LTSV - Lost & Found 7 (Patreon)

Nanny returned to the rooms around noon, pink-cheeked from the sun. Mira pretended not to see Anna show her the newspaper or their unhappy faces as they had a hurried, whispered conversation about it. 

“The house is in decent repair, miss,” Nanny announced, once she’d put up her coat and hat and received a cup of hot tea. “It needs airing out and the furnishings are all from your mother’s day, but your Lord Father hired a groundskeeper to keep the exterior in order and check the inside of the building twice a year. I visited a service agency on my way back. They should send over a few girls for review by tomorrow. I asked them to send candidates for a charwoman and a cook for now. I have the agency’s crystal frequency now if you’d like to add any other positions.”

Mira nodded, comparing the number of bodies they had compared to the townhouse as described. The building was three stories and had once been her mother’s full-time residence, according to Nanny, so there ought to be room for live-in staff.

“I’ll make my decision once I’ve reviewed the staff quarters,” Mira said aloud.

“There’s a maid room in the central apartment,” Nanny explained with a nod. “I thought it might do for Anna, especially given current matters.” She paused to clear her throat. She was probably going to take a while to address Mira’s condition head on. “There’s a small dormitory in the basement that can house up to four if they don’t mind sharing rooms and a housekeeper’s suite on the main level near the kitchen that I thought I might take for myself.”

Mira wondered if she should have been surprised. Violet’s memories of the Lord Warden’s residence were of an imposing fortress surrounded by exquisite gardens with attached barracks, so Nanny’s idea of a ‘small, comfortable townhouse’ must be influenced by that.

With the matter of housing settled for now, Mira seriously considered heading back to bed for another nap–except a mirror set into the wall near the front entrance started to glow in a rainbow pulse.

Anna stood up and went over right away as Mira watched with interest. The mirror was, as she realized, not actually a mirror. It was a flat plane of iridescent glass set into a frame. Anna passed her hand over the surface and a face appeared on the pane.

Oh, so not glass then. That must be the crystal Anna had used to call the teaching hospital.

The face in the crystal pane was familiar and stimulated both Mira’s own memories and her inherited ones. She squinted at the glass as both sets combined to paint a vivid picture for her.

Lady Vesper Galadine Coventry didn’t appear in the first game. Maybe her role was expanded in the third game, but Mira would never find out now. Vesper first appeared in the initial story arc of ‘Lost Daughter 2’, but after that she stopped being accessible for conversation. The player could reliably find her in her office, but her only response was ‘I’m busy with work now, perhaps later?’ but, ‘later’ would never arrive. 

As the oldest child, Vesper was her father’s direct heir. She had just finished university so she was in the process of establishing herself as the next Lady Warden of the Central Corridor. That meant serving the Crown Princess as her closest aide, which left her with little time for messy personal matters outside of an emergency, as Cecily would soon discover.

Vesper was five years older than Violet, which would make her twenty-four right now, and not even Violet had ever known for sure whether or not they got along. Violet remembered her as a quiet, severe young woman who was reliable and would take her side against outsiders, but not as a warm personality. 

Anna had positioned her body between the frame and the room so Mira could hear, but not see her sister when she introduced herself.

“Lady Vesper Coventry calling for my sister.”

Nanny caught Anna’s gaze and shook her head, which was an interesting choice. Mira had already guessed that Vesper had no idea anything had happened to her sister–but if she was in town then why hadn’t Nanny known about it? Or called her? How deep was the divide between Violet and her family? Mira had thought for a second that all the assets they’d settled on her was a good sign and not a severance package, but maybe not.

“Forgive me, my Lady,” Anna said, tone unreadable and nothing like her normal good cheer. “My mistress is not available at this moment. May I take a message?”

“I’m aware that I am interrupting her honeymoon,” Vesper replied with an undercurrent of tension that did something to settle Mira’s uneasy feeling. Marriage seemed to be a more private affair in this world. Maybe she just didn’t want to disturb her sister during a big transition. “Please let her know that I would not ask if the circumstances were not extraordinary.”

Anna hesitated. “There is no honeymoon, my lady,” she replied at last. “The Fenby family reneged on Miss Violet’s arrangement. She had a bad shock and is still recovering.”

“What?” Vesper’s register rose sharply.

“The matter has been reported back to the Main House,” Anna continued. “We have not yet heard back from Miss Violet’s Lord Father.”

“I was traveling yesterday…” Vesper replied. She started to pace and Mira spotted part of a storefront behind her. It looked like a dressmaker’s shop and something started to itch in the back of her head, not where Violet’s memory lived, but in Mira’s own past experiences. However, she didn’t have an opportunity to really think about it because Vesper was still talking. “...and occupied by a meeting this morning. Is my sister well? Is she able to talk?”

Anna turned with some hesitation to check and, at Mira’s nod, lifted the crystal frame off the wall.

Up close, Mira discovered that the resemblance between these sisters was slight, yet present. Vesper had wheat blonde hair where Mira was an icy platinum blonde with a pale lavender cast. Mira assumed they must both take after their mothers, but Violet and Vesper had the same clear amethyst eyes. Vesper had her hair back in neat side swirls to accommodate her elegant cartwheel hat, but no amount of grooming or fashion could distract from the sudden pinch between her brows and the distressed line of her mouth.

“I’m here,” Mira said. She didn’t like using the names of her hosts if she could avoid it. There was no way to avoid living their lives, but saying ‘I’m Violet’ would feel too much like a lie when really she was just the semi-immortal thing that had inherited the use of Violet’s body.

Vesper searched her face for a moment before exhaling. “You don’t look too poorly,” she said at last. “What’s the matter? Are you alright? What happened?”

“I’ve seen a doctor and had some rest,” Mira replied, resisting the urge to pat at her hair. What was that emphasis on ‘too poorly’? “The Fenby family sent Nanny back to me without a welcome letter, saying they’d thought better of the match. I–I had been under some stress already and the shock brought back my childhood seizures. Nanny summoned a doctor and they’ll be treating me.”

Vesper’s lips thinned and her eyes flashed with a brief fury that she quickly suppressed. “I didn’t think you remembered those,” she said very, very carefully. “Where are you staying? I’ll come there and we can talk more.”

“I’m still in the hotel Papa…” Mira had to fight to keep herself from stumbling. Papa? Had she really just called him that? It had been instinct to phrase it that way, almost a muscle memory, so Violet must have. “...arranged for me. We’ll be here until I can hire more staff for the townhouse and have it cleaned up.”

“Then you do have a plan,” Vesper seemed to relax as she said that. It sounded like she hadn’t expected Violet to. Rude. “I’ll be there soon. I have a guest with me today, but I’ll have her wait in the lobby while we speak.”

Vesper released the call before Mira could fully absorb what she’d said.

Anna took the crystal back to the wall, seemingly unaware of the way Mira’s thoughts were already whirling. 

‘I’m a fool,’ Mira realized. Of course, Vesper was in town. The opening scene of ‘Lost Daughter 2’ took place a few months into the summer break before Cecily’s final year of academy and Vesper was one of the characters involved in the opening cut scenes. 

The first arc could be happening right this very second and, if so, then the ‘she’ that Vesper planned to leave waiting in the lobby was none other than the actual heroine.

‘Think, Mira,’ she told herself, wracking her brains for what she recalled of the first part of the game.

There was an extended and upsetting cut scene in the beginning set at Cecily’s father’s office that revealed some things about the heroine’s homelife that the first game had only hinted at; her stepfather was abusive and her brothers were complicit in the abuse. She fled her house after her stepfather found out that she’d applied to graduate early and start university a year ahead of schedule. 

From there, Cecily visited the Temple District and discovered that her biological father was not her mother’s deceased first husband, but had really been Lord Bertram Coventry, the Lord Warden of the Central Corridor—Violet and Viola’s father. Since her background was now in question and she was in danger at her original home, the priests let her stay with them until a new guardian could come to get her. That was where Vesper entered the story. She was Cecily’s new guardian. It wasn’t uncommon in this society for the eldest children to have custody of their younger siblings when their parents had demanding roles, take Andrei’s relationship with the Crown Princess for example, so Cecily became Vesper’s problem to solve.  

That explained why Vesper was at a boutique. Mira had been wrong. That hadn’t been a dressmaker’s shop. It was the prêt-à-porter boutique where Cecily’s makeover mini-game happened. The clothes the player picked out for Cecily had a big impact on the second arc of the game and she picked them out while Vesper made a few calls outside on her walking crystal. That was happening right now.

Afterwards, Vesper took Cecily with her to a hotel so she could check on an indisposed relative, but Cecily wasn’t invited upstairs. Mira would have never guessed in a thousand years that Violet was the ‘indisposed relative.’ More importantly, the lobby scene was when the player chose where Cecily would go to live for the summer. 

A few of the NPCs from the first game with connections to the Male Lead candidates could be found loitering around the hotel and, if Cecily approached one of them to talk, they’d offer to put her up for a while after Vesper came downstairs with the bad news that she didn’t have anywhere for Cecily to stay. Vesper herself was staying in one of the Crown Princess’s guest suites and Cecily didn’t have clearance to enter the residential areas of the Hadleigh Palace Complex. There were background checks and sponsorships required that they just didn’t have time to get for her. In the game, Vesper revealed that she had been hoping to prevail on her ‘relative’ to host Cecily, but decided against asking due to the state of their health.

Well, of course, she wouldn’t have asked Violet to house their surprise sibling. No matter how Violet felt about Cecily, the heroine would inevitably attract Violet’s arch nemesis, Andrei, right into Violet’s home and he was surely the last person Violet would have wanted to see ever again—to say nothing of the effect he’d have on her health now that Violet’s seizure disorder turned out to have been canonical.

Not even a day ago, Mira had been entertaining a nebulous plan to mind her own business and let the heroine’s problems pass her by. Sometimes that worked, but not this time. She could already tell. No, the heroine’s problems had come right up to Mira’s doorstep all by themselves and Mira could either take the offensive or be forever stuck on the defensive.

The problem with following the game’s natural flow of events was that all Cecily’s lodging options turned out to be bad. Mira had reloaded her saved games hundreds of times trying to find the ‘right’ choice, but all her options ended up awkward at best and miserable at worst. It became clear to her that this was just a period in Cecily’s life where she seemed destined to suffer as a guest slowly overstaying her welcome. 

If Mira couldn’t avoid the plot -and so far it looked like she couldn’t- then she needed to divert it. She knew from past experience that the plot would unspool exactly like the original if she did nothing so, in order to survive this mess, Mira needed to exert a change that she could control. 

“Nanny,” Mira called out, hardly believing that she was about to do the thing she was about to do. “Order a tea and sandwich set for three, please, and call my sister to let her know she may bring her guest upstairs with her when she arrives. I will lay down for a little while before they arrive.”