Star's bedroom, too, was unnerving to see.

Like the exterior of the palace, the last time Star had seen this room was in Eclipsa's time, when it was decorated the way she preferred. And the time before that, it was before she had left for Earth in the first place. She'd modeled her bedroom in Earth to resemble her bedroom at home, but there were always a few details she couldn't replicate, and on top of that, in the time since she'd been gone, things had been moved. The servants had kept the room relatively dusted, which meant moving objects around, and the room felt weirdly sterile.

Like her mother had said, her wand was sitting on her bed. Her bed, along with the new bed that Marco was going to use, was positioned to subdivide the room into thirds. It looked like they had needed to do that to ensure that both she and Marco would be in range of the Mirror at all times while sleeping.

"Has anyone other than my mom and you looked at the mirror?" Star asked Marco, as he flopped down on his bed.

He looked up at Star. "When the Queen took the mirror with her, she had the Magical High Commission examine it. I guess they verified that it didn't pose a threat to us? Beyond that, she didn't tell me anything else about what they determined from it."

Star sighed. "Fair enough." She tossed the book and the papers onto her bed. "So what I want to ask is 'what part of Eclipsa's story should we look at next?' but... Given where it left off..."

Marco nodded gravely. "How badly do we need to know what happened in that basement?"

"I mean, the big mystery we're searching for is the Iris Experiment. Finding that out is pretty key to figuring out how to cure us. I'm going to go over the missing pages later, when I get a chance," she said, pointing at the stack on her bed, "but since the Iris Experiment pages were burned out of the book, it's unlikely any of them will contain the information we need. Meanwhile, if the Iris Experiment was something that happened in that basement, it would behoove us to investigate fully."

Marco curled up. "That's true."

"Fortunately!" Star said, a slight smile on her face. "I don't think that's going to be a problem. Because everything I've read, from the context at least, makes the Iris Experiment sound like something Eclipsa planned herself. More importantly, since the 'Iris' part of that name almost certainly refers to the mirror—an object she didn't take with her when she went there—it's really unlikely that the experiment took place in that basement. At least not at that time."

Marco breathed a sigh of relief.

"So, what I'm going to propose we look at is whatever immediately happened after Eclipsa left the Artificer's Guild that day."

"That makes sense."

Star held up the mirror. "Mirror?"

The scene transformed around them, to the exterior of a building inside the Mewnie Castle that Star didn't recognize. Looking around, it seemed that this building stood on the site of a fair that Star used to attend on a yearly basis when she was younger. So this building doesn't exist anymore, Star pondered.

No sooner had that thought occurred to her than the doors of this building slammed open. An old man, partially disrobed, was tossed out of the building, falling face-first onto the gravel. Eclipsa stormed out, her expression livid. As this unfolded, Royal guards began to spill out of the nearby buildings, observing this scuffle. Eclipsa barked orders to the guards, "Arrest all of them! This man, and every adult inside that building! Find the children they've been keeping in there, and get them to safekeeping. Get a move on!"

The guards hesitated for almost half a minute, then slowly they began to obey Eclipsa's orders.

Star noticed the hesitation of the guards. If any of the Mewnie Royal Guards had hesitated an order from her as long as they did, they probably would have gotten yelled at by her mother.

It didn't take long for the guards to start emerging from the building, Artificers in tow, their hands tied and their faces stony. A few of the men (and one of the women) were visibly exposed, and both Marco and Star shielded their eyes at the sight.

One of the Royal Guard Captains approached Eclipsa. "Your highness. What crimes are these men being arrested for?"

"All of the adults, not just the men," Eclipsa said in a snippy tone. "And the crimes are, among other things, Luring and Kidnapping of Children, and Sexual Assault of Children."

The Captain gave a strange look at Eclipsa, which Star read as disrespectful. "I don't see any children."

Eclipsa pointed angrily at the doors of the Guild, and as she did so, one of the Royal Guards emerged from the building with a young girl in tow, her body covered up by a blanket.

When the girl saw the bright sunlight, she was visibly blinded, and it almost looked like she was on the verge of an anxiety attack brought on by seeing sunlight.

Eclipsa, seeing the girl, shut her eyes and turned back to the Captain before opening them. "There's more than just her. I caught them in the act," she said, her voice sounding envenomed on her last syllable.

The captain narrowed his eyes. "I see." He turned to some of the other Royal Guards. "You heard the princess! Get these men taken to the royal jail, get those children to the nearest hospital."

"A Regular Jail."

The captain turned to Eclipsa. "What?"

She gritted her teeth. "They don't deserve the Royal Jail. Take them outside the castle and lock them up in one of the jails out there."

The Captain looked irritated. "A cell outside the castle won't hold this many people."

"Then use multiple cells."

"Your highness..."

Eclipsa's eyes locked onto his. "That was an order."

The Captain nodded. "I understand." He began barking orders to the other Royal Guards.

Eclipsa walked towards a group of children that was slowly forming through the coordination of the Royal Guards. One of the kids was walking extremely slowly, and the guard escorting him yanked on his arm to get him to move.

"HEY!" Eclipsa yelled, "they're kids! Be gentle with them!" She softened her expression and knelt down in front of the group. "Alright, listen up. I need your names, and the names of your parents, so that we can contact them. I'm going to have the guards pass around pencils and paper for all of you. I need the older kids to help the younger kids who can't write or spell, you got that?"

The kids didn't look any less frightened of Eclipsa than they had simply being.

Eclipsa turned to one of the Mewman kids. "Can you tell me your name?"

He winced and looked away from Eclipsa.

Eclipsa looked at the other kids. "I promise you they aren't going to hurt you anymore. I'm going to make sure of that. Um, can any of your tell me your names?"

The Royal Guards approached Eclipsa. "We've done a thorough sweep of the building, we don't believe there's anyone else in there."

Eclipsa averted her gaze. "They're Artificers. Secret Doors and Passageways are basically their Raison D'être. Does anyone in your squad have basic magic detection abilities?"

"We found several passages, but no secret rooms. All the passages led to outside the Guild Housing."

Eclipsa looked skywards. "I'll do a second sweep to verify. Get these kids to the nearest hospital, and make sure they're seen by the doctors there." She narrowed her eyes. "Make sure they're taken care of. If I find out anyone in your squad has neglected them, they'll be joining the pedophiles in jail."

The guards exchanged a look, nodded, and began to direct the children somewhere else.

Star looked around the scene, and noticed that the Queen was approaching Eclipsa, looking very unhappy. "Princess Eclipsa," the Queen began, "I detected that you used your dimensional scissors. Would you care to tell me what the hell is going on here?"

Eclipsa tensed up, and turned to her mother, herself sporting a serious expression. "It was the Artificers. They were abducting children and keeping them inside their Guild Housing."

"Eclipsa! The Guild legally adopted those kids! You don't know that they were—"

Eclipsa grabbed the collar of her mother's dress, and brought her face very close to her own. The guards attending the Queen tensed up.

Eclipsa spoke very deliberately and slowly, "I. Caught. Two of them. Fucking. One of the Girls." She released her mother's collar. "I don't care if the adoptions were legal or not. Many of them are guilty of abusing these kids, and the ones that aren't are still guilty by association." She walked past the queen. "I have a few things I need to investigate. I'll be back."

Eclipsa began walking in the direction of the palace.

"They still looked Mewman," Marco said, after a long pause.

Star nodded.

"Could we just..."

Star listlessly addressed the Mirror, "Is it possible to seek directly to the Iris Experiment?"

"ERROR: THIS DEVICE CANNOT FIND INFORMATION RELATED TO THE IRIS EXPERIMENT."

"Right." Marco said, folding his arms. "Doesn't this bother you?"

Star looked at him. "What do you mean?"

"Star, every time we ask the mirror to show us something like this, it's like... It gets under my skin. It's the same feeling I get when the mirror isn't masking away the awful stuff the curse is doing to my head. Every time I'm forced to think about what happened to those kids, I get this... disgusting... feeling. It starts in my gut and spreads throughout the rest of my body." He looked directly at Star. "Doesn't this get to you? Am I the only one who feels this way?"

Star glanced at Eclipsa, who was still visible from the mirror's vantage point. "When I was growing up, the shadow of Queen Eclipsa was one of the most vivid legends I was ever exposed to. My friends used to tell Ghost Stories about people and places associated with her. My parents would speak about her in hushed tones." She turned to look at Eclipsa's mother, who was carrying on an irate conversation with the Captain of the Royal Guards. "I don't know what kind of Queen she was. But when I see stuff like this, it's so... Dissonant... with everything I thought I knew about her. Like, I get how someone might have spun her into some kind of cackling villain—she's pretty terrifying when she's angry—but everything I've seen of her screams 'she's a good person, dealing with a terrible set of circumstances'."

Finally, Star turned to Marco. "Every time I see her, I'm reminded of that. And trying to associate everything she is with everything I thought she was is so taxing that I'm not as phased by the awful stuff she's dealing with."

Marco sighed. "I guess that's fair, but Star... Who's to say that dealing with all this stuff wasn't what turned her as she got older?"

"What?"

"I dunno, like a PTSD thing, or something? I mean, if she feels half as bad as I do—and I fully expect she feels a lot worse than me—this stuff would have to be tearing her up inside. And neither of us could possibly feel as bad as those kids, who... I don't even know what was going on there. Eclipsa tried to help them, but they didn't want to talk to her?"

"A lot of them were acting weird. Those Royal Guards were super... I dunno," Star said, scratching her head. "Like... Almost disrespectful of her. I mean, she wasn't being super nice to them either, but they're kind of supposed to be like, above it all." Glancing at the door, she added, "I've always tried to be as nice as possible to the Royal Guard, but they've never acted like that before."

"Could we see where Eclipsa went?" Marco asked of the mirror. "She said she was going to investigate the Guild Housing, but she's heading towards the palace."

The scene transitioned to Eclipsa's room, and a moment later, Eclipsa entered. She made a beeline directly for the mirror, and said, "I need a detailed map of the Artificer's Guild House, including explicit and obvious indicators of where secret passages and rooms are located."

When Star and Marco looked at the scene's version of the mirror, it simply said, "A DRAWN MAP OF THE ARTIFICER'S GUILD HOUSE."

"Alright," Eclipsa responded. "That should work." She left the room again, tucking the mirror into her clothes, concealing it.

Star nodded to this. "Okay, so she's going to help them make sure they didn't miss anything. What time is it in this scene?"

"ONE HOUR BEFORE SUNSET."

"Alright, does Eclipsa find anything interesting in the Guild Housing?"

"ERROR: UNABLE TO READ CORRUPT DATA."

Star rolled her eyes. "I thought we were supposed to be past that."

"DUE TO THE REPAIRS MADE ON THIS DEVICE, IT CAN RENDER SCENE DATA TO YOU WITHOUT PERSISTENT CORRUPTION IN THE PRESENTATION. ACTIVE ANALYSIS OF THIS DATA, HOWEVER, IS LIMITED TO REAL-TIME ANALYSIS ON PRESENTLY ACCESSED INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS OF CACHED DATA, AS RANDOM-ACCESS ANALYSIS REQUIRES USE OF THIS DEVICE'S DAMAGED MODULES."

Star sighed.

"Hey, Star?"

She turned to Marco.

"I'm going to go talk to my parents for a little while."

Star glanced at where the mirror would be if the scene weren't replacing its image.

"I won't be gone long, but maybe you could work on digging through the missing pages from Eclipsa's journal?"

Star nodded. "Alright. End the scene."

The room returned to normal.

Marco picked up the mirror. "You know where to find me if things get out of hand, right?"

Star nodded, and sat down on her bed.

"Alright. See you in a little while."