Oddities, Part 4 - Chase

Tove sat at her desk and stared at the cork board. There was something there, she just knew it. The fluorescent light above the board flickered softly as her eyes traced the red strings linking together places, people and weird occurrences. She knew the layout by heart at this point, knew every involved person's face, knew where all the locations were in the city, knew each and every detail. And still she couldn't link the incidents together.

She kept staring.

A light knock on her door that she only acknowledges with a muttered "Yea?" The door opened, the chitter chatter of her colleagues washing in from the hallway, and then silence again when the door closed. Tove didn't look away from the board.

"Got you that file you requested," came Ronja's voice from the door. Tove extended her hand and a folder was pressed against it. She finally took her eyes off the wall to look down at it. She flipped it open. It was pretty thick. "Everything we have on the current residents of Parkway 3 and the immediate vicinity. Gods only know what you need... that... Ah."

"This is a lot of info, thank you," Tove said, looking over to Ronja. She was now staring at the board, her brow scrunched up.

"You're still working on this?" Ronja asked. Tove shrugged. "Let me rephrase; management is still allowing you to work on this?"

"Hey, I get all my other pieces done perfetly on time, thank you very much," Tove said, crossing her arms. "I work on this on my free time."

"If you're at work, it's company time," Ronja pointed out. Tove rolled her eyes.

"Sure, but I finished the Lundkvist story, so until someone comes and gives me something new to work on, I'm working on this."

Ronja considered that for a moment. "Shouldn't you go and announce you're done though?" Tove opened her mouth for some kind of excuse, but Ronja cut her off before she could say anything. "I don't... care, really, what you work on, and I'm definitely not going to rat you out here, I'm just trying to look out for you. You've been chasing this... story? It's not even a story, you don't actually have anything. You've been chasing this potential for several months now, and I'm not sure that's, like... healthy?"

"Yeah, you're the real queen on healthy life habits," Tove said with a pointed look and Ronja laughed. "I do appreciate you looking out for me," she continued. "But I just know there's something here. I've been to each of the scenes and there's a distict, like... energy at all of them!"

"The magic energy? That doesn't--"

"No, it's the same! The traces of magic are usually different in different cases, different locations, but in all these six places--" she waved a hand towards the board "--it was the same in all of these. It's the same kind of magic. And the same person using it."

A pause. Tove hadn't really realised how worked up she'd gotten, until she stopped and looked at Ronja. She looked a bit worried, but to Tove's relief, she didn't seem to think she was crazy. Like everyone else...

"You always were pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff," Ronja said finally. "What about--"

"The police didn't think it was aything," Tove answered before Ronja even finished the question, slumping back in her chair. She rubbed her eyes a bit and ruffled her short, dirty blonde hair. "They don't have equipment that detects the type of magical energy, just if there is, and apparently my word isn't valuable to them. I'm a fucking journalist! Who's word is valuable if not mine!"

"You could start a smear campaign?" Ronja suggested with a grin. Tove chuckled. "I'm kidding, I know you wouldn't. You take your journalistic ethic very seriously."

"Damn right I do," Tove said and glanced at her watch. "You wanna go grab some lunch? Or did you have other data to deliver?"

"Nah, I can go. Should go, really, I've not eaten breakfast."

"You doofus," Tove said, shaking her head, though there was a small smile on her face. She stood up and grabbed her coat. "Come on then, let's go. We can drop by and see if the newbie wants to come too."

~X~

"Hey, Alaia, you working hard?" Tove asked in Esperanto after knocking on the already open door to Alaia's new office. The woman in question looked up from organizing a pile of books into the shelf.

"Oh, hey Tove," she said with a smile. "I'm slowly getting the office in order. The previous correspondent left quite a bit here, and the ducks didn't help." She gave Tove a pointed look, then laughed a little.

"Well, seems like you're managing despite that," Tove said, a bit awkwardly. There were no more ducks on the desk, except for one. That one was sitting neatly next to Alaia's typewriter. "Um, anyway, we were planning on going to get some lunch, if you want to join us?"

Alaia paused for a minute, then checked her watch. Hers was a lot more feminine than Tove's, a golden, slim strap and a small face, whereas Tove's was a big old thing, inherited from her grandpa, with black leather straps and a clunky face. They were quite different, the two of them, weren't they?

"I guess I could take a lunch break," Alaia said and Tove smiled.

"Great! We'll show you the restaurant a lot of the staff uses." Tove turned a bit and then noticed Ronja. "Oh, right, I didn't introduce you yet. Alaia, this is Ronja Mårdh, our resident IT expert and the Keeper of Information. Ronja, Alaia Vega Abaroa, the new Cametonian correspondent."

"How do you do?" Alaia said, extending a hand to Ronja. She took it and shook it breifly.

"I'm glad they changed to you," she said. "I never really liked the old correspondent." She leaned in a bit and stagewhispered, "He was always so demanding."

"O-oh?" said Alaia, glancing at Tove. She waved her hand.

"Don't mind her," she said. "She means well, she just doesn't... have a filter."

"I'm sorry for offending you," Ronja said. Alaia looked taken aback, almost panicked.

"No, it's fine, you didn't--"

"No, I mean when I do," Ronja specified. "In the future. Because I probably will. But I won't mean it. Probably."

"I... Uh..."Alaia's eyes were flicking between Ronja and Tove. Then she stopped, took a moment to collect herself and said, "Okay. Lunch?"

~X~

"So what exactly does 'IT expert and the Keeper of Information' mean?" Alaia asked once they had sat down at their table and ordered their lunches. They were eating at a small restaurant called Melodi a block away from the EFAR main building. A lot of the people who didn't bring a lunch from home ate here, Tove had explained, because it was so close and they had a great quality-price ratio. Melodi had a lunch menu that changed weekly, contained a wide variety of different foods and had a long rotation time, so despite coming here every other day, Tove had yet to have the same food twice. She could also count the times she'd been disappointed with her fingers.

"We have a computer in the basement," Tove said, after taking a sip of water. "It's huge and--"

"She is huge," Ronja corrected, then looked at Alaia and smiled. "I've named her Ada."

"Right," said Tove. "And Ronja is basically the only one who knows how to use iiii-- her. The basement is also where the archives are, which are catalogued on the computer, so whenever someone needs somethiing from the archives, they go down there and tell Ronja what they need and she does her thing and gets the right files from the archives and no one else has to go down there ever."

"Ada is very efficient in finding information," Ronja said.

"That's amazing, that you have a computer," Alaia said. "We sure didn't. I've never even seen one."

"You will," Ronja said nodding like it was obvious. "Computers are the future. Especially once we figure out how to make them more efficient without having to physically double their size. But you're always welcome down to the basement to visit me and Ada." She smiled widely and Alaia said something diplomatic about being sure to do that at some point and then their lunches arrived and the conversation died down as they all dug into their foods.

About an hour later, when they had finished their lunch and returned to the office, Tove sat back down at her desk and flipped open the file Ronja had brought her. It would keep her busy for the rest of the day.

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Whoooo! Stuff! Things! More characters!! 

I've always enjoyed those characters who are really good at that one specific thing (usually computers etc) and are kinda eccentric and just hyper focus on that shit and forget everything else. Like Abby from NCIS, or Entrapta from the new She Ra reboot that you probably haven't watched lmao (it's on netflix and I thought it was pretty good even tho it's very much a kids' show)

But yeah, here you go, here's the next part, I hope you like it, next topic is "Liquid" idk have fun BYE!!

Pie out.