Chapter Sixty-three – Detective Rabbit, Do Do Do Do Do DO Do…

The clock was ticking down on her transformation, and Pandy found herself obsessively calling up her stats in order to check it. She at least finally remembered that she could collapse the different sections, so it wasn’t quite as bothersome to keep it up in the middle of her vision. Maybe next time she saw Keros, she would ask him if he could move it to the top right or something.

Name: Pandy

Race: Rabbit? (Deceased)

Age: 24

LF: -2/1

Mana: 18/19

Stats▴

Skills▾

• Hop: Lv.15 (30/55)

• Bite: Lv. 19 (24/100)

• Scratch: Lv. 11 (2/19)

• Minor Heal: Lv. 19 (44/100)

• Wings of Glory: Lv. 1

• Verdant Surge: Lv. 1

• Vita Herbalis: Lv. 1

• Spark

• Shifting Faces: Lv. 1 (1/2)     00:21:34

Boons▴

Corruption Points: 95

Twenty minutes wasn’t a lot, so Pandy moved fast. Her health and Mana had mostly recovered on their own, but she still did a quick Minor Heal, just to bring her use count up. Feeling her forehead, she could tell that the bump was gone, which was undoubtedly suspicious, but no more suspicious than the fact that she had no idea what Ms. Wellington did and didn’t move, speak, or act like the Shadow. Yeah, this was going to be fine. Still, she’d told Thaniel she would try, and try she would, at least until someone attempted to kill or lock her up. Someone should really mark those big blue eyes as lethal weapons, though.

The room was still illuminated, but Pandy had no idea where the light was coming from, or how to turn it on and off herself. It was a very diffuse light, with no particular source, and she thought it might actually be something the chancellor had done, rather than the result of some spell or item in the room. She would find out soon enough, she supposed.

Taking advantage of the sudden improvement in visibility, Pandy dug through the small closet, finding nothing particularly interesting or suspicious. Mindful of the fact that her inventory made things reappear exactly as they were when she put them in, she donned a dress and underthings, struggling only a little with all of the hooks that held everything closed. Once she was fully dressed, she imagined it all into her inventory, and to her immense relief, that seemed to be how it was counted.

She had five slots in her inventory, and all of them were empty, now that she’d finally gotten rid of the disgusting ‘blood potion’ and – sadly – her hard-won soup. With shoes, socks, underwear, petticoats, underdress, overdress – probably not what it was actually called – and a few pins stuck rather haphazardly in her hair, the outfit consisted of far more than five pieces, but they all disappeared together, allowing her to put together a second outfit, slightly fancier than the first.

Even staff was expected to ‘dress for dinner’, and it would be a lot easier to just make a fancy outfit now than worry about doing it later. Plus, she piled on all the jewelry she could find, hoping that at least some of it was real, and she could sell it if and when all of this was over. After all, it wasn’t like Ms. Wellington needed it anymore, and her family wasn’t likely to claim her, if she even had any family.

Once outfit number two was safely stored in Pandy’s inventory – leaving her naked again – she pulled on a heavy nightgown made of surprisingly sensible cotton, or perhaps linen. Whatever it was, it was thick enough that she felt fully covered, which meant she was ready to keep looking.

All of that took more than ten minutes of her remaining time, leaving her only about nine, and Pandy began to tear the room apart. Books were shaken, pillows tossed, she even pulled the mattress from the frame, even though it was ridiculously heavy. What was it made of, solid gold?

That thought made her pause, and she looked up from the jar of sweet-smelling lotion she’d just opened. The vanity was covered in creams, lotions, powders, and brushes, most of which she didn’t know what to do with. No, no one would ever possibly suspect that she wasn’t the perfectly coiffed and made-up teacher.

But that was a worry for future Pandy, and right now, she wanted to know why that mattress was so heavy. Yes, she was sure that this world’s mattresses had springs, thanks to her time spent beneath Thaniel’s bed, but she didn’t think that was enough to make the bed that heavy.

Thanks to her increased Strength, Pandy was able to wrestle the mattress completely off the bedframe, finding as she did that one corner of the mattress was slightly heavier than the others, though all four corners seemed oddly heavier than the center. Feeling around the seam at what had been the bottom of the mattress, she found that the stitches were a bit lumpier, and the thread not quite the same color as the rest of it.

Sharp object, sharp object, sharp- Her eye caught on a tiny pair of scissors sitting on the vanity. It was gold, and the handle was shaped like a stork or some kind of bird, but the inch-long blades were wickedly sharp. They made short work of the thread, allowing Pandy to lay open the fabric, revealing the inner springs and stuffing.

To her surprise, the springs weren’t. Not exactly, anyway. They were metal, and they did provide some boinginess to the bed, supporting the feather-stuffed topper, but rather than being the familiar coils of steel or some similar metal, they were wooden, and made of a single curl, like someone had shaved off a thin wood paring that curved naturally. Bemusedly, she pulled one from the surrounding straw and pressed on the top. It took a fair amount of pressure to bend it, and when she let go, it sprang back into shape, the spatulate top creating a sort of springy platform to rest on.

Magic. She found it in the oddest of places, and now she found herself wondering if these ‘springs’ were created by low-paid workers in factories, draining their innate magic daily so that wealthy people could rest easy, or were they made by elementals, produced in such enormous quantities that even the middle-class could afford to sleep in comfort? Were they used in carriages to provide a smooth ride, and did children make them ‘walk’ down stairs as entertainment?

Nope, no time for that. Right now she needed to focus on what she was doing, and she could think about springs later. She pulled tufts of straw from around the first few springs, starting with the corner closest to her. At first, she thought there was nothing there, and then the soft clink of metal on metal sent a surge of excitement through her, and she looked more closely.

Coins. Not in a bag, but scattered throughout the straw, spreading out their weight and making sure they didn’t create a lump that someone might notice if they sat down on the bed. Once Pandy saw them, she realized that she’d probably missed some others, and looked through the clumps of straw more carefully, tossing the coins onto the soft chair and the equally soft carpet beneath it. 

She would have to count it later, but the important thing was that there were gold coins mixed in among the silver and copper, and she was fairly certain that not all of the money was from West Altheric. Their coins looked a lot like US coins; round, with milled edges, and a raised pattern. At least some of these were square, with smooth edges and an image roughly stamped into them.

This took far more time than she liked, but soon enough she worked her way up to the top end of the bed. The lumpy stitches had ended a good ways before this, so she found herself crawling into a cocoon of straw and shaved wood, but her questing fingers found something smooth and silky that most definitely wasn’t organic. The other corner yielded a sheathed blade, somewhere between the length of a kitchen knife, and the length of swords she’d seen in museums.

Just over a minute remained on the timer when she thought, <Cancel Shifting Faces,> and found herself back in the form of a rabbit, struggling to emerge from a surprisingly comfortable burrow. She held the sheath of the knife-sword in her teeth, hauling it back into the light, then dove back in for the smooth stuff that turned out to be fabric. This was particularly difficult to retrieve, since the material wanted to grab onto every piece of straw and catch every sproingy curl of wood, but eventually it, too, lay exposed.

The material was black, which didn’t really surprise Pandy. After all, what self-respecting villain wore anything else? What did surprise her was that it felt like some kind of spandex, and when she grabbed some in her teeth and pushed her claws against it, it stretched, rather than resisting or tearing. It also looked far too small for Ms. Wellington, unless she was able to shrink to Isidor’s size. Given how much it stretched, though, she supposed that if Ms. Wellington didn’t mind wearing something that fit like a second skin, it would probably work.

Pandy put the stretchy skin-suit into her inventory, mainly so she could look at it more closely some other time. It was solid black, without any handy labels telling her it was made in East Altheric by the Necromantic Nomnomicons, Hand Wash Only, Line Dry, Do Not Set On Fire. There was nothing helpful about it, so she tucked it away to examine the next time she had hands.

The knife-sword wasn’t much more helpful. It was tied into the sheath with a simple leather strap, and when she managed to pull the knot loose, the blade immediately slipped off the sloped side of the disemboweled mattress and thumped to the floor. Pandy froze, eyes on the door to the office, but it remained closed.

After more than a minute of standing like the taxidermy bunny she almost was, Pandy finally hopped down to check out the weapon. To her surprise, while the handle was a fairly normal-looking brown leather, the blade was as black as the skin-suit. Not only was it black, but rather than reflecting light as one would normally expect from metal, the light seemed to disappear into it, making it look like a knife-shaped hole into outer space.

It was also incredibly sharp, as Pandy discovered when she turned to look at the hilt and came a little too close to the dark edge. She didn’t even feel the cut, just saw the red numbers float across her vision.

-4 LF

Only then did she pull back, seeing red drops darkening the pale brown carpet. Then the pain hit her, and she flinched, feeling like someone had drawn a line of fire across her shoulder..

You have been Poisoned. Poison is ineffective. You take no damage.

Oh. Well, that was a nice perk of not exactly being alive. Seriously, she would have to make sure this thing didn’t fall into the wrong hands, though. It was dangerous!

Hopping back onto what was left of the bed, Pandy pushed the sheath after the long knife – Swife? Knord? – and with great difficulty and a few more cuts managed to get the thing sheathed. She cast Minor Heal again, reducing her Mana to eight, and put the weapon into her inventory as well. That meant three of her five inventory slots were now full, and she still had the slinky black outfit to add.

Once that was done, she found herself at a bit of a loss as to what to do with the coins now scattered all over the carpet and chair. There was no bag to put them all in, and unless they were made into a single item, they wouldn’t go into her final inventory slot. Seriously, she needed more space, but getting it would be…challenging. Still, now that she had a human shape, it wasn’t entirely out of the question.

After picking up a few gold pieces in her mouth, only to put them down again, Pandy finally decided to simply push them all into the gaps around the chair cushion. That was where loose change always ended up eventually anyway, so maybe if someone found it they would just think it fell out of her pocket. Purse? Whatever.

Gathering all of the coins took a while, but as she did so, Pandy detected no sounds of movement from outside her door, and surely it had to be getting late by now. The dinner bell would ring any time, and then Pandy would put the next part of her plan into motion.