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In reply to: The Precious Life and Rambles of Liz Tattler
Chapter Title: A Whiff of Inspiration – a work in progress by Elizabeth Tattler
The morning light slanted through the towering windows of the grand old house, casting a warm glow upon the chaos within. Elizabeth Tattler, famed author and mistress of the manor, found herself pacing the length of the room with the grace of a caged lioness. Her mind was a churning whirlpool of creative fury, but alas, it was not the only thing trapped within.
“Finnley!” she bellowed, her voice echoing off the walls with a resonance that only years of authoritative writing could achieve. “Finnley, where are you hiding?”
Finnley, emerging from behind the towering stacks of Liz’s half-finished manuscripts, wielded her trusty broom as if it were a scepter. “I’m here, I’m here,” she grumbled, her tone as prickly as ever. “What is it now, Liz? Another manuscript disaster? A plot twist gone awry?”
“Trapped abdominal wind, my dear Finnley,” Liz declared with dramatic flair, clutching her midsection as if to emphasize the gravity of her plight. “Since two in the morning! A veritable tempest beneath my ribs! I fear this may become the inspiration—or rather, aspiration—for my next novel.”
Finnley rolled her eyes, a gesture she had perfected over years of service. “Oh, for Flove’s sake, Liz. Perhaps you should bottle it and sell it as ‘Creative Muse’ for struggling writers. Now, what do you need from me?”
“Oh, I’ve decided to vent my frustrations in a blog post. A good old-fashioned rant, something to stir the pot and perhaps ruffle a few feathers!” Liz’s eyes gleamed mischievously. “I’m certain it shall incense 95% of my friends, but what better way to clear the mind and—hopefully—the bowels?”
At that moment, Godfrey, Liz’s ever-distracted editor, shuffled in with a vacant look in his eyes. “Did someone mention something about… inspiration?” he asked, blinking as if waking from a long slumber.
“Yes, Godfrey, inspiration!” Liz exclaimed, waving her arms dramatically. “Though in my case, it’s more like… ‘inflation’! I’ve become a gastronaut! ” She chuckled at her own pun, eliciting a groan from Finnley.
Godfrey, oblivious to the undercurrents of the conversation, nodded earnestly. “Ah, splendid! Speaking of which, have you written that opening scene yet, Liz? The publishers are rather eager, you know.”
Liz threw her hands up in mock exasperation. “Dear Godfrey, with my innards in such turmoil, how could I possibly focus on an opening scene?” She paused, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “Unless, of course, I were to channel this very predicament into my story. Perhaps a character with a similar plight, trapped on a space station with only their imagination—and intestinal distress—for company.”
Finnley snorted, her stern facade cracking ever so slightly. “A tale of cosmic flatulence, is it? Sounds like a bestseller to me.”
And with that, Liz knew she had found her muse—an unorthodox one, to be sure, but a muse nonetheless. As the words began to flow, she could only hope that relief, both literary and otherwise, was soon to follow.
(story repeats at the beginning)
In reply to: The Last Cruise of Helix 25
Helix 25 – Murder Board – Evie’s apartment
The ship had gone mad.
Riven Holt stood in what should have been a secured crime scene, staring at the makeshift banner that had replaced his official security tape. “ENTER FREELY AND OF YOUR OWN WILL,” it read, in bold, uneven letters. The edges were charred. Someone had burned it, for reasons he would never understand.
Behind him, the faint sounds of mass lunacy echoed through the corridors. People chanting, people sobbing, someone loudly trying to bargain with gravity.
“Sir, the floors are not real! We’ve all been walking on a lie!” someone had screamed earlier, right before diving headfirst into a pile of chairs left there by someone trying to create a portal.
Riven did his best to ignore the chaos, gripping his tablet like it was the last anchor to reality. He had two dead bodies. He had one ship full of increasingly unhinged people. And he had forty hours without sleep. His brain felt like a dried-out husk, working purely on stubbornness and caffeine fumes.
Evie was crouched over Mandrake’s remains, muttering to herself as she sorted through digital records. TP stood nearby, his holographic form flickering as if he, too, were being affected by the ship’s collective insanity.
“Well,” TP mused, rubbing his nonexistent chin. “This is quite the predicament.”
Riven pinched the bridge of his nose. “TP, if you say anything remotely poetic about the human condition, I will unplug your entire database.”
TP looked delighted. “Ah, my dear lieutenant, a threat worthy of true desperation!”
Evie ignored them both, then suddenly stiffened. “Riven, I… you need to see this.”
He braced himself. “What now?”
She turned the screen toward him. Two names appeared side by side:
Both M.
The sound that came out of Riven was not quite a word. More like a dying engine trying to restart.
TP gasped dramatically. “My stars. The letter M! The implications are—”
“No.” Riven put up a hand, one tremor away from screaming. “We are NOT doing this. I am not letting my brain spiral into a letter-based conspiracy theory while people outside are rolling in protein paste and reciting odes to Jupiter’s moons.”
Evie, far too calm for his liking, just tapped the screen again. “It’s a pattern. We have to consider it.”
TP nodded sagely. “Indeed. The letter M—known throughout history as a mark of mystery, malice, and… wait, let me check… ah, macaroni.”
Riven was going to have an aneurysm.
Instead, he exhaled slowly, like a man trying to keep the last shreds of his soul from unraveling.
“That means the Lexicans are involved.”
Evie paled. “Oh no.”
TP beamed. “Oh yes!”
The Lexicans had been especially unpredictable lately. One had been caught trying to record the “song of the walls” because “they hum with forgotten words.” Another had attempted to marry the ship’s AI. A third had been detained for throwing their own clothing into the air vents because “the whispers demanded tribute.”
Riven leaned against the console, feeling his mind slipping. He needed a reality check. A hard, cold, undeniable fact.
Only one person could give him that.
“You know what? Fine,” he muttered. “Let’s just ask the one person who might actually be able to tell me if this is a coincidence or some ancient space cult.”
Evie frowned. “Who?”
Riven was already walking. “My grandfather.”
Evie practically choked. “Wait, WHAT?!”
TP clapped his hands. “Ah, the classic ‘Wake the Old Man to Solve the Crimes’ maneuver. Love it.”
The corridors were worse than before. As they made their way toward cryo-storage, the lunacy had escalated:
A crowd was parading down the halls with helium balloons, chanting, “Gravity is a Lie!”
A group of engineers had dismantled a security door, claiming “it whispered to them about betrayal.”
And a bunch of Lexicans, led by Kio’ath, had smeared stinking protein paste onto the Atrium walls, drawing spirals and claiming the prophecy was upon them all.
Riven’s grip on reality was thin.Evie grabbed his arm. “Think about this. What if your grandfather wakes up and he’s just as insane as everyone else?”
Riven didn’t even break stride. “Then at least we’ll be insane with more context.”
TP sighed happily. “Ah, reckless decision-making. The very heart of detective work.”
Helix 25 — Victor Holt’s Awakening
They reached the cryo-chamber. The pod loomed before them, controls locked down under layers of security.
Riven cracked his knuckles, eyes burning with the desperation of a man who had officially run out of better options.
Evie stared. “You’re actually doing this.”
He was already punching in override codes. “Damn right I am.”
The door opened. A low hum filled the room. The first thing Riven noticed was the frost still clinging to the edges of an already open cryopod. Cold vapor curled around its base, its occupant nowhere to be seen.
His stomach clenched. Someone had beaten them here. Another pod’s systems activated. The glass began to fog as temperature levels shifted.
TP leaned in. “Oh, this is going to be deliciously catastrophic.”
Before the pod could fully engage, a flicker of movement in the dim light caught Riven’s eye. Near the terminal, hunched over the access panel like a gang of thieves cracking a vault, stood Zoya Kade and Anuí Naskó—and, a baby wrapped in what could only be described as an aggressively overdesigned Lexican tapestry, layers of embroidered symbols and unreadable glyphs woven in mismatched patterns. It was sucking desperately the lexican’s sleeve.
Riven’s exhaustion turned into a slow, rising fury. For a brief moment, his mind was distracted by something he had never actually considered before—he had always assumed Anuí was a woman. The flowing robes, the mannerisms, the way they carried themselves. But now, cradling the notorious Lexican baby in ceremonial cloth, could they possibly be…
Anuí caught his look and smiled faintly, unreadable as ever. “This has nothing to do with gender,” they said smoothly, shifting the baby with practiced ease. “I merely am the second father of the child.”
“Oh, for f***—What in the hell are you two doing here?”
Anuí barely glanced up, shifting the baby to their other arm as though hacking into a classified cryo-storage facility while holding an infant was a perfectly normal occurrence. “Unlocking the axis of the spiral,” they said smoothly. “It was prophesied. The Speaker’s name has been revealed.”
Zoya, still pressing at the panel, didn’t even look at him. “We need to wake Victor Holt.”
Riven threw his hands in the air. “Great! Fantastic! So do we! The difference is that I actually have a reason.”
Anuí, eyes glinting with something between mischief and intellect, gave an elegant nod. “So do we, Lieutenant. Yours is a crime scene. Ours is history itself.”
Riven felt his headache spike. “Oh good. You’ve been licking the walls again.”
TP, absolutely delighted, interjected, “Oh, I like them. Their madness is methodical!”
Riven narrowed his eyes, pointing at the empty pod. “Who the hell did you wake up?”
Zoya didn’t flinch. “We don’t know.”
He barked a laugh, sharp and humorless. “Oh, you don’t know? You cracked into a classified cryo-storage facility, activated a pod, and just—what? Didn’t bother to check who was inside?”
Anuí adjusted the baby, watching him with that same unsettling, too-knowing expression. “It was not part of the prophecy. We were guided here for Victor Holt.”
“And yet someone else woke up first!” Riven gestured wildly to the empty pod. “So, unless the prophecy also mentioned mystery corpses walking out of deep freeze, I suggest you start making sense.”
Before Riven could launch into a proper interrogation, the cryo-system let out a deep hiss.
Steam coiled up from Victor Holt’s pod as the seals finally unlocked, fog spilling over the edges like something out of an ancient myth. A figure was stirring within, movements sluggish, muscles regaining function after years in suspension.
And then, from the doorway, another voice rang out, sharp, almost panicked.
Ellis Marlowe stood at the threshold, looking at the two open pods, his eyes wide with something between shock and horror.
“What have you done?”
Riven braced himself.
Evie muttered, “Oh, this is gonna be bad.”
In reply to: The Last Cruise of Helix 25
Helix 25 – Space Tai Chi and Mass Lunacy
The Grand Observation Atrium was one of the few places on Helix 25 where people would come and regroup from all strata of the ship —Upper Decks, Lower Decks, even the more elusive Hold-dwellers— there were always groups of them gathered for the morning sessions without any predefined roles.
In the secular tradition of Chinese taichi done on public squares, a revival of this practice has started few years ago all thanks to Grand Master Sifu Gou quiet stubborn consistency to practice in the early light of the artificial day, that gradually had attracted followers, quietly and awkwardly joining to follow his strange motions. The unions, ever eager to claim a social victory and seeing an opportunity to boost their stature, petitioned to make this a right, and succeeded, despite the complaints from the cleaning staff who couldn’t do their jobs (and jogs) in the late night while all passengers had gone to sleep, apart from the night owls and party goers.
In short, it was a quiet moment of communion, and it was now institutionalised, whether Sifu Gou had wanted it or not.
The artificial gravity fluctuated subtly here, closer to the artificial gravitational core, in a way that could help attune people to feel their balance shift, even in absence of the Earth’s old pull.
It was simply perfect for Space Tai Chi.
A soft chime signaled the start of the session. Grand Master Gou, in the Helix 25’s signature milk-silk fabric pajamas, silver-haired and in a quiet poise, stood at the center of the open-air space beneath the reinforced glass dome, where Jupiter loomed impossibly large beyond the ship, its storms shifting in slow, eternal violence. He moved slowly, deliberately, his hands bearing a weight that flowed improbably in the thinness of the gravity shifts.
“To find one’s center,” he intoned, “is to find the center of all things. The ship moves, and so do we. You need to feel the center of gravity and use it —it is our guide.”
A hundred bodies followed in various degrees of synchrony, from well-dressed Upper Deck philosophers to the manutentioners and practical mechanics of the Lower Decks in their uniforms who stretched stiff shoulders between shift rotations. There was something mesmerizing about the communal movement, that even the ship usually a motionless background, seemed to vibrate beneath their feet as though their motions echoed through space.
Every morning, for this graceful moment, Helix 25 felt like a true utopia.
That was without counting when the madness began.
The Gossip Spiral
“Did you hear about Sarawen?” hissed a woman in a flowing silk robe.
“The Lexican?” gasped another.
“Yes. Gave birth last night.”
“What?! Already? Why weren’t we informed?”
“Oh, she kept it very quiet. Didn’t even invite anyone to the naming.”
“Disgraceful. And where are her two husbands? Following her everywhere. Suspicious if you ask me.”A grizzled Lower Deck worker grunted, still trying to follow Master Gou’s movement. “Why would she invite people to see her water break? Sounds unhygienic.”
This earned a scandalized gasp from an Upper Decker. “Not the birth—the ceremony! Honestly, you Lower Deck folk know nothing of tradition.”
Wisdom Against Wisdom
Master Gou was just finishing an elegant and powerful sweep of his arms when Edeltraut Snoot, a self-proclaimed philosopher from Quadrant B, pirouetted herself into the session with a flamboyant twirl.
“Ah, my dear glowing movement-makers! Thou dost align thine energies with the artificial celestial pull, and yet! And yet! Dost thou not see—this gravity is but a fabrication! A lie to lull thee into believing in balance when there is none!”
Master Gou paused, blinking, impassive, suspended in time and space, yet intently concentrated. Handling such disturbances of the force gracefully, unperturbed, was what the practice was about. He resumed as soon as Edeltraut moved aside to continue her impassionate speech.
“Ah yiii! The Snoot Knows. Oh yes. Balance is an illusion sold to us by the Grand Micromanagers, the Whymen of the Ever-Hungry Order. Like pacmaniacs, they devour structure and call it stability. And we! We are but rabbits, forced to hop through their labyrinth of rules!”
Someone muttered, “Oh no, it’s another of those speeches.”
Another person whispered, “Just let her talk, it’s easier.”
The Snoot lady continued, undeterred. “But we? Oh, we are not merely rabbits. We are the mist in the hedge! The trick in their tale! We evade! We escape! And when they demand we obey their whys—we vanish!”
By now, half the class had abandoned their movements entirely, mesmerized by the absurdity. The other half valiantly continued the Space taichi routine while inching away.
Master Gou finally closed the form, then sighed intently, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Let us… return to our breath.”
More Mass Lunacy
It started as a low murmur, a shifting agitation in the crowd. Then, bickering erupted like a solar flare.
“I can’t find my center with all this noise!”
“Oh shut up, you’ve never had a center.”
“Who took my water flask?!”
“Why is this man so close to me?!”
“I am FLOATING?! HELP!”Synthia’s calm, omnipresent voice chimed in overhead.
“For your well-being, an emergency dose of equilibrium supplements will be dispensed.”
Small white pills rained from overhead dispensers.
Instead of calming people down, this only increased the chaos.
Some took the pills immediately, while others refused on principle.
Someone accused the Lexicans of hoarding pills.
Two men got into a heated debate over whether taking the pills was an act of submission to the AI overlords.
A woman screamed that her husband had vanished, only to be reminded that he left her twelve years ago.
Someone swore they saw a moon-sized squid in the sky.The Unions and the Leopards
Near the edges of the room, two quadrant bosses from different labor unions were deep in mutual grumbling.
“Bloody management.”
“Agreed, even if they don’t call themselves that any longer, it’s still bloody management.”
“Damn right. MICRO-management.”
“Always telling us to be more efficient, more aligned, more at peace.”
“Yeah, well, who the hell voted for peace?! I preferred it when we just argued in the corridors!”One of them scowled. “That’s the problem, mate. We fought for this, better conditions, and what did we get? More rules, more supervisors! Who knew that the Leopards-Eating-People’s-Faces Party would, y’know—eat our own bloody faces?!”
The other snorted. “We demanded stability, and now we have so much stability we can’t move without filling out a form with all sorts of dumb questions. You know I have to submit a motion request before taking a piss?”
“…seriously?”
“Dead serious. Takes an eternity to fill. And four goddamn business hours for approval.”
“That’s inhumane.”
“Bloody right it is.”
At that moment, Synthia’s voice chimed in again.
“Please be advised: Temporary gravitational shifts are normal during orbital adjustments. Equilibrium supplements have been optimized. Kindly return to your scheduled calm.”
The Slingshot Begins
The whole ship gave a lurch, a gravitational hiccup as Helix 25 completed its slingshot maneuver around the celestial body.
Bodies swayed unnaturally. Some hovered momentarily, shrieking.
Someone declared that they had achieved enlightenment.
Someone else vomited.Master Gou sighed deeply, rubbing his temples. “We should invent retirement for old Masters. People can’t handle their shit during those Moonacies. Months of it ahead, better focus on breath more.”
Snoot Lady, still unaffected, spread her arms wide and declared:
“And so, the rabbit prevails once again!”Evie, passing by on her way to the investigation, took one look at the scene of absolute madness and turned right back around.
“Yeah. Nope. Not this morning. Back to the Murder Board.”
In reply to: The Last Cruise of Helix 25
Helix 25 – Gentle Utopia at Upper Decks
The Upper Decks of Helix 25 were a marvel of well-designed choreography and engineered tranquility. Life here was made effortless, thanks to an artful curation of everyday problems. Climate control ensured the air was always crisp, with just enough variation to keep the body alert, while maintaining a perfect balance of warm and cool, hygrometry, with no crazy seasons or climate change upheaval to disrupt the monotony. Food dispensers served gourmet meals for every individual preferences —decadent feasts perfectly prepared at the push of a button. The Helix cruise starships were designed for leisure, an eternity of comfort — and it had succeeded.
For the average resident, the days blended into one another in an animated swirl of hobbyist pursuits. There were the Arboretum Philosophers, who debated meaningfully over the purpose of existence while sipping floral-infused teas. There were the Artisans, who crafted digital masterpieces that vanished into the ship’s archives as soon as they were complete. There were the Virtual Adventurers, who lived entire lifetimes in fully immersive life-like simulations, all while reclining on plush lounges, connected to their brain chips courtesy of Muck Industries.
And then, there were Sharon, Gloria, and Mavis.
Three old ladies who, by all accounts, should have spent their days knitting and reminiscing about their youth, but instead had taken it upon themselves to make Helix 25 a little more interesting.
“Another marvelous day, ladies,” Sharon declared as she strolled along the gilded walkway of the Grand Atrium, a cavernous space filled with floating lounges and soft ambient music. The ceiling was a perfect replica of a sky—complete with drifting, lazy clouds and the occasional simulated flock of birds. Enough to make you almost forget you were in a closed fully-controlled environment.
Mavis sighed, adjusting her gaudy, glittering shawl. “It’s too marvelous, if you ask me. Bit samey, innit? Not even a good scandal to shake things up.”
Gloria scoffed. “Pah! That’s ‘cause we ain’t lookin’ hard enough. Did you hear about that dreadful business down in the Granary? Dried ‘im up like an apricot, they did. Disgustin’.”
“Dreadful,” Sharon agreed solemnly. “And not a single murder for decades, you know. We were overdue.”
Mavis clutched her pearls. “You make it sound like a good thing.”
Gloria waved a dismissive hand. “I’m just sayin’, bit of drama keeps people from losing their minds. No offense, but how many decades of spa treatments can a person endure before they go barmy?”
They passed a Wellness Lounge, where a row of residents were floating in Zero-G Hydrotherapy Pods, their faces aglow with Rejuvenex™ Anti-Aging Serum. Others lounged under mild UV therapy lamps, soaking up synthetic vitamin D while attendants rubbed nutrient-rich oils into their wrinkle-free skin.
Mavis peered at them. “Y’know, I swear some of ‘em are the same age as when we boarded.”
Gloria sniffed. “Not the same, Mavis. Just better preserved.”
Sharon tapped her lips, thoughtful. “I always wondered why we don’t have crime ‘ere. I mean, back on Earth, it were all fights, robbery, someone goin’ absolutely mental over a parking space—”
Gloria nodded. “It’s ‘cause we ain’t got money, Sha. No money, no stress, see? Everyone gets what they need.”
“Needs? Glo, love, people here have twelve-course meals and private VR vacations to Ancient Rome! I don’t reckon that counts as ‘needs’.”
“Well, it ain’t money, exactly,” Mavis pondered, “but we still ‘ave credits, don’t we?”
They fell into deep philosophical debates —or to say, their version of it.
Currency still existed aboard Helix 25, in a way. Each resident had a personal wealth balance, a digital measure of their social contributions—creative works, mentorship, scientific discovery, or participation in ship maintenance (for those who actually enjoyed labor, an absurd notion to most Upper Deckers). It wasn’t about survival, not like on the Lower Decks or the Hold, but about status. The wealthiest weren’t necessarily the smartest or the strongest, but rather those who best entertained or enriched the community.
Gloria finally waved her hand dismissively. “Point is, they keep us comfortable so we don’t start thinkin’ about things too much. Keep us occupied. Like a ship-sized cruise, but forever.”
Mavis wrinkled her nose. “A bit sinister, when you put it like that.”
“Well, I didn’t say it were sinister, I just said it were clever.” Gloria sniffed. “Anyway, we ain’t the ones who need entertainin’, are we? We’ve got a mystery on our hands.”
Sharon clapped excitedly. “Ooooh yes! A real mystery! Ain’t it thrillin’?”
“A proper one,” Gloria agreed. “With dead bodies an’ secrets an’—”
“—murder,” Mavis finished, breathless.
The three of them sighed in unison, delighted at the prospect.
They continued their stroll past the Grand Casino & Theatre, where a live orchestral simulation played for a well-dressed audience. Past the Astronomer’s Lounge, where youngster were taught to chart the stars that Helix 25 would never reach. Past the Crystal Arcade, where another group of youth of the ship enjoyed their free time on holographic duels and tactical board games.
So much entertainment. So much luxury.
So much designed distraction.
Gloria stopped suddenly, narrowing her eyes. “You ever wonder why we ain’t heard from the Captain in years?”
A hush fell over them.
Mavis frowned. “I thought you said the Captain were an idea, not a person.”
“Well, maybe. But if that’s true, who’s actually runnin’ the show?” Gloria folded her arms.
They glanced around, as if expecting an answer from the glowing Synthia panels embedded in every wall.
For the first time in a long while, they felt watched.
“…Maybe we oughta be careful,” Sharon muttered.
Mavis shivered. “Oh, Glo. What ‘ave you gotten us into this time?”
Gloria straightened her collar. “Dunno yet, love. But ain’t it excitin’?”
“With all the excitment, I almost forgot to tell you about that absolutely ghastly business,” Gloria declared, moments later, at the Moonchies’ Café, swirling her lavender-infused tea. “Watched a documentary this morning. About man-eating lions of Njombe.”
Sharon gasped, clutching her pearls. “Man eating lions?!”
Mavis blinked. “Wait. Man-eating lions, or man eating lions?”
There was a pause.
Gloria narrowed her eyes. “Mavis, why in the name of clotted cream would I be watchin’ a man eating lions?”
Mavis shrugged. “Well, I dunno, do I? Maybe he ran out of elephants.”
Sharon nodded sagely. “Yes, happens all the time in those travel shows.”
Gloria exhaled through her nose. “It’s not a travel show, Sha. And it’s not fiction.”
Mavis scoffed. “You sure? Sounds ridiculous.”
“Not as ridiculous as a man sittin’ down to a plate of roast lion chops,” Gloria shot back.
Mavis tilted her head. “Maybe it’s in a recipe book?”
Gloria slammed her teacup down. “I give up. I absolutely give up.”
Sharon patted her hand. “There, there, Glo. You can always watch somethin’ lighter tomorrow. Maybe a nice documentary about man-eating otters.”
Mavis grinned. “Or man eating otters.”
Gloria inhaled deeply, resisting the urge to upend her tea.
This, this was why Helix 25 had never known war.
No one had the time.
In reply to: The Last Cruise of Helix 25
Helix 25 – Poop Deck – The Jardenery
Evie stepped through the entrance of the Jardenery, and immediately, the sterile hum of Helix 25’s corridors faded into a world of green. Of all the spotless clean places on the ship, it was the only where Finkley’s bots tolerated the scent of damp earth. A soft rustle of hydroponic leaves shifting under artificial sunlight made the place an ecosystem within an ecosystem, designed to nourrish both body and mind.
Yet, for all its cultivated serenity, today it was a crime scene. The Drying Machine was connected to the Jardenery and the Granary, designed to efficiently extract precious moisture for recycling, while preserving the produce.
Riven Holt, walking beside her, didn’t share her reverence. “I don’t see why this place is relevant,” he muttered, glancing around at the towering bioluminescent vines spiraling up trellises. “The body was found in the drying machine, not in a vegetable patch.”
Evie ignored him, striding toward the far corner where Amara Voss was hunched over a sleek terminal, frowning at a glowing screen. The renowned geneticist barely noticed their approach, her fingers flicking through analysis results faster than human eyes could process.
A flicker of light.
“Ah-ha!” TP materialized beside Evie, adjusting his holographic lapels. “Madame Voss, I must say, your domain is quite the delightful contrast to our usual haunts of murder and mystery.” He twitched his mustache. “Alas, I suspect you are not admiring the flora?”
Amara exhaled sharply, rubbing her temples, not at all surprised by the holographic intrusion. She was Evie’s godmother, and had grown used to her experiments.
“No, indeed. I’m admiring this.” She turned the screen toward them.
The DNA profile glowed in crisp lines of data, revealing a sequence highlighted in red.
Evie frowned. “What are we looking at?”
Amara pinched the bridge of her nose. “A genetic anomaly.”
Riven crossed his arms. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Amara gave him a sharp look but turned back to the display. “The sample we found at the crime scene—blood residue on the drying machine and some traces on the granary floor—matches an ancient DNA profile from my research database. A perfect match.”
Evie felt a prickle of unease. “Ancient? What do you mean? From the 2000s?”
Amara chuckled, then nodded grimly. “No, ancient as in Medieval ancient. Specifically, Crusader DNA, from the Levant. A profile we mapped from preserved remains centuries ago.”
Silence stretched between them.
Finally, Riven scoffed. “That’s impossible.”
TP hummed thoughtfully, twirling his cane. “Impossible, yet indisputable. A most delightful contradiction.”
Evie’s mind raced. “Could the database be corrupted?”
Amara shook her head. “I checked. The sequencing is clean. This isn’t an error. This DNA was present at the crime scene.” She hesitated, then added, “The thing is…” she paused before considering to continue. They were all hanging on her every word, waiting for what she would say next.
Amara continued “I once theorized that it might be possible to reawaken dormant ancestral DNA embedded in human cells. If the right triggers were applied, someone could manifest genetic markers—traits, even memories—from long-dead ancestors. Awakening old skills, getting access to long lost secrets of states…”
Riven looked at her as if she’d grown a second head. “You’re saying someone on Helix 25 might have… transformed into a medieval Crusader?”
Amara exhaled. “I’m saying I don’t know. But either someone aboard has a genetic profile that shouldn’t exist, or someone created it.”
TP’s mustache twitched. “Ah! A puzzle worthy of my finest deductive faculties. To find the source, we must trace back the lineage! And perhaps a… witness.”
Evie turned toward Amara. “Did Herbert ever come here?”
Before Amara could answer, a voice cut through the foliage.
“Herbert?”
They turned to find Romualdo, the Jardenery’s caretaker, standing near a towering fruit-bearing vine, his arms folded, a leaf-tipped stem tucked behind his ear like a cigarette. He was a broad-shouldered man with sun-weathered skin, dressed in a simple coverall, his presence almost too casual for someone surrounded by murder investigators.
Romualdo scratched his chin. “Yeah, he used to come around. Not for the plants, though. He wasn’t the gardening type.”
Evie stepped closer. “What did he want?”
Romualdo shrugged. “Questions, mostly. Liked to chat about history. Said he was looking for something old. Always wanted to know about heritage, bloodlines, forgotten things.” He shook his head. “Didn’t make much sense to me. But then again, I like practical things. Things that grow.”
Amara blushed, quickly catching herself. “Did he ever mention anything… specific? Like a name?”
Romualdo thought for a moment, then grinned. “Oh yeah. He asked about the Crusades.”
Evie stiffened. TP let out an appreciative hum.
“Fascinating,” TP mused. “Our dearly departed Herbert was not merely a victim, but perhaps a seeker of truths unknown. And, as any good mystery dictates, seekers who get too close often find themselves…” He tipped his hat. “Extinguished.”
Riven scowled. “That’s a bit dramatic.”
Romualdo snorted. “Sounds about right, though.” He picked up a tattered book from his workbench and waved it. “I lend out my books. Got myself the only complete collection of works of Liz Tattler in the whole ship. Doc Amara’s helping me with the reading. Before I could read, I only liked the covers, they were so romantic and intriguing, but now I can read most of them on my own.” Noticing he was making the Doctor uncomfortable, he switched back to the topic. “So yes, Herbert knew I was collector of books and he borrowed this one a few weeks ago. Kept coming back with more questions after reading it.”
Evie took the book and glanced at the cover. The Blood of the Past: Genetic Echoes Through History by Dr. Amara Voss.
She turned to Amara. “You wrote this?”
Amara stared at the book, her expression darkening. “A long time ago. Before I realized some theories should stay theories.”
Evie closed the book. “Looks like someone didn’t agree.”
Romualdo wiped his hands on his coveralls. “Well, I hope you figure it out soon. Hate to think the plants are breathing in murder residue.”
TP sighed dramatically. “Ah, the tragedy of contaminated air! Shall I alert the sanitation team?”
Riven rolled his eyes. “Let’s go.”
As they walked away, Evie’s grip tightened around the book. The deeper they dug, the stranger this murder became.
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Epilogue & Prologue
Paris, November 2029 – The Fifth Note Resounds
Tabitha sat by the window at the Sarah Bernhardt Café, letting the murmur of conversations and the occasional purring of the espresso machine settle around her. It was one of the few cafés left in the city where time still moved at a human pace. She stirred her cup absentmindedly. Paris was still Paris, but the world outside had changed in ways her mother’s generation still struggled to grasp.
It wasn’t just the ever-presence of automation and AI making themselves known in subtle ways—screens adjusting to glances, the quiet surveillance woven into everyday life. It wasn’t just the climate shifts, the aircon turned to cold in the midst of November, the summers unpredictable, the air thick with contradictions of progress and collapse of civilization across the Atlantic.
The certainty of impermanence was what defined her generation. BANI world they used to say—Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible. A cold fact: impossible to grasp and impossible to fight. Unlike her mother and her friends, who had spent their lives tethered to a world that no longer existed, she had never known certainty. She was born in the flux.
And yet, this café remained. One of the last to resist full automation, where a human still brought you coffee, where the brass bell above the door still rang, where things still unfolded at a human pace.
The bell above the door rang—the fifth note, as her mother had called it once.
She had never been here before, not in any way that mattered. Yet, she had heard the story. The unlikely reunion five years ago. The night that moved new projects in motion for her mother and her friends.
Tabitha’s fingers traced the worn edges of the notebook in front of her—Lucien’s, then Amei’s, then Darius’s. Pieces of a life written by many hands.
“Some things don’t work the first time. But sometimes, in the ruins of what failed, something else sprouts and takes root.”
And that was what had happened.
The shared housing project they had once dreamed of hadn’t survived—not in its original form. But through their rekindled bond, they had started something else.
True Stories of How It Was.
It had begun as a quiet defiance—a way to preserve real, human stories in an age of synthetic, permanent ephemerality and ephemeral impermanence, constantly changing memory. They were living in a world where AI’s fabricated histories had overwhelmed all the channels of information, where the past was constantly rewritten, altered, repackaged. Authenticity had become a rare currency.
As she graduated in anthropology few years back, she’d wondered about the validity of history —it was, after all, a construct. The same could be said for literature, art, even science. All of them constructs of the human mind, tenuous grasp of the infinite truth, but once, they used to evolve at such a slow pace that they felt solid, reliable. Ultimately their group was not looking for ultimate truth, that would be arrogant and probably ignorant. Authenticity was what they were looking for. And with it, connections, love, genuineness —unquantifiables by means of science and yet, true and precious beyond measure.
Lucien had first suggested it, tracing the idea from his own frustrations—the way art had become a loop of generated iterations, the human touch increasingly erased. He was in a better place since Matteo had helped him settle his score with Renard and, free of influence, he had found confidence in developing of his own art.
Amei —her mother—, had changed in a way Tabitha couldn’t quite define. Her restlessness had quieted, not through settling down but through accepting impermanence as something other than loss. She had started writing again—not as a career, not to publish, but to preserve stories that had no place in a digitized world. Her quiet strength had always been in preserving connections, and she knew they had to move quickly before real history faded beneath layers of fabricated recollections.
Darius, once skeptical, saw its weight—he had spent years avoiding roots, only to realize that stories were the only thing that made places matter. He was somewhere in Morocco now, leading a sustainable design project, bridging cultures rather than simply passing through them.
Elara had left science. Or at least, science as she had known it. The calculations, the certainty, the constraints of academia, with no escape from the automated “enhanced” digital helpers. Her obsession and curiosities had found attract in something more human, more chaotic. She had thrown herself into reviving old knowledge, forgotten architectures, regenerative landscapes.
And Matteo—Matteo had grounded it.
The notebook read: Matteo wasn’t a ghost from our past. He was the missing note, the one we didn’t know we needed. And because of him, we stopped looking backward. We started building something else.
For so long, Matteo had been a ghost of sorts, by his own account, lingering at the edges of their story, the missing note in their unfinished chord. But now, he was fully part of it. His mother had passed, her past history unraveling in ways he had never expected, branching new connections even now. And though he had lost something in that, he had also found something else. Juliette. Or maybe not. The story wasn’t finished.
Tabitha turned the page.
“We were not historians, not preservationists, not even archivists. But we have lived. And as it turned out, that was enough.”
They had begun collecting stories through their networks—not legends, not myths, but true accounts of how it was, from people who still remembered.
A grandfather’s voice recording of a train ride to a city that no longer exists.
Handwritten recipes annotated by generations of hands, each adding something new.
A letter from a protest in 2027, detailing a movement that the history books had since erased.
An old woman’s story of her first love, spoken in a dialect that AI could not translate properly.It had grown in ways they hadn’t expected. People began sending them recordings, letters, transcripts, photos —handwritten scraps of fading ink. Some were anonymous, others carefully curated with full names and details, like makeshift ramparts against the tide of time.
At first, few had noticed. It was never the goal to make it worlwide movement. But little by little, strange things happened, and more began to listen.
There was something undeniably powerful about genuine human memory when it was raw and unfiltered, when it carried unpolished, raw weight of experience, untouched by apologetic watered down adornments and out-of-place generative hallucinations.
Now, there were exhibitions, readings, archives—entire underground movements dedicated to preserving pre-synthetic history. Their project had become something rare, valuable, almost sacred.
And yet, here in the café, none of that felt urgent.
Tabitha looked up as the server approached. Not Matteo, but someone new.
“Another espresso?”
She hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. And a glass of water, please.”
She glanced at the counter, where Matteo was leaning, speaking to someone, laughing. He had changed, too. No longer just an observer, no longer just the quiet figure who knew too much. Now, he belonged here.
A bell rang softly as the door swung open again.
Tabitha smiled to herself. The fifth note always sounded, in the end.
She turned back to the notebook, the city moving around her, the story still unfolding in more directions than one.
In reply to: The Last Cruise of Helix 25
Zoya clicked her tongue, folding her arms as Evie and her flickering detective vanished into the dead man’s private world. She listened to the sounds of investigation. The sound of others touching what should have been hers first. She exhaled through her nose, slow and measured.
The body was elsewhere, dried and ruined. That didn’t matter. What mattered was here—hairs, nail clippings, that contained traces, strands, fragments of DNA waiting to be read like old parchments.
She stepped forward, the soft layers of her robes shifting.
“You can’t keep me out forever, young man.”
Riven didn’t move. Arms crossed, jaw locked, standing there like a sentry at some sacred threshold. Victor Holt’s grandson, through and through, she thought.
“I can keep you out long enough.”
Zoya clicked her tongue. Not quite amusement, not quite irritation.
“I should have suspected such obstinacy. You take after him, after all.”
Riven’s shoulders tensed.
Good. Let him feel it.
His voice was tight. “If you’re referring to my grandfather, you should choose your words carefully.”
Zoya smiled, slow and knowing. “I always choose my words carefully.”
Riven’s glare could have cut through metal.
Zoya tilted her head, studying him as she would an artifact pulled from the wreckage of an old world. So much of Victor Holt was in him—the posture, the unyielding spine, the desperate need to be right.
But Victor Holt had been wrong.
And that was why he was sleeping in a frozen cell of his own making.
She took another step forward, lowering her voice just enough that the curious would not hear what she said.
“He never understood the ship’s true mission. He clung to his authority, his rigid hierarchies, his outdated beliefs. He would have let us rot in luxury while the real work of survival slipped away. And when he refused to see reason—” she exhaled, her gaze never leaving his, “he stepped aside.”
Riven’s jaw locked. “He was forced aside.”
Zoya only smiled. “A matter of perspective.”
She let that hang. Let him sit with it.
She could see the war in his eyes—the desperate urge to refute her, to throw his grandfather’s legacy in her face, to remind her that Victor Holt was still here, still waiting in cryo, still a looming shadow over the ship. But Victor Holt’s silence was the greatest proof of his failure.
Riven clenched his jaw.
Anuí’s voice, smooth and patient, cut through the tension.
“She is not wrong.”
Zoya frowned. She had expected them to speak eventually. They always did.
They stood just a little apart, hand tucked in their robes, their expression unreadable.
“In its current state, the body is useless,” Anuí said lightly, as if stating something obvious, “but that does not mean it has left no trace.” Then they murmured “Nāvdaṭi hrás’ka… aṣṭīr pālachá.”
Zoya glanced at them, her eyes narrowing. In an old tongue forgotten by all, it meant The bones remember… the blood does not lie. She did not trust the Lexicans’ sudden interest in genetics.
They did not see history in bloodlines, did not place value in the remnants of DNA. They preferred their records rewritten, reclaimed, restructured to suit a new truth, not an old one.
Yet here they were, aligning themselves with her. And that was what gave her pause.
“Your people have never cared for the past as it was,” she murmured. “Only for what it could become.”
Anuí’s lips curved, withholding more than they gave. “Truth takes many forms.”
Zoya scoffed. They were here for their own reasons. That much was certain. She could use that
Riven’s fingers tightened at his sides. “I have my orders.”
Zoya lifted a brow. “And whose orders are those?”
The hesitation was slight. “It’s not up to me.”
Zoya stilled. The words were quiet, bitter, revealing.
Not up to him.
So, someone had ensured she wouldn’t step foot in that room. Not just delayed—denied.
She exhaled, long and slow. “I see.” She paused. “I will find out who gave that order.”
And when she did, they would regret it.
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Matteo — December 2022
Juliette leaned in, her phone screen glowing faintly between them. “Come on, pick something. It’s supposed to know everything—or at least sound like it does.”
Juliette was the one who’d introduced him to the app the whole world was abuzz talking about. MeowGPT.
At the New Year’s eve family dinner at Juliette’s parents, the whole house was alive with her sisters, nephews, and cousins. She entered a discussion with one of the kids, and they all seemed to know well about it. It was fun to see the adults were oblivious, himself included. He liked it about Juliette that she had such insatiable curiosity.
“It’s a life-changer, you know” she’d said “There’ll be a time, we won’t know about how we did without it. The kids born now will not know a world without it. Look, I’m sure my nephews are already cheating at their exams with it, or finding new ways to learn…”
“New ways to learn, that sounds like a mirage…. Bit of a drastic view to think we won’t live without; I’d like to think like with the mobile phones, we can still choose to live without.”
“And lose your way all the time with worn-out paper maps instead of GPS? That’s a grandpa mindset darling! I can see quite a few reasons not to choose!” she laughed.
“Anyway, we’ll see. What would you like to know about? A crazy recipe to grow hair? A fancy trip to a little known place? Write a technical instruction in the style of Elizabeth Tattler?”“Let me see…”
Matteo smirked, swirling the last sip of crémant in his glass. The lively discussions of Juliette’s family around them made the moment feel oddly private. “Alright, let’s try something practical. How about early signs of Alzheimer’s? You know, for Ma.”
Juliette’s smile softened as she tapped the query into the app. Matteo watched, half curious, half detached.
The app processed for a moment before responding in its overly chipper tone:
“Early signs of Alzheimer’s can include memory loss, difficulty planning or solving problems, and confusion with time or place. For personalized insights, understanding specific triggers, like stress or diet, can help manage early symptoms.”Matteo frowned. “That’s… general. I thought it was supposed to be revolutionary?”
“Wait for it,” Juliette said, tapping again, her tone teasing. “What if we ask it about long-term memory triggers? Something for nostalgia. Your Ma’s been into her old photos, right?”
The app spun its virtual gears and spat out a more detailed suggestion.
“Consider discussing familiar stories, music, or scents. Interestingly, recent studies on Alzheimer’s patients show a strong response to tactile memories. For example, one groundbreaking case involved genetic ancestry research coupled with personalized sensory cues.Juliette tilted her head, reading the screen aloud. “Huh, look at this—Dr. Elara V., a retired physicist, designed a patented method combining ancestral genetic research with soundwaves sensory stimuli to enhance attention and preserve memory function. Her work has been cited in connection with several studies on Alzheimer’s.”
“Elara?” Matteo’s brow furrowed. “Uncommon name… Where have I heard it before?”
Juliette shrugged. “Says here she retired to Tuscany after the pandemic. Fancy that.” She tapped the screen again, scrolling. “Apparently, she was a physicist with some quirky ideas. Had a side hustle on patents, one of which actually turned out useful. Something about genetic resonance? Sounds like a sci-fi movie.”
Matteo stared at the screen, a strange feeling tugging at him. “Genetic resonance…? It’s like these apps read your mind, huh? Do they just make this stuff up?”
Juliette laughed, nudging him. “Maybe! The system is far from foolproof, it may just have blurted out a completely imagined story, although it’s probably got it from somewhere on the internet. You better do your fact-checking. This woman would have published papers back when we were kids, and now the AI’s connecting dots.”
The name lingered with him, though. Elara. It felt distant yet oddly familiar, like the shadow of a memory just out of reach.
“You think she’s got more work like that?” he asked, more to himself than to Juliette.
Juliette handed him the phone. “You’re the one with the questions. Go ahead.”
Matteo hesitated before typing, almost without thinking: Elara Tuscany memory research.
The app processed again, and the next response was less clinical, more anecdotal.
“Elara V., known for her unconventional methods, retired to Tuscany where she invested in rural revitalization. A small village farmhouse became her retreat, and she occasionally supported artistic projects. Her most cited breakthrough involved pairing sensory stimuli with genetic lineage insights to enhance memory preservation.”Matteo tilted the phone towards Juliette. “She supports artists? Sounds like a soft spot for the dreamers.”
“Maybe she’s your type,” Juliette teased, grinning.
Matteo laughed, shaking his head. “Sure, if she wasn’t old enough to be my mother.”
The conversation shifted, but Matteo couldn’t shake the feeling the name had stirred. As Juliette’s family called them back to the table, he pocketed his phone, a strange warmth lingering—part curiosity, part recognition.
To think that months before, all that technologie to connect dots together didn’t exist. People would spend years of research, now accessible in a matter of seconds.
Later that night, as they were waiting for the new year countdown, he found himself wondering: What kind of person would spend their retirement investing in forgotten villages and forgotten dreams? Someone who believed in second chances, maybe. Someone who, like him, was drawn to the idea of piecing together a life from scattered connections.
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Darius: Christmas 2022
Darius was expecting some cold snap, landing in Paris, but the weather was rather pleasant this time of the year.
It was the kind of day that begged for aimless wandering, but Darius had an appointment he couldn’t avoid—or so he told himself. His plane had been late, and looking at the time he would arrive at the apartment, he was already feeling quite drained. The streets were lively, tourists and locals intermingling dreamingly under strings of festive lights spread out over the boulevards. He listlessly took some snapshot videos —fleeting ideas, backgrounds for his channel.
The wellness channel had not done very well to be honest, and he was struggling with keeping up with the community he had drawn to himself. Most of the latest posts had drawn the usual encouragements and likes, but there were also the growing background chatter, gossiping he couldn’t be bothered to rein in — he was no guru, but it still took its toll, and he could feel it required more energy to be in this mode that he’d liked to.
His patrons had been kind, for a few years now, indulging his flights of fancy, funding his trips, introducing him to influencers. Seeing how little progress he’d made, he was starting to wonder if he should have paid more attention to the background chatter. Monsieur Renard had always taken a keen interest in his travels, looking for places to expand his promoter schemes of co-housing under the guide of low investment into conscious living spaces, or something well-marketed by Eloïse. The crude reality was starting to stare at his face. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep up pretending they were his friends.
By the time he reached the apartment, in a quiet street adjacent to rue Saint Dominique, nestled in 7th arrondissement with its well-kept façades, he was no longer simply fashionably late.
Without even the time to say his name, the door buzz clicked open, leading him to the old staircase. The apartment door opened before he could knock. There was a crackling tension hanging in the air even before Renard’s face appeared—his rotund face reddened by an annoyance he was poorly hiding beneath a polished exterior. He seemed far away from the guarded and meticulous man that Darius once knew.
“You’re late,” Renard said brusquely, stepping aside to let Darius in. The man was dressed impeccably, as always, but there was a sharpness to his movements.
Inside, the apartment was its usual display of cultivated sophistication—mid-century furniture, muted tones, and artful clutter that screamed effortless wealth. Eloïse sat on the couch, her legs crossed, a glass of wine poised delicately in her hand. She didn’t look up as Darius entered.
“Sorry,” Darius muttered, setting down his bag. “Flight delay.”
Renard waved it off impatiently, already pacing the room. “Do you know where Lucien is?” he asked abruptly, his gaze slicing toward Darius.
The question caught him off guard. “Lucien?” Darius echoed. “No. Why?”
Renard let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “Why? Because he owes me. He owes us. And he’s gone off the grid like some bloody enfant terrible who thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”
Darius hesitated. “I haven’t seen him in months,” he said carefully.
Renard stopped pacing, fixing him with a hard look. “Are you sure about that? You two were close, weren’t you? Don’t tell me you’re covering for him.”
“I’m not,” Darius said firmly, though the accusation sent a ripple of anger through him.
Renard snorted, turning away. “Typical. All you dreamers are the same—full of ideas but no follow-through. And when things fall apart, you scatter like rats, leaving the rest of us to clean up the mess.”
Darius stiffened. “I didn’t come here to be insulted,” he said, his voice a steady growl.
“Then why did you come, Darius?” Renard shot back, his tone cutting. “To float on someone else’s dime a little longer? To pretend you’re above all this while you leech off people who actually make things happen?”
The words hit like a slap. Darius glanced at Eloïse, expecting her to interject, to soften the blow. But she remained silent, her gaze fixed on her glass as if it held all the answers.
For the first time, he saw her clearly—not as a confidante or a muse, but as someone who had always been one step removed, always watching, always using.
“I think I’ve had enough,” Darius said finally, his voice calm despite the storm brewing inside him. “I think I’ve had enough for a long time.”
Renard turned, his expression a mix of incredulity and disdain. “Enough? You think you can walk away from this? From us?”
“Yes, I can.” Darius said simply, grabbing his bag.
“You’ll never make it on your own,” Renard called after him, his voice dripping with scorn.
Darius paused at the door, glancing back at Eloïse one last time. “I’ll take my chances,” he said, and then slammed the door.
The evening air was like a balm, open and soft unlike the claustrophobic tension of the apartment. Darius walked aimlessly at first, his thoughts caught between flares of wounded pride and muted anxiety, but as he walked and walked, it soon turned into a return of confidence, slow and steady.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to see a familiar name. It was a couple he knew from the south of France, friends he hadn’t spoken to in months. He answered, their warm voices immediately lifting his spirits.
“Darius!” one of them said. “What are you doing for Christmas? You should come down to stay with us. We’ve finally moved to a bigger space—and you owe us a visit.”
Darius smiled, the weight of Renard’s words falling away. “You know what? That sounds perfect.”
As he hung up, he looked up at the Parisian skyline, Darius wished he’d had the courage to take that step into the unknown a long time ago. Wherever Lucien was, he felt suddenly closer to him —as if inspired by his friend’s bold move away from this malicious web of influence.
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Matteo — Autumn 2023
The Jardin des Plantes park was quiet, the kind of quiet that settled after a brisk autumn rain. Matteo sat on a weathered wooden bench, watching a golden retriever chase the last of the fallen leaves tumbling across the gravel path. The damp air was carrying scents of the earth welcoming a retreat inside, and taking the time to be alone with his thoughts was something he’d missed.
His phone buzzed with a notification—a news update about the latest film adaptation from a Liz Tattler classic fiction. The name made him smile faintly. Juliette had loved Tattler’s novels, their whimsical characters, and the unflinching and unapologetic observations about life’s quiet mysteries and the unexpected rants about the virtues of cleaning and dustsceawung that propelled the word in the people’s top 100 favourite in the Oxford dictionary for several years consecutively.
“They’re so full of texture,” Juliette once said as she was sprawled on the bed of their tiny Parisian flat, a battered paperback in her hands. “Like you can feel the pages breathe.”
His image of her was still vivid, they’d stayed on good terms and he would still thumb up some of her posts from time to time —but it was only small moments rather than full scenes that used to come back, fragmented pieces of memories really —her dark hair falling messily over her face, her legs crossed in a casual way.
Paris had been a playground for them. For a while, they were caught in a whirlwind of late-night conversations in smoky cafés and lazy Sunday mornings wandering the Seine. They’d spent hours in bookstores, Juliette hunting for first editions and Matteo snapping pictures of the handwritten notes tucked between the pages of used novels.
A year ago, a different park in a different city—Hyde Park, London. She was there, twirling a scarf she’d picked up in Vienna the weekend before, the bright red of it like a ribbon of fire against the soft gray skies. They had been enamored with each other and with the spontaneity of hopping trains to new cities, their weekends folding into one another like pages of a travel journal. London one week, Paris the next, Berlin after that. Each city a postcard snapshot, vibrant and fleeting.
Juliette would tease him about his fascination with the little things—how he would linger too long over a cup of coffee at a café or stop to photograph a tree in the middle of nowhere. “You’re always looking for stories,” she’d said with a laugh, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “Even when you’re not sure what they mean.”
“Stories are everywhere,” he would reply, snapping a picture of her against the backdrop of the park, her scarf billowing in the wind. She had rolled her eyes but smiled, and in that moment, he had believed her smile was the most perfect thing he’d ever seen.
The break-up came unannounced, but not fully unexpected. There were signs here and there. Her love of the endless whirlwind of life, that was a match for his way of following life’s intents for him. When sometimes life went still during winter, he would also follow, but she wouldn’t. She had insatiable love for a life filled with animation, bursts of colours, sounds. It had been easy to be with her then, her curiosity pulling him along, their shared love of stories giving their time together a weight that felt timeless. It was when Drusilla’s condition worsened, that their rhythms became untangled, no longer synching at every heartbeat. And it was fine. Matteo had made his decision then to leave Paris and bring his mother to Avignon where she could receive the care she needed. Those past two weeks that brought the inevitable conclusion of their separation had left him surprisingly content. Happy for the past moments, and hopeful for the unwritten future.
He could see clearly that Juliette needed her freedom back; and she’d agreed. Regular train rides to Avignon, the weekends spent trying to make the sparse walls of his mother’s room feel like home as she started to forget her son’s girlfriend, and sometimes even her own son.
Last they were in this park together was one of their last shared moments of innocent happiness ; It was a beautiful sunny afternoon —or was it only coloured by memories? They had been sitting in the Jardin des Plantes, sharing a crêpe. Juliette had been scrolling through her phone, stopping at an announcement about an interview with Liz Tattler airing that evening. “You should watch it,” she’d said, her tone light but distant. “Her books are about people like us—drifting, figuring it out.”
He had smiled then, nodding, though he wasn’t sure if he’d meant it. A week later, she told him she was moving back to Lille, closer to her family until she figured out her next step. “It’s not you, Matteo,” she’d said, her eyes soft but resolute. “You need to be here, for her. I need… something else.”
Now, sitting in the park a few weeks later, Matteo pulled his phone from his pocket and opened his gallery. He scrolled through the pictures until he found one from their weekend in London—a black-and-white shot of Julia standing in front of a red telephone booth, her smile sharp and her eyes already focused on the next shooting star to catch.
Julia was right, he thought. People like them—they drifted, but they also found their way, sometimes in unexpected ways. He put on his earpods, listening to the beginning of Liz Tattler’s interview.
Her distinct raspy voice brimming with a cackling energy was already engrossing. Synchy as ever, she was saying:
“Every story begins with something lost, but it’s never about the loss. It’s about what you find because of it.”
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Matteo — Winter 2023: The Move
The rumble of the moving truck echoed faintly in the quiet residential street as Matteo leaned against the open door, arms crossed, waiting for the signal to load the boxes. He glanced at the crisp winter sky, a pale gray threatening snow, and then at the house behind him. Its windows were darkened by empty rooms, their once-lived-in warmth replaced by the starkness of transition. The ornate names artistically painted on the mailbox struck him somehow. Amei & Tabitha M.: his clients for the day.
The cold damp of London’s suburbia was making him long even more for the warmth of sunny days. With the past few moves he’s been managing for his company, the tipping had been generous; he could probably plan a spring break in South of France, or maybe make a more permanent move there.
The sound of the doorbell brought him back from his rêverie.
Inside the house, the faint sounds of boxes being taped and last-minute goodbyes carried through the hallways. Matteo had been part of these moves too many times to count now. People always left a little bit of themselves behind—forgotten trinkets, echoes of old conversations, or the faint imprint of a life lived. It was a rhythm he’d come to expect, and he knew his part in it: lift, carry, and disappear into the background.
Matteo straightened as the door opened and a girl that could have been in her early twenties, but looked like a teenager stepped out, bundled against the cold. She held a steaming mug in one hand and balanced a box awkwardly on her hip with the other.
“That’s the last of it,” she called over her shoulder. “Mum, are you sure you don’t want me to take the notebooks?”
“They’re fine in the car, Tabitha!” A voice—calm and steady, maybe tinged with weariness—floated from inside.
The girl named Tabitha turned to Matteo, offering the box. “This is fragile,” she said, a smile tugging at her lips. “Be nice to it.”
Matteo took the box carefully, glancing at the mug in her hand. “You’re not leaving that behind, are you?” he asked with a faint smile.
Tabitha laughed. “This? No way. That’s my lifeline. The mug stays.”
As Matteo carried the box to the truck, his eyes caught on something inside—a weathered postcard tucked haphazardly between the pages of a journal. The image on the front was striking: a swirling green fairy, dancing above a glass of absinthe. La Fée Verte was scrawled in looping letters across the top.
“Tabitha!” Her mother’s voice carried out to the driveway, and Matteo turned instinctively. She stepped out onto the porch, her scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, her breath visible in the chilly air. Matteo could see the resemblance—the same poise and humor in her gaze, though softened by something older, quieter.
“Put this somewhere, will you” she said, holding up another postcard, this one with a faded image of a winding mountain road.
Tabitha grinned, stepping forward to take it. “Thanks, Mum. That one’s special.” She tucked it into her coat pocket.
“Special how?” her mother asked lightly.
“It’s from Darius,” Tabitha said, her tone almost teasing. “… The one you never want to talk about.” she leaned teasingly. “One of his cryptic postcards —too bad I was too young to really remember him, he must have been fun to be around.”
Matteo’s ears perked at the name, though he kept his head down, settling the box in place. It wasn’t unusual to overhear snippets like this during a move, but something about the unusual name roused his curiosity.
“Why you want to keep those?” Amei asked, tilting her head.
Tabitha shrugged. “They’re kind of… a map, I guess. Of people, not places.”
Amei paused, her expression softening. “He was always good at that,” she murmured, almost to herself.
The conversation lingered in Matteo’s mind as the day went on. By the time the truck was loaded, and he’d helped arrange the last of the boxes in Amei’s new, smaller apartment, the name and the postcard had taken root.
As Matteo stacked the final piece of furniture—a worn bookshelf—against the living room wall, he noticed Amei lingering near a window, her gaze distant.
“It’s different, isn’t it?” she said suddenly, not looking at him.
“Moving?” Matteo asked, unsure if the question was for him.
“Starting over,” she clarified, her voice quieter now. “Feels smaller, even when it’s supposed to be lighter.”
Matteo didn’t reply, sensing she wasn’t looking for an answer. He stepped back, nodding politely as she thanked him and disappeared into the kitchen.
The postcard stuck in his mind for days after. Matteo had heard of absinthe before, of course—its mystique, its history—but something about the way Tabitha had called the postcard a “map of people” resonated.
By the time spring arrived, Matteo was wandering through Avignon, chasing vague curiosities and half-formed questions. When he saw Lucien crouched over his chalk labyrinth, the memory of the postcard rose unbidden.
“Do you know where I can find absinthe?” he asked, the question more instinct than intent.
Lucien’s raised eyebrow and faint smile felt like another piece clicking into place. The connections were there—threads woven in patterns he couldn’t yet see. But for the first time in months, Matteo felt he was back on the right path.
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
From Decay to Birth: a Map of Paths and Connections
7. Darius’s Encounter (November 2024)
Moments before the reunion with Lucien and his friends, Darius was wandering the bouquinistes along the Seine when he spotted this particular map among a stack of old prints. The design struck him immediately—the spirals, the loops, the faint shimmer of indigo against yellowed paper.
He purchased it without hesitation. As he would examine it more closely, he would notice faint marks along the edges—creases that had come from a vineyard pin, and a smudge of red dust, from Catalonia.
When the bouquiniste had mentioned that the map had come from a traveler passing through, Darius had felt a strange familiarity. It wasn’t the map itself but the echoes of its journey— quiet connections he couldn’t yet place.
6. Matteo’s Discovery (near Avignon, Spring 2024)
The office at the edge of the vineyard was a ruin, its beams sagging and its walls cracked. Matteo had wandered in during a quiet afternoon, drawn by the promise of shade and a moment of solitude.
His eyes scanned the room—a rusted typewriter, ledgers crumbling into dust, and a paper pinned to the wall, its edges curling with age. Matteo stepped closer, pulling the pin free and unfolding what turned out to be a map.
Its lines twisted and looped in ways that seemed deliberate yet impossible to follow. Matteo traced one path with his finger, feeling the faint grooves where the ink had sunk into the paper. Something about it unsettled him, though he couldn’t say why.
Days later, while sharing a drink with a traveler at the local inn, Matteo showed him the map.
“It’s beautiful,” the traveler said, running his hand over the faded indigo lines. “But it doesn’t belong here.”
Matteo nodded. “Take it, then. Maybe you’ll figure it out.”
The traveler left with the map that night, and Matteo returned to the vineyard, feeling lighter somehow.
5. From Hand to Hand (1995–2024)
By the time Matteo found it in the spring of 2024, the map had long been forgotten, its intricate lines dulled by dust and time.
2012: A vineyard owner near Avignon purchased it at an estate sale, pinning it to the wall of his office without much thought.
2001: A collector in Marseille framed it in her study, claiming it was a lost artifact of a secret cartographer society, though she later sold it when funds ran low.
1997: A scholar in Barcelona traded an old atlas for it, drawn to its artistry but unable to decipher its purpose.
The map had passed through many hands over the previous three decades and each owner puzzling over, and finally adding their own meaning to its lines.
4. The Artist (1995)
The mapmaker was a recluse, known only as Almadora to the handful of people who bought her work. Living in a sunlit attic in Girona, she spent her days tracing intricate patterns onto paper, claiming to chart not geography but connections.
“I don’t map what is,” she once told a curious buyer. “I map what could be.”
In 1995, Almadora began work on the labyrinthine map. She used a pale paper from Girona and indigo ink from India, layering lines that seemed to twist and spiral outward endlessly. The map wasn’t signed, nor did it bear any explanations. When it was finished, Almadora sold it to a passing merchant for a handful of coins, its journey into the world beginning quietly, without ceremony.
3. The Ink (1990s)
The ink came from a different path altogether. Indigo plants, or aviri, grown on Kongarapattu, were harvested, fermented, and dried into cakes of pigment. The process was ancient, perfected over centuries, and the resulting hue was so rich it seemed to vibrate with unexplored depth.
From the harbour of Pondicherry, this particular batch of indigo made its way to an artisan in Girona, who mixed it with oils and resins to create a striking ink. Its journey intersected with Amei’s much later, when remnants of the same batch were used to dye textiles she would work with as a designer. But in the mid-1990s, it served a singular purpose: to bring a recluse artist’s vision to life.
2. The Paper (1980)
The tree bore laughter and countless other sounds of nature and passer-by’s arguments for years, a sturdy presence, unwavering in a sea of shifting lives. Even after the farmhouse was sold, long after the sisters had grown apart, the tree remained. But time is merciless, even to the strongest roots.
By 1979, battered by storms and neglect, the great tree cracked and fell, its once-proud form reduced to timber for a nearby mill.
The tree’s journey didn’t end in the mill; it transformed. Its wood was stripped, pulped, and pressed into paper. Some sheets were coarse and rough, destined for everyday use. But a few, including one particularly smooth and pale sheet, were set aside as high-quality stock for specialized buyers.
This sheet traveled south to Catalonia, where it sat in a shop in Girona for years, its surface untouched but full of potential. By the time the artist found it in the mid-1990s, it had already begun to yellow at the edges, carrying the faint scent of age.
1. The Seed (1950s)
It began in a forgotten corner of Kent, where a seed took root beneath a patch of open sky. The tree grew tall and sprawling over decades, its branches a canopy for birds and children alike. By 1961, it had become the centerpiece of the small farmhouse where two young sisters, Vanessa and Elara, played beneath its shade.
“Elara, you’re too slow!” Vanessa called, her voice sharp with mock impatience. Elara, only six years old, trailed behind, clutching a wooden stick she used to scratch shapes into the dirt. “I’m making a map!” she announced, her curls bouncing as she ran to catch up.
Vanessa rolled her eyes, already halfway up the tree’s lowest branch. “You and your maps. You think you’re going somewhere?”
In reply to: Quintessence: Reversing the Fifth
Sat. Nov. 30, 2024 5:55am — Matteo’s morning
Matteo’s mornings began the same way, no matter the city, no matter the season. A pot of strong coffee brewed slowly on the stove, filling his small apartment with its familiar, sense-sharpening scent. Outside, Paris was waking up, its streets already alive with the sound of delivery trucks and the murmurs of shopkeepers rolling open shutters.
He sipped his coffee by the window, gazing down at the cobblestones glistening from last night’s rain. The new brass sign above the Sarah Bernhardt Café caught the morning light, its sheen too pristine, too new. He’d started the server job there less than a week ago, stepping into a rhythm he already knew instinctively, though he wasn’t sure why.
Matteo had always been good at fitting in. Jobs like this were placeholders—ways to blend into the scenery while he waited for whatever it was that kept pulling him forward. The café had reopened just days ago after months of being closed for renovations, but to Matteo, it felt like it had always been waiting for him.
He set his coffee mug on the counter, reaching absently for the notebook he kept nearby. The act was automatic, as natural as breathing. Flipping open to a blank page, Matteo wrote down four names without hesitation:
Lucien. Elara. Darius. Amei.
He stared at the list, his pen hovering over the page. He didn’t know why he wrote it. The names had come unbidden, as though they were whispered into his ear from somewhere just beyond his reach. He ran his thumb along the edge of the page, feeling the faint indentation of his handwriting.
The strangest part wasn’t the names— it was the certainty that he’d see them that day.
Matteo glanced at the clock. He still had time before his shift. He grabbed his jacket, tucked the notebook into the inside pocket, and stepped out into the cool Parisian air.
Matteo’s feet carried him to a side street near the Seine, one he hadn’t consciously decided to visit. The narrow alley smelled of damp stone and dogs piss. Halfway down the alley, he stopped in front of a small shop he hadn’t noticed before. The sign above the door was worn, its painted letters faded: Les Reliques. The display in the window was an eclectic mix—a chessboard missing pieces, a cracked mirror, a wooden kaleidoscope—but Matteo’s attention was drawn to a brass bell sitting alone on a velvet cloth.
The door creaked as he stepped inside, the distinctive scent of freshly burnt papier d’Arménie and old dust enveloping him. A woman emerged from the back, wiry and pale, with sharp eyes that seemed to size Matteo up in an instant.
“You’ve never come inside,” she said, her voice soft but certain.
“I’ve never had a reason to,” Matteo replied, though even as he spoke, the door closed shut the outside sounds.
“Today, you might,” the woman said, stepping forward. “Looking for something specific?”
“Not exactly,” Matteo replied. His gaze shifted back to the bell, its smooth surface gleaming faintly in the dim light.
“Ah.” The shopkeeper followed his eyes and smiled faintly. “You’re drawn to it. Not uncommon.”
“What’s uncommon about a bell?”
The woman chuckled. “It’s not the bell itself. It’s what it represents. It calls attention to what already exists—patterns you might not notice otherwise.”
Matteo frowned, stepping closer. The bell was unremarkable, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand, with a simple handle and no visible markings.
“How much?”
“For you?” The shopkeeper tilted his head. “A trade.”
Matteo raised an eyebrow. “A trade for what?”
“Your time,” the woman said cryptically, before waving her hand. “But don’t worry. You’ve already paid it.”
It didn’t make sense, but then again, it didn’t need to. Matteo handed over a few coins anyway, and the woman wrapped the bell in a square of linen.
Back on the street, Matteo slipped the bell into his pocket, its weight unfamiliar but strangely comforting. The list in his notebook felt heavier now, as though connected to the bell in a way he couldn’t quite articulate.
Walking back toward the café, Matteo’s mind wandered. The names. The bell. The shopkeeper’s words about patterns. They felt like pieces of something larger, though the shape of it remained elusive.
The day had begun to align itself, its pieces sliding into place. Matteo stepped inside, the familiar hum of the café greeting him like an old friend. He stowed his coat, slipped the bell into his bag, and picked up a tray.
Later that day, he noticed a figure standing by the window, suitcase in hand. Lucien. Matteo didn’t know how he recognized him, but the instant he saw the man’s rain-damp curls and paint-streaked scarf, he knew.
By the time Lucien settled into his seat, Matteo was already moving toward him, notebook in hand, his practiced smile masking the faint hum of inevitability coursing through him.
He didn’t need to check the list. He knew the others would come. And when they did, he’d be ready. Or so he hoped.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
Frella opened her mouth to reply, but Eris clapped her hands, a mischievous grin spreading across her face.
“Right, enough lounging. Let’s play a game—something to liven things up.”
“What sort of game?” Truella asked, “Nothing that requires too much energy I trust?”
“A card game.” Eris pulled a small leather pouch from her satchel. She gave it a shake, and a deck of cards flew out, shuffling mid-air before landing neatly in her hands.
Malove smirked. “If it involves hexes, I’m in.”
Eris began to deal the cards with a flourish. Each card shimmered, pulsing faintly with magic as it landed on the rug. “Think strategy, mischief, and a touch of divination. The goal? Outsmart your opponents while dodging whatever surprises the cards throw at you.”
Frella propped herself up on one elbow, eyeing the cards warily. “Define ‘surprises.’”
“Oh, you’ll see,” Eris said with a wink, placing the deck in the centre. “Rules are simple: draw a card, play your move, and handle the consequences. Last witch standing wins.”
“Wins what?” Jeezel asked, lowering her camera.
“The satisfaction of knowing you’re the most cunning witch here.”
“Sounds like my kind of game,” Truella said, drawing the first card. She held it up to reveal a swirling vortex labelled Spell Swap. The card glowed briefly before zipping into Frella’s pile.
Frella blinked. “What just happened?”
“You’ve inherited Truella’s card,” Eris said with a grin. “And a touch of her personality for the next round.”
Frella felt an odd surge of boldness, almost manic. “Alright, my turn!” she declared, her voice sharp and bossy and much louder than she had intended. She snatched a card marked Mystic Reveal and, with a theatrical flick of her hand, unleashed a shimmering projection of her week’s questionable decisions.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she cackled. “Why does everyone need to see this?”
It wasn’t long before the game descended into chaos—spells flying, laughter erupting in snorts and shrieks. Eris croaked indignantly from her frog form while Jeezel gleefully documented the mayhem with her camera, which was now a cackling raven perched on her shoulder. Malove scowled beneath a scandalous projection of her own making, and Truella lounged, flicking daisies where her cigarette had been.
Frella smiled, the madness finally something she could embrace. Winning didn’t matter. The chaos had its own pull—wild, reckless, and oddly exhilarating.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
“That was such a pleasant trip!” Truella said with a happy sigh, “First time I’ve ever been on a coach full of Italians, but weren’t they fun! Especially that Ravioli dude.”
“I think you mean Giovanni,” Frella said with her usual eye roll.
“Giovanni, yeah, he said he’d take me on a time travel tour of the Colosseum.”
“That sounds awful! You can’t be serious!” Jeezel said with a look of horror.
“No, not back to when it was in use, but back through the ages of its abandonment. It sounds ever so interesting. Apparently there were flowers and plants growing in there that nobody had seen before, they reckoned the seeds must have come in with the exotic animals.”
“Now that does sound interesting,” Eris said, “I wonder if we could time travel back and collect some herbs and seeds to use in our spells.”
“Well we’re supposed to be on holiday, not thinking about work,” Truella glared at Eris, “But I don’t see why not. Giovanni said there was a hermitage for pilgrims inside the colosseum, and it was covered in vines, a botanical paradise in the midst of the city, he said. We could take a picnic!”
“Yeah, that does sound good,” Frella was warming to the idea.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
“Steady on, Jeezel”, Truella said, thumping her on the back. “Cough it up, girl. What on earth are you reading?”
As Jeezel composed herself, Truella picked up the book she’d been reading. “Oh, it’s a Liz Tatler! And I haven’t read that one yet. Can I borrow it when you’re finished?”
“You can borrow this one too when I’ve finished,” Eris joined in with a titter. “It’s called The Trouble With Tremendousness.”
“That’s not by…”
“Indeed it is, Frella, and no need to look so horrified. It’s quite good, actually.”
“Lounging by a pool sipping champagne sounds good though, doesn’t it,” said Truella, flicking through Jeezel’s book. “Visiting Roman ruins, reading books by the pool. We should go on a holiday. No work, just play. Let’s do it!”
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
All their owls screeched at the same time across the vast distances separating them.
Malové’s voice on them. “I just got off the phone with the Headwitch of Salem. Witch hunting season is back on, can you believe it? Didn’t we have countermeasures in place? Who was in charge of the Lump thwarting warting spell? Come at once!”
In Limerick, Finnley snickered, only mildly annoyed at the sound of all the parked owls in the mostly empty Quadrivium building. Oh, I see. It’s all gone pear-shaped, has it? Witch hunting season indeed! You’d think by now they’d have sorted their spells and counter-spells like a proper orderly lot. Honestly, if it were up to me, I’d have those countermeasures filed, organized, and triple-checked like my cleaning supplies. As for whoever’s in charge of the “Lump thwarting warting spell”—sounds like someone needs a good talking-to. Probably spent too much time nattering about and not enough focusing on their spellwork. Typical, isn’t it?
Elsewhere in the Northern forest, Eris shrugged at the sound hooting echoing. “When I told them something was wrong with Malové, it was her charge all along. Now, let’s wait and see to find someone brave enough to say it to her face.”
Somewhere and somewhen else, Truella and Frella and Jeezel were probably thinking the same, unless they got lost themselves in the Well of Crom, a surefire way to stay clear of Malové’s screeching owls.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
When Eris arrived at the meeting room, she overheard Malové requesting yet another of those delicious licorice spider. Jeezel sprang to her feet, flashing what looked like a welcoming gesture toward Eris, in fact asking to join her at the treats table.
“She arrived so tense,” Jeezel said, seizing the bowl of licorice spiders. “I was worried she’d pick up that something was off, but the incense you prepared, combined with my sigils, worked like a charm.” She winked. “Now she’s as mellow as a sweet old grandma. And I must say she’s actually enjoying the party.”
“I’m wondering if we didn’t went too far on the relaxing part,” Frella remarked as she joined her sisters at the treats table. “Malové just asked when we’re starting the karaoke.
“Now, that is spooky,” Eris replied, smirking, “but I suppose it’s in keeping with today’s theme. I think the spell she’s under is reacting to our own enchantments. By the way, where is Truella?”
Frella, sighed, slightly uneasy. “She mentioned a leak in the historic artifacts warehouse—or maybe a flood? Hard to tell with all the gurgling sounds in the background. Then the line cut off, and I haven’t been able to reach her since.”
“I’m afraid we’ll have to start without her,” said Eris, a hint of concern in her voice. “Echo,” she said to her familiar who just appeared in a rainbow swirl at the mention of its name, “do whatever it takes to reach her, see if she needs our help. She still has with her an essential element for our spell.”
Echo nodded before vanishing just as swiftly as it had arrived, leaving a trail of iridescent light in its wake.
“It’s so beautiful,” said Malové, suddenly appearing behind them and startling the three witches. “I want one too. You’re naughty to leave me alone at the big table, as if I were being punished.” She pouted playfully, her eyes darting toward the array of treats and decorations that had caught her attention.
Jeezel exchanged a quick, amused glance with Eris, who quickly composed herself. It was going to be one of those long meetings.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
The fair was in full swing, with vibrant tents and colourful stalls bursting with activity. The smell of freshly popped corn mingled with the fragrance of exotic spices and the occasional whiff of magical incense. Frella turned her attention back to setting up her own booth. Her thoughts were a swirl of anxiety and curiosity. Malové’s sudden appearance at the fair could not be a mere coincidence, especially given the recent disruptions in the coven.
Unbeknownst to Frella, Cedric Spellbind was nearby. His eyes, though hidden behind a pair of dark glasses, were fixated on Frella. He was torn between his duty to MAMA and his growing affection for her. He juggled his phone, checking missed calls and messages, while trying to keep a discreet distance. But he was drawn to her like moth to flame.
As Frella was adjusting her booth, she felt a sudden chill and turned to find herself face-to-face with Cedric. He quickly removed his glasses and their eyes met; Cedric’s heart skipped a beat.
Frella’s gaze was guarded. “Can I help you with something?” she asked, her tone icily polite.
Cedric, flustered, stammered, “I—uh—I’m just here to, um, look around. Your booth looks, uh, fascinating.”
Frella raised an eyebrow. “I see. Well, enjoy the fair.” She turned back to her preparations, but not before noticing a fleeting look of hurt in Cedric’s eyes.
Cedric moved away, wrestling with his conflicting emotions. He checked to make sure his tracker was working, which tracked not just Frella’s movements but those of her companions. He was determined to protect her from any potential threat, even if it meant risking his own standing with MAMA.
As the day progressed, the fair continued to buzz with magical energy and intrigue. Frella worked her booth, engaging with curious tourists, all suitably fascinated with the protective qualities of hinges. Suddenly, Frella’s attention was drawn away from her display by a burst of laughter and squeals coming from nearby. Curiosity piqued, she made her way toward the source of the commotion.
As she approached, she saw a crowd had gathered around a small, ornate tent. The tent’s entrance was framed by shimmering curtains, and an enchanting aroma of lavender and spices wafted through the air. Through the gaps in the curtains, Frella could see an array of magical trinkets and curiosities.Just as she was about to step closer, a peculiar sight caught her eye. Emerging from the tent was a girl wearing a rather large cloak and closely followed by a black cat. The girl looked bewildered, her wide eyes taking in the bustling fairground.
Frella, intrigued and somewhat amused, approached the girl. “Hello there! I couldn’t help but notice you seem a bit lost. Are you okay?”
The girl’s expression was a mix of confusion and wonder. “Oh, hello! I’m Arona, and this is Mandrake,” she said, bending down and patting the black cat, who gave a nonchalant twitch of his tail. “We were just trying to find the library in my time, and now we’re here. This isn’t a library by any chance?”
Frella raised her eyebrows. “A library? No, this is a fair—a magical fair, to be precise.”
Arona’s eyes widened further as she looked around again. “A fair? Well, it does explain the odd contraptions and the peculiar people. Anyway, that will teach me to use one of Sanso’s old time-travelling devices.”
Truella wandered over to join the conversation, her curiosity evident. “Time-travelling device? That sounds fascinating. How did you end up here?”
Arona looked sheepish. “I was trying to retrieve a rare book from a past century, and it seems I got my coordinates mixed up. Instead of the library, I ended up at this… um … delightful fair.”
Frella chuckled. “Well, don’t worry, we can help you get back on track. Maybe we can find someone who can help with your time-travelling predicament.”
Arona smiled, relieved. “Thank you! I really didn’t mean to intrude. And Mandrake here is quite good at keeping me company, but he’s not much help with directions.”
Mandrake rolled his eyes and turned away, his disinterest in the conversation evident.
As Frella and Truella led Arona to a quieter corner of the fair, Cedric Spellbind observed the scene with growing interest. His eyes were glued to Frella, but the appearance of the time-travelling girl and her cat added a new layer of intrigue. Cedric’s mission to spy on Frella had just taken an unexpected turn.
In reply to: The Incense of the Quadrivium’s Mystiques
“Wait! Look at that one up there!” Truella grabbed Rufus’s arm. “That cloth hanging right up there by the rafters, see it? Have you got a torch, it’s so dark up there.”
Obligingly, Rufus pulled a torch out of his leather coat pocket. “That looks like…”
“Brother Bartolo!” Truella finished for him in a whisper. “Why is there an ancient tapestry of him, with all those frog faced nuns?”
Rufus felt dizzy and clutched the bannisters to steady himself. It was all coming back to him in a rush: images and sounds crowded his mind, malodorous wafts assailed his nostrils.
“Why, whatever is the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Come, come and sit down in my room.”
“Don’t you remember?” Rufus asked, with a note of desperation in his voice. “You remember now, don’t you?”
“Come,” Truella insisted, tugging his arm. “Not here on the stairs.”
Rufus allowed Truella to lead him to her room, rubbing a hand over his eyes. He was so damn hot in this leather coat. The memories had first chilled him to the bone, and then a prickly sweat broke out.
Leading him into her room, Truella closed and locked the door behind them. “You look so hot,” she said softly and reached up to slide the heavy coat from his shoulders. They were close now, very close. “Take it off, darling, take it all off. We can talk later.”
Rufus didn’t wait to be asked twice. He slipped out of his clothes quickly as Truella’s dress fell to the floor. She bent down to remove her undergarments, and raised her head slowly. She gasped, not once but twice, the second time when her eyes were level with his manly chest. The Punic frog amulet! It was identical to the one she had found in her dig.
A terrible thought crossed her mind. Had he stolen it? Or were there two of them? Were they connected to the frog faced sisters? But she would think about all that later.
“Darling,” she breathed, “It’s been so long….”
