(Disclaimer: The characters and everything referenced in this do not belong to me, and in fact belongs to the incredibly talented William Ritter! I do not claim to own anything in this!)
"And what, Ms Rook, do you hope this will achieve?" the detective asked, an eyebrow raised so high that it began to vanish under a stray lock of dark hair.
"Nothing really, though it is devilishly funny." the Spector responded, interrupting the person who was actually addressed, her long silver hair flowing elegantly around her as she floated several inches above the ground.
"What I was hoping was that if we went it might give us a better chance of finding the source, new perspective and whatnot." the young lady replied, her British accent causing her to stand out somewhat from the others present.
"And you think that these," the man began, his grey eye so regarding the array of uncomfortably elegant articals of clothing before him with utter disdain, "Will help us find the source of a cluster of fire sprites?"
Abigail nodded, determined to hold her ground, looking up at the taller individual, her employer, gesturing to the clothes that she herself found to be in poor taste.
"Something like this," Jackaby paused, lifting an unpleasantly bright, silken white waistcoat from the pile, "Is more likely to offend them, and one offended fire sprite leads to ten offended fire spirites, and ten to one hundred, and a hundred to a thousand, then they're all offended and causing anything within reach to combust. Thankfully there's nowhere that is large enough to house for than one thousand without them burning themselves out, or this would be infinitely worse."
As the man was rambling, the ghost, Jenny Cavanaugh, wished the living woman luck before slowly gliding out of the room, having already heard more than enough of his ramblings to last a lifetime, despite not actually being alive in any shape or form.
Abigail raised her arms as if in defeat, shaking her head ever so slight as she did so, having grown far too used to such a thing herself.
"Alright so, no disguises then?" she summarised , hiding the slightest disappointment that this had caused, feeling that it would feel more like one of the investigations that she had read about when she was younger, though of course her experiences have led her to know that investigations often don't run as smoothly as they would in such a novel.
"Correct." the man replied simply, nodding in such a way that it made his ghastly woollen cap shift slightly. Despite working for this man for quite some time, she seemed to forget just how horrid this article of clothing was, it's ungodly mixmatch of colours making it impossible to match with literally anything, even itself.
"Can you be certain that it is, in fact, fire sprites that we are looking for?" she enquired after a moment.
"Yes, Ms Rook, all given evidence points in that direction," he paused, tilting his head, "Though of course we can't entirely rule out the possibility of it being a particularly ornery lounge of salamanders, though that is highly unlikely simply due to the sheer scale of the damage we're looking at."
The eccentric fellow tossed several things into the multitude of pockets lining both the inside and outside of his seemingly oversized coat, making it even more impossibly bulky. Abigail could not, even if her life had depended on it, have successfully named everything that filled this pockets and would consider it a personal, yet all the same impressive, achievement if she could list even a quarter of the contents.
"Now, Ms Rook, time is of the essence. There is no time to dilly or to dally! We'd best be off before the blighters manage to set some bystander on fire now, hey?" he declared in an almost theatrical manner, his coat billowing most dramatically as he turned and made his way to the door before pausing, glancing over his shoulder to her. "A certain police officer will be meeting us at the scene so we really shouldn't keep him waiting, but if you feel the need to, take a piece of fruit, it's peaches this week."
The thought of seeing the wrongfully exiled policeman caused the faintest of blushes to creep its way onto her cheeks, which she tried to dismiss with a shake of her head, hurrying after her employer, not bothering to take the offered fruit from the overflowing cauldron as she made her way to the door.
"Wait! Are you just going to leave this mess here?" an irritated Jenny called, hovering inches above the pile of discarded clothes, regarding the mess with utter disdain, having had returned as she had heard them leave.
"We've hardly a moment to wait! Farewell Jenny." he called to her, as if he hadn't heard, already halfway out the door.
Promising to handle it upon their eventual return, Abigail dashed after him, into the bright sunlight, following her employer into yet another seemingly impossible adventure. Though it might've seemed impossible, her view on what is and isn't possible had been greatly changed during her employment as the impossible was her normal everyday life as of late.
When she had been told they were to search the area where a rather grand ball for the awfully dreary and all too familiar, in behaviour at least, aristocratic folk of the area was to be held before the fire she had been expecting something a little more... grand and infinitely less smouldering. Of course the building wasn't always a smoking mass of unidentifiable matter, quite the contrary actually, it had been oh so elegantly decked out in an array of bright, cheerful colours and pristine whites covering everything, not that any of that was in the slightest recognisable now.
Jackaby was busying himself with examining a rather sizeable hole in the wall, uttering the occasional "Hmm" and "I see" before turning on his heels, striding over to his assistant who was looking at what would have once been a rather elegant lace curtain which was now nothing more than a sad looking scrap of limp, scorched cloth.
"Well, it seems the reports had been rather an understatement, wouldn't you say?" the man said, sounding disproportionately cheerful, "We are aiming for something much larger, definitely bigger than a fire sprite!"
"Bigger, sir?" she asked, sounding rather apprehensive.
"A Drake, I'd say. Not fully grown yet, young male. His aura is especially strong here," he gestured vaguely in the direction he had came, "Must have spent several hours there after he did this."
"And what, pray tell, is a Drake?"
"A Drake is a wingless, dragon-like creature which, in the case of our little friend here, have quite a strong firey breath, and so must swallow flint much like a dragon, though there are also Drakes with icy breath, who must swallow ridiculous amounts of water in order to accommodate this..."
"Sir," she said quickly, interrupting his ramblings quickly before it had become any harder to follow, "You said dragons were extinct?"
"Dragons? Yes. Drakes? No." he replied simply, pausing for a moment before continuing, "I said they were dragon-like, not a dragon. Though of course they are closely related, but are distinctly different species."
"Excuse me, sir?" a voice called from the adjacent room, accompanied moments later by a slightly soot covered face, topped by neat dark brown curls, "I believe I found something." Charlie called, a hint of confusion in his voice.
It didn't take Jackaby's instruction of "Come, Ms Rook." to prompt the young woman to begin to make her way over to the room, moving at an almost too fast speed, her self described silly little crush on the police officer somehow growing every time she saw him, causing such a flutter in her chest that she was sure that he could hear it as plain as day no matter what form he had taken.
"What is it?" the investigator asked quickly, sounding all together too excited as he practically burst into the room, almost immediately seeing what it was they were called in to see. "Fascinating..." he mumbled, his grey eyes glittering excitedly as they scanned the small pile of brilliant, ruby red, albeit severely damaged scales, looking much like a child in a candy store.
"So it seems our Drake here," he began, rising to his feet having pocketed several of these scales with the full intention of further examining them in the, debatably, safer location of his laboratory, "Has come here having been attacked by something with, what I can assume, was the intention of resting before moving on, but whatever it was must have followed it here, attacking it once again."
"Can you tell what it was that attacked it?" Charlie asked, looking over at the scales as if he would be able to tell.
"Unfortunately I cannot. Have you heard of the practice of purification through fire?" Jackaby replied and, after judging their reactions, went on to explain, "The heat of fire was thought to be able to cleanse impurities, dark essences and the like, which isn't necessarily incorrect, though is so often handled incorrectly. Well, much like that the fire has quite successfully cleansed the area of any traces that it's attacker had left behind."
"So we are looking for both the Drake and its unidentified attacker then?" Abigail asked, noting this, among other things said, into her small, leather bound notebook.
"That is correct."
"And where do we start?"
"That, Ms Rook, is an excellent question." the Seer replied, smiling despite having not at all answered her supposedly excellent question.
And with that said, Abigail Rook and her employer, R F Jackaby found themselves blundering headfirst into another case, one which, as they so often did, began with more questions than they had means of answering, and, for Abigail at least, this was, as confusing as it may be, exactly how she liked it.