Grave Robbing The Deep

"It's no problem, Haraka. Those guys wanted us both dead, so we stopped them before they could carry out their threat." Victoria said to Haraka in response to his gratitude for her assistance. She turned away from the men they had just subdued and looked towards the castle that Haraka had pointed out to her. According to him, his home was simply a humble collection of buildings just a few miles from the entrance to the "Black Mountains." That sounded like the name of a top-secret military installation where scientists diligently labored to create new and more devastating weapons and technological innovations more advanced than anything the neighbors had, but it could just be the name of a mountain range that his hometown just happened to be set up near.

Victoria dismissed the outlandish theory that "Black Mountains" was a military installation that cranked out advanced war machines and instead focused on Haraka, who was clearly nervous about the trip now that the threat posed by the grave robbers had been ended. He must have been going through a lot of emotional turmoil the closer he got to his hometown. The mage was trying to put on a brave face and assure Victoria that he was still able to go through with the trip, but she could tell that he was experiencing a lot of strong feelings right about now. She had something a lot stronger than women's intuition on her side... she had the ability to see the truth by reading an individual's body language. The ability to discern the truth by merely observing someone was an ability that was valuable beyond measure but needed to be used carefully lest the brunette end up alienating potential allies with ill-timed utterances related to their secrets.

"So your hometown was actually the village beyond the castle and at the feet of the Black Mountains? I mean, the first place you were born in?" Victoria asked Haraka because she did not fully understand the circumstances behind his childhood and life in the undersea kingdom when it was still a functional political entity. She understood what it was like to have a wide discrepancy between where one was born and where one ended up.

"I was kinda in the same boat... so to speak. I spent the first six years of life in some house in Capital Crocus, then when I turned six I ended up on the streets somehow. I have no idea how I got there and I don't know who my birth parents are." Victoria told him a very condensed version of her life story in an effort to reassure him that she had a faint idea of what he was going through. Then she considered that she might actually be hurting him more by reminding him of the difficulties that lay ahead and went quiet.

"You lead the way. Whenever you're ready, of course." Victoria said to Haraka.

[Post Word Count: 496]
[Victoria's Word Count: 6,403]

Victoria blinked when she heard Haraka tell her all about the layout of his nation under the sea. There was so much that she did not know about nations under the sea, but that was because she lived on the surface and dealt with surface matters like rogue scientists, ghosts in run-down mansions, and mages who stole women's underwear in crowded malls. She did not even know that underwater nations could exist due to the peculiar nature of their logistics. She figured that they could hunt fish for food and maybe grow crops within the confines of their borders, but what they did for heating fuel was a mystery to her.

Victoria also blinked when she received confirmation that her wild unspoken guess that Black Mountain was a military facility was actually right. Instead of feeling vindication or satisfaction, the confirmation actually worried her because she did not know what it was that Black Mountain worked on. She did not know if the former military facility housed any old secrets like advanced war robots, superweapons that could wipe out the surface world, or some hidden magic that the kingdom kept as a state secret until it was time to expand their undersea kingdom. Maybe that was what the poachers were really after... clues to the facility's existence so that they could pilfer the kingdom's top-secret work for their own use. The brunette put aside her theories and tried to make sense of the kingdom's organization.

"So lemme get this straight. Your kingdom had Black Mountains for the military and White Mountains for the clerics. Then you had Gold and Silver Mountains for plants and animals. Were the Gold and Silver Mountains where you got most of your food or did you fish for most of it?" Victoria asked Haraka. It was none of her business, but she had to know. She did not want to trek into the mountains to find them full of bears, sharks, or bear-sharks that were looking for a meal. In the meantime she considered what Haraka had said about finding out who her parents were and actually thought about it, a process she did not engage in too often because she was not the introspective type. The pair approached the elegant, shimmering white palace and she could see a large white European dragon with two pronged horns.

The brunette could not help but to be impressed by both the castle and the dragon. Victoria had never seen a castle or a dragon outside of a children's storybook... not that she knew what children's storybooks were like. Living in the streets did not leave very much time to learn how to read or find books even if she could read.

"So you think I could begin the search for my parents by taking a blood test?" Victoria asked Haraka in all honesty. She had occasionally entertained the thought but had never seriously considered it before today because she had numerous, more pressing concerns. Maybe she should try and get a blood test... later. Right now she needed to help Haraka through this situation, but before she could do anything else she remembered his question about the first six years of her life being missing.

"You know, I don't know what caused me to lose my memory of the first six years of my life, Haraka. I don't know if I was deliberately thrown onto the streets by my birth family or if my real parents were killed and I was put on the streets to hide me from whoever killed my family. It'd be funny if my birth parents were super-rich people or something like that." Victoria mused before making an absentminded joke about her possible birth parents being wealthy and respectable people, two things that she was not when growing up on the streets of Capital Crocus.

"Maybe once I get that blood test I'll get an answer." Victoria mused to Haraka.

[Post Word Count: 671]
[Victoria's Word Count: 7,074]