Wealth Skill: Investigation (Novice)
22 Cylus 720
Evidence. The case had gone from a kidnapping to a murder and Balthazar thought of it as new evidence. He hated thinking of it like that but distancing himself helped him focus on the work he had to do now. Callipo had been taken and Balthazar was following the clues he had. The Cabin Boy had been closed for trials now and the workers had been questioned. If anyone knew anything, they weren't telling the Elements. Balthazar couldn't quite weed out the notes of deception in the workers frequencies and he had ample time to search. He sat in on each questioning and watched in silence as he read through the workers' frequencies. It was good practice, but fruitless. They didn't know anything about the case Anton had been working on. The same case Balthazar, Darius, and Yeva were looking into now.
So Balthazar went back to the evidence he'd found the first trial he was on the case. Only this time he had something he had not had when the children were first taken. A gift from Isabella that she claimed came from an alchemist in Viden. A ring. No, she hadn't proposed to Balthazar but she knew he preferred rings as his mystical jewelry. Rings could make punches hurt more. Rings didn't get grabbed or snagged on things in the middle of fights. Rings were discrete... and the ring she'd given him was the greatest gift he'd ever received. It made his job too easy.
The ring sat on a table in front of Balthazar in his small house in Scalvoris Town. Beside the ring sat the scraps Balthazar had looted from the Cabin Boy. Scraps of paper with headlines that read: "Craftsmen Revolt!" "Dawn of the handmade age!" "Monsters from beyond the Orm'del Sea!" "First Rharne, who's next?" and a burnt page with a cupped hand on it. The symbol seemed familiar but he didn't know why. Where had he seen it before? Who had show it to him? Balthazar knew he'd have to cast such distractions aside if he wanted to find Anton and so he began to long process of clearing his mind to get to work.
Part of him thought he should give the ring to Yeva and Darius so that they might be able to find the kids but part of him wasn't confident they had the mental discipline to use the ring properly. He had to clear his mind of extraneous details. He had to focus on what he remembered of the case. In his mind he envisioned the Cabin Boy as it had been when he came to it. The door locked from within. The papers scattered over the room. The furniture Balthazar considered tacky... wait no... there hadn't been tacky furniture. That was at Gregorio's house. With a shake of his head, Balthazar wiped the furniture from the room he was building in his mind. He replaced the tacky furniture with shadowy stand-ins to fill the gaps in his recollection. The room itself did not matter because he was not looking for the room. He was looking fro the man who'd been taken from it.
Balthazar had spent the time between the first disappearance and the first body being found learning to use the gift Isabella gave him. He tested it on smaller crimes- some of which he had commit. Isabella knew little of what the ring could actually do and Balthazar had to figure the rest out. He'd tested it by committing small crimes. He stole an apple from a stand and walked four blocks away then tried to focus on the victim of the robbery, the man who sold apples at the stand. The first trial he achieved nothing but a measure of guilt for stealing an apple. The second trial the ring worked... just as it would have to work now.
Balthazar closed his eyes and took a deep breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth while he focused in on thoughts of Anton Callipo. He'd met Callipo a few times but never attuned to him- a mistake on Balthazar's part. If he'd attuned to him they he might be able to find him now without the ring but he hadn't. Fortunately Balthazar had the ring. It would be incredibly difficult to hide the victim from him now. Balthazar honed in on the victim of the crime himself, putting him at the center of his mind. Anton Callipo had been kidnapped on the fifteenth of Cylus in the 720 arc of their world.
Like a puzzle piece fitting perfectly, Balthazar felt everything snap into place. His eyes opened, consumed entirely with a blue glow that washed over the usually golden orbs. Hovering just a few inches in front of his face sat a similarly glowing trail of blue mist had appeared. Balthazar's glowing eyes widened slightly and he craned his head to the side to see where the trail immediately lead. It stretched back through his house in a straight line through the wall of his home. It seemed that much like with the apple, the trail could only form a straight line... but that was alright because Balthazar could fly above the obstructions... if only he'd thought to do that.
Instead Balthazar, with his glowing eyes, came out of his house and ran around to the wall the mist had gone through. The trail continued into another building behind Balthazar's and rather than go into the building, Balthazar jogged around it to look for where the trail let out. He found the mist poking through the far right corner of the building and followed it down the street on foot. Natives to the island all around Balthazar turned to watch the strange man with the glowing eyes as he walked through the town following a trail of mist only he could see. Fortunately the straight line that the mist traveled in seemed to adhere to the shape of the street for a few blocks before running right into another building so Balthazar didn't have to run circles around buildings more than... well twice... It was on the third time that Balthazar realized he would have better odds of finding Callipo in the air than on the ground.
The ring was not a spark and did not draw on his ether, so he wasn't too concerned about overstepping as he called upon his kin element to lift him into the sky. The wind churned and Balthazar's feet slowly rose of the ground before he began to ascend higher and higher into the air. As he moved up, the trail he perceived seemed to readjust itself so that it would remain a straight line. By the time Balthazar was in the skies above Scalvoris Town, he knew where the trail was going. He could see the glowing blue line stretching out towards the water.
Towards the docks.
Balthazar flew low and carefully. If Anton was alive now there was no reason to think he'd be killed before Balthazar arrived. It had been trials. Whoever took him had no reason to keep him alive that long if they meant to kill him. But until Balthazar freed Anton- until he opened that cage, it would be impossible to know whether the Cabin Boy's owner was alive or dead. Balthazar lowered himself onto the docks where the trail of mist dove downwards into the floor and looked around.
"What do you mean, down?" Balthazar asked aloud as he looked left and right for the mist to lead him anywhere other than right into the ground. It didn't make sense. Why wasn't the ring working now? Unless... no it couldn't be. There's no way they'd have been able to bury Anton. Cylus ruined sleep schedules so they could never have been certain there wasn't witnesses... unless...
Balthazar crouched down and placed his right hand flat against the ground. By now there were a few more people watching him- his glowing eyes drawing attention, but he didn't notice them because he was pushing his senses outward with his Attunement spark. He was pushing them down through the floor where the trail lead... and to his surprise he discovered the floor was hollow. He could feel two men standing over another man. Perhaps any of them could have simply been a flat chested woman but by size and shape of them Balthazar assumed them to be men.
The plot thickens. Balthazar drew his senses back to himself and turned to his other spark, the defiant one, to help bring him down through the hollow floor. It was different kind of embrace than the wind. A less familiar embrace. He was closest with fire and wind but earth had always been a steadfast ally to Balthazar as well. He was initiated in the earth. Born again as a Defier through a stone mother. It felt oddly like going home as he slipped down through the stones. The softened around him like water to allow him through and the last thing Balthazar heard of the surface was one dock worker shouting
"Somebody help him!" But nobody tried to stop him from sinking.
*** *** ***
What happened next, happened faster than Balthazar could process. Now he was standing in a room with a sword in his hand pinning a man in normal clothes to the wall. Another man dead was sprawled out on the floor a few feet behind them and Anton Callipo sat, bound and thankfully gagged, in a chair on the far side of the room. Balthazar let go of the sword handle and backed away but the man he'd impaled just hung there- pinned to the wall by the sword. A stone stump blocked the door which more men seemed to be banging against as they tried to get in. Balthazar looked around as the fog of war cleared and he remembered what he'd done.
He'd fallen through the roof into the middle of the room and the two men inside panicked. One of them ran for the door and that was why the stone stump stat in front of it. Balthazar had conjured the stone from the ground to keep the man from alerting his friends. It hadn't worked. The man had screamed when he couldn't open the door. His friend, the one who hadn't run, had drawn his sword to attack but Balthazar dodged the first swing of his sword and caught his arm in the middle of his second swing. Balthazar jabbed the swordsman in the armpit and wrenched his sword out of his hand.
Balthazar was no swordsman, but it seemed the man who'd taken Callipo was not either. He cringed in pain and grasped at his armpit while Balthazar slashed the man's own sword across his throat. That was the sword he'd used to impale the screamer. The screamer was shaking the door and shouted still so Balthazar attacked from behind. One slash cut deep into the screamer who... well you can imagine, screamed. He turned, trying to draw his own sword but in the close distance Balthazar was faster and drove the sword he was holding forward into the soldier. He pushed too hard and the sword went through the man, into the stone wall behind him.
That was when clarity had returned to the mage with the still glowing blue eyes. Balthazar turned slowly to Anton and as soon as he saw the man, the glow faded from Balthazar's eyes and the trail from Balthazar's perception. "Hello there." Balthazar said with a small wave to Anton. Then Balthazar turned to the door and backed away slightly. Narrow paths were his specialty and he had learned a lot since the last hallway... Balthazar took a deep breath to clear his mind and prepare his body for the ether he was calling on. Sparks began dancing around his arms, trailing to his hands and collecting between his palms.
A small shuffle of his foot, like kicking a ball aside, sent the stone blocking the door back into the ground. A man in armor pushed through the door with three others behind him and Balthazar thrust his hands forward, propelling the lightning through the four of them. The bolt arched off each of them, bounding into the next as it hit but it did so with no real precision. The one in armor died, as did the one behind him, but the other two guards just fell to the ground, convulsing as the electricity moved through them. Balthazar turned to Anton and began undoing his restraints. "I'm with the Elements. I'm here to save you." Balthazar said to Anton who he saw now was in far worse condition than he'd thought.
Balthazar pulled the gag out of Anton's mouth and immediately hate began spewing from it. "Immortal damn, Crafters! They're a damn menace! A threat to society! They've held me here for-"
"I know! I've been looking for you, now come on. We need to get out of here and I'm not sure you can go out the way I came in." Balthazar instructed, try to cut off Anton who only continued his ranting about Crafters and how they were all horrible. Balthazar wouldn't realize the connection until they were in the clear. He lead Anton through what turned out to be a surprisingly small underground chamber. It only had the one room that held Anton and a stairwell leading up to a now empty house that Balthazar assumed the other four had come from. Strange.
That was all Balthazar could really think with all the noise Anton was making behind him. The Elements would have a fun time with this one.