Concordia discors

[The author wishes to thank everyone for reading, reccing, and keeping their voices down while she staggers off to bed.
ETA: Particular thanks, are due to temaris for the correction; that is indeed Sallust on Catiline conspiracy, but I can’t edit my comment, so consider this the correction. Thank you. Also many thanks to christwise for noticing the turn of the screw reference.]

Disclaimer: Mina de Malfois is an original fictional creation. These stories and characters are the sole property of the author, but she lends them out for fanfic and fanart. This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.



She would not, the departing investigator informed us, be pursuing inquiries about BalletChic or Ciyerra any further; she was completely convinced of the truth of what she had been told. As unlikely as it seemed, she concluded, BalletChic had really killed herself. Ciyerra was either someone else, or a ghost. The investigator added that her money was on ‘someone else,’ but that at any rate, she wouldn’t be following up on that. BalletChic was really dead, the amateur detective felt terrible for ever having doubted her, and unless we wanted to call her credibility into question, there seemed no response to this.

I don’t mind telling you that my blood ran cold as I read this, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I had spotted, you see, something truly disturbing. Of course the amateur detectives didn’t realize this, but this theory that BalletChic was deceased and Ciyerra just a standard impostor didn’t fit all the facts. I mean, I had one fact they didn’t, and I had it straight from Arc: Ciyerra’s IP matched BalletChic’s.¹

After an irrational moment of feeling chilled to the core I got hold of myself. Ciyerra couldn’t, just couldn’t, be a ghost. Either the matching IP meant that she’d been BalletChic’s sister or roommate (although one rather quailed at the thought of a sister or roommate so heartlessly morbid they’d impersonate a dead girl), or, even more likely, what we had here was a phoney investigator. Yes, that fit. One person among the handful of doubters had pretended to go along with the skeptics, but in reality had been a Ciyerra supporter, and she’d concocted the whole story about contacting the hospital in order to ‘prove’ BalletChic’s death to the credulous. I sighed heavily, relieved to have seen through it.

But then, a couple of days later, another of the lead investigators threw in the towel and said she, too, had reached a dead end. She told a similar tale of having contacted the area hospitals, and of having been informed by hospital x that yes, a girl of that name had been admitted but had failed to recover consciousness. Everything--hospital, phone number, name, date, and time--matched.

It gave me the willies. Not that I believed Ciyerra was a ghost, but I was starting seriously to think she was some sort of lunatic. If BalletChic really was dead, then what sort of person would be pretending to be her? And did I, I asked myself, want that sort of person haunting Malfois Manor?

My betas, showing a remarkable lack of timing, had sent back a list of tentative suggestions for polishing chapter four of ‘At His Lordship’s Behest.’ ‘Dash it all, Clive,’ I replied to my betas--I often address them this way, even though they are in fact a group of people, most of them female, and none of them named Clive; I am just that British--‘Dash it all, Clive, this isn’t the time. I’ll get to it when I get to it, old chap, but just now I have to sort out some in-game complications. Ta very much for your input, though, and I’ll be sure to credit you all by name.’ Beta readers like these little acknowledgements.

And I was busy, although strictly speaking I wasn’t doing anything, unless fretting counts as doing. I couldn’t shake off my fear that BalletChic had had a mouth-foamy axe-wielding dangerous maniac of a sister or BFF. The thought that I had had email from someone whose idea of an entertaining lark was to go around impersonating a deceased person was horrid enough in itself. The added fact of the identical IP address, indicating that this morbid fake had shared accommodations with poor BalletChic, was an additional turn of the screw.²

‘What on earth do you think motivates her?’ I asked Arc.

‘Quieta movere magna merces videbatur,’ she said, which was no help whatsoever.³

‘I can’t hire her. I mean, would you want to hang around Sanguinity with a lunatic?’ I went on.

‘Whither thou goest,’ she typed.⁴ A chilling phrase, but she’d spelt ‘ghost’ wrong, though I tactfully refrained from pointing this out.

The answer came to me the next day at work. I’m often subject to sudden inspirations at work, particularly while working the evening shift. It’s the combination of being slightly tired and bored out of my skull that does it, I suppose. I enter a kind of drudgery-induced trance, and all sorts of ideas flood in while my consciousness is being altered by rude customers and idiotic demands.

Anyway, I saw suddenly that I’d been getting ahead of myself in panicking. What I needed to do, obviously, was confirm the reports the amateur investigators had reported. I’d been in fandom long enough to be thoroughly familiar with cliques, after all; I must be losing it, to be so easily convinced by the sworn testimony of two complete strangers posting online. For all I knew, they were each other’s sockpuppets, or better yet, two sockpuppets belonging to BalletChic. They had different writing styles, but this would hardly be the first instance of someone faking that. It’s not like I’d met them for lunch or anything, so I could look them in the eyes and gain a true assessment of their personal honesty.

So the next day I tackled the thing head on. I sat down with the phone book--the actual, physical, tangible phone book; I was being thoroughly and sensibly paranoid at this point--and looked up the number for the hospital they’d claimed BalletChic had been admitted to. I dialled the number, and a pleasant female voice greeted me with confirmation that I’d reached the front desk of the hospital in question. So far, so good. ‘I’m looking for a patient,’ I said, and gave the woman BalletChic’s supposed name.

‘One moment, please,’ she said cheerfully, and put me on hold. When she came back on the line, all the cheerful had left her voice. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she began, and went on to confirm that the patient had indeed been admitted--and on the right day--but she had died without regaining consciousness.

I don’t even know what I said in response, but I got off the phone, quickly, and back to my computer. I unfolded the whole uncanny tale to Arc the instant she finally showed up online.

‘I think you should go ahead and hire her in-game,’ Arc said calmly.

‘But, Arc,’ I protested, creeped to the bone. ‘I don’t want Malfois Manor being haunted by a real virtual ghost, or a lurking lunatic.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, displaying a callous lack of empathy for my c. to the b.-ness. ‘It will add atmosphere.’ This was, I suppose, true, but much good it would do me to possess a reputation-enhancing bit of atmospherics if I were amongst those being terrified by it.

‘It jolly well won’t if I’m too filled with dread to log in,’ I pointed out reasonably.

There was a pause. ‘Have I ever mentioned that I do a lot of volunteer work?’ Arc asked.

I frowned. She was straying far and loose from the important subject of the Malfois Manor haunting, in my opinion. ‘Oh, yes?’ I typed coldly.

‘For instance, I sit on a board that reviews the non-medical hiring decisions of several area hospitals,’ she went on.

I paused. Arc seemed to be trying to communicate something here. Hope flourished slightly. Perhaps Arc had known something about BalletChic in life that would render the spirit of Ciyerra less damned disturbing, though I couldn’t imagine what. Or else--I struggled to remain rational--or else, maybe Arc knew that BalletChic had had a sister who was deranged but harmless, and this hypothetical non-violent nutter was the one playing Ciyerra.

‘You mean,’ I suggested cautiously, ‘you recognized BalletChic’s name as that of a former patient?’

‘I mean,’ she typed back patiently, ‘I recognized BalletChic’s name as that of a current front-desk receptionist. She’s a full-time employee. It’s how she affords things like ‘premium accounts’ and ‘repayment agreements.’’

Arc, I tell you, moves in mysterious ways.



Footnotes:
1. The matching IP address is an admiring reference to my beloved Charlotte Lennox.

2. an additional turn of the screw is of course a reference to Henry James' the Turn of the Screw.

3. Quieta movere magna merces videbatur Roughly, “They thought it good to stir things up.” Sallust, on the Catiline Conspiracy. I owe temaris for correcting my attribution on that.

4. Whither thou goest Ruth to Naomi: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.” Ruth 1:16.