[quote]"Welcome to my family's estate. I need to go to the library to scan through a few books. Feel free to explore as you feel necessary. There's likely a few more servants around here, and... my mother."

There was a loud clatter as the statue of the man fell off the stage, crashing against the floor and ripping through the sombre silence that hung over the ballroom.

“Grit! They’re here!”

As the intruder dove through an archway leading towards the kitchens, its face split into a wide manic grin.

She squinted at the holographic projection searching around. “Look here’s us I assume, though it may just have been more statue citizens. Map seems somewhat incomplete when it comes to private properties it seems.” With the map open she zoomed it in to their present location displaying a splattering of blue dots around her red one.[/quote]

The reverberation faded from the high-ceilinged walls, the tapestries and gold-gilded murals that shimmered at the edges of the ballroom, and all seemed silent and still.

On the floor before the stage, the stone shape of a once-lively servant was thankfully intact; his head was upturned, his face fearful, his legs in a poised position of movement -- as if he had been walking quickly and with purpose across the stage, caught off-guard by the sight of something at the ceiling just in the moment of his transformation. Clutched in his stone arm was a stolid tome of a book, leather-bound and ancient. In the library, Vincent might discover it missing from its space on the shelf: [i]Regarding Dreams and the Application of the Soul[/i] by Rounard Skip. The servant's soulstone was missing.

On Berry's map, her own red dot was clearest and bright; surrounding her were the paler pink dots of her comrades, one of which -- Vincent -- was quickly making its way across the ballroom and through another door, on its way to the library. Vincent's dot seemed to be a cluster of multiple pink dots, two or three: Berry was seeing the other soulstones he carried with him.

There was another clustered pink dot moving quickly at the edge of Berry's screen, but it didn't match anyone she could see with her eyes. It darted like a cat along the stage, through another doorway, ducked through the shadows past Vincent (in Vincent's peripheral vision it was shimmering and translucent like a distant reflection) and it dove into the kitchen.

The kitchen was enormous, all stainless steel and polished white. A statue of the cook stood with a rolling pin in her strong carved hands, hunched over a drying spread of crackled pie dough. Her fierce expression and wisps of stony hair were illuminated by the pink glow of the soulstone that hovered in front of her chest.

Here in the kitchen, enough food could be found to provide a small feast: dates and plums, fresh breads and meat dumplings, some leftover eggs benedict from that morning, and a fridge full of truffles, caviar and fine raw steaks. In the oven were cooked, cold blueberry pies.

In the library, everything at first seemed to be just as Vincent had last left it -- save for that missing tome, and for the pool of blood left in the middle of the floor. A table had been knocked over, and the back of a chair splintered and toppled. Spatters of blood trailed through the library and stopped at an open window at the far end.

Back in the ballroom, the portal drifted shut. Roy the robot stepped forward with a whirring noise, and his head swiveled back and forth as he scanned the room. "Something's here that's not a Grit," he warned them, and he pointed toward the offstage door, where the second pink-clustered dot had exited toward the kitchen. "It's got a heat signature." His head turned again, and his glowing eyes cast a pale illumination on Berry and Moth. "So where to? We're tracking down your friends and family, right? Did you decide whether to bring them back now or just grab the stones and run?"