Chapter Text
Historical records don’t state the origin of Mount Ebott’s current name. In fact, there are very few records on the location at all, save those of missing persons in the area whose last known location was the surrounding forest, and that of an ancient legend surrounding the mountain.
The legend states that, long ago, there were two races: humans and monsters. And, naturally, war erupted. The surviving monsters are said to have been magically sealed in the caves beneath Mount Ebott, never to be seen again.
There’s several things wrong with that, of course.
Magic clearly doesn’t exist. It’s scientifically impossible, and therefore so are monsters, as they were said to be beings made almost entirely of magic. Even if monsters somehow existed, they would have long since suffocated or otherwise died out from being sealed in caves, underground. Where there shouldn’t be any oxygen.
It’s surprisingly detailed, for a legend that likely has no basis in fact. But the legend of monsters and Mount Ebott is not why Connor’s here right now.
He checks his internal GPS to ensure he’s at the right cabin in, as Hank would call it, the middle of nowhere. He is. So, he raps on the door, and is greeted by a grizzled old man with a shotgun leaning a little too heavily against the doorframe. Connor retreats into his mind-palace briefly to scan him.
Wesley Bass, 69.
If Hank was with him, he’d snicker to himself and whisper, “Nice.” He’d also assume nobody could hear him, and would be very wrong where Connor was concerned. However, Hank’s busy with work, and Connor? Connor has a mission.
Criminal record: assorted traffic violations, public inebriation.
“Who the hell are you,” Wesley mutters.
Connor realizes, with no small amount of unease, that the shotgun is now leveled at his chest.
If Markus had told him ahead of time that he’d be dealing with a paranoid old man the likes of which could put Hank to shame, Connor… most likely still would have agreed to do this. Unfortunately.
“My name is Connor, Mr. Bass,” he offers, taking a step back and raising his hands in what humans consider to be a placating gesture. “I’m the android sent by Markus.”
And several other people besides, but Mr. Bass is most likely to recognize Markus’ name. He does, thankfully, and lowers the shotgun.
“Of course! Thought you were coming next Friday, if I’d known you were coming today…” He shakes his head to himself, opens the door wider. “Come in, come in! Do you drink tea or coffee, son?”
“I am incapable of consuming food or drink, Mr. Bass, as I do not possess a digestive system. I don’t mind if you wish to drink something.”
“Course, and… Wes. Please.” He’s turned towards an old-fashioned kettle on a stove that likely was new when Hank was a child, and as he fiddles around with it, Connor takes the opportunity to look around.
Wesley “Wes” Bass is a park ranger, and the only ranger—the only person —living within fifty miles of Mount Ebott. Connor strongly suspects that the legend of the mountain, and the disappearances, have much to do with why.
Wes also makes Hank look like the master of tidying up. Very little of the clutter left lying around is remotely relevant to Connor’s mission, but notable items include a tarnished trombone, what appears to be a photo album, and…
Connor’s curiosity is piqued. He strides over to the photo album, and opens it.
A child, with bright red hair, a striped shirt, and a too-tight grin smiles back at him. The picture is so old, it’s nearly faded beyond recognition, so Connor shouldn’t be surprised when his database turns up nothing.
“Who is this?” Connor asks sharply.
Mr. Bass limps over, takes one look at the picture, and sighs.
“That was the first person to disappear here,” he says, “that I know of. I keep a record, simply because no one else cared enough to before me. And after me…” He shakes his head, sighs again.
“What was their name?”
“Chara,” he says. “I… knew them, once upon a time. If I’d known them better, perhaps I could have stopped them. But then… I never would have become a ranger here, now, would I?”
He doesn’t sound particularly happy about that.
Connor flips to the next page, and the next. Names pop out at him from his database, faces. All missing, no bodies found.
And a disproportionate amount are minors.
“Why are there so many children?” Connor asks. “Why are they all children?”
“Why do you think?” Wesley smiles unhappily. “You are the android.”
“I am here to find why there have been so many disappearances in the area, Mr. Bass. If you have a theory of your own, I would like to hear it.”
Connor does, in fact, have a theory too. However, it’s not one he’s willing to share with Mr. Bass, because currently, there is a high chance of it being true. Wesley, for his part, strokes his beard thoughtfully.
“When adults want to disappear,” he says at last, “they generally have more options than children do. Access to weapons, money, contacts in different circles. Children… do not have as many options.”
Almost imperceptibly, Connor’s eyes narrow. It would be imperceptible to a human. Silently, he continues to flip through the book, begins to keep a tally.
“Are you telling me that seven children, compared to not one adult, came to this mountain to die?”
“Over forty years? Yes.” Mr. Bass sighs. “Do you have a better theory, Mr…”
“As I said, my name is Connor,” he repeats. “I might. I would like to take a look around your cabin, first, if that’s alright—it may be a good starting point.”
And he would like to ask Mr. Bass some other, more pertinent questions, but he can’t ask too much now or risk alerting him to his suspicions. Connor is carrying a pistol, but against Mr. Bass’ shotgun, he might as well use the photo album as a weapon for all the good it will do.
With luck, and a fair amount of patience on Connor’s part, it shouldn’t come to that.
There’s absolutely nothing in the cabin that confirms his suspicions, or even supports them remotely. There’s more shotgun shells than an old man in the middle of nowhere should ever need, for one thing, but that just means Wesley Bass is extremely paranoid.
After about an hour, Mr. Bass starts asking questions of his own. If Connor were anyone else, he wouldn’t be able to search more thoroughly and answer at the same time. However, Connor was built for multitasking.
He scans a poster on the wall—not removed recently, and he doubts the suspect would take kindly to him tampering with it while he’s right there anyway—and quietly asks Wesley to repeat himself.
“Course. Why would the leader of androids send someone to help with human disappearances?”
There’s several answers Connor could give him. He opts for the truth, this time.
“I may be an android, but I was built to be a detective.” One built to track down deviant androids, admittedly, but that much is irrelevant. “Markus offered my assistance in solving cases involving humans as well as androids, in order to promote the growing solidarity of humans and androids.”
Wesley squints at him, and Connor amends, “I believe I can solve this mystery.”
The old man smiles. “I hope you do,” he says, which is directly contrary to Connor’s suspicions, which is a problem.
Occam’s razor, a principle that came about long before androids, states—in short—that the simplest solution is typically the right one. The simplest solution here is that the park ranger on site is the one behind the disappearances, and currently, the only possibility that makes sense.
It’s entirely possible that Connor is wrong. But he rarely is, unless there are other variables he doesn’t yet know about. Which, there likely are—he knows little to nothing about the situation currently.
So, he says, “It’ll be easiest to track the most recent disappearance. The police report said you were the last person to see them. Can you take me there?”
Mr. Bass nods. “Course,” he says. “I’ll be bringing my trusty old double-shot here, if you don’t mind.”
Connor does, actually, but instead of voicing this he raises an eyebrow. “Any particular reason why?”
“Something in these woods makes people disappear,” he says matter-of-factly. “I hope you’re armed too, Connor.”
“I am.”
He doesn’t elaborate.
Humans are worse at lying than androids are, as a rule. There are outliers within both groups, of course—but Mr. Bass, Connor suspects, is no exception to the aforementioned rule.
He’s hiding something, that much would be obvious if Connor hadn’t been built with lie detection in mind. But that something seems to be related to only the first disappearance, and no others.
That something, however, is almost certainly relevant to the case. So, eventually, Connor says, “Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Bass?”
“Wes, please! And…” He frowns. “Sure.”
“How did you know the first missing person?”
Chara, Connor remembers. The first missing person in his album, and the only one Connor couldn’t identify on his own.
“On second thought, that’s not important to the investigation, is it?”
“Would I be asking if it wasn’t?”
Wesley shakes his head, although whether it’s to himself or Connor is anyone’s guess. “I don’t like talking about it,” he says. “And I’ll need a drink. Probably several. It’s getting dark—we should head back.”
“You’re welcome to,” Connor says. “I’ll look around some more.”
He shrugs. “Be careful.”
Connor watches him go. It’s only once he’s certain he’s left that he kneels next to an inconspicuous looking boulder, and examines it more thoroughly.
There are trace amounts of dried blood. Human blood, and now that Wesley is gone Connor takes the opportunity to sample it, identifies it as the last missing person.
They were here. A quick look around the area and a quick consult of his reconstruction software reveals the truth of what happened. In his mind palace, he steps back, and watches as a visibly exhausted child walks up the very path he and Wesley had taken, takes a seat on the rock.
They were holding their side, like they were already wounded, and his sensors aren’t picking up an attacker here. Connor has two options: follow the path the child took up ahead, or find what hurt them by backtracking.
He makes a decision, and proceeds up the slope. He’ll be able to reconstruct how it happened on the way back, and on the off chance his current theory is wrong, he brought a gun for a reason.
The trail leads to a cave, one where exterior lighting doesn’t extend far past the entrance. Not that there’s much lighting anyway—if the sun hasn’t set yet, it’s close to doing so. Briefly, Connor checks the local sundown time.
Or, more accurately, he attempts to, and then his stress levels go up fifty percent on the spot when it returns an error message.
He has no connection to the internet. If something happens to him now, he won’t be able to contact anyone for help. He’d be missed, but… not immediately. And it could be weeks, months, years before anyone finds him. He’d be long gone at that point, long beyond even the faintest hope of reactivation.
Connor decides to be more careful from here, even as he grabs a flashlight from his bag and turns it on. He was, unfortunately, not built with night vision in mind.
Almost as an afterthought, he zips up his bag and puts it to the side, against the cavern wall, out of sight from the entrance. His gun is in there, but he should be fine without it and the lack of extra weight should improve his preconstructions.
He switches on the flashlight, looks ahead, and starts walking, ignoring the bad feeling he has about this.
It’s a very big cave apparently. Or, a very long cave, if straightforward at least. No branching tunnels, so there’s only one way the child could have gone.
As he keeps walking, something… changes. Connor isn’t entirely sure of what, and when he retreats into his mind palace he can’t pick up anything . No strange signals, nothing that accounts for the quiet… buzzing, almost, his audio processors are picking up. Or the tingling feeling around the back of his neck, or the way that there’s a slight glow to the cavern walls growing brighter as he goes deeper in, one that his optical units have to be hallucinating.
Something’s not right here, and Connor doesn’t know what it is. He still doesn’t know what it is when his flashlight finds a hole in the ground.
Warily, Connor steps closer, and shines the light down it.
He can’t see the bottom.
His thirium pump begins to pump faster, and Connor takes several quick steps back. He really doesn’t like heights. And, unfortunately, he knows exactly why.
He pinches the bridge of his nose and counts to five silently. Closes his eyes. Opens them again.
He wishes he could call Markus. Or Hank. And, with that in mind, there’s nowhere else to go forward. It’s clear where the trail leads, and the last disappearance was not a recent one. He can leave and come back, now that he knows what he needs. Rope, preferably.
So, Connor turns on his heel, starts walking, and proceeds to walk face-first into a solid wall.
The only problem is, there’s nothing in front of him. And yet, when he takes a step back and feels for it, he can feel a wall there, even though his optical units are picking up nothing . There’s nothing here. There shouldn’t be anything here. There cannot be anything here.
Yet there is, and Connor finds himself squinting at where the wall should be, thoroughly baffled for a few, long moments. Then he keeps feeling around for the wall.
Several minutes later, his suspicions are confirmed. The invisible wall is blocking him in here. So, unless he wants to jump down the hole, he needs to find a way through it.
Good thing he has plenty of experience with breaking invisible walls, as do many, many other androids.
He takes another step back, then one more, carefully checking over his shoulder to make sure he’s a good distance from the hole.
He runs at it. Instead of walking into it simply from not knowing it’s there, he runs into it.
It trembles for approximately 1.2 seconds, but otherwise doesn’t budge. Connor steps back again, tries again, because he is not going into that hole, thank you very much.
The third time, the wall shakes, and doesn’t stop shaking. Connor takes a generous step back—and his led finally blinks from yellow to red, because the wall isn’t the only thing that’s shaking.
Connor retreats into his mind palace, and not a moment too soon. His body doesn’t look up, but he does—and sees the cavern roof beginning to fall in.
To put it bluntly: shit.
He has two options, and an all too limited amount of time to choose between them. If he was human, he would be breaking into a cold sweat right about now. Of course, if he was human, he wouldn’t have any time to choose. He does, though.
Break Wall — Chance of Survival: 6%
Jump — Chance of Survival: 8%
Neither of those scenarios have good odds, but one thing is quite certain: if he doesn’t move, his chance of survival is 0% . And… on the one hand, he’ll be fine if he can break the wall before the roof falls in. If he can’t, his chance of survival is the same as if he didn’t move at all.
If he jumps… he doesn’t know what’s at the bottom, but there is a chance that whatever it is will break his fall. If it doesn’t, his chance of survival isn’t 0%, but… it’s not much higher.
6% versus 8%. 0% vs 0.3%. The option he should pick is clear. It’s not much more likely, it’s still extremely unlikely, but there’s always a chance for unlikely events to take place. That much, he knows.
If he survives this, maybe he’ll finally, finally stop being so irrational when it comes to heights, on the bright side.
He’s almost out of time. So, he exits the mind palace, and sprints .