Chapter 205: Interlude — Fisheye Lens

Hi! Am really excited about sharing today's chapter, I hope you'll like it!! Montaparte is very fun to write.

Though tbh at this point in the arc I am incredibly excited about every chapter I get to share lol

Montaparte’s vocation was to solve problems. That, occasionally, involved taking on a new perspective. To look at things from a position hitherto assumed impractical, wrong, or difficult. Her experience was that once a thing had been observed from all possible angles, any puzzle tethered to it would come undone that same moment. 

Solving puzzles was thus primarily an occupation of doing the legwork. Of observation. Of considering options, weighing where to go and when. Trails could run cold, memories fade, evidence be destroyed — and while sometimes shortcuts existed, investigation remained mostly a work of triage. One bad choice, one hour spent too long on an obscurity or distraction, could spell the end — the window of time during which an answer could be found running out.

Montaparte considered herself, by now, the leading expert on what happened That Night. She knew with relative certainty the position and pursuit of every single person on the train.

Fentanyle was in the locomotive.

Carriage One: Poxie the puppet, Omi the clothing moth, Log the shark, Theora the Sun, Belliandra the Medusa, Qyy the Encyclopedia.

Carriage Two: Empty.

Carriage Three: Plink the phoenix and Ulber the bartender.

Carriage Four: Dr. Alp the physician, Rita under the clouds, Dema the Immortal, Treeka in her pot, Raquina the stewardess, Entrichia the cook, and the engine caretaker.

Carriage Five: Kaylay, Rita’s Knight.

Carriage Six: Montaparte herself.

Everyone accounted for, nobody missed. Except Fentanyle, dead the next day, murdered. No suitable magical items to aid in the crime on the train, nobody able to kill at a distance, all entrances to the Lavish surveilled.

Now, Montaparte found herself in carriage five, finally ready to exhaust her very last options. Dema was still hovering around her, and it was a welcome presence, despite everything. Montaparte could no longer share most of her investigation with the little demoness, but that didn’t seem to be a problem. They paced through the corridor together, toward the end. Behind the door up ahead lay Montaparte’s carriage — her carriage because she was the only one living in it, and had long since repurposed it as her own residence. Her destination still lay far ahead; the staff had accepted the decades she would need to spend in this place, and had accommodated to suit her.

But that meant Montaparte knew carriage six by heart. It was her home. She knew the storage compartment in it, knew every single passenger cabin therein.

They arrived at the hatch leading down to carriage five’s ground floor, and Dema used a gush of her blood to pry it open. A ladder appeared, as it existed in every carriage, and they climbed down. The storage compartments were relatively small — only the communal areas of the fronts and backs of each carriage had room to store anything, because in passenger cabins, the lower floor was occupied by lavatories.

Montaparte stepped into the small room and took a furtive glance around. If she was ready to believe — ready to believe Dema and Theora, ready to believe the staff, ready to believe the polycule — then she would find the answer to the mystery down here. 

And so they searched. 

“Are you finding anything?” Montaparte asked after opening the third cabinet door while Dema was parsing through a shelf.

“This is full of bed sheets,” Dema said with a hum. “Nothing interesting.”

“Bedsheets, huh…” Montaparte trailed off. “Curious.”

“Wha—” Dema turned her head, eyes big and alert, gleaming. “Bedsheets are curious? Why’s that?”

Montaparte gave a one-shoulder shrug while flipping through a batch of folded staff uniforms. “It’s curious because we haven’t seen any bed sheets in any of the other storage areas. But this train would, of course, have them stashed somewhere.”

“Yeah… so?”

“So this makes sense,” Montaparte said, disgruntled, gesturing around the little room. “Which is notable, because things aren’t supposed to make sense down here. We’re meant to be finding curiosities on this floor, not the expected. Something that unravels the mystery.”

“Yeah… that’s a bummer…” Dema let out a sigh. “Y’know, if we can’t find anything, maybe there really was no crime…”

“As fun as that fantasy may be to indulge in,” Montaparte replied dryly, “that still wouldn’t solve the question as to why we found a body. We checked with Qyy’s database and exchanged letters with Thalassia. The sources are conclusive: If Fentanyle had died of natural causes or by her own volition, we would have collected different facts. The magical residue, the state of her body, self-consistency of the Lavish — what we found leaves only room for murder. How is it going?”

Dema sighed. She didn’t seem happy with that idea. “One second,” she said as she was checking through another shelf. “Also… shouldn’t we search in like, the kitchen and the staffer’s rooms and such?” Dema’s voice sounded slightly terse.

“I already did,” Montaparte said wryly, sharing Dema’s perturbance. “I did it alone, to make it easier for the staffers to agree. The kitchen underneath the diner was of no note, as were the staffer’s rooms right next to it in the same carriage. The storage compartment in the lounge next to the laundry room was equally of little note. I checked the infirmary and Dr. Alp’s room next to it, and that leaves the entire lounge carriage without results.” 

The truth was — Montaparte had checked these first, in an all-nighter. She hadn’t told Dema, because it was a sensitive issue; Montaparte was reliant on the goodwill of the staffers to perform the investigation largely unhindered, but any individual staffer would also have had the easiest time erasing their trails with their knowledge of the train. Similarly to Theora, Montaparte did not like the idea of suspecting any of them — if she were to find out one of them had participated in the crime, it would be difficult to deal with from her position. 

“Ah,” Dema let out and snapped her fingers. A little gush of blood carried a small item from the top of a shelf down into her open palm.

A feather.

Montaparte leaned down to inspect it. “Fentanyle’s,” she surmised, and Dema nodded.

“Felt its magic. Definitely Fentanyle’s…

“There seems to be not a single spot on this train Fentanyle’s crows have not accessed in some way,” Montaparte said. “She really did her best to ensure Omiaradne’s safety.”

“Yeah…” Dema sighed. “Gotta have to be a struggle for Omi. Being controlled’s no good!”

Seeing that feather gave Montaparte a flash of memory from the engine carriage — she’d found three feathers in the engine room itself. However, she’d been granted no further access to it, for concerns of the investigation interfering with vital modules. She even found some outdated blueprints and manuals for the machinery. But no luck in these, either. 

While it was true that the train could have been used to amend reality and “make up” a murder and prove the Sun’s theories correct, there was no possible way for the train to have garnered enough energy to actually perform such a monumental operation. The praise books had been filled steadily, mostly by Omiaradne and Plink, but no amount of praise could have split reality in half.

Dema stored away the feather to return it to Omiaradne.

Montaparte let out a hum. “Either way, we’re done here.” She motioned toward the other end of the carriage. “Only the front compartment is left. Keep your eyes open. We’ll find something there.

Dema was about to take the first step into the corridor, when she hesitated. She turned to Montaparte, mouth ajar and frowning.

In her smoky voice she murmured, “Someone’s lonely.”

Just as Dema was about to say something else, the room flashed in bright light.

For a second, they both stood still. Montaparte’s head went into overdrive. Then, in a burst of sudden clarity, her brain zapped to a conclusion. “Go find the teleporter,” she hissed at Dema, pointing to the other end of the carriage. Then, Montaparte herself turned around, jumping up the ladder.

If she was right, she only had mere seconds. 

A flash of light. A teleporter activating in the storage compartment meant that it was hidden. Rushing after whoever was escaping from that compartment would prove difficult if it was concealed. So, Montaparte threw herself through the corridor upstairs, to reach the teleporter in the lounge.

She was making educated guesses. Someone was leaving rather than entering the storage compartment; if they were entering, Dema would see them. It was more likely they were leaving, because Dema and Montaparte had just talked about searching through that compartment, where the mysterious person was likely hiding. 

Another guess: That teleporter would, like all other teleporters, connect to the Lavish.

Within seconds, Montaparte disintegrated through the teleporter in the lounge and appeared in front of the open Lavish. She rushed in and found herself amidst a sea of mammoth trees. 

Ah. Curious. A forest of big trees to hide behind. The perfect place to run away. 

The perfect place to fail at it.

Montaparte opened her umbrella, a sea of stars greeting her from its underside. Whoever had decided to rush in here to hide likely did not know her. Montaparte’s vocation was to solve problems. This wasn’t one. 

Footprints on the needle-littered ground. Faint sounds of rushed breathing. 

Montaparte raised the umbrella, slowly turned it in her hand. She took one, two, three steps ahead. Eyes wide — wide — w i d e. Then her vision switched to full; the complement of singularity.

She saw the light bending around trees, followed its bounces, assumed the position of a fisheye in all knowable spots within two hundred steps. And then she stared.

This wasn’t a problem. This was a solution. As she gazed under the shadow of the stars, her mind put together all clues. The truth laid bare.

A secret passage to enter the Lavish. That solved the case, albeit not in a way she initially expected. It wasn’t on the blueprints. This machine was old, so old. No single staffer had been here since its conception… a part of the train, unknown even to them? How well was it hidden? In a frontside storage area, far from the ladder; bothersome to reach, rarely inspected. If not for this stowaway, it might have remained concealed. 

Montaparte smirked. She knew with relative certainty the position and activities of every single person on the train, she knew who was lying, knew who was telling the truth. She knew now the key to this puzzle — the true crime to unravel.

It wasn’t about who killed Fentanyle.

It was about who poisoned Rita.

“I found you,” she said, in as soft a voice as she could muster. She stepped gently over dirt and needles, approaching the thing in this forest that wasn’t right, the one who did not belong. “Don’t run away. You will not find harm with me.”

She knelt down and offered her hand.

Gazing down from all positions, she saw the child reach out to her.