[crow]

Here, again, he stopped. Lacuna was beginning to think that Fluffmutter had some gift for suspense. She wondered if she could ever convince him to narrate a thriller audio book...? He did have a really soothing sort of voice, so he would be good for the work if she could convince him to do it.

But no, that wasn't really practical either, for several reasons. Fluffmutter liked his job just fine, but that wasn't as much of an issue here as it would have been with Jack.

[crow]

You didn't have to quit your day job to narrate one or two audio books. The real trouble was going to be convincing him to do that much talking. A book wasn't just a few sentences after all, but this whole long narrative experience... And coaching him through a whole thing? She wasn't sure that she could do it.

And the other problem was that as good as these pauses were being for building suspense, she wondered if they were going to be too much for the listeners.

[crow]

The resulting audio book was probably going to be twice the length it would otherwise have been if it were anyone else doing the narrating. And the higher ups probably wouldn't like that either, since it would use more resources to upload... And all they were getting out of the deal were longer silences.

But she sure felt as though she were listening to someone tell a spooky story, anyway, the way that Fluffmutter was telling them.

[crow]

She really hoped this wasn't some sort of premonitory prediction. The weather department occasionally had someone fried by lightning to deal with, but blood and guts wasn't usually one of the things you risked by taking that job.

So she had to hope that it wasn't the case today either... Though, come to think of it, wouldn't that explain so much about his silences if it was? She'd be pretty stricken if that was what happened to her...

[crow]

Oh gods and alicorns. That wasn't it, was it? He hadn't found a corpse or anything in the mist, and come here to regale them with the tale of...?

She could see Fluffmutter clocking the look she was giving him, but this time he seemed more confused about it than anything else. Which, at this point, Lacuna was going to take as a good sign. Okay, so out and out horror was probably not where this was going... Probably.

[crow]

Maybe what that look meant was he didn't know how she had managed to guess, but she really hoped it wasn't that. Please do not let it be that, she thought to herself.

"Well," he said, maybe prompted by the antsy way that Lacuna was looking now. "We went out, me and a couple of our folks. And you wouldn't believe it, but..." Another really ominous pause here. Or at least Lacuna felt that it was ominous, anyway.

[crow]

But then Lacuna was matching it against any number of writerly possibilities in her head. Thrillers weren't her favorite genre, but she was an editor, and had to read them from time to time anyway.

Some of it was the writers she edited, and some of it was just so she had an example of what a good thriller was supposed to look like. She found that she didn't see a lot of those examples among the individuals she worked with or the manuscripts they turned in.

[crow]

"There was," Fluffmutter said at last, "someone in there... in the mist."

At first it seemed like just about the biggest letdown possible with all that buildup. 'There was someone in there'. Of course there might be someone in there. Jack had run through the mist himself at one point, so that wasn't a huge surprise. And if Fluffmutter meant to say 'a body', he wouldn't have called it 'someone', he would have just called it 'a body'.

[crow]

Fluffmutter wasn't needlessly sentimental about most things, his job and death included in that number. He could beat around the bush, sure, which was in fact what he was doing now, but if it was a body he would call it a corpse when he got around to saying it.

When he said 'someone', he must have meant someone alive. But then she thought about it, and concluded that there must be more to this than she knew.

[crow]

If it was just the act of having found a pony like Jack, running through the stuff when that wasn't the smartest decision he could be making, Fluffmutter wouldn't have had to talk himself up to talking about it the way that he had been doing, right?

He could have just come out and said it, and be done with all their curious looks. Which she was sure he didn't enjoy anyway, since he didn't exactly enjoy being the center of attention.

[crow]

"Were they okay?" Cocoa asked quietly, his eyes wide with quiet shock.

He was having, she was sure, some of the same thoughts that Lacuna herself had been having. The conclusion that Cocoa Bean had come to was that Fluffmutter and his coworkers had found someone injured in the mist, possibly in a really bad way, and possibly by the mist. After all, how long did the tower folk really have to be working on this stuff?

[crow]

It had only started appearing today as far as anyone knew, right? So it was entirely possible, and even quite probable, that there was some aspect of it that they had failed to realize or acknowledge in their hurried research. And that aspect could have gotten into a real ugly accident with a pony...

Lacuna had had this thought too, though she hadn't voiced it out loud. Absurdly, she felt that doing so might have made it more real.

[crow]

It was a superstitious line of thought, and not one she would usually have followed as someone who didn't really prescribe to them, but she felt a little on edge now. All the little spooky things she had heard in her childhood around campfires during other summers came crawling back to the forefront of her mind to wave ominous fingers at her.

"No," said Fluffmutter, setting at least that possibility to rest. "Not injured."

"Then what is it?" said Maple.

[crow]

Maple was getting right to the point as she usually did, but the fact that she felt the need to speak up at all spoke to her growing impatience with how this whole thing was going.

Maple wasn't good at beating around the bush, but she knew this about herself, and as a result she knew when she ought to be staying quiet too. Thus far she had been treating this occasion like one of those times.

[crow]

She understood, as they all understood, that it was just as well not to rush Fluffmutter, for several reasons. One of those reasons was that he really didn't rush well anyway, even when you wanted to do it, but the other was that he clearly seemed to need space to tell this story. And she had been content to give him that space so far... right up until now.

Lacuna wondered what kinds of theories Maple had about this whole business.