Of Ginger & Spice

R&N: Kintsugi Gold

18: R&N: Kintsugi Gold

7:45 pm, New York City, Brooklyn Apartment

"Thanks for the deets," Rani looked Nico squarely in the eye. "I can take things from here."

8:50 pm PDT/11:50 pm, New York City, Brooklyn Apartment

Rani checked over shoulder to where Nico was sound asleep. Slipping quietly out of bed, she tiptoed to the bathroom, donned her white leather gloves, gathered her purse, and orbed out quietly into the night.

8:52 pm PDT, Outskirts of Seattle, Dumpster

Ducking under the police tape, Rani slowly walked around the dumpster's perimeter, surveying the unmistakable scorch marks emanating from the structure that extended outward to the adjoining brick buildings. Magic had been used here, she was sure of it. Rani could sense the heavy weight of unseen forces bearing down on her consciousness, as though wind, earth, and fire had converged in an unnatural convolution.

From her college courses entitled "The Art of Dumpster Diving" and "Trash into Treasure," she recalled that Seattle had switched years ago from metal dumpsters to plastic. Made from 100% high density polyethylene, these plastic containers were lightweight, easy to transport. Easy to hide a body in, if one had a mind to, she thought to herself.

Rani gingerly rubbed her gloved index finger along the smoothened edges of the dumpster's blown-out top, which had a thin, nearly undetectable layer of gold dust. Typically, ordinary damage would include jagged markings. What she observed of the structure before her reminded her of a more sinister form of Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by affixing the cleaved areas with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, creating a new masterpiece. Highly advanced magic, Rani thought. If Great-Aunt Celeste had been fully in touch with her powers, she wouldn't have met her demise here. Perhaps she had been knocked unconscious?

Which led Rani to commence pacing forward to where the brick edges met the main corridor, and backward to where the shadows of Seattle's darkness loomed ever-larger, eventually hitting a dead end in the form of a ten-foot-tall chain link fence. No clues, none except for a bit of gold dust...Rani stopped in her tracks and retraced her steps from the furthest left-hand corner of the fence. Examining the atmospheric air with her fingers, she detected a shift, indicating that an unusual object or set of object had to have lain nearby. Bingo. Rani's thumb brushed against two tiny items torn from their owners and now affixed to the fence—a pair of tiny crow's feathers. Symbols of the Sarcana. Somehow, it didn't surprise Rani that her great-aunt had, with age, become increasingly foolhardy, attempting the magical realm's equivalent of stock market gambling. From when they had last spoken in Mykonos, Rani gathered that Celeste's mental faculties had been in a steady decline.

Rani removed the crow feathers from the fence, and was about to depart back to the comfort of her Brookstone apartment, when she caught a glimpse of a tiny piece of—hair? Or something else?—mere inches away from where the feathers had been. It was, as she carefully disentangled it, a single strand of thread that looked unmistakably as though it belonged to a Dominatrix black leather jacket. Abigael's.

12:10 am, New York City, Brooklyn Apartment

Rani arrived back to her bathroom; Nico remained fast asleep. Her life of countless investigations worthy of a crime thriller (or several, perhaps) meant that she fell into a stupor nearly as soon as her head hit the pillow. Rani shed her purse on the floor near her nightstand and removed her white gloves, carrying them into the kitchen. As always, she would disinfect them by hand.

12:30 am, New York City, Brooklyn Apartment

After disinfecting her gloves, Rani made herself a cup of peppermint tea; she microwaved a ceramic mug of faucet water (unlike Nico, who always used filtered refrigerated water), steeping the teabag for two minutes exactly. Rani then placed the teabag in a miniature eggshell-colored ceramic cup on the counter. She sat at the kitchen table with a piece of watercolor paper she'd had on hand (the closest thing to writing paper she had in the apartment, as her art tools were all back in R2 Design Studio), examining the spray of flowers Nico had given her earlier that day, trying to figure out just how to write down her thoughts, in a way that someone highly tempestuous and violence-driven would understand.

Can we talk? Rani frowned. Too desperate. She crossed it out.

I need answers. Rani sucked on the top of the red-inked ballpoint pen for a moment. Too direct.

I know what you did two weeks ago. She immediately nixed that type of language—it reminded her of a 1990s horror movie, and that wasn't the vibe she was going for, in attempting to glean answers about her great-aunt's death, especially from an ex-girlfriend.

We need to talk -R2. Perfect. Rani scribbled those words down using her red ink pen on a small-but-fresh piece of watercolor paper; she plucked a pristine rose the color of coconut milk from the center of her bouquet and affixed it to the piece of paper with a miniscule amount of clear plastic tape she found in a counter drawer. Rani tossed her pen in the air, as if to demonstrate satisfied, casual dexterity after an intense-but-successful bout of brainstorming and caught it, but not before dots of red ink issued forth from the pen and onto the petals below, giving the unnerving impression of drops of blood to anyone who were to come across it. Rani, in her fervor, failed to notice this at all, as she slipped the items bundled together through her mail chute just within the front door, whispering a few words she had learned a decade or so earlier from Celeste herself.