Revenant Day 1
A good night's sleep turned out to be what Margarita needed. Finally separated from her latest failure by sleep in a comfortable bed, she could actually think. And that, plus the fact that if she did nothing, the only event of note would happen the following night, made this day the only true time that she could plan.
Used to the pattern by now, Margarita collected the paper (from a traveler that was smart enough to be gone by noon), and a pen (from the innkeeper for a small fee), and laid it out on the floor of her room before shutting and locking the door so that she would not be disturbed.
First, going over the 'who'. The original target and already dead but didn't know it, Pabst Ribbon, servant of the Archmage. The whole reason why Margarita was even in town to begin with. Had blackmailed young woman Amy Foster into helping him with whatever his plan was… Margarita noted on a separate piece of paper that she still didn't know what precisely he was trying to do… despite Miss Foster already being in an Apprenticeship of sorts to Astoria Waldorf. Also involved with Amy were Sammy Siliam, a teenager with a garden that she used to grow flowers to sell to travelers, and Alexander Brandy a priest who was probably just on the cusp of a romantic relationship with Amy. Margarita frowned and turned to the other paper again, adding, Amy/Alex? on the second line. Also related to Amy was Cavan, the little boy that she and Astoria took care of from time to time for the Magistrate, Rupert Medoc. While Medoc was in charge of enforcing the law and order of Sallah, the Town Council was ostensibly 'in power', and the man behind everything that would happen in the coming days was the only member that Margarita had met: Bonarda.
That said nothing of the rather… fortunate, or unfortunate depending on her point of view, coincidence that brought together all of the students from the Silver Star Tower when Lillet had arrived, save one. Bartido was already in town, visiting his cousin Grot Greenham, which held him in town unless his cousin was killed, in which case he was often able to escape. Hiram and Professor Opalneria would pass through the town soon, and if the roads were open at any point, they would leave if able and not distracted. Lillet was in the Silver Star Tower, but would be called directly by Astoria if things in town got bad enough, which it generally did by or on the third day. It took a day for Lillet to arrive on dragonback.
The closest that Margarita had come had been when she had been fighting alongside both Lillet and Bartido, though both against her will. This was her problem, and she didn't need to watch… No, keep tallying.
Other than a few other minor players, that was the cast. The next clean sheet that she pulled out she started with 'Timeline' and filled out what she knew would happen without her time- intervention… ending with her own incarceration and Lillet's death at the hands of a Devil-infused Medoc before everything decended into chaos that she was forced to listen to. Obviously not ideal. She knew some of the ways that she could affect events, probably the most important having to do with the mess of relationships at the center of the town…
Margarita pulled the cast and questions papers and put them on either side of the timeline sheet and cast through them. Amy Foster was at the center of everything; part of the reason why bringing Cavan back the night before was so important. Being on the three of their — that is, Astoria, Amy, and Sammy — if Margarita was on their good side, it opened up a lot more options. Not really the one that she was looking for though, not without going through with her planned execution. Well, technically, murder, but in a town with this much chaos, what was one more death, anyway? That was the center, though. She had to exert most of her influence from there. And ideally, without attracting much of the attention of Medoc or Bonarda until much later in the timeline. If she was able to get the information she needed out of Amy while still flying under the radar, then she would probably be able to pull this off.
But she knew that just revealing herself as the Remnant Revenant wouldn't work. It wouldn't be awesome. It would be messy. And more people would be hurt than just the evil people. I can't imagine that the Revenant, were this person to exist, hasn't been gravely injured either. It's not as if Amy were wrong about it. Though with the advantage of being able to go through time again and again to get it right, she did have a better chance this time to make sure the ones who deserved to live did, and those that did not were left behind. Also something that telling Amy about it would probably be a bad idea. Not very many people knew that Margarita's current predicament had a previous example to cite; it wasn't the most believeable of stories after all.
And that left the biggest problem of all, which she hadn't even started on. The big thing that she had learned during the most recent 'attempt': There were two devils to deal with, not just one, and Bonarda may always be a devil. Maybe like one she used to know.
Given most of the information that Margarita had known going into the previous attempt, she had come up with a plan that had failed due to one thing that she had foreseen and one thing she had not. The thing she had foreseen was, while important, not critical. She still wasn't sure how to heal Cavan. As long as she could get him to return to his boy form and found a way to prevent him from becoming the Beast temporarily, she could bet that Astoria and/or Lillet could help her figure out a way to save him permanently. So the true failure there was she accidentally killed him. Again. It was a little embarrassing. But it was the other item that got her killed again: the second devil.
Already knowing that Bonarda was bad news from early on, Margarita had been dodging him entirely as much as she could. Given that he liked to work from the shadows, that wasn't all that hard. The problem was that meant that she had missed such an important piece of information that changed literally everything about how she needed to plan all of this. She had a general plan to deal with him that she basically had to throw out, as a second devil made it useless as long as she couldn't kill… innocents… oh. If Bonarda was actually a different devil rather than being possessed… then he hardly counted as innocent, did he?
Then she didn't have to worry about keeping another person alive once possessed. Just worry about sending them both to hell. And she knew precisely who she wanted to be possessed when she killed him.
That was it. For the first time since being sent back in time, Margarita Surprise smiled without any reservation or acting. That was something to work for. It did require her to get started as soon as possible in order to find all of the information and other things she needed, but she had never really expected to stay in her room all day.
The first step she took was one that was probably a bit paranoid, and possibly was a waste of time with the things that she wanted to accomplish that day. Staring into the fireplace where all the papers she had written on, save one, burned. No one was likely to pull any of it out of the fire before it was completely illegible, but it made her feel better to make sure that there was no evidence. Not that it felt all that likely that it would matter and that she would end up dancing back through time at least one more time. But it would clearly be the time that she didn't cross all of her T's and dot all of her I's that it would come back to bite her. What she hadn't expected, since she had been holed up in her room for so long, that someone would join her at the fire with his own lunch.
"I don't believe that we have been introduced," Bartido Ballentyne said as he managed to perch on the other side of the hearth.
Margarita ignored him, smothering a sigh. As much as it was annoying to deal with him, the last piece of advice that he gave her last time through still rung through her head. Tell me earlier… maybe if I knew what was going on the whole time, or even just doing something different around Grot, maybe he's not the victim. On the one hand, he was obviously right; there were clearly many variables that went into determining who the second devil possessed, and there was the clear possibility of it being Grot Greenham. The problem was that Margarita still didn't know what all those variables were, and there were many times where she completely ignored Bartido and it hadn't been him. If she was going to tell him… she didn't think that immediately was the best of ideas.
"I am Bartido Ballentyne," Bartido introduced with a rather impressive bow from his hunched over position. "May I have the honor of your name?"
That was laying it on a bit thick, even for him. Margarita made a show of looking at him suddenly, as if startled. "Oh, I'm sorry, were you talking to me?"
Bartido glanced around, clearly wanting to mention that the two of them were the only people in that part of the room, but to his credit resisted the urge. "Yes. My name is Bartido Ballentyne. May I ask yours?"
"Ah. Gertrude Silvaner," Margarita introduced herself incorrectly but smoothly with the ease of long practice. It was too bad that the Silvaner alias would be useless if— when she broke out of her loops in time. She continued to stir the ashes of the papers in the fire to make sure she had destroyed them enough. It barely looked like paper at that point.
"It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss Silvaner. May I ask why you are giving the fire such attention today?"
"You already did," Margarita replied.
"Ah, well, if it is not a question you would like to answer, I shall not press. It just seemed a better introductory question than asking why you were here in town, since that's what everyone probably asked," Bartido said before shrugging to himself. "It is no matter. If you would rather not be disturbed right now…" he was looking at her when Margarita looked up to confirm his suspicion. "…then I will simply say that I would love to speak more with you at a later time." He — more gracefully than Margarita thought he was able to — rose with his meal and went to one of the tables near the center of the room.
Why was it that, if Margarita was visible when Bartido was around, he would beeline to her no matter what else was happening? Was her disguise that bad? Or worse, was it that attractive to him? Margarita shook her head as she shook the poker to make sure that all that remained of her notes were black ashes. In the end it didn't matter; the more important thing was deciding if and how to break the news to him that everything in the town of Sallah wasn't as it seemed. As she stood up and brushed the ashes off of her dress, she decided that it was something that she would worry about later. She had a goal for the day, and she intended to complete it.
Thanking the proprietress on her way out, Margarita smiled as she stepped out into the sunlight. While at this point she had memorized the weather patterns of the week, she was still able to appreciate that the weather was kind to her on day one, even if she knew of all of the chaos that roiled underneath the surface. It was not a long walk to her destination. Astoria's shop was on the main road south, and not all that far away from the T intersection between that road and the western highway. On the left if coming from said T intersection where the inn was, it was obvious from the outside to anyone with a passing familiarity with Glamour magic that it was a magically enhanced shop. Margarita pushed open the far too familiar door and looked around the far too familiar shop to find that only Astoria was present. "Hello there," the owner said, brushing her hands off on her apron, but when she got a good look at Margarita, her welcoming smile got just that bit more sincere, and Margarita couldn't help but smile back. "Thank you again for your help last night, Miss Silvaner. Are you interested in purchasing something today?"
"No, that's not why I came by," Margarita said. "I had some questions that I hoped I could get the answers to here."
"Did you now?" Astoria asked, her smile slipping into a look of mild confusion and curiousity. "Well, I hope I can help you then. Do you mind if I work on these over here while we talk?"
"Oh, not at all!" Margarita said, shaking her head. "I don't want to keep you from your work too much."
Astoria waved Margarita over to where she was working in the corner of the shop, and pointed to a seat just to Astoria's right, which Margarita gratefully took. "Now, what is it that you wanted to ask about?"
"Well first, you said that you had an apprentice that I could deliver that poor boy to if he got lost again, but you didn't tell me their name or what they looked like so that I could find them!" Margarita said.
Astoria smiled. "No, I guess I didn't. My apprentice is Amy Foster; I wish that she was with me now, but she's currently serving with Mr. Ribbon in her other apprenticeship."
"She has multiple apprenticeships?"
"Yes; I told her that it was both highly irregular and probably too much to handle at once being an apprentice in both Glamour and Alchemy, but she wouldn't listen. She seemed to have reasons that she didn't want to discuss with me to the point that I backed off… I still don't know whether that was the right thing to do, but she seems to be managing okay so far."
A double apprentice; not the easiest excuse to keep up. Full credit to Amy for managing to pull it off. "Very impressive. You must be very proud of her."
"I am."
The sincerity in Astoria's voice hurt a little bit. Considering what Amy was going through, Astoria had no idea how proud she really should be. And how disappointed, considering. "Where is Mr. Ribbon's lab, then?"
Astoria glanced at Margarita before returning her visual attention to her plants. "It's kind of hidden near the forest on the southern edge of town. I don't really understand it, but Amy tells me that it's better for the Alchemy to be as far away from human 'contamination' as possible. That's kind of true for Glamour as well to some extent, and you see how well I do, so I don't really understand it, but Alchemy might be different in a way that I am not familiar."
It wasn't. Ribbon didn't want anyone to know what he was up to. "I see."
"I wouldn't recommend going down there without warning Amy first, as she tends to react poorly to surprises," Astoria warned with another glance over her shoulder at Margarita.
Margarita didn't plan to be seen at all. "I'll make sure to keep that in mind."
"Did you have any other questions, or did you just want to know about my apprentice?" Astoria asked. While the tone was light, Margarita could tell that there was some censure there. It didn't matter; she could easily move on.
"I heard that you were a member of the Magical Society once," Margarita said. "What was that like?"
"Did you now? I wonder how you heard about that if you didn't hear it from Amy. Yes, I was, and it was like any other gathering of practitioners of magic: politics, politics, politics. I eventually got too tired of it to really deal with it anymore, so I moved back to where I had come from."
"Oh; that's a bit disappointing. I was hoping that it would be a good place to settle down someday."
"It might be; it depends on your ability to deal with the constant bickering about things that don't really matter," Astoria replied. "What sort of magic are you familiar with, anyway?"
"I dabble in all of them," Margarita replied with as straight a face as she could muster.
"Hmm." Astoria fussed with her plant a bit before continuing. "It depends on what they've moved onto now, I guess. I've been out long enough that I'm not sure how someone who uses all four disciplines would be received."
Margarita shrugged. "That's alright. I have some options as to what I'm going to do." And more importantly, lots of time before it would matter, even ignoring this time trap that currently had her in its clutches. "Thank you very much, Ms. Waldorf," she said as she stood up, inclining her head to the older woman. "I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions."
"Oh it was no problem at all, dear," Astoria said, her smile fully returned to her face. "If you need anything else, be sure to let me know, and please call me Astoria."
"I would be happy to," Margarita replied. It was always nice to not have to lie.
Margarita made sure to go back to the inn and spend some time in the dining area (reading, in this case), before going back to her room. And then sneaking out via the balcony.
While Margarita wasn't precisely on the 'ground' floor due to the way that the land sloped away from the inn in the back, it was close enough that a little effort was all that was required for her to safely climb up and down from her room. There were a few concerns about her stuff, but she had decided not to worry about it too much; most of the things that she could actually be harmed by losing she kept on her person at all times, and everything else was replaceable, even if it would be annoying in a few cases. In the end, the advantage of being able to have easy alibis ready far outweighed the chances of the place being easily accessed without her being any the wiser.
She didn't believe that she was going to do anything that actually required an alibi that night, but it couldn't hurt her to have it in place. Hell, the possibility that people would get it in their heads that she tended not to go out at night might even help her out! She wouldn't count on it though.
Margarita stuck to the less-traveled areas of the eastern parts of town as she made her way to the southern end. The town wasn't that big, but it was big enough for her to take nearly an hour with all of the care she was taking not to be seen. That plus the fact that she hadn't pressed Astoria for the exact location; until this time through, she had never cared enough about it as she was not going to attack her target while he was in his own lair. That just seemed dumb, so she let him come out and sprung a trap on him. Lack of information on him, however, had changed the game. She was able to find it without too much lost time.
Like Astoria had mentioned, it was on the outskirts of town but well short of the forest. Kind of tucked into its own little alcove, it looked just the same as most of the other houses that dotted the area before it, save for one thing. The fact that the back door was guarded. By two Golems. They were remaining completely still — possibly inactive, but Margarita couldn't take that chance. That was at least part of the reason that he had his place out in the middle of nowhere, right?
So, no just strolling in the back door. Also probably best if she didn't walk through the sightlines of the Golems if she didn't have to. After examining the Golems for a minute, noticing that they apparently hadn't moved in long enough that a pair of birds had decided to build a nest on one of their necks. Even so, it was probably for the best that she look for another route.
Long experience let her slink around to the side of the house — though at this point she was pretty sure that 'house' was likely to be a misnomer. That side of the house, unfortunately, didn't have any windows or doors that she could use. What it did have, however, was a cellar entrance. An open cellar entrance. On the lightest of her steps and with her ears as open as they had ever been, Margarita approached the dark portal to who-knows-what. While she couldn't hear precisely what was going on down there, she could hear something going on down there. It looked like she needed to get closer, as risky as that was. Quickly, she checked her automatic defenses to make sure she actually had them with her and on, and then stepped down into the darkness.
Straining her ears, she finally identified that the noises were much like that of the lab back at the Silver Star Tower, plus voices. No angry Opalneria, or the generally genial banter of Bartido and the Alchemy Professor, but mutters. Conveniently — thankfully — there was a little nook by the stairs that she could settle into that gave her a view, if a bad one, of what was going on.
Amy was nearer to the exit, standing with obvious discomfort in her situation out of the way while Ribbon was working on what looked to be a large ball of… something. The work table that Ribbon was working on took up much of that side of the room, but the wall drew the eye with the giant drawing of some sort of alchemic diagram. Two of the thirteen distinct parts of that diagram had checkmarks, while the rest of them looked to be somewhat typical for alchemic plans that Margarita had seen, though she could make hide nor hair of it. Maybe it was a chart of what Ribbon was trying to make with his Alchemy? What was thirteen parts though?
There was only one thing she remembered, and she really hoped she was wrong.
Right as Margarita had that thought, Ribbon called Amy over to him to have her do something that was clearly Glamour to the object. So… it wasn't something Alchemy at all? Or was it still Alchemy, just with a little Glamour push? Margarita had no idea. She had never seen anything like that attempted before. Unfortunately, Ribbon dismissed Amy and Margarita had to hold her breath as Amy quickly retreated from the room right past where Margarita was hiding and flying up the stairs out into the open air as quickly as possible. As Margarita let out her breath carefully, she realized that it was probably too close a call for her to press her luck any further. She retreated as well, carefully following Amy's footsteps. There was one more thing she needed to accomplish.
While there was a mild chance of running into Amy since Margarita didn't know where the poor girl went to run away from Ribbon, she did know that Amy did not appear anywhere near her own destination: that same field that she had found Cavan the night before. There was a reason she was able to find him the first time, after all.
One of the biggest advantages that Margarita's foreknowledge brought her was she knew where mana would coalesce enough to form a crystal that she could harvest from, as well as the best places to place any runes for situations that she had seen before. And this was one event that she had seen quite a few times. There was a chance that it caused what happened later to be stronger, but if she could delay the deaths beginning by a day… she didn't think she had a good enough excuse not to. The familiar and easy strokes of the Hades Gate flowed into the ground from her ritual wand and immediately flowed into drawing a Chaos Nest, a rune that she was intimately familiar with. Out of the Hades Gate she summoned Ghosts to collect mana to replace what she had just burned, and out of the Chaos Nest came a grimalkin. Then two. While Margarita, the runes, and the ghosts were all hidden behind the nearest building to that field (a barn), Margarita had the two grimalkins step out to reveal themselves just as she heard the gutteral roar of the creature that the town referred to as 'the Beast'.
Nothing else was visible to the grimalkins nor the Beast, so they focused on each other. It wasn't really a fair fight. The second grimalkin was only there just in case everything went wrong, but the first sleep spell from the original grimalkin was plenty to knock out the Beast. Margarita had the other one cast it too, just to be sure, and then she started the process of cleaning up after herself. She erased the Chaos Nest rune and just as the ghosts fully drew the mana that she had spent, erased the Hades Gate and dismissed them as well. She had each of the grimalkins cast sleep one more time just as they had enough magic built up to do so, and then dismissed them.
Carefully, she approached the Beast, seeing if she could learn anything new this time. While on previous attempts at this Margarita had learned quite a bit about the Beast from this investigation of the creature directly, she was not too confident of finding out anything new this time around. Much as it was, as she had told Lillet, one of the last gaps in her understanding of what was going on, she wasn't sure that anything she could do here was going to give her the information she needed. But there was no reason not to try, since she had the opportunity, and the risk was relatively low.
That being said, she hadn't gotten as far as she had by being reckless.
Margarita slowly circled the Beast, looking once again at the rather chimera-like construction. It was as if someone decided that dragons weren't sufficient when it came to large Sorcerous creatures and wanted something that was more like Alchemy's Chimera. The first thing that she always thought of when she was this close to it was that it was just so bizarre. Having seen it so many times, she could see how the base human face had been transformed, and that made it easier to find the other things that had been transformed. Unlike the Chimera, it wasn't just made up of different parts of animals to make a creature designed for battle. Rather, it was made up of different parts of lesser devils to make a creature designed for battle. And Margarita was sure that it had been designed; she just wasn't sure why or how.
The head was reminiscent of an Imp's, though since it was based on Cavan rather than just a traditional Imp's head, as well as missing the stupid little hat, it was difficult to tell from far away. The body itself was definitely that of a Dragon's, though, and the claws that of a Demon's. Other lesser devils from her lessons from both Advocat and her… original tutor… could be seen in the modified jawline, and the shoulders. The tail looked to be that of a snake, but with a scorpion's spine at the end. While Margarita was sure that it was taken from another lesser devil rather than the combination that she saw in it, it was not one she recognized. It was actually something that she found a little comforting; even with was much as she knew about devils, there were still things that she didn't. Still depths she hadn't plumbed.
But no, as much as she could examine the body in front of her, the information that she actually needed was more on the level of how and why rather than what and who. And that, unless she got particularly lucky wasn't going to come from this opportunity. As she backed slowly away from the Beast she had to remind herself that all of that investigation was bonus. The true purpose of her actions with the Beast were already accomplished with him being put to such a deep sleep. As long as she hadn't alerted anyone else to the fact that she was playing with causality a bit yet, there would be no deaths that night.
It was disappointing that it was often only this night that she was able to pull that off quite so cleanly.
11
