I Dare – Chapter 1

Day 276
Standard Year 1392

Master Jenn’s Workshop
Neglit

In which Master Jen gets what’s coming to him.

This chapter takes us back nearly five months, all the way through Plan B and some distance into Carpe Diem. The dates in Carpe Diem can be vague, but this is almost certainly before Nova declared Plan B to be in force, and although it’s probably after Nova started poking around in the Department’s business, the collection of the ring is only the end of a sequence of events that must have begun well before. The Department plans ahead.

It’s not explicitly stated that the agents murdered the boy as they did the boy’s grandfather, but I think it likely; they would not want to risk him telling anything he might happen to remember. (And past experience of fictional villainy teaches me that the kind of people who promise payment in full and mean “we’re going to kill you” are often also the kind of people who say “we didn’t wake him” and mean “we killed him in his sleep”.) Certainly, since their next action is to destroy the evidence by burning the building to the ground, one hopes they didn’t leave anybody alive inside.

1 thought on “I Dare – Chapter 1

  1. Ed8r

    I hated this chapter the first time through. It actually took me by surprise, the character development and then the offhand murder(s) and wiping out all evidence (or at least delaying any forensic investigation that might have occurred). This time, I was prepared, and saw it only as another statement about the vicious implacability of the DOI.

    I will admit though, that somehow I “knew” from the start that the perfect emeralds were going to be a “mistake” in the calculations, although I knew for the wrong reasons: in our world, perfect emeralds are quite rare, and in fact fissures and eye-visible inclusions are expected.

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