One pie was never enough.

There was a reason why Fabrisse had to sneak into sculleries during the late afternoon when the cooks had all gone to the mess hall, the washing maids were on break, and the kitchen doors hung open and no one was watching. The hearth still glowed with dying heat, the scent of sugar and spice lingering like evidence of a crime already committed. It was the only time the place felt unguarded.

The hearing was tomorrow, and that would be tomorrow's business.

Thinking about it now only made his heart skitter in his throat. He could feel his mind starting to overheat, running the same contingencies in loops he'd already solved. He'd memorized every regulation clause, every likely question, every answer drilled into place until it was mechanical. More study wouldn't fix anything; it would just make the noise in his head louder.

A fresh slice of pie, on the other hand, was a tangible solution. Sugar steadied his nerves better than mantras ever did. Technically, sneaking down here was not procrastination; it was a stabilization measure.

He moved quietly, shoes off, activating his trio of Stealthy Trinity: Liminal Presence Drift (Rank III), Auditory Dissipation Field (Rank II), Aetheric Veil: Echofold (Rank II). Rows of cooling pastries lined the counter, and there—nestled among the lesser tarts and puddings—sat the prized mingleberry pie. The one that wasn't sold anywhere in the Synod except during feast days. Glossy crust, sugared edge, and perfectly intact, it was the treat for kings.

He swallowed. Just one piece.

Fabrisse inched forward, hand hovering. Almost there. One more inch . . . Just one more—

"Don't you go anywhere, dearie," a woman's voice rang out behind him.

His heart nearly jumped out of his chest.

He spun around, hand still frozen. Staring straight at him at a position that rendered all his skills useless was Marla, the scullery maid, with arms folded, flour on her cheek and a knowing smile that said she'd caught him doing this more than once.

"Marla! I—I thought you were on break!" he blurted, as though the declaration might somehow undo the situation. Too ashamed, he cast Veil of Shame on himself. It didn't make him disappear from Marla's sight.

She chuckled, stepping closer to rescue the endangered pie. "You know, Kestovar," she said, "if you'd just asked, I'd have given you one for free."

He blinked, utterly disarmed. "Really?"

Marla shrugged. "Well, maybe not this one. But something that wouldn't have gotten you hanged by the head cook, yes."

Fabrisse hadn't meant to befriend a scullery maid. It had just . . . happened gradually, like the smell of baking that clung to the courtyard air.

Back in his first year, when his stipend barely covered rent and mandatory reagents, he used to linger by the bakery wing after lectures. The scent of melted butter and caramelized crust alone had been enough to make him stop every time he passed. He never went inside; the place wasn't meant for apprentices who could barely afford chalk, much less a slice of Mingleberry pie.

Marla had noticed him early on. At first, she thought he was casing the kitchen like some half-starved academy rat looking for scraps. But he never stole anything (yet). He just stood by the window ledge, nose tilted toward the ovens, watching pies come and go like a miser watching coins.

One evening, after the supper rush, she stepped outside and found him still there, sitting on the back steps, scribbling notes in a small ledger.

"What're you writing, boy?" she'd asked, half amused.

He'd startled, nearly dropping the book. "Calculations," he said. "For the ratios of fruit density to crust integrity. Yours have the highest cohesion I've seen."

That was how it started. By the end of the term, she knew his schedule better than he did, and he'd learned that scullery maids had more power than most magi when it came to dessert distribution.

Which led them to the present.

". . . I'll just," Fabrisse said, "get out of the scullery very quietly now and pretend nothing ever happened."

He took one backward step, then hesitated, glancing toward the pie with an expression of pure, hopeless yearning. "And maybe," he added under his breath, "I can get a free slice of pie?"

Marla arched an eyebrow. "Reward for delinquency? No way," she said, in that firm, singsong way older women used when they'd already decided the world's sense of fairness didn't apply to you. "You get rewards for hard work, not for creeping about my counters like a shadow in socks."

Fabrisse wilted, offering the world's most sheepish nod. "Right. Yes. Of course."

"Speaking of which," Marla went on, brushing her hands on her apron, "there's a reason I come here at this hour, Kestovar."

That made him pause. She did seem rather preoccupied. He stayed still, listening.

"I can't seem to find Laika anywhere."

"Laika?" he echoed softly. "The kitty that chased that philter hawk off the roof last spring, right?"

Marla gave him a look caught somewhere between pride and exasperation. "Kitty, he says. Hardly. That beast's no proper cat, but she's mischievous all the same."

"Right. She's a cat-thing. Adjacent feline."

Marla snorted. "Cat-thing, aye. That's the proper term for her lot."

In the Synod, cat-thing was an unofficial classification used by both naturalists and people who simply didn't want to argue with naturalists. It covered everything in the broad, troublesome spectrum of creatures that looked, behaved, or felt vaguely feline—but weren't, taxonomically speaking, actual cats.

Some had too many tails. Others, like Laika, had none. Some purred through their bones instead of their throats, producing a sound like a resonant hum through stone. There were aetherically-charged cat-things that could phase through solid walls, others that dissolved into mist when startled, and a few that were technically invertebrates but pretended otherwise for social convenience.

Laika, according to Marla, fit squarely into that unhelpful category—an adjacent feline, as Fabrisse put it. Four-legged, whiskered, occasionally luminous, with the temperament of a spoiled deity and the instincts of a thief. But she was aetherically-charged, so she could be found using a detector.

Marla sighed, glancing toward the clockwork bell on the wall. "My shift's back on in fifteen minutes," she muttered. "And if I don't find that little menace before then, she'll wander off again and miss her dinner. Last time she did that, she raided the cream cellar and the head cook blamed me."

Fabrisse straightened a little, interest piqued. "So, if I help you find her—"

Marla was already smirking, seeing exactly where that thought was headed. "Aye. You help me find Laika before she gets herself into another barrel of saffron, and I'll make sure you're properly compensated."

He blinked, cautiously hopeful. "Mingleberry?"

"Merryberry."

"Acceptable."

The PRAXIS NODE flashed against his eyes at that exact moment.

[QUEST RECEIVED: "The Cat-Thing Caper"]

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Objective: Locate the missing Cat-Thing Laika before the eighth bell.

Reward: + 2 DEX

+ 1 Slice of Merryberry Pie

Accept the Quest?

[Yes] [No] [Remind Me Later]

The main reward was rather irrelevant, but he accepted anyway.

"Hold on." Marla rummaged through her apron pocket, muttering under her breath, until she produced something that looked like a cross between a compass and a lantern.

The device had a brass frame, a glass lens faintly aglow with inner light, and a slender needle that twitched as though trying to decide which way was reality. On one side, someone had painted a little black cat on it, its tail looping into the border like a decorative flourish. The paint was chipped and smudged.

"The little cat painting's how you know it's meant for felines," Marla said dryly, noticing his curious glance. "Apparently, that's standard labeling practice in the Naturalist Wing."

Fabrisse turned the thing over in his hand. "Ah. A categorical symbol. To prevent—"

"—idiots from using it to find goats, yes." She sighed. "And don't you start correcting the art, Kestovar."

The device gave an uncertain click. Then another. Then three quick ones in a row, like an impatient heartbeat.

"This," Marla said, brushing flour off her hands, "is the Aetheric Feline Detector. Works on feline-adjacents too, mind you. The naturalist wing gave us one specifically to patrol Laika."

He held it up to the light and narrowed his eyes in fascination. The lens rippled with subtle aetheric interference like oil on water. "Interesting." Someone had clearly built it with a working understanding of resonance feedback, but the ratios felt slightly off. The calibration runes etched around the rim were functional, yes, but unevenly weighted. It was the kind of imperfection that itched at the edges of his thoughts.

He wanted—no, needed—to know how it worked.

"It's keyed to Laika's aetheric signature," Marla continued. "So it'll only respond to her. The closer you are, the faster it clicks. And that arrow—" she pointed to the trembling needle encased within the brass ring, "—shows her general direction. Most of the time."

"Most?"

"Well," she said, with the weary air of someone who had long accepted that the world wasn't built for precision, "it's still an aetheric construct calibrated to a creature that refuses to obey physics. So don't expect miracles." Then she shoved a small paper pouch into his hand. "Her treats. Lure her out once she's close enough. She can't ever resist dried salmon."

Fabrisse tilted the device, watching as the arrow spun once, quivered, and settled pointing toward the far corridor.

He looked up, face lit with a dangerous mix of curiosity and mild academic glee. "So the faster the clicks, the closer she is. Directional guidance via sympathetic resonance."

Marla sighed. "Yes, yes, Professor. Now go before she crawls into a stew pot again."

The Synod gates loomed behind him now, with sky-blues and silvers that marked the boundary between sanctioned study and everything beyond it. Fabrisse slowed to a halt just past the eastern arch, his shoes damp from where the rain runoff gathered near the gutter drains. The Aetheric Feline Detector clicked in his hand—soft, irregular at first, then quickening into an offbeat rhythm somewhere between urgency and mockery.

He frowned. "You can't possibly have left the grounds."

The clicks were faster now.

Apparently, Laika could.

The device's arrow quivered, swung westward, then jittered back toward a row of stacked crates beside the lamplighter's post. Fabrisse turned in a slow circle, trying to triangulate the sound. The needle refused to settle. Every time he shifted his angle, it adjusted by a few degrees, like it was teasing him with near-answers.

The street smelled like everything the Synod withheld from impecunious students: yeast and roasting chestnuts, the sticky sweetness of candied kumquats, ripe figs sweating in the late-warm air. A fruit vendor hunched beneath a striped awning glanced up as Fabrisse passed, and in front of him were crates and panniers full of pears, oranges, and tiny green apples that were probably polished one too many times.

People are selling real food here.

For the first time since he'd left the gate, the small, sensible voice at the back of Fabrisse's mind: being outside the Synod alone at this hour was not safe. Not after what'd happened. He slowed, boots whispering against wet cobbles, weighing options like coins in a palm. Retreat to the gate, hand the detector back to Marla, accept a scolding and maybe a stern lecture about wandering off the premises at dusk? Or, he could push on. He could sneak a little farther, catch Laika quickly, then return flushed with success and a slice of Merryberry pie as proof of virtue.

The detector's clicking scrambled his thoughts into focus—then scrambled them again. The rhythm turned erratic, a jittery staccato that no longer mapped neatly to distance. It was as if the device had hiccupped and discovered a new emotion: near-possibility.

"It's near," he breathed. The logic was simple, immutable: faster clicks → proximity. If he could locate the aetheric signature here, at the fruit stalls where the crowd might mask oddness, he could scoop the cat-thing up and be back inside before anyone noticed. Quick, effective, minimal disruption. Fail, and he'd return empty-handed, maybe a little damp, but alive and not on any disciplinary lists.

He got lost in his tidy little decision-tree when something dark and small collided with his hip. He hadn't seen her. His head was full of schematic lines and if-then contingencies. The world folded back into itself with the soft thud of wool on wool.

A cowl slammed into him from the opposite direction, a body a head shorter than his, compact and urgent. The impact sent the detector skittering in his hand; it clicked a frantic triple as the arrow spun. For a half-beat his mind tried to parse the interruption like a misplaced variable.

He widened his eyes as his mind struggled to reassemble context from chaos.

The person before him was Severa Montreal.

Of all people to collide with in the outer quarter, at dusk.

For a moment, he thought his eyes were lying. She was still dressed the same, with too much embroidery for any sane temperature, yet her hood had been drawn low when she hit him, and that alone was strange. Severa Montreal never hid her face.

Now, though? Her lips were pale, almost colorless in the non-aetheric lamplight. Her eyes, still that blood-deep shade of red, looked . . . muted, somehow, but he couldn't pinpoint exactly what was wrong about her.

Just his luck.

Every encounter with Severa Montreal was like walking into a precisely arranged trap, if his last Wind Thaumaturgy practical session and the meeting before that wasn't any indication. Even before the Eidralith happened, she'd had a knack for showing up at the worst possible moments—usually when he'd just found a rare moment of peace or focus.

She'd appear unannounced in his workspace, dragging him bodily to Fire Thaumaturgy practicals because Instructor Tan had complained that he was 'intellectually elusive.' Granted, he was skipping classes, so he couldn't complain. She'd once even tried to teach him a basic fire spell on the pretext that 'every competent thaumaturge should command Fire.'

He'd told her that he couldn't. His attunement wasn't built for that, and he didn't want to. She hadn't believed him. Eventually, maybe after he'd successfully shown her his utter incompetence, she'd mostly left him alone.

Until the Eidralith.

For a beat, neither of them moved.

He followed her gaze down and saw a small batch of pears rolling across the cobblestones, their skins dented and split open like overripe fruit under pressure.

Pears?

First she was buying pie, now she is buying pears?

Didn't she have servants for that sort of thing?

He blinked once, trying to reconcile the sight of her with the mess of crushed fruit at their feet. One pear had miraculously survived intact, a bright yellow-green against the gray stone. He found himself absurdly noting that its curvature was near perfect—spherical symmetry, minimal bruising—right before his detector inched toward a crescendo of irregular clicks.

Click. Clickclickclickclick—

A flash of spotted fur, tufted ears, and too many teeth for a domestic species. It lunged, snatched the last unbruised pear between its jaws, and bolted.

Laika!

He half-lifted his detector as the clicks thrashed into a steady whine, heart doing the same in his chest.

It was near. If he caught it here, right now, he could bring it back before the Synod noticed he'd slipped the gates.

Then Severa's voice cut across the noise like a command bell. "Kestovar. Are you occupied?"

He froze. Yes I am. I have to go catch that cat-thing. "Well, I need to go . . . somewhere not here."

"So you are not occupied." Her tone was iron. "The cat-thing stole my pear. You are going to help me catch it."

Wait. No. Never mind. I don't want to catch it anymore. Cat-things have good memories. Surely she can find the way back by herself.

He sneakily tried to push the aetheric feline detector into his back robe pocket as he glanced sidelong at her, calculating escape vectors that didn't exist. "But cat-things are, um, excellent at hiding. I cannot possibly find them."

The detector betrayed him with a loud click.

Her eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't happen to have a device specifically designed to find them, would you?"

He tried, vainly, to slide it deeper into his pocket. "Not specifically. Any device I happen to have would be . . . multi-purpose." It can find normal cats as well, not just cat-things.

Another click.

He winced. She looked like she wanted to smite him by sheer force of will.

"Bring that device out." She pointed at the feline detector. "Do not make me say it twice."

And why does she need that specific pear anyway? Is she going to eat it, even after it's been dropped to the ground? Come to think of it, pears are peasants' food. Does she eat normal food at all?

"Can't you buy another pear . . ." He avoided her gaze harder.

"It's about principles. Now bring it out."

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