I was still half-rehearsing ways to sound normal when Llewellyn's front door opened.
Which was unfair. I hadn't even knocked yet.
We both stared.
Images from this morning—and, worse, from those posts—slammed into me.
"…"
I was so, so fucked.
Though, unfortunately, not in the way I was picturing.
Penguin chirped, distracting us both, before leaping out of my pocket and running off to find Lumos, who could be seen wagging his tail in the background.
Llewellyn raised an eyebrow.
"Shut up," I said, pushing in past him. "This day has been too long already."
Llewellyn snorted and closed the door behind me.
"You cannot keep stopping me from working my shifts, especially not when there's so much volume!" I said, dropping into a chair at the kitchen table and dragging a hand over my face. "All drama I caused, no less. My team's going to kill me."
"Your team's not going to kill you," Llewellyn said, turning the kettle on to make tea. "Tell me what happened."
I grumbled and explained about visiting Gran, the artifact suddenly failing, and how I'd ended up in that mess with the reporter.
Llewellyn handed me a mug full of hot water and a box with a selection of teabags, then sat in front of me with his own mug. "That's what I was worried about," he muttered after a while.
As I chose one of those green teas that tasted like gunpowder, Llewellyn unlocked his phone, found the text he was looking for, then slid his phone across the table toward me.
I picked it up. It was a long, timed message from Tiernan, set to vanish in under two hours.
I skimmed through it.
As Tiernan had already let us know that morning, their results indicated that the artifact had been manipulated somehow, and then forcefully activated from a distance.
Proof that it was possible to tamper with artifacts remotely, when we didn't even know it was a possibility until yesterday, was already a huge problem.
But that wasn't all. TAPESTRY had kept the keyring site under discreet watch and discovered that someone who was not KARMA (or any agency they knew) had turned up, slipped past the agents, lingered a few minutes picking through debris, and left.
They'd tailed him, somehow tracking him all the way to Liorim Forest, north of Innishae, where it seemed that this guy had found a Dungeon.
As far as we knew, the System usually dispatched people to Dungeons within a few hours from their formation—but no one had seemed to have been dispatched to this one yet.
Instead of claiming it, or negotiating with the System, or trying to barge in some other way, the guy had just… set up a tent in front of it.
"What?" I said.
"I thought he might not be System-awakened," Llewellyn said, pensive. "But he did teleport there, so that's not likely. They think he was doing something to it."
"How did they track him if he teleported?"
Llewellyn took a sip of his tea. "GPS tag," he said, deadpan. "They slipped it into his pocket."
Oh. Well. There was always that.
I scrolled down.
"Since there's a Knot involved," Llewellyn said, "Tiernan thinks it would be best if I go and take a look."
I read the remaining exchange quickly. Yeah, he did mention the GPS tag later on.
"He thinks he's trying to undo the Dungeon and turn it into a Knot again?" I said, frowning. "What would he have to gain from that?"
"Who knows. Blackmail? We get thousands of Dungeons around the world, but comparatively very few Distorted Realms. However, if Dungeons can be undone to create more Distorted Realms, you could blackmail anyone with it."
Blackmail via Knot? Really?
"Are you serious? That's like opening a black hole in the middle of town and say 'pay up or else'! Great plan, except the whole planet gets eaten, so—what exactly do they gain from it? Besides, it would be easier to just make sure no one tackles the Dungeon. Then it'd revert automatically to a full blown Knot and back to a potential Distorted Realm."
"But that would require stopping the System from sending anyone in, which is not likely. And then again, stopping the System from making another Dungeon from the recreated Knot."
He was right. But this still seemed off.
It was really unfortunate that I'd burnt through my Core Partition access for the day. I don't know if it'd have shown anything, but I could have confirmed what kind of Dungeon we were dealing with at the very least.
Though of course, if I hadn't inputted the prompt, I wouldn't even know this was something I could do to begin with. It was just annoying that my first access happened today.
"I'm going tonight," Llewellyn said.
I hummed. That wasn't exactly a surprise.
Still—
"I'm coming with you. But why tonight? We could just go now."
"We don't know if he noticed TAPESTRY tailing him, and we don't know how powerful he is. He'll be less likely to expect us in the middle of the night. Tiernan said he's pitched a tent—he's not leaving. And the guys will let us know if the GPS tag moves—unless the man finds it first. I think we'll have a better chance to get to the bottom of this if we find him with his guard down. Otherwise he'll just teleport out."
Alright, that made sense.
I handed his phone back.
"You should stay here in the meantime," Llewellyn added after a moment. "It'll be easier to coordinate when it's time to leave."
"…"
This was probably just to keep me off social media. But.
"So… We wait until tonight, then go investigate this mysterious tent guy. What do I do here in the meantime?"
...There was no reason for the air to suddenly shift.
Except that my eyes kept going to his mouth.
And.
I was still wearing his clothes.
"The guest room is available," Llewellyn said, a bit roughly. "This might take the whole night, so if you can rest, that would be ideal. I should probably take a nap too."
I almost said, Wouldn't coordinating be even easier if we didn't bother with separate rooms?
Almost.
I rubbed my face.
It really made no sense for me to be here, but I wasn't about to refuse.
As I was about to say, "Fine,"—
—there was a sudden knock on the door.
We looked at each other.
Llewellyn's eyes went toward the hallway.
"…Are you expecting someone?" I asked.
More knocks. Penguin and Lumos also came to check.
Llewellyn frowned and went to open the door.
"Llewellyn," a female voice said. "Do you have any idea what's happening online right now?"
Ah, damn it.
I knew that voice.
"Hello, Emma," Llewellyn sighed.