Lucky Rabbit

“There are two groups, more or less working together,” Bryan said. “The first are selfish, short-sighted fools. They have money and political power, but they want more of both.” He shook his head. “The Aeris family’s refusal to take any spouse who can’t prove they have only Air mages in their family for at least three generations has created a gap between those who are eligible and those who aren’t.”

“Why do they do that?” Pandy asked, remembering Clara, who had Light magic, not Air, but who was readily accepted as Kaden’s fiancee if she chose the prince. Was the change due to Louisa, whatever had happened to produce a princess with a Nature affinity, or did they simply believe that Light was the next best thing to Air? There was also the possibility that it simply wouldn’t have been that easy in this world, but so far the game had been astonishingly accurate.

Thaniel’s father looked startled. “The elementals, of course.” He seemed to think that was sufficient, but apparently Pandy’s baffled gaze was enough to let him know it wasn’t, because he began to look confused himself.

“The ones at the palace?” he asked. That was enough to make Pandy’s brain hamsters sit up and take notice, but he went on. “Queen Nora’s husband, Otto Blackwood, was an Air elementalist. She was too busy ruling the kingdom to run the palace, so that became his task. When they bound elementals to the building, it only made sense to use Air, not Light. Not only does Air breed true more often, but that way Otto and any Air-wielding descendants would be able to maintain the contract. If at any point there are no members of the royal bloodline who have the Air affinity, the contract will be unfulfilled, and the elementals will fade. After a generation or two, they’ll die, and the palace will be nothing more than another building.”

Judging by the look on his face, this had to be common knowledge that anyone native to the country – or at least Knightmere – would know. But Pandy was stuck on one particular word. “Blackwood?” she squeaked.

Bryan nodded. “When Queen Arrabella Blackwood married Spencer Aeris, she took his name, though a branch of the Blackwood family remains closely tied to the throne. My wife, Grace, was a cousin of both the Blackwood and the Aeris families. That’s how she came to know Augustus Blackwood, and why he’s a viable option as a guardian for the boys.”

“What do they plan to do to Aug- to the chancellor? So that he’s not able to be Thaniel’s guardian?” Pandy asked, seeing an opportunity. She really needed to know what the villains were up to, and she’d definitely gotten side-tracked, but…it was about Augustus!

“Discredit him as thoroughly as possible,” Bryan said flatly. “He’s chancellor because Queen Louisa insisted, but even I know he’s not popular. They’re gathering evidence that he’s incompetent, and Thaniel running away is the final proof they need. If Augustus can’t even care for one child, why is he responsible for more than a hundred noble heirs?”

That was bad. That was definitely bad. So when Thaniel failed to show up for class in the morning, these people would demand to know why. Then, in a few days, good old Uncle Andres would show up with a Thaniel who would probably have been spoiled rotten and coached by his own father, who he loved and trusted. Thaniel would say who-knew-what about Augustus, and it would all be over.

Okay. That plot definitely needed a bunny-wrench thrown in it, but first Pandy needed to focus on the actual reason she was here. Waving at the jars, she said, “So they’re trying to either strengthen their own Air magic in order to make themselves more interesting to… Kaden? Or, no-” her mind raced through a dozen things they’d put together. “They want Louisa, Kaden, and Eleanor out, and this Duke Benedict guy in? Why him?”

Now Bryan looked shocked. “How did you-?” He shook his head. “But you’re right. Duke Benedict has promised to make exactly the changes they’re demanding, including raising some wealthy commoners to the peerage and giving existing nobles more power. He can’t be seen to be involved with any of this of course, but if Louisa and her allies, including the Blackwoods, can be caught doing or hiding something sufficiently unforgivable, Benedict will become king by default.”

Pandy frowned. “But what would be that bad?” Well, she knew one thing, but did Bryan? Did the people he was working for?

Crossing to the desk, Bryan removed a key from his pocket and slid it into the lock on a shallow drawer Pandy hadn’t even noticed. Opening the drawer, he removed a small box, which he opened and held out to Pandy. Lying inside was a dark green stone, shaped like a teardrop and burnished until it shone like dew on fresh moss.

“This stone will change the elemental affinity of anyone it’s implanted into to Nature. It was created by stealing the affinity from someone born as a Nature mage. They want to use this on Princess Eleanor, before she’s officially announced as Air.”

Pandy’s brain-hamsters came to a screeching halt. Did they not know Eleanor was already Nature? Had someone done this to her already, but forgotten to mention it to the rest of the group? Some villain was sipping sodas on a beach somewhere, and would one day sit up, snap their fingers, and say, “I knew there was something else I was supposed to do.” If they didn’t know, why had they chosen Nature magic to ‘give’ Eleanor, and what was to stop the princess from just saying someone did this to her and she was actually Air?

Of course, Pandy couldn’t say any of that, so instead she said, “Wait. Does that mean there’s someone out there with your magic in them? And what happens to the magic the person already possesses?”

He grimaced. “Yes, and…we don’t know. We’ve tried to capture the original magic before implanting the stone – in volunteers whose desire to have stronger or different magic has overcome any sense they had – but once someone is magicless,” Bryan laid a hand over the stone in his own chest, “no magic can be restored to them. They have one kind of magic, we implant a stone, and then they have a different kind or their own is strengthened. We don’t even know why it works, only that we must begin with an utterly perfect essence stone.”

Essence stone. The kind of crystal the three schools used to test their students’ affinity. The kind of crystal Pandy had stashed in an empty cookie tin in her office after completing the Squawkward Spire. That kind of stone?

But she had heard enough about this group, at least for now. There were so many questions buzzing around in her head that she couldn’t nail any of them down, so instead she said, “You said there were two groups. What’s the second?”

For the first time since he’d started talking, Bryan actually looked nervous. “They’re the Shadow Exchange, but not all of the Exchange. I don’t think most of them have any idea what’s really going on, or if they do, they see only the nobles. To them, it doesn’t matter who’s king or queen, so long as they get paid, and intrigue means more jobs at higher prices.”

He drew closer to Pandy, and this time she didn’t back away. “They follow a Dark god,” he murmured, eyes flicking around the room, as if ‘Zhery-wery’ might appear and eviscerate them both at any moment. Which wasn’t entirely out of the question, as far as Pandy could tell, and Bryan probably couldn’t recover from that kind of thing the way she could.

“They don’t speak of it, but they had to show me some of the original texts. They seek a certain stone,” he touched his chest again, “that I believe these others are based on. My many-times great-grandmother was an Avington, and for many generations, the crystal she brought with her was known as Pandora’s Stone.”

Pandy had to hold in the startled jump caused by hearing her own name, but fortunately Bryan didn’t notice.

“That stone is the one I used to save Thaniel, and I think,” his voice sank even lower, “that it may be the one they’re looking for. I told them I made the one I had, but it was an accident, a fluke when an experiment went wrong. The first group wants it, but not desperately. Not enough to tear it from him so long as they know my cooperation hinges upon his life. If the second group learns of it… Or at least learns that it’s not fabricated, but likely predates the founding of the kingdoms and looks precisely like the one they so desperately desire, nothing will keep them from taking it.”

Pandy’s possibly-slightly-living heart climbed into her throat. A lot of people knew about Thaniel’s heartstone now. Hopefully all of them were either Augustus’s allies or had bought Bryan’s lie about where the stone came from, but it would only take the wrong person getting a glimpse of it to lead to Very Bad Things. The one glimmer of hope was that a number of the bad guys had now seen Pandy-as-Thaniel’s false heartstone, so even if someone on the good side slipped up, hopefully they wouldn’t believe them.

“And you wanted them to bring him here?” There was no keeping the accusatory tone from her voice, and Pandy didn’t even try.

Bryan flinched. “I had no choice,” he insisted. “I couldn’t go to him, and Flit and Tyne must be fading fast. They need help, and only the first group, the wealthy and the nobles, come to this house regularly. I knew they would check the stone and his blood, but I had to hope they wouldn’t know what they were looking at.” His gaze caught hers, begging for understanding. “I failed him…once and then a hundred times since. It can’t all be for nothing. It can’t.”

Pandy had heard this argument before. Well, not the exact one, with the Dark god and the magic-changing-stones and the dying elementals, but the idea that after someone invested a certain amount of time or money or effort into something, they had to keep going or it would all be wasted. There was even a name for it. Sink Ghost Forestry? No, that didn’t sound right.

“So the group that runs this place is the one that just wants to kick Queen Louisa off the throne and prevent Kaden from becoming king, all so they can be really rich and important,” Pandy summarized. “In order to do that, they figured out how to steal someone’s magic and give it to someone else, because they got hold of the Avington murder notes, and you’re helping them?”

Bryan opened his mouth to respond, but Pandy wasn’t done. “Then there’s the other group who’re wearing the first one like a big ugly hat, and they want to, like, summon a Dark god or something with this ancient stone they’re looking for or maybe trying to recreate, and you’re helping them, too?”

It took a solid three seconds for Bryan to make a noise, and when he did, he said, “No.” Just that. No. Pandy stared at him, and he sighed.

“They figured most of this out before I got here. I was able… I mean, I did suggest some new ideas regarding the Avington research, but I only gave them enough to make them believe it was worth bringing you – Thaniel, I mean – here. It was all for him. I won’t help them kill anyone, and once I’ve used them to find the solution to Thaniel’s problem, I’m going to destroy this place.”

He looked around, a rather grim smile on his face. “There are things here which are quite stable so long as they’re kept apart, but bring them together and-” He mimed an explosion, and Pandy’s eyes widened.

Without Pandy’s interference, the events of Gacha Love would have begun a bit less than two years from now, when the main characters were sixteen to eighteen years old. While there were plenty of deaths in the game, there was only one explosion that Pandy was aware of. Ceanna, Bastian’s villainess, mentioned that several members of her family died in an explosion two years earlier.

At the time, Bastian did something very Bastian-like and made her a batch of cookies, and it was this simple kindness that made her almost rabidly jealous of anyone who got close to him in the future. Ceanna was also the only magicless character in Gacha Love, and now Pandy wondered if that was a simple coincidence, or if her being magicless somehow tied back into what was going on now.

As in real life, Bryan had been abducted before the raid on his estate. Just like the real Bryan, game-Bryan must have agreed to go and help because he wanted to be able to save his son, Thaniel. Thaniel then died in the raid. That left game-Bryan no reason to help, so he destroyed some or all of this mansion, setting back this part of the conspiracy enough that Kaden was able to come to power without any great difficulty. Maybe because the stone meant to ‘convert’ Eleanor’s magic was also destroyed, and without Bryan and the research contained in this room, they couldn’t recreate it? Or was this Duke Benedict also killed in the explosion, and so they had no head on which to hang the crown?

But today’s still-living Bryan was looking at her, and she knew she had to say something, so she nodded. “I’ll take all of this back to Au- My- The Queen?” Who did Bryan think she worked for, exactly? But he just nodded back and turned toward the laboratory door.

“I have to return to bed,” he told her. “You should go back soon, too. I often can’t sleep and end up here, working, but if you’re caught, they’ll immediately go to check on Thaniel, and discover your ruse. There are…more things to fear in this house than men and Bound.”

He laid his hand on the doorknob, then hesitated and looked at her once more. “There’s one more thing Augustus should know. Thaniel’s rabbit. Does he still have it?”

Wordless, Pandy nodded, and Bryan winced.

“It’s a Bound. Not a strong one. An Echowretch, I think, though it was the strangest one I ever caught. It had no corporeal form at all. But when… If something happens to me, it shouldn’t be near Thaniel. It wouldn’t go mad, not like an Unbound Demon, but it would flee the body, which would immediately begin to decompose, if it hasn’t already. Thaniel shouldn’t see that.”

Pandy chomped down on her lip, holding in the tangled words that threatened to spill out. She just nodded again, and Thaniel’s father slipped from the room.