really got this death thing down

interlude

interlude: in which blacker has a crisis about loyalty and dumbass teenage girls and necromancy, expressed entirely through a continuous informative monologue

*

Uh, how did Ruby Redfort die? Funny story, actually – no, on second thoughts, maybe it isn't so funny after all. It is a bit of a long story, though, and she's not going to be unconscious forever, so we should hurry up and tell this story pretty quickly. All right.

It all starts – well, to be perfectly honest, it started a long time ago, really, before Ruby was even born. But for the sake of being clear and succinct, let's say it starts properly when Carla Lopez is murdered right in the middle of Chatterbird Square, choking and gasping for a last breath of air that never comes. Nobody in Spectrum can decipher the array that was used to kill her, the one etched delicately in the cobblestones on the path she used to shortcut her way into work every morning.

To reiterate: nobody in Spectrum. The most ancient, powerful and well-established community of mages in the country. So of course they hire a thirteen year old girl to do their job for them.

Magical training starts at fifteen, at the earlier, because that's the age when your magical core starts forming – and that's iffy territory as it is. Honestly, most people don't get a sword and training until they're eighteen, because magical stuff like this is just too dangerous for most parents to risk their kids on. But apparently they're desperate, and apparently Ruby is the most qualified person for the job, somehow, so in she goes to work.

Not for proper training, it must be stressed – no, they only ever wanted her to help out with unwinding the spell arrays. Ruby has a natural talent for that sort of thing. The sigils and patterns just seem to fall away underneath her fingers, and in less than a week, she and I are working together on deconstructing and reconstructing spell patterns like we've been doing it for years.

So that's all well and good until Ruby actually solves the array, and finds herself in the middle of a whole conspiracy to steal some important magical artefact. A lot of shit goes down. She gets trapped in a giant hourglass by one of the most feared practitioners of demonic magic of all time, it's a really long story and Hitch knows more about it than I do, go ask him. It's not even a painful sort of story, so he might actually tell you it.

She survives – yeah, she doesn't die at this point in the story, stay with me – and she's a reckless teen girl so of course she wants to keep on doing what she's doing, because it's an adventurous sort of thing to do, and what kind of young girl doesn't want adventure and intrigue in her life?

So Ruby stays on the team, and keeps working with me, and we get along like several houses quickly and consecutively set ablaze. The same can't really be said for Miles Froghorn, the other person assigned to the array-decoding case, but then again – you probably could have guessed that. To say they're at each other's throats would be the understatement of the century. Froghorn is furious that they hired a thirteen-year-old, as if he can't do his own damn job, and Ruby interprets this anger at Spectrum as anger at her, and then it actually becomes anger at her, and – well, it's a mess. But it's a tolerable mess, because although they're vitriolic coworkers, they are still coworkers, and I thought I managed to do a pretty good job of keeping the peace. But apparently not.

And I really should mention at this point that there's, like, an obscene amount of weird, wild adventures going on in the background. All of them featuring Ruby. Because Ruby's just like that, she gets all up in the most buckwild plots this state has to offer like they're magnets and she's another, stronger, magnet. And they're weird and wild even by our standards. Something with an ancient sea monster, something with a dire wolf or whatever it even was – a lot of animals, really. That might have been the kickstart for her interest in magical creatures, or maybe that was just... necessity.