Afterlife

20

Only a few short moments after Fiara's reassuring conversation with Diego in the kitchen, Connie returned home from her meeting with Santino and the Commander. Needless to say, they were all extremely disappointed when they saw her return without him, but at the same time understood the reasoning for which the Commander would choose to keep Santino close by. Instead of worrying about it much further, they all agreed the best thing to do would simply be to move on to the solution part of the problem.

As they all sat in their personally selected seats at the kitchen table of the common area, Connie then went on to explain some of what had transpired at the headquarters. Telling them about what the Commander had said, before moving on to her conversation with Santino. For obvious reasons, she chose to leave out certain bits of the conversation pertaining to Santino's heartfelt confession about his past, and about her apology for not properly recognizing the signs earlier, and doing something to help, but chose rather to simply sum it up by confirming that he had been trained by Hitori, as was suspected. The others shared a look of regret at this news, even though they had already heard it from other sources including Santino himself, they never wanted to believe it was actually true, but Santino confirming it now just felt more final somehow... and they, like Connie, couldn't help but feel responsible for never fully realizing what was going on and stopping it before things had gotten out of hand. Especially those who had known him the longest.

After giving them a moment to digest the information she'd given them about Hitori and Santino, Connie then decided to move on to the more important topic of the evening. "I'm sure you all will have a lot of questions about this Hitori business, but I think now would be a good time to move on to the plan for clearing Santino's name."

Even though they found it difficult at first, they all realized she was right, and slowly turned there attention to their leader to hear what she had to say.

Once she believed she had everyone's attention, she then began announcing the plan that she and Santino had come up with, and their reasoning behind it, saying, "While I was with Santino, we discussed how we should go about this whole finding the dagger business. He believes that searching the forest would be a waist of time, and I agree. Even if the culprit had disposed of it in the forest, its just too much ground for us to cover in a single week, so our best chance is to hope that the culprit made a mistake and kept it closer than the Commander is willing to believe." She then placed a single piece of paper on the table, placing her hand on top of it as she continued, "According to Santino and the Commander, Sam Jones entered a false report, saying that Santino killed Dan then disposed of the weapon before they arrived on the scene. We know that this isn't true, yet, according to the Commander, the dagger was not found inside the bag as stated... so we now have the painstaking task of finding out what actually happened to it."

"So what's the plan?" Diego asked.

She then gestured to the paper under her hand as she said, "This warrant was given to me by the Commander. It gives us permission to search any residence that we believe necessary to prove Santino's innocence. If Jones' group was actually behind all of this, then we should find proof there."

"What do you mean, 'if Jones' group was really behind this?'" Fiara interrupted.

There was a short silence as Connie seemed to consider her answer before saying, "There is a possibility... however slim, that Jones' group isn't actually at fault here. Something about this whole thing just doesn't sit right... with Santino or me... Sam has been working with us for years... so why would he suddenly decide to do something like this? It just doesn't add up. Until we have further information after performing a thorough investigation of the Jones' home and it's group members, I think we need to assume that everyone is the enemy here. Anyone could have tampered with that report, or removed that dagger from that bag if they really wanted to. For all we know, Jones' group might be just as innocent in this case as we are."