Chapter 28-
The city of Hilltop was originally constructed, as one might expect, atop a large hill. It was one of the first sites colonized by the early pioneers from Great Hopeland, and was now one of the most developed metropolitan centers in Andeidra.
The capital building of Hilltop was a great circular building with a wide, white, ridged dome. This place was constructed as a monument to Hope achievement, but the city itself soon extended much further beyond it. Its general shape formed a letter “I,” with a broader top than bottom, the capitol building was situated at the head of the “I,” and signaled the center of affluence for Hilltop. The city was split in half by a massive ravine, which began at the bottom of the hill and descended nearly 500 feet down into a river which led to the ocean. The underground levels of the ravine were thoroughly developed, and hundreds of businesses and homes were comfortably built into its walls.
The city was divided into four general segments. The top was known as “The Head,” for its placement, as well as being the greatest center of influence. It was the only district which was actually built on the hill, and was thus the definitive symbol of Hilltop. The second quarter of the city immediately below was dubbed the “Paper Square,” because it was home to the nicer residential homes, taller buildings, and mercantile populations. The western half of the Paper Square was adjacent to a medium-sized lake, the other side of which was developed into an especially bourgeois community called Lakeview that attracted politicians and other wealthy individuals who wanted to “get away from the city noise.” Gideon often called Lakeview “the tumor,” and tried to avoid invitations there as much as he could manage.
The third quarter of Hilltop was the general residential area, Braid Park. Not much was especially noteworthy about this district, as it was where the wealth began to “trickle down.” While it was a generally expensive city to live in, the income required to live in a modest apartment in Braid Park was enough to buy a house and two acres of land in the Southwest. All sorts of people came from there, though the quality of the schools and residents varied.
The fourth and southernmost quarter was built by those who wandered into the city, who were unable to afford the nice houses, who were considered a seedy bunch. This was The Chaff, so called because as it formed, the then-mayor of Hilltop publicly mocked it as being “the chaff of this great city.” Newspapers soon picked up the story, and the nickname stuck. It was not an inappropriate one either: poverty and crime were regular, it didn’t receive nearly enough police attention, drug use was rampant, and much of the infrastructure was practically falling apart. It should have gone without saying that as one descended into the lower levels of the city, shadier activity only became more common.
Each of the four districts had two ground-level bridges to connect the ravine, as well as several smaller bridges at the underground levels. There were another four total levels to the underground. The surface level was officially labeled Level 0, and each lower level was in increasing order of magnitude. Level 4 was riverside, and was basically inaccessible to the public so that it could be managed by the city’s trade commission and the blue-collar workforce.
---
The elevator was similar to those used in coal-mining operations, but much larger; its rickety doors rumbled as the steel box descended down the long, dark shaft. When those steel doors opened, Gideon Jepta found himself in Level 3 of The Chaff.
He was immediately greeted by a dank, musty smell that almost drove him to sneeze. There were only a handful of others standing next to him, each of them wearing dirty clothes and worn looks on their faces. The first thing he saw was an underground street, about as large as a regular city street, but with a high steel ceiling supported by many massive beams dotted about. Each underground level was on par with the surface in terms of width, though the further from the ravine one moved, the air quality and expense of housing both decreased. The street was lit by orange incandescent lights which lined the sidewalks. The underground was valued by corporations for the extra space it allotted, and as such the warehouses and factories that made up much of the east end of The Chaff descended into multiple subterranean floors.
Wearing a long brown jacket that obscured most of his body, Gideon stepped through the exiting crowd and made his way down the street, looking for signs to tell him where exactly he was.
“Alright… Fourth and Tweed…”
He continued strolling briskly down the sidewalk, past open businesses with shattered windows and the sleeping homeless. After about five minutes, he arrived at the intersection he was looking for.
The sign told him that this was Tenth and Silk, but it really wasn’t necessary. Gideon could tell that he was at the right place by the bustling crowd that filled the whole of the road.
Silk Street 3 was the main hub of trade and commerce on this end and level of Hilltop; the location where the most profitable shops kept their doors open and the small-time vendors popped their stands up in the hopes of making fast money.
The welcoming din of the crowd reminded Gideon how much he enjoyed the chaos of city-life. Even if he didn’t have a goal in mind, he thought he might like coming here just to throw himself into the constant struggle of life.
“Not joy, not success, that struggle is the true dance of life…”
Gideon mused to himself as he mingled into the mob of people, his modest presentation letting him blend in seamlessly with the average residents. He walked up and Silk Street, noting the peculiarities of the scene. Hucksters constantly hassled passersby in an effort to sell their wares; there were a variety of people, coming from all different races, cultures, and ages. Some were there with their families, looking for good deals on useful household items; he watched a husband pick out a newish-looking sewing kit, only for his wife to shake her head vigorously and complain about the pricing.
As the captain-in-disguise weaved through the throngs, he was able to make out the pitter-pattering of little shoes on the ground. He felt an impact on his right leg and looked down to see a child, no older than ten years, peering up at him with a dirty face. The boy was wearing a faded green beret cap and an ill-fitting pair of gray overalls, his eyes shone up at Gideon with a breathtaking innocence.
“Sorry!” the boy blurted out, before running away past him.
Gideon pressed his hand to his right pants-pocket.
“That brat stole my wallet!”
He smirked and looked in the direction the boy ran off in.
---
Down Silk Street, dodging and hopping around multitudes of people, the boy jogged, feeling a bead of sweat forming on his forehead. When he saw each intersection come up, he raised his gaze to catch the signs.
“Blackwell Street!”
He turned and broke free from the crowd, sliding swiftly along the walls of the buildings on Blackwell Street. The boy turned a corner and hurried down the adjacent street as well. Around what felt like five different corners, he eventually ducked his way into an alley with an apparent dead end. A man was standing against the wall, arms crossed and obviously waiting for somebody. He looked up when the familiar sound of the boy’s jog reached his ears.
“Jonas!”
“Hey, ya’ got somethin’ already?” the man called. He was about six feet tall and seemingly only in his twenties.
“Yeah,” the boy replied, catching his breath and fumbling around in his pocket. “The guy looked like his boots were new, so I tried to nack ‘im first.” He held out the wallet to the man.
Among the inner city youth, ‘nacking’ was a popular slang for thieving.
“Alright,” Jonas celebrated, snatching the wallet from the boy’s hands. “For getting this one so early, you get thirty percent of the money this time, ya’ see?” He waggled his finger at the boy like a parent assuring their own child.
“Really?” the boy said in disbelief. “There’s these gloves I’ve been wanting to buy for a month now, but the shop that sells ‘em is on Level 1, so it’s a lot more expensive, and that’s where Charlie from down the street got this brand new pair of-”
“Rian,” Jonas stopped the boy mid-sentence.
“Huh?” Rian replied.
“This wallet is empty.”
“W-what?”
The man held out the unfolded wallet, with nothing but a scrap of paper in one of the pockets. He pinched the paper with his fingers and yanked it out.
“What’s it say?” the boy asked, trying to mask his intense nervousness.
“It’s just a…”
The paper had nothing written on it but the message “Y?”
“Can you answer that?” a third voice suddenly rattled from behind the man.
“What in the-?” he couldn’t even turn around before a knife was against his collar.
Rian’s gaze slowly panned upwards to find that the owner of the wallet was now behind Jonas, holding the blade with one hand, the other placed on Jonas’ stomach, fingers stretched deftly over sensitive pressure points.
“Now,” words slipped out of Gideon’s mouth like poison. “I need you to give me some simple information.”
Jonas quivered in his dirty shoes. “Y-ye-” He couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I need you to give me some information, ok?” Gideon phrased it like a teacher interrogating a troublesome student, but hostility and ill-intent broke through to the surface in his tone.
“Yeah!” Jonas finally choked out.
“It’s real simple,” Gideon slowly exerted more pressure on Jonas’ stomach. “Where do you send your profits?”
“Huh?”
The knife pressed against Jonas’ neck, the cold metal shocked his nerves.
“You don’t pocket all the money here, do you?” Gideon’s voice was so kind and cruel it was unbearable. “Am I right? I mean, that piercing on your right ear, that’s a gang sign, isn’t it?”
“My piercing?” Jonas’ mind raced. “How did ‘e take in all that already?”
“Y-yes sir,” Jonas was now referring to this stranger with an honorific without even realizing it.
“You’re one of these scumbags who run gangs of kids like these, am I right?” Gideon didn’t give him a chance to respond before he continued.
“Well, if you’re running a business in this neighborhood, then you must need protections from your gang, so that a rival doesn’t come up and pop you?”
“Yes.”
“Make sense?”
“Uh-huh.” Jonas’ voice shook.
“So where does the money go?”
The young man was quiet for a moment.
“...I can’t tell ya’.”
“Huh?!” Gideon suddenly pressed his fingers down into Jonas’ diaphragm, causing his whole body to jolt. The movement of his core bent him forward, pushing his neck onto the blade. He began to feel his skin break.
“You know,” Gideon’s unbearable tone slipped back into his voice. “Right now, there’s less than a centimeter between this knife and your artery?”
Jonas was dead still, frozen by a fear which had become so intense that his base survival instincts controlled his body.
“So,” the captain offered once more. “Where does the money go?”
---
The Deep Sanctuary Bar was a dark building that found itself on the far east end of The Chaff’s third level. The air quality was repulsive, so softer types tended to keep their distance. Police also rarely patrolled the area, and a different kind of rule had come over those few neighborhoods. Establishments such as this were hubs for seedy activity, but the observation and record-keeping on them was so lackluster that arrests were nearly unheard of.
Gideon quietly opened the door of The Deep Sanctuary, whose windows were boarded up despite lights being visible from outside. The room was wide and dingy, several wooden tables were scattered about, a handful of patrons sat around, some at the tables, others at the bar to the far back. A few lights hanging from the ceiling were all that illuminated the place, smoke was hanging in the air, but there was no one in sight with a cigar.
The undercover captain didn’t look particularly out of place, wearing old and dirty clothes, among the frequenters of the bar. He made his way to the back, the sound of his approach prompting the bartender to turn around and stare at him wordlessly.
“I guess there’s no standard for customer service here,” Gideon mused.
---
In a small back room, Advent Yure stood quietly against a wall, despite there being a simple wooden chair and table placed off-center beneath a hanging lamp.
He was draped in a long cloak patterned with red and black diamonds; around his neck was a golden scarf tied on the outside and fastened with a silver band, so that his silhouette from behind made him look not unlike a bowling pin. Beneath the cloak, he wore a simple black shirt and pants.
The noise of footsteps alerted him to a newcomer. He jumped and looked wildly at the direction it came from. To his even greater surprise, a face was standing in the doorway, a face he would soon recognize.
The man wore a lace body stocking underneath a black leather corset tied up with moitie blue thread. A short frilled skirt extended from his waist to his mid-thigh, trimmed with the same color as the thread of his corset. Black leather boots reached his knees and his hair was big and messy. His hands were fitted tightly into finger-less gloves.
Advent’s mouth gaped for a moment.
“Noire!”
The corseted man stepped over the threshold and smiled.
“Who else?” he teased Advent.
“Well-well,” the younger man stuttered. “I just didn’t realize that the door had been left open, that’s all!”
Noire J. Swift looked behind himself, at the open back door he’d entered through.
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “I figured I’d try this way first, best not to leave a paper trail, am I right?” He closed the door and took a seat at the single chair in the room.
Advent flipped his hood off to reveal his pure white face and silver eye. His right eye’s lashes were oddly long, while his left eye was perpetually closed in a way that made him look hurt. Despite his uncanny appearance, Advent’s face was still flush with happiness at meeting his senior again.
“So, what have you been up to lately?” he asked excitedly whilst hopping to a seat on the table.
Noire tilted his head to the side and looked away, smirking.
“Aw, y’know, my usual business…”
“Come on,” Advent prodded playfully. “You can’t just write everything off like that!”
Noire leaned back and looked up to make eye contact.
“Well…” he said slowly. “You know what, let’s get the business out of the way first, then we can talk about the fun stuff.”
Advent sighed. “Alright, do you have the pictures?”
Noire reached into his bag and pulled out a manila folder. Flopping it onto the table, he opened it up and retrieved five specific papers.
“This is your cover?” Advent clarified, looking closely at one of the sheets. “Mr Taylor Holmes…” his voice trailed off.
“Sure thing,” came the reply from Noire.
The first three papers an in-depth explanation of every conceivable detail of this man, Taylor Holmes’, life, down to his greatest fears and formative childhood experiences. The last two were extensive photographs of his face at different angles, wearing different expressions.
“Is that enough for you?” Noire asked.
“Yeah, should be more than enough...” Advent said distractedly, as he was studying the images closely. After a minute of analyzing this man’s face, he looked up.
“Alright, I should be able to give it a shot now,” he declared. Noire smiled in reply.
“Oh but…” he added, catching himself; his face was suddenly overtaken by a sheepish blush. “Can you look away for it? I don’t usually like doing it in front of people…”
“Yeah, no problem,” Noire agreed, turning around and trying to find something to look at.
“[LOKI N ROLL]-!”
At the naming of his Vocation, Advent felt a sensation build up in his stomach. He cupped his hands in front of his face and tensed his cheeks. Upon opening his mouth, a torrent of thick brown mud came pouring out until it filled his palms and dripped to the floor; an unpleasantly guttural gurgling sound accompanying this action.
“Ok,” he signaled, spitting some unspent mud into the pile. “You can turn around now, I’m going to apply it, just close your eyes.”
Noire turned back and sat up straight, making sure to keep his mouth and eyes shut tight. Advent first pressed his hands to Noire’s face and smeared the mud across, pressing it so that it stuck tightly on. Next, he used his fingers to carefully mold and sculpt the face-mask. He pressed his thumbs to the center to form the correct nose, carefully stroked the bottom to get the right jawline, and worked the whole thing delicately so that the facial structure was as accurate as possible. When he was finished, Advent leaned back and arranged his fingers into a square so that he could focus on the appearance. In moments, the literal face-mask changed color from a dark brown to the lighter shades of Taylor Holmes’ skin tone, even down to a small scar above the right eyebrow.
Gone was Noire’s gallant jawline and strong nose, now replaced by the modest features of this stranger, one whose government database profile had been covertly secured by Noire himself.
“How do I look?” he asked, jokingly.
“Like a new man!” Advent cheerily replied, adding, “That’s my favorite line to drop, if you couldn’t tell.”
He then procured a hand mirror from his cloak to show his partner the disguise.
“It’s like the real thing!” Noire proclaimed, smiling widely, the contours of his new face forming completely naturally with the countenance, as if the muscles were really there.
“I’m glad to be of service,” Advent assured him, placing the mirror on the table. “Now I need to do the same myself.”
The younger man had not formed a disguise for himself, as he wanted Noire to recognize him when they met. Now that they were both together again, there was no need to carry on with his overly noticeable face, the product of a rare inborn disease of which there was only one other recorded case.
Before he was able to repeat his Vocation, the two of them heard the sounds of footsteps coming down the hall.
Advent twitched and turned his disposition on a dime.
“There’s only one back room on the first floor,” he recalled. “We can’t have any witnesses to Noire’s disguise!”
---
Trudging down the dimly lit hallway, the middle aged bartender wiped his brow tiredly. He meant to check up on the dealings going on in the back room, as it was suspicious for a single person to ask for access to one of them. He wouldn’t have forgotten a face like that of the man who had come in, and a newcomer using the back room alone was even more suspect; there was a hidden alley-side door that led into the first floor, but nobody save him should have known about it. Overall, the situation was uncommon enough to drive him to inspect just what was going on.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a gunshot from behind the door down the hall. The bartender’s scowl was broken by sudden shock as he broke into a jog to reach it faster.
“Did that ugly bastard off himself in the back?!”
Unlocking the door with shaky hands and throwing it open, he found an equally gruesome sight. The man who had checked in was standing above another mysterious person, who was sitting in a chair, slumped over, a bullet wound in his head and blood spattered all over the table. The man in the cloak was holding a pistol, raised up to his mouth, assumedly having just blown the smoke away.
The cloaked man glared at him with his one open eye and growled.
“Do you want something to do with this?!”
The bartender staggered backwards.
“N-no!”
“Then get the hell out of here!”
The middle-aged man turned tail and ran back down the hallway to the bar. He spilled out of the door and saw Gideon looking at him with intense eyes.
“What’s going on in there?!” the captain yelled.
“Shot! Someone was shot!” came the bartender’s unsettling response.
Gideon immediately jumped to his feet from the bar stool; the perhaps ten other patrons stared at him with amused looks. He leapt over the counter and rushed past the bartender.
The wallpaper down the dark hall was peeling and dusty; the roughly ten feet of distance between the two doors quickly disappeared, and Gideon found himself looking at an empty room.
“Huh?”
---
Advent and Noire ran through the dark city streets. At this time, the lights were dimmed in these areas because of the hesitance to supply equal amounts of power to neighborhoods that produced little to no income for the city.
“You’re a quick thinker, Advent!” Noire praised his younger partner.
“Aw, thanks!” was his reply, through sharp huffs of breath. “You know, I can do the shape, sound, smell, and texture as long as I know it!”
He was ecstatic to receive an honest compliment from someone he admired so greatly.
---
Gideon began a thorough investigation of the room. First, he checked the entire space for any evidence, coming up short. It appeared that the whole place had been cleaned just prior to the night, given the relative cleanliness of the floor and walls.
He then turned his attention to the pile of mud on the table.
“What could this possibly be?”
The bartender slowly entered the room from behind. Gideon turned around to face him inquisitively.
“Is there any way someone could get out of this room without going out the front door?”
The bartender hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“They only could have left this way,” he informed him while pressing on a space in the wall which promptly swung back to reveal the outside. “But nobody,” he continued, “should know about this door.”
Gideon puzzled for a moment.
“A secret door, a pile of mud…
One person enters from the front, two people leave out the secret back, neither of them should know about it, they leave a pile of mud.
The only way mud would be here is if someone brought it from ground level, there’s basically no way to find soft earth down here- everything is solid rock.
So somebody brought mud here? And left it?
Why would anyone bring a liter of mud down here? Is this a red herring?
Did someone come here knowing they would kill someone else, and this is a bizarre clue to lead me off-track?
No.
That doesn’t make sense either, no one would expect the police to get involved, otherwise all the other shady dealings in this place would be found out as well.
So…”
Gideon touched a hand to the mud on the table, and felt a shudder resound through his whole body.
The mud wasn’t particularly strange by itself, it was the expected temperature and texture of slowly hardening mud. What was so extreme about it was the sense of deja vu it triggered in him.
“This feeling…
No…
That would be too strange…
But…
This feels like a small piece of what I felt back then…”
When Gideon’s body was ravaged by Warren Roseraid’s Salamander, he fell to within an inch of his life. As he dipped in and out of consciousness, the friendly saloon owner, Gabriel, tended to his immediate wounds and gave him water. Gideon’s first cohesive thought was that he had never felt a sensation like that attack in his life. He had sustained various bodily wounds prior, but this was the first assault that had scratched his soul.
Like the nerves of a newborn child, his soul’s sensitivity to contact suddenly intensified. Despite not being nearly as potent as Salamander, Loki N Roll’s mud still retained a trace of fading spiritual charge. If Gideon had been capable of spirit sight, he would have been able to see it rising off of the pile like steam.
Having first experienced an inferno, he was now touching dying firewood. His spiritual awareness wasn’t nearly acute enough to make the distinction, but his body, or rather, his spirit body, could intuit it.
The captain pensively held his hand back up, watching his fingertips, as if they would reveal to him some new information.
“If the Fang Team had some skill that made them able to do what an army of agents could not-”
Excitement and adrenaline pumped thoughts through his mind even faster than usual.
“If they were handpicked by one of their own, and all fit that criteria, then that sounds to me like they had some kind of special ability-”
It all came together in his mind.
“If the Fang Team was made up of anybody-it would be Vocation users!”
Bingo. He had it.
---
Gideon paced quickly down the street, passing the same riff-raff as before. To his right, if he could see over the tops of buildings, he would have been able to make out the light of the setting sun bouncing around the ravine and spilling into the city.
He made for the nearest elevator and took it straight up to the surface. He was so focused that he forgot to enjoy the clean air which flooded the car as soon as the doors opened.
He had been given a lead- that a member of the Fang Team was suspected to have appeared in Hilltop, spotted in the lower levels of The Chaff. He assumed an inconspicuous appearance and went for his gut feeling- to discern the location of a place which would house unscrupulous types and serve as a meeting spot. Using his knowledge of the area, he correctly followed a strategy of finding a member from a local gang, extorting information from him, and investigating the Deep Sanctuary. Instead of relying on information from the police about “suspected” areas of congregation, he’d gone immediately to the source.
The telephone was a fairly new product, and as per agreement between the city and the company which owned the monopoly on the business, public-use phone stations were set up at various points around the city in exchange for the company investing in phone lines to be built.
Gideon reached one such station and inserted a quarter. He spun the rotary dial to a number he knew would pick up. The phone rang for a few moments before a crackle of static buzzed from the speaker.
“Hey, Isaiah, this is Gideon. I’m in Hilltop right now, and I need you to get down here.”