Professor Layton: Conundrum of the Vanishing

Chapter Ten

Alex led his group out to the outskirts of town. The residential area was far away from the town hall, for which Alex was thankful. He hadn't really gotten on all that well with Reina and Randall. They were a bit too perky for his states. Everybody else seemed to agree with his thoughts, as he discussed it with his group the entire time they walked.

Alex held up a hand to stop his group. Kurisu, Chloe, Scarlet, Jean, and Theo paused when he gestured. "We're here," Alex declared to the group, turning to face the quintet behind him as he spoke.

"Let's peek our head into a nearby house and see if anybody is willing to talk to us," suggested Scarlet. Before giving anybody a chance to talk or suggest other ideas, she skipped up to a nearby door and rapped her knuckles up against the wood. "Hello? Is anybody in there? We need to talk to you, whoever it is that you are living in there!"

Scarlet took a step back as the door opened just a crack. She seemed to expect that it would open much more than just a few inches. "Hello?" Scarlet repeated, leaning over to the crack to peer through it.

On the other side of the door was a thin and frail looking woman with thin brown hair. She looked so gentle that you could snap her in two if you had enough muscle. Her hands were shaky and her dark eyes were filled with fear. "W-who are you?" The woman's voice was shaking in fear as she spoke, something Scarlet didn't understand. Did this woman really think that she was going to hurt her? Scarlet hoped not, but that was starting to seem like a rather distinct possibility.

"My name is Scar-" Scarlet tried to begin, only to be interrupted by none other than the woman standing on the other side of the door.

"I-I don't need your name!" The woman's voice had raised considerably in volume when she spoke next, which made Scarlet flinch in shock. "I already know who you are! You're one of the people the mayor and his wife told us about! One of the villains mentioned by the mysterious men!"

Scarlet frowned and tilted her head to the side slightly. This woman seemed to be her best shot at getting any sort of information at that moment in time. "What do you mean? The mayor and his wife told you about my friends and I? How is that possible? He didn't know us until about an hour and a half ago," Scarlet pointed out to the woman.

Unfortunately, this woman didn't appear to wish to listen to reason, if she was even capable of doing so in this state. The brown haired woman shook her head madly in denial. "N-no... The mayor and his wife told us that you all were coming... He said that you were going to ultimately destroy us and our island with all of your fancy technology and that the men who showed up randomly are here to protect us from you," the woman said. Her trembling wasn't getting any better, so her voice was sho shaky by this point that Scarlet could barely understand her. "Y-you need to leave me alone... Leave all of Bohimika alone! You shouldn't be here! You're evil and you always have been and you always will be!"

The door slammed in Scarlet's face as the woman retreated back into her house. Scarlet looked the building up and down. It looked normal enough, she supposed. The outside paint was peeling a little bit, but it was nothing too major. A little bit of renovation would do this place wonders, but it wasn't Scarlet's place to think of other people's homes without consulting them first to ask their opinion. Scarlet wasn't a rude person, after all. She never had been and she planned on never becoming one.

"That went well, didn't it, Red Cherry Face?" Chloe asked, a laugh on her lips. She leaned forwards and flicked Scarlet on the back of the head, making the latter flinch in shock. "Wow. You're even easy to scare. Perhaps you just weren't cut out for this mystery business after all. I bet that you solving that Psylias mystery or whatever it was was nothing but a fluke. You can't really be one of the people who Reina and Randall really thought would save their poor city from those creepy men who decided to show up out of nowhere."

Scarlet's hand clenched into a fist. She wanted nothing more than to slap Chloe right across the face and separate her jaw from her neck, but she held back. She didn't want to be too rude to Chloe, even if the blonde girl was nothing but a straight up spoiled brat. "Let's just move onto the next house and look around in there a little more. Well... Not really look around so much as just talk to whoever comes out and beg them to give us some sort of information," Scarlet said. "We might want to split up so that we can cover a little bit more ground. Going to each and every house together is going to get a tad tedious and won't get us very far before we need to meet back up with the other two groups of investigators."

"I agree with Scarlet," Kurisu nodded. "Let's go and gather as much information as we can and then meet back up with the others and tell them about the weird things that woman told us. She gave us a bunch of wild and crazy information about Reina and Randall that I'm sure that we'll find to be rather useful in the end."

"Yeah. But for now, let's divide and conquer this problem before we need to go back," Alex declared. "Let's meet back here after tackling three different houses each and talk about what we've discovered since the divide."

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I was forced into a basement while typing this due to weather so my legs are hurting so much oh my gosh

-Digital