Chương 59: Sleepwalk II [REWRITTEN]

The small wizard hut atop the water tower was larger on the inside, though not by much. The shack-sized exterior hid an average professor's office. One wall was covered in book cases, a couple monographs toppled to the floor. The one facing it held exotic devices for measuring the movement of stars, a globe, and a map tacked covering the entire eastern wall. The desk was dusty, there were cobwebs everywhere, and judging by those white stains and scattered eggshells, this place used to have a pigeon problem.

I craned my head, my body doubles following the movement instinctively.

"Addy?" No response. I frowned. There was no place to hide in this room. Did I miss her? Was I in the wrong place?

"Welp, that's that," Rico said, the pixie buzzing around my head.

"Guess your girlfriend's gone. Too bad, so sad. Maybe she got eaten by a bear. Maybe she exploded into a thousand tiny grizzly bits."" Shut up," I mumbled, picking up some scattered sheafs of paper. They were some sort of student report cards, dirty and worn. The imprint of half a boot was stuck on them, leading further into the hut There were more bootprints, barely perceptible to my human eyes, but practically glowing to my spider eyes. They led to a wall, where they stopped abruptly. Slowly, I approached it.

There was a slit in the wall, a hairsbreadth of light escaping from a much larger room behind it. I poked out of the window. There was no space for a room past that wall, and yet here it was, backrooms-style.

"What the heck?" I felt my heart rate spike.

"Rico, any idea what that is?" Rico made some muffled sounds. When I turned to stare at him, it looked as if his lips were glued shut. When did that — oh, right." You may talk." He gasped. I felt bad.

"Sorry for gagging you. But jokes like that are off-limits."

"You're the boss, Killjoy," he grumped.

"Not just because of that. We're Custodians. Dangerous stuff like that can actually happen to us." I turned back to the wall.

"Except for the bear part. Pretty sure I can out-wrestle a bear at this point."

"Yeah, one of your stupid earth-bears maybe." He watched me poke and prod at the slit in the wall, trying and failing to get my fingernails underneath the gap.

"Y'know, if I didn't know better I'd say someone is either trying to hide something from you, or is trying to lure you in."

"Yeah, well. I have a gun." And friends. Not sure which of the two were more lethal at this point. The last time I checked on Becca she'd somehow set her wardrobe on fire. Blue fire.

"Moe, does this look like the work of one of your cousins?" The little gnome popped out. He peered at the wall, slipping through the crack as if defying euclidean geometry was natural to him. Which it was. He was a gnome. I still distinctly remembered him and his family pulling me through every crack and fissure in Clem's house. He popped back out, wide eyes betraying the same nervousness that always seemed to possess him.

"Can you take us through?" He stared up at the crack, then back at me.

"He's saying you're too fat," Rico said.

"He's not! He would never. This is all muscle."

"Fat, fat, fat! Chubby spider! Chubster! Flabby—"" Shut up. You have revoked your talking privileges, and you're only getting them back once you have something productive to say." As annoying as the little pixie was, he had a point. There was no way I could fit through a gap as wide as the side of a credit card. Unless… okay, I have an idea. I indicated for Moe to hold my index finger.

"Alright Moe. This might look a bit scary, but I'll be fine. Once I'm ready, I need you to go to the other side and pull me through quickly, alright?" He shot me a little salute. With a deep breath, I closed my eyes and channeled [Elasticity]. Normally, I used the spell to optimize ligaments and muscles for longer, stronger, bouncier steps, and or snappier trigger fingers. Small modifications in specific places. This time, I was channeling it to the max.

My legs lost cohesion first, bending my knees and slamming my face on the ground. It didn't hurt beyond the initial shock, bones and skin and organs all turning soft and stretchy, like a character from one of those old cartoons. They called it rubber hose animation, I believe. As I grew into a soft, malleable dough, options opened up to me.

"Now pull me through," is what I wanted to say. Sadly, my vocal cords were too floppy to vibrate, and my trachea had collapsed along with my lungs, ribcage, and spine. All that left my mouth was a sad blip of remaining air.

"Mlep," I commanded. Moe knew exactly what to do. He pulled my finger. It stretched three feet before it started to tug the rest of my hand along. Then came the rest of the arm, and the goopy part of my chest. Moe disappeared through the crack, and my finger with it. Slowly, but surely, like hauling in an ever extending pile of rope, he pulled me through. It took about a minute until my body was solid enough to talk again, and two more minutes to attain my baseline rigidity.

Walking without optimized tendons was weird. Every step was such a strong shock, the act of walking alone was making me unhappy. I'm going to have to redo all those optimizations, aren't I — woah. I looked up as my hand snapped back into place. We were indeed in a room, with a low ceiling and dim lights buzzing where they hung from it like insects wrapped up for later consumption. The wizard hut had the kind of shabby look of abandonment, this place was shabby because no one inside cared to clean it.

It was also dimly lit, which after an initial shock served my spider instincts just right. The air smelled of herbs and incense, of burned plant matter and biting things. In the half-light, humanoid figures trod with heavy steps. The werefolk seemed barely lucid, some snoring and staggering as they sleepwalked to and fro. For every one of them there were three to four child-sized critters that stalked the halls on knuckles, like a gorilla, prodding them in directions and yelling at them for one reason or another.

They wore green bowler hats, had horrid teeth, and hair growing on every part of their body. I ducked into a shadow as one walked past.

"Was that a motherflipping leprechaun?" I asked, turning back to Moe just as he finished pulling Rico through the gap." You may speak."

"If that's a leprechaun, then I'm a cucumber. It's a fake, a Lepre chud. They're boorish, just as greedy for money as ye old tales, and twice as gullible as your average dumbass pixie."

"You're a pixie."

"But I'm not a dumbass, Killjoy. And besides, no self-respecting pixie would breathe the same air as these bastards." I watched from the shadows as a pixie flew past. It glowed oddly blue, with a mix of purple every time it had to evade one of the knuckle-walking fake leprechauns.

"... unless under duress." I noticed some gnomes as well, looking just as unhappy to be here as the pixies. That explained how they got Addy to fit through here. But for what? And where was she? I rubbed my face. This was becoming too much too quickly.

"We're grabbing Addy, then getting out of here."

"And how are you planning to do that — woah." I climbed up the wall, then onto the ceiling. [Sticky] was as helpful as it was fun to use. With six arms and two legs, I was a real spider. I imagined myself as one of the little critters sitting on a wall, observing the collection of fae critters and conveyor belts below. Soon I'd find Addy. That was enough anticipation to fuel this spell indefinitely.

"Gotta say, you really are full of surprises," Rico whispered as he settled on my chest. He peered over the side.

"Whoever's making these people work together's gotta be real scary. No way you get verdant and crimson fae in one room without them gutting each other like <<a rodent-like animal which was bred with the chief purpose of eating them guts-first, traditionally while still alive>>." I didn't pause to give him an odd look. Silent as the night, I flipped my back to the ceiling and shuffled along. I was getting an idea of what was going on in this room now.

On the far right, there was a huge pile of what looked like plants, rocks, and jars of powders and liquids. Fairies arrived every now and again through various cracks along the wall, depositing some loot they'd snatched on the pile, and leaving through the cracks again. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. From there, other fairies placed the items on conveyors.

They ended up at one of dozens of stations in three separate lines, where a fake leprechaun would pick them up and inspect them. Every station had a wereperson standing there, eyes closed, seemingly fast asleep. From every wereperson, a tiny thread traveled to a teddybear locked in an iron cage. When one of the fake leprechauns was done with his shift, he cut the thread with giant rusty shears, and the wereperson was escorted off, leaving back through one of the cracks in the wall.

The leprechuds were the clear bosses here, or at least more trusted employees. My system translated their guttural, gnashing language, which turned out to be a horribly accented version of late-crimson.

"Hmm. Myrtle. Blue. Some earth attachment. Give it a sniff, dog." One of the fake leprechauns lifted a dried herb to a wereperson's nose.

"Seventeen… days… old," they muttered. Rico gave a small huff.

"Oh, yeah, makes sense. No way to determine that accurately, unless you've got the nose for it, and myrtle changes properties depending on the moon's phase during harvest."

"That's why they're risking snatching werefolk Custodians." They had the noses and the Sense. They were using them to sort herbs, reagents, other things… were the pixies stealing this crap from wherever they could? Just from up here, the system was giving loads and loads of pings on what each of these reagents did.

"Wait, that's the flower they use to make regeneration potions." The stuff that was so rare and expensive each potion cost over one thousand soulcoins. They were definitely sneaking this away from some important supplies. How could they? People were going to die for every regeneration potion missing in the world.

"Heyo, miss Killjoy. Does your girlfriend look like a gray, nine-foot werewolf?"

"No, unless she's in her warform, and she's more brown and beige—" Wait, that was Old Beni. The Old Beni was standing down there, being used to sniff away at reagents. He was level forty-ish. And yet, because he was sleeping, his body was vulnerable enough to be puppeted about like some doll by the tiniest of bears. And next to him, hidden behind his frame, was Addy. My pupils shrunk to pinpricks, and I felt something take over my body.

It wasn't something as silly as spider envy; humans were entirely capable of envy beyond a spider's wildest dreams. But that vampire part of me, that carnal part that had taken Addy's presence and grafted it to my heart so that a day without her felt like a day that was incomplete, raged. Mine. [Charging emotion: Anger]"Okay Killjoy, what's the plan — hey, woah, WOAH!"

I dropped down, barely a tenth of a second passing between my feet hitting the ground quiet as a whisper, yanking a leprechud down to the floor with me, and pointing my Lucky 7 at his temple. He had been holding something to Addy's face that was making her purr. My system noted it as 'tanuki-nip'. The leprechud's cry of surprise was strangled as I wrapped an arm around his throat.

"Move, and I shoot. Scream, make any loud noise, and I shoot. If you understand, nod twice." He nodded twice. The room was dark and poorly lit. This was a shadowy corner. It would take some time until anyone notice the missing fake leprechaun.

"Give answers only as a whisper. Doesn't matter how quiet, I'll hear them. Answer my questions, and you'll get to go back to your work. I'll even give you some soulcoins. Nod twice if you understand." He nodded twice.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"Sorting bits from other bits. Good ones go in that hole." He gestured to where a conveyor disappeared into a wall.

"Bad ones go there."

"Where does that lead?"

"I don't know, I just work here! A-all I know is that stuff that makes you angry, irritable, and that's addictive goes in the cafeteria hole."

"That… leads to the cafeteria?"

"Yah, special mix." He swallowed, sweat pearling on his oily skin as he realized who or what he was talking to.

"S-s-soulstealer food o-only." They're spiking Custodian's food. Is… is that why everyone's so irritable? No. People don't start hating each other because of that. There has to be more. The leprechud squirmed in my grip.

"M-mistress, perhaps there's been a mistake, ol' Ziggidy only stole a little bit of crack, once." I tightened my grip on his neck, looking Addy in the eye. She was asleep like the rest, quietly mumbling things to herself. She looked so peaceful, despite the circumstances.

"Killjoy, hey, Killjoy," Rico whispered, fluttering up to my ear.

"I just chatted with one of the other pixies. They said they all got suckered into signing a demon pact." A tiny bit of the life debt between him and me lessened. I blinked.

"The demons are involved too?"

"That's the thing. They signed the contract, but the contract was written in English." I blinked at him.

"But that can't be — they have made their entire language as clear and literal as possible. If they used a foreign language—""That means they were trying to screw the pixies over extra hard."

"Or it wasn't written by a demon." One soundbite of Cultures of the Worlds remained stuck in my ear. We'd learned it the other day when we touched on the various ways magic worked on the different planets.

"Earth is unique in that it has very little innate magic," a guest lecturer, who was a tinkerer renowned for pioneering a method of transmuting gold into printer ink, said.

"But it has still been connected to planets with centuries, millennia of refining their own magics. The technological race was lost on that front from day one… except earth wizards cheated. They simply copied the work of all the planets, and in blending them together, made it their own." So, someone with advanced enough knowledge, capabilities, and the talent for magic, could in theory write a demonic contract that was as binding as the real one. Or they could strongarm a demon into writing one for them, either or.

This implied that whoever was heading this operation had a lot of power and influence, not just magically, but over the entire Academy. Students disappearing in sleepwalks overnight couldn't be hidden forever, ergo someone was muddying the waters, either normalizing this behavior, or covering it up. If I had to guess, probably both.

"Alright. That's all."

"Yes!" Rico said, clapping his hands.

"Now kill him."

"W-what?" the leprechud said.

"Kill him! No witnesses."

"No. I don't kill people," I said.

"I'm a Custodian. And that aside, I was planning on bribing this gentleman with some soul—""OH GOD SHE'S GOT A GUN!" Someone across the room yelled that, and suddenly all eyes were on me. There was one moment of silence that stretched into seconds as I tried to find a way out. Leprechuds. Short, gorilla-like. Strong front arms. Stay at range. Custodians? Probably non-factors, they'll stay asleep. Can cut the wires leading to them. Pixies might call for help, they're fast. How the hell do I get Addy out of this?

The moment passed. I shot one of the lights above. It only dropped the light level by a tiny bit. If I wanted to drown the room in darkness, I still had about ten dim bulbs to go. But pandemonium broke out at the first shot. Every fae creature big and small started running, flying stumbling over things and hitting their knees on conveyor belts. I grabbed Addy, picking her up and jumping over the chaos, all while Rico was cackling like a maniac.

"Oh this is hilarious. Never a boring moment with you around, Killjoy."

"My name is not — shit, sorry mister gnome!"

"Geeble, gabble, gooble!" said the gnome I'd almost stepped on, shaking an angry fist before remembering that he ought to be running. Running from me. I stopped in front of the crack in the wall, trying to pull it wider.

"I don't get it, why is everyone afraid of me?" Rico fluttered in front of my face, floating upside-down.

"Well, for one, you're armed. And for two, you're a literal soul-stealer. Soul. Stealer. You're terrifying when you're trying to be friendly in a well-lit place, and this druglab here is the opposite of well-lit. In the halflight, you looked like a monster." A tiny part of my heart made a crick sound, cracking like glass.

'I… I'm not… Dangit. Moe, can you get both of us through?" Moe shook his head quickly. He hopped out of my backpack and began yelling at the other gnomes.

"I'm a good magical girl," I said.

"I'm friendly, approachable. I'm just trying to do the right thing. Sure, I look a bit spider-y, but I don't get what's so scary about that." Rico's grin was as wide as his face could accommodate.

"It's not scary to do what you believe in. How far you're willing to go is what makes it scary." I made a worried noise. He patted me on my forehead.

"There there, don't worry. You've shown what you're not willing to do today. It's honestly quite uplifting, knowing I won't be scrunched up and used as a potion ingredient even if I offend, insult, and inevitably betray you. And that's laudable."

"Why do I get the feeling you're patronizing me?"

"Because I am! Duh! You're too soft. Softie!" As I was about to retort — it was wasted on this pixie, but someone had to do it — Moe appeared with roughly fifteen other gnomes. They all linked their hands, Moe looking up at me expectantly. When I went to grab his offered hand, he shirked back, thumbing towards his gnome friends. They looked ragged. Tired. Destitute.

"I need to get out. Can you help me do that?" Moe shook his head.

"Why not?"

"It's 'cause they're all contracted to not help intruders, of course," Rico said.

"You can see the weight floating right next to them and… wait, no, of course you can't. One sec." He rubbed his wings, then smacked his hands in my eyes.

"Ack!"

"There. Notice anything different?" I blinked. A small ghostly string like that of the teddy bears grew from the top of their heads. They bundled together, then led deeper into the complex.

"I…" I really hope that wasn't fairy dandruff.

"Alright, so you can't help me get out… But what if I don't want to get out? What if I want to destroy everything and anything here?" I raised my gun and shot the teddy bear in a cage, exploding fluffy filling everywhere. The gnomes watched the filling fall like snow, then at the sleepy Custodians wobbling in place. From there, getting out was almost too easy. +++ Nothing happened after we stepped out of the fae druglab. Mason had arrived with a small army of Custodians.

I'd explained the situation to him briefly before noticing that the crack behind the wall had completely closed. While he didn't look like he quite believed every word I said, he did say he would spread the word among the lodges to tighten the locks on their alchemical supplies. Nobody followed us as I led a woozy and confused Addy back to our dorm. I locked the door, and stayed up all night with all eight limbs wrapped around her. Addy complained at the start, but quickly fell asleep again.

It suddenly made sense that she was always tired, that she always slept more than twice as long as I did despite having as much or more points in Body. My Addy wasn't lazy. She simply had a part-time job she didn't know about. An unpaid, secret part-time job in a druglab. Qui bono? I couldn't figure it out, not throughout the entire morning. The lectures passed by in a haze. I'd have to get Orianna's notes.

She was already giving hers to Becca since Becca's body-morphing experiments were both time consuming and something she'd be embarrassed by if she did them in public. Whatever that meant. There was no dollhouse time assigned today. It was a Wednesday, a rare off-day for my rather overfilled calendar. I only had courses until four PM. The moment I was done was the moment when I felt an inescapable dread assault me. I shouldn't have discovered that lab. They saw my face. They know I know.

Someone is doing some seriously screwed up stuff on campus. If they can induce anger through cafeteria food, what else can they induce? Fear? Disgust? Trust? I stepped on their toes. I must have. Nobody who spikes the food of living weapons would think it's not a big deal that I'm trying to open a chill and fun space with the Free Poker League. … I am going to keep Addy safe. No matter what happens, I am not letting her walk back in there. They'll take her hostage, use her against me.

No problem, I can take naps after class, stay awake all night. It's a small sacrifice to make until I can figure out who the hell is behind— In that moment, as I was staring at the dorm's coffee machine, my thoughts spiraling, I got the message that brought everything into focus. [Optional quest: Performance review] Assumed difficulty: Lvl 1, 1 agent Primary objective: Meet Professor Fowl in his office for a thorough performance review. Primary reward: 1 Soulcoin