Maybe she could get used to civilization after all!
Ranthia rose, stretched, and went through her morning preparations. Washing her face was vaguely unnecessary, but it felt nice. The morning stretches that followed were also unnecessary, but they were more-or-less habitual. This was followed by her usual brief morning prayer to Xaoc—mostly saying hello and seeing if He needed her for anything for the first time ever (He did not). With that done, she pulled on her mistweave tunic and sandals before she saluted mage-rock (yes, she had stolen the tile without asking, but Swarm hadn’t complained so far) and made her way out for the morning Sentinel meeting.
The Sentinel meeting proved mundane. There was a Ranger team that was weirdly overdue for its next stop, but the decision was made to wait a bit longer before they dispatched Sentinel Nose (seriously, it was a better moniker than Scorch) to investigate. At least there were no new action items for her, nor did Swarm mention anything about the inscription that she walked away with.
With her contribution to the hell months done, she had a bit of “free” time (aside from patrols, absent other crises) until she had to figure out how in Xaoc’s glory she was going to impart useful lessons to the trainees as an instructor. Which meant that she needed to stop putting things off and tackle some of her to-do list before time ran out.
In no particular order:
- Find her mother, tell her the truth about what happened to Ranthia.
- Speak to Green, endure another lecture.
- Maybe check in on Hexara’s letter? Eh, they said they’d send it to her when they found it.
- Find a real solution to help the street kids long-term.
- Find some way to cause a bit of chaos without making herself feel sleazy.
- Prepare for her teaching obligations or at least speak to some instructors to coordinate efforts.
- More visits to Xaoc’s temple.
- There should be an eighth thing, she was probably forgetting something.
Speaking to Green had some potential. She still wasn’t looking forward to debating the woman about Lysia, but she needed to do it sooner or later. Green was still an important bond, and she was more than a little curious about why her former leader had already retired from the Rangers. For all of Green’s fondness for calling herself ‘old’, she was in better shape than most middle-aged people in Remus. Which meant that there was probably some sort of story involved in her retirement.
And as much as she wanted to help the kids on the street, she didn’t have any solid ideas yet. She was never the sort to find inspiration while cloistered away to ponder, so it needed to remain a background item until she found an idea worth pursuing. It was unfortunate, but it was for the best. Discovering an avenue for chaos fell under the same need for inspiration.
Visiting Xaoc’s temple was always an option, but it also wasn’t something that should occupy her day—it was something to do when the urge found her. Which left her teaching obligations, but she really didn’t want to go straight back to the island. She needed a change of pace.
…
Yes, she was aware that she had skipped an item off the list. It was a task that she had found numerous excuses to put off, but it looked like she was out of realistic options. She needed to either visit Green or try to face her mother.
And as much as the thought of it made Green’s probable lecture more appealing, she had promised herself that she was done being a coward and hiding from her past.
Irritably, Ranthia geared up to set out on her patrols once again. She could kill two dinosaurs with one knife, since she would need to explore the city to find her mother anyway. She hadn’t seen any of those horrible food stalls, but she hadn’t exactly gone looking for them either.
Ariminum was big, so her lack of observation didn’t mean much.
Ranthia’s thoughts followed her along her patrol. For the moment, she was trying to decide if she wanted to show up before the woman in full Sentinel equipment or if she wanted to change into something more casual for the conversation—not confrontation, not this time. There were advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The Sentinel badge might, might, make her mother reconsider who her daughter had become in her absence, but it also very likely could put her into a defensive mindset, which would make Ranthia’s confession even more difficult. This was worsened by the fact that the woman’s second husband was a shyster—being the face of the government could possibly make things worse.
Ugh, she was already regretting her decision.
The locations of the Iccius’ Food stalls had changed from where they used to be. The one near the government district—where her mother had worked—was entirely absent. She finally caught sight of her first one in a poorer district of Ariminum.
After half a day of patrols, she had clear confirmation that there were far fewer stalls than there used to be, and they were all in less desirable parts of the city. None of them were quite in the slums, but some of the streets were barely a step up from there. Also, gods and goddesses, none of them smelled appetizing. That couldn’t just be an effect of her vitality—they plainly had few customers in spite of their surprisingly low prices.
Ranthia had grown used to generally being popular with merchants—especially those in poorer areas—since crime had a noticeable downtick while a fully geared Sentinel was present. The youths that ran the Iccius’ Food stalls, on the other hand, seemed to be terrified of her. Few would look at her, and one of them dropped the food he tried to hand to her three times before he succeeded.
Last time she had investigated the food stalls her mother had married into, she had been unimpressed. Aside from the stall near the government district, the meat was old and dry, and the bread was both stale and flavorless. The modern version was, to an uninformed tongue, better. Her senses proved it was either worse, or what she had eaten before was worse than she had thought. The meat was still dry, but they soaked it in a spicy sauce, which helped offset that. The chunk of bread it was dropped on was crispy. But a little reused sauce couldn’t hide the fact that the meat had plainly gone very off, and the bread wasn’t just stale—it had sand and Xaoc knew what else added to make the portions stretch further. It wasn’t even food at that point, they were exchanging garbage for coin and were ineffectually trying to hide it under a watery sauce.
Even with her vitality, she refused to actually take a bite. The ‘food’ was practically identical at each stall too.
Few wanted to speak to her, but the kids were also cowards that weren’t willing to deny a Sentinel. Every one of them was relatively new; none of them had worked for Iccius’ Food for more than a week or two. Unfortunately, no one that she spoke to knew anything about their employer’s wife, though the only one who seemed starstruck by interacting with a Sentinel spoke enthusiastically of his children. At least this meant her mother no longer ran herself ragged trying to man a stall on top of whatever other duties she pulled for the family business.
It was probably a scathing indictment of Ariminum that Iccius’ Food still existed. She had been completely certain that the scam was a year or two away from collapse back when she investigated it so many years ago. Yet here it was… worse than ever. Seriously, what the fuck was the government doing?
Her mother’s husband’s workshop was still exactly where it used to be. Except instead of being a den of debauchery where he abused female slaves, it was just full of empty containers of cheap alcohol. She never saw a single slave any time she passed by close enough to glance through a window, just the old man in various stages of drunken stupor. Alone.
After several days of wasted investigation—and mundane crime mitigation, though she probably should have considered bringing a wanted rapist to justice noteworthy—Ranthia finally decided she needed to take drastic measures.
She needed to actually visit one of the record halls that Sentinel Swarm had shown her.
Ranthia was trying and failing to not regret her decision through sheer force of will. The records halls, repositories, and dusty mounds of scrolls tossed haphazardly into entirely too many rooms that represented the documents that she had access to were only somewhat organized. And they covered nearly everything that happened in Remus. If anyone had to report on something or get permission to do something, it was there. Somewhere.
It was a lot. Even just locating documents related to businesses in Ariminum cost her a full day (and she could only hope no one would take her to task for breaking from her assigned patrolling task without notice, not that anyone had mentioned it in the last Sentinel meeting—it was kind of just busywork).
Ranthia’s candle had run low, her patience had run out sometime long before the sun had set, but she finally had a decent picture of the situation. Clinically, it was fascinating in a mundane sort of way. Iccius’ Food had continued as she had last seen it, until somewhere a bit less than two years ago. Then, abruptly, they missed payments on their stalls and disappeared off the map for nearly half a year. Around then their debts were paid through the trade of assets, including both goods and slaves. Then, suddenly, they bought three of the cheapest open stall slots that could be found and returned to business. From there they grew very slowly until they were in the sad state she had seen.
Which was all neat to know, but none of it really told her much! Grudgingly, she had to acknowledge that she would probably need to just visit the family’s home instead of hoping to run into her mother in the city. Somehow, she suspected that dropping by would just cause her mother to have even more resistance to a real conversation, but…
Well, she still had the tax offices’ records to try. She could do that before she took the stupid option, but it could wait for the next day.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Once again Ranthia got through the Sentinel meeting without anyone making a comment about her lack of patrols. Swarm had offered her a strange smile when he left, but she wasn’t sure if that meant something or if it had more to do with the fact that he was stuck sitting on Ranger Command duty that day. (She was so never asking why she hadn’t been assigned that duty yet.)
Getting into the tax records proved to be surprisingly complex. When she had been with Sentinel Swarm the tax workers had let them right through, but by herself… Well, questions were raised.
Fortunately for her, she was a Sentinel. And that meant something.
“I’m investigating a citizen.” Ranthia had to repeat the sentence eight different times to five different people, but she gradually brute-forced her way through the bureaucracy.
It wasn’t even a lie! It just wasn’t the whole truth, but who would openly accuse a fully geared Sentinel of running an investigation for personal reasons?
…Oh Xaoc, Swarm and Ocean were so going to ask her about it, weren’t they?
The tax records were slightly better organized than most. She was able to find the crate belonging to Iccius’ Food, at least. The tax records started a bit more than three years ago (where the older ones were stored was a mystery that she could only hope she wouldn’t need to solve), and there were more than a few missing scrolls. But it was a solid start, especially when she found a stamped scroll that seemed to contain a transcript with the owner.
The record was laden with profanity—and her mental image of a stoic [Tax Collector] dutifully recording every swear offered a lovely bit of levity—and seemed to mostly just be him yelling at the tax officer that only his wife knew the answers to any of the questions the man was asking. …Which was more than a bit sad, given the questions were bastions of complexity like “How many employees do you have?” and “How many stalls do you operate?” and other matters that the owner damned well should have known.
But why was he…
Owner: Look, if you want your damned answers then call up Black Crow and get him to take a message to my dead wife, you—
Ranthia couldn’t even enjoy the following string of profanity. She just stared at two words in particular in utter disbelief.
Her mother was dead.
Ranthia followed the thread obsessively. From that profanity-laden record, Ranthia found more and more records. Then she learned that the [Healer] that had looked after her mother had been arrested several months ago for tax evasion—seriously, was the woman utterly incapable of making even just one decent decision in her life—which brought her out of the tax offices and into the sprawling room of evidentiary documents seized from criminals from around the right timeframe.
Which was not sorted. At all. As if she needed any further reasons to think little of the brutes that tended to become guards.
Once she found one of the scrolls from the same [Healer] she was able to track the rest. Even better, no one came in to catch her sniffing piles of scrolls like an animal seeking a morsel—the man plainly loved his herbs. Armed with the scrolls, she was able to complete the picture with the details she had gathered already.
It was true. Her mother passed away a bit less than two years ago. The damned woman had overworked herself to death! The unscrupulous [Healer] had seen her several times across her final years, noted her deteriorating condition, and advised her husband to have her stop working. Clearly, either her husband never passed the message along or she refused the counsel. The fact that the [Healer] made no note of telling her that, just her husband, was almost as infuriating as the situation itself.
It was infuriating enough to almost become funny, in a twisted and terrible way. She had put so much effort into trying to figure out how to have a real conversation with her mother. And the damned woman hadn’t even been alive! Her mother, who couldn’t even be bothered to deal with her only child, and decided that it was easier to just write Ranthia off… overworked herself until she died. She just drank cheap, shitty potions like beer to keep herself going until her body just failed too far for that low-grade fraud of a [Healer] to help.
Clearly, godsawful food stalls had meant significantly more to the woman than her own flesh and blood!
Ranthia was basically incandescent with ill-contained rage by that point, but she had an objective: her mother’s wealthy, lazy scammer of a husband had gotten approval to have her burned and her ashes scattered outside of town. The description of the location provided was vague, almost literally just that it was beneath a tree and which road the tree was off from. But she was going to find it.
She would never get to have it out with her mother. They would never make amends. She could never tell her mother how much the damned woman had hurt her. She would never be able to try.
She would never be able to tell the woman the truth about the daughter that she had lost.
The thoughts roved through Ranthia’s head like enraged echoes, each louder than the last. Just on the other side of the city gates, a wasp buzzed into her face. She very nearly smashed it aside but recognized the fungal growth on it just in time. The bug clutched a small piece of parchment, which it allowed her to take.
The message was brief: Is there a Problem?
Ranthia laughed bitterly, she wanted to say yes. Instead, she located a small piece of charcoal in one of her belt pouches and scrawled ‘No’ into the small clear corner of the scrap. The problem was nothing but her own—she was leaving the city to hunt a ghost. No other Sentinel needed to be bothered by her madness.
Six years ago she would have considered trying to find a tree where ashes had been scattered two years prior to be impossible. But she wasn’t constrained by mortal concerns like how easy something was. She was worldly enough to know that ashes made plants grow better and she had enough vitality that the minor differences in the plant life were blindingly obvious. Even by sight—let alone by scent—she knew where wildlife tended to relieve itself.
It took time, but Ranthia managed to find the location. The greenery was just a bit healthier, a touch richer. Between her vitality and what she had absorbed from two years spent on rotation with Green, Ranthia was fairly confident in her assumptions. They had burned her mother there, in the clearing that was teeming with early summer blossoms, then scattered her ashes around the big tree facing the field of flowers.
Ranthia approached the tree slowly, with a maelstrom of emotions. Guilt warred with loss, and both were swept aside by outrage as it intermingled with pain and anger and through it all burned a surprising amount of raw hate. By the time she arrived, she was smiling viciously at the tree. Gods, she could almost imagine the woman’s smug, hateful face on the tree. She never had dared to carry any real hopes for reconciliation, but she had been denied everything. Through her hate, the boundary between her fury and her pain blurred.
“You really had to grind my nose against your hatred of me one last time, didn’t you? I wasn’t worth a single whit of your energy, but your precious new damned pretend family was worth everything!? I hope Xaoc and the other gods saw fit to condemn you before you were given the luxury of Samsara. Well, I guess I better take a close look into your precious fake family, hadn’t I? You were so damned worried about me touching your new life. See you soon, Mother.” The Sentinel snarled at the tree.
Like most tales of petty revenge, Ranthia’s promised to take entirely too much prep work, was borderline nonsensical, and clearly fell on the wrong side of most of the morals she possessed. Yet her dark emotions reigned and prevented her from thinking things through.
Revenge was a dangerous motivation because it always required a degree of detachment from one’s senses. Revenge against a dead woman was worse than most in that respect.
But Ranthia was shaken from her efforts to create a new disguise form with her oft-neglected [Distorted Likeness] Skill by Sentinel Swarm pounding at her door and calling one of the few words that could possibly pull her out of her self-destructive spiral.
“Emergency!”
The meeting room was occupied only by Swarm, Ocean, and Ranthia—at least until the Nose Sentinel Misnamed As Scorch (…wow, she really was not at her best if she came up with such an awkward mouthful) ran into the room before he even bothered to pull on his tunic over his sodden body. Swarm began to speak the moment their last arrival came into the room as they all ignored the brief display of nudity. Emergencies beat out social propriety by a wide margin, though the man plainly used way too many bath oils and the room was rapidly being overrun by the dense aroma.
“We now know what happened to our missing Ranger Team. A second arrived and sent for a Sentinel. A large flock of ornithocheirus have nested near…” Swarm continued to speak, but Ranthia had tuned him out inadvertently.
The sound of wings and calls from Ranthia’s nightmares threatened to overwhelm her. She wasn’t stupid. Ocean was barely viable on land and there were Ranger teams that outclassed him, Swarm, or any other Sentinel in Remus… except her. The bastards were going to send her after the ornithocheirus!
For a horrible moment she relived the terror.
The darkness that she so nearly succumbed to.
She balled her fists and shoved the dark thoughts to the side. She was one of the highest level creatures ever recorded in Remus! She had once feared the war goblins and she had butchered them on their reunion. She was fine.
She could do this.
“I’ll go.” Ranthia announced aloud before she could stop herself.
…Okay, yes, saying that while Swarm was in the middle of saying something was probably less than ideal, given some of the looks she got. But she couldn’t wait, she refused to spend more time in her own head over this!
The sun had set (…hadn’t risen yet? she had kind of lost track of time) before they managed to get underway. After a brief debate about the logistics, Ranthia agreed and boarded Ocean’s ship so they could sail down the Nostrum Sea at top speed. He was going to receive the wounded that needed a [Healer] of a better grade than could be had at their destination. The infestation of beasts was further inland, which meant that Ranthia was on her own.
That was fine, she was fine.
The second Ranger Team—Ranger Team 11, the one that sent for them—met them at the docks beneath the moons. Ranthia was impatient to rush ahead and get her task done, but getting more recent intel was probably the smartest play.
“Sentinels!” The man saluted as he stepped forward. “I’m Ranger Helvius, this is my second, Ranger Pyra.”
Ranthia’s brain almost tripped over itself when she realized who was standing next to the man, saluting smartly. And there was Juvenae, with the rest! It felt impossible to connect the young, distractible rookie that Ranthia had known with a capable woman that was second in command of a Ranger team, but there she was. Pyra had seemed to still be basically the same distractible girl she had used to be, at least in the privacy of old friends, too! Still, good for her.
“Thank you Rangers, at ease. We could use an update on the situation.” Ocean ordered.
Pyra snuck in a subtle little wave and smile to Ranthia as she relaxed. Ranthia was all too happy to return the smile for a moment.
“Er, I’m sorry to say sirs, but the situation is resolved. An Adventurer team came into town and used some sort of trap to drive the beasts off. I had Ranger Aelea track the survivors, and it looked like they’re heading into uninhabited territories.” Ranger Pyra’s Leader explained with an awkward expression.
“I see. Are there still wounded that need help?” Ocean calmly accepted the lack of need.
Then again, with how slow couriers were and the time it usually took Sentinels to muster a response, maybe being too late to make a difference was the norm. Realistically, Sentinels focused on monster slaying, like they were, would rarely be able to arrive in time for a situation to still be hot in most circumstances.
“Yes, the local [Alchemist] has been doing what she could, but the only [Healer] in town uses Dark and mostly works against sicknesses.” The Ranger answered.
“Any lingering situations that could use a bit of speed or muscle?” Ranthia interjected.
“Not really, cleanup’s already mostly handled. People from the roads have mentioned a solo Ranger. Not sure if it’s that survivor from Ranger Team 13 or a fake, but we were going to look into it as we progress. Rather not bother a Sentinel off rumors.” The man replied.
“I’ll handle the investigation, which way were the rumors coming from?” Ranthia insisted.
It would have been nice to catch up a bit with Pyra and Juvenae, but a solo Ranger—possibly a survivor of Ranger Team 13 no less? She was probably uniquely suited.
Ocean signaled his consent and Ranthia got her directions from the Rangers. She did delay to steal a quick hug from Pyra—and a somewhat begrudging one from Juvenae—and wished them well. But she couldn’t linger, once she was done being a decent friend (for a change) she was off.
It was time for a different sort of rescue. …Namely, a type of rescue that she hadn’t done (that she knew of) since she was a child.
Oh Xaoc, she could have done without that realization.
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Nozomi Matsuoka.
Sarah "Neila" Elkins.