#rivervale_lodge

"Thank you very much, Hearth Kerri."

"A wise chieftain once told me we something about moving on from where things are not where we wish they'd been" Siv says

Brekke carefully touches the three bullet wounds on her daughter's back several times in different sequences, then once with her splayed fingers, murmuring a children's rhyme about mending buttons in Norse as she does so...and the glamour creeps into the wounds to heal them some more.

"It is a not-so-wise daughter who throws her mother's words back in her mother's face." Brekke grumbles.

"Ah mom, you'll make it too soft. how's anyone supposed to take me serious if I have baby skin?" Siv smiles atouch.

Then sheepish "Well, I admit... when time travel's involved, hard to tell what you could go back and do over"

"Better, soft skin than dead daughter."

"Not that we were planning on time travel, either..."

"Nope. That was all the WIll WOrker's fault. Muckign with things, silly wizards"

"And I am uncertain if that is what happened. Not precisely."

It seems that Kerri may have slipped a bit of a bunk into the pouring of the tea, such that Zara is further healed as well.

"Siv...." A sigh.

Siv winces "Oops"

Brekke looks from one to the other of them, then shakes her head. "Wait. Stop." She gets her coffee and takes a seat. "Tell it, now, slowly and clearly."

"We were searching for the cause of a missing birthday, Chieftain."

"I did not know you had been enlisted in this search." Not an accusation.

"Okay. I had been looking into the missing date, as I said I would if you recall" Siv says "Went to FIrnost to find Zara. She wasn't there, so I darted over to Earth Runes which has a straight trod there. "

An eyebrow at the casual visit to EarthRunes.

"I am the Librarian at Earth Runes, and had invited SIv previously to use my... 'their' collection..."

"Their" has a tinge of untruth. Those are Zara's books!

A slow nod. "Connection to resources. Fine." She doesn't seem particularly happy about it, but....

..at least to her, they are...

"Aye. Library good, librarian better or so I figured and it worked. Zara had ideas, got me thinking. We brainstormed for hours."

"I see. I had wondered why you were not here shoveling."

"Aye. Quite a bit of research to figure out a possible cause for such a massive working..."

A wince "I guess I'll do double duty for whoever got stuck with it. Sorry"

"The scope was really quite fascinating - so broad, but strictly limited in time and place."

"And ONLY Bergen"

"It did not affect you where you were?" Kerri asks Zara.

"It did not, and I was in Scarsdale.."

"Not so far " A nod

"Strange," Brekke says, then nods for them to continue.

"I forget exactly how we figured out it was the date of the first saturnalia... I think Zara just knew. From there we started looking for related things"

"But I spotted this one newspaper article... an odd pattern, aye? An ancient statue was to arrive on the 17th - of Saturn - Chronos - and yet.. naught."

"Nothing on the 18th."

"Arrive? Arrive where?" Kerri asks.

"At a museum. So... I thought to see if the statue were there or not, it might be a clue..."

A nod from Brekke...this much seems to make sense.

"I knew the place. We got in... and , well, Zara did the work on that. Willowhispering a new display that wasn't even mentioned."

"Ugly golden paper clip is what it looked like"

Both grumps look puzzled by that.

"WHere the Saturn statue should have been, there was this modern art sculpture. But it didn't have a plague or anything." She lookss to Zara to se e if she wants to try

"It seemed... off. Out of place."

"And when I whispered it, it returned nonsense."

"Well, Whispers sometimes do not work well," Brekke allows.

A shrug. "Magic is one of my strength. I asked of the 17th, of the missing day. And so then I asked for the day before..."

"Still cryptic, but Siv thought to turn off the lights... and all went out, save a spot on the out-of-place sculpture. So.. ah... I blocked out the light."

"And it all went wibbly wobbly timey whimy" Siv says

"It...what?"

Brekke looks very confused.