I closed the box again and tucked it under my arm. Why would a Jar-Jar Binks action figure would have a fate thread? I'd never seen the movie, I only knew the character from a meme that had briefly been everywhere, but I knew that it had come out in the... late nineties? Early two thousands? Unless there was another player we didn't know about that would imply it was Greg or something, but... well, first of all it didn't seem like him, but more importantly it didn't explain why it had been left here.

Although... probably there were other players. The note on the Staff of Destruction that had referenced this place made it seem like Coelestis had recovered it from Worthington Hardware Co., like it had just been sitting here. That would imply that at least two different magic items had been in the same little antique shop in some random town in Virginia before Coelestis found them, somehow. Maybe it was the owner of the place? Maybe they were from fantasyland and had popped out of Nusos onto Earth and just... started running a hardware store?

Something like that had to have happened before. People got lost in Nusos all the time, right? Cyne had even warned me about the outlets, so presumably among people who explore the planes it's just known that if you get to the wrong part of Nusos you never come back. They just don't know it's that people are stuck on Earth. Most wouldn't have mana batteries, or if they did most would be small and degrade over time - far less time, here on Earth, since they'd be using them all the time in a zero-mana environment.

"Katrin? I found the thing with a fate thread, it's... strange. If you're done staring at the floor, can you do a quick pass and see if there's more magic stuff that just doesn't have fate threads attached? If there were two things, there could be three."

She was already standing up and brushing herself off, but she kept frowning at that spot on the floor. I knew she'd heard me though, so I went over to check on the others. Zoey, Matlyn, and Calliope were all looking at something near the back. "What'd you guys find?"

There was a ding as the register drawer popped open. Calliope looked up at me and smiled. "I figured it out. No money, bah."

Zoey nodded her head at me. "Connie can add some. You have something to purchase, goat licker?"

I put the box down on the counter. "I always wanted to ask, why the fuck did you call me that?"

She shrugged. "I was going to call you a goat fucker one time, just... you know, picked a random barnyard animal, and a teacher was walking past. So I fumbled it, and said 'licker' instead even though in retrospect it would have been easier to just stop talking. And then, well, I couldn't admit that that wasn't what I meant to say, so I had to just commit to it."

"Well, it worked better than you could have hoped. I didn't care about the insults, but not knowing why it was that specifically drove me nuts."

Calliope glanced at the box. "One very boring box. Ten dollars." She punched some buttons on the register, and then got a plastic bag from under the counter and tossed the box in before holding out her hand for money. I gave her two fives - what the hell, right - and she popped the drawer back open and even managed to get a receipt to print up. "Thank you for shopping at Worthington Hardware Company. If you will excuse me, I am now going to steal the money back from the register."

Zoey nudged her. "Now we've both worked at a hardware store," she said.

I got goosebumps. "Wait. Wait. When did you work at a hardware store?"

"Oh, not an actual hardware store, but the tool shop for the people that worked for my adoptive family, before they adopted me. We'd sign out tools and equipment to people, gardening stuff mostly, and they'd check it back in at the end of the day. There was also a guy that made tools, Leff, but he worked in the back. I was the one at the counter, dealing with requests for whatever the crew needed. It did feel a lot like a hardware store, most of the time."

That sounded familiar, she'd mentioned something about it right when we first reunited. But it wasn't just that.

"Okay. Okay. So... all of us have gone on a mission with mercenaries, got into a fight in some old ruins, then traveled through Nusos to our destination. You and I, but not Calliope, have been befriended by a brother and sister that we ended up being related to through adoption - I could argue that Calliope was also kind of adopted, in a really awful sense of the word. We have a doubles of ourselves - both of us because of time resetting, and arguably Calliope because of... you know, me. We've all worked in a hardware store. Kind of. Again, Calliope is the weakest connection here. What else... all three of us have spent time on Earth and in fantasyland. Oh, and... not to touch on a sore subject, but uh... whose not-actually-their-mom has tried to kill them?"

All three of us raised our hands.

Well then. That... probably meant something. I just didn't know what. I packed the box into my bag, just as Katrin was coming back. "I looked as best as I could," she said, "and I didn't see anything. I can just see mana, and not even in as much detail as someone with the Perception gift, so there are some types of things that I might not catch. Low-energy alchemical metals, magic items that work on runes that haven't been powered for a while - speaking of, I did find some wards around the front of the store. Inactive."

Yeah, nothing would last long on Earth without a mana battery powering it - and those would be rare. "Hey, just an idea... if there were magic items in here... could you find them by opening the mana battery some and just flooding the room with mana?"

"Probably not," she said, "since any that recharge using ambient mana should have done so over time with the little amount that's - for some reason - building in this shop. And I'm not going to manually force mana into every item in here, that would take ten years. Although... some things, I suppose, might still react if I sent out enough energy. The wards should be fine, once they're fully inactive they require intent to turn on again. Hmm. It would dissipate quickly, but if there's anything active downstairs where we haven't looked it could cause problems."

"Fair enough. Yeah, let's finish tossing the place for information about Coelestis, and then maybe on the way out we'll try it."

I was about to tell everyone we were heading to the office downstairs, when Errod called us over to a nearby wall. He was looking at a framed picture - from the quality, it looked like it was maybe a newspaper clipping or something - and he looked like he'd seen a ghost. It was a picture of a kid with dark hair, bushy eyebrows, and a birthmark near his left eye. I'd seen him before, in a portrait where he was posing with the queen of Brinkmar and wearing fancy clothes. It had been in a desk drawer, in Jake Ross' room.

Jake Ross - the real world one, whatever his name actually was - had been here? I took the frame down and popped the back out, hoping that there was something written on the back of the picture like people sometimes did. Instead, I found that it had been torn from a larger piece of paper, with the bottom third of some big block letters peeking past the jagged edge.

"Okay, four straight bits, then two curved bits, three straight bits, one curved bit. But... those are wider at the top. So M, and the other is an N. Oh. It says 'missing'. This is torn out of a missing person poster. Huh. In the books, he was returned to the exact moment he left, so there wouldn't have been time for people to make a missing poster. The Rivet - the Causality Engine, whatever - was for sure capable of that. Did he return some other way? Or not return at all?"

I kept the picture. I had the portrait from Brinkmar too, but not with me here on Earth... and I wanted to see if I could find out more information about this kid. We headed downstairs, with Katrin in the lead checking for wards, and then proceeded to absolutely ransack the place. Almost everything was worthless, but we did manage to find a few things out. It had been around since at least 1890, and had indeed just been a hardware store for most of that time. At some point, probably around 2000 although we couldn't find the date, Coelestis Acquisitions got involved in some way.

The original owners were still around, and there were things in the office from as recently as a month before which meant they were still using the building, but there was a reference to Coelestis keeping them from re-opening. Based on some of the stuff I saw online, they didn't seem like they particularly wanted to anyway. It seemed like Coelestis owned Worthington Hardware Co. but not Warehouse Antiques or Frontier Antiques, even though those were all the same business as far as I could tell. I didn't have the legal or business background to make any sense of it.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"This shit is all from the non-Coelestis people. Nothing about why Coelestis cared about this place, or anything useful. I have an address, in New York. So I guess that's something."

Zoey nodded, and slammed a filing cabinet shut. "Nothing for me, either, except for this."

I looked at the paper she'd handed me. It was a printout of an email, where someone from Coelestis - agent 0144 - was saying that yes, they still needed the storage space in the basement, and nobody was allowed to tamper with it. Well, that was something. We spread out into the cluttered floor, and before long found a padlocked door in one corner.

"It's warded," Katrin said, "and still active. Give me a minute, I want to make sure I can break it without setting it off."

I had a decent amount of knowledge of runes from when I was Connie, but without my Dumine developed for it I couldn't read them as well and could only write them really big; Katrin, meanwhile, could understand the intent people had when writing runes and the ones she made were smaller every day. I leaned down and looked alongside her, even though it was very unlikely I'd figure anything out, and had to admit I was impressed and a little scared.

"Holy shit," I said, "the runes are so tiny!"

She nodded. "That's half of the problem; I won't be able to alter the chain at all, since I can't make functional runes that small. The other half of the problem is this right here. Can you read it?"

In the same way that a lowercase "L" and an uppercase "I" looked the same, or some words had multiple meanings, there were runes that were inscrutable if you couldn't interpret the intent behind them. There was a section of the code that had multiple parts like that, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

"That's on purpose," Katrin said, "whoever wrote this has done it in a deliberately inefficient way so that they could slip things like this in. They want to make it confusing, so there's no way to tell what it actually does. It's... genius."

"But you're also a genius, right?"

She sighed. "Not at this level, but... I'm trying."

I gave her some space, and gathered the others together. "Okay, this has gone pretty well. We found the item I was looking for, found a picture of Jake Ross, got an address for Coelestis which is good since I couldn't find them online. But. Katrin might not be able to deactivate those wards, so if we bust in to that room there's a chance we'll be alerting someone and they'll come after us. Whatever is behind that door is important, so... if she says it's beyond her, do we do it anyway?"

Zoey nodded, still mad about her alternate self being mind-wiped. "If we just kick the door down, take everything, and run..."

Errod frowned. "We're not in a good position to run. We haven't converted any of the gold into currency, we don't have a vehicle... is it worth the risk to sneak out quietly, and then break in a second time once we're better prepared?"

"Option three," Grunkle said, "I get the fuck out of here before you guys do anything stupid, I hold onto the gold for you, and then you guys do whatever you want."

Calliope and Matlyn agreed with Zoey and Errod, respectively, so we started talking about what we'd need to do if we went with Errod's plan. Before we'd gotten far, Katrin came over to cast her own vote. "I've come up with a way to disable the wards that would trigger if we open the door, but there's another layer that I think will do something to anyone that actually enters the room."

That meant we could take a look, and then decide if it was worth barging all the way in. I ran upstairs to the key center, and began digging around. As I'd hoped, among the blanks and various tools I found a lockpick set - it was missing some pieces, based on the empty spots in the leather wallet, but it was mostly there. Enough for me to use. Katrin did her thing, I picked the lock... eventually... and we swung the door open.

Inside, we found a big piece of plywood laying on the ground. "Well that's... not interesting at all. No. I refuse to believe that's it. Hang on."

I grabbed a broom that was nearby, and after confirming with Katrin that inanimate objects shouldn't trip the wards - I reached it in and carefully wedged it under the plywood. I was able to lift it a few feet, just enough for Katrin to duck down and look underneath. "Yup," she said, "that's a teleportation circle. There's some interference runes on the underside of the wood, so long as it's laying there the circle will be unusable. If we can lift it all the way up, I can copy the rune sequence down... just in case, I guess."

We did that, without too much difficulty, and then left the plywood up so the circle could be used and locked the door; it was possible that could benefit Coelestis, but presumably if so they would have left it up themselves. With that, it seemed like we were out of things to do. We took a moment to tidy up the office again so nobody would report a break-in, and then it was time to talk about the best way to get back out without being seen.

My main idea was, basically, a reverse version of the way we'd gotten in. Go out, use opaque walls to block us from direct sight, send some lights out there to distract people, and hurry out onto the street. I'd been hoping to find a way into the rest of the building, which extended two floors up, but there wasn't access so far as I could tell. The other option was to wait until things were quieter outside and sneak out over the wall in the ally on the bank end - I'd avoided that on the way in because it had all the foot traffic of he other street in addition to the bank cameras, but hopping the wall from this side would be quicker and less conspicuous than it would have been on the way in.

And then there was a jingling sound from the front door.

Errod looked at me. "Out the back?"

It was an option, we were right there. It was how we'd been planning on leaving anyway. But if it was Coelestis, they'd be waiting for us. "I need to get a look, and see if it's an agent. If it is, I'm taking them out right here in the store so there's no witnesses."

Katrin put a hand on my arm. "And if it's not?" She whispered. "Then you've shown yourself to them, and they call the guards."

Why did I think it was so cute that she kept calling the police "the guards"? "Yeah... yeah. Okay, here's the plan. Zoey, gimme the Coelestis pin."

I attached it to the inside of my jacket, and walked out just as a man - and what turned out to be a very protective German Shepherd - were arriving at the back counter. "Whoa, there, pooch! Agent one-fifty-six, Coelestis Acquisitions. We're just clearing about seven backpacks full of shit out of our storage area downstairs." I flipped the corner of my jacket out, so he could see the pin.

The man didn't look particularly intimidating, just some older dude, but he did look like he was pissed as hell. "You can't just show up here unannounced in the middle of the night!" he yelled, looking like he was ready to start writing angry letters.

This was a tough one. Too nice and he might start having too much fun yelling at me, which I didn't want. To aggressive, and he'd call Coelestis right now. I'd dealt with customers like this before, and I handled it right about a third of the time - which wasn't bad, compared to the track records of the other people I'd worked with.

"Well, if my asshole supervisor were here - I think you've had the misfortune of emailing back and forth with him - he'd tell you that we absolutely do have the right to come and go as we please, if we want access to our storage area. But, again, he's an asshole. If I'm being honest, though, the fact is that I just didn't think you'd be here; it's not like you're in the store all that often."

He looked like he was going to go off on a "that may be, but that doesn't mean you can..." kind of rant, and if this was an actual customer service thing I'd let him get it all out. But in this case, I was hoping to just steamroll him. "Listen, I get it, and I'm genuinely sorry for startling your dog, but the fact is I'm just getting back with my crew from dealing with a shitshow at an auction in Georgia and I'm not even going to be able to go home because they're having me take this crap from our storage space down to Texarkana.

"I'll tell you what - let us get out of your hair, you get on with your night, and by way of apology I'll see if I can convince the Director to give you that space in the basement back, now that it's basically empty. My supervisor mentioned you'd been asking about that. I know, I look like I'm twelve, but I've been at the company long enough to know what buttons to press - the trick is for me to bring it up in March at the big meeting, when I don't have to go through my supervisor. Did I mention he's an asshole? He's an asshole. That guy would hold on to the storage space forever just on principle."

As planned, that was too much information. He sputtered a little, and while he did I yelled back at the others. "Come on guys, I want to be on the road as soon as possible. Let's give this nice man some space, yeah?" I turned back to him to further distract him from the others as they filed past towards the front door. "Sorry again for the scare, keep an eye out in late March and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised; the big guy will give you back the storage space once the planning meeting for Q2 is over, I'll make sure of it."

And we left.

We walked until we were back by the library, and then turned and headed down a random street. There was an abandoned building, which was tempting, but I had to break out of my old habits. We had money, we could find a hotel. We just had to stay off the main road for a bit. "So... do you think that worked?"

Zoey laughed. "It was great. I was very impressed. I think... I think we're in the clear. Probably. It depends on if there was a camera we missed."

It did very much depend on that. Still, I felt as good about it as I was going to. Zoey booked rooms for us at the local Howard Johnson, and we walked slowly back that way while listening for sirens. There weren't any. Once we were checked in I showed everyone how to turn the showers on, handed out the toiletries I'd bought, and ordered them all to actually bathe and put on new clothes before we went and got dinner.

Instead, we all fell asleep. It had been a hell of a day.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.