Surprise Visit

Saying goodbye to Christie had been largely unremarkable, other than discovering that she made failing to suppress a yawn look cute. There hadn’t been any more surprises from her lord father either, and his RS remained at 0. Which made it less than surprising that John had failed the bonus objective.

He was kinda curious if Lord Chastain-Wessel’s RS would now read ‘1’. If not, that would confirm that display as also being faked. Unfortunately, the Quest completion window had come up just after the door closed and his and Christie’s nameplates vanished. Her RP had increased by 4 to 52 over the evening.

He also wanted to know how close that EXP put Christie to Leveling Up, but his only way of checking would probably get him skinned by cartel thugs. Actually, now that John thought about it, her getting that Level could also get him skinned by said thugs. He had no idea how it felt to anyone else. He should probably try to set up a grinding session with Qhila to check as soon as possible…

On the topic of Qhila, he did have a few other things he wanted to ask her, so while making for the closest Barrier Alley, he sent her a text.

[John]: Can you tell me anything about House Chastain-Wessel, Abyssal Normandy or CW Industries?

[Qhila]: Mostly what’s on the Librarian website plus Abyss common sense stuff. Do you want a general rundown or are you asking for a particular thing? Are you thinking of joining them?

That actually hadn’t occurred to him, but Qhila did have a point. John didn’t really feel like he had much of a read on Christie’s father, but since the Gamer was definitely staying friends with Christie, he was going to have some sort of relationship with the Abyssal noble. Joining his guild might be a way to get on the sigilcaster’s good side.

On the other hand, all John actually knew about the guild, or noble house or whatever, right now was that it could get people skinned by cartel thugs. Granted, it was done to someone who Lord Chastain-Wessel had implied was absolutely vile, but John wasn’t keen on skinning anyone for any reason.

[John]: I wasn’t until you mentioned it. But it turns out one of my mundane schoolmates has a very not mundane Lord Chastain-Wessel as an adoptive father…

[Qhila]: That sounds weird… I would keep my distance, a mundane getting mixed up in Abyssal business rarely ends well for the mundane…

[John]: Yeah that’s not happening. She’s been pariah marked by the cunt at the top of the social hierarchy and I’m basically her only friend. Plus, her lord father made some thinly veiled threats about what would happen if I hurt her, and I’m pretty sure he’d consider abruptly cutting contact to be hurting her.

[Qhila]: ... You’re a sucker for hopeless cases, you know?

That brought John to vividly recall her failed attempt to hide her appreciation when he had used Academic Capacity to learn Low Draconic, or her affectionate tone when she called him a heroic fool earlier today.

[John]: Maybe you can yell at my mom for how she raised me if the two of you manage to meet :P I still want to know what you can tell me about all that though.

[Qhila]: Right. I can’t tell you what skeletons they have in which closets, but nobody gets as big as they are, or stays that big for as long as they have, without accumulating some. House Chastain-Wessel has ruled Abyssal Normandy since the middle ages, but in the last few centuries, they have mostly been known for owning CW Industries. That’s the Abyss’ foremost commercial supplier of sigil magic and Artificial Spirit based products, and an A-list business guild. According to the Librarians, the mundane-facing part of the business is supposed to be some robotics stuff. I guarantee they’re involved with some sort of money laundering outfit on the mundane side as well though.

That money laundering stuff was probably where the cartels came into the picture…

[John]: Well at least we know they do other things that have people skinned for making a child ‘witness something no child should’. Do you know anything about an Archibald Chastain-Wessel, or a Norman Reversal, I think it was called?

[Qhila]: The name rings a bell, but I can’t recall any details. He isn’t on the Librarian website, but the Norman Reversal is. The official story is that the Ducal seat and the main bloodline had faded into a figurehead position for a few generations, but for some reason when one Duke died without legitimate heirs, they dug up a bastard grandson from somewhere instead of just passing the title to a great nephew. Twenty odd years later, that bastard grandson, now Duke Arcath II, decided that he wasn’t going to stay a figurehead and used a power struggle between two non-noble company executives to seize power for himself. That turned into a bloody affair and left most of the previous leadership and all Chastain-Wessels except the duke dead. He proceeded to legitimize some bastards, but their names, or even how many, aren't listed so he has probably ‘requested’ that their information isn’t put on the Librarian website.

John pondered that for a bit. It would seem that this Duke Arcath was probably the ‘chessmaster’ that ‘Chessmaster’s Eye’, the title in Lord Chastain-Wessel’s second Observe sheet, referred to. He also wanted to ask about the not putting information on the website thing, but before he had a question to that effect typed up, he got another text.

[Qhila]: Now, the official story is the official story, but this one kinda smells. While it’s a public secret that the rich and powerful can have information omitted on the Librarian website, the stuff they do put up is usually either legit or very widely believed to be. But this section has a lot of details that don’t make a lot of sense. I’m going to look into this a bit, I know a few places that sometimes have good information that the Librarians don’t. It’s mixed in with a sea of garbage and technomancer pranks though, otherwise I’d just send you the links so you could look around too…

Now that sounded like a few mundane online communities John was aware of… The thought of getting told to ‘lurk moar’ for misidentifying a spell or calling a wyvern a dragon brought John a slight chuckle.

[John]: Thanks, I really appreciate that. Before you do that though, there’s two other things I wanted to ask.

[John]: Actually, there’s three…

[Qhila]: Sure. I could use the distraction anyways.

’Distraction from what, I wonder?’ John had barely had that thought when he realized that distracting himself from unpleasant memories described a large chunk of his waking hours for the past couple of years. With the cute kobold’s life having been far worse than anything he had been through, he felt a pang of guilt at even having thought the question.

While writing his next text, he popped out of the Barrier Alley in the old park. A few steps towards the entrance to the Alley that would take him home, he realized that he had an opportunity to do something that would only take a quick detour.

[John]: “1) How difficult is it to fool assensing?
B) Could you do me a favor and set tomorrow afternoon aside for EXP farming? I need to know how leveling up through my system works for other people, ASAP.
III) What’s up with the weird overlaps between mundane fiction and the Abyss? Like Warhammer somehow meaning rat ogres might show up spontaneously.”

[Qhila]: “Why would you number your list like that?? Draconic doesn’t even have Roman numerals!!”

John chuckled to himself as he continued jogging down the Barrier Alley. Taking a moment to find the draconic symbol that looked like an uppercase ‘I’ was absolutely worth it.

[Qhila]: “Insane enumeration aside, I’m not really the right person to ask about the first one since I’m pretty bad at assensing. But as far as I know it’s simultaneously super easy and super hard. Basically, people who have a stronger aura than you or more practice at deception, in general, than you have at assensing will unconsciously skew what you feel towards what they would like you to feel. The bigger the difference, the bigger the skew. That goes for both actual disguise shit and for people who just want to seem more confident. Deliberately messing with it on the other hand is, as far as I know, very difficult. Similarly to transmutation on the fly. That goes for your own aura, for other people’s auras, and for messing with spells and magical objects that don’t have masking ‘built in’, so to speak.”

John hadn’t exactly needed more evidence that Lord Chastain-Wessel was powerful and dangerous. But the nobleman messing with Observe had reminded John of someone else whose results were almost certainly false: the ‘Totally Normal Schoolgirl at school that was talking to Kim Moon. Who had appeared to be *Level... John didn’t remember exactly, somewhere in the high teens. Based on what Qhila said, either Marisa was wrong about Wentworth being the only powerful person at Ashcroft or that girl had the backing of someone powerful. Someone powerful like the True Dragon that Qhila feared was involved with the Moon Clan.

[Qhila]: You making me stronger is a favor to you? That aside, the timing is… a little inconvenient but doable. Why the rush to learn that specifically?

[John]: Well… Long and short of it, I got some EXP for Christie today. And I learned that if I want to keep my skin where it is, I am very much not to introduce her to the Abyss. So I need to know if I have to avoid that kind of reward like the plague…

[Qhila]: I see.

[Qhila]: The answer to your last question is Grimm Permeation. I don’t know how it works, not my area of magic theory so to speak, but the collective thoughts, feelings and beliefs of mortals, especially demihumans, affect the Abyss. Since there are a lot more mundanes than there are Abyssals, it’s mostly mundane cultural stuff. Famously, black skinned orcs and goblins started being born after some mundane novel got popular. Meanwhile, again for reasons I don’t know, things from the Abyss show up in mundane fiction fairly often. Except it’s usually just part of the thing that shows up, with too many similarities to be a coincidence but too many differences to be quite the same thing.

[John]: So if a book or show or game with monsters in it gets popular, the monsters start showing up in Natural Barriers eventually?

[Qhila]: Usually, yes. Sometimes, it causes an already existing, very similar type of creature to start changing to match the fictional one more closely.

[John]: I see. One last thing.

[John]: Knock Knock.

With that, John slipped into her barrier. Momentary curiosity about the name of the barrier, now that he could read it, caused him to stop for a moment to Observe it before pulling aside the manhole cover. He was just expecting something akin to ‘Qhila’s Nest’, causing a double take and a chuckle when he found it to be ‘Keep Out, Trespassers Will Be Blown Up’.

John climbed down the ladder and was just in time to see Qhila emerge from deeper in her Nest as he turned around to face the ‘correct’ door. She looked confused. “Hi John. I thought you would be at home?”

“I was on my way home when I passed through the park and decided that a 15ish minute detour was completely worth it to hug you goodnight.”

“That’s silly…” Qhila was suddenly busy studying the wall, but looking to the side failed to conceal the pinkish hue creeping into her cheeks, and John had caught a glimpse of her eyes lighting up before she averted her gaze.

He still felt like teasing her a little though. “Well, if you don’t want one, I-”

He was interrupted by Qhila holding out her arms in the universal gesture for offering or requesting a hug, while the red in the kobold’s cheeks grew more pronounced. Chuckling to himself, he closed the distance and went down on one knee to hug her.

She grabbed on and squeezed herself more tightly against him than expected, as though he had been gone and dearly missed for weeks rather than half a day. Of course John didn’t mind in the slightest that she pressed herself against him. Especially not that she did it so tightly that he could vaguely feel the shape of her two small breasts pancaked against his chest through their clothes. So he reciprocated the tightness of the embrace with one arm, while stroking her back with the other hand.

After a short while, something occurred to John and he asked, semi-jokingly, “You know, since we’re saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ with hugs now, dropping by to give you one means I should actually give you three. Do we need to let go and restart twice for it to count, or is one long hug okay?”

“Dummy.” Qhila’s response and giggle were both somewhat muffled by her nuzzling her face into the crook where his neck and shoulder met.

They stayed like that for a couple of minutes before getting rudely interrupted by John’s phone, playing a particular call tune he had set to his mom’s number. “Sorry, I’ve gotta take this.”

He stopped stroking Qhila’s back to pick up the phone. “Hey-” Noticing that he had accidentally started in Low Draconic, he faked a cough, cleared his throat and tried again in English, ”[Hey Mom, what’s up?]”

“[Hi sweetie. You’re on your way home, right?]”

John immediately went tense, which Qhila reacted to by pulling away enough to see his face. Brenda’s tone was off, the casual calm was very obviously **** and there was tension beneath it. To the best of his judgment, it was frustration or anger, though not at him, mixed with worry. Also, there was no reason for her to wonder where he was yet, even with the detour he would’ve been home no later than 5 minutes past the expected time. The advantage of planning travel time with a buffer. “[Yeah. I’ll be home in, uh, 15-20 minutes. Is everything okay?]”

There was a suspiciously long pause before Brenda responded, “[Just come home as soon as you can, sweetie.]”

“[Okay, see you soon.]” John hung up, put the phone away and pulled away from the hug. “Sorry, Qhila, I’ve gotta go home.”

“Is everything okay? Do you need my help?”

Qhila’s tone of concern and desire to help him was touching, but John shook his head. “My house is too far from the Alley to barrier hop, and this might be a mundane thing, but thanks. But I do need to figure out what sort of Abyssal security can be put in a place where mundanes live, so if you’ve got any ideas, I’d love to hear that tomorrow.”

“MOM?” John yelled the moment he got the back door open and was met with silence. Feeling worry starting to build into panic, John rushed through the house. ’Maybe she is out front?’ Before the budding panic could overtake him completely, he looked out of a window to the front yard and saw that he was right. Brenda was standing out there with two police officers.

John froze. For a moment he was taken back to when he was 12 and a pair of cops brought bad news that shattered his world.

’Get a grip, John! You’re not a kid anymore, you’ve killed rat ogres and a funguzombie boar. And they can’t drop another bomb like that when Mom is right out there talking to them!’ It could be about his grandparents though, but there was only one way to find out. So he steeled himself, clenched his fists against the trembling and marched out to find out what was going on.

The conversation outside stopped when John opened the door, but with a clearer view of his mother, he could easily see in her face, and hear in her voice, the frustrated anger she had failed to keep out of her voice. He could also see that it was directed at the officers. So, they probably weren’t there because of something happening to Sam and Liz.

The younger looking officer, an athletic Latin American in his 30s with a 5-o’clock shadow, stepped towards John and spoke in a demanding tone, “Mr. Newman? You need to come with us to the station. We have some questions regarding the **** of Frank Dickinson Jr.”

… That explained the anger, which John now shared. “The ****? What the f-”

John stopped in his tracks as, surprisingly, Sam turned the corner. The old man was talking on the phone, a bit more loudly than necessary but in a cordial tone, “-and say hello to your mother from me. Oh, and remind her to book a routine check of her hip replacement, if memory serves, it’s around that time.”

John stole a glance at the policemen looking just as surprised and Brenda looking considerably less so. Meanwhile, the voice from Sam’s phone, which was in speaker mode for some reason, responded, “I will. Take care, Dr. Miller,” then hung up. The voice was unfamiliar to John, but judging by the two police officers standing up a bit more straight at the sound, they did recognize it.

Sam turned his attention to the police officers with a smile that John could only barely tell was anything besides the old doctor’s usual friendliness. “Good evening, officers. That was Chief Emmerson; he’s having someone take a look at the incident report records, where they will find at least nine good reasons to rule this whole thing a case of self defense. Now, I know you can’t just take my word for that but there’ll be a lot less egg on your faces if you haven’t driven off with anyone when that call comes in. Meanwhile, if I’m wrong, nobody can fault you for spending an extra ten minutes taking statements, crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”

The cops shared a thoughtful glance before the older looking one, a chubby white guy in his 50s that was a dead ringer for the ‘donut stop cop’ stereotype, nodded. “True enough.” He took a notepad and a pen from his breast pocket and looked at John. “Let’s hear your version of events then.”

John took a moment to gather his thoughts, then something occurred to him to check first. “This is about what happened at school today, right? Because otherwise I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The donut cop, as John had just decided to mentally refer to him by, nodded so John continued, “Frank sucker punched me from behind while I was walking to class. Then he and four other guys from the football team moved to gang up on me, but I called them cowards for going five on one. That made Frank try to beat me up on his own; I defended myself and ended up winning the fight.”

While the officers hadn’t looked like they were buying his story uncritically at any point, it went to straight disbelief at the end, so John quickly added, “Grandpa gave me an old army manual on unarmed combat a few years ago, and I guess more of it stuck than I had realized… In any case, I’m pretty sure that me actually trying to fight back took Frank by surprise.”

While mentioning this, it occurred to John that he really should’ve checked if that thing was a Skill Book. Unfortunately, he had forgotten about it entirely until earlier today when trying to think of ways to explain his victory over Frank to his family, or to other mundanes.

The policemen still looked doubtful, but didn’t press him further on that. Possibly because Sam had nodded at the mention of the army manual, wordlessly backing John up. Instead, donut cop had a different question, “Okay, do you have any witnesses that can verify that version of events?”

“There were at least two dozen people who watched, but if they realize that talking might get them on Frank’s bad side, they’re probably gonna clam up,” John remarked dryly. “Fortunately, I have something better.”

The cop raised a brow while John fished out his phone. While he had never actually cared, he had somehow managed to pick up on, and remember, the names and handles of a few big time social media gossip mongers at school. That came in handy earlier today when he was walking to French class after the fight and decided that a recording of Frank getting his ass handed to him would make for a nice digital trophy.

Even better, the gossip had been recording Frank and the goons before the fight even began. There was a chance that she had been put up to this by Vanessa, but the meathead squad were, from this angle, so obviously waiting in ambush that it could be an opportunistic recording as well. In any case, there it was: John enters the picture from around the corner, Frank grins to his fellow henchmorons and throws the sucker punch et cetera.

It continued all the way up till John was the clear winner. Conveniently, the view of John threatening to ruin Frank’s leg was then blocked by none other than Moira, who was visibly irate despite the video showing her back. The cops watched the video with a ‘hmm’ from the older one and frown from the younger, at which point John half expected them to leave. Instead, donut cop had another question, “This looks clearly premeditated. Do you have any idea what motivated these actions?”

Brenda made a strangled sound that she transitioned into a cough. Though the mature woman rarely insulted anyone or anything, John nonetheless knew her well enough to recognize that she just bit back an insult. Whether it was aimed at Frank’s character or the Springfield Police Department’s previous work in that regard was as unclear as it was obvious that insulting either wouldn’t be a good idea at the moment.

Grandpa Sam put a comforting hand on his daughter’s shoulder and spoke more diplomatically in her stead, “Those incident reports will show that this isn’t exactly unusual behavior from young Mr. Dickinson.”

Neither of the cops seemed particularly pleased with this, but John felt like more details were only helpful in this case and added, “This time around, I think it’s because on Tuesday, I called him out while he was harassing a blind girl and he responded by tackling me and ramming his head into the wall I was standing in front of. So he probably wanted **** for me being present when he made himself look like an idiot.”

Donut cop made another note while asking, “Did you report that incident?”

At this point, Brenda could no longer contain herself. While the words chosen were fairly mild, her tone was caustic to a degree that John was half expecting damage notifications, “It has been years since we learned not to bother calling over things that didn’t require medical attention.”

The Latino officer looked like he was about to return figurative fire when they were interrupted by the police radio. It wasn’t quite loud enough for John to make out the words, but it clearly was enough for the officers since donut cop radioed back, “Roger. Mr. Newman has presented video evidence in support of that and we’re finishing up here.”

Following that, the officer flipped to a fresh page on his notepad, scribbled something and tore the page off for John. “Send a copy of the video to this number or e-mail, labeled with your name, and you can consider the issue settled unless you hear further.”

He shifted his attention from John specifically to the Newmans and Miller as a whole, though it was directed a bit more towards Sam than the rest, and continued, “Thank you for your cooperation, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Have a nice evening, Dr. Miller, Mrs. Newman, Mr. Newman.”

Once the cops drove off, Sam addressed John, “You really did give him a proper thrashing, huh?”

Rather than doubtful of John’s words, the old man had the sound of someone double checking something that seemed too good to be true, so John replied with a grin, “Yup.”