[Indigo]

Jadz de Lyons, alleged knight and family reject, stared at their ringing phone with mounting apprehension. There was no way they could think of that any of their relatives might have found their phone number, and no good reason for them or anyone else to be calling Jadz, except possibly the sceptre, but if the sceptre had figured out how to use a phone then the question of who was calling them became the least of their problems—

"Will you stop pacing?" the radill said mildly. "It's distracting."

They stopped. The radill, as a new participant in this endeavor, made them so intensely nervous they hadn't yet found out her name, but she'd spent all of the forty minutes they'd known each other concentrating hard on something and Jadz had a strong feeling this was important. Even though they were also too nervous to ask what it was.

They took a long, deep breath and answered the phone. "Hello?"

A voice they'd never heard before in their life said, "Good sir knight." The tone was vaguely scornful and the accent completely unplaceable, and it sent a chill deep into Jadz's bones. "What a pleasure to speak with you."

[Indigo]

"I'm not sure sir is entirely accurate" was all they could think of to say. It was apparently unexpected enough to silence the mysterious caller for a slightly uncomfortable span of time.

"But you are the knight," the voice said, eventually.

"I suppose so?"

"You suppose—"

The voice abruptly cut off, and there was a great deal of distant rustling and overlapping voices, which went on long enough that Jadz considered hanging up. Before they could, there was a sharp click that made them think the mystery caller had beaten them to it, and then a new voice said, "Sorry about that. You are Jadz de Lyons, yes?"

"Yes," they said, because this person already had their phone number and being honest about their name couldn't make things that much worse.

"Excellent. You need to come and meet us two blocks south of your current location, behind the Barakkan fusion restaurant, or something very bad will probably happen." Then the line did go dead.

[Indigo]

They looked over their shoulder at the radill, who shrugged. "I trust your judgment," she said.

"That makes one of us," Jadz said, but they followed the mysterious caller's directions anyway. If it did turn out to be a bad decision, at least they were armed.

The first thing they noticed was that there was a fucking gousankke hanging out in this alley behind the restaurant, uncomfortably close to a dumpster full of decaying noodles and gods only knew what else. This was a shocking enough revelation that it distracted Jadz for some minutes from the gousankke's companion, a slender man with a shaggy mane of unnaturally red hair and two black horns curling out of his forehead, who seemed more interested in the radill than in Jadz themself.

"Interesting," said the man. Jadz identified him as the second speaker on the call. Which could not possibly mean what they thought it meant.

But the gousankke said, "I still fail to understand what could possibly have been wrong with the way I was doing it," and there was the unplaceable accent and the trace of condescension.

[Indigo]

The last two and a half weeks of Jadz's life had been very complicated, and very surprising, and had required them to take a lot of things on faith, and they were already here on the advice of a traditionally inanimate object, which made them perhaps more willing to follow unexplained orders than they ought to be. This, however, was strange enough to snap them out of it. "You didn't have to threaten me," they said sharply.

"I didn't threaten you." The man sounded genuinely confused. "I made a statement of fact."

"You don't see how something like that could be interpreted as a threat? How did you even know about me? Who are you?"

The gousankke said, "This was a mistake."

"Oh, shut up," the man said, and sighed. "I'd assumed--well, it doesn't matter. I'm Perrin. This is Rodion. I know about you because I foresaw that you would be here." He rolled up one of his sleeves all the way to the shoulder, revealing what appeared to be a tattoo of three red lines fanning out across his upper arm. As Jadz watched they opened into flat red eyes with white pupils that rolled around to fix on them with heart-stopping intensity. Perrin made a face and pulled his sleeve back down. "See?"

It took Jadz a moment to find their voice. "Not...not really."