Wandering the big halls of the Wellington mansion proved a fairly interesting pastime, but I had to remember that I was searching for anything suspicious, not leisurely touring myself around. I got a really good lay of the land, seeing rooms and decorations on the southern wing that screamed luxurious fashion, but a lot of areas were off limits by locked doors.

  “Hmm…” Locked doors meant potential secrets, and secrets were just little bits of info waiting for me to discover them. “Samael, I need a little help here.”

  My snake slithered out from under my big detective hat and coiled up in my hand, cutely staring up at me and tilting his head expectantly.

  “We need to figure out what’s behind some of these doors… So, do me a favour and sneak around the vents, okay?”

  “Ss…” he hissed approvingly.

  “That’a boy!” I unplugged one of the spare crystal hearts on my metal bracer and put it in his mouth. It looked like he was trying to eat a big blue egg, which was a little cute and worrying at the same time. Lucky for me, he was smart enough not to actually eat it.

  To give him a boost up to one of the vents, I spawned out my wings and fluttered the two of us up to the ceiling. The vent I was heading for had a grate that Samael and the heart fit through perfectly.

  “Okay, Sammy!” I said, communicating through my heart with him. “The first room should be somewhere to your left, so please check it out for me.”

  I could see everything in a 360 view around the crystal heart that Samael took. It was clear as day and I had sound too. Not HD or 5.1 audio, but I had to settle with what I had through my ethereal connection.

  “I wonder if I could upgrade the broadband…” I mumbled to myself, skimming my UPGRADE menu and coming up short.

  “Hsssshh…” Samael did his best to make a hiss with the crystal heart in his mouth, trying to get my focus back on our objective.

  “Opp…” I uttered. “Sorry about that.”

  He’d made it to the first locked room and was looking down on it from above. It looked like a teenage girl’s bedroom… Pretty and pink. There were posters of pop idols all over the place and cartoon girl figurines on the rim of a desk.

  A silky white bed was tucked nicely within a canopy of pink drapes. Frilly pillows really added to the cuteness factor that tempted me to sneak in and take a nap. But of course, I didn’t want to make like Little Red Riding Hood and just steal someone else’s mattress.

  “Is that Adalyn’s room?”

  I had my doubts. Not only was it a little smaller than I expected from Adalyn, it was a bit too girly. She definitely was into cute things, but I didn’t get the vibe that she was a pink enthusiast like this. Maybe it was from when she was a little girl?

  Well, no. That couldn’t have been the case. One of the posters on the wall was an advertisement for a pop idol concert. A bunch of dates were written at the bottom, and one of those dates was actually today. So that meant this room had to have been recently used, at least within the last year or so.

  “Who’s using it though?”

  Did Adalyn have a sister? She mentioned someone named Riley before, but she said that was a boy.

  Regardless, this wasn’t a suspicious room beyond just having an unknown resident.

  Samael moved on to the next room. It just seemed to have a bunch of manikins with fancy clothes on them. If there’s one thing this house wasn’t lacking, it was fancy clothes. Every room had closets packed like sardines, brimming with all the latest and retro fashion imaginable, as if space was running sparse. Even the room I was in had a lot of stuff, which was where I found this detective outfit.

  Most of the other locked doors down this hall were pretty much the same thing. Just mundane rooms without anything of note in them.

  “Hmm…” I really wasn’t convinced to stop searching. And to be fair, I was only searching at a glance, not really digging for anything hidden. But in my mind, something projecting a lot of undetectable dark power had to be big, right?

  “Maybe we need to change our approach.”

  Seeing as the darkness was off the radar, I needed some way of narrowing down which rooms were the most likely to be suspect in my search. There had to be hundreds of doors down this hallway alone… I could have checked all of them, but that would have taken longer than I would have liked.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Time was of the essence here. If this dark power was something dangerous, then I needed to deal with it ASAP. That was my God given job, after all.

  One of the things I was noticing was that there were some rooms with strange magical signatures to them. If I got close enough to their doors, I could see some sparklies emanating through the thin gaps between the frame and door.

  “What are these rooms?”

  Samael peeked in. It was dark, like the room had no window. But something else was happening in there at the very opposite end. A faint blue light was swirling like a tornado tipped over, facing the vent with the eye of the storm gazing at Samael.

  “That’s freaky…”

  I was detecting some particles that at first had me baffled, but were quickly identified as expected occurrences around Nalnara portals.

  “Is that a portal?”

  Nalnara portals were fueled by mana that ran through the planet, so it was strange to see one in this house. Given that a few of the neighboring rooms had the same magical anomalies going on, I had to assume that they were also portals too, or something similar.

  Samael needed to go check those to confirm my suspicion, but before he could leave, he made a stressed out hiss that I’d never heard before.

  “SsssSSSss!”

  A huge vortex began to spiral out of the portal, creating a tugging wind that drew Samael from the vent. He fell into the room and fought against the vortex, but failed to get away in time and got sucked in.

  “Sammy!” I screamed as I rushed to the door, trying to yank it off its hinges.

  My auxiliary heart went in along with him, but I lost connection with it, so I couldn’t see what happened after they entered.

  With all my power I couldn’t force the door open. I attempted to activate my combat mode for the necessary strength, but instead had to let out a cry of pain as my muscles felt like they were getting torn to shreds inside of me.

  “I…ugh…” I grunted. “I hadn’t recovered from the last fight. My body needs more time before I can power up again.”

  The Combat Mode pushed my body to its limits, and going into the False Theta form pushed even further beyond that. My physical strength couldn’t have been any lower at the moment.

  “Hang on, Samael, I’m coming!” But even as my efficiency tanked well below its lowest point, I posed myself and aimed my heart toward the door, knowing I wouldn’t be giving up that easily.

  “Mana Cannon…” I charged a small orb of mana at my core, then forced it forward in a beam of energy. “…Fire!”

  The beam struck the door, shrugging off the first few seconds of energy and dispersing it around, but it quickly fell prey to the power of my spirit’s might.

  A hole was blasted through it, large enough for me to fly through. I dove through the air and twirled, curling my wings in as I corkscrewed through the artificial entrance.

  The eye of the magical portal was on me, as if it were alive. I glared at it, no hesitation in my forward motion to dive right in after my friend. It embraced me, exactly like the mana waters of a Nalnara gate.

  For what felt like an unending amount of time, a stream of mana carried me along as if I were flowing through a magical waterslide… Uncharacteristic of the Nalnara portals, so clearly an inferior version. But no discount portal would ever keep me from rescuing my pet and friend.

  Finally this sparkly tunnel of blue came to an end, suddenly spitting me out in an unknown environment that I didn’t have a second to analyze before…

  *CONK!*

  …before my head slammed right into a big tree, shaking it so bad that trees and little glowing particles of blue dust came down on me like magic snow.

  “Ouch!” I slowly slid down to the ground.

  After transferring all my inertia into the static tree trunk, I sat cross legged and rubbed my head, making a lot of “Ouchy” noises as I recovered.

  “What the heck…” I peeked my eyes open and scanned them across a forest, seeing trees so tall that their leaves made a ceiling above my head. All sorts of ambient sounds could be heard from their tops from birds and owl hoots, to rodents making warning calls.

  Across the ground were flowering plants that were glowing and giving some brightness to the dark forest. Along with the vibrant weeds were mushrooms that illuminated blue light. Spores occasionally floated off them and gently landed on the ground, awaiting to spawn more of the fungus around. The tree I’d hit was covered in those mushrooms, so clearly hitting it did them a favour.

  A light fog wistfully crossed the air in the distance. Little eyes of a variety of colours were glowing across the haze and looking my way.

  “Where am I?”

  Something was dancing through the brush and creating a fluttering sound. A tiny little face popped out from behind some leaves, but quickly dove back in once spotting me.

  I marched over to where I saw that tiny thing, but digging around the brush didn’t help me find them. They probably got scared off.

  “Excuse me?” I called out in a disarming voice. “Have you seen my friend? He’s a little snake named Samael.”

  There was no response. Whoever was just here wasn’t going to reveal themselves.

  Instead of waiting around, I began to trek along a path of glowing mushrooms, aided by the stardust light of my spear.

  “Spear of Destiny!” I called out, materializing my choice weapon and marching into the depths of this enchanted forest. “Let’s see what secrets we’ll find here…”

  -(From left to right) Yalda Holmes, Chibi Emily Wolfstone, Uncle, Cynthia (Concept)-

  Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, please support me, Taylor The Writer, here on Royal Road! :)