Arc F1.10 | Chapter 20: Brilliance That Blinds

✮ ✮ ✮ Several Hours Earlier ✮ ✮ ✮

[Baalphorian Brat:whatever happens]

[Baalphorian Brat:i would like it on the record that it was in no way, shape, or form my fault]

[Baalphorian Brat:well… maybe its a teeny tiny bit my fault]

[Baalphorian Brat:the bigger part]

[Baalphorian Brat:thats not related to everything that might go down tho]

[Baalphorian Brat:def isnt my fault]

[Baalphorian Brat:for the record]

Clover, who had only been working under Officer Fawnreen for a few months after being transferred into the city following an incident that was better left unspoken of, had no idea who this Baalphorian Brat was. Whoever they were, they certainly spoke to his grumpy boss quite informally, and while that wasn’t exactly strange—Officer Fawnreen seemed to prefer a more casual environment, but it generally took a few years of familiarity for new officers to fall into treating their boss more as a friend than a boss—Clover wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone who wasn’t a Drinarna treat his intimidating boss so casually.

Only a few months in, Clover had yet to fully grasp how to relax around his boss, but he was working on it. If he weren’t, it wouldn’t have mattered how good he was at his job: Officer Fawnreen wasn’t the sort to suffer formality in favour of some well-done paperwork, especially when the way Clover had come to live in Falmíer—which wasn’t the city where he was trained, and had therefore expected to spend his life—was odd.

Once again, the incident in question was better left unspoken of.

Clover’s job was a strange one, being part second-in-command, part secretary. Currently, he was working more as a secretary than anything. At the moment, this mostly involved fielding questions about an operation that would be going down later that day—there had been some rumblings of something going on in the city, and while many of the district heads seemed perfectly content to let the criminals of the city do as they pleased, Officer Fawnreen was not the sort of avert her eyes.

As a result of this mentality, which constantly put her at odds with other district heads, her station was a bit of a strange thing, being largely composed of people like Clover himself: people who had fallen out with their original city’s Drinarna due to some sort of ethical conflict. Usually, this involved outing someone for corruption or going against a stupid order. One of the oldest officers in Officer Fawnreen’s district had long ago refused to pretend they hadn’t seen a superior’s spouse after they were beaten half to death during an argument. The superior had been fired—but never charged, despite their beaten spouse begging for their case to be heard—and while the officer who refused to bury the evidence had done nothing wrong, her career had largely been over from that moment of supporting the spouse on.

Many Drinarna thought that protecting their own was the most important thing, even if that protection meant leaving them to beat their spouses until they were barely breathing, their body a mottle of yellow and grey bruises and broken bones.

A young Officer Fawnreen, during an intercity training exercise, had met this old officer, left sitting at a desk for decades but with a bright mind, meant to glance over crime scenes and find the smallest of clues. Even at that desk, the woman had occasionally been able to contribute enough to solve a crime no one else could crack, but the reality remained: if she hadn’t been unjustly punished for doing the right thing, it was likely dozens, if not hundreds, of unsolved cases in her home city might have been solved.

They would never know the full scope of the damage down by holding that officer to a desk. What was known was that, after Officer Fawnreen—a legacy—had demanded their mother—a high-ranking officer when she had been alive—have the old officer transferred into Falmíer, the number of unsolved cases in Falmíer went down. Now mostly retired, there had been a time when everyone had wanted this old officer’s opinion on difficult cases, their career pushed on by a young Officer Fawnreen and their mother.

Clover’s own story was much messier, but this was how most of their department existed: as outliers, rebels, troublemakers—at least to some people. Hence, they had somehow found themselves the only district seemingly giving a single shit about these rumours circling through the city. The lack of support was actually worse than usual, and this had led Officer Fawnreen to suspect that at least some amount of the Drinarna were complicit in whatever was happening, either through active choice, blackmail, or allegiances to other Drinarna whose careers would be ruined, should facts about their part in the situation come to light. Without any actual evidence, however, there wasn’t much they could do.

“If we find evidence, I’ll take it to Wander,” the woman had said a few weeks back, when rumours of a startling number of Drinarna interns with irregular deviations giving up on becoming Drinarna and returning home had reached them. As far as any of them could tell, none of those missing interns had actually made it home, but their family had received messages, stating their intention to return home and reassess their paths in life.

Every single one of those messages had been flagged by their family as odd and not sounding like their child. Of course, with how infrequently children returned home after starting their internships—especially if they worked in a different city from the one they’d grown up in, as all of these missing interns did—there was no way to say that these missing interns hadn’t simply changed in all their time away from their families.

Had it just been one missing intern, not over a dozen, all with irregular deviations, all never returned home, all leaving strange messages with their family, one might have been tempted to believe they’d run off somewhere else. It wasn’t exactly uncommon for those people who felt a disconnect from their career path to vanish into the wind. Many went to neighbouring Free Colonies—Norvel and Crishar, for the most part, although sometimes they ended up in Byshire or booked passage to the Atrium or Baalphoria—where they could slip into outlier and diaspora groups and live a life that was… freer.

It was a common enough thing, for those who thought even to return to their parents homes upon finding themself in similar positions to suddenly head elsewhere, that their family’s hadn’t thought much of it.

Such was the way, sometimes.

It didn’t seem the way, this time.

“Do you know where Officer Fawnreen is?” Clover asked a passing officer, after handing over question fielding to his own second, who actually was more of a secretary than Clover himself was meant to be.

The officer he’d happened across in the hallway, who was sipping one of those strange—and likely illegal—drinks that the entire city seemed to be obsessing over, pointed him in the general direction of their boss before slipping away, intent to get some shut-eye before the mission started in a few hours… assuming nothing went wrong.

As he moved through the hallways, officers scurrying about and bumping shoulders and gossiping all around him, Clover looked back over the messages with this Baalphorian Brat. One of his other jobs was managing his boss’s xphern, which Officer Fawnreen was notorious for accidentally leaving somewhere—it was never an accident. The woman received so many messages from other district heads, claiming she was causing problems by, you know, actually doing her job, that Clover couldn’t blame her for hating the thing. Combined with how few personal messages she received—even those officers who had been part of the station the longest were unclear if she had any friends or family, now that her parents were dead—it had been easy for Clover to take over managing the thing.

Rarely did he need to ask his boss what sort of response to send someone—refusals to event invitations, fuck offs to anyone trying to tell her how to do her job, inquiries about information that suggested someone might be a good fit for their station. In the case of this Baalphorian Brat, however…

So far, Clover had sent a single message reading only: Where are you thinking trouble may pop up?

There had been no response, and the combination of having no idea who this person was and the fact that they were Baalphorian—and therefore, might be in the midst of causing an international incident…

No, he needed to talk to his boss about this, definitely.

While he moved, Clover skimmed up through the few other messages in the chat. There weren’t many, but they went back almost two decades. Most originated with the Baalphorian Brat, who seemed to enjoy poking at Officer Fawnreen, many of their messages edged over with a teasing energy that inevitably left his boss not responding to the person. Over the two decades, the person’s Lüshanian had improved considerably, going from a flawed Lüshanian with a mixture of its own words and grammar and that of Baalphorian, into the near perfect, if slightly rusty, Lüshanian of these most recent messages.

There were also references to the person in question visiting the city and wanting to come visit—not with Officer Fawnreen, but a few of her officers. While his boss never responded, the messages seemed more of a heads-up that this Baalphorian Brat would be showing up soon. About a year ago, they had apparently forgotten their underwear behind and Officer Fawnreen had been forced to contact the person to let them know, Clover’s boss asking if she should be concerned that one of her officers had broken the law. The Baalphorian Brat had replied with a thanks for his boss’s concern and a promise that she’d hooked up with one of the interns who were on a work round. As those interns tended to be in their late twenties and early thirties, presumably, this person was in that same age range, his boss concerned that the person had gone along with Baalphorian, age-based consent laws, rather than Lüshanian, age-gap-based ones.

It also seemed that the person had a knowledge of both Chief Officer Fulbrun and his daughter—another clue that they were likely around Cameron’s age—whom the Baalphorian Brat didn’t seem to like much. At the same time, a decade and a half ago, there was a moderately long conversation, in which the Baalphorian Brat had asked Officer Fawnreen for advice on a situation with Cameron and her mother.

“That woman is not a good person,” Officer Fawnreen, who was a childhood acquaintance—Clover didn’t think she and the Chief Officer were ever even childhood friends—with Cameron’s father had said. As Chief Officer Fulbrun had already been divorced by the time Clover came to live in the city, he didn’t know much about the woman, but he knew she wasn’t well liked by many people, and if he knew that after only a few months, Clover imagined the truth of how little people thought of Chief Officer Fulbrun’s ex-wife was much harsher.

Regardless, his boss had gone on to tell this Baalphorian Brat, that just as Chief Officer Fulbrun was better off without his ex-wife, so too was his daughter better off without her mother. “Wander will never tell his daughter to cut her mother off. He will not become a stone between them, but it is a difficult position to be in, as he is inherently not protecting his daughter by not encouraging her to cease tolerating that woman.”

“So…” the Baalphorian Brat had said, “you think I should tell Cameron the truth about what I see? If it’s coming from me, it might upset her—actually, it might make her double down on having a relationship with the bitch, just to spite me.”

“Whether you two get along or not, I struggle to think anyone sensible would know your opinion and brush it aside so easily. You are brilliant, and that means you must watch your words carefully, lest someone take them as truth without true cause. That isn’t fair to you, who should be able to speak freely and not risk people falling to their knees before you, but it is the reality you must learn to live with,” Officer Fawnreen had replied, in one of those rare moments when the woman lived up to her reputation as someone who, while grumpy and tending towards using force over words, could express herself quite well.

“So, tell Cameron, and know that, more than likely, because of me, she will cut her mother off?”

“Yes, but it is for the best, and I know you. If you say it right, you can make sure that girl leaves that city and woman knowing that she was never the problem. The problem has always been her mother.”

Strange, to say the least.

Someone Chief Officer Fulbrun’s daughter didn’t like, but whose opinion she would respect.

Someone aware enough to know their opinion meant something—and potentially meant something to anyone who knew they were brilliant.

Someone who his boss spoke to with both respect and admiration, while also edging towards… Clover didn’t want to say Officer Fawnreen was talking to this Baalphorian Brat in a maternal way, but also… that did actually seem to be the case? At the same time, many other times, she didn’t acknowledge messages from this person, or replied with curt, annoyed answers—and the fact that the person was labelled Baalphorian Brat in their xphern?

Strange, indeed—strange enough that, despite how busy they were and the fact that this person had vanished and was giving no more information on whatever situation they had found themself in, Clover thought it a good idea to go and talk to his boss about it.

Better safe than sorry; better to know about some strange situation that, in the end, had nothing to do with them, than to let it lie and only later realize that, oops, probably should have been paying attention to whatever this person was up to.

A shiver raced up Clover’s back—a premonition from the gods, his mother would have called it. The last time he’d felt something like that, well… he’d ended up here. In no way did Clover regret ending up here, despite the messy circumstances. Still, his steps sped up as he entered the foyer of the station.

Now, he just had to find his boss.