What the fuck.
"How did you find her?!" I asked, shocked.
"I have my methods," Emma said, sipping her tea. "Also the police gave me some hints that helped. I'm not sure if they identified her already though. I'm trying to decide what to tell them."
Holy shit.
I went through the page.
—
Name: Sheila Thompson
Usernames: RightSideofHistory, HurdlesForJustice, AgeFree, BloomWhereYouAre, RunningTheNarrative, BackOnTrack (and likely more)
Age: 52 — insists she's "ageless" / "age is a social construct"
Former Career: Professional Track & Field Athlete (hurdles specialist). Retired at 28 due to a knee injury. Occasionally brings up her athletic past, framing herself as someone who "understands the true meaning of overcoming obstacles".
Current job: Works part-time at an organic grocery store. Views it as temporary, even though it's been years. Wrote a book about her athletic past mixed with Knot fighting but no agent was willing to buy it.
—
Damn, Emma was good.
I was baffled by this profile though.
More than anything, I couldn't believe this person was fifty-two and behaved that way online. At one point, I'd honestly wondered whether she was fourteen and posing as an adult.
I kept reading.
Emma's background check had been thorough.
Apparently, RightSideofHistory used to run several secret microblogs focusing on performative activism and Llewellyn bashing, interspersed with TV show gifs and political commentary.
On these side ones, where she didn't have to maintain her usual image as RightSideofHistory, her posts were less polished and ranged from passive digs to explicit violence.
Some of the screenshots read: "I wish Ryo would step on a knife", or "I hope Llewellyn gets stabbed by an ice shard in a Dungeon and bleeds to death so we'll never have to see him again."
For fuck's sake. Just reading that made my blood boil.
Emma had added screenshots of her 'about' section across sites. Most of them were vague, but almost all of them included a note about how she refused to interact with people who didn't have clear disclaimers in their bios. To have her blessing, they were supposed to clearly state support for the anti-Knot community and how the user did not endorse "the Knotheads" (that'd be me and Llewellyn).
Her HurdlesForJustice account was the weirdest. Posts ranged from "At least I care about humanity" to "Compared to Ryo, I have more physical training". I turned the page and my eyes landed on: "Imagine Ryo getting stabbed in a Dungeon and bleeding out in the dark. That'd be wonderful. That'd be peaceful."
Damn. What was with these stabby tendencies?
The more I read, the weirder she got. On a third account, Emma had screenshotted an opinion piece she'd written about how older people in the community should support and guide younger voices in the Knot fight, positioning herself as a mentor. Any criticism of this point was dismissed as "misunderstanding the importance of intergenerational solidarity".
"We knew she was nuts," Llewellyn said, flipping another page with clear distaste. "Why the spotlight today?"
"Because," Emma said. "She went radio silent the day Ryo's flat was bombed."
Wait… What?
"But that makes no sense," I said, frowning. "Doesn't she live in the States? Would she come all the way over here just to bomb my flat? Besides, there was also that previous bomb threat to my Gran. That couldn't be her as well."
I mean, she worked at a grocery store, right? I knew what it was like to live on a low salary. I doubt she made enough to travel back and forth on intercontinental flights multiple times a month.
"Glad you asked," Emma said, "because—guess what—she didn't post anything around those days either."
…Huh?
I frowned.
That still didn't seem right to me.
"It wasn't the first time she disappeared, anyway," I told Emma. "She was offline, or only vaguely active, for almost an entire year between the #KnotOnOurWatch campaign and when she started posting again around the time I got involved. It'd been so long I'd almost forgotten about her entirely."
"I know," Emma said. "I'm still looking into that. At the moment, this is all just circumstantial, which is why I'm hesitating to bring this up with the police, in case it accidentally derails a more promising thread in their investigation. Moreover, if they get in touch and spook her, we risk losing her tracks and it will be hard to investigate her all the way from here. Unless she's on Innishean soil, what can the police even do?"
She had a point.
But it wasn't just a problem for the police; our courses of action were limited too. Even if we teleported there and tracked her down… realistically, what could we do? I was reminded of when we tackled Gilded in Haneve before we knew he was harmless. It's not like we could have tied him up and kept him prisoner until we managed to get information out of him. Of course we had to let him go.
"What's your plan, then?" Llewellyn asked Emma. "It's clear this is too little to do anything about."
"Yeah," Emma said with a sigh. "I just wanted to make you aware. Assuming she doesn't use concealment artifacts, or at least doesn't have that many, since she's not awakened, it's good to know what she looks like, should she target you. I've also asked the agency to watch her online activity more closely and send me a daily report, starting tomorrow."
Damn. I didn't envy my team right now.
Wait, but tomorrow meant…
"Looks like you'll get the first report from me," I said with a grin. "I have my last shift tomorrow and I'm the one actually working the night, so end-of-day reports are on me."
Emma let out a noise, clearly unhappy about that.
"Guess you're not willing to skip it?"
"Nope," I said. "But I'm sure there won't be too much. She's not been that active on a daily basis for quite some time."
"On that one account," Emma said. "I asked them to monitor all of them."
Ah, damn. That might change things.
"Still," Emma said. "You're under my wing too now, so… don't overdo it. That's literally why I have this job, so you two don't have to deal with this kind of lunacy."
I grinned.
"Don't worry," I said. "I know what I'm doing. Besides, I'm going to have owner access from the day after tomorrow, so I can set up some alerts—let me know if you need anything specific. Even without the agency's tools, I can check all this through the System. It's just that I don't get the team notes or see the shift reports there, so keeping an eye on everything is more of a hassle."
I mean, there was a reason why this was a team job with round-the-clock shifts.
Emma sighed.
"I can't believe I'm saying this, since he's definitely the other extreme of the spectrum, but I wish you took more after Llewellyn when it comes to online nonsense. Sometimes, I literally have to bribe him to open my links when there's something important for him to check. And I'm not always that successful either."
I snorted.
"If someone attacks me in person, I'll fight them," Llewellyn said. "If they're just spewing nonsense online, I don't care."
"Unless they escalate to bombing flats!" Emma said, annoyed.
Well. She had a point.
"It was negligent of me not to check that Ryo had set up home security," Llewellyn said, looking upset. "He's not been working with me that long, so I didn't think they would— But they can't harm us here."
Emma relaxed slightly. "I know," she said. "It's not your fault. Obviously."
"I'll come and review yours," Llewellyn said after a moment. "It should still be working, but I don't want to take any risks."
"We're fine," Emma said, waving her hand. "This is not about me."
"No," Llewellyn said. "You have a child, just— I'll come next week. Let me know when."
"Alright," Emma said. "Thank you. Leon will be happy to see you."
Llewellyn nodded.
Well, that was it then.
"Can I keep these?" I asked, waving the pages she'd printed for us. "I've been moderating her stuff for so long, maybe there's something in there I can help with."
"Suit yourself," Emma said, standing up. "I need to go now, but I'll be in touch if anything new comes up."
I went through the screenshots again while Llewellyn saw her out, but nothing new jumped out at me. Could it really have been her? No matter how I thought about it, with Baugh being alive and well, after our last encounter, it made much more sense that he was the one responsible, not RightSideofHistory. Besides, she seemed to have more stabbing tendencies than… exploding ones.
Well, I wasn't going to get to the bottom of this now, so I just put everything away.
Besides, it was almost time to meet the others at the Rusty Chalice.
"Hey Penguin," I said, since we still had some time to kill. "Want to experiment a bit more?"