*The Chronicles of F.R.E.E. Atania's Knight - Raquel Festow* Part 1

Chapter 33 - The Check List

*Ruth Watson POV*

"Well, this certainly makes a difference, being able to pick up each others swords!" I smirked, spinning both Rhianna's Spineripper and Dragonwrath around myself and showing off.
Rebecca made an impressed noise. "You took me by surprise there. It was certainly entertaining, I'll give you that!" She put her arm around Natalia and pulled her closer.
"Can I have Spineripper back now?" Rhianna scowled.
"If you can get it from me." I challenged, but Rhianna looked fed up. I stopped mucking around and handed it back to her, frowning. "You alright?"
"I'm tired. I'm going back to bed." She murmured and turned to go back into the house.
I frowned as I watched her go.
Rebecca also watched Rhianna slowly walking away and narrowed her eyes. "Ok, either she's a really sore loser, or there's something really wrong."
"Maybe they went too far at the cafe?" I asked, feeling guilty for laughing at her earlier.
"It was nothing less than what she deserved." Rebecca snorted. "I would have done a lot worse than that if I had been given that power."
"Maybe you should go and speak to her, Ruth?" Natalia suggested.
I gaped at her. "Why is it always me that has to go and speak to everyone?" I complained.
"Because you have a good way of getting people to tell you everything?" Rebecca nudged me before looking at Natalia. "Come on Darling, I want a spar with you."
Natalia gave me an empathetic look. "She's right you know. You do have a knack of getting people to tell you what's wrong." She gave me a wry smile.
I rolled my eyes. "Fine." I snarled, before turning to run after Rhianna. "RHIANNA, WAIT!"
Rhianna stopped when I managed to get close enough.
"What is it?" She asked, defeatedly.
"Mate, what's wrong?" I asked.
"Nothing. Just leave me alone." She said, turning away from me.
I grabbed her hand. "I know you better than that, Rhianna. You know you can tell me anything." I told her.
She looked at me before glancing over my shoulder at everyone else behind me. I glanced back too. Rebecca and Natalia were now sparring together as well as Hunter with Ruby. Hunter was really struggling against Ruby because of her fast agility skills. There was no way he was going to be able to win.
I looked back at Rhianna and furrowed my brow. "Fancy an exploration of this place?" I whispered.
She looked me in the eye and I saw her eyes sparkle straight away. I smirked. She was so easy to read!
"Come on." I said, mischievously and pulled her through the kitchen into the hallway.
"Let's start on this side." She said, opening the door to the dining room.
It looked like we had stepped into the Queens dining room. It was the length of the rest of the house, with the table long and wide enough to fit at least seventy people at comfortably. The table was bare, dark mahogany wood and the chairs were the same wood, with cream padded cushions on the seats and backrests. There was a grand fireplace that hadn't been lit up in years by the looks of it. I ducked inside and looked around.
"What are you doing?" Rhianna asked, folding her arms at me.
I ducked down to look at her. "Looking for a secret passageway." I whispered, narrowing my eyes and looking around sneakily. "They're usually found by pushing a hidden loose brick or something."
"The fuck you on about?" Rhianna snorted, mocking me.
"Hey!" I snapped. "I'm trying to be in a movie here, will you shut up and let me do my thing?"
"Movie? The fuck? You're as crazy as Raquel, you know that?"
"At least I'm fully dressed." I muttered back, sending her into a fit of laughter.
After a thorough search of every brick in the fireplace, I decided my hunch had been wrong and slipped back out of the fireplace, feeling very disappointed.
"Well, that was shit." I sighed, looking at the fireplace and glaring at it.
"Come on, idiot." Rhianna sneered, shaking her head at me.
We looked around the next few rooms. There was a sitting room, a bar (that both of us said we would be spending the evening in), a billiards room and back into the kitchen. All the rooms were huge but it seemed the kitchen stretched across the whole width of the mansion. It was ridiculously big.
We then looked in the lounge that hadn't been what I expected at all. The house had been very old fashioned so far, but the lounge was so modern. It had three huge red leather sofas surrounding a faux, glass fireplace in the middle of the room. The walls were lined with framed vinyls, with a stereo sound system in the middle of the external wall, and it looked like it belonged in a bachelor pad. Rhianna gaped at the room in shock, while I leapt onto the sofa and lounged back.
"Now this is my kind of room!" I exclaimed. "Lets have a look at their music choice, shalllll we?" I dragged out the last two words, being stupid on purpose to make her laugh.
I looked at their choices of music and I had to say, I was pleasantly surprised.
"HIM... My Chemical Romance... Slipknot... YUS! Bloodhound gang! That's going on straight away!" I sniggered and turned on the stereo, slipping in the CD as I did so.
Turning it up loud, I grabbed the stereo remote and leaped back onto the sofa, pointing at the other ones for Rhianna to take a seat.
"What's the music like here?" Rhianna asked, in a faintly amused, but more worried way.
"It's sexy." I replied, grinning widely, pressing the play button and letting 'The Bad Touch' do it's thing. "Be sure to listen to the words!" I hinted to her, watching closely for her reaction.
The song starts, but I forgot it spoke as if it was a documentary at the beginning.
"This isn't music! This is shit!" Rhianna snapped, getting up.
"Just give it a minute!" I told her, and stuck out my leg to push her back on the sofa.
She listened to the song with a faintly amused but mostly confused face, it wasn't quite the reaction I had been hoping for. Instead she just picked the song apart, not understanding a single word of it.
"What's a waffle house? Coca Cola? X Files?"
I slapped my forehead, rolling my eyes. "Ok, this is going completely over your head isn't it?" I sighed, once again disappointed. I groaned as I got up off the sofa.
"What's Doggy Style?"
"Banging them from behind." I grumbled, switching off the music.
"Why do they call it that?"
I let out a frustrated roar. She's worse than those people that have to ask a question every two minutes during a movie. "Ok. Coffinhounds, right?" I said, annoyed that I'm having to explain the karma sutra to someone older than me.
She nodded, her eyes widening at where this is going.
"How do you think CoffinHounds procreate?" I asked, finally, putting my hands on my hips. She looked a little disturbed, so I took that as her knowing what they did. "Now, here, we don't have coffinhounds. We have dogs or doggy's. Get it now? Yeah? Good!"
I didn't leave her any room to ask more questions, and quickly went into the next room, a library.
"Whoa..." I looked that the shelves lining the walls full of books, there were around six stand alone bookshelves that were from floor to my height, as well as a podium with a large, purple book on it. Everything was the dark mahogany wood again but it had the green shaded lights hanging from the ceiling.
"Wow! I have never seen so many books!"  Rhianna gasped, picking one up and looking at the cover. "They all look really old. Like, older than Rebecca old."
I snorted and went to the podium to look at the purple book.
"Kaching! Jackpot!" I exclaimed to her.
"What?" Rhianna asked, coming over to look at the book.
The large purple cover looked worn meaning it was very well read, but what had caught my attention was that it looked more like a journal than any other book in the library.
Rhianna raised her eyebrows at me and opened it, carefully. There was six folded, yellowing pages just inside the cover. I opened one.
"This is a map of Neonia." I whispered in shock, showing Rhianna. "Look, there's Bygenton with the red mark on it."
Rhianna picked up another one. "This is Rulid!" She gasped, shoving the paper under my nose to show me. She pointed where the red mark was on her piece of paper. "Eoceth. My hometown! They know where I've come from!"
I picked up another two slips of paper, opening them up simultaneously. "Cristis and Atania. Wacchica is marked on Atania twice."
"Natalia and Raquel." Rhianna hissed, her eyes widening in realisation. "We were being stalked!"
"This one's Earth, and my hometown is marked too. But... Uistea? We don't have anyone on Uistea..." I furrowed my brow.
"Sugo is from Uistea. Maybe it's her mark?" Rhianna said, looking at the map.
I hummed and turned to the first page. There was just more details about the Realms. Key cities, where most people gathered, special events, even where family members lived of the Doppelgängers. My blood ran cold when I looked at Earth's page and saw the list of my entire families names. I started to shake.
Rhianna noticed the extensive list of my family members, and quickly flicked to Rulid. There was nothing under her name, just ORPHAN. She breathed a sigh of relief. "Well, I owe my bastard of a father one thing I suppose."
I flicked to Neonia's page and looked at Rebecca's family members. All of them had a red line through them. I looked up at Rhianna, feeling extremely emotional at seeing all the names crossed out with hers being the only one untouched.
"No mention of her having any sons. Looks like the family died out." She said, sorrowfully.
I sighed and turned the page. It was a breaker page, but it had 'page 51' scribbled down in the corner. Curiosity got the better of me. Keeping one hand on that breaker page so I could find it again, I flicked to page fifty one.
It was a report on Rebecca. It even had a very old, black and white photograph of her stuck to the top corner. She was standing in a very old fashioned armour, nothing like the comfortable, scuplted to the body ones we had today. She was looking away from the camera, with a very serious expression, her hair blowing in the wind that was coming from behind her, holding the sword with the curved hilt that I had been allowed to try out back when I visited her in her hut. I scanned my eyes over the details they had on her.