It wasn’t difficult to find Garyung. The three of them returned to the inn and found him in his little closet of a bedroom upstairs. Despite the size of the room - and his own large stature - he urged them inside to speak rather than finding a more comfortable venue. Reno and Ess took the opportunity to excuse themselves rather than squeeze into the tiny room.

“Your letter was very descriptive,” Kaldalis said. “I’m not sure what else we could need to discuss directly.”

“I didn’t know how secure the messenger was,” Garyung hissed, “and I knew you would get everything you needed to know as fast as possible. What do you want me to do, open my purse and dump everything out on a page that could get intercepted?”

“Who the fuck is going to intercept your mail?”

“The Zaran government?”

Kaldalis almost snapped something about conspiracy theories, but Garyung wasn’t being unreasonable here. He was technically the leader of a foreign country. The Zarans might actually be intercepting any communication he sent out.

“Alright, fair,” Kaldalis admitted. “So what’s going on? Are the Jormongumo here? Did Onirioago escape?”

“No, but thank you,” Garyung said with a grimace. “I think I needed a reminder that it could have been worse.”

“Okay, so less bad than those things,” Kaldalis said. “That doesn’t narrow it down at all.”

“Alright, so I think…” Garyung trailed off. He looked around as if someone else could possibly be hiding in the shoebox of a room. Despite them obviously being alone, he lowered his voice. “I think someone is trying to kill me.”

Kaldalis felt his eyebrows shoot up his forehead. “That’s pretty far up there,” he said, “in terms of the big list of bad things. Not Onirioago-tier, but pretty fucking close.”

“Thanks,” Garyung said with a sigh. “I was worried that you were gonna say I was overreacting. I mean, even if they do take me out, I’ll just respawn, right?”

“Hey, man, I’ve played on a pvp server before,” Kaldalis said, patting Garyung on the shoulder. “I know that even if you can just get up again, it fucking sucks. And Baimer hasn’t exactly been welcoming to us. If the Zarans are behind it, the guards might look the other way and let someone spawn camp you.”

“Right, right,” Garyung said, nodding. “Thank you. I feel a lot better with you on my side here.”

“So tell me what happened,” Kaldalis said.

“So ever since we got here,” Garyung began, “I’ve been pretty sure someone’s following me. A few too many familiar cloaks everywhere I go. Footstep sounds on empty streets. You know, all the most unnerving shit possible. I’m not sure when it started, but I noticed it about halfway through the day yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t think it was weird.” Garyung shrugged. “The Zarans probably want to keep track of me pretty bad, and I don’t hold it against them. Foreign head of state wandering around their capital and all. And if it wasn’t that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Demriv hired someone to watch us, too.”

“Why?” Kaldalis asked. “I haven’t even seen her since she chased after Onirioago in the hall of justice or whatever.”

“You haven’t?” Garyng seemed surprised. “She approached me yesterday and demanded I tell her where you and Bangen were. I think she’s obsessed with getting her sister’s case thrown out. It just seems like she could be desperate enough to hire a PI to follow us around town while we’re here.”

Kaldalis hadn’t thought of that. If she was looking for him, he hadn’t exactly been hiding. She could have easily found him. So why hadn’t she accosted him? She had every opportunity to jump him in the street and start screaming at him again.

Or try to kill him.

“So why do you think someone’s trying to kill you?” Kaldalis asked, pushing his own concerns aside. “Like you say, it seems obvious someone would be following you, but why do you think you’re in danger?”

“I was inspecting my estate,” Garyung said, “you know, just poking around, making sure the place is still in order. My staff had some things I had to sign off on and take care of personally, so I was kinda just following directions and not really paying attention to my surroundings. And then a horse got loose in the stables. I was nearly trampled.”

“If this was an assassination attempt,” Kaldalis cut in, “then it sounds like it was kind of an ass plan. How is a horse gonna kill you? You’re tanky as fuck, man.”

“Trampling is technically an ability in this game,” Garyung said. “In addition to damage, it just has a flat percentage chance of being fatal to anything smaller than the horse.”

“That’s kinda bullshit,” Kaldalis said. Though he waved the thought away with a gesture. They weren’t here to complain about game mechanics. “But that’s not odd on its own. If there were maintenance tasks you had to sign off on or handle personally, it’s possible the horse could have gotten out because of neglect.”

“I know what tasks I had to sign off on,” Garyung said with a smirk, “and so I know that horse maintenance isn’t one of them. If it was, there wouldn’t have been a horse in the stable still alive. I’ve been out of town for almost a month, after all.” His expression turned hard as he continued: “but the groundskeeper saw someone strange leaving the stable ten minutes before it happened. But she described a very familiar-sounding cloak. One matching the description of the figures I’ve seen following me.”

Kaldalis tried to come up with another counterargument, but all he could produce was a grimace. It did indeed sound like this was a low-effort attempt to kill Garyung.

“I feel like I’m freaking out here,” Garyung said. “Someone’s after me? What? It feels like I’m losing my mind. Why would they even try? I’m just gonna respawn.”

“Okay,” Kaldalis said, putting hands on Garyung’s shoulders. “Calm down. Breathe.”

“Okay.” Garyung started to make the visible attempt to calm himself. “I’m alright.”

Kaldalis didn’t believe him, but he was working on it. That was probably enough for now.

“So there’s two reasons they could want to go after you,” Kaldalis said. “And one of them is this right here. It might just be an intimidation tactic. If the Zarans are behind this, it might have never intended to be fatal. They might want you to think you’re in danger if you piss them off. If you truly believe that they can and will just kill you, you might go along with whatever demands they make.”

“Right, okay,” Garyung said. The bhogad was trying to take deep, slow breaths, and it was making the room seem slightly claustrophobic to Kaldalis. “What else could it be?”

“Well, we have to acknowledge that someone might actually want to kill you,” Kaldalis said. He put his hands out to try and calm Garyung down when he looked up sharply. “Let me finish. It’s possible that someone might be plotting to spawn camp you. Have you died in game before? Outside of a dungeon?”

“Uh, once,” Garyung admitted. “It’s been a while, though.”

“Respawning costs Aplomb,” Kaldalis continued, “which is a limited resource. Dying over and over in the same spot could get you fucked up pretty bad, right? So you have the option to respawn at your home point or whatever it’s called. Spawn location. Have you reset your spawn location since you started playing?”

“I hadn’t before, but I did set it to my estate when I got there today as part of the checklist from my staff,” Garyung grimaced. “Was that stupid?”

“No, no, not at all,” Kaldalis said. “It’s possible that they might have thought your spawn location was set in Cotanaku. Think about it, if they kill you and drain enough of your Aplomb that you have to go back to your spawn location, then there’s no way for you to make it to the War Council meeting.”

“And if I don’t show up, we’re fucked,” Garyung nodded. “Okay. But that doesn’t change the fact that my spawn location is now in Baimer. If they can spawn camp me on my own estate, they could camp my spawn location, too.”

Kaldalis grimaced. He’d been hoping Garyung wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. “Right. So that just means you shouldn’t go to your estate alone. As long as you’re elsewhere in the city, they’d need enough people to kill you there, and enough people to kill you at your estate if you spawn there. If you’re going back there, you need protection.”

“Why would I go back there?” Garyung said, waving his hands in the air, panic clearly reasserting itself. “The one fucking place where I could get gigafucked!”

“I’ll go with you,” Kaldalis said, trying to calm him down all over again. “But we do have to go. The only way we can be sure of whether they’re trying to scare you or kill you is to figure out who it is. We need to investigate.”

“Okay,” Garyung said. “Okay, we’ll go. But if anything even starts to look a little spooky, I’m going to run like a bitch, and I’m not stopping until I’m back on the Persimmon.”

“You mean the Rambutan,” Kaldalis corrected. “The Persimmon was destroyed, and is being rebuilt back in Cotanaku.”

“Did I fucking stutter?” Garyung snapped.

Kaldalis supposed he hadn’t.