[center][h3]Team Mao[/h3]
[b]Location:[/b] Al Mamoon Northeast - Rocket Inc.
Midna’s [@DracoLunaris], Sectonia’s [@Archmage MC], Mao’s [@Potemking], Jesse’s [@Zoey Boey], Joker, Fox, Necronomicon, Braum[/center]

Shadow and Ciella, all too eager to tear into one another, launched into an all-out bout without delay. Throughout the northern half of the arena the duel between harpy and hedgehog, a cat-and-mouse chase in constant motion, made for quite the spectacle. It took the Agito only seconds to get a grasp on her opponent’s strategy, but stopping it was an altogether different beast. Again and again Shadow launched himself in a homing Spin Attack, quickly closing the distance on Ciella no matter how she dodged and easily evading her arrows. Well before he entered the range of her conjured wing-arms, however, he and Nastasia vanished into a vortex of distorted space, becoming an untargetable crumplezone of brutal damage to chew through anything in his way. Even a glancing blow from the mobile anomaly shredded skin and feathers, spraying blood into the air to shower down on the sand below.

Yet even in the midst of her mad fury, Ciella still possessed her cunning streak. A well-timed burst of speed right before the Chaos Burst hit her would bear her to safety, allowing her to charge an arrow or summon an ice boulder to try and hit Shadow as he emerged. After taking one too many such opportunistic strikes (which is to say, one) Shadow began warping and throwing Chaos Lances after re-appearing. Though Ciella possessed impressive firepower of her own and did not mind a shootout, Shadow’s efforts kept her on her toes. “Grr!” the Agito growled, wiping blood from her lip after a lance’s explosion scarred her face.

“What’s the matter?” Shadow taunted. “Having trouble with my strategy?”

“Your ‘strategy’ is as brainless as it is repetitive! Cease this insipid flailing and fight me,” Ciella threw back.”

Shadow smirked. “You’re calling me a spammer? Well, if it’s so cheap and easy, why can’t you do anything about it?”

Trading such barbs every so often, their fight raged on. Their single-minded focus on one another at the very least gave the victims of Ciella’s devastation time to regroup and rearm themselves. A little too eager to return to and end the battle, the Phantom Thieves paused at the edge of the destroyed section of colosseum floor. Looking back, their team seemed to be in pretty bad shape. Most of them needed healing before they could fight again, and not the gradual, piecemeal regeneration offered by Sectonia’s items, either. If the Thieves rejoined the fight right now, they realized they would be alone. Mona and Fox turned to their leader. “What’s the plan, Joker?” the feline asked.

The young man had already decided. “This is too serious for us to go it alone and leave them high and dry. If that lunatic does another wave attack, our allies might be done for. We’ll help ‘em out.”

Together the three headed back to the others. Mao lay front and center, seemingly on his last legs, and Mona hurried to heal him. “Joker, all the way?” When his leader nodded, Mona understood his task and called upon his Persona. Zorro manifested in a burst of azure flame, his dancing blade whipping up a restorative Diarahan. Unlike Diarama, this spell offered a full heal, but it consumed so much mana that Mona would be completely unable to participate in the fight itself. In just a few casts he’d go from a refreshed reinforcement to even more drained than his friends. Nevertheless, he moved between his fallen allies, casting one Diarahan after another. Gunnar and even Fuse, brought to near death right after his friend hearting by Ciella’s Veil Piercer, were quickly brought back to full. “You newbies better make the most of this!” he told them, having assumed by gleam-free eyes that Fuse was a newfound ally just like the Dragonborn.

Mona paused when he came to Jesse. The redhead seemed only lightly hurt, thanks to her barrier, but she was in intense conversation with the remains of Sven. “Oh right, that might work!” he murmured, watching as the spirit resonated with Jesse’s words. It reached out with threads of prismatic light, binding itself to her, and in the span of a few short moments a new Striker had been recruited.

[center][hider=For Jesse]New Striker connected:
[url=][b]Uncle Sven[/b][/url]
[i]A zany old soul who blends chemistry with chaos. He’s forgotten more about alchemy than you will ever know – and maybe more than he remembers. Able to toss out a few offensive or supportive vials whenever he appears, he offers Fire Flasks for burst of up-front damage, Acid Flasks for lingering pools of corrosion, Elastic Ooze to make a super jump puddle, Healing Waters for a zone of continuous restoration, and once things have really gotten mixed up, Chaos Quaff to polymorph all targets in the area into harmless animals for about six seconds[/i][/hider][/center]

For the moment, however, Mona couldn’t reach Midna. He’d assumed she would avoid Ciella’s onslaught by hiding in the shadows, but even with terrible injuries the imp was determined to make a difference. She gathered up her magic to hurl her shifting sands across the battlefield. In just a few moments a screen of sand gathered around both Ciella and Shadow, buffeting them with minor but constant damage over time and obscuring their vision. As incredibly annoying as it was, the Agito knew that to ignore Shadow for the sake of her indignation would invite destruction, and tried to focus on her enemy. There was just one problem--she couldn’t tell where he was. Suddenly on edge, Ciella whirled around in an effort to spot him, but her enormous wings and feathered hair made it difficult enough to see even without the sand. It quickly dawned on the Agito that it was taking her too long. She was going to get hit.

With all her might she twisted herself around a full one hundred and eighty degrees, spinning just in time to witness the sand-wreathed locus of distorted space bearing down on her from above and behind. Her intuition had been correct; Shadow’s pattern of attacking from behind whenever possible held. But it was too late to dodge now. She clenched her teeth and braced for impact, bringing her legs and arms together into an almost fetal blocking position, manifesting a Karmic Shield, and the next second Shadow made contact.

“KYAAAAAAH!” Ciella shrieked, feathers and blood flying as the Chaos Burst ground like a spatial blender. Thanks to the Karmic Shield’s reduced damage and her general toughness, however, the Agito persisted where Sven succumbed. Shadow pushed harder, digging deeper, and Ciella’s life drained away like water through a sieve. As she fought desperately to withstand Shadow’s brutality, Ciella brought her Siren arms around, their ethereal hands closing in on the distorted space itself. It was a terrible agony, as the harpy’s screams attested, but against all odds she endured. One hope kept her going: that no matter how bad it got, she needed to hold out only one second more. Just one...more...second…!

Shadow’s Chaos Burst ended, and the hedgehog disappeared from distorted space. Instantly he launched himself forward in an Air Shoes-propelled kick, smashing Ciella right in the eye, but then her hands closed around him. “Grah!” Five great arms of enchanted water snapped shut around his limbs and head, with the last yanking Nastasia off to squeeze her like a stress ball. “I am...the wings!” With a final pump of her wings Ciella rose higher, then fell backward. With her enemies in her clutches she hurtled downward in a deadly spiral. “Of DESPAIR!”

From within the Agito’s grasp howled a desperate, pleading cry. “BLEEEEEEEECK!”

Then the  three smashed into the ground in a typhonic explosion of water. The whole arena shook beneath the impact, swaying wildly, and sand poured through the holes in the floor as the runoff washed most of the colosseum clean. Thanks to Midna’s efforts, Mordecai and Reinhardt had been retrieved and brought to safety in the lower part of the arena along with Braum. Shayne and Orendi’s spirits, caught up in the flow, drifted almost to the edge but did not descend. When the maelstrom died down it revealed Ciella back in her sylvan form, her arms and face very badly injured. All around the arena her Feral Shroud, the barrier cutting off escape for anyone in the terrible skirmish, broke down.

It was hard for Joker to imagine anyone surviving that, but at this point, it barely even surprised him that Shadow remained.

The hedgehog was down on one knee, his Chaos Boost dispelled. In front of him lay Nastasia, unmoving. Necronomicon reported her findings from a quick scan. “Unbelievable. She’s still alive. Although, I think her neck’s broken…” The morbid realization caused the Persona to trail off for a moment. “I’m not detecting any unusual brainwaves from Shadow. But he’s still-!”

Joker didn’t need her to say it. Even from her he could still see Galeem’s influence burning sunset-red in the hedgehog’s eyes. The fight wasn’t over. Shadow floated up with a smug look and began summoning a Chaos Spear to finish Ciella off for good. “Alright, rabbit stew!”

He and Fox were already on the way, but they had a lot of ground to cover, even just to get close enough for a shot from Joker’s Leena. Any allies with greater speed or long-range attacks, be they magic or technological, would be able to take decisive action.

[center][h3]Ms Fortune[/h3]
[b]Level 4[/b] Nadia (100/40)
[b]Location:[/b] The Maw
Blazermate's [@Archmage MC], Bowser's [@DracoLunaris], Ace Cadet's [@Yankee], Sakura's [@Zoey Boey], Mirage’s [@Potemking], Link’s [@Gentlemanvaultboy]
[b]Word Count:[/b] 1269[/center]

Nadia, taken aback by the sight of so many ghoulish, bloated restaurant patrons, scooted over to a crouched screen. Until she got her bearings she wanted diner and server alike to see neither hide nor hair of her. Naturally, just a moment after taking cover she did get spotted, but for once she was glad for some unexpected company. “Ace!” she beamed, just about hugging the boy. Instead she settled for bonking shoulders with him, just like on the docks before the day’s whirlwind adventures began. In the conga line of trials and tribulations since the Depths she’d lost sight of her new pal, never even getting the chance to check on him after his unsafe and unpleasant flight courtesy of Moreau. Since then she’d been mostly concerned with either dying of hunger or the chefs determined to make kids food in a different way, and she felt bad for instinctively looking out for number one again. But here he was, pretty okay all things considered, and with the Koopa Troop back in the sudsy washroom it was just Ace and Nadia against the world once more.

Having gotten a couple extra moments to view the stomach-turning scene ahead of them, Nadia shared what she’d seen. “They’re packed wall to wall, like sardines,” she told him, the deliciously salty, oily fishes still on her mind. She could feel the weight of the tin she’d snatched, but just as with the Cadet, witnessing the grisly feast evaporated her appetite. “Its dark under the tables but we might be able to sneak under, between the legs of the benches and stools. I don’t think we wanna go up top. Those things aren’t picky about what they eat.” In fact, the guests reached for whatever happened to slide or plop down into arm’s length, scarcely even looking at what they mindlessly shoved toward their gullets. They didn’t even seem to notice when morsels got caught on one another or slid back out of their mouths onto the table, and just tried to push it in once more. It was a slovenly, morbid, almost dispassionate act of excess, without taste, without need, without end. Nadia shivered. “Its like food is their whole existence. If this is the curse, I’m glad I stopped when I did.”

Sooner rather than later, however, she and the Cadet needed to confront the feast. Observing for a few moments rewarded the pair with a realization. The Volbonians who regularly replenished the Guests’ interminable meal could only come from and return to a single food source: the kitchen. All Nadia and Ace needed to do was follow them.

Nadia led the way, scampering over to the tables. She ducked out of the lantern-light and into the shadows beneath, only to find after a moment that her plan had a flaw. The guests, messy as they were gluttonous, had allowed an incredible amount of food to drop to the floor, and a few of the eaters had followed suit. Like slugs they pulled themselves around on their bellies, sucking up and slurping down everything in their paths. “No good,” Nadia hissed. With poor visibility and no room to move, the kids could just as easily get lost as cornered down there. Sighing, Nadia climbed up onto an empty stool, and onto the table itself.

The guests didn’t really react. Nadia doubted they even saw her. As long as she and Ace could stay out of the way of their stubby little arms, she figured they’d be okay. That just left what route to take. From here she could see the route the servers took across the tables, although she wondered if they brooked no response from the guests because they weren’t edible in their eyes. Either way, it gave her a pretty good idea, and once she saw a Volbonian head down some stairs she pointed a silent finger in the direction she and her friend ought to go. Then, they had nothing left but to get there.

Nadia walked quickly to avoid making too much noise, staying close to untouched food where possible in the hopes that it currently lay beyond the Guests’ reach. She didn’t think twice about climbing on top of the loaves, fishes, cutlets, and stacked dishes to get a leg up. The first time she got a little too close to a Guest and the horrid creature reached out to her with his grubby hand, wheezing and whimpering in desperate lust, she just about had a heart attack and fell off the table. A little help, however, would get her back on track. “Thank you,” she whispered emphatically, and pressed on.

Caution gave the two steady progress, but not quickly enough for Nadia’s liking. Not with lives on the line. Before long  she couldn’t suppress the thoughts of her friends getting cooked and butchered any longer. [i]To hell with safety[/i]. She needed to rescue Sakura and the others [i]now[/i]. She clenched her teeth and changed tact, suddenly jumping off the lid of her stewpot onto a Guest’s back. The beast of habit, hunched over her meal, straightened up in surprise, grunting as she flailed her arms. Nadia jumped to the next one over, and though it reeled like a stepped-on seal when she landed the feral moved on long before she could fall off. Then an idea hit her. Once she landed on another diner she slid her claws into the flesh of its neck, and with a gurgling cry the guest bucked backward. Nadia allowed its momentum to send her flying, and while the Guest toppled to the ground she soared over an aisle to land with a roll between two more monsters. One reached for her, but she shoved a ham into its paw instead and squirmed away.

This was the last set of tables before the stairs. In front of her sat a row of hungry Guests shoulder to shoulder, and the eyes of the one dead ahead had already lit up with greed. With a moan he launched herself from his stool as best she could, clambering onto the table to pull himself toward Nadia. Taking initiative, the little thief grabbed hold of a wine bottle like a club and rushed forward to slam it right into the Guest’s face. Nadia jumped on as the diner blurted out an exclamation of pain and fell backward off the table, riding the Guest through his stool all the way down to the floor for a very cushioned landing. She bounced off and rolled to a stop at the head of the stairs, where she turned to look back for Ace.

After a moment, however, the fallen guest stirred. He flailed and kicked wildly, smacking the already bent stool out from beneath a neighbor, who then fell alongside him. With beady eyes on Nadia the two slugged across the wooden floor toward her, forcing her to run for the stairs. She sprinted down as the ravenous tide rolled after her, barely making it in time to avoid the Guests that then plowed into a waiter. Fresh sushi dishes littered the ground around them, seizing their attention, and Nadia moved on. She’s reached the first floor.

[center][img]https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2018/usgamer/little-nightmares4.jpg[/img][/center]

Though this area was a single large room compared to the many smaller rooms of the restaurant upstairs, its added vertical space would do little for Nadia, and plenty of Guests remained between her and the dumbwaiter on the far side. Her heart pounded in her chest from both the tension and the chase, but as long as she was with the Cadet, she could make it through. Probably.

[hr]

After Nadia and Ace the dishwashers had assumed that whoever came in did not mean to bother them, and with a very important task at hand, they planned to return the favor. Bowser’s loud and unexpected announcement, however, startled them unexpectedly badly. All of them jumped, with one koopa so surprised that his plate flew from his hands. It shattered against the floor with a loud crash, sending him into a panic as his coworkers flinched. A storm of hissed, urgent warnings flew Bowser’s way.

“Quiet!”
“Shh!”
“Not so loud!”
“Shut up!”

Despite his proclamations the washers did not believe him to be their king, and right now they had other issues. Now that Bowser got a good look, he could see that many of these rather high-strung troopers bore scars across their faces and arms. In just a few moments he could get a sense that these koopas lived squarely under the thumb of the chefs, and for how long was anyone’s guess. Fidgety, furtive, and meek, they seemed to possess almost no will to fight, except maybe when it came to getting a potential troublemaker in line. The nearest one jumped down to menace Bowser with a half-scrubbed pan. “Are you trying to get us killed!? You know the chefs are looking for any excuse to make us into turtle soup! We’re already in hot water ‘cause of the plates!” He pushed the pan into Bowser’s arms along with a scrubber, then tossed a dishrag to Junior. “Here, hurry up and get to work before they come in here and see you kids goofing off!” 

[hr]

Seeing Sakura heartbroken brought Bella’s spirits almost as low. She felt like weeping herself, whether from empathy, the pain of hanging by a rope around her wrists, the smoke in her eyes, or all three. With plenty of distraction and difficulty seeing it was difficult to take stock of the situation and arrive at any conclusion other than ‘this is bad’. Being cut off from their friends and left dangling over a blazing cookfire, with a heaping portion of killer butchers on the loose, made for a pretty bleak situation. But was it really that much bleaker than the other ones? They’d already gotten past a headless shadow monster and a flooded factory full of aquatic abominations. Armed with this information, Bella staved off despair, reasoning that if she, Rika, and Sakura could just keep it together they could hold out until their rescue.

With that in mind she craned her head around to address Sakura. “Don’t blame yourself, mon cheri. It was just bad luck. Could have happened to any of us, oui?” Any more encouragement than that, however, would have to wait. Her young friend had noticed something else, a detail that slipped away from Bella in the relatively brief time since the cafeteria, but a big one nonetheless. “I am?” As best she could, the Water Princess looked herself over, then glanced at the other meals-to-be, trying to get a frame of reference. “Humm...I think you may be right. My limbs...un peu plus long.” Though she couldn’t see it, her leviathan tail had benefited the most from her growth, straining against the bonds that tied its throat against her wrists.

She spotted Mimi, but unless the pokemon could lift all three girls off their hooks and over the fire to safety without Larry noticing, the situation wasn’t much better. For the moment, all Bella could do was wait and think. Something Sakura said got her gears turning, and one detail in particular concerned her. “Actually, I ate quite a lot,” Bella corrected. “I wanted to..” she paused to cough, straining to get her head away from the smoke. “Agh...I wanted to see if zere were...any effects. For ze team, remember? My tail and I just dug right in.”

Sakura’s plan seemed solid initially, the team’s current inability to eat food notwithstanding, but for reasons Bella couldn’t quite articulate something bugged her about it. She spent a few moments in quiet but furious contemplation, trying to put it together, before she realized. “Hold on, it may not be zat simple. This curse...it turned back time, yes? Zat explains everyone’s clothes. But remember zose other kids? They did not want to eat, yes? Zey must have known it would make them big...big enough for ze Janitor zat chef mentioned to send zem to ze kitchen. Like agneaux to slaughter.” Another coughing fit wracked her less-little body. “Z-zey weren’t cursed like us. Maybe ze food does not turn forward time to undo curse, but instead stimulate ze body’s growth.”

Her brows furrowed as she tried to puzzle it out. After a moment her intense expression turned on Sakura. “Listen, you trained as a child, right?” She awaited confirmation. “Well...if I am not wrong, eating could ‘skip’ us through many years of our lives. It would be like you reached fourteen without having ever trained a day. Or...” Bella became more worried. “What if we missed ze mark? We might pass our ‘current’ ages. What would happen if ze curse is zen broken?” At this point, without a lot of concrete knowledge on how exactly the food worked, she was just spitballing, but even then she found no end to the alarming possibilities. 

[hr]

Though Mirage could not resist the cheesy temptation laid before him, the boys reached the main kitchen’s first floor unharmed. Once there, however, they discovered even more trouble than they bargained for. Even with the added firepower of a magic nail, a sharp kitchen knife, and a bottomless dart gun, this didn’t seem like a fight they could win. If this ‘King of Cuisine’ character held sway over not just the stretch-faced chef but Larry too, it was hard to imagine him as a weaker combatant. The sushi chef didn’t  look too deadly -or even very imposing- but the tempura wizards’ use of actual magic tipped the scales. Stripped of all their equipment and powers and locked into weak, frail bodies by the pervasive curse of the Resentments, the Seekers already had little to work with. Being transmogrified into actual food was more than anyone could stomach.

Unable to vent their fury in a straight fight, the trio strategized beneath their cabinet, wary of attracting the ire of chefs, wizards, and coffee cups alike. In a succinct fashion they bandied around a couple ideas, including the use of a decoy, but they soon settled on the stealthy approach. With the numbers and the area knowledge that the kitchen staff possessed, there wasn’t much of a choice. Luckily for the marauding sneaks, this place featured an incredible amount of clutter. At any time a good half-dozen projects seemed to be in progress at once.

The sushi chef possessed an entire station in the southeast corner near the dumbwaiter, complete with hibachi grill, and he also seemed to be in charge of plating. With a fastidious eye for detail he arranged and deftly sliced each roll, adding a dash of actual artistry that it was hard to believe would be appreciated by either his coworkers or his clients. In the eyes of the intruders at least, he could be written off; his station stood in the opposite direction from the stairs, meaning a trip in that direction could be a sizable and risky detour

At the central chamber, the stretch-faced chef labored at the pot roast to which he’d been assigned. Sizzling over a fire pit in a massive, green-sided cauldron of a pot, the stew existed in a state of flux that demanded constant attention, both ladling out its contents into tureens for delivery and replenishing the ingredients. Moving as quickly as his ponderous, doughy physique would allow, the hideous butcher threw in chunks of tough meat to soften, peeled potatoes, chopped carrots, and scattered seasonings. The carrot heads and potato peels went to the Tempura Wizards along with anything else the chefs didn’t need, transformed into deep-fried food to be stacked in heaping bowls and served. All three remained more or less stationary, unlike Antoine. The gray-haired King of Cuisine scuttled around like a beetle, attending to various dishes. He moved unpredictably between the ovens, shelves, stovetops, and mixing bowls, always on the hunt for some ingredient or another, spending a few seconds at a time before hurrying on. He presented a wild card, but as long as the kids were observant, they could make do.

The counter they found themselves under in the kitchen’s northeast corner harbored a selection of spices, vegetables, and herbs, as best they could guess. It featured at least one chopping block, although the one on the upper middle cook station served Stretch-face well enough for his carrots and potatoes. It was there that the communal knife rack stood, as well. All that meant that the chefs didn’t come by the kids’ hidey hole that often. Going west would bring them to a set of dirty sinks, going under which meant navigating past the various pipes and drains only to arrive at the stovetops and prep space that Antoine most frequented. Four large ovens lay stacked facing east in the northwest corner, offering nothing but impediment. Next to them stood a trough full of various meats, heaped indiscriminately beneath a chute in the wall probably fed by the efforts of the butchers above. Then came a row of drawer counters with various well-used machines, including a sausage maker, a pressure cooker, a fryer, a blender, a toaster, and a couple mixers, all dingy metal and very much in the crude style of the Maw. The stairs began right below where the counter ended, while mostly cupboards existed beneath the staircase itself, going all the way to the southeast corner where Fujimoto bent to his painstaking task. The drawer knobs looked rather climbable.

The lower middle station, on the other side of the fire pit, was where the Tempura Wizards did most of their work. Using some sort of hexes, they kept a couple metal carts rolling in a counterclockwise circle around the kitchen, offering convenient transport of both ingredients and refuse, which they took for transformation when the carts rolled by. Overhead shelves and racks kept a smorgasbord of pots, pans, and tools all readily available above just about every counter and sink. Less than perfectly organized, the chefs appeared to have just left various things lying everywhere, too, used and reused. Hopefully the disarray was merely the byproduct of a dinnertime rush, but the kids could by no means be sure. Dangling chains and needlessly long sausage links, some seemingly hanging from the second floor railing, swung hypnotically in the Maw’s gentle heeling. It was a lot to take in, but it made for a lot of options.

[center][h3]Old Mill[/h3]
[b]Location:[/b] Frozen Highlands - Alpine Skyline / Wildwood Glades
Linkle’s [@Gentlemanvaultboy][/center]

For a few moments Albedo’s eyes lingered on Linkle as she used it to take a flurry of pictures of their surroundings. Without a single dull angle available to either of them, she really could just hold down the button and let her new badge work its magic. In his own world of Teyvat plenty of people shared her enthusiasm when it came to the newfangled devices known as Kameras, delighting in their ability to capture a forever memory in but an instant. Albedo himself never partook, instead finding greater fulfillment in the painstaking act of artistry to immortalize the creatures and landscapes that captured his interest, but she did have a point. This composite world offered an unprecedented amount of variety, a canvas splashed with the colors of countless different places in remarkable density. Even if he managed to make a drawing a day of the fascinating things he encountered, it would easily take a lifetime to depict everything. He did not have that kind of time. So when it came to Linkle snapping pictures as she frolicked among the wildflowers, or even up in the Alpine Skyline, he did not mind one bit. However cruel the World of Light’s origins, it would be a shame to pass its wonders by. 

Able to admire the scarlet forest later, the duo managed to reign in their enthusiasm and focus on the gardener. After Linkle gave her and Albedo’s names he introduced himself in turn. “They call me Tuley.” He bent down to pull out a scraggly weed from between a few fresh buds, which he flicked into a bucket of other unwanted flora he’d pruned from his own little slice of paradise. “Freya…” he repeated, stroking his whiskers. “Sorry miss, I dunno anyone by that name. If anyone does though, it'd be the Witch o’ the Woods.”

“A witch?” Albedo prompted him, hoping for more information.

“Mm-hm,” Tuley confirmed. “She watches over the valley. Most kind-hearted lady there ever was. Treats birds ‘n beasts like her own children. Even cares about the plants. Not many folks do.”

The alchemist was already writing in his notebook. “She sounds like just the person to ask. Do you know where she is?”

At that, Tuley shook his bearded head. “‘Fraid I don’t. I don’t get out much, but I heard her house’s tucked away somewhere secret. Can’t find it if ya go lookin’. Maybe you’ll run into ‘er, though.”

One benefit of showing little emotion was not looking discourteously disappointed. “I see, thank you,” Albedo told him. He gave a stiff wave goodbye, then rose to head over to the river of grass and flowers flowing between the trees. It looked like he was already leaving, but in truth he only went out of Tuley’s hearing range for a little privacy, where he waited for Linkle. Her arrival prompted the delivery of his plan. “This valley is quite large, especially for one who does not wish to be found. If this witch is secretive but loves animals, we may be able to draw her out with one. The cries of deer, boar, and elk can carry great distances when distressed. Perhaps we could hunt one.” He considered Linkle’s own kind nature. “Or pretend to do so. A nonlethal wound would achieve the desired effect. Either way, the plan is predicated on your crossbow.” He scrutinized her expression, wondering what Linkle thought.