Chapter 1667 (1/2)

Their familiar call and response made, instantly the tension in the room spiked upward.

“An innocent bystander…? Pah!” Delilah had the impression that Commissioner Arrietti intended to spit in disbelief at her words, but then suddenly realized he was in a police room and forcefully suppressed the impulse. She saw him swallow and couldn’t resist giggling to know that she had forced him to swallow his own spit.

Trembling slightly, the Commissioner raised one of the folders and waved it in front of Delilah’s face. “Speaking of our… history, do you still have nothing to say about this particular open case… where a mysterious assailant installed renegade, temporary runes on Kharon’s new police headquarters sky island and had the piece of land fly off and ground itself in a swamp. And since the malicious vandalism wasn’t discovered until the next morning, the first floor had flooded with mud.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Delilah kept her expression even.

“Or this!” Commissioner Arrietti picked another file up at random. The shaking of his shoulders had intensified as he scanned the name and identification number of the file and recognition flashed in his eyes. “Four years ago, when the student body of Kharon Academy had voted to create a new mascot… and somehow, someone broke into the supposedly secure Academy voting boxes and stuffed them with the suggestion… that my own face, drawn by some hack of a caricature artist into a leering grin, should be the school mascot…?”

“Isn’t the break-in just speculation?” Delilah asked. “I heard that they could find no evidence of tampering-”

“The number of votes for my face as Kharon Academy mascot exceeded the number of enrolled students by a factor of ten!” Commissioner Arrieti bellowed and slammed the file back down on the metal table.

Delilah bowed slightly to him. “Wow, I had no idea you were so popular.”

The Commissioner pressed his lips together and picked up another folder. This one was the thickest of the folders on the table and he held it reverently with both hands. “And this… this travesty, where some impetuous little girl used a very complex illusion Skill to replace the bowling pins in my first frame with live chickens-!”

Delilah clucked sympathetically. “I can’t believe you would throw a bowling ball empowered by an image at helpless chickens. I heard the whole Interzone Bowling League Championship had to be delayed to clean up the mess. Oh, did killing them all count as a strike?”

“You-!” Commissioner Arrietti pounded his fists against the metal table.

But this show of force didn’t even cause Delilah to bat an eye. She actually quite liked how easy this man was to goad. She leaned back in her chair and puffed up like a contented toad. “But Commissioner, aren’t you too easily engaging in speculation? Didn’t you fail to find any evidence linking me to these completely normal circumstances? Perhaps they were all just accidents.”

“I might have lacked evidence before, but this time, in this case of destroyed property and trespassing, here you were, caught red-handed within a restricted area.” Commissioner Arrietti poked the table with a thick finger. “Do you truly expect me to believe you were unrelated to the destruction that occurred within the warehouse?”

“Some friends and I were going for a walk, when we discovered a mysterious figure who was up to no good,” Delilah remained in her reclining position. “We followed them into the warehouse out of our strong sense of civil responsibility. Shouldn’t you be thanking me for uncovering this? I quite like the idea of a gold medal.”

“Are you sure,” Commissioner Arrietti growled. “That there isn’t anything you want to tell me? Anything you want to talk about?”

“Quite certain, thank you,” Delilah lapped up the attention like a kitten next to a saucer of milk. “My friends and I were disturbed by a mysterious interloper who definitely was filled with ill will. Who knows what would have happened if we didn’t happen across them by chance.”

For several long seconds, the two looked at each other. Then Commissioner Arrietti began to neatly stack his folders on top of one another until a manila pillar sat between them. “Humph. Your suggestion is preposterous. An infiltrator, here, in the heart of Kharon? No, not very likely. You probably just accidentally set things off and are unwilling to admit it… but you are lucky. You’ve been bailed out.”

“You don’t believe-” Delilah started furiously, but she paused as her mind acknowledged the end of his sentence. Her eyes brightened. “Bailed out? Are my parents here?”

“No, but some fool paid your bail all the same.” Commissioner Arrietti glowered at her for several seconds, then waved his hand. “So what are you waiting around here for? You are free to go.”

Feeling that something was off with this dismissal, some line of their special ritual crossed, Delilah stood slowly from the metal chair. She had assumed she would be interviewed for much, much longer, as she had been the previous times. But as she stood there, the Commissioner just watched her with a frown. Did he truly mean to allow her to leave…?

Didn’t he care?

Delilah wandered out of the room, wondering why her insides felt so squishy. But when she saw the figure waiting for her in the police bullpen, Delilah’s eyes brightened. “Aunty Vye!”

Vye “Trailbreaker”, one of the most famous members of the Order Ducis due to her constant expiration of the Wildlands of Expira, swept Delilah up into a hug that spun her through the air. “Hullo, little one. I hear you’ve been getting yourself into some trouble, so I’m here to watch you for a bit until your parents make it back from challenging that Chimera.”

Instantly, Delilah’s expression turned sour as she looked up at this woman toward whom she possessed such respect. “I don’t need a babysitter…”

After training in the Ghosthound’s Alpha Cosmos for almost a year, Delilah had returned to Expira and decided it was time to see the world. She wheedled her parents for several months, always whining and nagging that she was a growing woman who needed to have her horizons expanded. Her mother Annie had been extremely dismissive of such claims, but Delilah could tell that her father Dozer was slowly being persuaded.

Finally, it was announced that Delilah would be able to accompany Vye on her latest exploratory expedition. The following year had been the best one of Delilah’s entire life.

Even the hubbub of the police station couldn’t wipe away the smile on Delilah’s face. Vye returned a clipboard to one of the police officers and then led Delilah away, out of the building and out under the open sky. “Don’t you need a babysitter? Why do you always stumble into the most dangerous situations? It was only when I traveled with you that I was swallowed whole by an earth dragon…”

Delilah grinned at the memory, but then her expression twisted again. “Go tell that idiot Commissioner that. He seems to think that we caused that explosion! I bet he doesn’t even plan on investigating the incident!”

Vye led Delilah over to a cherry-red skybike that instantly had the girl drooling. With a casual grace, the older woman straddled the vehicle and started the engine. The metal hummed pleasantly to life as the runes activated. Then Vye gestured for Delilah to climb behind her. “Do you really think that the Commissioner wouldn’t investigate? Girl, you are smarter than that.”