Sisters Reunited: To the Kitsune Village!

Some time later, a semblance of order had been restored. Lalika, her earlier theatricality now replaced by something of a comical embarrassment at having failed to recognize her own sister, sat beside Xiao Ru on one of the great, grey blocks. I had discovered, upon sitting on one myself, that the stone was a mere illusion; the block yielded to my weight with the soft, pliable texture of a dense cushion, a fact that was but one more small absurdity in a day full of them.

It was I who broke the awkward silence. My mind, ever the investigator's, was grappling with the inconsistencies of the encounter. "I confess I am... confused," I began, addressing the light-haired twin. "You found this office so quickly after it was granted. And you knew my profession. How?"

Lalika looked up, her shining eyes with a renewed earnestness. "Oh, that! It is because I have not seen my dear sister in weeks!" she declared. "I have been positively frantic! I consulted investigator after investigator, but none could find her. Your new... agency... was simply the latest to appear upon the Umbral Nexus, so of course, I came at once!"

"I see," I murmured, though the logic of this world still felt like a tangled and foreign web. "So it was... a coincidence."

It was Xiao Ru who now seemed uneasy. She shifted on the soft block, her violet eyes narrowed in thought as she looked at her twin. "But, Lalika," she said, her voice quiet and laced with a strange apprehension, "why were you so intent on locating me? Why hire investigators at all?" She leaned forward slightly. "Surely you know where I live?"

Lalika stared at her sister for a long, silent moment, her eyes wide and blank, as if the question were a complex riddle written in a language she had never learned. Then, to my surprise, she let out a light, airy laugh, a sound like the tinkling of little bells. She placed a hand behind her head in a gesture of sheepish forgetfulness that seemed entirely out of place.

"Lalika," Xiao Ru said, her voice dangerously quiet, her brow furrowed in a mask of pure, unamused frustration. "What is wrong with you?"

The laughter died on Lalika's lips. She cleared her throat, her posture straightening, the earlier flightiness vanishing as if it were a cloak she had just shrugged off. A shade of seriousness passed over her features, making her look, for the first time, like a true and identical twin to the concerned fox beside her.

"I have been searching because there is a grave problem at the village. One that requires your attendance."

The words, so stark and serious, hung in the silent, blocky chamber. A problem at the village. Xiao Ru’s expression of annoyance was instantly replaced by one of dawning horror. My first, absurd case had concluded, it seemed, only to reveal the beginning of a second, far more somber one.

"A sickness of silence has fallen upon our village," she began, her bright eyes dark with memory. "The pale women of the fey, those who live in the damp and shadowed places, have stolen our young. They do not come with violence, but with a silver music that lulls keen ears into a sleep like deep water from which the children do not wake. They are simply... gone by morning."

She shuddered, a delicate and almost imperceptible tremor. "When our hunters pursued, the fey lords themselves turned them back with mockery—illusions of paths that turn back upon themselves, and a laughter that plants madness in the minds of good foxes. It is a war of attrition, detective, fought most unfairly."

I watched as a terrible change came over Xiao Ru. The gentle, girlish creature I knew seemed to recede, replaced by an older, sterner, priestess. She rose to her feet, her expression one of icy and direful resolve. She did not speak, and simply held forth her hand, palm upturned to the strange light of the chamber.

I witnessed then a miracle of a most unnerving kind. The very air before her began to shimmer, and from this glittering vacancy, motes of a faint, golden light were born. They swirled and knitted themselves together, weaving substance from nothingness, until a great bow of a pale, luminous wood rested in her grasp. In the same instant, a quiver of arrows, each fletched with what seemed a single, captured feather of sunlight, appeared upon her back.

Her words, a tale of stolen innocence and fae cruelty, lit a different and far more familiar fire within my breast. It was the old, clean-burning flame of the law, the protective rage that rises in the face of a crime against the helpless. The thought of children taken from their beds... it was a grievance my heart, in any world, could not abide.

"I will locate the missing children," I stated, my voice a low and steady thing that cut through the chamber's silence.

Xiao Ru met my gaze and gave a single, serious nod, her own resolve mirrored in her reflective eyes. She turned her gaze to the ceiling.

"Ashley," she called, her voice clear and ringing. "It is time."

This time, the groan from the upper chamber was followed by the distinct and heavy sound of a body reluctantly extricating itself from a state of comfort. Our languid companion was, it seemed, finally stirring.