Lucky Rabbit

The next day began far too early. Thanks to the ever-shorter daylight hours, Pandy was able to stay with Thaniel until the morning bell went off, but that meant she had to fly home quickly and as high as she could go so dawn didn’t highlight the rabbit flying above the city. Fortunately, it was easy enough to recognize Avington House even from several hundred feet up, thanks to the fact that it was still a murky black and brown blot on the landscape.

Pandy had taken to landing just inside the encroaching tree-line formed by woody plants of all kinds that grew in, on, under, and sometimes through what remained of her fence-wall. These plants concealed most of the outside of the house as well, so she had no chance to see the crates that had been shoved just past the property line in the general direction of her front door. That, in turn, meant that she slammed face-first into an immobile wooden box, rather than landing neatly on her paws.

There was a crack as something yielded – Pandy wasn’t sure if it was wood or bones – and she flopped down to lay on the overgrown and now overturned cobblestones that were meant to make up the path. A logo burned into the side of the nearest box filled her vision, and the crossed hammer and anvil told her what must be inside.

Pandy thought somewhat dazedly when her body failed to respond to her instructions. Her body twitched as the spells took hold, and she was able to climb to her paws, which was good because just then Isidor appeared at the door, a slice of half-burned-half-raw bread in his hand, and said, “Those arrived a few hours ago. Woke everyone up. There’s a horse in the back, too. It ate Hazel’s weeds, so she tried to eat the horse. Gloria thinks most of the fur will grow back.”

Augustus had said it was too late to visit his friend’s stable last night, but he would send a message, and apparently he’d done exactly that. Either that or they were now harboring a hijacked horse, and Empress Glory had better not know more than she was telling. First it was cheese, and now horses?

Pandy thought, swaying just a bit as she switched from four paws to two feet.

Shifting Faces successful.

04:52:29 remaining today.

“Do we even have a stable?” she asked, as she pushed the closest crate with an experimental foot. Not surprisingly, it didn’t budge, and she sighed as she trudged toward the door. Being a responsible adult really was overrated.

That thought was quickly thrown aside as Eleanor greeted her with a hug and a shining face. “We have a horse! He’s so smart. I made him a flower crown and told him not to eat it, and he didn’t.”

Pandy smiled down at the little princess, whose short hair was sticking up in tufts, while a few sprigs of grass clung to the cuffs of her pants. “That’s good. But I’m not sure we were actually ready for a-”

“There is a stable,” Isidor told her through a mouthful of underbaked toast. “It’s even mostly intact. I think someone was living there at least part of the time.”

“Master Piers lived in the carriage house when he ran out of funds,” Nox said, floating up through the floorboards in front of Isidor and totally not making Pandy let out a startled ‘eep’.

“So the horse can live in it?” Pandy asked cautiously.

“If you don’t mind that he can just walk out whenever he wants,” Isidor said. “The roof is intact, but the doors are broken.”

“Master Piers’s creditors were aware of his secondary residence,” Nox said with something that might have been dry humor coming from anyone else.

Pandy gave Eleanor another little squeeze, just glad the girl was comfortable enough with her now to hug first and ask questions later. “I’ll go check it out, but first I need everyone to go somewhere out of the way so I can work on the plumbing.”

She looked down the hall, considering. Presumably the pipes lay behind the walls in every room. Did that mean she’d have to go all over the house to fix them all, or could she fix one area and the rest would follow? Her eyes widened in horror as she suddenly realized that she might need one hundred and eighty-three Metal for just the upstairs bathroom, and it might take even more to fix everything.

“I want to go back to Soot,” Eleanor said, already heading toward the rear of the house. Pandy met Isidor’s eyes and he shrugged, following the princess with a casual stride that still kept him within three feet of her, even as she veered off into the kitchen, undoubtedly heading for the outside door there.

Soot was either the horse or the pit in which Nyssa cooked breakfast, and Pandy wasn’t going to ask which. Instead, she headed up to the office, where she grabbed the Avington House book and got to work. As she’d discovered when she needed marble for the kitchen, she could indeed take the book outside, though it vanished from her grasp the moment she tried to exit through the rusted remains of the gate.

She briefly considered sending the gate itself into the book out of sheer annoyance that she wouldn’t be able to just wander the streets adding discarded trash – not that there was likely to be any in the posh neighborhood in which Avington House squatted – but decided she wasn’t quite ready to find out if the book could fix the wall and gate as well. Besides, Queen Louisa had recommended changing the outside of the house slowly so as to not attract attention, and that seemed like good advice to Pandy.

At first, Pandy attempted to pry the lids off the crates, but then she realized they were made of wood, and she needed that, too. There was something terribly satisfying about making a large, immovable box disappear in an instant, and soon all that remained of the delivery were the gouges in the ground where they’d rested.

On her way back to the house, Pandy paused and looked around. She’d wandered the back yard a few times by now, but whenever she went out the front, she always seemed to be in a hurry. Besides, the whole area had been taken over by brambles that were using branches fallen from the sheltering trees as trellises, so there really wasn’t much to be seen. Brown grass, brown sticks, green and brown leaves that mingled with a few yellow and orange ones, a dead-white hand-

Pandy froze, gaze locked on those cold, still fingers. Creeping forward, she picked up a stick and used it to poke one slender digit. It didn’t react, but it also didn’t give the way flesh would. It wasn’t falling below freezing overnight just yet, though she had a feeling that time wasn’t far off, so the hand wasn’t frozen stiff, just made of stone.

With an overwhelming sense of relief, Pandy began pushing thorny vines out of the way, absently casting Minor Heal each time her hands were scratched. The brambles had grown up around the statue so thoroughly that it had been completely hidden from view until whoever had shoved the crates through the gate caught the main branch beneath one of them and yanked it out of the way. The crushed vine trailed away from the foot of the statue, which was indeed of a woman.

She stood on a marble block about six inches high, and seemed to be about Pandy’s height. Dirt and some kind of mildew or lichen darkened quite a bit of her dress and arms. Well, the one arm she had left, which was bent at the elbow, palm up as if she was holding something out to Pandy. The other arm was completely absent, but judging by the shape of the shoulder, it had probably mirrored the remaining one. Her face was calm and a little stern, blank eyes staring sightlessly straight ahead.

“Queen Nora, huh?” Glory’s voice came from behind Pandy, making her jump. The other woman squatted down beside her, brushing at the base of the statue until she revealed a metal plaque that was so tarnished and scratched it couldn’t be read. With a shrug, she straightened again.

“Pretty sure, anyway. She always has that look on her face, like she never laughed at anything in her entire life. Makes me feel sorry for her.” Turning, she looked at the undisturbed tangle on the other side of the path. “They used to make these in pairs. During parties and festivals, they’d cover them with flowers, or put offerings to Ismara in the hands. Lots of these old houses have them. I wonder if there’s another one over there.”

Dismissing the question, she turned back to Pandy. “Isidor said you can fix the bathrooms now. Get to it, those kids stink.”

Pandy hadn’t noticed that, though there was a dark ring forming along the back of Eleanor’s neck and behind her ears. It fit with her persona though, and might well just be part of her ‘costume’, so Pandy hadn’t said anything. Besides, it was her fault the girl couldn’t wash up properly, so if she did say something, she’d just be asking for trouble.

Nonetheless, the Empress was right. Pandy shouldn’t be playing with statuary when there were toilets to fix. Which reminded her – she looked down at her empty hands. Where had the book gone? When had the world snapped back to full color? After the crates but before she found the statue, wasn’t it? She’d definitely noticed the colors of the leaves when she-

“Come on,” Glory said, motioning for Pandy to head up the steps to the open front door. How long had she been standing there, watching Pandy dig out the statue? Pandy had a feeling she knew, at least in a general way. Apparently the book really didn’t like having an audience. That hadn’t happened with Nox and Nyssa, though, maybe because they were ‘part of’ the house?

Pandy followed, though she had to resist being shoved into the first bathroom they came to by a very enthusiastic Empress. “You can’t watch,” she finally said, and Glory drew back with a scowl.

“I thought you just told the kids that so they’d stay out of the way,” she said.

Shaking her head, Pandy said, “It’s just part of the magic. I’d let you all watch if I could.”

“Oh,” Glory said, drawing back and going oddly pensive. Seeing Pandy’s expression, she sighed and lowered her voice, admitting, “My father refused to let any of us watch when he worked on our home, but I thought he was just being-” She clamped her lips over whatever else she was going to say, then turned and marched off, head up and shoulders back, disappearing into the kitchen.

Well, that was interesting, but not actually relevant, at least not right now. Pandy went upstairs and got the book again, then entered the bathroom in the upstairs hallway. That was the one she’d first tried to fix, and she’d gotten the superficial details right, but it turned out she hadn’t repaired anything behind the walls.

This time, she ignored the bathtub and the porcelain throne – which had a pull chain for flushing, rather than a lever, and attached directly to the wall rather than having a water tank, but was otherwise recognizably toilety – and crossed to the wall above the sink, which had blown out the last time she tried this. Opening the book, she concentrated on, not the bathroom itself, but whatever lay right behind that wall.

The blank page filled with a complex pattern of lines that first looked like a particularly chaotic jungle gym, then resolved itself into something like the skeleton of a house. Massive sections of it glowed bright red, shading into paler reds in a few places. None of it was the pure black of ‘everything’s fine here’.

Tracing her finger along the shape, Pandy tried to puzzle out what was what. There were actually three full bathrooms downstairs, and two and a half baths upstairs – this one, the one off the master bedroom, and a half-bath attached to the office, which Pandy had only glanced into once – but it almost looked like there were some pipes going to the front of the house as well. What were those for, or was she just reading this completely wrong?

Glaring from the page to the wall, Pandy said, “Show me those.”

The page flapped slightly, curling up and then flattening back out as lines appeared on the walls, not just the page. Words rose to the surface of the paper as if an old inkstain was reappearing.

PLUMBING – Enchantments x3 [Temperature Control, Anti-corrosion, Anti-clog]

Physical condition: 14%

Cost to repair: 116 G/0 Metal

Magical Condition: 1% 

Cost to Repair: 247 LF/2338 Mana/708 CP

Pandy groaned. What were the odds that the plumbing system would work without the enchantments tied into it? The good news was that whatever was in the crates had been enough metal to do what she needed it to do, but now she regretted not looking at this sooner. She wanted Nyssa back up to full, but if she’d been applying that Mana to the plumbing system instead, it would be almost repaired. As it was, she didn’t have enough of any of the three forms of payment it would accept to fix it. But maybe this worked like buying groceries back in her old world? A little cash, a little credit, a little EBT, and maybe she could pull this off. She really needed to experiment a little anyway.

A glance at her stats told her she had a bit less than nine hundred Mana at the moment. She’d used some up healing herself, but most of it was back. Laying her palm on the page, she thought, then braced herself for impact.

Every time, it felt like someone had placed a vacuum-cleaner hose on her bellybutton and was sucking out her innards. It didn’t exactly hurt, but it definitely wasn’t a pleasant experience, either. Once it was over, she checked the book again.

PLUMBING – Enchantments x3 [Temperature Control, Anti-corrosion, Anti-clog]

Physical condition: 14%

Cost to repair: 116 G/0 Metal

Magical Condition: 32% 

Cost to Repair: 183 LF/1638 Mana/488 CP

All right, that was better. Now the question was, just how much did she want this? She could go tell the kids they’d have to wait several hours until she could slowly pay this off with Mana, or she could go all in. Looking around, she could see that very little of the network of pipes was still the deep red of complete failure, and there were a few spots that were almost black.

“Yep,” she muttered, “let’s do it. Give the plumbing two hundred and forty-four Corruption Points.”

She didn’t feel anything this time, which was nice, but a glance at her stat sheet told her the points were gone and she was down to two hundred and eighty-four CP. She’d have to spend a lot of time around Empress Glory today. The woman had seemed to like Pandy when she was Bunny, so maybe she’d have better luck lingering when she was furry.

PLUMBING – Enchantments x3 [Temperature Control, Anti-corrosion, Anti-clog]

Physical condition: 14%

Cost to repair: 116 G/0 Metal

Magical Condition: 66% 

Cost to Repair: 91 LF/819 Mana/244 CP

That brought the cost down to ninety-one Life Force, which was all Pandy hadn’t tried using yet. She very much did not want to intentionally hurt herself in order to fix the toilets, but she was actually curious what would happen if she told the book to take the points. Would it chomp her fingers off? Slice her with a thousand paper cuts? Or would it just suck out those points the way it had the others?

Quickly, she fed the required gold into the book. “Give the Plumbing ninety-one LF,” she said, and the last thing she saw was Nox’s face, rising up out of the book, black on black on black maw gaping wider and wider until it swallowed her whole.