The Silence ♜

The mission was simple.

• Step 1: get the *ahem* attention of an off duty guard, and use that leverage to get inside the walls.
• Step 2: From inside the facility, one particular magical protection needed to be taken offline.
• Step 3: Get back out and rendezvous.

Easy.

Steps 1 and 2 when off without a hitch. After getting in, it was easy enough to cause a disturbance with a little trickery teleporting an object somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be. With attention off of her, she cast invisibility and walked where she pleased, rifting past any doors or other problems without issue. Once the magical protection was disrupted (that tiny magic chess piece was worth the steep price), all she had to do was walk out.

But He was there. He wasn’t supposed to be here, and He was never without significant guard and obvious magical protection when anywhere else. But He was just here. And why shouldn’t he drop his guard in the middle of the most secure prison ever built?

Too good, too easy. In hindsight, that should have been a clue.

She snuck up behind him, drew her dagger…

And stopped.

Couldn’t move, and she heard a small alarm tone ring out. He turned around, waved a hand and uttered what sounded more like a curse than anything, and she felt her invisibility drop.

There wasn’t much for them to take off of her. She really only came in with three things: a hidden dagger, the chess piece, and her focus glove. The first was no loss at all, daggers are cheap. The chess piece was already in place, and unnoticed. But her focus! She only needed it for a couple things, but how fucking dare they! Trying to pass it off as purely ornamental didn’t and was never going to work with Him there. Fortunate really though, that she didn’t have anything more incriminating. A seductress assassin is barely worth a second look. “Accidentally” letting slip who she got the “invisibility potion” from covered her story well enough for them to not investigate further, at least for now.

This cell has an odd smell. And it’s a damn shame they also locked her up inside it rather than just dumping her in. She’d be out if they hadn’t. Pricks.

At least it should only be an hour before the rendezvous window, and missing that is gonna have the party ready for a fight. Sym smiled, and settled in for the wait. Might as well use this still time to rest from suppressing her rifts for most of the last 8 hours. Fucking pricks taking her focus glove though. Takes hours to make those, and the good leather is pricey.

Xyrevi paced around the small clearing. “Come on Sym, where are you?” she thought. This was the last chance. She told Sym it was her last chance. This was a simple mission, very little could go wrong enough to stop Sym from making the rendezvous. If something had gone wrong… She stopped pacing for a second. If after all their information gathering something was still unaccounted for, well, that’s why they set a time window to meet. But if Sym had done it again, tried to lift some extra treasure that triggered an alarm, or — more likely — spotted an Amethyst Hand agent she decided needed to die and got caught.

This would be it. Xyrevi told her there wouldn’t be any more chances.