Through Stone Eyes

John stared at the illuminated symbols for a second, his fingers sliding away so he could see the whole magic circle. It was an odd effect; it was as if the majority of the card was in the shade while only the circle and the symbols within had a flashlight shining down from directly above.

“Oi, you coming?” Aeolia’s voice jolted John from reading the Observe sheet. With far more haste than was advisable given the amount of debris around, John exited the room, holding the card aloft as he passed the blackened curtain into the hallway.

“I found something interesting,” he reported, showing the card to Aeolia. She quickly grabbed the card and turned it over to examine both sides, a frown forming on her face.

“You use that info skill of yours on this?,” she asked.

“Yeah,” John replied, gesturing in front of him to indicate the still open sheet. “All Observe says is that it’s from a newly formed business and that the circle is somehow used to contact whoever owns it. It does have an Attribute and Evocation I haven’t checked yet.”

Not bothering to wait for Aeolia to tell him to, John clicked the Attribute .

Arcane Imprint: When placed upon an appropriate surface, reveal encoded information.

“So, it looks like we’ll have to place this on something to get more info out of it,” John reported as he closed the Attribute screen, “and for the Evocation...”

John read aloud the Evocation text, then closed the screens. “And that’s everything I can get from this. Do we see what this is all about, or go on with the original plan?”

Aeolia’s frown deepened as she considered whether to follow through with their original plan or investigate the card. She rubbed the sturdy rectangle between her fingers for a moment, then handed it back to John.

“We’ll stick with the plan,” she said solemnly, “I trust my brother wasn’t involved in anything that would have drawn whoever attacked us. We can look into who he was in contact with later.”

Aeolia turned and briskly headed for the exit. John followed after her, his thoughts buzzing.

‘She doesn’t want to think her brother had any part in being attacked,’ he reasoned, ‘I hope that’s the case.’ Aeolia stopped right before the exit, hand extended for John to take.

“What, no running start?” John tried to lighten the mood with a joke, though the withering glare Aeolia leveled at him quieted any further jesting. “Sorry,” he mumbled and took her hand.

Hands joined, Aeolia quickly pulled John through the false wall, seamlessly returning to the main part of the Barrier. Instead of flying, however, Aeolia spread her wings out to slowly glide down to the floor. John did his best to refrain from fidgeting as the strain began to send twinges of pain through his arm and shoulder.

‘Note to self,’ John thought as the ground slowly grew closer, ‘try to develop a flying or levitation Skill.’

When they were around a foot off the ground, a cool sensation ran down John’s arm, then Aeolia relaxed her grip. John fell the short distance and landed far more gracefully than after his last flight. Aeolia remained in the air as John’s perspective of the hallway changed; the towering walls grew less imposing and boulder sized debris turned into palm sized rubble in an instant.

John watched Aeolia float down to the floor a few feet from him, landing before she grew to her maximum size.

“Let’s get moving,” Aeolia said tersely and prowled towards the Barrier’s main chamber. John followed silently after her.

‘Okay,’ John thought, recalling what he could of the room they were heading to, ‘what would make a good target for Observe?’

Given the brief amount of time he spent in the room, and the fact that his attention had been on his distressed companion as opposed to the trappings around him, he couldn’t remember anything that stood out as much as Clay had.

‘Does it matter what I Observe when I use the recall ability?’ John continued to muse as they neared the main room. ‘Or can I just go with any random chair?’

His ponderings came to an end when the pair reached the trashed chamber. John noticed that Aeolia’s steps faltered for an instant as they entered, but she pressed on and made her way to the center of the room.

“Alright,” she said after taking a breath, leveling a gaze at John, “you need to do anything before using that ability of yours?”

“No,” John said, withdrawing the Crystal from his Inventory, the Mana storage gem now closer in size to a pebble. “But since we’ve only got a limited amount of Dark Mana, and my skill takes a lot from me too, I think I should try to find the right thing to Observe.”

Aeolia frowned. “Won’t that drain your mana?”

John shrugged. “Not by a lot. It’d take three uses to drain off a point and I can regen that in less than two minutes.”

By the look Aeolia was giving him, John knew that what he had said must have, in some way, flew in the face of normal Abyssal conventions.

“I’m guessing most people can’t just put numbers to their mana amount or how much their abilities will cost, huh?”

“No,” Aeolia said, “it’s more of a feeling for me. Like holding a bucket of water and pouring some of it out to use. Couldn’t put a number on it. Can’t really say how other people would describe it.”

“Well, guess that gives me the advantage when it comes to planning delicate things like this,” John said with a grin, a proud lilt in his voice.

Aeolia hummed in agreement, but remained silent. Taking that as a cue to get working, John began to walk the square room. Most of what remained was broken furniture: toppled chairs with their legs snapped, upturned desks with their drawers torn from their housings. Not even a worn couch had survived the ****, its cushions ripped open and padding tossed about.

John cast Observe on a few pieces of the destroyed furnishings and remaining pieces of technology, mainly broken computer monitors. Each use, however, only revealed general information, none of what remained carried a more interesting history. John made his way towards the back of the room and rounded one of the few desks that remained standing, though its drawers had all been pulled out and paperwork was scattered around it, when he saw something that stood out.

On the floor were the remains of a small plaster bust, an unblinking eye surrounded by an elaborate pattern of lines staring up at John from atop the pile of its shattered head. John placed the crystal down on the desk and knelt down to examine it, finding another mostly intact piece: a thin ear with a decidedly pointed tip. With careful movements, John scooped up the pile and placed it upon the desk.

“Let’s see if this works,” John mumbled to himself, casting Observe on the pile.

‘Could that make a difference?’ John mused, noting that this bust had meant something to its presumed owner the same way Clay had been by the leader of Aeolia’s guild.

“Hey, Aeolia,” John called out to the winged woman, “you know anything about this elven bust?”

“Bust?” she responded, drawing closer to see John hunched over the plaster pile. “Oh, Selma’s. Yeah, she picked that up on a marketplace somewhere. She fawned over the thing, always making sure to clean it. You think you’ll see something from it?”

John grimaced at the melancholic tone to Aeolia’s voice as he answered, “I think I’ll get a better look if I use something that people had a connection to. At least, I think that might be how it works. Better to start with something that’s like the first thing I used this Skill on than to try something different and waste time and Mana.”

Aeolia nodded and took a step back. John placed his left hand upon the crystal. ‘33 Dark Mana to use and 55 Mana of own. That’s 6 minutes of recall. I should probably not go all in to start. 2 minutes should be enough, and that lets me double it if I have to.’

John turned his thoughts to the crystal and, like with his knife, willed two units of Dark Mana into himself. The instant he felt the now familiar cool sensation he channeled that power, along with 18 units of his naturally generated Mana, into Observe.

The tranquil silence that meant the members of the guild were absent had been broken by the sound of cracking masonry and groaning metal, and now a number of unknown people poured into the room. From the vantage point of the far desk, unmoving elven eyes watched as the black clad people swarmed in, some moving in a coordinated fashion to remove the computers while others simply went around, ripping open desk drawers and rifling through what they contained, keeping some of the pages and discarding others.

At the entrance to the room, two figures remained as observers of the operation, while a few others moved behind them into other parts of the Barrier. One was a heavily muscled man with short blond hair, wearing a shirt that left his arms bare. His partner was a full contrast: a slender woman, hair pulled into a ponytail that left two bangs to hang from either side of her head. Her white shirt had most of its buttons open, leaving her bra cradled breasts visible while a black jacket hung loosely off her shoulder.

Something from out in the hall drew the woman’s attention and she turned her back to the room. One of the ransackers had made their way to the far desk and began to rip out the drawers. They looked right into unblinking eyes and, with a contemptuous grin, swung a withdrawn drawer. Suddenly, up became forward for a second, then everything spun around and the ground grew closer.’

John flinched as the vision ended, his sense of balance thrown off by the tumbling end of the bust. Before he could topple over, a hand pressed into his back, steadying him.

“Looks like that’s a bit of a trip, huh?” she said, her hand lingering on John’s back.

“A little bit, yeah,” John replied. “Saw how the bust got knocked off the desk and it ended when it hit the ground.”

“So you got a vision of what happened,” Aeolia said anxiously, her hand still lingering on John’s back.

“Yeah, I did,” John said. “Thanks for the save, by the way.”

“Y-yeah, no problem,” Aeolia said, hastily removing her hand. “So what did you see?”

“Bunch of guys taking all the stuff,” John reported. “They weren’t saying anything. I did see the two who took out Clay in better detail. The big guy has blond hair, and the woman has pink hair and walked around with her shirt open.”

“That’s isn’t going to be as helpful as you think,” Aeolia said. “The Abyss has a lot more variety of looks than the mundane world. Could probably take a stroll in one of the larger Barrier towns and see more than a handful of people that have pink hair and like walking around with their tits on display.”

“There are town sized Barriers?” John asked.

“Yes, even city sized ones,” Aeolia responded, then shook her head. “But we’re getting off track. Anything else?”

“Not really, sorry,” John said, lowering his head a bit. “Those two were too far away to hear if they said anything, but something grabbed the woman’s attention in the hallway. We might be able to see more if I can find something in the hall to Observe. Unless you want me to see if I can get a view at some of the stuff these guys were taking?”

Aeolia frowned in thought, weighing the two options. After a few moments she said, “Let’s go with the hall plan. I think it’s a better idea to try to see who these bastards are than to take stock of what they took.”

Aeolia didn’t wait for John to respond and turned towards the door. John followed after her, his face drawn into a worried frown.

‘She keeps avoiding the idea that someone in her guild made them a target,’ he thought. ‘I mean, yeah, trying to get more info on the attackers is a good idea, but it sounds like we might be getting into a needle in a haystack sort of situation. If there are that many people in the Abyss, will finding one or two little details be enough to track them down?’

John kept his thoughts to himself as he joined Aeolia in the hall, eyes sweeping for anything distinctive to Observe. Sadly, only the floor, wall and bits of stone debris was in the area of the doorway.

“Guess using Observe on the wall or floor are the only options,” John said. “Think I’ll go with the wall. Not sure getting the floor’s perspective is going to help, but if we need to, I can do that next.”

He drew in two mana from the Crystal and cast Observe on the wall opposite of the doorway.