"Will this space do?" Yuri Alpha asked of the unused office in which they stood.
"Yes… Yes Lady Yuri, it will be fine." Myne replied, as she approached a wall where a board had been set up for her.
A small table with various pins and bright red colored yarn, along with a quill, ink, and blank rough paper were laid out just in front, waiting to be used. "The three hundred of the Papal elites are in Kami Miyako, and I've had artists draw pictures of the children's faces as they might have looked in life. They will be canvasing the orphanages to put names to faces in short order, and then once we've identified where they lived…" Yuri Alpha approached as she spoke, and Myne picked up on the thinking.
"Yes, I see, then they'll start questioning people, and my sister, Lady Yuri?" Myne asked, reflexively checking the door to the office.
"She has already been dispatched to Elferon to find out if any of her old contacts still live there, or if they can help." Yuri Alpha answered while Myne took up the map of the region and pinned it to the board.
"I see, you are very efficient." Myne said with her face twisted in bitterness, "No wonder we lost. You'd worked for half a day before we got breakfast." She praised Yuri Alpha without reluctance, but her bitter face was not lost on the stern faced Yuri.
The battle maid watched while the former vice commander for Remedios Custodio put pins in the places where bodies had been found, and added in small scraps of blank paper, on which she wrote:
-Date?-
-Local activity?-
-Merchants or travelers?-
-Dog owners?-
When she'd put these in place, Myne took the red thread and began binding the end to one pin, then ran it down and wrapped it to another, then another, then another, until she had every body dump site bound and secured the other end of the other end of the thread back to the start.
"What are you doing?" Yuri asked with a tiny frown on her face.
"Lady Yuri, in my experience, operations that are well organized will inevitably have a pattern of some sort, they will have an area of comfort or of 'safety' if you like. Or some goal that requires them to be in a particular place. In the military it was the limitations of supply chains, but this is different, not much so, but different." Myne explained, folding her hands behind her back and staring at the map.
"You don't believe these are random?" Yuri asked with doubt, folding her hands in the same fashion.
Myne shook her head. "No, My Lady. No, I do not. If this had been multiple races of children, if this had been both sexes or multiple ages? Then it could just be a well organized traveling killer. But the same dogs every time? The same sex and age range? And the sense to dump bodies where they wouldn't be recognized? Whoever was doing this, or is doing this, I suppose, is doing it with purpose. I really wish we knew how they were killing these kids though. It's obvious they wanted people to believe it was just wild dogs killing runaways. But 'something' was killing them first and then dogs were allowed to tear them apart after."
"Find the method of killing, and you think we will find the motive?" Yuri Alpha said to the sadomasochistic prisoner.
"Yes. I think so." Myne replied with a patient nod, "My sister will probably be able to get us that, if there's some underbelly to all this, chances are she knows who it is, even if she doesn't know she knows it yet. She will work it out."
"You have great confidence in your sister, for someone who doesn't like her very much." Yuri Alpha replied with a dark raised eyebrow.
"My sister is an evil sadistic bitch who drove our other sibling to suicide and tortured me till I liked it… giving and taking it." Myne said with a caustic tone, "However, she's good at what she does, she was a Black Scripture, if I hadn't gone the path I did, well, I might have followed her."
"Didn't you set people on fire during the war just to torture the pope and wreak havoc on the morale of her followers? You call Clementine a sadistic bitch?" Yuri looked at the barely attentive Myne and huffed.
"Sure, but that was business. Not that I didn't like my work, for all the good it did. But I'm no worse than any of you, I've seen the way your demons torture their victims. Your great human champion, from what I hear, destroyed whole cities. But I'm a prisoner while your own all rule. I don't object, but between the two of us, Lady Yuri, we don't need to play hypocrite."
Yuri Alpha could think of no ready response to that, so she fell silent to look over the map without knowing just what she was looking for.
"I've been to a few of these areas." Myne finally said, reverting back to the important subject, "There are, or were, a lot of open grounds around the villages, I'm sure since so much of this part of the Theocracy was depopulated during the war, that is still the case. I'm also not much of a gambling woman, but I'll just bet that the other villages where the bodies were dumped were just the same."
"Does that matter?" Yuri asked with a faint hopeful tone that belied the neutral mask she wore.
"Maybe. It means they're trying to avoid being seen, that whole 'pocket dimension' you people use is not something we have access to, so how are they moving bodies? Yes, they're avoiding being seen, but they're probably not just walking around with a corpse over the shoulder. A cart maybe? Or a horse could carry a bag with a crumpled corpse in it without a problem and without drawing any unusual attention." Myne took up the quill and began to chew on the end of it as she thought the matter over.
"Gah…" She said and began to tap her foot impatiently, "I need more information."
"It's only been a few hours since Clementine was sent out, there is no telling how much she'll get done in that time." Yuri Alpha remarked and went back to quietly staring at the map, waiting for its secrets to be revealed.
Clementine felt like a tourist. She stared around Elferon just 'gawking' at the impossible. Clad in an expensive traveling outfit of blue and maroon, with black boots and a pair of sharp stiletto blades, they were all that helped her keep her sanity in the moment. 'Elves… free, loud mouthed, in your face, say what they mean without flinching, bowing, or scraping… elves!' It was a bizarre sight to the former scripture who had never seen an elf that wasn't on their knees.
More shocking than that were the undead just walking around the major western mountain city. Death knights blocked traffic, while skeletons pulled carts. Demihumans of various races, not to mention including a few obviously heteromorphic races… all seemed to go about their business without so much as bothering one another. Clementine rubbed both her eyes hard enough that for a moment, they stung. "How…?"
'Is nobody else… seeing this shit?' She asked herself as she looked around the former Theocracy city. Clementine never much cared for the human supremacist drives of her former masters, there were the strong and the weak, and anyone could end up on the wrong side of that equation. But absent the human supremacism, she still found herself walking around gawking like the simplest of country rubes visiting a city for the first time.
Around her it seemed that nobody noticed or cared, elves loudly argued with merchants, dwarves bartered with ogres, bafolk were walking walls in military uniforms and trading jokes with their human counterparts.
It took the better part of an hour of wandering before she got hold of her senses. 'Bizarre or not, I need to adapt to this very strange turn of events or I'm as good as dead… again.' Clementine shuddered at the empty blackness that followed her previous death, and made her way into the interior of what had been a more seedy part of the city in the past.
Finding the one she wanted was not as difficult as she first feared, the gray stone buildings were built to last, so little of the city ever changed, with materials harvested from the mountain itself when mining for precious, precious iron. The stone roads were as familiar to her as if she'd walked them yesterday, and true to form in the smaller areas, the poorer citizens still lived. Among those areas were the small stalls where minor vendors worked, and there he was.
A mustache thin as the tip of a quill, shifty eyed, hunchbacked, licking his lip over and over like a lizard licked its own eyeballs. His thumbs were intact, which was a change from the last time she saw him. But he was otherwise the same, right down to his half bald head of wispy black hair that was combed over the bald spot as if that were going to fool anyone.
"Hi there." Clementine said with a nice, sweet voice when she approached the fruit stand her old contact was running. He looked at her with a face pale and full of fear. 'Cowardly as ever, didn't take much back then, doesn't take much now.'
"Cl-Clementine… you're ah, well, alive… and… you look good, like you haven't aged a day… like you know ah, well, like you're doing well." He gestured with shaking hands to the angled display of various apples. "Got some nice food if you'd like to buy something."
"I don't need fruit Micah, I need information, information I know you're just the sort to have. Information you're going to give me." Clementine gave her catlike smile to the skeevy little man and licked her lips, but to her surprise, he didn't knuckle under as he usually did.
"Careful there, Clementine, one shout, one hint of violence, and the death knights will come down on you like that mountain." He waved a hand to the mountain against which the city sat.
"That's fine, I'll just explain that I'm acting on behalf of one of the King's servants and you… are withholding information pertinent to my work. See how they like that?" She giggled a little and put away her blades. He went far more pale than he'd ever been before and his body trembled like a leaf clinging to a branch during a windstorm. 'OK, maybe there are some advantages to a job like this.' Clementine reluctantly acknowledged as he frantically held out his hands just between them with his palms down, and waved them as if to fan her while he whispered…
"Keep it down will you…? I'm almost entirely out of that line of work, and I'd like to get the rest of the way when I can!" Micah hissed out, "Just tell me what you want to know!"
His shifty, beady eyes bugged out of his head and he leaned toward her over his stall just a bit.
"Some kids have been getting killed, a lot of them. What can you tell me?" Clementine asked with her arms crossed in front of her body and her feet planted in front of him, her glare as predatory and catlike as it always was.
"That?!" Micah hissed, "and for the sake of god's own bones keep it down! Listen I don't know much, all I know is...