LMS VII: I am going to finish Loosely Lawful dangnabit

Listen friends I know I've published 12 chapters of this work and have 6 more sitting in my draft because I'm a coward, but I will end this. It will be done. I need motivation. Unfortunately I am maybe not as competitive as I was when I was in school and writing in the very early rounds of LMS.

Anyway wish me luck I guess. Probably this will be where I put stuff when I get through my word count but dont have a full chapter yet. I'll try to note with each post what has made it into the literary works and what hasn't.

You can find chapter one here: Loosely Lawful | Chapter 1

HERE IS WHERE WE ARE LEAVING OFF FROM... since I didn't finish another full chapter before it was 10 pm my time on the eve before LMS begins hahahaha.

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Sera was about to pass out from butter-sugar-flour-chocolate overload when Kali slammed open the door to Kyle’s room. Sera flinched up off the floor. Kyle cringed. Benvolius froze like a kid caught with the cookie jar.

“Done talking nerdy?” Avon asked, still sprawled over the laundry Kyle had already managed to strew about.

“Your paying visit to La Drippe without retrieving a takeaway coffee for me is abhorrent, first of all.” Kali arched a brow, and the boys stiffened under her gaze. “Second, our spell preparations require another day, so I come bearing a suggestion for your afternoon.”

Not more shopping, hopefully. Sera was sick of wizard errands.

“Poliphenia–one of the PhD candidates–tells me there’s a career fair today for the sciences and engineering departments on campus, and that the North Wilds Company has a booth. Surely this is as good an opportunity as we may get to ask questions without breaking any rules?” Kali leveled Sera with a questioning glance, and Sera grimaced. Misrepresentation wasn’t exactly good, but maybe it would preclude any ideas Avon and Kali got about breaking and entering.

“I’m a horrible liar,” Sera said, before pointing at Benvolius. “And also what are we going to do with him?”

“Benvolius will stand for examination here. And I’m certain Kyle and Avon will pass for non-traditional students well enough.” Kali either did not see or ignored the wicked glint in Avon’s eyes. “You can tag along as… an advisor, I suppose. Keep them out of trouble.”

Which, of course, was an impossible ask. Sera had never regretted pastry as much as she did over their long walk back to campus, during which her stomach went from sinking to jittering to twisting itself in knots and then through the whole routine again a handful of times. She tried her best to make note of the stories Avon and Kyle had come up with for themselves; they were both non-trads, slowly paying through school by taking on adventuring work and coffee shop gigs and myriad other odd jobs, and only now had they finally earned enough credits to think about landing a real internship. Ideally paid. They were willing to travel, and particularly interested in the new frontiers opening up in the far north.

“What are you going to do if someone asks for your transcripts?” Sera hissed, as they passed by a gaggle of fine arts students painting in situ on the campus’s main lawn. “Or a resume? We are carrying none of those things!”

Kyle waved a hand. “Brah. Chill. It’ll be fine.”

“We’ll say we didn’t have money for a print shop,” Avon answered. They had grown several inches over the course of the walk, going from normal, lanky, birdish Avon to a brawnier, bro-ier, more filled out version. It was disconcerting. This was not a transformation Avon had ever wanted or needed to make when they worked together in the past. They looked vaguely like a red-headed copy of Kyle.

It took a great deal of wandering to find the career fair. The National University’s Jadeport branch sprawled like a lazy goddess, jewel-like in its lawns and gardens and sparkling, white structures. Finding the name of a building required walking all the way up to it, across entire city blocks’ worth of open space and through seas of stately, well-dressed students. It was nothing like the dense, dirty weave of the Gaville branch.

But eventually they stumbled across a towering, glass-clad building with a career fair banner hanging from the roof, and made their way inside. Sera’s skin crawled as she followed Avon and Kyle down the steps into the building’s basement. It had been so long since she’d been a student that she felt uncomfortable being back in an academic setting. Everyone here looked young and fresh and innocent.

---

Ok. Go time! Hahaha. Maybe I'll last longer than a few weeks this round lol.

Thanks Lim!!

Submission for this week under the cut, coming in at 1144 words.

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The front doors dumped them onto a wide, concrete balcony that ran the perimeter of the building, from which Sera had an expansive view of every classroom, every office, and every lounge space that opened into the atrium. Below them, the career fair ebbed and flowed, masses of students roaming the stalls like enormous slimes. Noise bubbled up from the basement floor in a deafening buzz.

Sera gulped. With the Kavarn scholarship, she’d never needed to attend a career fair. The law firm that the family kept on retainer had already been contracted to hire her.

“Any of you see the North Wilds Company?” Avon asked, leaning over the balcony wall.

A few companies had shelled out for massive banners, announcing themselves like knightly orders of old, and Sera peered at them, looking for the telltale tree in the North Wilds Company logo, only to come up empty. Kavarn Mining, though, had made their presence known. A trio of enormous signs flew high in the center of the atrium, eye-catching in their bold yellow and black.

“I don’t see them,” Sera said, and Kyle surveyed the hall for a few more seconds before agreeing.

“Then in we go.” Avon turned on their heel and headed straight for the nearest staircase, Sera and Kyle following behind.

They meandered slowly through the milieu. Sera found, to her surprise, that she recognized a fair number of the companies represented here. Each of the founding families had one or two of their subsidiary corporations here. In addition to Kavarn Mining, she spotted booths for Thalass Canning and Guren Industries–the two families known for settling much of the lower Jade Coast. They were really old money, with claims on the Consumed Continent that stretched more than a hundred years earlier than those made by the Wildes, Kavarns, or the upstart Huo family currently building their train empire across the eastern plains.

Frowning, she tugged on the spirit of Librata in her chest. She had beef with the Kavarns and the Wildes already. Was the goddess going to have her fight every rich asshole in the country?

Power roused inside of her, but didn’t swell, or answer, or really indicate anything other than a broad ‘kind of,’ which was definitely helpful. So instead of thinking further on what ‘kind of’ might mean, Sera just looked up to make sure she could still see Avon and Kyle’s distinctive heads of red and white hair above the crowd.

They’d gotten a bit ahead of her, of course. Stupid tall people with their stupid long legs. After a bit of dodging and shoving, she elbowed her way to the booth Avon and Kyle had stopped at, freezing when she noticed the telltale tree logo on the tablecloth. It was go time. That was definitely the North Wilds Company. Sera glanced at the faces of the two young men manning the booth, as if she could determine if either of them had been one of the masked attackers from Azuria’s Amazing arcanery, but there was no way for her to know.

Great, now she’d be thinking about it all through Kyle and Avon’s interactions with them. Before the two could approach directly, she nabbed them by the backs of their shirts and hauled them down to her level.

“Alright, do either of you have a plan?” She slid her gaze back to the men at the booth. “Also, is there any way for us to know if those two are also super secret Wilde family assassins?”

von looked over, considering. “If I go first, I might get a good scent off them. Then I’ll pull Kyle in?”

“Solid, bro.”

“And then what?” Sera asked.

Kyle clapped a jaunty hand on Sera’s shoulder. “Brah, chill. How many fellow bros have I charmed for you?”

Sera wrinkled her nose and ignored Avon’s amused look. “I know, I know. I just. Usually I’m your backup for that.”

“I promise I’ll take good care of him,” Avon said, and then before she could stop them, they turned lazily on a heel and strolled towards the booth.

The two young men looked up, and Sera saw on their faces the immediate interest. They probably didn’t get a ton of strapping, muscular folk on this campus. Avon offered them a nervous smile and made a show of glancing around at the pamphlets and booth decor. Their shoulders rose on a long inhale, and then they snaked hand behind their back and signaled for Kyle to join them.

“So uhh. North Wilds Company?” Avon started, pitching their voice into a deeper, more masculine timbre. “That’s crazy. I didn’t know you guys did anything down here.”

Sera took a step back and let the rivers of students come between herself and the booth, obscuring her from view. It was hard to hear the conversation, but like Kyle said, it was probably best to leave this to him.

One of the men at the booth answered in a loud, booming tenor. “Haha! It’s true. Most of our operations are up north, but we do a lot of sales down here. And some R&D.”

“Oh, so no environmental research work for folks out of Jadeport?” Avon asked.

“Not unless you’re willing to relocate for a season.” The man paused as Avon and Kyle looked at eachother with matching, agreeable shrugs. “But if relocation is an option, then we have a lot of open positions.” He winked, and Sera perked up from her hiding place in the crowd. “Let me just dig around in our box of extra materials…”

“We can totes relocate,” Kyle said, beaming. He reached up to scratch absently at his neck, and even looking at his back, Sera could imagine the charming, boyish face he employed as he explained their backstory. It was the same face he’d used to somehow charm Kali the first time they’d run into each other. “I’ve actually been up there, you know? The trees are legit so huge.”

The second man’s eyebrows shot up. “You made it pretty far north, then.”

Kyle chuckled. “Adventuring gigs, man. You go crazy places! But I bet you guys have made it even further. How far does the lumbering tract even go? Like, I swear I could have kept walking forever, and there’d still be NWC camps around.”

“NWC?” repeated booth man number two, just as his partner came back with the promised extra materials.

“Oh, shoot, you guys don’t call it that? My bad!” Kyle reached for the papers, his hand dwarfing the booth man’s, and he snapped up the extra pamphlets before any attempt could be made to sort them for him. “North Wilds Company? NWC? Just an acronym, dudes.”

Avon peered over Kyle’s shoulder, and their face lit up at some title. “Surveying track? What’s that? It sounds like something an ex-adventurer would be good at.”

Since I don't like spoilers, I won't read anything until you publish it. But rest assured, I am waiting with bated breath =D

The booth men made identical faces of snide disbelief. “There’s a lot of math in surveying,” said one of them.

“So?” said Kyle.

In the awkward pause that followed, Sera adjusted her position in the crowd to get a better view of all the boxes in the back of the booth. Maybe one of them was full enough that she could get a glimpse of what was inside. She stood on tiptoe and tracked behind a pair of students comparing resumes, but still wasn’t tall enough to catch a good look.

Maybe Librata would allow a clairvoyance spell in this one instance? Since she was in public, and her targets were in public, and she could maybe bend the privacy laws to– nope. Her chest tightened, Librata’s holy energy warning her against it.

Eventually, one of the booth men gave in. “I don’t know that a pair of ex-adventurers can handle all the math that goes with”-

“I’m in environmental sciences,” Avon broke in. “Of course I can handle maths.”

Kyle elbowed them, wide grin still plastered across his face. “And we’re already great at logistics! What areas are you trying to survey? Is the North Wilds Company going all the way up to the White Ocean?”

A bit put out by Kyle’s superior deftness with conversation, Avon snatched up the brochures and flipped further through the stack. Booth man number one fiddled with his tie as he considered how to answer Kyle’s question.

“Er, yes. But there’s a lot of land between our current operations and the shore of the White Ocean. I don’t think we’ll get there any time soon.”

Avon unfolded one of the pamphlets, considered it, and then held it up. “That’s a bit odd. The North Wilds Company made it from Gaville to here”- they poked a spot on the page, probably a map that Avon had facing the booth men -”in less than a decade. Does the climate north of that change so drastically that you couldn’t”-

Kyle reached one meaty hand up around Avon’s shoulders and dragged them in close, somehow still beaming. “What my buddy means to say is that we’re worried about job security! You guys move so fast, what if there’s nothing left to survey once we’ve finished our degrees!”

Booth man number two made a constipated face. “I’m sure there will still be plenty of new regions. Listen, the Wilde family themselves are the ones managing choices about when and where we send survey teams. We really can’t tell you any more.”

Damn. They really kept that information under lock and key. Sera hadn’t expected a pair of recruiters to know everything, but if they’d indicated they knew something about the company forecasting and were merely doing their due diligence to not share beyond their fellow employees, then Sera might have been able to find verbiage in the company business plan that they could use for their lawsuit. If it was truly only the Wildes that knew anything, this would be much more difficult.

“That’s alright!” Kyle said, reaching across the table to shake the men’s hands. “Thanks for chatting with us anyway. You got any kind of separate recruiting office we can go to if we want to apply later?”

The booth men handed over business cards. Kyle wrapped up the interaction so smoothly that Sera almost missed it when he tugged Avon away from the booth and back into the crowd. Grumbling to herself about the pitfalls of short legs, she scrambled to catch up with them.

“Well,” she said, as they paused by a Moore Industries booth covered in bright blue banners, “that was a bust.”

Avon smirked. “Not entirely. I saw you trying to snoop, thought I might have better eyesight and a better vantage point. They had the company business plan open in one of the boxes. I managed to catch a few lines about a ‘protected zone’ in the northwest quadrant of the Wilde Family territory.”

“I guess that’s not nothing.”

After snagging a few cubes of brightly-colored lokum off the nearby Moore Industries booth, Kyle chewed thoughtfully. “And we know the rank and file bros are just bros. Which is good and bad.”

Good, because it meant that only the Wildes themselves would face punishment. Bad, because it would make information harder to get, and because these regular employees might not have anywhere to go when the Wilde family’s secrets blew up. This sucked.

“I could turn into a spider and try to dig around in their boxes,” Avon suggested.

If Sera couldn’t use clairvoyance to get a better view of their boxes, then the goddess sure as hell wouldn’t approve of that. “Maybe once we translate the contracts, this will make more sense,” she said, turning them toward the stairwell. But her brain whirred as they exited the building, turning over the conversation and the wording Avon had mentioned from the open business plan.

A ‘protected zone.’ That was odd language for a region that, as far as Sera knew, had no publicly recognized status. How unusual that the Wildes would categorize some part of their own massive holdings that way.

---

They arrived back at Dr. Crev’s house to find one of the graduate students hurling her guts out in the bathroom. Raw fish didn’t agree with her, apparently. Kali greeted them in the hallway by the bathroom, her pursed lips the only sign of her distress at the situation.

“Oh, excellent,” she said, eyes dropping immediately to the coffees Avon and Kyle had insisted they buy after their failed excursion. Kali snapped up a cup and drained it in one long, upsettingly continuous gulp. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sniffed. “Sera, remind me how far you got into law school?”

“Er, most of the way through year two, why?”

“Caro is indisposed, as you’ve no doubt seen. And smelled. I’m loathe to add any more outside parties to the translation team at this point, so you are my backup. Your law knowledge may prove useful.”

Kyle danced along the edge of the hall, looking uncomfortable. “Is there another toilet somewhere? I gotta piss.”

Pointing him in the right direction, Kali took Sera by the arm. “We’re almost ready, actually, so allow me to brief you before we throw you to the proverbial arcane wolves.”

“Do I get any say in this?”

Kali rolled her eyes. “Actually, I don’t know why I didn’t think of including you sooner. Deep Oceanic A and B, from what we know of them, have very little legal terminology, which means there’s a possibility that some of the words we’re struggling over are some kind of naturalized or oddly translated version of legal terms that existed in whatever version of Survivor Common that people spoke when they crossed the sea.” She pulled Sera through the winding halls of Dr. Crev’s house, diving into things Sera didn’t understand like phonemes and graphemes and… other eemes.

And then they arrived in the work room.

Papers littered every surface. Every wall was made of book cases and supply cabinets, which even hutched over the one permanent desk installed in the far corner. A mismatched collection of foldout desks sat scattered around the space, each one piled with open books, material spell components, and the remnants of a few explosions. The only area that looked vaguely calm was a cleared out magic circle drawn in chalk on the floor, in a space that clearly had chalkboard paint slathered onto it.

Light filtered down through a single clerestory window in the center of each wall, and Sera grimaced when she realized they’d all been spelled to have adjustable time-of-day lighting, probably to augment spellwork. This was ridiculous. Wizards were so ridiculous.

“Seraphina is back!” Kali announced. “We have our ninth. We can begin the translation spell now.”

One of the grad students whooped. Dr. Crev smiled with all her sharp, dragonesque teeth. The already frantic energy in the room grew even more frantic as people collected up their papers and dashed to various positions on the magic circle.

“Ah, Gregor,” Kali called, pushing Sera to one of three spots closer to the center of the circle, “since we’re adding in Sera, we might as well pool magic via contract and see if her goddess deigns to assist. If you could move to position five instead?”

“But I’m in position five!” someone wailed.

“Go to nine, then!” Kali fired back.

“But my research”-

“Nine!” Kali shouted.

The offending grad student slumped to a different spot on the outer edge of the circle, and in short order, everyone had gathered.

As a practitioner of divine magic and not arcane magic, Sera found the entire setup baffling. The crisscrossing lines between various points of the circle made no sense. And was there any rhyme or reason to the positions each scholar was stationed at?

Someone dropped one of the round flasks they’d bought at Azuria’s into her hands, and she sniffed its contents. There was seaweed in there for sure. And ink. And… fish, probably. It was pungent. Then someone else tied a hooded cloak around her shoulders.

She sent Kali a panicked look as the other girl set down stacks of paper in the true center of the circle and then stepped into her spot, but there was no answer. Dr. Crev rounded out their trio, and then everyone else settled around the circumference, and with absolutely no explanation, they all looked directly at her.

Oh. Right. The magic pool.

“Um.” Sera cleared her throat and adjusted her grip on the flask. Librata save her, her hands were sweaty. “I’ll just get started then?”

No one objected, at least. They just kept staring at her.

The words for magic-pooling came easily; she’d just done it a few days ago with Benvolius, and the conditions were still fresh in her mind.

Hahaha Mint I'm afraid I don't know enough about linguistics to actually write the conlang or come up with any actual systems for it, but hopefully it still measures up.

I believe this comes out to 1599 words this week! Might not get to publishing until Monday.

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Her voice, on the other hand, did not come easy. This wasn’t life or death. This was a group of whackadoodle academics all watching her in a mixture of fascination and judgement as she tripped over her own tongue. Still though, she managed to get through the contract, and her magic leapt out of her to bridge between everyone, running like an electric current as the rest of the ritual began.

Kali tilted her head, magic-sight glasses perched on her nose, and spoke aloud in her mothertongue. The clicking, tongue-popping language was soon joined by Dr. Crev’s hissing through what Sera figured was some ancient dragonesque language. She heard Old Common from somewhere behind her, and then several more languages she couldn’t recognize at all. Feeling uneducated–Sera spoke only the common tongue–she glanced down at the pungent flask in her hands.

Someone had written in awkward cursive, “May my mind join this meeting and build bridges fleeting.” Was she supposed to say that? Sera listened more closely to the voice speaking Old Common and tried to parse it out. They were definitely all repeating something over and over again.

Ugh. If no one would bother to explain, then it wasn’t her fault if she messed this up! Sera started quietly, repeating the line on her flask over and over.

She couldn’t tell if it was real, or the ritual playing tricks on her, but as Sera continued to mutter “may my mind join this meeting” over, and over, and over again, the room grew dark. Every candle in the circle became a blazing pinprick of light. The nose-twisting smell from the flasks ebbed and flowed like the tide, playing havoc on her tearducts and snaking down onto her tongue. Her magic thrummed through it all, pulsing like a heartbeat, and she felt it as every disparate language and voice condensed, matching cadence. Her breathing matched Kali and Dr. Crev’s. Her heart fell into perfect sync.

The candles whooshed out, suddenly. Sera felt the prick of something foreign at the edge of her brain.

And then she blacked out.

---

Sera woke up on the floor, staring straight into Benvolius’s very concerned face. The other members of the translation ritual groaned around her, blearily rubbing their temples and blinking into the harsh light of the late afternoon. In the center of the circle, as if nothing had happened, sat two stacks of paper, one entirely Kaliko’s neat, transcribed copy of the two Wilde contracts, the other a bizarre mishmash of all the disparate penmanship within the group.

“There’s water in the kitchen,” Dr. Crev rasped out, looking more tired than Sera thought an eccentric wizard-professor could look.

“I need a nap,” someone grumbled.

Sera’s head hurt like nothing she’d ever felt, throbbing so much she could feel it in her ribcage. When she tried to push herself up off the floor, she found her arms wobbly. Librata sat dormant in her chest, fluttering to life only when Sera finally roused herself enough to try reading a few lines of the translated contracts.

She got as far as “Herein lies the agreement, formed on the seventh day of the seventh month of the year two-hundred and ninety-seven” before her brain decided it was well and truly mushed. She held up two limp, grabby hands. “Someone please help me off the floor.”

Benvolius pulled her up with the grace of a man who’d spent his life partner dancing, and then rushed over to help up Kali. Avon and Kyle poked their heads in through the study door.

“Are they done, Benny?” Kyle asked.

“They look done,” Avon said, strolling through all the moaners and groaners to look at the reams of paper on the ground. They squatted and flipped through the pages. “This looks done.”

“We require water,” Kali said, brow tightening like she was mad, only she was too tired to pull it off. She peeled herself off Benvolius to help up one of the grad students, and Sera figured she’d better follow the other girl’s lead. Kyle disappeared from the doorway, and his lumbering steps echoed through the hall. At least he knew how to make himself useful.

Sera closed her eyes and stood, still wobbling, in the afternoon sunlight. She rubbed her temple to see if it would make her head hurt any less.

“Sera, when are you going to be able to look at this?” Avon asked.

“When my head stops hurting, obviously.”

Kali sniffled. “Ah. I remember now. This is why we originally left Sera out of the ritual.”

“What even happened?” Sera asked. “I blacked out.”

She heard Kyle thunder back in, and the grad students flocked toward the door to get rehydrate themselves. Sera didn’t think she could move from her spot. The colorful books and bright light were too much. But a moment later, she felt Kyle’s rough fingers press a cool, already condensate-covered glass into her hands, and heard Kali murmur a quiet “thank you” as he did the same for her. They drank greedily, leaving Avon to stew in impatient silence.

And then, sounding much clearer, Kali said, “We elevated our consciousnesses into the ethereal plane, condensed time, and utilized the singular mass of our combined magical and intellectual presence to create one super-mind that could translate for us.”

Sera pretended that sentence made sense. Already feeling less wrung-out, she squeezed her eyes open and slumped toward Avon and the stack of paper. It hurt less to read, now.

By the date, she gathered she was looking first at the contract on the ground. The wording was somewhat antiquated, but at a glance, it followed modern standards of contract construction. Even leases contained sections defining terms and… naming parties.

Sera stopped reading, finger hovering over a word that her subconscious told her was one they had spent a lot of time in the ethereal plane arguing over. She wasn’t even sure how she could remember that. “This G’aoen Coast People? In the list of contracted parties? Kali, is that”-

“The only pre-Consumption civilization identified since our re-populating the continent?” Though still tired, Kali’s eyes gleamed with wild excitement. “Indubitably.”

Sera furrowed her brow. “But if this is to be believed, then they were still around when the Wildes first began exploring their charter area in the late two-hundreds.”

Kali brightened so much it almost hurt to look at her. “Precisely! In fact, given the continued existence of this contract, I hypothesize they are still alive today, within the boundaries of the”-

“Well, hold on.” Sera flipped to a later section of the stack, trying to see if there was a clear outline or headers she could use to sort through this more quickly. “We don’t know what the end condition is for this contract. They could be alive, sure, or they could have died out while trapped by this thing.”

No one liked that. Immediately, a handful of grad students proclaimed that surely an ancient people who survived the Consumption could survive anything. Kali stared at Sera, eyes wide and shiny, threatening tears. Kyle, Benvolius, and Avon all lept to assure her that Sera was definitely, absolutely, just being a negative Nancy. And Dr. Crev frowned, contemplative.

Wincing, Sera shrunk in on herself. “Okay, no pessimism.” She skimmed further, past all the definitions and into the meat of the contract, where things got… interesting. She pursed her lips. “Here it says that the Wilde family and any agent of the family may not pass within five miles of the G’aoen settlement, unless they first request an audience. Likewise, no G’aoen person may pass across that same border without requesting audience with the Wildes.

“Failure to provide notice shall result in immediate activation of the”-- Sera squinted at the page and the bizarre mishmash of letters on top of letters that they had collectively written there. “Thing,” she finished. There wasn’t a good way to read that. After skimming a few more pages, she looked up to the group. “And then it explains how to announce yourself for an audience.”

The brainiacs buzzed with excitement, fidgeting and whispering to each other as new paths of research were being handed to them on silver platters. Avon’s mouth dropped open in disbelief.

“Are you kidding me?” They stormed toward Sera and peered over her shoulder at the pages. “All we had to do was ask? This is ridiculous!”

It was ridiculous. Sera puzzled over the contract, suddenly finding she had more questions than answers. Had the Wilde family simply forgotten the contents of this document, or was there a more sinister reason why they would try to have someone forcibly remove that monster in the woods? And what was inside that barrier that they wanted so badly?

---

The group just barely made it onto the overnighter back to Gaville. Dr. Crev had been shooing them out of the house, grad students riotously arguing in the background, and they’d had to run any time they weren’t on the trolley, but they made it, spilling from the platform into their assigned train car like bats out of hell. Sera’s lungs burned, and she was pretty sure Kyle had lost a pair of poorly-packed underwear during their mad dash down Jadeport Central Station’s grand staircase.

The least ruffled of the bunch, Kali pulled out their tickets. “Our reserved bunks are in cabin eighteen-C. And Benvolius, please remove yourself from the doorway.”

Benvolius squished in, letting the train doors close behind him, and Avon marched down the cramped aisle as the train slowly began to pull out of the station.

Hmmm... I was supposed to publish some chapters, wasn't I?

This week's wordcount: 1623

-----

This was a marginally nicer car than the one they’d ridden down. There was no musty smell, and though the wallpaper had faded, it wasn’t peeling. Sera ran a hand along the handrail as they all trudged to their cabin, noting the dings and dents passengers had left over the years.

A little over halfway down the length of the car, Avon and Kali stopped. They heaved open the heavy sliding door, claimed the first bunks, and tugged everyone inside to get settled. Before Sera could even set her backpack down, Avon swung their legs over the edge of their top bunk and asked the room: “So, we did the translation. What’s next?”

“Sleep,” Sera muttered under her breath. She expected Kali to take over and popped open her backpack to dig out a towel to put over the pillow, but no one else spoke.

Oh. They were asking her.

Sera’s stomach burbled and twisted as she formulated an answer. “Um. Well. I guess we get these translations to the real temple lawyers, first? Give them an in-depth read and all. And we’ll come up with a plan from there?”

Avon’s eyes gleamed, reflective like a cat’s, and they kicked their legs back and forth in a slow, even rhythm. “Or you could read them aloud for us now. While we have a nine-hour train ride ahead of us.”

Kali winced from the bunk beneath Avon’s, but didn’t say no. Benvolius glanced down from his own bunk, eyes so wide he looked like an orphan begging on the street. Only Kyle stood up for her, reaching a giant hand down from his bunk to pat Sera on the head.

“Avon, broski, it’s beddy-bye time.” And then, hand still on Sera’s head, he used his grip to nudge her down to her bunk. Avon glanced between their legs at Kali and sighed. Without a word, they tucked themselves in, and the rest of Sera’s team followed, one by one.

Sera tried to sleep. She should have knocked out immediately. Her head hurt, and her eyelids drooped, and her bones ached. But for an hour after Kali magicked the cabin lights off, Sera tossed and turned, the thin, train-provided blanket tangling around her. Despite the fact that she should have been magically tapped after the translation ritual, she could feel Librata stirring, eager and bright in her chest.

When Kyle started snoring, she gave up. Sera tugged the curtain of her bunk closed, dug through her backpack for the stacks of paper, and called forth a tiny bubble of light by which to read.

She read back from the beginning, with what she’d already read in Dr. Crev’s study, and picked over the wording on how to request an audience with the G’aoen peoples. It wasn’t quite as simple as just asking. Only a member of the Wilde family even had the right to call upon them, and they had to follow a script. And because following a script was too easy, they had to mean every word of it.

“I come without ill will,” one line of the script said, “without intent to harm, steal from, or otherwise transgress upon the G’aoen settlements or their inhabitants. This meeting is intended only as a meeting.”

This was no mere contract, Sera thought. This was a treaty, like those that existed on the Survivor Continent, from the days before the Consumption. The treaty denoted a specific longitude and latitude for the land-side boundaries of the G’aoen territory. It named chiefs and mayors and exactly who qualified for each role. It defined who qualified as a member of the Wilde family.

Notably, however, it did not define an ending. There was no contingency. There was no expiration date. The various parties were not even required to meet regularly to reaffirm each other’s agreement. The Wilde family or the G’aoen people could be caught in unforeseen disaster and disappear, leaving the other party without any method to update the treaty.

Frowning, Sera flipped back to the page that listed out who qualified as a member of the Wilde family. Now that she had made it through the whole thing, Librata was growing sluggish inside her chest, receding back and leaving Sera even more exhausted than before. She dragged a finger along the definition and mouthed the words quietly, just to make sure they stuck.

“A qualified member of the Wilde family must meet the following requirements: they must have reached the age of majority; they must proficiently speak the language and know the magic of the G’aoen Coast People; and” --Sera’s heart dropped– “they must be in good standing with the current head of the Wilde family, whose position is defined hereafter.”

Sera read through that definition next, just to cover every base, but she knew already that Benvolius would not be able to get them past the barrier–not unless his family took him back.

-----

Clerics Hauli and Wilbert had made it through both the treaty and Benvolius’s NDA by the time Sera woke up from her much-deserved post-travel nap. Still feeling wrung out from her poor sleep on the train and the trek back to the temple, she trudged blearily to the meeting room her senior clerics had already set aside, and where the rest of her party was already waiting.

“You still look like shit,” Avon said, as Sera slunk in.

“Shut up.”

Kali nudged her a cup of coffee as she sat, and Kyle handed her a platter of his mostly-eaten lunch with a few nibbles of greenery left on the plate. The coffee smelled caustic. Sera gulped it down anyway.

“Glad to see you up and about, Seraphina!” said Cleric Hauli. “I’ll fill you in later on everything we’ve covered so far, if you need it. We had to spend most of the morning on terminology and witness preparation.”

Oh gods. Witness preparation? Sera had been so sure they’d find something they could use in documentation that she’d forgotten about witness preparation. Kali, she had faith in. But everyone else?

Yikes. She could already imagine Avon on the stand, cussing out the Wilde family lawyers, or Benvolius seizing up as his family’s magic constricted his throat. Kyle wouldn’t say anything too bad, but calling the judge and jury ‘brah’ might not go over well.

“Um. Yes please. Thanks,” Sera said. How was she supposed to address Hauli and Wilbert in this situation? This was her quest, but she was barely qualified to be co-counsel, let alone direct two senior clerics and practicing lawyers. Hell, she couldn’t even remember their first names!

“Excellent, excellent!” Hauli said, his cheerful baritone voice rattling the furniture. His vestigial fins– monstrously fancy and delicate things, especially compared to Kaliko’s more streamlined features –flicked back and forth as he found his place again on the page. “Now as we were saying, this will take some cross-referencing with young Mr. Wilde’s contract, but I would say you’re unlikely to be able to get into the treaty territory under the current circumstances.”

Avon scowled. Next to them, Cleric Wilbert shuffled through a few papers and carefully pulled out a page. She tapped a wizened finger at the beginning of a paragraph.

“Ah, thank you!” Hauli scanned the text for a moment before pulling his mouth into a knowing half-grimace. “That does rather set things in stone, doesn’t it?”

“What does?” Sera asked. She hadn’t made it to Benvolius’s contract during her frantic read on the train.

Hauli leapt to explain as Wilbert slid the page across the desk to her. “The family contract defines ‘good standing.’ It’s actually a remarkably difficult bar to clear. Pure conjecture, of course, but I would suspect only the family head and a handful of older family members actually qualify.”

It was a difficult bar to clear. To be in good standing, a member of the Wilde family had to prove that their contributions to the family were worth more than the monetary expenditure it had taken to raise them. They had to have attended at least ten family meetings in the last year, and have presented business plans at three of them, minimum. At least one of those plans had to be good enough for incorporation into the annual strategic planning for the North Wilds Company.

And the list continued on: gala attendance, continued education, published academic papers, signed oaths about passing on the family bloodline, physical fitness, magical prowess… Sera didn’t see how anyone could be in good standing in the Wilde family. She didn’t know who the head of house was, but she wasn’t convinced even they could manage this list.

At the very bottom of the paragraph though, she caught the line that really mattered: the head of the family judged if a person had met all the requirements. Because of course that was how it worked.

Sera peeked up at Benvolius, tuning out Hauli’s passionate explanation of contract law versus tort law versus criminal law. He sat stone still, hands clasped on the table, knuckles white, his expression tightly neutral. And he looked so bedraggled. Less than a week ago, he’d been a bright-eyed, rich-kid idiot Sera thought she would have to drag out of Kyle’s brand of trouble, but now he’d been under examination by wizards and lawyers who only talked about the contract and the magic that sealed his mouth shut. Regardless of the fact that they all had good intentions, the fact that Benvolius had to hold his tongue through all of these conversations must have worn on him.

Silently, Sera reached across the table and tapped Cleric Wilbert’s wrist to get her attention. She gestured for the rest of Benvolius’s contract, and the older cleric pushed it over.