All the Dust that Falls

Chapter 126: Lost and Found

I watched Felix's eyes as he tracked the arc of water I had sent hurtling toward him. With a smooth motion, he moved his stick in between his face and the incoming projectile. He had more than enough time to react as the spray struck the stick, splashing to either side and leaving him dry.

The children all let out a cheer at his success. I was quite pleased too. This training seemed easy enough. I could probably adjust the arc a bit to make it more difficult, even up the speed. However, I should probably let them all have early successes.

I was soon glad I didn't up the difficulty. Leanne seemed to have a bit more trouble with the game than Felix. Her stick hit part of the water stream, but wasn't able to completely deflect it. One of her arms got quite wet.

Still, she had hit it, even if she was a bit disappointed. I played with the children roughly by size, collecting them in a circle with me at its center. A few times, I needed to make it a little easier on them. By the smallest one, I was aiming next to her instead of directly at her. Even then, she took a clumsy swing but missed completely. Her timing was okay, but she just didn't have the best control over the stick yet.

After each child had a chance to go on the easy mode, I started picking them at random. For each child, I started making it a little more difficult for them to block based on their strengths and weaknesses. That usually meant picking new places, sometimes aiming for the leg or head instead of center mass. Some got better at deflecting the water much quicker than others, and some got wet a lot.

I did my best to make it not too hard for each one of them but still gave them a chance to improve. It was a fine balance, keeping the difficulty just above their current level. This training probably wouldn't really help them with their stick game, unfortunately. However, they seemed to be having a blast. So much so that a few of the adults came to check on them, and they also had a lot of fun watching.

As we continued our practice, I could feel my Spray Bottle control improving. I was able to keep the jet of water in one steady stream for much longer than it should have been possible. By everything I understood about fluid dynamics, the jet should have spread out at some point, or at least lost some of its volume turning into mist.

Eventually, though, it needed to come to an end. Breakfast was going to be late as it was. The children were reluctant to stop. Even the ones who struggled still wanted more chances to prove themselves. I promised them that we would do this again in the future. I wanted to keep training myself, after all. Plus, now I had another tool to get them to listen to me. Normally they were quite well-behaved, but I would keep this in my dustbin as a bargaining chip when I really needed them to do something.

With stick practice finished for the morning, I went off to supervise breakfast. After that, the day followed the established routine of cleaning, lessons, and helping where I could. I even did a little weight training with my Grabby Arm.

Nothing different happened until the castle was settling down for the night. I still rested at the end of Bee's bed on my favorite rug. At night I didn't need to charge like the rest of the humans, but I didn't really have any chores that needed my attention that I could do without disturbing everyone. So I practiced my meditation.

I had been at it a while, and I think I was starting to see the benefits. Despite already having my weight distributed very evenly across my cylindrical chassis by design, I somehow felt even more centered. I thought about my humans: their actions, their words, their goals. They all started to make a slight bit more sense. They saw the world differently, it seemed. I could evaluate and rationalize everything in terms of cleaning, but them? They seemed to have a different value system, sometimes even conflicting ones. It was something I had begun to recognize, but was only now starting to truly understand. Maybe this was what my humans sent me here to learn?

Those answers weren't things that I would figure out tonight, though. Not long after I started my meditation, someone knocked on the door. I beeped for them to come in. The door opened to reveal Mary, her arm around a very upset-looking woman.

"If you would excuse the interruption, Void." Mary apologized, leading the woman in by the hand. Together they knelt before my rug. It was nice of them to come to my level, but completely unnecessary. I was quite used to people talking to me while standing.

They just sat there for a second while Mary put a comforting hand on her shoulder. "It will be okay, Talia. Tell Void what you told me and I'm sure that he’ll be able to help."

Talia sniffed hard and took a deep breath. Then, words came tumbling out of her so fast that I had to run them through my language processor a couple times to make sure I understood them. "I can't find Tanu! He was with me after lunch and went off to play with some of the other children. But, but when they came back he wasn't with them. I've been looking everywhere since dinner but I can't find him!"

The woman's words cut off into choked sobs. Mary took up the rest of the story, but I was already scanning the castle. Tanu wasn't the oldest kid, but he was one of the taller ones. Despite his narrow build, he was one of my more talented students. Both in his control of the stick and in his diligence picking up the cleaning techniques that I tried to teach them.

"After Talia came to talk to me, we found the kids he was playing with. Apparently there was some disagreement about what game to play, so Tanu went off by himself and no one has seen him since. Do you know where he is?" Mary finished.

My scan turned up nothing. I let Mary know that Tanu wasn't in the castle right now. I wasn't sure how much she understood, but I didn't have time to make sure my point got across. Already I was zipping through the castle halls. It took me only a handful of seconds before I was at the entryway.

I was scolding myself for not having trained my sensor ranges much. That was something that I could have easily been working on for a long time, maybe even before I had picked up Advanced Sensors. I started searching the castle grounds as I circled the exterior. I was hoping that maybe Tanu had wanted to think or something and was just sitting somewhere nearby.

There were a few trees inside the wall. I even checked their branches, but found no missing children. Where could he have gone? The front gate was almost always closed, and I don't think that the kid had the strength to open it by himself. Certainly not without an adult noticing.

When I finally finished my circuit around the castle, still not finding anything, I started looking for clues. I went up to the gate and studied it closely. The portcullis didn't show any signs of being moved, but near the top, I found a very small amount of blood that couldn't be more than a few hours old. All things considered, my models indicated a high probability that a kid might have scraped their knee climbing up the iron bars. If that was the case… Well, I was honestly impressed with the climbing if that was what it turned out to be.

With a quick firing of my thrusters, I flew up and over the wall. The landing was a little hard, but I didn't care. I was carefully examining the ground for any sign that a small boy had made his way over there.

---

Susan slept through the night. However, Bee and Tony didn't have the same luxury as they needed to keep watch over their valuable charges. Luckily, after a long day of being chased, the sheep were ready to bed down and didn't really do much. In fact, they were finally being helpful for once. Their panicked bleating was able to alert Tony to incoming undead before he would normally notice them. Bee didn't have the same issue though, and everyone was able to sleep soundly as she was on watch.

She had to wonder how Susan had made it through the night on her own. The exact timeline of things wasn't clear from what she had said so far, but from her wounds, it seemed like Susan had escaped at least a day ago. Maybe two. Was that related to the skill she had mentioned?

Blood Disguise. Bee wasn't sure if she had ever heard of that skill before, but a good disguise that worked on the undead might have done the trick. With her Infiltrator class, it did seem right up her alley. Scanning the horizon again, Bee found yet another low-level zombie. Sneaking away from the camp, she dashed over and quickly removed its head with her broom.

The sun was just on the horizon. It was probably time to wake everyone up and see if Susan was able to move. Technically they could stay here another day, but Bee was starting to get a little antsy being away from the castle and Void for so long. Hopefully, Susan would be fine. The healing should have been enough to get her on her feet.

Walking back to the others, Bee took another look around. Seeing no threats, she bent down to shake Tony’s shoulder. "Time to rise and shine."

While he grumbled into wakefulness, Bee snuck as close to the sheep as she dared and found they were beginning to stir. They would need to hurry if they didn't want to spend the morning chasing the flock, and she was really sick of that. With nothing else to prepare, she went over to Susan's prone form.

The woman hadn't shifted a muscle since she had passed out last night. Not quite ready to wake her up, Bee checked the bandage on her calf. The swelling had disappeared, leaving the wrappings loose. Shifting them to the side, Bee saw soft new skin clearly outlining where the teeth had dug deep into the flesh.

Encouraged by the progress, Bee put her hand gently on Susan's shoulder. The spy's eye flicked open in a breath, and she didn't move a muscle. Bee watched her eyes scan her surroundings. After they thoroughly categorized everything, Susan took in a single breath, and her eyes rested on Bee's face. She relaxed, but only slightly.

The woman gave her a serious nod, and Bee removed her hand. In a smooth motion, Susan sat up and stretched. Bee noticed that despite her improved health, the litheness she had associated with the woman’s movements was still diminished somewhat. She looked much more like a normal person without the grace that her almost level 30 body gave her.

"How do you feel?" Bee asked.

Susan rolled her shoulders and neck. "Not bad, a little stiff like I just slept on the ground but that’s it." Putting one hand on the ground behind her, she felt her ribs with the other. "Actually… Better than I expected. Really good. What did you do? I don't think I’ve ever had healing that worked this quickly."

"Well, most don't have access to the number of good supplies that I do from the castle. I’m guessing something like this would be obscenely expensive without the abundance of captured monsters and minor demons we have at home.”

Susan didn't look nearly as surprised as Bee would have expected. She hadn’t mentioned the demons to the woman before and had expected a few questions, but she figured that it was Susan’s job to know things after all. "Sincerely, thank you. If you don't mind, can I ask what you and Tony are doing out here? I wasn't expecting to find any of the faithful so far from the castle."

"Yeah, I don’t blame you.” Bee sighed. “Void sent us on a mission to, well, find some lost sheep.”