Ruli had nothing.
Kire frowned, seeing the helplessness creep into Ruli after he reacted to what she had seen in the forest. Ysaryn looked the way she felt at the moment. How could Ruli just give up on Envy now? And yet, Kire remembered how she had first met him, the self-imposed, guilt-ridden exile, closing himself off for the ‘sin’ he had committed of letting Akuma in. A shadow of a man. Gods, she did want to snap at someone, something—but not yet. Not now. Gavin, too, seemed like he was about to be lost, himself, seeing how one of his mentors had disappeared, and the other wasn’t putting his foot forward to get on top of the situation. But from the look in the lad’s eyes, he at least wasn’t as ready to stop thinking of solutions.
“I’ll hunt down something. His hair, maybe his pipe, [i]something.[/i] I’ll comb his room if I have to,” the young Gemini said. 

Kire nodded. “Look, she may be a goddess, but for now she seems most powerful within the confines of the forest. A god with limitations is an enemy with weaknesses. We’ll find it.” She looked at Narda, who had been gazing at the forest, uncertain. “We’ll find it,” she said again, more firmly, both to convince her friend, and, in part, to convince herself. She frowned again as Ysaryn berated Ruli’s lack of initiative. “We need everyone to put their heads together here,” she said to him. “Alright? We’ll figure something out. Narda, Daryll, you two go on back to the town. I have something to take care of here.” 

The town was still wrapped in a haze of sleep. Narda and Daryll felt it immediately. “Then it’s not Lyta,” Daryll said. 
“The next question then: is it the goddess?” Narda grunted, narrowing her eyes as she did her best to focus through the fog. “I have a feeling the mayor knows more than he lets on.”
“And I don’t think the goddess has anything to do with this town,” Daryll said, similarly frowning as he looked around. “We haven’t had a single vision since getting here. 
The sleepiness looked worse this time, too. None of the guards accosted them, and anyone who looked their way had glazed eyes, as if already half-dreaming and assuming they, too, were part of it. 

Narda heard a cry. Turning, she just saw a familiar plump figure run away, and immediately afterward the people nearest to where she had been standing slumped over, a few of them even snoring as they sank down onto the ground. “Isn’t that the mayor’s…” Daryll began, before a big yawn interrupted his statement. “The mayor’s…” With each attempt to finish the sentence, Daryll slowed down, until finally he, too, had succumbed to sleep. 
The giantess would have helped him up and shaken him awake, but she, too, blinked slowly at the spot the woman had left behind. “Y-you go on ahead, Ysaryn,” she grunted, the words slurred as if drunk. “Bring her…bring her here…” 

The mayor’s wife didn’t go far, torn between the fear of being caught and the fear of a harsher penalty. She knew she couldn’t very well go back to her house, knowing that the strangers had just been there. After they had left to fetch the Lyta girl, she had grown so nervous that, upon her husband’s frantic return from the Glenn house, she had put even him to sleep. The effects would normally fade after a while, but she had to keep it up. There was no way she could run from the Crown. And the peculiar woman with the unearthly features that the giantess and Wyvern had brought with them didn’t even succumb to the sleep at all. It was only a matter of time. 

Realizing this, the woman stopped running and turned. “Please—don’t be angry at us,” she pleaded, kneeling. “My husband and I—we didn’t know what to do when the—when this [i]thing[/i] started happening to me,” she said, sobbing. “It had started happening about a month ago. Not long after Her Majesty got her throne back. My husband, he said I would be taken away. We know what the Crown does to people like the Gemini, t-to people with uncontrollable magic.” She sniffled, and pointed to the direction of her house. “The lords of these realm, even the lady Countess’s own father, they had sent vassals, messengers here. First time it happened, I had put them to sleep by accident. The next ones, w-we, I-I mean.” She sobbed again. “It just got worse from there. We were afraid the next ones that would come would punish us a-and all we could think to do was keep them here.”
--
Heeding Ysaryn’s advice not to go back to Uvano just yet, Kire took Gavin to Narda’s and asked where Envy had stayed the night. The servants had yet to clean and replace the bedding, so Gavin scoured the room for any traces his mentor had left behind. “I almost wish he and Narda really did sleep together, there’d be, er, more to get out of it,” the lad said with a nervous chuckle. Kire didn’t chastise the crass remark, seeing the concentration on Gavin’s face, knowing he was trying to sort through his own desperate thoughts. He found a few hairs, though he paused and wondered if he should just bring the pillowcases and sheets with him anyway. 
“Would getting Kartaian blood work at all?” Kire wondered aloud. “Any Kartaian blood? Since I doubt there would be any other Kartaians this side of the gate.”
Gavin’s face crumpled. As Ikegai’s unwilling servant, he’d had more than his fair share of dealing with Kartaian bodies and using their blood to turn them into dolls. “I—it could. But you can’t exactly find that lying around here—or on our side. And it works better if you’re blood-relation. But again—you know.”
“I know.” Kire grunted. “It was just a thought.” 

Gavin looked at the anger and frustration in Kire’s eyes and shuddered; it almost reminded him of another pair of eyes that had murder in them, red irises like embers, on an eerily perfect face. Kire was, after all, the type of person to hunt down her quarry across two worlds, slaughter her way through an army of dolls, and killed her enemy at the expense of her own life. Even if Kire wasn’t Akuma, Akuma’s own cold hatred had its origins somewhere, a twisted version of something that nevertheless had real roots. “I’m scared, Kire.” He admitted. “Envy’s gone and—did you see the look on Ruli’s face? It’s like he’s just—he’s here but he’s not. And he’s usually the biggest smartass with all the answers.”
Kire sighed, and the knife-sharp anger Gavin saw in her eyes dissolved into something softer. More tired, more worried. “I know. I saw.” She stepped closer to him and lay a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’ll have to prepare yourself. I know you looked to both of them for guidance, but you might have to take on more of a burden now, yourself. At least on your side of the gate. But you are a capable young man, and a capable mage.”
Gavin nodded, though he didn’t look convinced. “What’s our next move?”
“We wait for Ysaryn to come back with the others, and then we’ll see about trying to get Ruli’s head back into the game for this. I need to talk to Risa and the goddess’s worshippers on your side, and the priests Ysaryn mentioned. And maybe go back to see the Raielwen again.”

They returned to camp, where Myka reported that, oddly enough, there wasn’t much trouble stirring among the townsfolk confined within. The ones they had taken from the forest look more clear-eyed than they had been earlier, and none of them had set anything aflame just yet. “I don’t know Kire. It feels—weird. Eerie,” the [i]Wench[/i] captain said. “Like they’re waiting quietly for something.”
“We’ll just have to take advantage of their compliance for now,” Kire said, rubbing her nape. “They’re at least making good on their promise to wait for me to make a decision. In the meantime, perhaps a makeshift temple. Not to her, but to the patron deities of this province. If they pray to them either way, that might be enough of a compromise.”