The Reborn - Finishing What Was Started IC [M]

[Azazeal849]

With Georgina, the royal in red, leading and the purple eyed slave in tow, they left the foyer and journeyed into the left hall. Each step Gina took was loud on the marble, and also painful for the wound at her neck. The straps held her in place, but momentum and gravity were not her friends, causing cruel pulls and tugs. Beauty is pain, and this was certainly true for the former immigrant student.

The doors they passed were made of beautiful redwood, with symmetrical ridged lining of something akin to gold, causing the thin lines to reflect the lights. For the two teenaged young women, their eyes were dazzled by how many reflective surfaces there were: from the ground below them, the walls, and the nude statues along with the doors. It was bright and all very expensive.

Though beautiful, there was no indication of where the prigkipissa could have gone. The clicks of her heels and her cries had vanished, and the doors were all shut with no extra markers as to what they were for.

They were beginning to consider giving up before they got lost, when round the corner came another patrolling guard. He flashed a confused look, staring at Cal with discontent.

"Does she insult you, Lady Georgina? Shall I make her bow before you?"

Gina felt her stomach give a nervous twinge, but she managed to only hesitate for a second.

"That won't be necessary." she told the guard, and hoped that her position would dissuade any further questions.

"I'm looking for the princess." she added, disguising a roll of her neck as tossing her hair as she tried to ease the pressure on her bite wound. "Have you seen her?"

The man nodded. "The holy prigkipissa has gone to her art room."

His features calmed, now simply disregarding Cal.

"Do you wish to be escorted?" He gestured down the hall that the two girls had yet to see.

"Yes, thank you." Gina said, nodding.

The guard bowed his head and guided her through more of the marble and gold halls. As beautiful as it was, it in a way was almost monotonous, seeing the same style everywhere. It was also disorienting through its winding halls, for already they had taken several turns with many more passed as possible options. Angry eyes cast themselves on Cal each time patrols came and went, but other than the guards it was noticeably empty through the entire building they wandered through. Gina cast a few nervous glances at Cal as they walked, worrying that they might not be able to find their way back without the help of another guard.

Cal glanced back at the redhead, the barely hidden distaste at the treatment extended to her from the guards showing through her attempt at a blank, subservient expression. It was difficult for the young Princess to bite her tongue at such disrespect - but perhaps she would have to stop thinking of herself that way. It was strange - she had longed to be free of the shackles of her heritage, but now she was (and ironically encased in shackles of a different kind) it was difficult to let go.

The door the guard led them to had that same redwood design to it as the others, but the man seemed confident that it was this door, compared to so many that they had passed, which led to the woman they was seeking. Gina glanced at Cal again, then back at the guard who was still standing rigidly to attention.

"You can go. Thank you." she told him. She waited for the guard to turn on his heel and sweep out of sight before turning back to the door. She bit her lip, and knocked.

"Hello? Princess? Can I come in?"

Slowly the door opened ajar and the silverlette peaked out through the crack, her crystal eyes wet. The hand holding the door taunted Gina and Cal with the symbol of importance; now she got a good look at it, Gina recognised it as the symbol of Venus - a circle with a cross below.

Cal swallowed, gulped down her indignance, and adopted what she hoped was the dutiful, attentive expression of a handmaiden - she had seen it expressed toward her enough times that she hoped her mimickry was passable. The guards were one thing - this Prigipassa, or whatever they had called her, was clearly used to deference, and Calamity feared what might befall her if she was to overstep her place. Fear... an interesting emotion.

The girl only looked up at Gina through the crack, silent and hesitant. Gina raised her eyes from the girl's wrist back to her face, and hoped that things would go more smoothly this time.

"Hey." she began. "Uh, I'm sorry about earlier. Do you still want to talk?"

The woman took a pause, her visible eye looking at Calamity. There was a heavy sense of pity in her gaze, looking at the bruised slave. Gina dared to relax slightly, thinking that the prigkipessa wouldn't give Cal the same treatment as the guards had. It belatedly occurred to her that she might have asked their guide to fetch drinks and ice, so that she could make an ice-pack for the younger girl's wound.

"Can we come in?" she prompted the prigkipessa gently.

"O-okay..." the beautiful girl answered. She stepped back, a clank of her heel echoing in the room she was in. Opening the door, Gina discovered how bare the room was in comparison to the rest of the elaborately decorated building. There was only one light source: a light with a long thin cord and a metal circular cover. It hung over a large easel that stood on a circular raised platform. A large sheet of crinkled plastic covered the platform and the surrounding area, just ending where the light did. The room was dark, the marble walls barren and the room empty.

In the painting that was propped up, a victorious and handsome man stood over a ruined city. He was strong, with broad shoulders and each of his muscles visually defined even through the torn and bloody robes he wore. He was a commander, but there was an overwhelming element of danger to the dark-haired man that the woman had painted. Lurking in his lowbrow, ice-blue eyes was a deep, almost evil and bone-chilling monster. He was a man for conquest; bloodshed no stranger. In many ways he was classically handsome: strong jaw, bold and high cheeks, and even a beauty mark on his right cheek. But the eyes dominated, pulled attention past everything else.

The eyes of a murderer. Gina had seen them before; more often than any person could be comfortable with. Them; Gelda, Vlad, Samnite - even Roze if we can't save her. Thinking of the half-vampire Rozaria brought an uncomfortable throb to the wound in her neck, and made her worry again about how she was supposed to get back to her friends. Some instinct was telling her that the prigkipessa had something to do with it. The infinity symbol on her wrist twinged again.

Gina subconsciously rubbed the tattoo with her other hand as she looked again at the picture. She was pretty sure of who the handsome, dangerous conqueror was supposed to be. Perhaps the eyes were just the prigkipessa's interpretation, but after what her phone had told her Gina suspected them to be accurate. This was Lycus Nikas; the usurper emperor of Gela, and as far as everyone here was concerned, her brother.

"This is really good." she said truthfully, gesturing towards the painting as she gathered her thoughts.

The woman wiped her face with a sigh, turning to look at the heroic portrait.

"Your brother drags me out here to his palace, but now he won't even stay in bed with me...obsessed with his...war...."

War. Gina recalled. Gela Empire presses claim on Crete. The prigkipessa's complaint might have seemed peevish, if she wasn't so obviously unhappy. Gina found herself wondering if the incongruously bare and cheerless art studio was a reflection of the other woman's mental state.

"And what do you think about the war?" Gina probed carefully, keeping her tone sympathetic. Were she and the prigkipessa friends? Or had she just preferred to confide in another woman? She couldn't help but wonder why the prigkipessa had been so hostile towards Vahsi.

"I hate it." There was a slight echo in the room; the gusts of AC blasting heat into the studio. The Lambros woman sobbed. "I was humiliated!"

Putting her back to the wall near the door, she slid down to a sitting position. Her purple and silver hair flowed down the marble as she tilted her head back.

"But now this is all I know." Her hands gestured down to her nightgown. "I've become a transvestite and everyone praises me for it."

You what? Gina narrowly stopped herself from saying. At first she thought she had misheard, but then she took a closer look at the prigkipessa and belatedly realised the significance of her slightly too-flat chest, the slight squaring of her chin and the tell-tale bump of an adam's apple. Well, fuck me.

Once the penny had dropped, she didn't quite know what to say. She slipped her bag off her shoulder, smoothed the back of her gown and lowered herself onto the floor next to the princess - or rather, the prince.

"Where would you be if you had the choice?" she asked, skirting the cross-dressing issue as one her companion might not want to talk about directly right now. A sigh came from the male's pouty lips.

"I..." He looked up to Georgina and then back down at the palms of his hands. "I came here because the emperor made me feel things I've never felt before."

"Oh." said Gina.

The prigkipessa covered his eyes with his hands and the women saw the Venus symbol glowing a bright white; a tingle in their infinity symbols bubbled. Cal's eyes shot to her arm, shocked; between her bewildered indignance at her change of station, and the cruel and painful method in which she had learned of it, the dark-haired girl had failed to notice the symbol before, even with the more subtle sensations it had awoken with earlier. She didn't have time to wonder over it then, though - the Princess... or, Prince; was speaking again.

"And no matter how I dress or present myself for him...he just goes off..." He sighed in defeat.

The light of the symbol faded and he put his hands to his face now, crying heavily again. The feeling from their wrists faded.

"Maybe I should just go back home...he says he loves me but I don't see it..."

Gina nodded her understanding. It was difficult to gauge the prince's age through his make-up and delicate features, but he had to be young. Gina herself had had the dual, perhaps unfair advantage of having a very rational head on her shoulders and of getting her first doomed romance out the way relatively early in her teens, but she could empathise with someone dealing with their sexuality for the first time. The time when nothing in the world seemed more important than being with that one person, and the complications were a hundred times worse if you were gay or otherwise "abnormal".

And your fixation is an emperor who murdered his parents. Gina thought. Now that is complicated.

"How about," Gina said, tugging thoughtfully at her hair. She wasn't about to encourage the young prince's crush based on what she had read so far, but she didn't want to pressure him without knowing more either. "How about I go and talk to him for you?"

The prince looked over in shock, pushing some of his divine hair behind an ear.

"You...would do that? But you've only known me for a little over a week..."

"Well," Gina said with a slightly strained chuckle. "Don't judge me just by what you read on Twitter."

The prince sighed and shook his head. "You are my only friend here...thank you..." Pulling his knees close to himself, with a scratching sound from his heels scraping the marble, he hid his face between his knees.

Gina chewed her tongue for a moment, before asking, "What did my other brother do to upset you?"

"Ever since I've been here, he's been staring at me. I can never tell if he wishes to harm me or touch me. I hide in here..." He gestured to the art room. "I haven't told Lycus, maybe if I did he would stay with me..." He glared up at Georgina. "Your younger brother is a creep!"

"I'll have a word with him too." Gina said, wondering just how Vahsi would react to that news. "I wouldn't tell Lycus though, at least not yet. It might not end well."

It wasn't so much her natural disdain for petty moves like trying to make a partner jealous instead of just talking to them - she was worried what a man who had already killed two family members might do to Vahsi...or to Panos himself. Her advice, however, made the young male glare. Propping himself against the wall, he worked his way up onto his feet.

"And what has made you so insightful suddenly?" Now his words were spiteful, humphing in distaste of her. Harshly stepping away from Gina, he made his way to the door, heels loud. The slam of the door boomed in off the marble walls, echoing slowly into silence.

Wrong-footed, Gina shot a look at Cal as she jumped up and headed for the door, her purse hanging from one hand. She hadn't expected the prince to call her his only friend one minute, and then take offence and storm out like a child the next. Then again the prince was clearly high-strung at the moment, and she herself hardly had a good grasp of the situation. She tried not to be annoyed as she pulled open the door and looked left and right.

"Hey!" she shouted after the prince. "Wait!" To her right she could see the royal walking furiously away, a guard now escorting him.

"Don't run away when I'm just trying to help you." she said more quietly as she trotted after them as fast as her heels would allow.

The prince turned around, still as unhappy. Even the guard looked at her with disapproval.

"Please do not speak harshly to the divine-blooded, Lady Georgina." the man asked her firmly.

"I'm going to my bedchambers." the prince announced. "If you're going to help me, why don't you speak to your siblings like you said you would?" His sapphire eyes glanced over to Cal's injured face before he turned gracefully on his heel, exotic hair flying about before he walked off again. With each step away, once again the women felt a tingle of the important symbol distancing itself from them.

"I will." Gina called after him, a slight frown on her face as she shouldered her purse. She stood with her arms folded for a moment as the prince disappeared round the corner of the hall, then looked again at the strange mark burned into her wrist.

"Well," she said uneasily to Cal as she turned to look at the younger girl. "He definitely needs our help." Against a psychopath he has a crush on. Oh Jesus. She gave Cal's cheek a sympathetic look. "How's that feeling?"

Calamity's first reaction was to scowl - there it was again, the pity. She had seen it in the Prince's expression earlier, and now Gina, too. But scowling tightened the muscles around her eyes, her cheek throbbed with pain, and she winced instead, giving her a moment to let go of the childish annoyance at her new ally simply showing her concern.

"It's... fine. At least, I don't think it's going to get any worse from here."

"It doesn't look like you've fractured anything." Gina agreed. "They must have ice around here somewhere." she added, resolved not to repeat her earlier missed opportunity with the guard. "Hopefully that'll stop it swelling up any more."

It better not, thought Cal. The afterthought was unhelpful, but unavoidable. Cal's eye was slightly swollen, but not enough to hinder the girl's vision, and her puffy, discoloured cheek would heal. "The guard called him divine-blooded. What does that mean?"

"I think he's a Lambros." Gina said, digging her phone out of her purse once again and showing Cal the Wikipedia page. "The people here think they're the sons of a god or something."

"And where did this come from?" Cal asked, holding up her forearm. "I felt something, when you were talking to him, then I looked down and there it was. I didn't have it before! At least, not on Serroc..." The girl trailed off. Honestly, she wasn't sure when it had first appeared, not having spotted it until the art room. "It's something to do with him, I'm sure. We have to help him."

Her voice resolved as she agreed with Gina's earlier statement, giving a small nod.

"What if he knows something about how we got here?"

"Maybe." Gina said uncertainly. She traced the tattoo on her own arm with a fingertip. The fingertip itself was scarcely less strange; the nail longer and far better manicured than Gina herself usually found time for. They still knew next to nothing about this alien world, and even about their own supposed places in it. With the prince no longer in a talking mood, there didn't seem to be any better plan than for Gina to do as she had promised and speak with emperor Nikas.

"I suppose we'd better start with heading back to the others and finding this emperor." Gina said, gritting her teeth and reaching up to loosen the halter-neck of her dress against her bite. She took off back up the corridor with Cal, doing her best to recall the route they had walked. As they made their way down a long, straight corridor of gold and marble, she pulled out her phone and Googled Lycus Nikas.

The searching of her supposed brother turned up a lot of contrasting results. Pages of information were listed, some focused more on his personal history while one link alluded to his battle strategies. There were memes about him, praising his appearance and making lewd jokes about his desirability. Funny what they'll forgive celebrities for, Gina thought quietly to herself. Murdering your parents is a new one though. She had been right about one thing - as she saw a picture of him pop up in the search, the man in the prince's painting was indeed the emperor, and those eyes were not merely a translation.

Through the halls, Gina was able to summon another robed and armed man to her side, who followed without hesitation.

"I need you to take me to my younger brother." she told him. "Where's the emperor right now?" she added after they had been walking for a few seconds. "I need to see him as well."

[The Cockatiel]

Vahşi said nothing as the woman talked. When she suggested that he and Baka find some food, he nodded curtly and glanced sideways at the other man. The women left and he started off down the hallway in the opposite direction, back toward the hall where he'd first appeared. "I'm guessing that you don't know much more than I do about this place. So, who are you, exactly?" he asked Baka, assuming that the other men was following him.

If it hadn't been for the fact that he'd had someone waiting for him in the hall, Vahşi wouldn't have been sure where to go. As it was, he still didn't know what he was doing, but his confidence, assumed or real, would probably get them through the rest of the day at least. The man he'd left in the hall seemed to be some sort of servant of his, or something like it, so he was guessing that he wouldn't say no to Vahşi's requests.

"My-my name is Baka!" He spoke up with nervous energy. He scanned around again, this was so different from his island life. It was exciting as it was nerve wracking. The man in front of him seemed really tough, but somehow he felt connected with him. They were in this strangeness together? Just like with the two girls?


"Nice to meet you. My name's Vahsi, or hey-you-bastard if someone's angry at me. I guess you got here in the same way that I did. Everything was black, then you appeared in a netherworld with a strange letter in your hands? I felt your mark just after we appeared here. So I guess we are all in this together. I don't suppose you know about anyone or anything here?"

Baka shook his head fast, the blonde hairs about.

"No..." Vashi seemed like a good guy to have on his side in all of this. But right now the islander had nothing of use to offer in what was going in.

Vahsi led the way back into the main hall. The man was still where Vahsi had left him. A few guards were still in the hall as well, one of them the one that Vahsi had threatened earlier. The guard looked over at them as they entered and Vahsi, subtly changing his posture to be aggressive, stared directly back at him until the guard looked away. Vahsi motioned for Baka to follow him and crossed the room to the servant.

The servant had been very still, dropped down on the cold marble ground without fuss at all. Head down, bare skin against the stone without any hesitation. Vashi, was in complete command of the people around him.

"Hey, you," Vahsi said to the servant. "Uh, may you stand up?" If everyone was obeying him, he probably had quarters here. Unfortunately, he had no idea where, and even though he'd been shown marked deference so far, he didn't want to push his luck by wandering around the castle. "I want you to lead us to my quarters, then have some food prepared for four persons." The servant would obey him, right? The middle aged man had squabbled up to his feet, still his head hung down. Baka felt uncomfortable by how broken the man was acting, this was nothing like his...old life?

"Of course Sir Vashi..." The man was weakly leading them up the steps. Under their feet was the hardness of the stone, red carpet flowing up the middle. The area was eerily empty, and a bit cold for the nearly half naked Baka who was following, shivering, and hold himself. The servant walked gracelessly, sort of lifting the side of his hip to raise his left foot and raising his right leg undisturbed.

He led, hobbling up two levels of the sharply turning sets of stairs. At each level was a little square platform that led to either the floor or the next set of stairs. The second level had yet another hall of doors, without the statues, only three doors in before there was a sharp turn to the right.

When they got to the third floor Vashi and Baka were witness to beautiful baroque paintings on the walls where doors would have been, long hall of art as if it were telling a story. They contained various naked men and women, some being lovers, others enemies, fields of grass or chasms of rock with thunderous skies and legions of sword and shield armed men.

"I will bring the prepared food immediately" In his thin white high thigh cut robes he dropped to his knees again when they stood before the wood, gold lined door. Baka scrunched his lips as he looked down at the guy, his face showing a bit of unease for what he was seeing.

Through the building they could feel the girls still on the first floor, walking further away from them. It was an odd sensation for Baka to know exactly where someone was standing, feeling some strange tether to them.

"Could you not kneel down every time you talk to me?" Vahsi asked the servant. "New orders. You stay on your feet, okay?" He had no idea if he was breaking any rules of protocol but this was unnecessary for both of them. Besides, the rules were more like guidelines anyway. No need to follow them. "And ask someone to bring a set of clothes befitting a freeman to my quarters. Two sets," he corrected himself. "Thank you. I think that will be all for now."

He could feel the prickling in his wrist tell him where the women were but he decided not to ask the old man to do anything else. The man looked like he was about to fall over from old age. Vahsi turned to Baka and added in a low voice, "I don't know what the girls are doing but once they get back to our meeting place we'll need to get a guard to bring them here. For now we need to sit tight."

[Azazeal849]

"He is in the war room, Lady Georgina." The man answered evenly. In the foyer they saw the middle aged man that had dropped before Vahşi running his way back down the stairs and going past them, with a bow to Gina.

The guard escorted quietly, just started walking away and up the stairs. The girls had enough common sense to figure out he was leading them to Vahşi's room.

Variety was not something this home had in its flavours of beauty, passing pantings that matched the statues below. As they walked they could feel the nearing presence of Vahşi and Baka.

On the third floor the guard had escorted them straight to the two males, who were just about to open the bedroom door before they came.

"We'll have some drinks and ice, please." Gina remembered to say.

The guard nodded and walked off, leaving the four of them be. Though Baka and Cal were glared at, no doubt because they were not bowing before their leaders, or perhaps because they were not the ones tasked with relaying the drinks order.

"Welcome back!" Baka nervously waved at them.

Cal smiled back, relieved to see another face that wasn't completely unfamiliar - and unlike the other two, Baka was in the same situation as she; where Vahsi and Gina had become royalty, Cal and Baka had been given rags. She caught sight of the guards' steely, disapproving glare as he exited, and dropped her head hurriedly. Was it already become second fucking nature, she thought; angry at herself, to act subservient under any scrutiny?!

Her stomach growled, providing a welcome distraction from her fall from grace. She looked up at the two males again hopefully.

"So, did you find us something to eat?"

"We sent a servant to get something from the kitchen," Vahşi explained. "And I told him to bring a different set of clothes for Baka that will be a little more comfortable. But unfortunately we didn't think to send for some clothes for Cal." He shrugged as he glanced at her. "Sorry about that." He clearly wasn't use to apologising, as he nearly stumbled over the words and didn't seem at all sure if he should say something else. His voice rose a bit at the end, as if he were asking a question, but the same look of self-confidence remained on his face.

Gina was oddly unenthusiastic about the fact that Vahşi had successfully found them food, chewing her tongue pensively as he related that it was a servant bringing it rather than something they could be sure hadn't been drugged. After West Hills, it was difficult not to be paranoid.

"Well," she said, trying to distract herself from her fears and focus on the bigger mystery. "We talked to the princess - or rather, the prince."

She shrugged at Baka and Vahsi's surprised expressions. "Prince?" Vahşi repeated. "That's something we didn't expect." He didn't think that the princess/prince gender difference would pose much of a problem, but there was no way of knowing if they were in a matriarchal or patriarchal society.

"I'm afraid he doesn't like you very much, Vahşi." Gina admitted. "He said you'd been perving on him. I know!" she added defensively, raising her hands. "It looks like we did a lot of stuff before we arrived here. I mean, it looks like I'm into coke and gang-bangs. The point is, I think he needs our help."

She hitched her bag up on her shoulder and tugged thoughtfully at a lock of her hair.

"He's...uh, a bit stressed out. He's not been here long and he's hating it, but he's also totally in love with our brother - you know, the emperor. The emperor's being pretty cold with him."

She cleared her throat, aware of how much like a petty lovers' tiff she was making it sound.

"No way I'm going to encourage him when this emperor sounds like a complete psychopath, but I did say I'd talk to him. It seems like as good a way as any to find out what's going on."

She looked up and down the corridor, conscious of being overheard.

"Shall we?" she asked, putting a hand on the engraved doorknob of Vahşi's bedchamber and pushing it open.

"I don't think anyone is going to stop us," Vahşi said. "Even if it's not really ours. But the servant will be back soon so let's keep our conversation benign."

The room was a simple square shape, the flooring a light tan carpet to give heat where marble would not. The sounds of heat blasting through vents, a welcome modern comfort, came from the walls. A bathroom was to the right as seen from the open door, closely adjacent.

Everything was simplistic and empty. The room was void of much personality, only having necessities. The left corner was cut off by a tall and narrow bookshelf, littered with eclectic hard backs. The bed was shoved up against the wall to the right, next to the bathroom door and a closet, and had sheets scattered with the Nikas family sigil. On the bed was a book that felt vastly of importance, much like the young boy with the symbol on the back of hand. It was hard bound and difficult to tell what subject it was, as it was lying face up and open.

Baka frowned. "What is that feeling?"

Gina returned the frown, uncertainly, and slipped her handbag off her shoulder to drop it onto the bed.

"I don't know." she murmured as she gingerly approached the bed and sat down to examine the book.

"Is that supposed to be mine?" Vahşi asked. He guessed that they wouldn't find a public library's barcode on the book's spine, but he couldn't remember ever seeing a book even vaguely like the one on the table outside of a city's archives.

Gina's eyes could see the hard back book's newly-printed white pages. On the left page was a bold, black symbol that took up its entirety. A circle crowned with a crescent lying on its on it side, pointing up; and south the circle, a cross. Gina - who was no student of astrology beyond the ubiquitous male symbol and the feminist Venus cross - didn't recognise the Mercury sign. She was, however, put closer to the right track by the right hand page, which contained a list, titled in artistically swirly words: The planets and their qualities.

Spaced apart below the heading were the calligraphic names Mercury and Venus, and under each was a list of words. Mercury was listed with Intellect, Knowledge, Communication, Learning, Logic and Reasoning, while Venus held Love, Romance, Beauty, Compassion, Femininity, Sensuality, and Unity.

"Just some zodiac nonsense." Gina frowned in confusion. She would have turned away, had the tingling in her wrist not urged her that there was something important about the book. The prince had the Venus symbol on his wrist too. she remembered, although she still had no idea what it might mean. Whoever had sent them here and given them the bloodstained parchment was clearly trying to give them a clue, but she couldn't see it yet. The thought frustrated her, warring with the apprehension that she had no reason at all to trust the sender. She turned the page.

Behind her, Baka suddenly yelped in surprise.

"What's up?" Gina said in alarm, half rising.

"My wrist." the blonde boy replied, holding up his forearm. Gina looked at her own arm and saw the skin on the inside of her wrist darken with the outline of a second tattoo. It was the Mercury symbol from the book, now reproduced in miniature below the sideways figure-8.

"The hell...?" Gina murmured to the others, just as confused as they were. Rubbing futilely at the tattoo, she turned back to the book to see that the symbol on the left hand page had disappeared.

"It's gone." she told her companions. "The symbol from the book. It was on the page and now it's on..." She broke off to look down at her wrist again, and began to flick through the pages of the book in earnest. To her consternation, they were all blank.

Cal, staring in shock at her own wrist, squinted as she gazed down at the new symbol there.
She had no idea what Gina meant by 'zodiac'; Serroc did not lie beneath the same stars as the older girl's home. But the symbol looked so familiar...

"Isn't this the mark that was on the Prince's arm? No, it's a little different. There were no horns," she remembered, running a finger along the crescent that topped the mark.

"Mmm hmm." Gina nodded in agreement. "The mark he had was a Venus cross. It's a sort of generic female symbol." Struck by sudden inspiration, she dug her phone out of her handbag and Googled planet symbols. The first images that popped up confirmed that the mark that had translocated itself onto their arms was indeed a symbol for the planet Mercury.

"Maybe it's trying to tell us something?" she guessed as she looked again at the list of words on the book's only remaining full page. Venus. Love, beauty, femininity. That might describe the prince, after a fashion. Did that mean that they were supposed to act as the things that the Mercury symbol described? Learning...reasoning...communication. Perhaps they were supposed to be the ones to facilitate understanding. The prince and the emperor were one thing, but there were also all the things she had read about in the news - breaking alliances, family fueds...

Bloody hell. Gina thought, feeling more than a little overwhelmed. She wormed her fingers into her hair and rested her temple on her palm. Okay. Think. First thing first. We need to talk to the emperor.

"I hope you didn't just put a curse on us," Vahşi remarked coolly. "We'd better keep this second mark secret until we know for sure that it won't get us into trouble. So far we don't know anything about where we are, or who we are as far as this world goes. Except for the supposed drug addict and the supposed chaser." He laid heavy sarcasm on his last few words but was obviously in earnest. "Do you girls want to look in the closet for something to change into? I doubt you'll find anything but it might be worth looking."

Cal looked down at her thin, sparse dress and sighed, lifting a hand to gesture at her swollen face. "Probably better I stay in this." She said nothing more, but the look on her face spoke volumes; clearly, the girl had no desire to find out the consequences for a slave dressing inappropriately.

"Maybe you're right." Gina opined, rising from the bed and grimacing slightly as she slid two fingers underneath her halterneck to relieve pressure on her bite. As nice as it would be to get Cal and Baka out of those demeaning clothes - hell, right now she herself would have been happy to slum around in some trackies - it didn't seem like a good idea. "We don't want to be drawing too much attention, and we definitely don't want anyone getting hit again."

Bringing up Cal's wound made Baka frown; he was powerless to stop the abuse, just another slave himself. He stared at the book Gina was flipping through - it felt important still. He wanted to grab the book and hold it, feeling the instinct that somehow keeping the book safe was a good idea.

He stepped up next to the bed, seeing that the few other pages the book had were blank. Much like the rest of this place, this book was odd. It seemed out of place with the rest of...wherever they were.

There was knock on the door. "I'll get it," Vahşi said. "This is supposed to be my room, after all." He went to the door and found the servant he'd sent out to get food, holding a tray of seafood and dolmas.

"Food, as you have requested." It was the voice of the middle aged man that had thrown himself on the floor before Vahşi. Baka turned his gaze between the two royals. Every choice here seemed to matter...and something as simple as opening a door seemed very scary now. The damage done to Cal's face should have been proof enough for her and him.

"The Emperor wishes to speak with you personally," the servant said. He kept his head down in Vahşi's presence.

"Thank you," Vahşi said, standing aside to let the servant enter the room and gesturing at the nearest table. The servant put the tray down and went back out the door. "I'll be out in a moment," Vahşi told him. He closed the door behind the servant and turned to the trays of food.

Gina waited for the servant to retreat before crossing to the bathroom, retrieving a hand towel, and filling it with ice out of the tall glass decanter that had arrived with the trays. Bundling it together, she offered it to Cal to hold against her face.

"Here." she said. "It'll make the swelling go down quicker." Hugging her elbows, she turned to Vahşi. "I suppose we had better all go with you."

She doubted that Lycus Nikas would be expecting her to come along too, rather than being at a party somewhere. But she didn't want Vahşi going into a potentially dangerous encounter with the murderer-emperor alone, either.

"So, is this emperor the lover-but-not-really-lover of the prince that said I was stalking him?" Vahşi asked. "Because things might get a little complicated if you all come. If you do, we should have a few weapons. Even if they're just daggers. The guards would probably murder a servant that had a knife, so those of us that aren't should carry a pair so we can hand them off to Baka and the girl if we need to."

"I don't know if that's such a good idea." Gina answered. "All the guards I've seen have guns, and how do you think they'll react if we take something that looks like a weapon near the emperor?"

They weren't even close to safe here, Gina knew that much, but all her instincts were telling her to keep a low profile as far as they could. Where would we even find daggers around here? she wondered, her attention turning briefly to the knives and forks that were wrapped in gold-edged napkins next to the food trays. She had hoped that they would be silver, something she could use if They really were involved in this, but for all the palace's opulence the cutlery was only stainless steel.

No use against men or ghosts. she thought grimly.

"We should at least take this." Baka ventured, picking up the book from Vahsi's bed.

Gina considered. The book was something else that might look odd for them to be carrying around, but Baka was right - there was something important about it.

"I'll shove it in my handbag." she said after a moment.

[Azazeal849]

Baka was already staring at the green wraps. They glistened in how moist they were, and the smell of fish reminded him of what he was used to eating. He had glanced over at Gina, trying to avoid looking at her pushed up womanlyness, and instead put his youthful eyes on her purse where the mysterious book was placed. He shoved a wrap into his mouth, holding the last half in delight. Taken by the enjoyment, he savoured the spritz of lemon and the sprinkle of spices across the warm rice.

"Yummmeh" the blond male told everyone in the bedroom as he kept chewing. He was the only one smiling, the tension thick.

Cal sidled over and grabbed a wrap herself. She had to keep one hand holding the makeshift ice pack. Baka beamed at her as she took a wrap.

Cal smiled back. "Thank goodness! I'm starving!"

The pungent, but tasty smelling fish reminded the young royal of Ockilsetter, the fish man who had lived amongst the rebels. That had been the last time she'd eaten - the stew he had given her. How long had it been? The girl's stomach growled at the thought, and she bit into the wrap hungrily.

"Are you guys feeling okay?" Gina asked cautiously after they had taken a few mouthfuls. Baka was rapidly nodding his head.

"Mmmm," Cal managed a satisfied sigh through her mouthful. The food was delicious, though chewing exacerbated the pain in her cheek. Swallowing, she looked at Gina quizzically. "Why wouldn't we be?"

"I've, um, had to deal with a lot of drugged food lately." Gina explained, reasoning that it wasn't any weirder than anything else they were currently dealing with. "Can you remember the last...stressful thing that happened to you?"

"Yeah," Cal couldn't help but laugh, "I was transported here, from my home, by persons unknown." The young teen giggled, the presence of food in her belly obviously having put her in a better mood.

Gina matched the grin, grateful for the moment of levity. "Fair enough."

The older girl massaged her wrist, thoughtfully. That's the million pound question, isn't it? If They didn't bring us here, then who did? And perhaps more importantly, could they be trusted. Paranoia aside, Gina was wary of anyone who deliberately addressed and then sidestepped the question of their identity, in a note that was written in blood.

"Before that," Cal went on, " I was kidnapped by rebels, discovered who my father was, and..." she trailed off, for the first time since she'd found herself in this place remembering the mysterious jewel she'd been given by the fae who'd proclaimed himself her biological father, and the strange sensations she'd felt upon touching it. Obviously, the gem was gone; taken by whoever, or whatever had placed her in these strange clothes. The possessive feeling that had been overwhelming in it's presence was weaker now, but still enough that - for reasons she was unsure of - she decided not to mention the treasure.

Gina made a sympathetic expression. "As soon as this is done, I think we owe it to each other to hear our stories. Our real stories, I mean. Not the parts we're playing here."

She took a breath, letting it out slowly as they stepped out into the corridor. First, they had to navigate their way through their meeting with the emperor.

Baka had shoved another wrap in his mouth, worried that as a slave he might not get this much food later. Stuffing himself, he ran up to the wooden doorway and stuck his head out, seeing Vahsi, Gina, and the other real slave man, who had apparently remained waiting outside the door.

Cal placed the makeshift icepack reluctantly on the table beside the food and followed the others, sticking close behind Gina. When she caught sight of the slave, she hurriedly swallowed the rest of her mouthful, attempting to conceal the wrap she had begun eating inside behind her back. Her eyes were fixed on the floor as she shuffled past the servant, mimicking the lack of eye contact that she had witnessed from the other subservient people here.

"Psst." Baka tried to get Gina's attention as she was clicking off with each step of her strange but interesting footwear. "What are we supposed to do?" He whispered harshly, Cal and him would ...die or something before an Emperor, right?

"You're our personal assistants." Gina said. She couldn't bring herself to address them as slaves. "Just keep your heads down and me and Vahsi'll look out for you."

She glanced back at the middle aged servant, who was keeping his head low before Vashi. He either had not caught Baka's actions or was ignoring them.

"How may I serve you?" he was asking.

"Take us to the emperor," Vahsi said after a moment. The slave bowed, still keeping his gaze away from anyone's face, and backed out of the room, holding the door open for Vahsi to pass through. As Vahsi followed him down the hall, he hoped he wouldn't get anyone killed doing this. If anyone got hurt, it would be his fault. His responsibility. Casualties and injuries happened in war, but this wasn't war yet. Just a bunch of crazy fakers traipsing around an unknown castle.

"Was he just hanging around for us or was he listening in?" Gina murmured, wondering aloud.

The younger girl couldn't help a worried glance at the man at this thought, shifting her gaze quickly back as their eyes met. She had been beaten for merely daring to speak earlier, what would the consequences of helping herself to food intended for royals be? Or for entertaining the idea of an audience with the Emperor, for that matter!

Gina had her nose in her phone again as they walked.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for clues." Gina answered, glancing up briefly. Oddly, a search of her messages had revealed nothing from or about her supposed brother Lycus, and now she was looking uncertainly at the text cascade to her so-called bestie love who had eagerly demanded pictures of her last sexual escapade.

Lets hope the lack of messages doesn't mean Lycus hates me. Gina thought wryly as she started typing, doing her best to mimic the syntax of her previous texts.

Hey sweetness, the divine Lambros kid just asked me to talk to Lycus for him, what do you make of that!? xxx

Bestie Love's response was swift.

*Gasp!* She's so pretty! Oh my Gods, you better be careful! *Frown face* Don't make him angry again *Frown face*

Jinxed it. Gina thought, twisting her mouth. Not registering the others' curious glances at the buzz and chime of her phone, she typed a reply.

Do you think he's still mad? Did I do the wrong thing? Vahsi's coming too xxx

Gina's phone buzzed again and she saw something that was both unhelpful and rather foreboding: a simple frown face emoticon. It seemed that Bestie didn't think much of Vahsi either.

Baka was following behind, keeping his shoulders slumped and his head down, he didn't want to pull attention. But he kept shooting side glances at Cal, he worried about her. They were in the most danger.

[Azazeal849]

Guided, the four of them were taken to the first floor. Their path down the halls took them further in then they had ever been before until they came face to face with a door purely made of dark metal with no noticeable handle. Adjacent was a keypad outlined by identical metal and its keys black with bold numbering with a small dark square above.

The middle aged, balding and injured slave only turned before the royals and kept his head low. The lavish halls were only occupied the rare passing security personnel.

"...What do we do?" Baka whispered to Calamity but his voice was loud in the halls filled with nothing but the white noise of air cooling ventilation.

Cal shot a worried look between the strange door and the patiently waiting servant. It seemed logical that the pad would open the door; though it was unfamiliar to Cal the absence of any keyhole or handle left it as the only method of entering. Nervous of seeming too inquisitive in a place the slaves seemed to know better than any other, she dropped her head downward, fixing her eyes on the floor once more and responded to Baka without looking at him.

"I think..." she whispered back, painfully aware of the echo of her muttered words, "he's waiting for them to open it."

The girls' heart thudded in her chest, the half-eaten wrap still clutched awkwardly behind her back, though hopefully it would just appear as if she were holding her hands dutifully behind her. When they gained entry to the room... if they gained entry, for she had no reason to believe Gina or Vahşi had any more idea of how to open the door than she, she would throw herself to the floor as she had seen others do, she decided. Hopefully she would be able to discard the food while doing so.

Gina glanced at Cal and then back at the elderly servant.

"I don't want to barge in on our brother without some sort of warning." she said to the servant, thinking on her feet as best she could. "Can you go in and announce us, or call ahead on the radio or something?"

The slave who had been ever so humble, surprisingly looked up into Vahşi's eyes for conformation of Gina's words.

"Yes, I think that would be best," Vahşi agreed, looking completely confident. He'd quickly realized that none of them knew how to open the door, and he'd been rapidly running out of ideas that would keep them out of trouble.

The middle aged slave hesitantly faced the metal door. A rap of his knuckles on the metal door gave way to a deep, cold sound gave way. For a pause, nothing happened and Baka swallowed hard. Vahşi glanced back at the others for a moment, wondering if they'd broken some unknown protocol but hoping his and Gina's status as royalty would protect them in some way.

Drawing up, the door raised, slowly revealing a guard in the silken garb, colored black and armed with a much more lethal weapon than a mere pistol. Held across his chest was a large, ribbed long barreled intimidating gun.

Baka flashed a look to Cal to drop to their knees, he already doing so. The young princess has clearly had the same thought as she descended to the floor beside him, her mind flashing over what had been revealed in that brief moment before her gaze only showed her the cold, sterile ground again. Whatever the guard had been holding, it looked dangerous; as did its owner. His stature was obviously above their own; the far greater quality of his attire had shown that instantly. Amid her quick descent she allowed the food to slip from her fingers, where it bounced once against the otherwise impeccably cleaned floor and rolled some distance from their small group. Cal placed her hands innocently in her lap, her eyes downcast.

The olive skinned man's face was harsh, trained discipline and obedience. He had not given any of the slaves a moment of his attention, his eyes on the two royals.

Behind him they could see yet another door the mimicked the security features of the one he was guarding them from. This man lacked the formality of the guards outside, simply staring down the two royals in wait of them to speak.

Gina cleared her throat, feeling her heart rate rising.

"My brother and I want to speak to the emperor." she told the guard, invoking Vahşi after sensing from the older slave's behaviour that he possibly held more authority here than she did.

The guard scanned the two royals one last time. A click of his gladiators on the marble flooring came as he stepped aside for them to walk in. While Gina and Vahşi exchanged a glance, debating if they should simply walk in, Baka had decided he was going actually crawl on his hands and knees behind them, fearful of showing any resistance. Cal grimaced at the thought of crawling along the floor, however clean it might be. If she were home, she would be the one being guarded - the shame of this... She followed Baka's lead all the same, but it was probably a lucky thing her face was so close to the floor, and downturned - the disgruntled expression on it was not one she could mask.

As they shuffled through the first door, the guard utilised the keypad of the second. The heavy door pistoned upwards just like the first, and revealed behind was a large room, lit only by huge wall-sized screens. The one to the group's right showed a map of the Crete that Gina could recognise from her phone searches, while the screen directly in front of them was showing an olive-skinned woman talking into a handheld microphone. Behind her was a war-torn urban environment, terrified people scattering for cover at a stumbling, hunched-over run. The leftmost screen rapidly flashed with data and numbers, too fast for Vahşi and the others to understand without studying it.

The room held six older men, each intimidating with their signs of age and wisdom. The exception was a young man wearing a crown made from golden olive branches. His intimidation can through the brutality of his muscular figure, displayed by the exposed skin that the silks he wore did not cover. His eyes were a cruel ice blue, his jaw was strong and a beauty mark on his left cheek accentuated his fearsome handsomeness. Gina recognised the man from the prince's painting instantly, but even that intimidatingly lifelike portrait did not do justice to the frightening reality of emperor Lycas.

The emperor's hand was playing with a table-wide touch pad that sat atop a raised dais, dominating the floor. The horizontal screen depicted the Crete, superimposed with moving two dimensional depictions of soldiers, warplanes and military vehicles.

The emperor studied Georgina and Vahşi. His expression did not show pleasure in their company. "What do you want?"

Several of the older men had stopped what they were doing and were now also frowning in their direction. Gina got the uneasy feeling that her plan to talk to Lycus about his upset partner probably wasn't going to bear fruit in front of all these stoic, forbidding witnesses. Baka was trying to hold himself from shaking; the cold, dark room and its occupants clearly sending fear pumping through him. Gina half wished she could offer the younger boy encouragement, but a demeanour of obvious terror might actually be Cal and Baka's best defence right now. Too bad me and Vahşi don't have that option.

Trying to ignore the cold sweat that was threatening to break out on her own skin, Gina straightened her back and blanked the other men out, facing the emperor.

"I tagged along when I heard you wanted to see Vahşi." she began. "There's something important we need to talk about." She paused, glancing at the nearest steel-haired, steel-eyed adjutant. "Probably best if it's in private."

Lycus Nikas pulled away from his war table, standing at his full six feet, and stared at one of the prominent men in the room. His cold stare generated a nod in response, and the emperor walked around the table to approach his siblings. Lycus had taken his eyes off Georgina to stare at Vahşi. The servant that had guided them crawled backward to hide himself further behind the royals and two other slaves.

Vahşi realized that he was probably supposed to say something. He'd guessed from Georgina's words and the old servant's behaviour that this was the emperor. An emperor that had wanted to see him regarding a subject unknown. But it wasn't as if he could just say, 'Hey, what's up?' to someone he'd never met before. He'd rather gotten the impression that wherever they were, the culture was built on a respect - and fear - of the ruling class. The emperor was glaring at him now, which usually wasn't a precursor to friendly conversation, but in a few seconds the silence would be getting uncomfortable.

"I know you wished to speak with me, but the matter between us should wait for a few moments. What she has to say-" He indicated Georgina. "-is on a subject that cannot wait to be attended to." Not to mention that he didn't really know why he was here, himself, and would prefer to put off their own conversation as long as possible.

Oh Jesus. Gina thought, as Lycus Nikas' eyes went away from Vahşi and back onto her once more. Thanks, Vahşi. So much for easing things in under Bestie's advice to try and avoid pissing off their murderous brother.

Imperious in his blood red silks, the emperor looked back to the older, high-ranking military men. He growled his words.

"Leave us."

Each of the silver haired men stood back from their digitised maps and screens, and stepped out of the metal door. There was a heavy sound as it closed. Gina and the others were now alone with the emperor.

"By the gods." the emperor asked his 'sister' sternly. "What can be so important that you have to interrupt me?"

Gina felt herself flushing slightly at the obvious contempt in his voice. Well, fuck you too, she thought. But she had made her plan of attack, and even if it was coming out sooner than she had intended there was nothing left to do but pitch it.

"It's about the prince." she began. "I've been talking to him and he doesn't seem very happy here. Now, fair enough, I don't know anything about wars..." She tugged at her hair, hoping she had found an angle that would grab the emperor's attention, "But I looked at the news today and half the world's up in arms over what Nero Drusus did to him. I don't want it to end up with them saying the same things about us." She hesitated. "Maybe we should send him home, so he can see his family? So he can be safe?"

So he can be away from you.

[G]

The emperor's face flushed and twisted with apparent embarrassment, and a hint of anger that could be seen by the singular bold line that formed between his furrowing brows.

"And what am I supposed to do? I have an empire to lead. I find him precious and - unlike you two sloths - an inspirational being." His bearing became dominating and explosive as he pointed a finger at Vahşi. "You have done nothing but hide with cowardice in your chambers. It is time you become useful. And you," His ice blue eyes glared at Georgina, "Are nothing but a drug-fueled whore. What possible insight can you give me on my personal affairs?"

Vahşi fought a rising urge to throttle the emperor. The insults against him made little impact, and the faded sense of a forgotten memory indicated that he was used to such things. But despite his own shortcomings, which he'd been told over and over, there was no reason to speak to Georgina that way. The emperor was fortunate that he was too important to make striking him viable. Vahşi moved his gaze to the far wall, not trusting himself to speak again or to look the emperor in the eyes.

On the floor, Baka felt his stomach twisting in knots. Nervously he crawled closer to Calamity. The floor was freezing on his bare exposed skin; nothing about this room gave any sense of comfort. It told him to be submissive and fearful.

Gina forced herself to stand her ground. The insults stung, even though she hadn't done anything to earn her alter ego's reputation. She dropped her handbag, still containing the book, onto the floor next to Cal and Baka, and folded her arms.

"It was him who came to see me." she told the emperor. What has made you so insightful suddenly? had been the prince's reaction to her as well. It wasn't a good feeling, sensing this underlying contempt from everyone who wasn't a servant. "I'm sure you do find him inspirational. But he told me he wants to be seen as a person, not an idol."

She was trying to choose her words carefully. She still didn't know the full story between the emperor and the starstruck young prince, and she didn't want to encourage her proven murderer of a brother into something that said prince would quickly regret.

"I think he's lonely." she finished, letting her arms fall to her sides.

Emperor Nikas stared at her intently. He looked around at the war room for a moment before he pushed Vahşi to the side to walk between his "siblings" to the door. Vahşi flinched as the emperor's body contacted his, but managed to stay standing where he was instead of backing up. The older slave and Baka practically had to roll to avoid being in Lycus' walking path; Cal was fortunate enough to simply not be in his way.

"There is going to be a gathering of my highest ranking." the emperor growled at Gina and Vahşi. Vahşi met the emperor's angry glare with a defiant stare of his own, fear tinging his stronger emotion of dislike.

"Be useful and attend to boost morale." the emperor continued. He glared at Georgina. "Come sober."

Gina jerked her head slightly, as if trying to physically shake off the rebuke. Lycus Nikas turned to the door and opened it, barking at his men to return to their work.

"We're not done." he warned Vahşi as he left through the other doors. Vahşi made no verbal reply, only nodding as the emperor departed.

As the stony-faced ruler left the room, Cal exhaled; a long, tremulous burst of air she hadn't even realised she'd been holding. Well, that had gone...honestly, she wasn't sure; but they were all still breathing, so not terribly at least. Her back and shoulders ached from kneeling on all fours for such a length of time, and her muscles screamed to be released, to stretch. Sitting upright, she turned her stiff neck left and right; and realised what she hadn't been able to see from her prone position on the ground; one of the heavily armed guards was watching them intently.

Shit.

Her eyes scrambled for a reasonable excuse for her movement, and, trying not to let it seem like an act of desperation, she reached over to retrieve Gina's bag from the floor, holding it up for the 'royal' with her eyes cast down to the floor again. This didn't seem like the kind of place where people of Gina's stature would have to stoop for anything. Surely it was a reasonable excuse. She hoped, too, that the older girl would take the hint, and make an exit; she needed to breathe, and to stand. The guard was still staring at them, waiting for them to leave.

"Come on." Gina said to her three companions, looking down at Cal and taking both the bag and the hint.

Gina walked a little stiffly as they all exited the war room. They seemed to have achieved something at least - even if I keep getting slated for stuff I had no part in. She glanced sideways at Vahşi, wondering if he was feeling the same. Vahşi returned her glance, his gaze echoing similar sentiments, although a darker part of himself seemed to brood below the surface of his irritation. After the emperor had called him a coward and useless, Gina realised something that she should have picked up on in the book-filled room. Maybe the doppelganger Vahşi was just an extreme introvert, and the staring that had offended the prince was simply a lack of decent social skills. She wondered what her own backstory was, beyond the superficial evidence of her Twitter feed. Looking at Cal and Baka, she felt her stomach twist in sympathy at how they must be feeling.

"So." Gina said with a rather strained smile as the door rumbled closed again behind them. "Your place or mine?"

"Let's try yours." Vahşi suggested. "Once we're there, we need to talk."

"Can you take us to my room, please?" Gina asked the older slave. They could use some time to gather their thoughts and plan their next move. And, she thought as she pulled the tie of her gown away from her neck wound once again, maybe even get out of this fucking dress.

The slave bowed, with a nervous shake, and glanced at Vahşi for confirmation of the order. Vahşi nodded to the older slave, a bit ruder than he'd acted before. Hadn't he requested clothing for Baka? The overly-clean smell of the palace irritating his nose did not help his edgy mood.

The slave started off down the corridor and Vahşi followed, feeling as if he had nearly remembered something crucial during their audience with the emperor, only to forget it more completely than before.

While the middle-aged slave guided the group, Baka studied the bruise on Cal's face.

"Are you okay?" he whispered to her. His stomach bubbled, digesting the wrap he had eaten - a noise which pulled the attention of one of the patrolling guards. Baka threw his head down instantly to become invisible again.

Cal's only response to the question was an infinitesimal nod; she had almost blown her cover a moment ago, and wasn't willing to risk it again.

The older slave led them through the golden corridors to yet another redwood door, and prostrated himself on the floor until Vahşi gave him curt permission to leave. Gina shook her head, a pensive expression on her face, before turning her attention back to a more practical problem and fishing a bottle of eyeliner out of her handbag. She barely registered the Gucci stamp as she unscrewed the top and marked a subtle streak of black kohl under the burnished doorknob.
"That might help us find it again if all else fails." she commented as she rose and took a breath. Okay, let's see what Gigi's room says about her...

When she opened the door, she found herself greeted by a softly-lit room, with a succession of small square lights lining the four marble walls. Decorative lines of contrasting black marble were inlaid around each individual light, and stretched between them in a repeating pattern of square spirals. The walls were decorated with thick-framed modern art showing simple, artistic swirls, and the marble floor was covered almost from wall to wall by a circular, black velvet rug. The rug was emblazoned with a huge image of a dusky-skinned glamour model, clashing sharply with the room's subdued black-and-white aesthetic.

To Gina's left was another door which she assumed led to a bathroom, and directly across from the entrance was a huge walk-in closet; well lit, and with long racks of clothes neatly organised by colour. They even had matching heels, wedges and flats lined up underneath the hangers. The careful organisation did not extend to the rest of the room, as the modern vanity dresser by the bathroom door was scattered with makeup cases and brushes, and some of the drawers had been left carelessly half-closed. The circular bed to Gina's right stood on a raised marble platform, and was underlit by white LEDs studded around the base. The lights illuminated discarded makeup items that had rolled under the bed, and the floor itself was scattered with dresses, heels, and the odd piece of lace underwear.

Gina twisted her mouth. She was hardly the tidiest person in the world, but the room suggested the careless indifference of someone five years younger who knew that their mum would tidy up after them. A mum or a slave. Gina thought. She twisted the dial of the light-switch beside the door to raise the lights, and turned and looked at Cal and Baka still hovering behind her. Cal's cheek was still red, turning slowly purple.

"Sit down, guys." Gina said, indicating the bed. "I'm going to be sick if I have to watch you act like slaves any longer."

Cal raised her arms above her head, grimacing (then wincing; the movement sent a pang through her bruised cheek) at the tiny clicks and cracks from her shoulderblades and back as she stretched like a cat. Her muscles were stiff from her subservient position, and as she lowered her arms, she lifted a hand to rub small circles over her shoulder.

"You're going to be sick!" she said, frowning, "Even when I was kidnapped I was treated better than this!"

"Kidnapped?" Gina asked in alarm, but Cal was already in full flow.

"If I was treated like this at home, these floors would not be nearly as clean. Mother has killed for less. If she could see her Princess now, on her knees, beaten..."

The teen trailed off with a small shudder. She wasn't actually sure what the Grand Sensibility would do. Certainly, those who expected this behaviour of her would be punished... and harshly. But Cal had let them frighten her into submission; that was not how she'd been raised, and Lyr would not respond kindly to such a display of weakness.

"If she ever finds out about this, I'm fucked." she continued. The afterthought followed swiftly; "If we ever get home, that is."

She surprised herself with the lack of worry in her voice at the statement. Did she even want to go back? With a sigh, she sat down where Gina had gestured.

Gina slumped down next to Cal, her elbows resting on her knees and her fingertips supporting her temples.

"Well, we're getting somewhere." Gina said after a moment, straightening. "But I don't know how much getting the prince and the emperor talking is going to help. God, what a prick!"

On Cal's other side, Baka looked around the room, clearly disgruntled. He didn't know what to say or do. Gina pulled the book from Vahşi's room back out of her handbag and flicked through the blank pages, as if in the hope that it would offer the group some new insight. Dropping it back onto the bed with a shake of her head, she looked up at Vahşi, who was still standing.

"Are you alright?" she asked him, "You looked about ready to commit murder back there." Her eyebrows knitted together as she remembered his dark expression leaving the war room, and his insistence that they should talk.

Vahşi shrugged. "I don't know if I'm all right," he told her, not bothering to lie and say he was fine. "I've met some pricks, but the emperor is more like a grove of cacti."

Intentional or not, the pun drew a brief laugh from Gina.

"When we were in the War Room," Vahşi went on, "I felt like I was starting to remember something, but..." He made a vague gesture with his hand that indicated his hopelessness and frustration. "Now it's like whatever barriers were up in my mind have built themselves higher. I can't remember her. There was some woman, that I was thinking of when I was trying to think of something to calm me down, but I can't remember her name or what she looked like."

She would have had to be important to him, if he had thought of her at such a time, and he wished he could remember. Gina looked sympathetic, then worried.

"What happened?" she asked. "To make you forget?"

"Forget it." Vahşi said. "We'll figure it out eventually, I guess."

Gina shifted around in her seat, winced, and slid two fingers under her dress' strap to pull it away from the side of her neck yet again.

"Can you unzip me please?" she asked Cal, and excused herself into the en-suite after picking one of her alter ego's day dresses from its hanger, more or less at random.

The bathroom was all white marble, with organically-curved cream fixtures and polished silver faucets. As Gina unfolded her chosen item clothing, she saw that what she had taken to be a simple, short-sleeve beige dress carried a Prada label, and no doubt a four-figure price tag. It was detailed with intricate patterns of silver thread, forming a double band around the hem, and a third band encircled the collar and ran across the shoulders to edge the cuffs. Even Gina had to admit that it was gorgeous.

She changed, folded the red dress haphazardly over the bath and turned to the mirror, gritting her teeth uneasily as she turned her head to examine the bite on her neck. The twin puncture marks had closed, but they were surrounded by dark, blotchy smudges where the skin had bruised over. Looking at the wound brought back the unpleasant image of Rozaria's leering face; invisible, but outlined in blood as they tore at each other in the deadly hedge maze outside West Hills. Gina shivered involuntarily, and began to worry where the rest of her classmates were now. How long had she been gone? And what the hell might be happening to them while she was away?

Becca, Olivia, Sam, Dave...Gina didn't think of herself as a leader, but they all as good as looked up to her as one. Did whoever brought her here not care about abandoning them? She heard Cal, Baka and Vahşi conversing softly outside the door, and reflected that she could hardly abandon them either, even if she had been able to. She looked again at the bite on her neck, and then down at the twin symbols branded onto her wrist. Whoever had brought them here seemed to be toying with them - making Cal and Baka into slaves while she took the role of a spoiled princess, and taunting Vahşi with memories he couldn't quite recall. Back in West Hills she would have blamed the drugged food, but this wasn't West Hills.

"You're a sadist." she accused the marks on her wrist quietly.

Ill at ease, she rearranged her hair over her shoulders to cover Rozaria's bite as best she could, and exhaled a deep breath as she leaned over the sink to stare at her reflection. If nothing else, she thought, she had to admit that her alter ego Gigi was a dab hand with a curling wand. She unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out, slightly self-conscious in her new attire.

"How noticeable is it?" she asked, figuring that if the others could see what she was talking about, she would need to pick out a scarf.

"Ummm." Baka began, noticing her dress before anything else. "What is noticeable?" He scanned her again, seeing nothing wrong with her.

"Right answer." Gina said, a smile tugging at one side of her mouth. "I've got a bite on my neck that I don't really want people seeing."

"A bite?" Cal asked, her own eyes on the new dress with just a hint of jealousy in them. She had hated the fineries her mother had forced her into at home, but after spending the day in the guise of servitude, she found she missed the privileges of her old station more than she'd realised. "From what?"

"Would you believe that one of my classmates is a vampire hybrid and tried to take a bite out of me?" the older girl replied, twisting her mouth. To her obvious surprise, Cal nodded, accepting the answer instantly. Though the revelation worried her slightly, she was more relieved; this was perhaps the first thing of Gina's past she had heard that she could relate to her own world.

"A vampire? That's a type of Fae, right?"

Gina shrugged. "I don't know where they come from. But in Roze's case a crazy scientist stuck a needle in her."

"Ouch." Cal winced. "It's not... contagious, is it?"

"I don't think so." Gina said, and wrinkled her nose. "But wouldn't that just cap off a really shitty week."

She padded over to the walk-in wardrobe and picked up the silver-threaded flats that went with her dress. She made a point of dropping her old red dress into the clothes bin nearby, so that at least none of the palace slaves would have to pick it up. It seemed a rather small and futile gesture, which irked her as she sat back down on the plush white stool in front of the vanity dresser. Pinned to one of the triple mirrors was a glamour photo of Gina herself, winking out at her. Gina got the sense that her alter ego was simply spoiled rather than vindictive, but she found Gigi's obliviousness vaguely offensive. Well. she resolved, It's time for her to grow up and step out of her bubble.

Standing near the dresser, Vahşi could pick up a mix of perfume scents; powdery, artificial and unpleasant. Behind the flowery fragrances was the hint of a more toxic smell. He frowned and leaned a bit closer, careful not to touch anything.

"Does anyone else smell that?" he asked, looking over the items scattered across the dresser.

Baka got up to look, his eyes noticing a bag of some sort that was poking over the lip of a half-closed drawer. He grabbed a plastic bag filled with what looked like tiny hard sweets, imprinted with stylish symbols such as smiley faces or little cartoon characters. Baka had no idea what they were; they looked tasty but were hard. Maybe they were hard chewable candy? He opened the plastic bag and began to grab one. As he opened the bag the scent whiffed right into Vahşi's strong nose.Gina noticed what he was doing just in time and lunged across the table to snatch the bag away from him.

"Sorry." she apologised. "Um...trust me, you don't want to be taking them right now."

Guess Gigi was an E girl. she thought as she hurriedly stuffed the pills down into the bottom of her handbag.

[Azazeal849]

"You know," Gina said as she stood back up. "I still feel like I know more about Georgina Nikas than about any of you guys."

She padded over to the wall and leaned against the marble in between two of the modern art paintings.

"I mean," she continued, folding her arms and looking at Cal. "For you vampires are something normal?"

"Well, everyone knows about the Fae," Cal replied in a matter-of-fact tone, although the disbelief in Gina's face didn't equate with that statement.

"Everyone in Serroc, anyway." she amended. "The vampires mostly live in the woods. Only the more normal ones - the ones who can hide it, I mean, live in the city. With the faeries, the witches, people with just minor magic. They're not allowed in the main part of the city, of course, but we allow them to live on the outskirts. That's where I was captured. I snuck away from my guards, and changed my clothes, but the rebels still recognised me."

The once-princess sighed, a frustrated hiss of air that seemed to deflate her a little, her shoulders slumping forwards. When she spoke again, her frustration was evident in her voice.

"Maybe I should have listened to mother. I was just so sick of being Princess Calamity. I just wanted to enjoy myself for once, maybe have a conversation with someone. Most people were too frightened to speak to me. It gets tiring, you know, the airs, the clothes..."

She looked up at Gina with the last words, habit sending her gaze to the older girl's beautiful, but casual (albeit clearly expensive) dress.

"Speaking of clothes... you aren't wearing that to the Emperor's 'gathering,' right?"

"You what?" Gina asked, wrong-footed.

"I mean, it's stunning, don't get me wrong. But he said all his highest ranking would be there. You definitely need to change before we...before you go. I suppose slaves probably aren't invited." Her still puffy lip curled with the word.

"Bullshit." Gina said decisively. "If they'll let us take you into the emperor's war room they'll let us take you to a party. I'm not giving them the chance to hit you again."

She pushed herself off the wall and crossed over to the wardrobe, beckoning Cal over.

"Okay, you clearly know more about this princess thing than I do. Talk to me."

"Well, like I said you need to change your dress. Some jewellery wouldn't go astray, either." With each statement, some of Cal's entrained haughtiness returned - her back straightening, her eyebrow raised slightly, and her tone carrying a hint of command. She didn't seem to realise it until she'd finished speaking.

"No offense," she added quickly, "You just don't want to look out of place."

"No, it's fine." Gina reassured her, turning back from the wardrobe hangers to look at Cal. She wasn't about to criticise the younger girl for getting some of her battered confidence back.

"Why?" Cal added as an afterthought, as though only now recognising she'd given something of a speech about herself, without a thought to the others.

"Why what?" Gina asked as she pulled out a shimmering silk ball gown at Cal's direction.

"Are vampires not heard of usually, in Leicester?

Gina grinned. "I'd have to say no."

Cal looked at Baka and Vahsi. "Or Merriweather, or Destiny Islands?"

Cal spoke the place names as if they were taken from a bard's tale, giving a small shake of her head after she'd spoken.

"I still can't believe there are so many other places. I thought the woods just carried on forever, outside the city walls." It seemed rather stupid, now she said it aloud. But what reason had she had to disbelieve it, until now?

"I know how you feel." Gina nodded, smiling through pursed lips. "I didn't think ghosts existed until a bunch of them tried to kill me and my mum. And until a week ago, I'd probably have drawn the line at vampires."

She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.

"There were Heartless, but I never got to see them." Baka mentioned to the girls. He was still frowning slightly at Gina for taking the 'candies' off him. "They were...uh..well, heartless."

He gave a cheesy smile and rubbed his hand up and down the back of his head. "Don't know what a vampire is. Are they heartless too?"

"They can be," Vahsi said with a shrug. "We had plenty of vampires but most of them were nice enough. They kept to themselves out by the witches' village on the moor. There were a few up in the city, of course, but most of the city dwellers were lyrians or vulpians if they weren't human. Out in the forest, though, you'd find anyone." A smile crossed his lips for a moment. "You'd find villages of all kinds of folk living together. If it was a full moon, they'd be wary of strangers of course, but usually they were kind people. If you were running from something, it was the best place you could go to find shelter and help. Or at least it used to be like that."

"What happened?" Gina asked, as she entertained the slightly absurd thought of what West Hills might have been like if they'd had a friendly vampire to deal with and not a sociopathic sex predator.

"The humans were afraid of us - the lupians, lyrians, shapeshifters and all the rest. We were a threat to them because of our abilities, and a danger because some of us didn't know how to control them or couldn't."

"Them?" Gina asked. "You're not...uh...human?"

Her tone was more one of surprise than fear - Vahsi had so far shown no signs of wanting to hurt them - but to look at him she would never have known that she was looking at yet another supernatural being.

"No, I'm not what you'd call human," Vahsi said. "But I'm not dangerous - at least not to my friends."

Gina nodded slowly. I should probably stop being shocked by stuff like this.

"Usually there was a clear difference between, say, werewolves and lupians. But sometimes the lines blurred, and the humans started to be afraid of all of us." Vahsi shook his head. "If it weren't for us taking them in when they first arrived, the humans would have all died off in just a few months. Once they realized they weren't the dominant species in their new world... They repaid our kindness by trying to exterminate us. Eventually their government and economy collapsed under the weight of all the bounties being collected, and the responsibility of dealing with us fell to whoever decided to take it. Most of us ended up in laboratories or as slaves. Farla and I were in one of the military labs, and then suddenly I was here."

"Farla?" Gina asked, unsure what to make of the rest of the story but picking up on Vahsi's expression as he said the name.

"Farla is the woman I love, unless you want to restrict the usage of the word 'woman' to humans only. She's a lupian, same as I am. I don't know what's happened back home since then, or even if it's still there."

Gina's face fell in sympathy.

"I've got friends I want to go back and help as well." she nodded, her eyebrows knitting together. "They've already killed five of us, and I don't know yet if my mum even got the email I sent her..."

She halted, registering the blank looks that the other three were giving her, and took a seat on the bed.

"I'm starting in the wrong place, aren't I? It all started when my mum dropped me off at West Hills." She stopped again. "Actually no, go back even further than that. It really started when my mum and me moved to America, after her and my dad got divorced."

She dropped her gaze and began to pick at the embroidered hem of her dress.

"I was just so..." She shook her head. "So angry at her. And I know I shouldn't have been. She needed the job, and she was just trying to make the best of things for the both of us - but all I saw was her pulling me away from home and expecting me to get on with it, pretending everything was okay and insisting we were all going to be fine..."

Gina shook her head again, her eyes still fixed on the floor tiles.

"I think it was the fact she wouldn't say dad's name that set me off, I don't know. I was so unfair. I called her a coward and everything."

She coughed, as if to clear a lump in her throat.

"Anyway, we moved to a town called Austere which was going cheap, even if it was a fair way off mum's commuter route. The first person we made friends with was another out-of-towner called Aiden."

"How did you meet?" Baka asked.

A brief smile flickered across Gina's downcast face, and she raised her head to look at the others.

"He nearly ran me over with his motorbike! He was stuck for somewhere to stay, so we let him crash with us for a bit. And then we met Yv."

She winced slightly at the memory - not for the Yvette that she knew now, but for the broken-doll thing that had come crawling and spasming up the corridor towards her, a dozen monstrous faces leering at her from behind the helpless girl's own.

"We thought she was just a normal girl at first, but the locals all acted really strange around her. And then our next-door neighbour turned up dead."

Another slight wince.

"We knew something was wrong when the coppers wouldn't do anything about it, saying it was a heart attack and the screaming we heard must have been foxes... The whole town had this conspiracy of silence going on. We had to put it together from old books and records in the library, and even then we didn't get it until another out-of-towner called Remy told us about a legend he'd overheard from the locals. And then he turned up dead as well."

She paused, looking at the others as she reached the part of the story that she still sometimes had trouble believing herself.

"Yv was possessed. By ghosts." She glanced around the others. "I don't know about you but in my world ghosts are not supposed to be real. It was fucking terrifying. But I couldn't run, no matter how much I just wanted to jump into mum's car and drive away... We were sitting in a café, me and Yv, both of us pretending that there was nothing wrong...and she looked right at me and said help me."

She shook her head again, this time pensively.

"I couldn't just leave her behind, not after that."

* * * * * *

An asylum, Gina thought to herself as she padded forward, trying to keep the tread of her Converse silent on the rubbish-strewn floor, Why did it have to be a sodding asylum?

Her fingers were trembling with what she hoped was adrenaline, causing her torch-beam to waver as she panned it across the peeling walls. They were filthy with damp and spots of mould, and in several places the ceiling was cracked and sagging ominously. The torch grip was rough but slightly slippery in Gina's fist, and her nose was full of the sickly sweet smell of the petrol can she was carrying in her other hand.

The bones they were looking for had to be around here somewhere. Gina hoped to god that this was going to work. The legend had already been right about the silver, hadn't it? If only Aiden hadn't gone running off after Yv himself - poor, naive, noble Aiden. Gina wanted nothing more than to turn around and bolt, straight out of this place and not stop until her distance-runner's legs had carried her into the next state, but she couldn't have lived with herself if she'd left anyone else to die.

She realised that she had slowed to a stop, and she lowered the petrol can to the floor as quietly as she could to ease the burning in her arm muscles. A gentle hand on her shoulder almost made her jump out of her skin, until she saw her mum looking down at her. Gina and her mum shared the same auburn hair and blue eyes, although Jenny Wright was a half-hand taller and a shade longer in the face. She was wearing the same look of pained concern as she always did when she sensed that her daughter was worried about something. Instead of the helpless, bitter resentment she had felt so many times at that same look until the night before, she saw the obvious. So much had changed, but they still both cared. Why had it taken them so long to simply talk?

"Mum..." Gina whispered, on a sudden impulse. "If we don't make it out of this..."

Jenny shushed her gently, and put her free arm around Gina to pull her close enough to kiss the top of her head. "Don't say that Georgie. We will."

It was a nickname that Gina had always hated, but right now she didn't care. She laced her hand into her mother's, and at that moment, the torches they were holding both began to flicker.

"Oh shit." Gina said in a thin voice, looking down at the device in her hand as it slowly faded out. The torches were dying - that meant that They were close.

A deeper darkness seemed to close in around the corridor; a darkness that was something more than the simple absence of light. Gina felt a frigid breeze ghost across her cheek - a breeze that her misfiring imagination tried to turn into cold fingers. Both she and her mum instinctively clasped each others hands tighter, and then whirled as a low hiss emanated from behind a rust-streaked door to their right. The door itself slammed back with a deafening squeal, the old lock shattering and falling to the floor.

Yv was standing in the middle of the ward beyond, surrounded by the rusted skeletons of beds, and a young man that Gina recognised was laid out cruciform at her feet. Ragged shafts of moonlight sifted in through the cobwebbed windows, draping over the scene like a shroud.

"Aiden!" Gina whispered, her eyes darting from the dishevelled girl to the body at her feet. He was still breathing, because she could see his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps, but his eyes were closed.

"We know what you are." Gina's mum said, in a stronger voice than Gina herself would ever have been able to muster. "Let her go."

Yv smiled a broken-mirror smile. Then she went rigid, her arms trembling at her sides. She convulsed as if about to vomit, her head lurching back and her mouth snapping open. Black smoke poured out of it, splitting and coalescing into a dozen hovering figures with shadows for bodies and dark mist for cloaks. Each one was grinning with feral intensity, blurring a kaleidoscope of faces beneath their misty hoods. Gina saw her dead neighbour, and Remy, and a dozen other faces that she didn't recognise.

"One would have been sufficient to open the portal." they rasped as Yv slumped to the floor, the voices like sand sifting through dry bones. "But you are welcome to join us."

Glancing at each other, Gina and Jenny dropped their useless torches and clawed instead for their silver knives. The shadows were faster - even before the broken torches had pinged off the hard floor, one of them flew at Gina. A high-pitch screech filled her ears and the smoke became something cold and solid as it lifted her up and hurled her against the wall of the ward. The rotted plaster gave under her and she fell hard into the dusty space between the walls. Something cascaded down on top of her, and she let out a yelp as she scrambled free. The objects were hard and pale and irregular. Bones.

Gina scrambled up onto her knees and lunged for the petrol can, her mind seemingly too full now for fear. As she fumbled with the cap and spun back towards the hole in the wall, one of Them let out a piercing shriek and swooped into her, sending her skidding forward across the floor. Gina felt a sharp pain as something sharp on the filthy tiles tore her jeans and gashed her knee, and then she went down hard on her elbows, spilling the box of matches she was groping for and sending the can tumbling out of her numb hands. The can landed on its side as the cap bounced away, and a wash of clear, stinking fluid spread out towards the pile of bones.

"We won't be stopped!" They shrieked at Gina. "There are more of us than you can imagine!"

One of the shadows swooped again, only to bank away with a screech as something metallic caught the light and Jenny Wright dived into the phantom's path, slashing at its smoky cloak with the sterling silver kitchen knife. Gina didn't wait; she lunged on her hands and knees towards the can, threw it straight into the centre of the bone pile, and struck one of her remaining matches into the spreading pool.

The flame was just a blue flicker as Gina and Jenny scrambled back, almost invisible as it leapt along the trail of spilled gasoline. It was eclipsed utterly by the red flash and the wrenching shriek as the shadows simultaneously caught fire, came apart and evaporated.

On the floor, Yv and Aiden's eyes snapped open as they sucked in a breath like someone held underwater to the point of drowning.

* * * * * *

"We beat them." Gina finished, with a kind of savage pride. "We killed them, we saved Yv. And until last week I thought that was the end of it, but it turns out Austere wasn't the only town where these things lived. They were crawling all over my new school at West Hills as well. It was..."

She looked at the floor again, dropping her head into one hand.

"It was a clusterfuck, basically. Like I said five people died already, and god knows what's happening to the rest of them." She looked up at Vahsi. "I know exactly what you mean when you say you don't know what's happening to your friends."

She paused again, the pensive look back on her face., and Cal nodded, a worried look passing over her own.

"If anything happens to the friends I made back home, it will be all my fault," she chewed her lip. "I mean, they did kidnap me. But only because they were desperate.. and they treated me kindly. I think they just wanted me to see, as much as get information about mothers' keep. And I did... the way she treats them, it's like they're not even people!" Cal flipped through the dresses in quick, angry movements, not really looking at the gowns.

"I don't doubt mothers' gathered half the orderlies by now to storm down to the fifth district. They'll kill anyone they think had anything to do with my disappearance."

"Maybe that's what we've all got in common." Gina said, rising to her feet and hugging her arms. She put a hand on Cal's arm to halt her angry raking through the wardrobe. "There's people we need to get back and help."

And somebody knows that. she thought forebodingly. The same somebody who keeps putting tattoos on us and seems to want us to help this prince with his love life.

"You think whoever wrote the note will help us?" Baka asked.

"I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to trust anyone who rips people out of reality and signs notes to them in blood." Gina said flatly. "But right now they seem to be the only lead we've got. So we've got to help the people here."

She let out a breath. It was, after all, the whole reason she wanted to become a paramedic: to help people, to save people. It just seemed that whatever cosmic comedian was writing the script to her life seemed to like giving her opportunities to do so which shouldn't have been physically possible...and which carried the most horrific dangers. Gina chewed her lip, and a look of determination came over her face.

"And that means going to this meeting with the emperor."

[Minkasha]

The illustrious bedroom of the imposed princess seemed to be one of the very few places where the four of them could remain together safely, but Vahşi had wandered off on his own during the downtime before the party. The candy-like pills that Baka had almost eaten had continued to give off a harsh scent as the time passed, and eventually Vahşi couldn't stand it any more. He'd given some excuse and had almost bolted from the room, giving a wolf-like snort as he passed through the doorway. Since he wasn't familiar with the palace, he simply ordered a passing servant to lead him back to his quarters. When he got there, the old man was waiting for him, and Vahşi took the opportunity to send him off in search of a different set of clothing.

It took only a few minutes for Vahşi to become bored with his solitude. He left his quarters, again commandeering the service of a palace worker - this time a guard - to lead him to the armoury. The wide variety of weapons locked behind the heavy doors were more than tempting to one such as himself, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to walk out of the armoury fully loaded with weapons. Settling for a pistol and small dagger-like knife, he returned to his quarters, by which time the old man had brought his change of clothes.

Soon afterwards Vahşi was comfortably arrayed in a new outfit of dark jeans, a grey shirt and a high-collared cashmere blazer. The pistol he slipped between his skin and the back of his jeans, relieved by the familiar feeling of steel on flesh. The knife he slipped horizontally against the inside of one of his new shoes, which were sneaker-like things with metal webbing laid against the instep. Grabbing his old clothing, he went back to the room he'd left earlier, following a guard most of the way until he recognised the halls. He knocked on the door, waited to be let in, and flung himself down on one of the couches along the wall, dropping his red toga-towel-thing at the foot of the furniture and stretching to his full length.

Georgina's phone displayed the time to be 7:50pm, their shared existence just shy of twelve hours together in the foreignness of the cruel, cold, marble palace. The teenage boy, Baka, had decided to splurge on the food Gina had ordered for them and was sleeping off his stuffed stomach on miss Nikas' bed. According to Gina and Cal, his happy-faced rest was nearing its third hour. He had invited others to join him, but the interest wasn't shared. The two young women had been busy trying to learn all they could about their surroundings, and from Gina's phone they now knew a little more about the Gela Empire and its neighbouring city states of Itanos and Akrai. It seemed that Gela had only recently become newsworthy, now that emperor Lycus was throwing his military weight around in a series of appallingly bloody takeovers. Itanos seemed to be in a shambles; its matriarch Livia Drusus holding onto power with white-knuckled fists. An attempted alliance against Gela had fallen through when Livia's son had married and then quickly divorced prince Panos of Akrai, and now the luckless prince had been passed on to emperor Lycus in an attempt to save his home city from Gela's wrath.

It was alarming to think that the person who had brought them here seemed to want them to solve this country-spanning mess on their own. Certainly, intervention from outside didn't seem likely. Beyond some toothless condemnation from world leaders that Lycus was steadfastly ignoring, the world at large appeared to care little for the Greek civil war; perhaps because of the relative lack of weight the city states seemed to have on the global stage. Even Akrai, prince Panos' home state, seemed an unremarkable city beyond the supposedly divine blood of its ruling family, and - apparently - its world-famous wine.

After they had read that, she sent a dismissive text to 'Alex' stating "Can't make our appointment because Lycus has called a meeting :/ xxx" to remove him being a complication. Gina had hit upon the idea of retrieving a bottle of Akrai's Lambros wine from the palace stores, on the logic that a gesture to make Panos feel more at home might make him more inclined to talk to them again. Taking the opportunity to explore the palace a little more, Gina was now reasonably confident of the route between Vahşi's room and her own, as well as how to get back to the main staircase that led to the kitchens, a ballroom and the entrance hall that they had all first appeared in. The palace seemed almost unnecessarily difficult to navigate, although according to a guard Gina had asked it was a deliberate defensive strategy, in case the mansion was raided. Evidently, aggressive paranoia ran in the Nikas family.

While Gina had gotten her bearings, Cal had retrieved both the wine and their lunch from the kitchens, where an older slave had given her the rather ominous warning to keep her head down. She had been given the impression that she was a new arrival here, and that abuse from the higher ranks of the household was far from uncommon.

Back in Gina's room, there was apparently little to do but finish picking out their clothes for the evening. Cal barely noticed Vahşi's re-entry as she stood beside the vanity where Gina sat, idly picking through a jewellery box that sat atop it. Every now and then she plucked out one of the array of beautiful necklaces and held it up in the redhead's direction, appraising its combination with the gown she'd helped the older girl choose for the soiree.

Looking up at her own battered reflection, she lifted a silver necklace dripping with tiny, purple gems to her throat and gave an almost imperceptible sigh before dropping it back to lay amongst the others.

"You know," Gina offered, picking up on Cal's wistful expression, "You can wear that to the party if you like. I'll tell them I wanted you to look nice."

Cal looked at the necklace. Would she ever be allowed to wear something like that again? Certainly not while they were here - the warning she had received from the robust woman who ran the kitchens still echoed in her ears, and even trying on something belonging to a royal would no doubt bring on violent retribution, if seen by the wrong person. She cast a sideways look at Gina.

"You should take care not to be too nice to us; Baka and I, I mean. At the party."

From what the slave had told her, it would be out of character for the other girl to do so - it had probably already seemed strange, when she had saved Cal from the beating she'd received earlier.

Gina looked uncomfortable as she touched up her makeup, no doubt still hating the enforced power dynamic between them, but she nodded. "Yeah, I suppose you're right."

"This one," Cal said with a small nod, changing the subject. The princess moved to stand behind Gina, fastening the ornament around her neck. It was a choker with bands of silver looping over each other to form a wide, intricate pattern that both complimented the other girl's dress, and hid the bite on her neck from view. Cal nodded again, happy with her choice, and smoothed her own dress, her eyes rising once more to her reflection. She could not dress up, of course, but she had found another plain dress - similar to the one she had been wearing when she appeared here, and free of the stains and water marks that being thrown and crawling across the floor had left it with. She'd washed her face, hands and feet in the bathroom adjoining Gina's chambers, marvelling over the plumbing system as she did so ("The water, it just shoots out of the wall!") and combed out her tangled hair, tying it back again into a neat ponytail when she was done. Aside from her still-swollen face - which, from what she had learned of the royals' cruelty toward those who served them, would not draw much notice - she looked quite neat and presentable...albeit very common.

Sitting plugged-in to its charger on the vanity, Gina's phone suddenly buzzed as it received a text from someone called 'Personal Service', warning her of the party's time. It was to begin in ten minutes, downstairs in the large ballroom past the entry foyer. It was the first outside contact that they had received after being left to themselves in the clothes-strewn bedroom.

"Shit." said Gina, and disappeared into the bathroom to swap her dress and shoes for the ones Cal had picked out.

The beeping of Gina's phone started Vahşi out of his half-doze and he rose to a sitting position, but once he realised the source of the sound he made a muffled, perturbed grunt and lay back down, turning his back on the room. The irritating scent of the pills had returned to him as soon as he'd come back to this room, entering his nose in acrid fumes and refusing to leave, and he didn't feel much like being sociable while the chemicals were pulsing obnoxiously through his system. His shirt pulled up a bit at the back, revealing part of the grip of his pistol. With Cal not having seen a gun before, he wasn't challenged on it until the bathroom door clicked open and Gina reappeared, giving her well-curled hair a self-conscious, last-minute brush with her fingers. The gown that she and Cal had eventually settled on was made of rich, claret-coloured silk, bias cut so that it fell in an elegant spiral. A sash woven into the material followed the curve and formed a diagonal drape over her left shoulder.

"Cal, can you zip me up?" Gina asked, and then "Jesus, is that a gun?" as she caught sight of the rough-sided pistol grip poking out the back of Vahşi's jeans.

Vahşi turned over with a sigh, realising he wasn't about to go back to sleep any time soon. "No," he said. "It's a carrot."

Gina made a face at him. "You know what I mean. Where'd you get it?"

"The armoury. They didn't stop me, so they can't be too worried about us walking around with weapons." He stood up and stretched, then glanced down at himself. "I guess I won't get away with going to the party dressed like this?" From the smirkish smile on his lips it was clear he knew the answer already, and he bent down to pick up his former clothing. "If you girls could part from the bathroom for a moment, I promise not to shoot up the shower."

Gina hesitated for a moment, still looking wary, then stepped aside. Vahşi disappeared into the bathroom and closed the door behind him. Picking up her handbag and the bottle of Lambros wine, Gina crossed over to the bed and gently shook Baka awake. "Come on, lazy. Time to go to the party."

She said it encouragingly, but she took a steadying breath as she clicked over to the door on her silver heels. Her mouth was dry again, and it wasn't just because she didn't look forward to dealing with the understated contempt that Lycus seemed to have for her and Vahşi - never mind the overt contempt that Cal and Baka would be getting. With their tattoo-planting guide practically demanding that they make a scene of some description, she was equal parts nervous for what they had to do, and for what their tyrant of a brother might do.

**

In a series of heel clicks and sandal flaps against the speckled marble steps, the four Multiverse Travelers steadily moved from the second floor to the first. Gina's red silk dress left a small trail that Baka almost tripped on when he followed behind her. Instead of taking her down with him, the boy stumbled off the final step and crashed on the marble beside the other three with an awkward thud. Vahşi's ears picked up the finer details of the teenager's fall and sigh of pain, the others were having their ears drowned out in audio opulence.

What could be estimated as roughly one hundred guests or so were walking from the foyer, and steadily entering into the ballroom. Though the guests lacked variety, consisting of older men whose shades of color range from almond tanned to sun darkened fair skin and wearing the similar variations of silken robes. A few men had many more decorative square pins of honor at the chest, giving some distinction. Women were few and their roles looked fairly decorative compared, younger females at the arm of the older, more distinguished of them. Their dress was more free form than the males, able to explore different cultural backgrounds in their presentation. Beyond them, there were a sprinkle of slaves all wearing the same short, skimpy, frumpy white tunic-like attire Baka and Cal had found themselves in when first arrive. Their expressions showed oppression and submission. The Lupine could smell all their various body scents, perfumes, the overly squeaky clean pine smell of the walls, and, more satisfyingly, well cooked food from the ballroom that was filling up.

No one paid attention to Baka who had fallen, and he felt his knee ache. Pulling himself up to his rear he saw no wounds and waved off the other three with a cheesy smile. One of the men walking from the front to the ballroom looked over and glanced at Calamity and Baka, his eye narrowed with sleazy intent on the much younger male but he didn’t stop walking in. Baka shivered, things here were a bit different than they were at home.

Calamity’s young, attractive features weren’t missed all in part to Gina’s eye pulling red dress. Onlookers, who seem to prefer the females, gazed at Gina, some even smirking as if to exchange some sort of recognition with her, while others looked from her to Calamity for selfish reasons. Baka was getting really tiffed off that the girls were being grossly ogled – cheeks flushing with anger. You don’t treat girls that way! he thought angrily.

No one particularly gave Vahşi any attention.

The ballroom, or what they could see of it from the stairs and past the heads of graying haired men, was a large room so tall they couldn’t see the ceiling from the double doors, a windowless room that had evenly separated red drapes all branded with the Nika’s sigil in the center.

[Minkasha]

The ballroom, or what they could see of it from the stairs and past the heads of graying-haired men, was a large room so tall they couldn't see the ceiling from the double doors, a windowless room that had evenly separated red drapes all branded with the Nikas sigil in the centre.

Delicate strings were being played by a trio of white-robed men, and the wealth around Georgina came off endless. As she bobbed up onto her tiptoes and scanned over the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of either Panos or emperor Lycas, another man draped in a red silk chlamys with a dagger brooch strolled into the ballroom. He turned his head and let his eyes slide deliberately down Gina's dress, then up again to offer her a smirking grin.

Having spent a number of weekends scamming into Leicester nightclubs with her friend's borrowed ID, occasionally while dressed in far less than was strictly necessary, Gina wasn't a stranger to being subtly and not-so-subtly appraised. Receiving such looks while she was sober, however, was rather more annoying.

Well to hell with standing here like a wallflower. she thought. If you can blag your way into Mosh you can handle this.

"Let's go then." she said to Vahşi and the others. At Cal's suggestion she had handed off her handbag with the book still in it to her so-called attendant, but she hung on to the bottle of Lambros wine as she clopped forward to catch up with the man in the red cloak. He had stopped next to an older, sun-weathered man with a much younger woman on his arm. The second man wore the same square rank pins that Gina had noticed on the officers in Lycas' command centre, and both he and the young woman had long champagne flutes balanced in their hands.

"What's new?" she challenged the man in the red cloak as she drew level with him, hiding her distaste for the man behind a sweet smile.

Georgina’s words compelled the two decorated men to look at her. Their leering gazes reminded her yet again of the floozy persona she was superimposed in as the two older, ranked men took her in as much as the champagne in their glasses. The red cloaked put on a belittling smile, his nose raised in a way that made it clear her royal airs were being snubbed off. White noise chatter filled the silence until the man in the red cloak finally spoke.

“Is the lady to make her rounds tonight?” he asked her flatly.

Gina had expected something of the sort, but it still stung. "Why, are you feeling left out?" she retorted automatically, abandoning her fake smile. It earned her a look of disgust from the red-cloaked man, and the latter a meaningful, slightly patronising look from the elder general.

Yeah, I know. Gina thought, taking a slightly perverse pleasure in the men's annoyance. Ignore lady Georgina, son; she's just at that annoying age where if she isn't high all the time she's just a little bitch to everybody.

The tanned woman, who looked to be in her early thirties, pointed with the arm that wasn't wrapped around the elderly officer towards Georgina’s swirly, decorative case of wine. It seemed that she instantly recognised the elegant bottle.

“Do share.” she said.

Gina turned her attention to the woman and pointedly ignored the two men, who only looked likely to give her aggro rather than any useful information.

"Sorry." she apologised. "I would, but I brought it to give to prince Panos."

**

Vahşi split off from the group, confident they wouldn't manage to get lost in the room. He lifted a glass of something alcoholic from a passing tray and kept going, not bothering to stop and mingle. Using the more sensitive lupian senses that his human companions were unable to command, he examined the room and found little of interest. Pacing along the wall helped him locate the exits and security, after which he casually made his way back to the others. The sight of a servant's entrance intrigued and attracted him but he knew better than to wander off into the backstage areas of the palace while he was supposed to be mingling with the other guests.

Speaking of the other guests... He had yet to see the emperor. While this world also utilized some form of "fashionably late", and the emperor didn't seem all that popular, Vahşi would have thought the emperor would be one of the first to arrive. He bumped into someone and apologized without really paying attention to who he'd contacted. One of the girls would likely have some thought on this, as they seemed to fit in well to such social situations. Vahşi had always preferred quick, stealthy work. Partygoing was new to him.

Vahşi’s social blundering was picked up by three black robed military men who were as aged as the others but wore fewer color squares of honor. They shared smirks and sipped their wine. The more Vahşi looked around it became obvious the men were looking at him with amusement, he the center of a joke he didn’t’ know about.

Vahşi noticed three men watching him with evident amusement and he glanced quickly away. The last thing he needed was to get irritated and start going wolf, especially in a huge and crowded room like this one. It was probably a good thing that he hadn't managed to conceal a weapon on his person. That would complicate things even more. He scanned the crowd for his companions, noticing Baka being dragged off to help and Cal being shoved a purse. Gina wasn't too far off from his current position but plenty of people separated them. Starting to work through the crowd, Vahşi decided to forget about the men watching him until he was in a position to do something about it.

**

Baka was awkwardly standing around while the mass of people filled the large room, he stared to Cal wondering what he should say to her. Bewildered on his duties, he was swiftly reminded when an older slave grabbed him by the arm and dragged him away from Cal.

“Hey!” Baka protested to the man but he didn’t stop until they were at a corner, it was the injured one from before.

“Don’t be young and stupid” The man lectured, pointing with a tilt of his head to a group of men looking at them expectantly. “Get them drinks” The boy not knowing what else to do fumbled around the ballroom, looking for where he could get drinks to serve

**

Cal was disturbed by a young woman already starting to drink, shoving her purse at her. The dark blue leather smashed into her breasts and the woman didn’t say a word, expecting her to do something with it. She, in a dark blue velvet dress, kept still in front of Cal, busy with swallowing down her wine.

The tiniest of gasps escaped the former Princess's lips as the surprisingly heavy bag slammed into her chest, painful where it struck her; in the midst of puberty, that was a tender area. Her forehead creased, but she regained her subservient expression quickly, accepting the bag without protest as she searched the throng of people for her companions. How had she lost them so quickly? Inwardly, she cursed the woman; would she now be expected to remain nearby, in case the partygoer needed to retrieve something from the purse? The weight of it alongside Gina's bag and the heavy book it contained, was already wearing on her skinny arms; unused to labour of any kind. Still scanning the crowd for her friends, she slung the bag over her shoulder, wondering if she should speak to the woman and deciding against it; she was in no hurry to suffer more violence for speaking out of turn.

The decidedly less than subtle looks from the men around her were not lost on her either, and unlike Gina, Cal was not at all accustomed to being ogled in that manner. A flush rising in her cheeks, the relief in her eyes was plain as she caught sight of Gina in her eye-catching dress. She looked right at home.

Glancing at the woman whose bag she was holding, she decided to risk moving. With a small half-bow, half-curtsy, mimicking the actions she had only received, rather than performed in the past, she began to slip between people, closing the distance between herself and her 'royal' friend.

**

Calamity Isis Mae Sensibility & Georgina Wright

Behind Cal's back she could hear the woman call out in distress. The beautiful teenager and newly made slave shuffled her way through the people just in time to see Gina quip off to a group of two high ranking and aged men with a woman as arm candy for one of them.

"Prigkipissa Panos" The arm candy said nervously in what Gina could assume was religious fear, drawing her hand back and subsequently ending all conversation to do with the holy wine.

The man swished his red cloak in subconscious, humbling display of his superior rank to the military men around him. It was only now noticeable after Cal had walked in that there was a good five foot bubble or so of space around them.

"A girl like you surly will writhe and rotten sooner rather than later" He snubbed Gina once more. "I do wonder what you will do after, live a legacy of suckling the emperor's teat?"

"You thstupid little bitch!" A lispy woman's voice damned Cal loudly. "Thath's my pursth and where do you- GIGI!" The woman squealed and now that Gina and Cal could both see her face it was not debatable that she was beautiful; but, the way her right brow was just so permanently poised inadequately higher and raised angled than the other, and noticeable makeup cracks on her face suggested that wasn't the face she was born with nor she woke up with either. "I talked to the help and. By. Hera.- you are here with all thethse thsiver gentlemen!"

Blue dress made union with red as she came forward, waves of black hair held down by heavy product Gina came to become personally acquainted with, when the woman embraced her. The hair shoved against the front of her face, breasts mashed together, arms circling around Gina's arms and back, and maybe a smug of the woman's makeup transplanted from her face to Gina's jawline - feeling a spot of greasiness. She continued to squeal, smelling of shampoo and the sweet scent of wine from her lips, jumping and forcing their chests to shift together gracelessly.

Her energy was off the wall, already moving on to something else when she pulled away, keeping one arm around Gina's back. The two men watched the two women with patronizing amusement, the red cape chuckling as if his judgments were only bloomed by this woman's dawning, stupid, light. This energetic woman pointed back to Cal.

"Tshe needths to be...maybe...retrained" She scoffed. "Thsheth's not even bowing for you. Gross - I love you my little Dite" Her caked nose rubbed on Gina's cheekbone.

The two men stared at Cal. Red cloak's cloak swished once more. He had stopped chuckling.

**

Vahşi

Vahşi's inadequacy was culled by a man's voice ten feet across the room. His super hearing picked up the voice across the string instrument music and chattering white noise. When he stood next to the women his nose couldn't help but notice how fake their fragrances were. Up close it was repugnant.

"Sir Vahşi!" The man's voice called out again.* He stood under the rounded, marble rimmed platform, a series of curved stairs along the wall led up to it, what was behind it blocked by red curtains.

---

Notes:

*I will PM you his description

[Minkasha]

Calamity Isis Mae Sensibility & Georgina Wright

"Prigkipissa Panos." the arm candy said nervously, in what Gina could tell was religious fear; she drew her hand back and subsequently ended all conversation to do with the holy wine. While Gina was digesting this, Red Cloak felt the need to have the last word in their previous argument.

"A girl like you will surely wither and rot sooner rather than later." he snubbed Gina once more, "I do wonder what you will do after? Live a legacy of suckling the emperor's teat?"

He swished his cloak in a subconscious, humbling display to the other military men around him. It was only then that Gina realised a good five-foot bubble of space had formed around them.

A powerful guy then, Gina thought. Not a wise man to openly fight, but not a man she was resigned to taking shit from either. Getting Gigi taken seriously is going to have to start somewhere.

"Who knows where any of us are going to end up." she answered coolly, her hands finding their way to her hips as she turned to look at Red Cloak once more.

"You thtupid little bitch!" A lispy woman's voice suddenly damned Cal loudly. Gina looked around at the sudden shout, and belatedly saw that Cal had fallen behind her, and had been accosted by a dark haired woman in a blue velvet dress as she tried to catch up.

Fuck! she thought, the curse directed at herself more than anything as she took a step away from the hostile officers to begin running to her friend's aid.

Cal has frozen in place between the two women, glancing from her friend to the extravagantly dressed woman, wincing at the harsh, shrieking tone of her voice. Her muscles tensed, ready for another blow.

"That'th my purth!" the woman in the blue dress was shouting. "And where do you- GIGI!"

The name caused Gina to forcibly choke down the rebuke she had been forming, and stopped her midstride. There was only one person she knew of here so far who referred to her by that name.

"Bestie?" she said stupidly, caught flat-footed and only then realising that she had said it aloud.

The woman squealed. Blue dress made union with red as she came forward, waves of black hair held down by some heavy product that Gina came to become personally acquainted with when the woman embraced her. The hair shoved against the front of her face as their breasts mashed together, and Bestie's arms circled around Gina's arms and back. Gina just about managed to keep her feet and unsteadily return the hug, glad that only Cal could see the surprised look on her face as Bestie's shoulder crushed against her throat. A smudge of the woman's makeup transplanted itself from her face onto Gina's jawline - she felt it as a spot of greasiness. Bestie continued to squeal, smelling of shampoo and the sweet scent of wine from her lips, as she jumped and forced their chests to shift together gracelessly.

"Oh my god, hi!" Gina managed, succeeding in hitching up a smile as the other woman finally retreated to arm's length.

Now that Gina and Cal could both see her face, it was not debatable that the other woman was beautiful; but the way her right brow was just so permanently poised, raised higher and more angled than the other, and the noticeable makeup cracks on her face, suggested that it wasn't the face she was born with -nor the one that she woke up with either.

"I talked to the help..." she went on. Her words came in nervous machine-gun bursts. "And...by Hera. You are here with all theeth thiver gentlemen!"

Her energy was off the wall, already moving onto something else as she pulled away, keeping one arm around Gina's back. She reminded Gina a little of her school friend Meena, who had been almost absurdly melodramatic and could have talked for Britain, though Gina was not as impressed as Bestie by the gentlemen of her brother's military.

She glanced back, and saw that the two men were watching them with patronising amusement. Red Cloak was chuckling, as if his judgements were only bloomed by this woman's dawning, stupid, light. It suddenly occurred to Gina to hope that her alter ego didn't just keep Bestie around so that she could have someone to lord it over. The hyperactive girl's lisp certainly wasn't an excuse to bully her. Though her attitude towards Cal might be.

She took Bestie's hand in her own and tried to tug her away from the two older men, flicking her eyebrows in signal to Cal. Following Gina's gaze, the energetic woman pointed back to Cal.

"Thee needth to be...maybe...retrained." she scoffed. "Theeth's not even bowing for you. Gross. I love you my little Dite." Her caked nose rubbed on Gina's cheekbone.

Gina's stomach sank slightly as Bestie's comment brought the attention of the group onto Cal. The two men stared. Red Cloak's cape swished once more. He had stopped chuckling.

Cal's cheeks burned at the eyes on her, and she forced her eyes to the ground, once more keenly aware of the thin, skimpy cut of the slaves' attire she had felt it wisest to wear. Masked by the bags she held, her hands clenched into fists. And how exactly was she supposed to bow, carrying around their belongings like a beast of burden?!

"Leave her alone." Gina said firmly, addressing Bestie but with her eyes fixed on Red Cloak. "She's my new personal assistant. She picked out my dress for starters."

She gave Bestie's hand another, slightly more insistent tug.

"Come on, if this gentleman doesn't have anything to say except for how much of a slut I am, then I think staying to talk's a waste of everyone's time. Have you seen prince Panos come in yet?"

Gina's change of conversation pushed away the two men, the older one dragging his female companion along. Red Cloak grabbed his decorative red cloth one last time and pulled it after him in a swirl as he turned and walked away. The other guests parted for him as he passed, before slowly crowding back around Gina and the others.

"Prigkipitha ith thoooo gorge...but, no." Bestie said, with a heavy frown. The young woman scanned Gina, taking her in with her strong gaze. "The thlave picked your dreth out?"

Gina nodded. "Her name's Cal." she said, probing to see how much she could get away with. "She's great."

Bestie turned to Cal in shock. She studied her in turn, reaching out to grab her hand and making a train of the three women.

"I like your eyeth." she commented.

Well that's a start. Gina thought hopefully. As long as she doesn't snap right back... She shot Cal a subtle nod.

"I was hoping to talk to Panos again before the announcements." Gina explained as they found a convenient marble column to cluster around. She put down the wine bottle and stood up on her toes again to look around, as much to check if anyone was listening in as to look for the prince. Shit, and where have Vahşi and Baka gone? "You know how I told you on the phone he was asking me to talk to Lycus. Well I did."

Gina noticed that Cal was still struggling with her bag and Bestie's purse, so she took the two of them off her on the pretext of checking her phone before dumping them at the base of the column, next to the bottle of wine.

"It's complicated as fuck." Gina went on, nudging her handbag out of the way with a foot. The packet of MDMA tablets at the bottom of the bag crinkled quietly under the weight of the zodiac book, though Gina was too busy watching Bestie's reaction to notice. "Panos basically told me he's sick of being treated like an idol. And he's obviously crushing a bit on Lycus - but I don't want to encourage him when Lycus is a bit...well, you know. Not ideal boyfriend material."

**

Vahşi

Vahşi walked over, having no where else to go and no clues to follow, to the man who welcomed him with a hug. The Lupine did not hug back, but the man didn't seem to mind, the shadow of the overhead platform darkened them, a semi-private conversation from the wealthy mass.

"I know how hard it must have been with the loss of your mother." His features saddened and he took another heavy sip of his wine. "It was a loss for all of us. Tonight is going to be it." his words came out a grave message of some sort.

"Losing my mother was, of course, a heavy blow," Vahşi agreed, dropping his gaze to the floor for a moment as if remembering. It was remarkable how much of his life he spent bullshitting his way through things he knew nothing about. "And you still believe it to be the best course?" Vahşi asked, catching the meaning of the others' words. This might be something he would have a harder time getting through, relying solely on luck as he was. He had to get back to Gina and her phone to try to figure some of this out.

The man stared at Vahşi with a shaking head.

"You wanted this, we both do. Don't pull from the waters now"

**

Everyone

On the balcony above Vahşi and the man he was speaking to, came out the two figures they had been missing. The tingle of importance coming from the one with the venus marking on his hand. Together they looked happy, the Emperor donned with two dramatic draping half cloaks, the golden vine wreath, and black robes for power. Panos dressed in a flowing white dress, shoulders and back decorated with a spider web backdrop of stringed diamonds, a shining silver cuff choker on his neck, and in his beehive hair styled locks, evenly dispersed hair pins tipped with a single diamond. He sparkled under the light in nearly every direction, everywhere. But his young nose was held high and he held greedily onto Lycus' arm.

The music had ended, people were clapping at their entrance. The loud sounds echoed even more in Vahşi' ears. The powerful emperor raised his hand.

"No!" Only Vahşi's sensitive ears picked up picked up among the crowed. It was Baka's voice...pfft the sound of a hushed gun shot and then the louder thud. The Lupine heard it, but all of them felt a sudden loss of one of their bonds, as if Baka had suddenly vanished from their senses. The clapping world around hadn't noticed. On their forearms burned a new mark, several finger spaces below the Mercury symbol came a circle with an arrow pointed to the to right.

"I have gather-"

"Lycus!" Panos screamed, diving before him and turning back to the rim of the balcony. A bullet pierced through the younger one's right shoulder, the webs of diamonds intricately covering his small back began to fall apart and scatter all over the floor and ground below, blood coming out from his wound. The lupine's senses were filled with the scent of flowery iron and Gina, Cal and Bestie were witness to the horror of Panos falling from the balcony.

The screams began and the guards were drawing their guns. When the people were dispersing, Gina and Cal now noticed Baka's bloody corpse on the floor, the abdomen soaked through his humble clothes. He laid there still and glossy eyed.

"Oh my goddthsths!" Bestie screamed in the panic, trying to pull the girls away while she still held to their hands. The man beside Vahşi paled.

---

Notes:

Vahşi could catch Panos if he wishes. Gina and Cal can break from Bestie's grip too. Vahşi's scent and smell who fired the gun. It is a man dressed as security in the middle of the crowed, standing at 6'4'', a handsome Mediterranean man who has tears in his eyes and is about to fire again, in Lycus' direction.

We are about to switch universes! You only have one symbol left and he's falling off the balcony!