Carol, Part 17 - Warmth

Suddenly Cecil is kneeling in front of me, his warm hands on my shoulders, turning me to look at him. He looks very serious.

"What happened?" he asks. "I need to know exactly."

"He... I.." I try, but my voice is still broken. Leea shoves Cecil's shoulder a bit.

"Stop that crowding, jeez! Come on," she says to me, extending her hand. "You think you can stand up?"

I let Leea pull me up, and she leads me to the other side of the room and sits me down on a couch. I don't think it was here before. She keeps holding onto my hands even when we sit down. Rachel comes over as well, sitting on the armrest on Leea's other side. Cecil is still standing.

"Thank you," I whisper to Leea and then pause. Flame's body is warm on my lap and I focus on that, the warmth and it grounds me after the darkness of the dream. "It was another dream, I think. Everything went dark suddenly, and all I could hear was someone eating a... an apple. I tried to run, but I couldn't and then I fell. He told me he knew, th-that he knew I had the elemental and he knew I've had help hiding it. That he knew everything. He-" I look up at Cecil, and swallow hardly. "He can't know. Can he?"

"It is hard to believe he could," Cecil says, pushing up his glasses. "I didn't think it would be possible, but..."

"No way he knows," Rachel says sternly and crosses her arms. "Just this morning he was complaining to me how he had combed over half the town and had no leads left."

"Unless," Cecil says quietly and then continues, louder, "Unless that's the whole point? Maybe he's bluffing. He has no leads and is starting to get desperate, so he decids to amp up the game, sending threatening dreams to people he thinks could be hiding the elemental in the hopes of getting some kind of reaction to give him clues for where to look. You two would be the first on the list, because he saw you at my shop and he knows you've seen the elemental."

"Does that mean I'm gonna get a weird dream like that too?" Leea asks.

"That would make sense, if he's gauging for reactions," Cecil agrees. Then he turns to me again. "Now, is there anything else you remember, any details?" I shake my head and look down. "Every detail is important, try to remember."

Leea huffs in annoyance.

"Okay, now you listen here," she says and we all turn to her in surprise. "I think you need to start giving us some details about what the eff is really going on here, because we're risking our physical and apparently mental health to make sure this buddy of yours doesn't know a thing and we deserve to know. So no more funny business, no vague stories, no more bull shit. You tell us everything."

Cecil blinks a few times, looking baffled, and then he looks at the floor, a pink flush spreading from under his collar and on the tops of his ears. Rachel just stares at Leea, grinning madly.

"Okay then," Cecil says with a sigh, and sits down next to me, his leg brushing against mine. "You want the whole story? I'll tell you.

"For me it all began when I got into university. I was majoring in Myths and Legendary Creatures, and apparently I caught the eye of one of the professors. She seemed very impressed with my work and asked me to take a look at some old documents she had found about the Arthurian times. I, of course, agreed, and afterwards she introduced me to some of her colleagues. They worked for the NALMC."

"I've heard of that," Leea chimes in. "It's the... National archive of legends and......"

"Magical creatures, yes," Cecil says. "Their headquarters are in Dublin, and I must say, if you ever go there, you must visit their library, it is stunning. They have whole sections just for-"

Rachel clears her throat loudly and Cecil stops mid-sentence.

"Right, so," he says and fixes his glasses again. "I go to Dublin to get to know this organization. Rachel comes along, God knows why, because she is not particularly interested in these things."

"Well I couldn't go and leave you to fend for yourself in the big bad world, now could I?" Rachel all but purrs. "You were barely 18. Who knows what they would've done to you."

"Yes, because at 21 you had so much more life experience."

"So how exactly do you two know each other?" I finally ask. It's actually been bothering me for a while now, though I'm not sure why.

"She's my sister," Cecil says.

"Big sister," Rachel says.

"Oh," I say. I had not expected that, although now that they mention it, they do share some facial features and have the same silvery eye colour.

"But what happened in Dublin?" Leea asks.

"In Dublin we become official members of the NALMC. The first few months were just desk jobs, archive work and all that, but then we got to go to the field. And it was brilliant, all the creatures we found and stories we heard. It was great, to say the least. We did that for three years, until we were stationed here last May, because of the tattoo parlour."

"It belonged to our aunt," Rachel explains "She could do wicked cool tattoos, but her eyesight started to go rapidly worse a year back and now she can't see well enough to run the place anymore. She left it to Cecil, who used to work there as a kid, and being the obedient little child he is, he decided we'd have to stay put. For the most of the time, anyway. Though I guess it's cool to have headquarters or whatever."

"So a few months back we receive word from Dublin that they are detecting growing amounts of energy from around here," Cecil continues. "Fire energy. They think it's white elementals. I am excited, of course, because no one has seen one in over a century and even then they were very rare. And then HQ sends over this goon, Rafael Vargas. Wasp. I have no idea why he insists on calling himself that, but once he saw my butterfly tattoos, he's insisting on us all having weird bug-related code names. I think he's seen too many spy movies as a kid...

"Anyway, it's all going ok, until one night he comes in, possibly drunk, and asks me if I knew we could get good money off rare creatures on the black market. He asks if it would be interesting to capture the elemental and sell it, to see how much we could get. I tell him no and he drops it, but I know he's still planning on doing that. Only now he knows I know of his plans and he thinks I might try to sabotage them somehow. That's why he came into the dream, because he thought I was warning you to stay away from him if you found the elemental. Of course I was, but he doesn't actually know that.

"See, after Wasp shot me out of the dream, he started yelling at me, asking what the flip I was doing, trying to sabotage the mission and scaring off useful people. I told him that I wasn't doing that, I was just trying to contact the choir so they would come talk to us if they found the elemental. He did eventually believe me, thank heavens, even if it was after following me around 24/7 for two days."

"Wait, I'm confused," I say. "What did he believe?" Cecil shifts, his whole thigh against mine now. It is very warm.

"OK,here's the deal," Rachel says. "Wasp wants to sell the elemental for a lot of money. Cecil wants to study it because he's a nerd." Cecil makes a protesting noise at that, but Rachel ignores him. "Wasp tells Cecil his plan, because he wants an accomplice, but Cecil doesn't like the plan. So now Cecil knows the plan, and Wasp believes Cecil knows the plan and will try to sabotage it. Cecil does try to sabotage the plan and Wasp stops him, but Cecil convinces Wasp that he was trying to advance the plan and so Wasp thinks he screwed up. And right now Cecil knows about the plan, but Wasp thinks that he doesn't. ...as far as we know."

"That... didn't really help," I mutter. This is all very confusing. All I wanted was to write a spectacular Christmas carol and now I'm stuck in this mess of conspiracies and counter conspiracies, and mythical creatures and legends and archives, and scary black market goons and cute nerdy tattoo artists and way. too. much. warmth.

I draw in a shaky breath. Flame seems to sense my discomfort, jumping into Leea's lap instead. She finally lets go of my hands and I tug them through my hair. Cecil is still radiating warmth against my side, but without a fire elemental in my lap it is much easier to handle. And when I think back to the darkness and coldness of the dream I just had, I am suddenly very grateful that Cecil is there. I look up at him and smile, and he smiles back, although somewhat confusedly. Something occurs to me.

"In the dream Wasp said you were his employers," I say. "I thought you all worked for the NALMC? If you're his employers, couldn't you just fire him and he couldn't do jack squat?"

Cecil looks at me with his mouth slightly agape, eyebrows furrowed in confusion. Then he starts to laugh.

"Ahh, no no," he says between bouts of laughter. "See, he doesn't speak English too well. He's originally Italian, and he's been living in the UK for only two years so far. I think he meant "land lord", it's the same word."

"We're leasing him a room in our apartment," Rachel says, while Cecil tries to stop giggling.

"Weird choice of words," Leea mutters, but then shakes her head, seemingly dismissing the thought and smiling widely at me.

I smile as well and lean back on the couch, the warmth filling me on the inside as well.
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Wow, Cecil is a dick to people who are learning a new language and mix up words.

I'm not late, you're late. HA, you can't actually know when I posted this, because it says 23:58 regardless. Unless you were just sitting in the dark, refreshing the page over and over. Or heard me when I went to the bathroom shortly after posting this. BUT OTHER THAN THAT............... what was I talking about? I really don't know.

I'm sorry these are so late, but I have zero motivation to write in the day. It's weird, really, because more often than not I know what I want to happen, I just suck at trying to get myself to write for whatever reason. Also there's a lot of distractions in the living room. Maybe I should stop trying to write there, hmmmm....

I feel very accomplished now. I should probably go to bed though, we have gigantti in the morning............. nnggh.

Your topic is Game(s). Byeeeeee~

Pie out.