LTSV - Lost & Found 8 (Patreon)

Mira was sitting up again, after a short and restless cat nap where she focused everything on trying to calm her racing heart before she ended up convulsing on the floor again, only present for it this time, when Anna let her guests into the sitting room.

Vesper divested herself of her hat and coat, tossing them to Nanny with the ease of long familiarity, before coming over to examine Mira’s face again up close.

Behind her, hovering by the door in a dress and bonnet that must have still had tags on them an hour ago, was Cecily Rousseau ; the heroine and player character of ‘Lost Daughter’ —and an embodiment of the biggest threat to Mira’s comfortable future.

“Vesper, I’m fine,” Mira told her older sister, who had just taken her by the cheeks to tilt her face from side to side. “My doctor has matters well in hand. I ordered lunch for us. Sit down. Stop fussing.”

Whether this was how Violet had treated her sister or not, Mira had no clue. Unlike Nanny, Violet’s memories of Vesper seemed to be at an end. Maybe they just didn’t interact all that much?

Behind Vesper’s back, Anna collected Cecily’s wrap and her hat. In the first game, Cecily wore her hair long in a ‘flapper’ style, which was a long low braid affixed with big bows at the base of the neck and the end of her braid. Only careful observation of the other characters revealed that all the other girls her age in the Capitol either wore their hair half up-half down or in a Gibson tuck. Only farm girls and factory workers wore theirs in a flapper. Cecily’s clothes in the first game, aside from her school uniform, had been equally unflattering. She was beautiful enough that she made her brown cotton frocks, ill-fitting pinafores, and darned cardigans look cute rather than frumpy. The thing was, Cecily had been born and raised in the Capitol along with her classmates and there was no obvious reason why she dressed like a hick farmgirl until the opening scene of game two revealed how her family was treating her.

Now, though, her pink hair was bobbed short. Her new style was just long enough for it to curl in shells that framed her heart-shaped face and seafoam green eyes. The new cut made her look older and, coupled with her new linen and lace walking suit, gave her an age-appropriate elegance that she’d been sorely lacking in the first game.

Mira wished she didn’t know the reason for that haircut. That knowledge made it hard to be wary of the child. 

“Come sit, dear,” Vesper instructed Cecily. There was a slight pause before that ‘dear’ and it didn’t come off as natural, which made Mira wonder what Vesper really thought of her new charge. “My sister arranged for lunch. You eat while we talk.”

‘My’ sister, not ‘our’ sister. Interesting. 

“Thank you, Lady Coventry,” Cecily said, voice low and eyes downcast as she took a seat on the sofa furthest from Mira.

She was always like that when Violet was around in the game. Cecily could never manage to meet her eyes, which the male leads all took to mean that Cecily was scared of Violet and they weren’t necessarily wrong. Even Mira thought that during her first playthrough, but it wasn’t until her second time through that she noticed that Cecily’s initial attitude towards her ‘rival’ was actually quite friendly—until the Bath Scene; an unavoidable cutscene in every route where Violet appeared unexpectedly while Cecily was having a late night wash and discovered the secret that the heroine had managed to hide from her schoolmates and boyfriend(s). 

There was a reason all Cecily’s casual clothes had high necks and long sleeves in the first game. It was the same reason why she wore her hair in such an ugly and unflattering fashion. There were three reasons, actually: Cecily’s stepfather and her two older step brothers. 

Mira watched as Cecily very carefully settled down and acknowledged that the girl had real acting skill. If Mira hadn’t already known that Cecily’s stepfather recently hit her upside the head with a lit candelabra and then beat her with a cane while she was on the floor trying to put her smoldering hair out, she would have never guessed that the heroine had been hurt at all.

‘Lost Daughter’ hinted at the abuse, but never came right out and said it was happening. You could see a few bruises on Cecily in the Bath Scene if you went back and looked carefully, but her body was mostly shielded from the player’s perspective by her hair so the bruises and old lacerations were easy to miss. Also, Cecily would get quiet and agitated if her brothers appeared in a scene. They’d say awful things to her, too, if you messed up and allowed them to be alone together. Otherwise, it took a few playthroughs before you realized the game was being coy about what happened to its heroine offstage. 

‘Lost Daughter 2’, though, shed that nicety right at the starting line and kicked off with a graphic beatdown that ended with Cecily fleeing her house with nothing except the clothes on her back and half her hair burnt off. 

After spending the night on a park bench, the newly homeless Cecily found a newspaper and discovered that all female citizens of the Capitol around her age had been ordered to report to the Temple District for bloodline testing. Most mandatory temple functions came with a free meal and a day pass for the omnibus, so Cecily went—unaware that she was about to change the course of her entire life.

Now, here she stood in Mira’s parlor with only her unseasonable clothes and new hair as evidence that anything had happened to her. Mira had originally assumed that the salamander in the grate was heating their rooms, but in fact it was removing heat. Everyone’s coats and hats had thrown off Mira’s sense of the seasons, but she figured it out when Anna opened a window for some fresh air. It was summer outside, not autumn or winter. The light coats and hats she’d seen the other women wearing were all for sun protection.

Cecily, meanwhile, had on a thick coat with sleeves that went down well past her wrists and long sleeves under that. There’d be no risk of her clothes sliding back to reveal what had been done to her, but she had to be sweltering even in the cool sitting room.

‘Kids who grow up like that get good at masking it,’ Mira reminded herself. “Anna, tea, please,” was what she said out loud.

This country had an interesting tea culture. Given the fact that this was a magical society, ice wasn’t as scarce here in the summer as it might have been elsewhere so Anna served them an iced green tea sweetened with muddled fruit and floral syrup in tall fluted glasses. 

Cecily ate neatly, but fast enough that Mira could tell that, even if Vesper had fed her already, it hadn’t been enough. If Mira was right about the timeline, Cecily had spent the past few days staying in a pilgrim’s hostel and eating from the temple district’s soup kitchens until the clerics found someone to take charge of her. The temple district’s charity kitchens provided the homeless with enough to keep body and soul together, but everyone walked away still a little hungry. 

Although, Vesper also ate with a clear appetite so maybe they’d both just had a busy morning so far and hadn’t stopped at a cafe yet. 

“Dear, I need to have a private conversation with my sister,” Vesper told Cecily once they were all done with the meal.

“You may use my bedroom if you’d like to take a nap,” Mira offered. She didn’t love the idea of sharing her bedroom, but letting Cecily loose in the hotel to get snatched up by an NPC was an even worse prospect. “Nanny can make up the chaise in there for you.”

Cecily glanced her way, blatantly unsure about the offer, but nodded.  Nanny showed Cecily out of the room and, as soon as they were gone, Vesper focused her entire attention on Mira and said, “Now, I want to hear about this seizure.”

Since she’d had time to consider her options, Mira had decided to keep her story to the actual sequence of events. She left out the ‘memory loss’, though. That was personal and she didn’t understand Vesper well enough to trust her just yet. 

“Would you be willing to submit to a third examination?” Vesper asked, once Mira was finished. Only the way she was drumming her fingers against her knuckles hinted at her state of mind. “This Doctor Desmona is still a student. I’d like to have another opinion from the Royal Hospital and, ideally, have them consult on the inscription before it’s applied.”

“If such a person is willing to make a housecall, then yes,” Mira replied with misgiving. “Not many people are willing to associate with me right now, Vesper.”

Again, Mira had an odd feeling about the way her older sister looked at her whenever Mira used her name. She kept pausing and giving Mira these searching glances. Did Violet not speak casually with her siblings?

“Leave that part to me,” was all Vesper said. “For now, I have some news that may upset you. Should I wait? It may be easier to hear it now before the newspapers get hold of it.”

“Is this to do with the reason you have Miss Rousseau in your custody today?” Mira asked, settling back against the sofa. She wasn’t alarmed. She already knew what was coming, but she’d have to fake it.

“Yes,” Vesper folded her hands in her lap, took a breath, and explained. “The Temple of Eyes issued a prophecy the week before last. There is, somewhere in the Capitol, a nobly-born girl who was switched at birth with a commoner’s child. The Veiled Goddess requires both girls’ identities to be restored to them. To that end, the Prince Regent issued an order for all female citizens of a certain age to report to the Temple of Blood for bloodline verification.”

“...and the girl was Miss Rousseau ?” Mira asked, when Vesper seemed to struggle for words. 

“That, we don’t know for sure,” Vesper sighed and pinched her nose. “She’s one of many candidates right now. The Temple has found over forty girls so far with hidden parentage, but none whose parents would have had both the opportunity and motive to exchange their infant with someone else’s yet. They’re mostly adopted children or someone’s secret lovechild, no mistaken identities yet and there are no two families with the same set of misplaced children. Father placed a blood sample on record with the Temple of Blood as part of my confirmation process to become his designated heir, so they were able to identify him to be her actual parent, but, given our father’s history, they’ll need to also test Viola in order to be sure that Miss Cecily isn’t just a lovechild.” A brief, uncomfortable expression flitted across her features, “I do not mean—I only meant that Papa has never had a paramour who would have had the inclination or even an opportunity to steal Madame’s daughter. He also does not recognize Mrs. Rousseau's name, so at the moment it’s not clear to us how Miss Cecily came to be.”

Mira didn’t recall this being part of the game, but -then again- Cecily would have been staying with someone else while Vesper verified her other younger sister’s ancestry so she wouldn’t have been privy to these conversations. As Mira recalled, Cecily wouldn’t receive confirmation that she was one of the girls in the prophecy until somewhere around mid-game.