Interlude 1. Klaus Gets The Red Herring

He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Normally, Klaus did not care to resort to scryings, magic foresight never gave straight answers and more than often proved to be misleading in hindsight. But still, some things could be divined if one approached the matter with a grain of salt. And the mystery of fraulein Gillespie was... a problem. All available data he had insisted she is merely a divinely inspired noble, gifted with a few scraps of alchemical knowledge. Available data was a load of crap. He had seen his own head, as delivered back to Kraut by kronprinz Hiram, along with dire warnings not to antagonize obviously powerful family further. His own notes mentioned that this was not a solo operation, he had two aides. Neither of which could be found. Which meant they were all caught and disposed of, quickly and efficiently, given that out of the whole Parsee, Hiram was apparently the only one in the know about his demise there. Alyssa Gillespie was most emphatically not whom she appeared to be. Hence, the divination.

Most of the scrying is relying on visions. Something he was very loathe to do, because visions are intrinsically colored by the biases and presumptions of one experiencing them. That left one odd ritual that was more of a summoning than scrying, and called forth assorted items that had "connection". Mostly, random crap, like pebbles that had been stepped onto by target in the past or scraps of fabric from clothes worn by the target in the past, or... In short, random garbage. All of that random garbage was, in some way, important - for example, a pebble could be the one the target stood on when they beheld a miracle or some such. The problem was deciphering such connections, which was very much a crapshoot. The problem is, this time it was different. Instead of an assortment of random garbage, he found himself in possession of twelve neatly calligraphic sheets of paper, with immaculately drawn portraits and a bit of information.

He considered the papers intently. What was the connection? Three women, nine men. All of them considerably older than Alyssa Gillespie. None of them even remotely resembling her parents. Or any people Klaus knew. That did not mean as much right now, sadly, him being only a few weeks out of the decanter. He was still refamiliarizing himself with the situation. Directing his attention to the papers, he split them according to what he could figure out from the names and short details provided. One pile contained "not likely to find out much about". Names like Xianyong Bai and Quarbani Singh went there - he recognized the names as natives of far Orient, and the pictures had borne the assumption well. Most of the others went into "maybe" pile, with names and faces he tentatively placed as people from Pharos and Transbalkan. In the end, he had put his focus on three papers. Michelle Dachss sounded very Champagne-like, though he knew of no nobles with that family name. Warren Clyde - very albish, both in name and looks, but again, likely a commoner. But the last? Oh, the last paper was where he would concentrate his attention for the foreseeable future.

Frank Bilders. The black sheep of Bilders family. Also known as Oireland Butcher. No one knew he was named Frank, actually, but every other Bilders was accounted for, and the information.... did match, well, insofar as he could gleam. He was still expressly curious about all the weird names on the papers. It was clear that they came from a world not quite the same as one Klaus inhabited currently. He knew enough to sense the otherness to papers. But that was simply fascinating on the level he could not fathom - was Alyssa Gillespie really from another world? Could be, could be. The question was, then, what is her connection to Oireland Butcher and who are the other eleven?