The Queen's Curls

-10 003- Plea

She was very, very far from her squeaky hinges and the bell above her door.

The parlour woman awoke abruptly when a hand collided with her face at the speed of, well, as fast as a slap can go. She groaned and tried to lift her hand to rub her flaming cheek, but her arms were tied to the armrests of her obnoxiously hard chair.

"Welcome back, 01," an all too familiar voice drawls. "Remember me?"She groans again and opens her eyes. There were four people before her; two of which she expected, one she didn't recognize, and the last one was a surprise.

"I didn't know you had a brother, Jack," the woman says with enough ice to make the earth's poles jealous.

Jack doesn't meet her gaze, instead focusing his muddy gaze on the floor near his shoes."Is this the sister you told me about?" The parlour woman looks to the other lady in the room up and down. "What was it about a church and fires that you told me, Jack? That some boy decided to-"

The shocking cold of a gun barrel pressed against her skull shut her up. The wielder said, "Say another word. I dare you."

The parlour woman smiles, showing her canines. "Cunt."

She could feel that the man was millimetres from pulling the trigger, but Jack of all people steps in. "Don't. They want her alive, remember?"

The man in front of her glares daggers into her eyes before holstering his gun.

"Now," the other woman in the room says. "You know where you are, correct?"

She knew exactly where she was.

"And you know that you're not going to be getting out anytime soon, correct?"

The parlour woman chuckles. "Sure, love."

The woman's eyes narrow. "Even though you probably remember the conditions, I will say them anyways." She clears her throat. "You are now in the Traveler's Correction Institution. You will not leave your cell. You will be able to and can not travel. You are trapped here, and you cannot get out."

The parlour woman huffs out a laugh. "Correction Institution my ass."

The last thing she saw was the fourth person's wide eyes before she sedated again and brought to who knows where.

x x x

Turns out, who knows where is actually a humid, mold-infested concrete cell with nothing but a drain in the middle of the floor for decoration.

It had been one week since she last saw Jack and his siblings, and the only other person she saw was the occasional guard passing in front of the tiny window in the wall that leads to the hall outside. She got one meal a day -- a small paper cup of weak chicken broth -- and her cell didn't have a cot, so she had to sleep on the floor.

The one thing that her captors didn't know was that Yūrei had been tucked in one of her pockets.

When they had first thrown her into her cell, they had thrown a shirt and a pair of pants after her. She still had the clothes she had come in with her -- in a neat pile in one corner of her cell --and they hadn't bothered to come and take them.

The was probably one of their biggest mistakes. In just one pocket alone she had sneaked in a whole familiar, and in another pocket, she had brought her rings.

All of them.

In the cardigan she had decided to wear that day was the only one in her collection that she had put a spell on that connects all of her rings to its' pockets.

The only truly important ring she had with her in that cell was one that she liked to call Bendrauti. It was the only ring she had that could communicate with another piece of jewelry.

The thing is, she had no clue where the hell that piece of jewelry is.

The only hope she had was that the wisps of time would guide her pleas for help to wherever the matching ring is.