The hard part now wouldn’t come from school on the Virginia Commonwealth University campus. No, the hard part was having patience with her searches and whatever holes they dug for her around the FRoE and this Chateau D’rahl and Inmate 4872. My dad. It has to be.
* * *
Nothing pulled up with her keywords or sub-level terms for over an hour. Although she had more to work with now, Cheyenne was antsy. She popped into the Borderlands forum to look around. Maybe a unicorn needs help with a dragon problem. She snorted. Yeah, right.
The first few topics were mundane. New Arrival Support and Guidelines and Regulations Not Outlined in the Accord. She might have gone back to look through those if every other thread turned out to be as useless first.
The next title made her stop: We Have a New D-class Resource.
It was the first time she’d seen D-class mentioned, but the D had to stand for drow. Dragon’s out of the question. I would’ve heard about one of those by now.
Cheyenne opened the forum thread and took a deep breath. “This is not good.”
Our friend HahaRadz444 had a visit from a D-class berserker last night. She helped him out with a greenskin power struggle. So far, things are looking up. Use this thread as a board for requests. If she’s looking, she’ll see them.—
The original thread post came from none other than gu@rdi@n104, which shouldn’t have surprised her. They were all watching now for sure, or looking for her at the very least.
Cheyenne pushed back in her chair and shook her head. “He made me my own bat signal. On a dark-web forum for magicals who need help with…what? Not being extorted? Oh, my God, this is not what I signed up for.”
Still, she couldn’t help poking around through all the comments addressing their new D-class Resource. Most of them just referred to her as D. Cute.
A few trolls wanted someone to sit in on their business meeting with a warren of Nightstalkers, whatever those were, to discuss Ambar’ogúl produce smuggling.
Someone else was asking for money to help them pay the bills for the next three months.
One person, whatever they were, wanted the opportunity to meet her in person because “I crossed through when I was a child and never had the chance to see one with my own eyes.”
“This is insane.” Cheyenne kept scanning requests. None of them hinted at anything on the same level as the goblin Radzu needing somebody to get orc thugs off his back and out of his store. “I’m not gonna find anything about Durg or the people going after Ember’s friends on this. They better not start sending me fan mail.”
No one knew her real name or where she lived—or that she wasn’t a D-class resource. Not the way they thought she was. These people wouldn’t expect their shiny new drow in the system to be just a halfling.
A private message from gu@rdi@n104 blinked on in the corner of her screen.
gu@rdi@n104: There’s a lot of fluff to sift through in places like this. But something might show up that’s worth your time. I’ve heard good things.
Cheyenne typed back that whatever the guy had heard, he was mistaken and should leave her alone. Then she deleted it before sending, stood, mussed the hair on the back of her head, and went to take a shower.
This was what Mom meant when she said everything has a price. I try to do a few good things to help some people out, and now I have to deal with everybody asking for everything.
What Cheyenne needed was to focus and not let herself get distracted by wondering how much this gu@rdi@n104 knew. Her data searches could do the rest. She’d gotten this far without a bulletin board for how to contract a drow berserker.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Without needing to get to class and sit through the most boring part of grad school so far—which was all of grad school—Cheyenne had the time to do her hair the way she wanted and put on the makeup she hadn’t bothered with yesterday. Pale ivory foundation everywhere. Thick black eyeliner blended into the dark gray on her lids. This forum thing with gu@rdi@n104 calling her out as some kind of drow superhero put her in a don’t-screw-with-me-mood, so she added black lipstick to go the whole mile. She saved that for special occasions and not being mistaken for a savior of every Border crossing—whatever that Border thing was—magical.
Metallica’s Master of Puppets blasted from her Bluetooth speaker. Cheyenne walked circles around her desk, pausing every few rounds to check for pings on her searches. The music drowned out that blaring duck quack whenever a notification came up, but the music helped her think and stay calm.
She took a break to clean the kitchen and wash what few dishes she had. Then she made her bed, stuck some laundry in the wash, and got out the compressed air can to spray the dust out of her computer tower and the server box and used lint-free wipes on the monitors.
When her apartment was as clean as she could stand to make it, she ended up lying on the floor in front of her desk, trying to summon even a trifling spell without seeing the changes in her skin crop up. “Just a tiny spark. Something!”
She snapped her fingers for what felt like the hundredth time, and a silver flash ignited between her fingers. The second it happened, her skin tingled and took on the purple-gray color of her drow heritage. “Well, at least it’s getting faster. That doesn’t help me right now.”
The last of the Funyuns went into her mouth, and then she stood to check her searches and the time. Still nothing, and it was almost 12:45 p.m. “Bergmann better have her office hours open.”
If the halfling couldn’t spend her afternoon sifting through the information her search programs hadn’t found yet, she might as well spend her time doing something
