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supercrabneo · 1 year

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An Invite to Castle Thade: A Neopets Mystery

PART II

Read part 1 here

Part 2/6 below the cut -->

“How did you do that?!” Sirena turned to Becks, her heavy silver jewelry tinkling, her wide yellow eyes aghast, but clearly entertained.

“I… didn’t,” she replied, her heart catching in her throat as she spoke. She smoothed down her ruff again, hoping none of the gathered Neopians had seen her hair stand on end when the massive castle doors slammed shut on their own. Her cousin Roxanne seemed to have a few frightening tricks in store for the guests, and Becks would have to try her best not to get scared right along with them if she was to keep playing the mysterious host. “It was the house itself, of course.”

“Such colorful characters out here in the boonies,” Quincy sounded loud and cheerful as he fluttered away from the door, almost masking the slight tremor of fear in his voice. “Always giving their superstitious little warnings!”

“It’s quite the warning,” Baldur raised his brows, his bright Techo eyes flashing with intrigue.

“Sure it is,” Jasper flicked his icy wings, shrugging off his traveling cloak, then straightened his bright red scarf before continuing. Becks sighed, picking up the cloak, once again relegated to butler. “And I bet the malformed freaks out here in the Haunted Woods say that about every castle. Great way to scare off prospective buyers who might want to build something useful out here instead of just another big creaky mansion–” The Hissi stopped mid-sentence, his tongue flicking out to smell the air. “What is that smell?”

All eyes once again turned to Unga the Usul. She didn’t seem to notice the unwelcome attention.

“It’s not often I see a Tyrannian out in the wide world of Neopia,” Baldur smiled down at her, his clear disdain lost on the heavy-browed Usul.

“Unga always rise to challenge,” she replied. “Even if Unga have to walk very far.”

“Hold on,” Sirena held up a tentacle, silver bracelets clinking gently against each other. “So you were told there was a Battledome competition here. I was told I would be meeting a… personal friend. Clearly neither of those is true… unless…” The Acara turned to Jasper, that coy smile once again creeping onto her face, slowly batting her heavily lashed eyelids. “Does the name… Sirena32 mean anything to you…?”

“Nope,” he replied, tiny points of light reflecting around the room as he shook his translucent head. “You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, lady. Are you folks not in real estate? I was told I’d be bidding on this place.”

“And I was under the impression this was a gala,” Quincy’s faerie wings flapped in annoyance, his flippers on his hips. “And clearly that is not the case.” His shining Bruce eyes darted to the plainly-dressed Becks.

“So we’ve been brought here under false pretenses,” Baldur squinted, his voice filled with mounting suspicion.

“If you’ll follow me,” Becks spoke loudly, projecting over the gathered Neopians. They all turned to face her. “I’ll show you to the dining room.”

Becks hadn’t been given a map of the castle. In the letter, Roxanne had only said ‘take them to the dining room’. And before Becks had arrived at the massive castle with its expansive grounds, she’d assumed it would be fairly easy to figure out which room was which. Now she was worried she would immediately get everyone lost and fail at the one clear instruction she’d been given. But, as it turned out, she didn’t need a map. Just as the candles had lit themselves when Roxanne appeared at the top of the stairs, they lit up all the way down the corridor, balls of light flickering to life deeper and deeper down the black hallways. Becks was pretty sure this was her cousin’s doing somehow, maybe the work of some switch that supplied the candles with gas.

At least… she was pretty sure.

Becks’ long Cybunny ears couldn’t help but turn nervously towards the guests, swiveling to focus on the shuffling feet, slithering bodies, fluttering wings, and pop-pop-pop of tentacles that barely covered their nervous whispers.

“I can’t believe the ravings of some old coot has got you all shaking in your boots,” Jasper hissed dismissively. “At least the rumors mean I’ll probably be able to buy this place for a song. A new coat of paint, a few renovations… I bet I could break this place up into a bunch of housing units. Call ‘em luxury haunted condos. They’d sell like hotcakes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m not shaking in any boots,” Quincy rebutted. But the chattering of the Bruce’s beak suggested otherwise.

“Unga just want fight,” the Tyrannian Usul grunted loudly. “It okay if it ghost. Unga not afraid to punch ghost.”

“I’m not afraid either,” the Maraquan Acara scoffed. “What can a ghost do? Nothing, unless you let it. I am intent on having a lovely evening. Even if I did get stood up.”

“You all say you’re not frightened,” Baldur’s voice was steady and calm. “As if none of you have ever heard of Eliv Thade. I’m sure all of us are feeling at least a little apprehensive. It’s all right to admit it.”

The crowd fell silent. Of course they’d heard of the Kacheek known as Eliv Thade. The one who’d gone mad, the one who supposedly haunted his castle, trapping anyone foolish enough to step foot inside and forcing them through endless puzzles until they finally met their end. It was a story they’d all heard around a campfire at some point in their lives.

Becks smiled to herself. She was glad the mutant Bori had managed to rile them up. Some of the pressure was off, and now she wouldn’t have to rely on her own less-than-average acting skills to sell the experience. Becks wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Roxanne had hired the old Bori herself to bring the last guest, just to get that extra bit of ambience. Her cousin was thorough, after all.

The only Neopian who didn’t seem bothered was the strange little alien Aisha. It had finished its granola and was now keeping step with Becks, smiling excitedly, taking selfies with the flickering candles and decaying tapestries like they were all taking a casual stroll through a museum. But she was sure this Aisha had some vital role to play later in the evening. She wouldn’t want to inadvertently cause any problems for Roxanne, so she didn’t question the little green creature in its spacesuit.

The candles led them to the end of a long corridor, where an elegant doorway stood open, the room beyond lit dazzlingly with massive crystal chandeliers. Flickering candlelight danced across the stone walls and antique furniture, highlighting ancient china cabinets full of exquisite dishwear, expensive-looking bottles of exotic sparkling juice, and various other fineries from around the world. In the middle of the room was a long table, already stacked high with food and beverages, the chairs pulled out as if inviting them all to their seats.

Becks turned with what she hoped was a dramatic flourish, motioning for the guests to enter ahead of her. The Aisha nodded enthusiastically, leading the way for the rest of the nervous crowd.

Baldur was the last to slip past the red-ruffed Cybunny, his pastel scales practically glowing in the dim light of the hallway, outshining even the gold trim of his deep red tunic. His stride was confident as he stared into her eyes. There was an unsettling cunning to them. But he bowed slightly as he passed, joining the others in the bright room beyond.

Becks quickly pulled Roxanne’s instructions back out of the collar of her sweater, skimming her cousin’s coded bullet points just in case there was something she’d missed. But the instructions ended here. She was supposed to let the guests get comfortable, have a nice dinner, and then… she assumed something was going to happen. She wished she knew what it was.

But there was clearly nothing to be gleaned from this worn piece of paper. She shoved it back in her collar and straightened up, trying to assume an air of confidence as she swept into the room, pulling the door closed behind her.

“Ugh,” Quincy scoffed. “Is the whole castle going to be this… moldy?” He gestured towards the cabinets as he hovered above the floor, as if too nauseated by the disintegrating rugs to even touch them. It seemed he’d managed to pull himself from his nervousness by focusing on his mounting disgust.

“It’s not moldy, it’s antique,” Jasper crooned. “Folks pay big money for pieces like this. Strip ‘em down, re-paint them in hip modern colors, sell them for a pretty penny. It’s called upcycling. See, it’s all in how you spin it.” He tapped a splintered side table with the tip of his tail, and it wobbled dangerously, threatening to pitch a small vase of dead flowers to the stone floor below.

“If everyone would please take their seats,” Becks once again projected her voice, cutting through the guests’ murmured conversations. The Aisha plopped down in a chair the table in the center of the room. Unga followed, her pungent smell spreading out in a wave behind her. The others made their way to their seats hesitantly, glancing around the room as if expecting to be attacked.

But no attack came. There was only a spread of still-steaming dishes, waiting to be eaten.

“Let’s begin,” Becks took the lead, doing what she thought a host might do, though she’d never been nearly anywhere so fancy. She barely even recognized most of the food, though that was at least partially due to her unfamiliarity with the cuisine of the Haunted Woods. Her dish stared up at her, two eyeballs perched on top of a thick coil of oddly grey pasta. She hesitantly lifted a few greasy strands on her fork. She glanced back up at the other Neopians.

Unga wasted no time, grabbing the nearest hunk of protein, a steak which screamed and flapped a tiny pair of devilish wings as she tore into it. The Aisha snapped a quick picture of its plate, but the helmet protected it from having to sample anything. Sirena took a polite bite of the stew in front of her, which bubbled menacingly, faces seeming to swirl up from its depths. She fought to swallow, and didn’t go in for a second spoonful. Quincy only looked down at his food in obvious disgust, Jasper sneered at the spread, and Baldur sat back with measured dignity, napkin folded in his lap as he made no moves to eat.

Becks put her fork back down, the noodles still dangling from its tines. She’d done her part. There was no need to give herself food poisoning in an attempt to be a decent host.

“So you’re from Terror Mountain, then?” Sirena turned to Jasper, breaking the uneasy silence at the table.

“Born and raised,” he replied, tossing a strangely lively olive into his mouth with the tip of his icy tail. “I’m kind of a big deal up there. I own most of the town at this point, and I’ve taken it from backwoods wasteland to the bustling tourist attraction you know today. I’m what you might call a local celebrity… in fact, I’m actually related to the Snowager. Yes, the Snowager. I’m sure you can see the resemblance.”

“I certainly can,” Sirena crooned. “I was fortunate enough to vacation up there with one of my ex-husbands. We took the whole ice caves tour, Snowager and all. You’re really the spitting image. Alas, that trip isn’t all pleasant memories, as my husband got lost in the snow and was never recovered. They figured a Snowbeast took him. But at least we got a good vacation in before that.”

“Oh, you poor dear,” Quincy placed a comforting flipper on Sirena’s tentacle. “It must have been so difficult to cope with such a loss.”

“Thank you, thank you, it was,” she sniffled. “But at least I had his fortune to go home to. He made sure I was well taken care of.”

“How very thoughtful,” Jasper sneered. But he leaned a little closer to Sirena, clearly intrigued by the mention of a fortune.

“And, uh… Ugga, was it?” Quincy asked politely, his Faerieland manners overruling his disgust for the unkempt Usul. She grunted in recognition. “You said you were a Battledome competitor? I assume you do a lot of traveling, a lot of sightseeing?”

“Ugga mostly stay in Tyrannia,” she waved a fistful of wriggling pasta as she explained. “Ugga too big a deal to travel. Battledome fighters come to Ugga.”

“And yet you’re here,” Baldur leaned forward, gently taking charge of the conversation. “I suppose I’ll be the one to address the Elephante in the room. All of us came here for our own very important reasons, important enough to drag us all out into the middle of the Haunted Woods. Yet it seems we’ve all been lied to. So… why were we brought here under false pretenses? And who exactly sent us our invitations?”

“I wish I knew,” Jasper rolled his eyes. “Whoever it was has wasted a lot of my incredibly valuable time. But I’m not stickin’ around to figure it out. As soon as I’ve eaten as much of their expensive weirdo food as I can stomach, I’m out of here.”

“I have no enemies that I’m aware of,” Quincy rested his head in his flippers, sighing heavily. “I have no idea who would pull a prank like this on a member of Fyora’s court. Everyone knows we don’t have an evil bone in our bodies.”

“No one here has any ties to the Haunted Woods, then? Has anyone so much as visited before?” Baldur asked, chuckling slightly, trying to keep the mood light despite his line of interrogation.

“Oh, I came here on one of my honeymoons!” Sirena piped up. “It was terrible. The relationship didn’t survive the trip, I’m afraid. And neither did my ex-husband. So we can rule him out.” She laughed. Jasper shifted away from her slightly.

“Not necessarily…” Baldur squinted, glancing around the room with mounting suspicion. “What about you, gracious host?” He turned his piercing gaze to her. “Surely you know something.”

Becks stared back at him dumbly. She had no idea what to say, or whether she should even say anything at all. She was the only one who came here knowing what she was supposed to do, and even then, she only knew part of it. If all went well, they’d finish dinner and she could see all the guests to the door and settle in for a delightful evening of catching up with her cousin. But it didn’t seem like such an elaborately planned event would end so easily. She was on-edge, and had no idea whether she was supposed to step in and calm everyone down, or if all this was part of whatever Roxanne had planned.

“Ugh, what a sorry excuse for wine,” Jasper scoffed as he gestured with his goblet, breaking Becks free from her obligation to answer Baldur. He pushed his chair back, glancing around at the finery behind the glass cabinets. An elegant display case full of unopened bottles caught his eye, and he smirked, uncoiling from his spot at the table and making his way across the room. “If whoever invited us here is going to waste my time, I might as well waste their expensive drinks.” He reached out his glimmering icy wing and unfastened the cabinet doors.

Becks half-stood, getting ready to admonish the Hissi for his blatant theft, but the words caught in her throat. The bottles weren’t the only thing in the cabinet. Inside, tucked between them, was what looked like a spectral, feathery hand, blue and translucent. It inconspicuously pushed one of the bottles forward before disappearing. Becks blinked, unsure of what she’d just seen. Jasper seemed none the wiser, his eyes scanning the labels, and Becks sat back down, any words of protest fading from her mind, replaced by mounting dread.

Baldur’s eyes flicked to hers. His expression was unreadable, but Becks somehow got the distinct impression that he had seen the same thing she did.

“Now look at this,” Jasper hissed, his tail coiling around the neck of a bottle and hoisting it up for all to see. It was the bottle the ghostly hand had pushed forward. “Excellent year, made with Altadorian grapes, with the subtlest hints of plum… this is not an easy wine to get ahold of, let me tell you. Let’s crack it open and really make this mysterious host regret sending those letters.”

He yanked out the cork with a skilled twist of his tail and a loud pop.

“Wait, I don’t think you should–” Becks held out a hand, as if she could stop him from all the way across the room. But he didn’t pay her any mind. In one swift motion, he knocked it back, swallowing at least a quarter of the bottle in one go. He lowered it, letting out a satisfied sigh.

“Not as good as I remember it…” he glanced down at the dark liquid sloshing around inside the glass. “Has a weird aftertaste. Maybe this one’s gone off.”

Something dripped to the floor. He glanced down, his brow knitting in confusion as more droplets splattered to the rough cobblestones directly beneath him. He stretched out his wings, examining them with wide, shocked eyes as yet more liquid dripped down his scales.

He seemed to be sweating profusely. Or, more precisely, his icy skin seemed to be melting.

“What in the…” he was suddenly less transparent than before, his translucent pallor clouding over, shifting from a pleasant blue to rotten green. The other guests watched on in horror, Becks included. The feathers dripped from his wings, leaving only green mottled hands behind, spotted scales erupting along the length of his body. His sleek face seemed to puff up, his expression shifting towards ferocity as armor grew out of his brows and forehead.

Finally, and most horrifically, a bulge started to form at the base of his neck. It writhed, pushing out and elongating, like a living thing was struggling underneath his skin.

“I can’t watch!” Sirena turned away. Quincy had already all but fainted, draped in his chair dramatically as the Hissi continued to shift and change.

The bulge grew eyes. Then it opened a wide, fanged mouth, its forked tongue flicking out. It continued to push out from Jasper’s body, lengthening until its face met his, and its shape finally coalesced into something that made sense, as horrific as it was. A second head had sprouted from his shoulders.

“Y-you’ve become a mutant!” Quincy sputtered.

“What are you talking about?” Jasper gasped. “The juice just isn’t agreeing with me, I’ll be right as rain in no time…”

“No, he got it, we’re a mutant now,” the second head sighed. While Jasper’s eyes were sharp and fierce, this head seemed to have an eternal look of despair, its eyes heavy-lidded and morose, the corners of its mouth drooping in a permanent frown. “There’s no point in denying it.”

“And who exactly are you?” Jasper demanded, turning to face his other head.

“I’m that little voice in the back of your head that tells you not to lie and do bad things,” it whimpered. “You stopped paying attention to me a long time ago, though.”

“Of course I did, just listen to you,” Jasper crossed his arms, the end of his tail twitching in frustration. “You’re all mopey and pathetic.”

Becks watched in confused horror as the two heads bickered. Both Quincy and Sirena watched along with her, expressions betraying their fear and disgust. Only Baldur and Ugga seemed unfazed, the latter happily munching a massive hunk of meat.

A chuckle from the far corner of the room caused Becks to nearly startle out of her skin. The crowd collectively turned towards the sound, and were greeted by the ghostly figure of a Lenny, lightly glowing in the darkness of the grand dining hall.

“Well, Jasper, old pal,” the Lenny snickered. “You made this too easy. I knew you couldn’t pass up the opportunity to take something valuable that isn’t yours.”

“Is that a… g-g-...” Sirena stammered.

“A g-g-ghost?” The Lenny completed for her. “Unfortunately, yes. Though not for much longer. I’ve just wrapped up my unfinished business, so I’ll be moving on to greener pastures momentarily. Now that Jasper can never menace anybody else. Not while at least one of his heads is honest.”

“Now hold on just a minute,” Jasper crooned from across the room, stumbling slightly as he tried to slither forward, his new body uneager to listen to him. “I don’t even know you! You’ve got no right to do this to me–”

“But we do know him,” the morose head interrupted. “Don’t you remember? We tried to scare him out of his property by throwing bricks through his windows and leaving nasty anonymous messages scrawled on his door. When he was at his wits’ end, thinking everyone in the neighborhood had turned against him, we approached him and offered to buy his place so he could move away… and of course he accepted the first offer we gave, for much less than what we knew the place was worth. We basically stole his house right out from under him.”

“And then with the ridiculous pittance you offered me, I was unable to buy anything else,” the Lenny continued. “Not up in Terror Mountain. Not Happy Valley, not even Neopia Central. The only place I could afford was way out here, and eventually, I found my way to this place… and never made it back out.”

“That’s your own fault!” Jasper chided defensively. “Your place was prime real estate. You should have known you could sell the place for more, whether you were being terrorized has nothing to do with whether or not you did research before high-tailing it out of there! That’s not on me.”

“You know that’s not true,” the other head said in a baleful voice. “Oh, well. We got what was coming to us.”

“That’s right,” the Lenny smiled, his form already starting to dissipate. “You’ll never be able to lie to anyone again. Not even yourself. Have a good life, Jasper.”

And with that, he was gone.

The room fell silent, as if the gathered Neopians were waiting for the spirit to reappear for one last jab.

“Oh, and while I’m at it,” the second head broke the anxious quiet. “We’re not even related to the Snowager.”

#neopets #fanfic #eliv thade #faerie bruce #alien aisha #maraquan acara #cybunny #tyrannian usul #pastel techo #all mention of alcohol will be removed when I submit lmao #uh it's sparkling juice #of course

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