in this case of destroyed property and trespassing, here you were, caught red-handed within a restricted area.” Commissioner Arrietti poked the table with a thick finger. “Do you truly expect me to believe you were unrelated to the destruction that occurred within the warehouse?”

“Some friends and I were going for a walk, when we discovered a mysterious figure who was up to no good,” Delilah remained in her reclining position. “We followed them into the warehouse out of our strong sense of civil responsibility. Shouldn’t you be thanking me for uncovering this? I quite like the idea of a gold medal.”

“Are you sure,” Commissioner Arrietti growled. “That there isn’t anything you want to tell me? Anything you want to talk about?”

“Quite certain, thank you,” Delilah lapped up the attention like a kitten next to a saucer of milk. “My friends and I were disturbed by a mysterious interloper who definitely was filled with ill will. Who knows what would have happened if we didn’t happen across them by chance.”

For several long seconds, the two looked at each other. Then Commissioner Arrietti began to neatly stack his folders on top of one another until a manila pillar sat between them. “Humph. Your suggestion is preposterous. An infiltrator, here, in the heart of Kharon? No, not very likely. You probably just accidentally set things off and are unwilling to admit it… but you are lucky. You’ve been bailed out.”

“You don’t believe-” Delilah started furiously, but she paused as her mind acknowledged the end of his sentence. Her eyes brightened. “Bailed out? Are my parents here?”

“No, but some fool paid your bail all the same.” Commissioner Arrietti glowered at her for several seconds, then waved his hand. “So what are you waiting around here for? You are free to go.”

Feeling that something was off with this dismissal, some line of their special ritual crossed, Delilah stood slowly from the metal chair. She had assumed she would be interviewed for much, much longer, as she had been the previous times. But as she stood there, the Commissioner just watched her with a frown. Did he truly mean to allow her to leave…?

Didn’t he care?

Delilah wandered out of the room, wondering why her insides felt so squishy. But when she saw the figure waiting for her in the police bullpen, Delilah’s eyes brightened. “Aunty Vye!”

Vye “Trailbreaker”, one of the most famous members of the Order Ducis due to her constant expiration of the Wildlands of Expira, swept Delilah up into a hug that spun her through the air. “Hullo, little one. I hear you’ve been getting yourself into some trouble, so I’m here to watch you for a bit until your parents make it back from challenging that Chimera.”

Instantly, Delilah’s expression turned sour as she looked up at this woman toward whom she possessed such respect. “I don’t need a babysitter…”

After training in the Ghosthound’s Alpha Cosmos for almost a year, Delilah had returned to Expira and decided it was time to see the world. She wheedled her parents for several months, always whining and nagging that she was a growing woman who needed to have her horizons expanded. Her mother Annie had been extremely dismissive of such claims, but Delilah could tell that her father Dozer was slowly being persuaded.

Finally, it was announced that Delilah would be able to accompany Vye on her latest exploratory expedition. The following year had been the best one of Delilah’s entire life.

Even the hubbub of the police station couldn’t wipe away the smile on Delilah’s face. Vye returned a clipboard to one of the police officers and then led Delilah away, out of the building and out under the open sky. “Don’t you need a babysitter? Why do you always stumble into the most dangerous situations? It was only when I traveled with you that I was swallowed whole by an earth dragon…”

Delilah grinned at the memory, but then her expression twisted again. “Go tell that idiot Commissioner that. He seems to think that we caused that explosion! I bet he doesn’t even plan on investigating the incident!”

Vye led Delilah over to a cherry-red skybike that instantly had the girl drooling. With a casual grace, the older woman straddled the vehicle and started the engine. The metal hummed pleasantly to life as the runes activated. Then Vye gestured for Delilah to climb behind her. “Do you really think that the Commissioner wouldn’t investigate? Girl, you are smarter than that.”

Delilah blinked as the engine began to roar beneath her. “What? But he said-”

“Let me ask you this: what would have happened if he admitted that you might have encountered a terrorist?” Vye opened up the throttle and led the bike up into the sky. They floated up off the concrete, giving more perspective on their surroundings. The tall lump of the police compound sat before them, but as they continued to rise until Delilah could see the edge of the sky island and the wide expanse of blue around them. Casually, Vye turned and guided them toward the edge of this skyisland’s space.

As soon as they reached the edge, emerald moss spirits spun upward from the intricate machine below to form an elegant road up through the sky. Vye detached a small box from her waist and opened it. A powerful moss spirit flitted out and pulsed with authority. Instantly, Delilah’s eyes widened. This was a Key Spirit, which was only given out to important members of Kharon and the Order Ducis, which would grant them priority access to create sky roads.

Below them, Delilah could see Kharon sitting at rest. Around them, at various heights and sizes, about twenty massive sky islands guided silently forward. The moss spirits paved a dense web of emerald roads between these sky islands, forming a blinding net. But as soon as that Key Spirit pulsed, the web below trembled.

Those elastic emerald roads pulled backward, opening a direct path down to the city of Kharon. And riding an emerald wave, Vye quickly began to build up speed as she shot downward.

“Oh wow.” Delilah blinked and gripped her arms around Vye’s waist, torn between the woman’s question and the euphoric feeling of acceleration as they cut underneath slower-moving skybikes and ugly metal bugs. They continued sharply downward, too sharply to head toward Kharon, until Vye pulled sharply upward on the bike and they began to rip along the top of a low ridge.

Vye laughed a bit at Delilah’s stunned silence and continued to speak. “If Commissioner Arrietti had said this had become a serious investigation, what would you have done? Demanded that you be a part of it, even though you are a twelve-year-old girl with no experience or training to speak of. And then he would have told you not to get involved and you wouldn’t have listened. And then Commissioner Arrietti would have had the headache of trying to keep you from putting yourself stupidly in danger.”

As though to punctuate her speech, Vye twisted the accelerator on her sky bike and they jumped forward one granite hillside to another. The moss spirits whooped with glee and spun around them in a brilliant gleaming tunnel. Even with her face pressed against Vye’s shoulder, the wind was incredibly powerful. They circled widely around the expanse of Kharon, giving Delilah a gorgeous view of the at-rest Kharon, surrounded by its orbiting bits of land.

The thick emerald veins that ran upward from the resting Kharon made her think briefly of the image of Randidly Ghosthound’s Yggdrasil.

Delilah blinked several times and focused on what Vye was saying. “So you…?”

She could hear the smile in Vye’s voice. “In this case, I’m the aspirin.”

****

COME.

FIND.

ME.

Randidly hissed and started out of his meditation, shaken to his core by the powerful reverberation of the vision that he had seen when he had finished the Glimpse of the Shallah Path. His heart was pounding and he raised his hand to press against his chest, as though feeling the contractions would ease them. He drifted like that in the misty interior of the shaft for several minutes.

When he began to calm down and that overwhelming voice began to fade, he raised his fingers and rubbed his temples. His Nether Core spun fiercely, bristling at the interference. I knew the source of the voice was dangerous, but I sorta thought it would be like my first brush with Elhume, content to impact me and then too busy with its own matters to interfere further…

Randidly’s gaze toward downward. Perhaps it sensed my presence in the shaft then…? Well, nothing I can do about that now… but does that truly mean that the source of the voice is Pine…?

For several seconds, Randidly furrowed his brows and scanned the dark depths below him for any sign of a threat. The Nether Gatekeepers below continued to sit and meditate, unaware of the mental blast Randidly had just experienced. A part of him wanted to leave the shaft immediately but the combination of plentiful ambient emotions, dense Nether, time dilation, and his promise to the Nether Gatekeeper to come help its kind were rather persuasive arguments to stay.

Randidly released a breath and organized his thoughts. On the positive side of this reminder, there was no new urgency to that familiar phrase when it had shaken Randidly out of his recovery meditation. It was simply a reminder; similar to a domineering alarm clock. Because if the message truly originated from the bottom of the shaft, the sender probably had already experienced an eternity since it had contacted Randidly the first time through the Path completion vision.

More than a coincidence, this might just be that being sensing Randidly’s proximity.

Even still, Randidly decided not to listen to the voice just yet. He wanted to take advantage of his time in the shaft to make some more preparations to grow in the future. But he did resolve himself not to forget he had attracted such an entity's attention again.

Influence +16!

Humming to himself, Randidly did not return to his manipulation of Nether nor restart his acclimation to the Hierarchy of Burden, which he had stopped while he was trying to take a true rest. Instead, Randidly cracked his neck and manifested Yggdrasil around himself. Gradually, under the prodding of his Willpower, an increasingly realistic scene filled the surroundings.

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 404!

Randidly heard the rustling of Yggdrasil’s leaves, felt the warm rays of sunlight filtering down through the canopy, and leaned back to press his head against the pitted bark of the world tree. He breathed out through his nose and opened his eyes, finding himself sitting in the base of his first image.

He had been inspired by Charlotte’s request and the information he had received from Octavius Shrike regarding image refinement. He didn’t have a Sculptor, but Randidly used the enormous space provided to him by the shaft to blow up his image and planned to walk amongst it and search for weaknesses.

Randidly hopped to his feet and cracked his knuckles. He grinned around, relishing the realistic sensations. The soil beneath his feet felt warm and thick. Around him were several low ferns that had evolved to grow in the shade of Yggdrasil. A colorful bird sat on top of one of those ferns, staring unnervingly at him.

Randidly chuckled. “Alright, time to get to work.