Paint it Another Colour

Chapter 20

Sabio left the meeting room and frowned as he past the receptionist, Amaranta, turning to her at the last minute.

"Is there still no sign of him?" he asked her, peering over her computer screen to check for himself as though he didn't trust her.

She scowled and turned the monitor away from him. "No. He's vanished, completely. The last anyone saw of him, he was with Lucia in the carpark of the Vatican City meeting hall. Then they both just disappeared."

"Lucia as well?" Sabio pulled a face. "Did the CCTV cameras pick anything up? Anything at all? Any suspicious people?"

Amaranta shook her head. "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The carpark was pretty much void of any life at all except for them."

Sabio rubbed his face in confusion. "What the heck is going on? First the Belorussian and Ukrainian economies, then the Russian, then the Norwegian, then the sudden split of Italy again, now this." He hesitated. "Nothing's happened to Seborga has it?"

Amaranta glanced at her computer, made a couple of painfully slow clicks here and there with the mouse, a few taps of the keyboard and then shook her head. "Nothing. It's functioning perfectly normally, if anything better than normal."

Sabio sighed. "At least we can put aside any problem with the personification himself then. I mean, who heard of a country without a personification? Heck, Vatican City is the smallest country and that still has one!"

As he left, Amaranta muttered something about a financial crisis two odd years ago where a couple of personifications went missing, but he was out of the door before he heard what she said. He shrugged it off and drove home, ignoring what was on the radio, the streets, everything.

When he got home, he sat down for a second, frowning at the floor, doing nothing before standing up and making his way to his computer. What was it she'd said about the crisis? He wished he'd listened now.

He brought up Google and typed in the date before clicking on the first link that came up. A huge list of reasons and more obscure sounding theories appeared on the page, spanning almost the entire length of the page. Then, right at the bottom, was a list of countries effected. Sabio stared at it for a second before reading the list. It didn't take him a second to see the connection between the missing and the effected. It only took him a couple of seconds longer to put two and two together.

Then, he was back in his car, back at the meeting hall.

"Back again?" Amaranta said, not looking up from her screen. "What did you forget?"

"The crisis you were talking about before, the one a couple of years ago" Sabio demanded, flying towards her desk. "The countries mainly effected, can I have a list of them?"

Amaranta gave him a confused look before reeling off the list, exactly the same as the one on the page. "They all recovered at exactly the same time as well, which was odd."

"And, stupid question, but can a nation die?"

The look she gave him this time was even stranger. "Of course they can, it's just harder to kill them as they recover and heal quickly, although when they do eventually die, they  are reborn in about a year. You should know this. You're closer to Sebastian than I am."

"Merde" Sabio muttered, taking a step back. "And... our economics. Just look at them again for me?"

"Are you alright?" Amaranta said, frowning but looking back at the screen. "You seem shaken up." She turned the screen around for him to see. The facts were displayed as a line graph, the part nearest the end raising reasonably high, but that wasn't the bit he was interested in. The bit he was looking at was right at the very end, where the red line dipped down a little, not much, but it dipped almost vertically downwards.

"He's dead" Sabio muttered.

"What?" Amaranta pulled a face. "Have you eaten too much sugar again? Who's dead?"

"Sebastian"

She went pale and shook her head. "Impossible. We would've been informed and there would have been an obvious change in the country already."

"You don't need an obvious change yet" Sabio said, turning the monitor back round to face her and pointed to the line. "During the crisis a couple of years ago, at the same time, a small number of personifications went missing. Those nations were the same as the countries who struggled during that time. So, when a nation goes missing, their country struggles economically. And when had a nation ever gone missing for no reason? When they go missing, they die. When they die, their country struggles. That line is the start of a struggle."

"How..." she trailed off and picked up a phone. "Let me talk to Ludovico. If that's happened to us, why wouldn't it happen to Vatican when they're in the exact same position as us?"

"I'll contact Russia" Sabio said, reaching for another phone. "They're struggling at the moment, so there's a chance something might have happened."

For a while, there was frantic talks in various languages being fired back between the two and phones. Then, Sabio put his phone back in the cradle and turned to Amaranta as she finished. "Ivan's dead. They found him a bit ago but haven't told anyone. Other personifications know though" he said. "So that confirms my theory, what about you."

Amaranta took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. "Vatican City have found Lucia's body."

Hello! Sorry for crappy chapter, I know where I'm going, I'm just struggling writing anything at the moment XD Hope it was alright, it's just a kind of filler chapter with two random people from the Seborgan Government XD
MiddleEarth4eva (who is literally in love with the country of Seborga! Look at it!!!!!)