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Steam wafted into the air and fogged Odile’s glasses as she finished pouring two cups of tea. She set them on a tray with the additives and snacks, and carried it out to the balcony where Isabeau was waiting. He stood as she walked out, and she shot him a look that made him sit right back down. She set the tray on the table between the two plush chairs provided by the very fancy inn they were staying at – free of charge with the saviour discount that Odile had finally convinced Mirabelle and Isabeau to take advantage of.
The balcony overlooked a large lake, ringed by a dense forest and backdropped by a low-peaked mountain range. The forest stopped a long ways from the inn, but there were a variety of exotic plants around the property, most notably of which was a superbly large wisteria plant that clung to the building and whose long racemes formed a canopy that shaded the balcony. The owner proudly told of how her family had cultivated the plant for three generations now, aiding the growth of new vines, removing dead ones, and preventing damage to the building. They even sold cuttings, which Loop had immediately bought one of.
Mirabelle, Pétronille, and Boniface could be seen down by the shore closest to the inn, laughing, playing, and just generally goofing around. Siffrin and Loop were further around the lake, getting new angles for their sketches. All in all, it was a pretty idyllic spot that would surely be full of tourists if everyone wasn’t so busy getting the country running again.
“It feels kinda weird not doing this in a bar or pub for once,” Isabeau said, adding copious amounts of honey to his tea.
“A little bit,” Odile nodded, “but we’re grown adults. I’m sure we can manage to enjoy each other’s company without being drunk.”
“I hope so!” Isabeau laughed. He held his cup in both hands, letting it warm him as he watched the others down at the lake.
“So, shall I start, or do you already have something in mind?”
“I do actually. I’d like to talk about the past. Mostly yours, because it’s much more interesting than mine.”
“I can assure you it isn’t. I’ve lived a perfectly ordinary life. Your own curiosity is going to disappoint you.”
“Well, what about when you said you had stalkers, and then never elaborated? That’s interesting and mysterious.”
“I said that?”
“Yeah, to Sif, after the whole… thing. I haven’t stopped imagining jilted ex-lovers out for revenge, or something equally dramatic.”
Odile chuckled. “Oh yes, so I did. Well, I can tell you immediately that it’s not jilted exes. I only have one ex, and they were very much not jilted.”
“Really, only one? In all your years?”
“Watch it, I’m not that much older than you are. But yes, it’s not very high on my priorities, or even really on the list, so I never really bothered. Well, unless you count a couple of one-night stands. Which I don’t, and neither do they. Or an awkward little thing that lasted barely two months as a teenager, which I really don’t count. Anyway, would you like to hear about the times I was stalked, or my non-existent love life?”
“The stalkers, I’ll ask about the relationship later.”
Odile smiled and sipped her tea. “There were three, that I know of, anyway. The third one was the one you’d find most interesting, something right out of a bad romance novel, so I’ll skip the first two and start with that one. They were a woman who, and I quote, ‘fell in love with me at first sight’. In a café, and never actually spoke to me.”— Isabeau scrunched up his face, and Odile smirked at him. —“Indeed, quite nasty. She started sending me letters. Then, when I blocked off my post-box, started sliding them under my front door. I ended up waiting for one such time, and when she left after leaving her message, I just followed her home. People lose a lot of their confidence when cornered on their own doorstep.”
“That’s so menacing, M’dame,” Isabeau said, faux fear filling his face.
“Oh, relax, I just threatened to inform the authorities.” She lifted her cup and mumbled something else into it.
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
Isabeau chuckled nervously, and grabbed a fig from the tray. Odile took a shortbread to cover up her own quietly amused chuckling.
“Back to the first one, then. It was a bizarre and confusing affair, though not so much as the second one.”— Isabeau leaned in slightly. —“So, the first one thought that I was cheating—”
“With their partner?!”
“No, on my exams. Calm down. This was still a few years before I started dating the ex I mentioned. I was in university, and doing really well in my chosen area. Another student suspected me of cheating, and so he naturally decided that the only logical course of action was to stalk me like a private eye to build a case against me.”
She paused to finish her shortbread and have a drink. Isabeau raised a hand.
“Yes?” Odile asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Did you threaten this one as well, then?”
“No, stalker number two threatened this one.” Isabeau’s eyes bugged out at that, and Odile barked a laugh at the sight. “You see, stalker number two was in a relationship with number one, and he had noticed their growing obsession with me, and that they kept sneaking around and avoiding him. So he started stalking the both of us, eventually learned what was really happening, and made number one apologise to me. He also apologised. It was quite funny; I had no idea either of them were stalking me until they told me. Isabeau, you’re going to catch flies if you don’t close your mouth.”
Isabeau closed his mouth, then opened it, then closed it again. “This is what you consider ‘uninteresting’? M’dame that was insane! I mean sure, stalkers one and two were basically a comedy sketch, but stalker three was like, actually scary. She could have hurt you!”
“Please, I was a grown woman by then. I could handle one little weirdo. They were not interesting highlights of my life. The students went completely unnoticed until they told me, and letter lady lasted less than a month.”
“You can’t just brush this off. You have to tell me more.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
“You’re not a very good storyteller.”
“Well then, show me how it’s done.”
Isabeau opened his mouth to speak, but was cut off by a loud hooting from above. An owl had perched itself unnoticed on one of the hooks jutting out of the wall for the wisteria to wrap around. It peered down at them, tilting its head to extreme angles. Both Odile and Isabeau looked up at it with wide eyes.
“How did it get there without us noticing?” Odile whispered.
“Owls are scarily quiet in flight,” Isabeau whispered back, “It’s a shame we don’t have anything it can eat or I’d try and call it down.”
The owl’s head snapped to one side, perking up as it heard something far beyond the range of human hearing. It looked down into the grass below, shuffled in place, and sprung from its perch in complete silence. The tips of its wings grazed by the faces of the humans it paid no heed to as it shot past. Both heads whipped to follow it as it swooped across the ground, coming up with some small mammal in its clutches.
Odile and Isabeau shared a look, commiserating in the knowledge that no one would ever believe that just happened to them.
“I don’t suppose you have a story that tops that?” Odile asked.
“I do, actually, if you’ll believe it.”
“I’ll keep an open mind.”
He paused, took a breath, held it a moment. “Alright, this was just after I’d joined the Defenders, and it was all very new. I was exactly the kind of wide-eyed, hope in his heart, optimistic recruit you think I was. One of the first things I was asked to do was to perform regular wellness checks on this guy – I don’t remember his name any more, I want to say Bernard, but I could be wrong. This guy, he was really, really big on trying to become a bird, and had apparently dedicated several years to researching Body Craft to become one.
“The defenders basically treated him as a wellness check tutorial for the newbies. He was pleasant, super cordial; his house was always clean and tidy, and he’d always offer a snack and a drink. The whole works. I’d just pop over once or twice a week and chat with him, make sure he was still doing alright. And he was. He never got angry, or even frustrated by his inability to become a bird. He had friends, family, a job, and spent most his time studying anatomy. Honestly, his life was more put together than mine was. The only thing about him that warranted these checks was other people believing his obsession was unhealthy, and that if he actually tried to Change in that way he’d end up severely hurting himself.”
He stopped, interrupting himself to down half his cup in one gulp.
“Then, one day I checked on him and he was all smiles. He showed me this... handful of feathers, and told me they’d grown out of him. I didn’t really believe him,”— he chuckled to himself —“and wasn’t entirely sure how to handle it. He pulled up his sleeve, and showed me his bandaged arm. When he pulled the bandages off, his arm was covered in these tiny wounds, almost like he’d gone at himself with a sewing needle. Most were already scabbed over. He told me how he’d finally managed to make them grow properly, but they’d started all falling out that morning.
“I made a report about it that evening, talking about my concerns that he was going to actually attempt it, but my report was dismissed. I was told it was impossible – which I knew – and that he must have been lying, or deluded. They just told me to increase the frequency of my visits and make sure he didn’t do anything further to hurt himself.”
Isabeau paused for breath, staring down into his cup and steadying himself. He turned to study Odile, searching her face for some indication that he should stop. He found none.
“I started visiting every day I could, and paying more attention than I had been previously. I know a thing or two about Body Craft, and I knew that the energy required to literally transform into another species was simply not an option – it had been tried before, and proven impossible – so I never really listened to his theories. After actually paying proper attention, though, I could see just how much research he’d done. He knew exactly what would need to happen, every facet of his biology that needed to change, every bone and muscle adjustment down to the millimetre. And, crucially, he knew he wouldn’t have the power to do it.
“I’d never asked what bird he wanted to be – no one had, as far as I knew – so I finally did, and he showed me his shrine. It was a small thing, set up in a room that was clearly prepped for someone to undergo intensive Body Craft. It even had a large window that opened nice and wide for ample light and airflow. In one corner of the room was a small shrine: a miniature Favour Tree constructed from the fallen feathers and collected bones from a songbird commonly found in the area around Jouvente.”
The wind picked up, and the setting sun reflected off the lake, casting ripples of light and shadow towards the inn.
“On one of my visits not long after that, the front door was locked, and he wouldn’t answer my knocks. Nor on the next, or the next. I asked around, and no friends or family had seen him in that time, he hadn’t shown up for work, nor had his neighbours hadn’t seen him coming or going. We Defenders weren’t allowed to force our way in, not until the neighbours made a report of a “blood-curdling scream” from within the house in the middle of the night.
“The next day, myself and two others who had spoken to him regularly had a locksmith open the door. I went straight to the shrine room, and found nothing. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. Nothing was broken, missing, or otherwise disturbed. The official report states that the scream must have been him finally realising it was impossible, followed by running away.”
“But you think otherwise?” Odile asked.
“I shouldn’t. Even the most minor Body Craft takes days, a full Change – at the time – took months. Turning into a bird, if possible, should have taken well over a year. …I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like that the Defenders never really seemed to care about him, even after he vanished.”
“They didn’t search?”
“Only for a week, to see if he was in the surrounding area. Then he was marked a missing person and no one ever spoke about him again. What’s with that look on your face? What are you thinking?”
“Lots of little things, but I need to check something before I reveal them.”
“Oh, mysterious. I guess I’ll wait, then. In the meantime, I think I’d like to hear about something more upbeat. Got any good stories from your childhood?” Isabeau asked, helping himself to more figs, and offering them to Odile, who had one while she thought.
“There was the time I accidentally helped someone rob a museum. Does that sound upbeat?”
“Uhh…”
“I promise it’s funny, kind of. No one gets hurt.”
“Sure.”
Odile finished her tea, and leaned back in the chair, sinking into the plush cushions.
“I was… I think twelve at the time, maybe a bit older, and there was a museum that I loved going to. I went there at least once a week, every week, for the better part of six years. It was a small thing, handful of exhibits, plain building, minimal staff, barely ever any visitors. It was great. It was also somewhat unsecure. I began to notice these problems, and started cataloguing them. It got to the point where I basically had a list of every security feature and what was wrong with it. You could plan a heist with those notes.
“I realised this, of course, and took my findings to the museum’s curator. He, however, neglected to even hear me out. He probably thought I was just some child messing around, wanting to show him some scribbled heist plan. I was completely ignored, and very annoyed.”
Odile stood, stretched, and moved to lean on the balcony railing.
“One of the other staff members spotted me stalking around the exhibits, fuming in that way only a child can, and asked what was wrong. Naturally, I told them everything, even showed them my notes. They took me very seriously, and I remember being so relieved that an adult was actually listening to me for once. They asked for my notes, promising to make the curator listen, and so I handed them over. I went home feeling so happy that day, so convinced that I was improving the museum.”
She turned to look back at Isabeau, smiling like she’d just remembered something funny.
“The next day, half the exhibits were missing and that staff member had vanished without a trace. I realised what had happened, but was at least smart enough to not confess my involvement to anybody. Honestly, I was always more upset by how easily it could have been prevented, and that it caused the museum to shut down for a few months whilst they updated security, than the actual crime I’d been apart of.”
“Wow,” Isabeau said, “Has there ever been any part of your life that didn’t have weird stuff like this happening to you? It must have been a riot being friends with you.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Odile shrugged, “I didn’t have a lot of friends.”
“What, why not? You’re so fun.”
“I was smart and socially awkward. I alternated between spectacularly nervous, and accidentally incredibly rude. It’s not a great combination.”
“I know what you mean, it’s really not.”
Odile looked at him, really looked at him for a moment. “Yes, I suppose you would. Actually, that reminds me of the time I accidentally joined a fight club. I made some decent friends there for a while.”
“The time you what?!”
“Oh, look, the others are coming back. We should see how they are, talk about tomorrow’s plans,” Odile said, already heading back inside and crossing to the door.
“M’dame! Wait, you can’t just—” But the door was already swinging closed behind her, leaving Isabeau reaching for nothing, with more questions than he started with.