Blueberries
Warning: Contains talk of abuse
So she did, though she never felt she got a good justification for why the upstairs and basement were off limits. The basement especially, with its strange latch entrance almost hidden behind the main floor’s dining table. What was it hiding? She never did like questions without proper answers. Mysteries were things that begged to be solved. She wanted to know what was upstairs and what was in the basement.
She wanted to know who kept leaving her blueberries.
If the house’s mysteries were out, she could at least solve that.
So by the third week Blueten moved on from exploring the house, and proceeded to observe the guild mates who passed in and out of it. Not including herself, there were 17 members total, all Soundless (she supposed it made the thieving easier). They came and went through the house like passing tides. There could be as few as three members in the house at any time to a full house. Sometimes members slept over, came in at odd hours, or just passed through. Baya’s house, it seemed, acted as their headquarters of sorts, and the only times they really were all there were for planning raids or coming back from them to split their spoils.
Whoever was leaving the blueberries would have to be someone among them who regularly passed through the house in the early morning. The top suspects were the ones who actually lived there but… Aside from her and Meritt, there was only Baya and her husband. Darach was too loud not to be caught, and Meritt was just as bad. Besides, he seemed too honest to lie about it. Was it Baya after all? She said it wasn’t. Did she lie?
Blueten tried to catch whoever it was in the act a couple times, but the best she caught was a glimpse of someone’s coat as they left the house. They were gone by the time she got outside. She was disappointed, but it did give her a solid hint: it wasn’t someone who lived in the house.
That left quite a lot of members, and she quickly discovered that they were all rescues of a kind. They’d either lost something: homes, families, jobs, or had otherwise been hurt. She saw it in the way some shrunk, tried to be invisible, and others grew larger, lashing out at others as if to make up for some insecurity or another. Meritt was always eager to tell her what he knew of each member, but she often knew before he told her or saw more than he did.
Claws had a mechanical arm he frequently tinkered with to replace his lost one, he must’ve been an engineer before; Onora was powerful but super defensive, showing signs of coming from a broken home; Needles had a gambling addiction, she talked like she was stuck in debt; Bogs was abandoned, frequently panicked at not being included; And Sheridan…
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