Disclaimer: Ib and Soul Eater belong to their respective owners.
Chapter 2: Investigations Begin
"Have you heard of the artist Weiss Guertena?" Maka asked the others around her. She was currently reading through a newspaper, specifically a headline reading "Disappearances in Art Gallery."
Maka was a meister, a wielder of their death weapon partner Soul Eater. Both attended the DWMA, the Death Weapon Meister Academy, located in Death City. At the moment, their lesson in the Crescent Moon class had just finished, and a break had begun.
"No, why? Should we have?" Soul asked, though he evidently wasn't very interested. He could perform on the piano well, but art just wasn't his thing.
"Well, in the news, they say there've been disappearances in one of his galleries," Maka continued.
"I presume you're talking about an art gallery?" clarified Death the Kid, another Meister who just so happened to be Death's son. He stood with his hands held behind his back looking slightly more interested than Soul.
Maka nodded in confirmation. "There've also been rumors that the gallery itself is haunted by a witch and ghosts of the people who've disappeared."
"G-ghosts?" Liz, one of Kid's Death Weapons, stammered nervously. "Kid, please tell me we're not going to go there." Her meister didn't reply.
"That's not cool at all," Soul remarked as he leaned back on his chair. "'sides, how d'you know it's not all fake?"
"Even if it's not a witch behind the disappearances, you have to wonder what the cause is," said Tsubaki, the soft-spoken Death Weapon of Black*Star, her near-opposite.
"Whatever's the reason, I'm sure that I, Black*Star, could deal with some puny ghosts!" her partner boasted, climbing onto the desks.
"Black*Star, please get down…"
"Ah…excuse me?" All heads turned as another student came up to the group, and Black*Star almost immediately flipped off the desk and landed before her. Startled, the girl continued, "I was—"
"Hoping for an autograph from the great Black*Star?" the blue-haired boy asked. He soon found a book wielded by an irritated Maka impaled into his head.
"Uh, no." The girl turned to Kid. "Lord Death wanted to see Death the Kid and Liz and Patty Thompson."
"What could Father want this time?" Kid wondered. "I'll catch up with you guys later." Standing, Kid left the room with Liz and Patty trailing behind him.
"What was that all about?" Soul asked, looking at the others. They just shrugged.
As Kid strolled under the torii designed to resemble guillotines and entered the Death Room, he was met with the vast expanse of tan desert and cloudy skies. Lord Death awaited him at the end of a slightly raised platform amidst numerous black crosses. He stood in front of a rounded obsidian mirror.
"Hey there, Kiddo~!" Death called, waving one of his large cartoonish hands and swaying on his shadowy perch.
As Patty waved back and Liz raised a hand, Kid merely stated, "Hello, Father."
"So? How're your classes? Anything new~?" Death continued.
"Father, please," Kid interrupted. "Why is it that you called me here?"
"Straight-to-the-point as always, I see," remarked Death, wagging a finger jokingly at his son. Serious, he went on. "I'm sure you've heard about the disappearances at a certain art gallery, have you not?"
Recalling the conversations earlier, Kid nodded. "I'm guessing that will be my mission then?" he clarified.
"Uh-huh," Death confirmed. "I have a feeling these disappearances are the work of a witch and not something mundane. However, we've found no information about what we're up against. I already sent Stein and Marie to investigate, but they came back empty-handed. And it seems only youngsters have been going missing. I'm sending you because I believe that you'll be able to find and handle whatever's the trouble."
After a moment of thought, Kid asked, "Are there any other similarities among the victims besides their age? And why hasn't this been investigated sooner?"
"Not that I could tell," Death answered, "though it might be a good idea to learn more about Guertena and his exhibits, and maybe talk to friends and families of the disappeared before you go. As for investigating, no one thought it had anything to do with witches or not until rumors that the gallery was haunted arose."
"Such as…"
"Such as portraits' eyes following visitors, statues moving when their backs are turned, and shadows streaking through the halls."
"And all of this was seen by witnesses?"
"Yes."
Kid thought about this. While it was true that evidence could have been faked, there was no reason for an art gallery to go as far as to frighten off visitors. And it couldn't be a publicity stunt – none of the disappeared had been found. There were many other possibilities as well, but he decided it wouldn't hurt to look.
"Hold up," Liz suddenly cut in nervously. It was no secret that the abnormal and occult terrified her. "You're telling me we're going to a haunted museum?"
"An art gallery, actually," Kid corrected, "but yes."
"Well, what're we waiting for?" asked Patty cheerfully. "Let's go! Let's go!"
"I suppose we should." Bowing respectfully to his father, Kid told his father, "Thank you. I'll finish this mission as soon as I can." Then, saying goodbye, Kid, Liz, and Patty started to leave the room. And as they were leaving, he heard Lord Death call, "Good luck, Kiddo!"
The trio's first stop for finding information about Guertena was the art gallery itself. After all, what better place was there to learn about an artist than their gallery?
At the moment, the Guertena exhibit was located at an art museum in Europe, so they were lucky that the place was still open by the time they arrived. As they'd anticipated, there were fewer visitors than there'd normally be (or so they assumed), probably as a result of the rumors. Even so, the museum still held a few dozen patrons not scared off or even curious about the rumors themselves.
Passing through the wide double doors, Kid, Liz, and Patty headed into the white-walled entrance all and to the front desk. A receptionist stood there, and he supplied the trio with a pamphlet of information. Behind the man hung a poster of an indigo abyss and a giant, wide-eyed fish.
"It's quite unusual for young ones such as yourselves to attend an art exhibition," the receptionist remarked. "Must have been a month since I last saw someone around your ages. Not to say there haven't been any kids around recently. You just can't forget those red eyes…"
"Red eyes?" Liz repeated. It wasn't completely impossible for someone to have red eyes, though they were somewhat of a rarity. So if someone had such eyes…
"How long ago was that?" Kid asked almost impatiently.
"Huh? Oh, maybe three weeks?" replied the receptionist. Three weeks? That's about when the disappearances began, thought Kid. That girl with red eyes may have something to do with it. Maybe he if could find this girl's name, they'd have an actual lead to go on.
"Hey, Kid?" Liz's voice cut into his thoughts. He glanced at Liz, who gestured to the ever-growing queue of guests. "We're kinda holding up the line."
"You know, places like these usually have those thingies people write their names in, too, right?" Patty suddenly added. "Maybe we could look there!"
"We do have a Guestbook, if that's what you're looking for," the receptionist told them. "Though, I'm not sure where it is."
Seeing that the receptionist wouldn't be of any more help, Kid said, "Alright, then. Let's go, Liz, Patty," and led the sisters away from the desk.
"Well, that was a complete waste of time," Liz complained.
"Maybe, maybe not," Kid answered. Then, waving the brochure, he said, "In any case, let's take a look around the exhibit."
Opening the pamphlet, they found a map of the gallery, which had a considerably simple layout. Located on the first floor were a few halls of more unconventional art, while on the upper floor was mostly paintings, though sculptures mingled throughout. The other floors contained works of other artists. To Kid, it was easy to see how the three could split up so that they covered more area.
"Can you two manage investigating this floor?" he asked the Thompson sisters.
Glancing around, Liz took note that there were still several people wandering around the gallery. Scaredy cat she was, if she was with her sister and there were other living people there, she could handle it. "Yeah, I think so," she replied. "Let's go, Patty."
"Alright!" her younger sister agreed.
The trio split up almost immediately after that, with Liz and Patty walking further into the first floor of the museum, and Kid traversing up the white stairs that led to the second. A row of windows frosted with intricate designs met him, and paintings lined the curved walls of corridors branching off into different directions. At first glance, nothing seemed off about the art gallery.
As Kid strolled further into the gallery, he couldn't help but glance almost warily at the canvases. The paintings in this area, he noticed, all seemed to have eyes staring out at the gallery-goers. Others had no eyes yet were still foreboding. Lady Taking the Newspaper, The Two Roses. There was another painting that featured only a single eye, underlined with dark shadows, titled Worry. And then he saw three mannequins with no eyes (or heads, for that matter) draped in identical dresses of different colors. Maybe it was just his imagination, but it felt as though someone was watching him.
Shaking that thought from his mind, Kid continued down the corridor to the next room. This one contained more nontraditional artwork and abstract paintings. He passed by the Misshapen Diamond first, merely glancing at the rather generic still-life Bitter Fruit.
Then, a few paintings later came the uneasy sensation of being watched. Kid immediately looked over his shoulder at a gold-framed portrait hosting a striking young woman with a light smile, crimson eyes, and a dress as vibrant as her eyes. Long brown hair flowed down her back as she posed stilly in time.
"The Lady in Red, huh?" Kid read the title plate. "Wonder if she has anything to do with this. I wouldn't be surprised…"
He moved on before other visitors began to stare and passed by sculpture of a Taste-Cleansing Tree and what looked to be a melting blue woman called Fusion. As he came to the front of sculpture and noticed, however, everything went downhill.
The head tilted to the left; an arm bent out to the right, and the sculpture seemed to slouch in on itself.
The head tilted to the left…
an arm bent out to the right…
In no way was the statue at all symmetrical.
"NOOOOO! IT'S NOT SYMMETRICAL!"
After splitting up, Liz and Patty were wandering throughout the first level of the gallery. To their left hung a polished sign worn with use that read "Welcome to the World of Guertena." There were only two murals in this area, and a couple of corridors. The blank white walls were somewhat intimidating, and the classical music playing softly added a regal air.
"Hey, sis! Let's go look at that!" Patty suddenly exclaimed, grabbing Liz's arm and pulling her to the center of the room where an enormous mural was.
"'Abyss of the Deep,'" Liz read the title plate outside of the rope barrier. "No kidding – it looks like it goes on forever."
The artwork of the anglerfish reaching the surface of an endlessly deep pool was surreal, to say the least, and it almost seemed magnetic, luring in patrons with its beauty. Perhaps it already had.
But that was absurd.
"Come look at this one, sis!" Liz heard he sister call from a painting that stood as tall as the wall itself not far off. This one was less realistic than the Abyss of the Deep, using abstruse streaks of paint the scene of an overbearing mother dictating her son's piano practice.
Joining Patty, Liz read the plaque underneath the painting, "A Well-Meaning Hell." She thought of Maka's partner, who came from a family of talented musicians. "Kinda reminds you of Soul, doesn't it? I mean, he was pressured to go into music like his brother, wasn't he? I bet his parents thought it would be for the best, but Soul might think otherwise. I think that's what this piece's saying."
Patty regarded her sister's words for a moment before laughing and saying, "I don't really get it, but you sounded really smart, sis!"
Despite her initial worries, Liz found herself engrossed in the atmosphere. However, they found that few of the other artworks caught their attention enough to pause and examine it or ponder its meaning, though Liz was interested in the collection Twinkling of Crystals and Stars, and Patty found The Coughing Man hilarious.
They were just approaching a sculpture of a luminescent red rose when they heard their meister scream. Sighing, Liz glanced at a clock on the wall. C'mon, Kid, she complained silently. It hasn't even been half an hour yet.
Nevertheless, the two hurried up the main stairwell to the second floor where Kid should have been, striding past near-identical blank mannequins and other works, and to another corridor where bystanders had gathered, no doubt curious about the disturbance. What the sisters saw was typical: Kid hunched over, gripping the sides of his face, while staring horrified at a (weird) sculpture. A few museum guards stood nearby, telling him to either quiet down or leave. That's when Liz knew it was time to intervene.
"Excuse me," she spoke up, marching up to Kid. The guards turned to her expectantly. "Sorry 'bout my friend here. He, uh, just gets overemotional sometimes."
"Well, he's disturbing the other patrons," said the guard. "I'll have to ask you to leave."
"Got it." To her meister, Liz hissed, "Let's go, Kid," before dragging him away by his collar, with Patty close behind. They were aware of the stares, though they were used to them by now.
"I can't believe you got us kicked out of a museum, of all places!" Liz complained as they passed yet another enormous abstract painting. "They won't let us back in now."
"We could always sneak back in, sis," Patty suggested cheerfully. "Like spies."
"That is true. What do you think, Kid?" She looked at her meister, but he had disappeared.
They caught sight of him gazing up at the wide painting, deep in thought and with a hand to his chin. The painting was of a landscape that vaguely resembled the gallery and incorporated its artworks, but was made up of such seemingly arbitrary strokes that it would take a moment for one to actually see the subject. On a stand in front of it lay a worn ledger and pens, no doubt the guestbook they'd been looking for.
"That's odd," Kid remarked to no one in particular. "There's no plaque or title."
Joining Kid, Liz and Patty examined the book, flipping through its pages and skimming over the names. Most of the signatures had dates written next to them, and others were accompanied by comments. Overall, everything seemed normal.
But then, as they went began turning to the entries from around a month prior, something struck them as odd. Several names had been signed more than once, many on the same days. Some didn't even make note of the date. Even more mysterious was the fact that a number of these signatures were crossed through with red ink. Elimination – that was the word that immediately came to mind from the sight. Two names appeared the most:
Ib, in plain handwriting, and Garry, in cursive scrawl.
Their names were scattered throughout the guestbook, but they both started on the same day and appeared together in later entries. Once in a while, though, one would appear and the other wouldn't. The last time they appeared was nearly a month before, when the disappearances began.
And neither had x's etched through them.
None of it made any sense, but these "Ib" and "Garry" people were definitely involved in the disappearances.
"Let's get going, Kid," Liz said, feeling satisfied with their discovery, even if they hadn't figured it all out yet. But Kid was still gazing at the abstract canvas, oblivious to the world. "Uh, Kid?"
"What a strange piece," he murmured. "It's almost as though…it's…" Trailing off, Kid reached a hand towards the canvas as if to touch it. Liz stiffened and scanned for the guards.
"Hey, Kid!" she hissed. Kid froze and turned to her in confusion. "You can't just go 'round touching paintings. We'll get into even more trouble!"
"Right," he replied shortly. With one glance back at the painting, Kid marched past Liz and Patty saying, "Tell me what you found."
And as they headed for the exit…
None of them noticed that three painted shapes in the painting, one in black and two in red, disappeared.
A/N: Sorry this took so long to update! I have no excuse except for procrastination. I feel like the quality of my writing went down in this chapter (the first chapter was a "spur of the moment" thing), but perhaps that's just me. In addition, I don't think I wrote Liz and/or Patty in character. This is more of an introductory chapter, too, for those who haven't read/seen one or the other. I think I should've added a little more detail.
I hope you guys enjoyed in any case. I've already started writing the next chapter, so it shouldn't take as long.
Thanks for reading and please tell me how I'm doing!