Chapter One Hundred and Fifty: Dinner at a Fancy French Restaurant (Patreon)

The Blanchette is one of the oldest restaurants in Soho, and one of the finest for French cuisine. It also happened to be Anne’s pick of the night for dinner.

The maitre’d raised an eyebrow when I walked up. Fair enough, you don’t see too many six-foot-eleven chaps in a T-shirt and jeans walk through your fancy French door.

“Monsieur, are you with a party?” the man sniffed.

“I’m with the Drakes. Paul and Anne Drake? They messaged that they’re here.”

“Ah. The monsieur and the mademoiselle are seated in the booth, they mentioned a third would be joining. Please follow me.”

The man led me to a glass-walled booth, with Anne and Paul tenderly sampling a rather large fish.

"Hey," Anne greeted me. "What do you think of the meuiniere?"

"What fish is that?"

"It's not a fish, it's a style of cooking. Although ordering the whole sea bass might have been a bit much."

I surveyed the fish. Then reflected on Anne's and Paul's relative appetites. "I'll help you finish it."

"Awesome! I told you, Dad, Andrew'll help."

Paul sighed. "You've got to stop counting on your brother to finish the leftovers. That’s how people gain weight."

“Are you saying Andrew’s getting fat?”

“I’m saying, next time you order something and the waiter says, ‘Will it be just the two of you?’ - take the hint.”

I plopped myself into the chair.

“Eat up,” Paul said. “After the little demonstration today, I’m sure you’ll need your energy.”

“It was nothing. Just a friendly spar.”

“They’ve been playing clips of it across the TV channels for the last few hours. ‘Veteran Belessar puts rookie team in their place.’ ‘Belessar schools arrogant Americans.’”

“I didn’t mean for it to get out of hand.”

“You’re a celebrity now, Andrew,” remarked Paul. “You need to be a bit more careful of your reputation. Anyway, what did Ainsworth say?”

I ran Paul and Anne through the details of our conversation. After explaining the second family-distant cousins theory, I finished with, “So it seems we’re actually related.”

Paul nodded. “That may be. I’ll confess, I never expected to find answers to Hilary’s ancestry while looking for yours.”

“Maybe that’s one of the reasons I showed up at that moment. Anne might have a Summoner skill as well.”

“Summon Amnesiac Second Cousin? Seems a bit weird. Wouldn’t it show on my skill list?”

“Certain skills stay hidden until the right moment, I suppose. Maybe it shows up only in moments of extreme danger. Either way, it would explain a few things. Possibly I was bathing somewhere when the attack happened, and Anne was able to yank me from my bathroom to the roof.”

“So now we have to find reports of people who walked into a bathroom, never to be seen again.”

“Ainsworth already tried that, there’s a depressingly high number of cases.”

"People entering bathrooms and vanishing?"

"Missing college-age students. Almost ten thousand people across the world in the sixteen to nineteen age group just straight-up vanish every year."

"Wait, seriously? How is nobody investigating that?"

"Because it's all unconnected individual cases spread across thousands of jurisdictions. Most are runaways, some have drug problems, some are kidnapped and never found, some are trafficked and others turn up with memory loss after a few months."

"Can we do something about it?"

NEW QUEST ALERT: THE MISSING CHILDREN.

CHILDREN GO MISSING ALL OVER THE WORLD EVERY YEAR, NEVER TO BE FOUND AGAIN. POLICE DEPARTMENTS INVESTIGATE EVERY CASE, BUT A SYSTEMIC SOLUTION HAS NEVER BEEN FOUND.

DEVELOP A DEVICE THAT CAN FIND MISSING CHILDREN AND REUNITE THEM WITH THEIR PARENTS. THE DEVICE SHOULD BE ABLE TO OPERATE WITHOUT MP AND BE MASS PRODUCIBLE.

REWARD: +10,000,000 XP + 500 ETHICS + RELATIONSHIP INCREASE WITH ALL NATIONS WHERE MISSING CHILDREN ARE RETURNED ALIVE.

"... Anne, I think you just gave me a quest." I explained the alert as Anne's eyes widened.

"Ten million XP sounds like an awful lot of motivation," she said. "Although it’s a worthy cause in itself. You should do this."

“Gladly, except I have no idea how.”

Paul scratched his chin. "Doesn’t the XP scale with difficulty?”

“It does.”

“If I recall, you got your quest to defeat a Carnotaur well before you were in a state to actually pull it off.”

“… You think I should wait until I’m stronger to tackle this?”

“I think you'd best concentrate on getting your current quests done first. Aren’t there quite a few pending?"

“A lot, actually. Figuring out mysterious devices for General Xavier, forging armored vehicles, mentacapacitors, titanweave, resonant shield generators, nanoweave fabricators, investigating the Liraens, supplying the Brits with their armor, and now inventing a device to find missing kids.”

“Now that you put it that way… it’s rather strange you didn’t get a quest for investigating your own past.”

I shrugged. “My power gives me quests for cooking. I’ve long since stopped trying to figure out the logic behind quests.…”