Pete and Cain walked down the street with Pete humming a jaunty tune. Pete had never been much of a singer, nor did he have any great appreciation for music, but in his experience silence was alienating to new friends, whereas making sounds signaled openness.<br/><br/>Pete had been silent during Ashton's verbose mission statement and whenever Ashton had looked at him in a way as if the young noble thought Pete would interject and take over the conversation, Pete had only nodded encouragingly for him to go on. If Pete was correct in his assumption about Ashton, then Ashton's assumption about Pete had already been falsified once, and the ambiguity should serve Pete well in the future.<br/><br/>As for the newcomer Pete had waited patiently for the newcomer to ask for clarification. Ashton made long speeches, which tended to spawn more questions than simple, direct summation points, so it was an easy guess. Even then, Pete had looked around at the others, encouraging them wordlessly to speak before him. It would do well to see if the others were clear on the mission statement, simple as it was.<br/><br/>In the end, all Pete had needed to say was a cryptic message, disguised as a foreign proverb: "Like eagles and hedgehogs, we are."<br/>Well, and he had suggested splitting up and that he would go with the estranged noble, Cain. Ashton was setting himself up as a secondary leader, eager to take charge and show he was just as good, if not better, than Pete, and letting him lead the others during a harmless part of the mission would make it much easier for Pete  to later cement himself as an authority by acting more competently during a more dire situation.<br/><br/>Everything was going swimmingly, and more importantly, the day was turning out to be hilarious.<br/><br/>Pete had suggested they meet up back at the same inn in approximately four hours, which would give them time to search the city for nobility to befriend or inconspicuous accommodations to rent. It would also, Pete had innocently remarked, give Ashton time for supper.<br/><br/>And so Cain and Pete were walking mostly silently together, one of them humming and setting a brisk pace, making sure to stay one step in four ahead of Cain so the other always had to walk a little faster than what he found natural to keep up with Pete, who of course made it look like his natural stride.<br/><br/><br/>They eventually had some light, non-committal banter, and talked a little about what sort of place they should stay in. Pete had no idea how alchemy worked, but he said he assumed substances needed to be mixed and they could not rule out the possibility of odorous fumes, so an inn would be ill-suited if Worthy was to work on his incendiary devices in peace. Likewise, there was the problem that if he was making substances that blew up they could not rule out the possibility of accidental or experimental explosions, which not only would make noise to attract unwanted attention, but even more directly presented a direct risk to all of them. Having lots of room to separate themselves from his potential odors and explosions would be necessary, either by finding a big, empty house, or by secretly installing Worthy alone in some basement and then renting rooms for the rest of them in some fancy inn elsewhere.<br/>Or, if Ashton and Cain did come up with a viable for cheating their way into the castle as nobility they could possibly stay there which Cain and Pete discussed the benefits and drawbacks to.<br/><br/>Throughout their chat Pete came to quite like Cain Westerling, even if he knew nothing useful about him, he did not model the other as a fool, nor as one to lack emotional control like Ashton Cromwell.<br/><br/>And then, after two hours of sight-seeing and noting down potential hideouts they quite coincidentally stumbled upon the Lonely House of Benefit Street. All the houses on Benefit Street stood narrowly side-by-side, except for the The Lonely House, which stood solemnly by itself with wide-open alleys on either side, devoid of people, and the houses next to it tilted slightly as if they had tried desperately to move away from the larger Lonely House.<br/>The Lonely House, originally a farm or semi-farm building, stood abandoned and overgrown, but with only a small fence separating it from the rest of the world. Its construction, more than a century and half  ago, followed the winding and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity, for Benefit Street had at the time of construction been a winding lane through the graveyard, and whoever had built the Lonely House had needed to remove no small number of gravestones to make room, and the crops had naturally been both bountiful and feared by the locals, none of whom ever got the chance to taste them, save for a few brave corn-thieves who defied the unnatural sense of unease that had pervaded the atmosphere around the House from the day of its construction.<br/><br/>Pete only took special notice of the house when he realized he had, quite unconsciously, strayed in a half circle around the entrance gate of the house and when he looked around he saw this was a common practice amongst the passer-bys; everyone walked away from The Lonely House and Pete defied the goose bumps on his arms and took a step towards the gate, where the street was empty.<br/>The curtains of the house had long-since been stolen by thieves as brave the corn-pickers from the days when the house was habited, but Pete noticed that even though the house looked abandoned to sloth and that the lawn was overgrown with weeds, there were a few straws of corn still sprouting, many of which still bore cobs. Moreover, as Pete could see through the windows he noticed there were objects lying on the floor of the house, and chairs and tables still stood, upon which seemed to be objects like bowls and plates in a brown color Pete attributed to them being either wood or cheap pottery.<br/><br/>Pete made a lightning calculation and the observations did not match up to how an abandoned house shold be. Benefit Street did not look impoverished, but Cain and he had walked through poorer parts of Tounstead and the people there would have stripped an abandoned house of everything not nailed down, corn cobs, cheap wooden plates and children's toys, everything to fetch a coin or fill a stomach. The obvious answer would be that the house was not abandoned, but Benefit Street was otherwise too nice to have a garden like that and the interior boasted at least one cobweb of such dimensions Pete could see it even from the outside. Secondly, Pete noted that the upper floors did, in fact, retain their old swampy-green curtains that the more accessible ground floor missed, and Pete supposed then, in a way he did not quite find quite rational, that the sense of cold that was spreading in his finger tips from standing near the front gate of the Lonely House was not just a phenomenon experienced by him, but something was keeping people away, like a primitive fear of harmless old buildings.<br/><br/>There were probably some fumes or smells or sounds that he did not consciously pick up on, but which his body reacted to and told him to back off. The grounds around the house were saturated with the smell of impossibly-old dust, perhaps enough scare away the superstitious Teleronians, but not enough to stop a Darmlander.<br/>If the smell of dust would mask Worthy's chemicals then Pete welcomed it. Pete's eyes twinkled with victorious glee when he turned to smile widely, his teeth showing, at Cain.<br/><br/>"Let's check it out," Pete said and moved to push open the open iron gate.<br/><br/><span style="font-style: italic">Wrong!<br/><br/>Don't!</span><br/><br/>Pete took a step back and looked shocked by the impulse that had come over him. He gave the closest thing he could to a sneer and forced his legs into the Lonely garden.