Artefact Hunters: Ikimono's Mirror

     In a hidden cave deep within the mountains of Shenkuu, an Ixi and a Kougra were on the hunt.

     Well, truth be told, at the moment it was mostly the Kougra hunting. Her research into the object of their interest suggested that it had been hidden within this cave in a small crevice far off the ground, in hopes that it wouldn’t be stumbled upon by accident. The cavern’s walls were covered in small cracks and crags that provided ample handholds for climbing, but they were narrow and slick with moisture. It had been decided that only one of the pair should try scaling them at a time.

     “This seems strangely backwards,” Hanso mused aloud, leaning against a nearby stalagmite as his partner picked her way carefully toward a promising-looking high cave shelf.

     Brynn shifted position and turned to glance back at him with a raised eyebrow. “What makes you say that?” she asked.

     Hanso shrugged. “Just the fact that you’re the one scaling treacherous walls while I stay on the nice, sensible ground. Wall climbing is one of my many specialities, you know.”

     Brynn snorted. “You may be the Master Thief on this team, but I was still nimble enough to catch you back in the day. Besides, you’re the one who suggested I test the new travel armour with some rock climbing.”

     That much was true, Hanso had to admit. He and Brynn had been hunting down and securing dangerous artefacts for Queen Fyora for several months now. While they weren’t constantly on missions or anything, at the moment, there were still enough unclaimed artefacts that didn’t require too much digging to keep them busy. Fortunately, after a rather eventful first mission, they’d secured the next few artefacts with little fuss once they knew where to go. So far, this mission was shaping up to turn out the same way.

     Now that they were getting a feel for how missions went and the frenzy of rebuilding after Faerieland’s big crash was slowing a bit, Queen Fyora had finally gotten the chance to have a more travel-ready uniform made for Brynn. As captain of the Queen’s guard and a practically lifelong knight, she was accustomed enough to the usual plate armour. But it just wasn’t practical for long trips with a lot of navigating odd spaces and a low chance of serious combat. So now, she wore a brigandine in Faerieland colours over protective but flexible padded armour.

     Hanso shrugged. “Just because I suggested it doesn’t stop it from being weird,” he said, a playful quirk at the corner of his mouth.

     Brynn just shook her head and got back to climbing. It was slow going. Moisture dripped from the ceiling and ran in rivulets down the cave walls, and Hanso thought he saw lichen clinging to some of the rocks. Brynn had to pick out each hand- and foothold carefully, not just to ensure it held her own weight but to get any steady grip at all.

     Hanso frowned. He felt like he should be spotting her or something, but a deep pool butted right up against the wall she was on. He watched his partner reach up to a small ledge, her claws poking a little through her gloves to dig into the wet stone, and silently reminded himself that at least the water would make a better landing than the rocky floor if she fell.

     “Be careful,” he called out lamely as she shifted her footing and prepared to pull herself up onto the next shelf.

     Brynn didn’t bother looking back this time as she replied, “I know.” Her long tail twitched with anticipation, her grip tightened, her muscles bunched, and all at once she vaulted smoothly onto the ledge. Hanso had to hand it to her: for a seemingly straightforward guard type, she had the Kougra’s feline agility down pretty well.

     Brynn brushed a few hairs that had strayed from her Unitail out of her face and looked back up at the shelf she was aiming for. This one was a little larger than the others, and it seemed to disappear deep into the wall. It was a prime hiding spot for an artefact waiting to be rediscovered if there ever was one.

     “Okay,” she muttered to herself. “If I just…”

     Reaching out for a smaller outcropping, she found a solid grip and lifted herself up off the ledge she’d been standing on. One step, then another, she crept from handhold to foothold and inched ever closer to her goal.

     Then something cracked. Hanso jumped up, alarmed, but he could do nothing else as everything seemed to happen all at once. The stone beneath one of the tiny crevices Brynn was using as a foothold crumbled beneath her weight, throwing her off balance; her hands began to slip with her shifting weight as she scrabbled for another purchase; losing grip, she gave in to gravity and pushed off the wall to avoid hitting other outcrops or ledges as she fell. Only seconds after it started, she disappeared into the deep pool with a mighty splash that echoed through the otherwise still cavern.

     “Brynn!” Hanso called out, scrambling up to the edge of the pool. He put a steadying hand on the rock wall and looked out over the water, trying to make out the form of his partner through the rippling waves that threw their lantern light every which way. She had managed not to hit anything else before the pool, and she’d taken a short enough fall into deep enough water that it shouldn’t have hurt her either. He reminded himself of that in his head, over and over.

     So why wasn’t she surfacing?

     Movement caught the corner of his eye, and he turned. Maybe Brynn had come up somewhere other than where he’d expected?

     But it was just a bedraggled Biyako that must have wandered in at some point, shaking itself off not far from the pool. It looked over at him, opened its mouth, and let out a strange sound like something between a yowl and a weak roar.

     Hanso shrugged the petpet off and returned his attention forward. “Brynn?” he called again, voice starting to crack with desperation.

     What was in that water? Was it shallower than it looked, and she’d hit the bottom and been injured or worse? Was she struggling against some unseen cave monster beneath the surface, her oxygen running out even as she fought?

     Hanso was about to jump in after her when something pressed against his leg. He let out an undignified yelp – not that he would admit it afterwards – and looked down.

     It was the Biyako again, nudging him rather insistently with a paw. This close, he could see (and feel) that the poor thing was soaked through. It looked up at him almost expectantly, and nudged him again while making a low rumbling noise.

     Hanso sighed. “Look, I don’t have any food for you. Now, I’m gonna assume by this buddy act that you’re someone’s pet, so hang tight, and we’ll go find your owner as soon as I’ve rescued my partner.”

     The Biyako’s hackles rose at that, and it let out another weird yowl-roar. It then gripped his jacket in its teeth and started yanking him away from the water, growling deep in its throat.

     “Hey, what are you –” Hanso just barely suppressed another yelp as the petpet’s insistent tugging unbalanced him on the slick cave floor and sent him sprawling over the hard stone. “What is your problem?!”

     The Biyako gave him a look that could only be described as incredulous. With a snort and a flick of the tail, it turned and stomped over to the satchel and the unbuckled sword belt that Brynn had set aside before she started climbing the cave wall.

      Hanso’s breath caught in his throat. Now that he was paying attention to the Biyako and not caught up in his own panic, several things stood out to him. The creature’s behaviour – how it kept trying to get his attention and seemed to genuinely understand what he was saying. Its colour – Orange, which wasn’t common in Biyakos but suddenly seemed awfully familiar. The fact that it was still wet – like it had just come out of the cave pool, which he didn’t recall seeing any petpets swimming around in earlier.

     And tying it all together, the nature of the artefact that he and Brynn were looking for here in the first place.

     “No way,” Hanso half-whispered. “Brynn?”

     The Biyako let out a small huff, almost like a relieved sigh, and nodded.

     “But –” Hanso glanced back at the pool, grimaced, and edged further away from it. “But how could this happen? It’s not like you used that stupid mirror.”

     Brynn gave an awkward quadrupedal shrug and started nosing through her pack. She wasn’t able to get very far without hands, so Hanso stood up and grabbed the pack to rifle through it for her.

     “You looking for this?” he asked, pulling out a well-used journal that contained her notes on artefacts they planned to hunt down. Brynn sat back on her haunches with another, friendlier huff – a ‘chuff,’ he believed it was called.

     “Uhh… I’m gonna take that as a yes.” Hanso sat down on a smallish boulder next to the one his lantern was resting on and flipped through the journal’s pages until he came to the most recent section.

     “Okay, here we go,” he muttered half to himself. Brynn clambered up onto the rock next to him for a better look, and he tried his best to ignore the absurd mental image of himself reading a bedtime story to a petpet.

     “Ikimono’s Mirror,” he said, skimming through the notes jotted down in Brynn’s tight, neat handwriting. “Crafted by the Shenkese Earth Faerie Ikimono, turns targets into petpets, blah blah blah, hidden cavern. Okay, see, here it says there’s supposed to be an incantation that gets spoken while someone’s looking into the mirror. And unless your name is also a magic word I didn’t know about, neither of us was saying any incantations when you fell into that water.”

     Brynn made a rumbling noise in the back of her throat and jabbed a damp forepaw at the page. Hanso raised an eyebrow and skipped ahead to the passage she seemed to be pointing at.

     ”Ikimono’s Mirror was hidden away from civilisation because it became unstable. It may activate unpredictably and without the incantation, so take great caution when approaching.”

     Hanso blinked at the warning, underlined in bold dark ink. “Oh.” Had Brynn told him about that? She probably had at some point; it sounded kind of familiar, now that he thought about it. He should have paid better attention when they were prepping for this mission.

     Hanso frowned and looked back out at the pool Brynn had fallen into. Unstable or not, the artefact shouldn’t have turned her into a petpet in the water if it was still tucked away on some high ledge. But if, at some point after it was hidden, it had somehow fallen out of its little alcove…

     Grabbing his lantern, he made his way back to the pool’s edge. Careful to stay far enough back that he wasn’t in danger of falling in, he held the lantern out over the water and peered as far as he could into its depths. Brynn came up beside him, Biyako tail twitching uneasily.

     There. Deep in the now still water, not too far from the cavern wall, a reflective surface ringed in gold caught his lantern light. At least that was one mystery solved.

     “Okay,” he thought aloud. “So, magic mirror’s in the water, and the whole instability thing means it’s gonna get anyone who goes in after it.”

     He took a moment to regard his transformed partner. In hindsight, it was obvious why she had expected him to recognise her sooner than he did. Biyakos were remarkably similar to Kougras, with only the Taigar making for a closer match. And along with her coat colour, Brynn still had her sharp blue eyes and the same stripe pattern. Even beyond that, there was something in her expression and the way she carried herself that was just so very much her.

     Hanso smirked. “Well, at least one good thing’s come out of this.”

     Brynn gave him a questioning look, but before she could do anything else, he scooped her up under the forelegs and lifted her like a bag of flour. It was easier said than done — even standard Biyakos were on the large side for petpets. In her current state and on all fours, Brynn still stood up above his knee.

     Undeterred, he gushed, “You are absolutely adorable as a petpet!”

     Brynn glared at him, growling in annoyance. She raised a forepaw and batted him in the snout. Not hard or with claws or anything, but it was enough to get the point across.

     “Sorry, sweetheart,” Hanso said with a chuckle, setting her back down. “But you know it’s true. Anyway, let’s call up that court wizard and figure out how to fix this.”

     With that, he plopped back onto the rock and rooted through her pack again until he found her communication gem. The rune-inscribed disk of metal and faerie crystal was a rare commodity that the two of them mainly used to report to Queen Fyora. Most high-ranking court types seemed to have something like it, though, and the quick communication proved useful when they were in the field.

     Hanso held the gem up so its crystal surface faced him and cleared his throat. “Hey, Min, you got a minute?”

     The gem pulsed with light at the sound of the name, and after a few moments, an image of an elegantly berobed Pastel Jubjub peered out at him from its surface.

     “That’s Lady Min to you, Master Hanso,” the Jubjub sniffed. “I don’t know how things are done in Faerieland’s courts, but we respect our stations here at the Imperial Palace.”

     Hanso didn’t recall the imperial battlemaster Hikaru being all that particular about titles back during the Fall of Faerieland, but he didn’t bother arguing the point. He and Brynn had been in contact with Lady Min and her colleagues for some time while they worked to pinpoint the location of Ikimono’s Mirror. They’d set out from Shenkuu’s Imperial City just yesterday to hunt down this cave.

     “Right,” he said. “So anyway, we kind of have a problem here.”

     Leaning back a little, he turned the gem so that Min could see Brynn.

     Min’s mouth pressed into a thin line at the sight. “Please tell me you’re showing me a random wild Biyako you have some concern over, and not the result of the more sensible of you two carelessly getting herself affected by the very artefact you’re here to neutralise.”

     Brynn’s fur bristled at the accusation, but that was her only reaction. Hanso scowled for both of them.

     “Hey, there was nothing careless about it!” he snapped. “Look, the mirror ended up in this deep pool where we couldn’t see it until we knew where to look, and its magic infected the water or something. Brynn fell in, and now we just need to know if there’s someone close by who can change her back and how we can get the thing out without it turning me into a Juma or something.”

     Min kept her severe expression, but it softened into something a little less accusatory as she thought. “I see. Well, I can tell you now that undoing such a thorough transformation from an artefact like Ikimono’s Mirror is not a feat for an ordinary hedge witch. Even I would hesitate to attempt a counterspell without studying the artefact to understand its workings. You will have to retrieve it first, and then meet with me here.”

     Hanso’s ears pinned back. “Wait, seriously?” He’d been afraid he and Brynn would have to trek all the way back to the Imperial City to return her to normal. But he’d counted on her at least being herself again in time to help him safely dispose of the mirror. It wouldn’t make a difference if he could just grab it now, but he doubted the rope in his pack would be enough to get it safely out of the pool.

     Min tapped a toe in thought. “You will likely want to retrieve the mirror first in any case. You can ward off unstable magic with properly applied silver, but if it’s that deep underwater, anyone who approaches close enough to cover it will be transformed anyway if they were not already.

     “Fortunately, I know of a wizard not far from your location who should have what you need. Find Master Ryuji in Kasuma Village and tell him I sent you. He won’t deny aid to associates of the court, even if what he can do for Captain Brynn is limited.”

     Hanso nodded. He was pretty sure he’d seen that village named on the map he and Brynn had brought. Grabbing her notebook again to scribble the names down in the margins, he said, “Okay, silver stuff in Kasuma Village. Got it.”

     Min nodded. “Once you have secured the mirror, keep it secure and contact me again. I will start preparing my study so that we can safely work with the artefact until it can be neutralised.”

     Once she had signed off, Hanso sighed and looked at his partner. “Welp, looks like we’re done here for now. You think you can still carry some of your stuff?”

     Brynn grunted in response and hopped down from the rock they’d both been sitting on. She trotted over to her scabbarded sword to regard it for a moment, ears twitching. Hanso could see from here that the aptly named longsword would be too big and unwieldy for her to carry. She seemed to think so, too, because she shook her head with a small growl and turned back around to focus on her pack. After cinching it closed with her teeth, she slipped her head through the pack’s single strap and wriggled through to wear it just over her back.

     “Cool,” Hanso said. He’d tossed the notebook and communication gem into his own pack and grabbed both of their lanterns while she was working on that. Now, he walked over to grab her discarded weapon and sling the strap over his shoulder.

     Once everything was in hand, he turned to Brynn again. As much to fill in the relative silence from his now speechless partner as anything else, he said, “All right, off to Kasuma.”

     Brynn chuffed and started back down the path, tail swishing a little as she wove among the stalagmites and gave the treacherous pool a wide berth. The lanterns’ light bounced off the cave walls as Hanso followed her out into the Shenkuu sun.

To be continued…