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Author's Chapter Notes:
portrait of authority
Max and Justin strode down yet another hallway that felt every bit as familiar as it was unfamiliar at the same time.

Vineholdt was proving to have a lot more wings and corridors than even its palatial size suggested from the outside. Putting both of them in mind of places with similar properties, to both of their trepidation. Max, especially, felt as if the place was somehow rearranging itself behind their back.

Struggling to put his fun experiences in the Harken Building out of mind, he found himself recalling some old legend Shades told him about once, of a giant maze, and someone unrolling some string to show the way back. A trick that Alta’s Undercity, let alone the Lower Ruins, would have been too massive to even attempt. Here, though, he questioned whether a rope tied to anything would actually lead them back to the same place at all.

Even some of the twisted passages of the Building occasionally managed that much.

Having long since lost any trace of Shades’ trail, to say nothing of Melissa’s, they were reduced to haphazard fumbling in the dark.

Along the way, they heard that grandfather clock toll a couple more times, finding it every bit as worrying as the first. Especially since they had no clue what it was even about. For his own part, Justin tried very hard not to think of it as an alarm.

At first, he wished they had ignored everyone’s advice and brought their radios along, but based on prior experience, he doubted they would have been any help finding Shades.

They both paused and looked out a bank of windows lining one side of this hallway, overlooking the back of the estate. Providing a commanding view of a massive, checkered gameboard, with two sets of pieces arranged in apparent mid play. Recalling a game Shades once told him about, called chest, or something like that” even found a board in a compartment of odds and ends back aboard the Maximum and offered to show him how to play” and he couldn’t help but feel they were playing a similar game here. Only with no clue what the rules even were, let alone how to win.

Seeing nothing of use here, they resumed what neither of them could really quite think of as exploration anymore, lost as they felt.

A while later, they came upon another of Vineholdt’s many assorted paintings, of a little girl, with two black kittens sitting in her lap. Some of the others, like the grim old lady who glared at them from all angles, whom he wouldn’t care to meet anywhere, or the old man who would have looked right at home sitting among the Board of Directors back in the Triangle State, as well as what appeared to be their daughter and some other man, seemed to be the Rigby family everyone in town talked about. Yet this one stood out to him, because he’d seen her before somewhere.

“Eleanor…” Justin mumbled, staring at that face across a gulf of years.

“You know her?” Max tilted his head, but found no angle that lent the child any familiarity.

“Yeah…” Justin paused for a long moment, then told him, “You remember that ship I stayed on as a kid, before I ended up in the Triangle State” the Skerry?” she was a passenger… maybe more… I think she was on that ship even longer than I was. She was like the First Mate’s daughter, or something like that…”

Found he even recognized the kitten on her right. Poe, she called him. At first, he was at a bit of a loss about the second one, but then he remembered that she had mentioned another, if he could just remember her name…

Max, on some vague impulse, turned around to find a small black cat sitting down the hall, gazing at him in cryptic observation, and he couldn’t help but notice the uncanny resemblance to the kitten depicted in the portrait.

As seldom as they ever got to speak to each other, Justin was sure Eleanor had mentioned Poe having a twin sister…

“Look, there’s a cat,” Max told him, but Justin continued to stare at the painting.

The cat, meanwhile, rose from her haunches and turned back the way she apparently came.

“Let’s see where he goes,” Max suggested, “before he gets away from us.”

Justin nodded, but said nothing, and Max turned to follow, trying not to imagine Bandit wandering around this creepy estate like that. In that moment, he couldn’t help thinking about his old friend as a cub, and quietly hoped he was still sleeping soundly at the Pines, rather than following after him, as he had a habit of doing.

“Now I remember…” Justin thought aloud. Lydia. A name Eleanor followed up with a distant, wistful look, as if she regretted even bringing it up. And a nickname to go with, giggled and spoke of her as… “Liddy-Kitty.”

As he snapped back from his reverie, he would swear to his dying day that the kitten on the left had started glowering at him while he wasn’t looking, as if she didn’t like that name. Even Eleanor’s face seemed to have changed, looking as if he’d said something particularly uncouth at the dinner table or something.

“Liddy-Kitty,” he repeated, for good measure, then turned to Max, saying, “Did you see that? Did you see her face change when I said that?”

When he received no reply, that was when he noticed that his friend was no longer there. Looking around, recalling him saying something about a cat. Wishing he had paid a bit more attention, as he couldn’t even remember which way Max took off.

The next tolling of the grandfather clock startled him into stumbling back from that painting of his childhood travel companion, alarmed and ashamed at how easily they had allowed themselves to get separated in here.