The moss-covered ground parted slightly as Vivian emerged. Lucy’s mother looked younger, healthier, and very much like a Liyun’shael. That was to be expected though, at least by those of us who were familiar with Salem and Brynna. It brought back memories of Salem’s own rebirth in the game as we waited for Vivian to open her eyes.

Her eyes fluttered open and I saw from the light of my hair that they were now bright green like Salem’s rather than the slightly dull grey that they had been before. Her hair was now replaced with a thick and luxurious mane of leafy vines and her skin was a coating of olive green moss. Even just waking up and not completely alert, she had a healthy glow about her now that she had been sorely lacking before. She was brimming with life and I could see in her eyes as she looked around at us that she felt rejuvenated, even in her weakened post-rebirth state.

“Mommy!” Lucy scrambled toward her mother and once she caught a good look at her, looked uncertainly toward Salem.

“Careful, little one,” Venika cautioned. “Your mother has been through a big change and she’s probably tired. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. It’s only her body that’s changed, she’s still the same person inside, just healthy now and a bit different on the outside.”

“She’s gonna be okay?” the young girl pressed, looking again from her mother to Salem.

“You’re looking a lot better now, Vivian,” Salem said with a smile and a nod toward Lucy. “You should take it easy for a bit though and eat something, the induction process can be exhausting and you were near death when you started. I know from experience how that feels. I need to warn you, you’ve changed, you’re a Liyun’shael like me now and… uhh… technically my daughter.”

Vivian’s eyes drifted over to Salem and she nodded tiredly. “Thank you, Salem. How did you…”

Salem seemed reluctant to answer the unfinished question, not wanting to pressure Vivian with the knowledge of what she had been given. Salem had given a part of herself though, one of her few chances at having children someday, so I jumped in. “She gave you one of her seeds. It’s how her kind reproduces, and now you’re one of them. Liyun’shael are a type of Fae related to Nymphs and they only have three seeds to give over their lifetime, which can be hundreds to thousands of years. It’s considered a great gift to make someone their child, one that they don’t give lightly.”

“And Salem hasn’t been a Liyun’shael for long,” Nishalle added. “Only a few weeks from our perspective.”

Vivian’s eyes widened as the realization of what Salem had given struck her. “I… thank you, Salem. I guess I’ll be a Fae after all, and I won’t have to go through the simulation, though I had hoped to get a few of those skill downloads that you all talked about.”

“There’s no reason that you can’t,” I told her with a smile. “There are F.I.Ts with only water inside for those who don’t want to change their bodies. Even the ones with the transformation mixture inside will only change you if one or more genetic samples are provided to do so. We probably won’t need you out here immediately so I was actually hoping you would consider going into the simulation anyway. Volunteers are being gathered to learn your skills and while the skills and knowledge are great, practical hands-on experience is important too. You could help give those volunteers that experience while learning new skills of your own and adjusting to your new self.”

“If she does that, I’ll want to go in with her, Tae,” Salem told me apologetically. “There are things I’ll need to teach her about being a Liyun’shael and she’ll need to be taught the basics of using her magick too. Especially glamours.”

I nodded as I followed Salem’s subtle tilt of the head toward where Vivian was unconsciously tugging at her soil-covered clothes. She would need illusions to fit in among Humans, not only because wearing clothes would be uncomfortable for her but also because I was going to need her with me at some point to buy all of the necessary equipment for her practice and that of any others who learned her skills. “I understand, Salem. We’ll miss you but it’s only going to be a week at most from our perspective before the sim is finished. Why don’t we work out the details while we get something to eat?”

After I had reluctantly woken up Rei and Lissany, my Guardian followed her nose to lead us to one of the areas where the morning meal was still being served. Tsukiko was there with her massive familiar and was able to tell us what exactly we were having for breakfast besides fish and rice since apparently we were mostly surrounded by people from Spring server at the moment. She explained that the green stuff was nori, a kind of dried seaweed that’s high in protein, and that the hot soup was miso soup. I had heard of them before but never been able to try them and I found them tasty, even if they were a bit different from what I was used to.

Lucy didn’t seem so sure about trying it but relented and did so after a stern look from her mother. I guess that she was taking better to her Mom’s change than I had thought and though she made a few faces at first she managed to eat her entire meal. She stayed close to Vivian the whole time though, seemingly unwilling to let her mother out of her sight again. It was a good thing that Vivian was planning to take her daughter into the simulation as well, they both needed time to get used to Vivian’s changes and prepare for their new lives in Varüus’kiel.

As we ate we talked about what they both might want to learn in the simulation and Lucy was still determined to become a Guardian like Lissany. Vivian compromised with her. She told her that if when she was Lissany’s age she still wanted to be a Guardian then she could take the training for it. As for her daughter becoming a Beastkin, she was willing to allow it.

If later on Lucy found that she really wasn’t happy that way she could always be changed again with the F.I.Ts and there was also the option that Vivian might be able to offer her daughter one of her seeds. While we couldn’t determine exactly what animal might Call to Lucy it could be somewhat influenced by the personalized simulation for her race and class after she was done character creation. She would be a Beastkin with the child class for now and we would talk with those controlling the simulation about placing her in an area with a lot of felines to increase her chances.

Vivian thought that having the F.I.T attendant monitoring her tube briefly elevate the levels of certain hormones in Lucy’s virtual body should cause the character to go through the Call without any risk to Lucy’s real body if it didn’t work. Lucy would be happy that she was being allowed to try to become a ‘kitty’ while Vivian would know that it was being done safely and her daughter still had other options available later. It was the best of both worlds.

Tsukiko also let us in on what she’d heard from Sahnae, who was leading the team in Japan, when they had come to drop off family members of players and employees a few hours earlier. It seemed that, unlike Britain, the United States, Canada, and several other countries that were sending all non-humans to camps or otherwise detaining or outright attacking them, the Japanese were going more on a case-by-case basis. They were killing any that proved themselves to be violent or dangerous but the government was setting up a registration system with those who wanted to live peacefully or help to fight the various monsters and hostile Yōkai that had been showing up there since the Veil fell.

The Japanese Emperor and Prime Minister had gone as far as to make a public announcement decrying the treatment of peaceful and innocent non-humans by other countries. It looked like we might actually be able to make an ally out of Japan and Sahnae and her team were going to look into contacting the right people about that as they attempted to acquire more supplies for Varüus’kiel. That news had me pretty damn excited and I hoped to talk to Sahnae about it before she and her team returned to the Japan safe house.

Since I needed to find my Mahair anyway to talk to her about the simulation and so I could pass on Danu’s message, I cast my Trail of Light spell so that I could find her quickly. As luck would have it she was with Narek, the other Queens, and a group of other miscellaneous Fae near where the servers and F.I.Ts were temporarily set up. Humans who wanted a go in a F.I.T to change their forms and/or learn new skills were starting to trickle into the area as well.

After pointing out the simulation programmer to Salem and sending her along with Lucy and Vivian to speak with him about their request, I made my way to the assembled Queens and Warden where I found Sahnae reporting to her mother, Queen Anatha of the Spring Court. I quickly caught my Mahair’s attention and motioned her toward me. As she approached her eyes darted around and I had to assume that she was looking for Vivian because when she saw Lucy with Salem and a second unknown Liyun’shael her eyes widened in surprise.

“I take it that Vivian took a turn for the worse while we were out finding people interested in learning her skills and preparing people for the simulation?” she asked with a glance toward the group talking to the sim programmer.

“Yeah, Mahair, she was in bad shape so Salem offered one of her seeds to save her. We didn’t think she’d have enough time left to wait for the sim to start. Salem is going to join her and Lucy inside so she can start teaching her about magick and her new self. I’ve got a bigger surprise for you though,” I replied seriously.

Copper eyebrows inched higher for a moment before settling back in place as she asked, “Oh, and what would that be, little rose?”

“Danu asked me to pass on a message to you. She wants you to use a locator spell to find all the children of your lineage,” I told her in a quiet tone. Then before she had a chance to ask why, I quickly explained. “She said that your son had another kid before me and my sister that he didn’t know about and that she’s awakening.”

Amoiraishe’s amber eyes went wide as she considered that information. “Did She say anything else?”

I shrugged since Danu had implied a lot more than She had actually said directly. “Not specifically, she didn’t sound in a rush so I think we have a bit of time but I still think that we should bring her here as soon as possible, Mahair. If I’m reading between the lines properly, she’s a Yseil’dhraí. Danu called her your new Heir and said that you need to find her before the Humans do.”

“I will go and begin working the spell immediately. If you think that you can…” my Mahair said hesitantly. It was the first time that I had really seen her hesitant and uncertain about official business and there was this faraway and determined look in her eyes.

“Go, Mahair. I’ll tell the others that something important came up,” I told her, gently squeezing her shoulder and shooing her off before going to join my Pájar and the two other Queens. “Sorry everyone, but Mahair had a matter of urgent importance to the Autumn Court to see to. So, what business is there to discuss?”

The first order of business was introducing me to the nearly two dozen Fae from across all four Courts who wanted to gain the knowledge and skills offered by Vivian. Half of them were Pixies, Sprites, or Fairies so it looked like the Fae of the smaller variety would be able to benefit from those skills as well. Most of them would work together to set up clinics for their Courts but five had been selected because they were also interested in living in the capital and serving those who would live there alongside Vivian once she could establish a clinic of her own.

It was almost an hour before we got all of them, the humans who wanted to try new forms, and some people to act as skill trainers set up in the F.I.Ts and ready to go. Salem volunteered to be a skill trainer and to teach beginner magick skills to those interested in becoming Magi. At my request, the programmer also tweaked a doctor’s office in the simulated town so that Vivian could help those learning from her skill memories to get some practical experience as well.

Once all of those entering the simulation were undressed and inside F.I.Ts with attendants assigned to watch over the tubes of those changing forms, we were able to get on to other business. Jhuras and Jhena had materials wish lists for both artificing and for constructing homes and other buildings. I also got status reports of how many new arrivals we had gotten since my last check-in and progress reports from the New York, London, and Tokyo teams.

I had gotten a general idea of what was going on in Japan from Tsukiko earlier but Sahnae was able to provide more details. It seemed that the Fae, Namahage, Kitsunes, and a few other allies who had appeared or recently awakened there were actively protecting people and just generally kicking ass against outbreaks of dangerous Yōkai and it had earned us a lot of goodwill among the Japanese, who seemed generally more accepting of us in the first place than some other countries. Sahnae and I exchanged cell phone numbers in case she was able to open up diplomatic relations and needed me.

Things in London were a bit shaky with non-humans being dragged off the streets, violently in some cases, by overzealous police officers. People on both sides of the issue were protesting and those protests were getting violent. At least the team there had managed to get most of the family members of AD players and Pegasus Entertainment employees out of London and to Varüus’kiel. They currently had people watching for snatchings of non-humans under glamours or invisibility spells to see if they could track down the rest, or any black sites, and mount rescue missions.

A couple of our people in New York had almost been captured by military forces when launching an attack on a black site there. It was the only black site that they had found so far and fortunately, they had managed to turn the tables and disable the soldiers without killing any of them. Just like in Canada, it seemed that family members of anyone connected to Pegasus Games were being heavily monitored, and in some cases taken into ‘protective custody.’ Most of them had been quietly extracted but those in custody were proving as hard to locate as the black sites. The Winter Court had put tracking spells on some of the higher-level people from the black site they did find while escaping with the captives and were hoping to use them to find a bigger fish who might know more.

It was nearly lunchtime by the time we returned to the Vancouver safe house with lists of needed supplies and materials to look for. Whisper and Grell were both passed out on the couch and the former had her familiar, Shadow, snuggled up in her arms. We had barely materialized in the living room from the teleport when Venika and I were both pounced by our Wisps. Poor Venika, Silverheels was going to hurt one or both of them one of these days if she couldn’t get him to be less exuberant in his greetings, especially as he got bigger. I really tried not to giggle as I showed Willow some affection.

It turned out that Pete and Kinara were both awake, Pete at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee and Kinara seated across from him with a half-eaten sandwich and a glass of juice. Kinara was the first to see us and a relieved smile touched down on her face. She practically jumped out of her seat to hug Lissany and then me before admitting, “We were getting worried.”

“Sorry, Kiddo, we had to make an unexpected delivery to Varüus’kiel, and then there was a bunch of things that needed to be taken care of while I was there. How are you doing?” I asked pointedly.

“I’m good, my armor stopped the bullet, the impact just cracked a rib. I’m fine since Rei did her thing and I got a good night of sleep,” the pink-haired Yseil’dhraí insisted. “How’d things go? I was freaking out a bit. I would have expected our fight on the beach to make the news last night with all of those cameras there.”

Rei asked cheekily, “So Taelya kicking a Goddess’s ass didn’t make the news?”

“Whoa, she fought a Goddess and we missed it?” Pete complained.

Nishalle slipped behind him and playfully nibbled on his earlobe. “We wouldn’t have been able to do much, Lover, at least not up close. Tiamat was scary strong and had that whole godly fear aura going. Daenyss did a great job buying some time for Tae with the Dragon though, and Tae didn’t just fight a Goddess, she killed her and saved a plane full of people while doing it.”

My Attendant flushed, “I… wasn’t going to let her hurt Mistress.”

“Maybe we should give you the highlights,” Venika suggested as she and Silverheels got comfortable on the table.

One very long recap later Kinara was frowning and shaking her head. “I didn’t see anything about that. It’s like there’s a total news blackout about what happened last night. There was no footage on any of the stations. The only mention of an airplane on local news was about a flight out of Toronto that had to make an emergency water landing.”

“Humph, how much do you want to bet that our pal Jonesy and his goons confiscated all the news footage and the cameras and phones of everyone at the beach after we left?” Nishalle spat bitterly.

“I knew we should have stuck around to make sure they didn’t harass those people but we needed to get Vivian to Varüus’kiel,” I grumbled in response. “I’m probably going to have to get Whisper to try and get the passenger manifest for that plane and try to track some of them down, to make sure that asshole isn’t holding them somewhere.”

“You mean the plane that you snatched out of the air while fighting a massive dragon goddess and then placed down on the beach real gentle-like?” Whisper asked as she entered the kitchen. She made like she was covering a yawn but I could see the mischievous grin that she was hiding as every set of eyes in the room snapped on her.

“Why are you smiling like a kitty who just swiped the last of the cookie dough ice cream from the freezer?” Lissany asked, peering at the little blonde witch intently.

I wasn’t the only one to turn and give my Guardian a long look. “That… was oddly specific, Liss.” Kinara pointed out.

“Ummm… well, yeah. She looks like did something... really sneaky yet satisfying. What’d you do Whisper?” Lissany stammered, giving an innocent look that wasn’t really all that innocent as she directed our attention back to Whisper.

“It wasn’t me, it was Grell’s little doohickey, I just have all of the footage to ready to upload to YouTube, social media sites, and all of the news stations that we sent all that other stuff to as soon as Her Majesty gives the word,” the Assassin said with a shit-eating grin as she produced a small black sphere roughly the size of a golf ball.

“Is that a…” Rei started to ask, peering intently at the device.

“It’s a tiny little artificed stealth drone camera,” Whisper confirmed with a predatory gleam in her eyes. “Grell thought that we might need something like it for the raid on the black site last night. I brought it with me and then sent it to follow Nishalle and Venika to the morgue after I got footage of all the prisoners. Then I slapped it on Lissany’s shoulder when you all headed off to deal with the dragons on the beach. I just had to wait until you were all there and have it follow Taelya at a safe distance. It was sending footage directly to my laptop until you all ported off to Varüus’kiel and I piloted it back here. That big ass dragon bitch nearly destroyed it and bumped it around a few times, but I’ve got footage of everything.”

“Everything?” I asked, in concern.

“Yup, after Grell got home from Robyn’s place, he and I spent half the night going over the footage to keep anything incriminating but making sure that sensitive information, like the reports from their little autopsies, were cut out,” she said, looking very pleased with herself.

“I thought that you two were watching something on T.V. the way you were going on while I was trying to sleep,” Pete grumbled.

“Yup, and while the raid stuff was disturbing on so many levels, the rest was quality entertainment,” Whisper agreed, still grinning from ear to ear. “We must have watched Lissany punch that dragon’s teeth out, zoomed in and in slow motion, ten times. That chain spell of Taelya’s was wicked too, I have got to learn that.”

I tried not to encourage her by covering my smile and rolling my eyes as I told her, “Okay, let’s get some lunch made, and then we’re sitting down to watch that footage.”

The footage was only slightly grainy and overall surprisingly good for coming from such a small device. Whisper and Grell had indeed edited out anything that I considered sensitive information that could be dangerous to our people and I approved both clips for dispersal along with some of the information on the new ‘Department of Changed Affairs’ that Whisper had gotten from the CSIS server. I wasn’t really looking forward to being plastered all over the news but people needed to know what was going on and what was being kept hidden.

For the rest of the afternoon, we were fairly busy, or some of us were. Grell was getting everything he needed ready to drastically improve our cell phones' signal ranges and creating mana batteries for them. He also planned on installing the sim card emulation program on them until Varüus’kiel could eventually get an official cellular service provider. The time that he wasn’t working on those he would be building us a secure, and hopefully untraceable, web server.

Whisper was going to be working on our information distribution campaign, looking into the status of the other people who were on the plane, and laying the groundwork for starting to design some websites. It wouldn’t be long before we and Varüus’kiel, in general, would be appearing on the world stage and we would need an official online presence. I also planned on having several government-run businesses to bring income to our young nation and provide a livelihood for our people that would need an online presence.

We could provide services that nobody else could: Monster hunting services (we have millennia of experience), specialized training for groups via the F.I.Ts, charitable medical assistance for terminal patients, transformative therapy for people with gender or quality of life issues, eco-friendly artificed technology, and magical security and consultation services. We could even start up a teleportation travel industry for fast, eco-friendly, and inexpensive travel. Some of that would be charitable work, but for the rest of it we could name our price and bring in a lot of money or trade for them. I just needed to invest the capital and place people that I trusted in charge.

While they were both busy with the fun stuff I, of course, was busy trying to spend a shitload of money with my entourage making sure I was safe while doing so. My first stop was a realtor so I could look into buying a local warehouse. I was going to need a local address that I could have large-scale deliveries sent to and once placed inside they could be quietly moved by portal to Varüus’kiel. I found that it was much quicker and less expensive to lease a warehouse for a year than to buy one and it would be more convenient on a short-term basis as well.

By the time that I was able to find a place that fit the bill and was available for lease immediately, it was too late to do any shopping for other important stuff. I was a little bit disappointed but the food situation at home wasn’t desperate yet, especially with all of that dragon meat that Yola had been planning on taking to be cooked up once she had the beasts skinned. I promised myself that I would just get a good night’s sleep and we would make an early start on looking into food wholesalers and places where we could get the Atlantean wish lists filled.

Daenyss spoiled us all by cooking a nice dinner for us and we spent a lot of our time for the rest of the evening discussing our plans as Grell and Whisper worked on their various tasks. Whisper was able to find out that the people from the plane were all accounted for and not in government custody. She was able to hack into the cameras at the police station that they had all been taken to for their interviews. They had been set free but all photos and video footage of the incident had been erased from their confiscated phones and cameras before the devices were returned. Some footage had briefly made its way online but it had been quickly removed.

Were Jonesy and his ilk really stupid enough to think that they could keep what was going on in the world covered up? They couldn’t keep everything hidden in the shadows forever, even without our help this stuff was all going to see the light of day eventually. Were they trying to cover up their actions or ours, and to what purpose?

Unfortunately, I believed that I knew the answer to that. Their actions and goals so far had painted a pretty good picture. They wanted to be, or at the very least appear to be, in control of the current situation. Trying to get their hands on the F.I.Ts and the black sites were both attempts at finding ways to fight not just the monsters, but us as well. To them, everything that wasn’t human, everything they couldn’t understand was a threat. We were fighting an unseen war, and it was one that we needed to win if we were going to survive.

Jonesy was just a yes-man though, a convenient patsy; this went much further up the totem pole. Fighting them by bringing the truth into the light was a good start but we needed to fight this war on two fronts. First, we had to cut off the head of the snake and stop this inquisition, and second, we needed to hit the public with a PR campaign and show that we weren’t a threat but were willing and able to help humanity. We were starting on the second, but for the first task, we were going to need more information. Whisper had managed to put a full dossier together on Jonesy from the information we had gotten from his phone and the CSIS database but so far we had nothing on whoever was pulling his strings.

By eleven o’clock Whisper had our footage all over the internet despite numerous attempts to quash it and it was going viral. With the internet going crazy over it I figured that it wouldn’t be long before the mainstream media picked it up as well. Hopefully, it would be a good start to building a good reputation with humanity. It was as I was considering our other problem and looking through the various information in Jonesy’s dossier that I looked at the photo of his family that we had downloaded from his phone.

Something bothered me about that photo and despite my Yseil’dhraí memory, I was having trouble placing what it was. I was about to give up and crawl into bed with Rei when the realization hit me like a bolt of lightning. My hands were shaking as I moved my finger along the laptop’s trackpad to open the file I was looking for, clicked on the file, and let it play. I hadn’t looked at it too closely the first time, I hadn’t wanted to. Then I saw it and I paused the video, just staring in horror for a moment as my suspicions were confirmed. “Oh Goddess, Jonesy. What did you do?”

Raw fury gripped me as I stood up, my hands clenched tightly enough for my nails to draw blood briefly before the wounds began to heal. Carefully controlling my voice, I said, “Sis, Pete, Liss… get into your gear.”

Rei was back in male mode and my tone had gotten his attention from where he had been drifting off to sleep on the sofa. After seeing the look on my face he quickly stood up to give me a measured look. “Whatever it is you’re doing, Babe, I’m coming too.”

“Oh shit, I know that look,” I barely heard my sister mutter.

I said nothing, I merely nodded my acceptance to Rei, and barely gave the four of them the time to switch to their combat gear before I was casting protective spells over all of us, uncertain of where he might be or what we might face when we got there. Then I cast the spell to take me to my target. “Kaida liantuir tala siashe yasrin!”

We appeared in what looked like somebody’s backyard in the middle of suburbia. Most of the lights in the house were dark and Jones was sitting in a patio chair with his suit jacket and tie gone and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the ground beside him. He turned his head at our appearance, shielding his eyes against the light that I was emitting as he mumbled, “Hmmm?”

I glared at him for a moment, burning with rage. The heat of my anger was a stark contrast to the carefully controlled glacier cold tone of my voice as I asked, “Tell me, Agent Jones, are you a god-fearing man?”