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  Chapter 222 Part C2

  The fae intelligence agents got together after securing the inn. And with them is Ness'ryn'dyl, the secretary assigned to the archmage Shun.

  "So... what's our status?" the team leader said.

  "Site is secure. We're interviewing people now," the assistant said.

  "Make sure to keep your detect lie spells up. And detect evil also," another said.

  Several nodded.

  "Can I go? I am pretty busy. I have several reports to give today," Ness'ryn'dyl said.

  "NO! We've got to talk," the leader said.

  The way he said it Ness'ryn'dyl flinched.

  "Come with us. We've got a table over here where we can interview you," One of them told her.

  Ness was led over to the dining area's tables. The fae agents had pretty much taken over half the dining section and had 2 dozen agents all throughout it, interviewing adventurers. They sat while Ness took in the scene.

  "Thanks for speaking with us. We'll try to get this over as pleasantly as possible without any trouble Ness. I'm agent Ya'Syk. This is agent Ke'shard," one of them said.

  Although she could tell something was up already because there were supposed to only be 2 agents per interviewee. And she 2 but then 3 others were hanging over their shoulders and were too interested in her. Of the other 2 dozen interviews in the room, none of those had this many agents listening in.

  "What? I haven't done anything. And I was at the bombing. If anything I'm a victim," Ness said.

  "We understand. And we ephathize with you also," one of them said in that soulless bureaucratic dead voice way that only machine bureaucrats can do.

  "So you were at the bombing then. That's interesting," one of the agents said.

  Ness flinched again. Its clear that had made them more interested not less. She sighed. "They already asked me all about that event. I got interviewed 5 times. I'm not going over that again. It wasted my whole day."

  "Actually we don't want to know about that. But when we asked you about that we didn't know to ask you about this Shun character," one of the agents said.

  "Shun? I only recently got the assignment. I haven't known him long enough to have very much information," she said.

  "So you don't know him well?" one of them asked.

  "Nope. Sorry," she said.

  2 of the agents grimaced.

  "But all the data intersects with this Shun guy coming to the inn. There has to be something there," one of the agents said.

  Several nodded.

  "If that's true I still don't know enough to tell you anything," Ness told them.

  "That's not a lot of info to go on," one of them said.

  "Anything unusual happen recently with them? When they got here? Anything odd you've seen. It might be the slightest detail. How they act, or things they do. Something in their mannerisms," Ya'Syk asked.

  "I don't know. But I get the feeling this Shun guy is avoiding me," Ness frowned, with arms crossed.

  "Oh? That's interesting. Why would he do that?" one of them asked.

  She shrugged. "Its weird. Although that by itself might not mean anything. You see most humans are obsessed with hanging around fae women. We're as beautiful as elves were. Everyone knows that. But not this Shun guy. Although it does seem like he has his own women. And they are nice looking so I get that too. Or maybe that's my own vanity." She grimaced.

  "Oh? Have you met his team?" they asked.

  "I've met some of them. But not all. And I'm not clear which. But I already sent in a briefing to the intelligence committee on that. You can find reference to that with the Agency," Ness said.

  "OK. We'll not ask about that then. Unless we find ter that the already submitted document is incomplete," one said while staring hard.

  "Can I go now?" she asked.

  "Not so fast... you see..." one of them leaned closer.

  ...

  And as she listened she's more curious also.

  It just so happens that the demon energy spiked both times when Shun was at the inn. It also happened that he was around the inn when all these events happpened. And only bad things started happening when this Shun guy shows up. She also thought that was weird, but there could be an expnation for it still. Still, the math on the coincidences was starting to pile up though. Who was this Shun guy really? They found in the guest log that Shun's overp didn't fully coincide with all the dates of the bodies being stashed in the sewer but some did. And his mana had a weird reading also.

  "Weird reading on the mana? How so?" Ness asked,suddenly interested.

  "Your familiar with mana readings?" one of them asked.

  "Yes I am. But I was told you can't always rely on mana signtatures to clearly identify someone's race or heritage," Ness said.

  "That's not entirely true," one said.

  "That's not what they teach in the schools teaching magic. I've been to the same csses you have on tracking mana readings. So what you say isn't fully solid. Not yet," Ness said.

  The elders shifted a bit uncomfortably.

  "Well you are partly right. But not entirely. When you do a mana reading on someone. An expert can usually tell what race they are," Ya'Syk told her.

  "Yes, he's right. But there are exceptions. It only holds true for most of the popution," Ness frowned. (Why was this even bothering her anyway? Its not like she really liked that Shun guy that much...) But for some reason she'd wanted to speak with him more recently.

  "There's a bit more to it. Sure there are exceptions. Outliers. Every mana reading has outliers. Like distribution curves in probability which have to do with popution graphs. But the outliers are like 10%. That's reality and the real story. That's a pretty narrow margin. So we can take 90% of various mana readings and using a few experts tell their race with that much accuracy. Only 10% will be wrong race identifiers or be unidentifiable," one of them said.

  "OK. So? We have tons or races here," Ness folded her arms frowning.

  "So. We think one of the occupants of this inn was a demon. And it just so happens that this Shun character shows up around then. I don't think its a coincidence. And we're going to test him," one of them said.

  She froze. Ah this wouldn't be good for her career if its identified she was under a demon. They had enough of a reputation that people tended to avoid anyone connected to them even if they weren't in on it. She'd studied specific examples.

  I hope my job isn't ruined, she thought.

  "You know there's something else to consider," she began.

  "Go on."

  "The 10% outliers in the popution are often also people with mixed blood. Say their grandfather was a dwarf, but everyone else in the family is human and looks human. That's often what you find in those 10% outliers," she told them.

  "Oh. That's smart. I didn't know that," one agent said.

  "Ah, so that's why it does that. I'm curious too," another said.

  "Well either way why does all this stuff happen around this Shun guy? We need to interview him next."

  "Be patient. We want as much data as we can so we can trap him," another said.

  Several nodded.

  ...

  Elsewhere another fae mage was doing readings on the inn. Time space mana readings to track people going in and around the site. Only a time space mana element wizard with tracking could do this skill. If you did it right you could go back within a day and track peoples movements. It got more difficult the further back you went back though if you wanted very clear consise imagery. Also it was very hard to do.

  So now he was rewinding the data while looking at an air screen which was showing the past day much like a video camera's footage.

  There! He'd rewound to find Shun and a bck haired pale short busty girl appear in the alley by the inn! There's the poof also of dark mana spreading when they appeared. Then it settles. The dark mana is an indicator; they'd appeared out of a time space rift of some kind.

  But which kind? Without looking inside it, it would be hard to tell. And there was more than one kind of time space rift.

  He studied them intently. The girl was a bit pale for a human. And too pretty for a human girl, err a woman. A very short woman, very skinny also. So he suspected issues. There's no way she was human. And her eyes looked red. He froze the image in motion with the date stamp in the screen. Then slowly activated it in slow motion. He froze it when her mouth opened to speak.

  And there he had his answer! Look at how sharp those canine teeth are! And so long! It was hard to get that on the imagery. He had to py with adjusting it with the time frozen to narrow in enough to catch it.

  Ah... vampire maybe? That wasn't good. Why wasn't she purged? The skin on her looked too perfect to not have something inhuman in there anyway, so he wasn't surprised.

  So this Shun guy ... things weren't looking up for him. In the company of vampires...

  He gnced back at Shun. But he didn't have vampire features. He wasted a few minutes before eliminating the possibility of Shun also being a vampire.

  But as he watched them walking to the inn some parts bothered him. He'd studied and helped with some vampire hunts. But normally, you noticed a trend with vampire business retionships with the vampire very clearly dominating the other humans they were around. Also they tended to be 'business only' in their retionships and look down on others. As he rewound this 'video footage', he could see them walking and talking, and the odd part was that it didn't seem like the vampire was in charge. And it didn't appear to be only business, they acted like they enjoyed each other's company. He found that puzzling.

  There were ways of analyzing group social dynamics that helped you know who the leader was in observing clusters of people. Like in a typical group setting if you watched them, the followers tended to cluster around and look at the leader more than the others. But the leader usually would be not looking at the followers. When the leader spoke there'd be less counter arguing also, and more head nodding.

  After rewinding the brief 1 minute clip of time space footage that he was reviewing, it was clear that the vampire girl, was enamored with the Shun guy. She smiled too much at him, and seemed to dote on him as she followed.

  That's so weird...

  Wow her tits are huge for that small body size, he thought. But then he frowned and berrated himself. He was married! What the hell was he thinking looking at another girl!

  OK. Focus... just because my wife hasn't had any sex with me recently doesn't mean I'll stray ... Besides she already had a man so his chances were too slim.

  He went back to work. Although stealing a few quick gnces at the busty short vampire girl didn't hurt. It wasn't cheating really...

  He coughed.

  He rewound the footage again. OK, right from the beginning. The smallest of details might help him. The two of them appear in the alley. Then there's the mana dust off from 2 atmospheres colliding, but its subtle. He almost missed another clue but there it is. When they appear, there's a subtle time space gate way that's briefly visible. And he could actually look into it if he froze the footage. It was difficult to work the footage on this though, because the gateway was only open to see through for maybe 0.3 seconds. Just working out the time stamp to freeze the footage on took him 11 tries to get right. But finally he'd worked it.

  Yes! It worked! He'd frozen the image enough to see through. He also took a few magic pictures to send to higher ups to get more opinions on. Plus he'd get credit for having done something difficult which made him look good.

  Since his own element was time space magic, he could look into the gateway briefly. It wouldn't be stable though. At best he'd only get like 2 seconds to see what was on the other side. Going through to get that 2 second glimpse would probably also cause the image and viewing magic to colpse. So he'd have to get a very good look, and then probably use a memory projection to look at what he saw after to focus in on specific details.

  So he did so. He briefly went up to the doorway and looked in. He could even cross over for a few seconds...

  And as he did so his eyes widened in shock.

  "Th-this is! HOW?! What the hell happened here?!" he breathed out.

  The image did colpse along with all of the viewing magic as he'd expected. He'd overloaded it like he'd suspected he would. He could only alter reality so much in a past time recorded sequence to try to stretch seeing into the background imagery also.

  But there wasn't any mistake for what he saw.

  The ruins of some kind of rge building in a foreign architecture style with the front blown out. And amid the rubble in front of it, were dozens of incubus and imp bodies. All over the front of the building.

  He wasn't sure what to think now.

  The Shun character must have sin them?

  Damn it. This messed up his theory. Everything up till then suggested that the Shun guy might actually be the demon they were looking for. He'd been hoping for it. He wanted to get the bad guy. But the incubi wouldn't sy each other. At least not on that level.

  So who the F--k was he? And to sy so many at the same time. This only made it even more difficult to figure out.

  They were wrong. This Shun guy wasn't a demon...

  Instead, he might be a hidden Hero css!

  Plus... ah he'd almost missed it. There at the edge of the image there was an woman in white, too obscure to be seen with a hood up holding up a sword. She appeared to be fae also...

  Who the heck was she? He couldn't see her face. She must have met with Shun also either before or after all those imps and incubi were sin.

  But he can't get a good look at her face.

  Damn it....