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The thought usually comes to her in glimpses, never very coherent. Perhaps it's in her nightmares, forgotten as soon as she wakes, or maybe it's just her disoriented brain wandering too far back into a faint, distorted memory. But even in fragments, it always seems to be the same.
A restless little girl stands at the foot of a stairwell, trembling either in fear or cold — she can’t tell the difference. She calls out for her parents above, never receiving an answer. It's a scene too dark to make out if they were ever actually up there, or if she’s just always been alone.
Her cries are quickly drowned out, however, by the heavy boots of masked men and women approaching her. All of various shapes and sizes, their silhouettes are distinct enough to where, sometimes, when the vision repeats, she can recognize a select few. Yet each one is alike in that they’re all equipped with some sort of dangerously large firearm, donning the ugliest coats she's ever seen.
One small child would never be a match for them, clearly. She's less than an obstacle, a mere inconvenience after already capturing their true goal. She is the mess to be cleaned up — an afterthought. Still, she doesn’t flinch or cower.
“Where are my parents?” She asks firmly, voice hoarse from her cries, even as they raise their weapons. “I'm not scared of you!”
“I like this girl,” the tallest man chuckles, approaching her closer as he lowers his firearm. His coat is just as ugly as the others. And his voice is familiar, too, though she can never fully place it. Maybe she doesn’t want to. “I like the fight in her.”
Breaking the anticipated chaos, he offers her his hand, and while she’s never able to look him in the eye, his stare still paralyzes her in a strange mix of pride and regret.
What mostly sticks is that final mental image: the little girl slowly reaching for the faceless man’s hand. She never really remembers the rest. The other details of the thought vanish as quickly as it crosses her mind.
It's all just a story she told herself, anyway.
<>∆<>∆<>∆<>
“I can turn here, right?” Emmy asks, an uncharacteristic tone of uncertainty creeping into her voice. She brakes suddenly at the stop sign, jolting both her and Bronev forward with the vehicle.
“Yes, Emmeline.” Bronev responds, flat and expressionless, not even bothering to look up from the tome firmly within his grasp. It’s some dusty text on Azran artefacts, she knows that much, and it certainly will not be the last of its kind to take importance over everything else.
She wants to ask him about what he’s reading, if he’s making any progress in his studies. It’s a source of connection, maybe. A weak attempt to break through to the warmer, more approachable Uncle Leon, who needs only some provocation to show himself. Instead, though, she simply grips the steering wheel a bit tighter, turning left almost as fast as she stopped the car.
To the average teenager, this would be an exciting moment of growth and accomplishment: Practicing behind the wheel! And most parents, Emmy thinks, would probably be taking in every last detail of her driving from the passenger seat.
But Emmy Altava knows that she is anything but average, with an atypical guardian to match.
“It shouldn’t be long to reach the Nest,” Bronev comments, flipping a page. “Surely, something even you can handle.” He still hasn’t looked up once.
Emmy smirks, pressing down the gas as she narrowly runs a light changing to red. She knows she can manage, of course — and even if he doesn’t think so, she’ll gladly take the chance to prove him wrong.
“What, Uncle Leon, you think I can't handle it?” She laughs playfully, aiming to stir up conversation. She can break his indifferent silence. “It’s just a little drive back home.”
She catches herself nearly hesitating on that last word, but figures it must be fine. Still, she thinks of boarding school, her friends, how dissimilar their understandings of returning “home” for holiday must be. The Nest, Targent’s base of operations, is probably anything but homely to them. If its perpetually overcast sky, pierced only by looming, dilapidated skyscrapers seemed uninviting just on its own, certainly they wouldn’t even dare approach closer, the strict paramilitary presence lurking around every corner. She almost laughs at the thought - how unlike her they are, how little they know. To her, this is the closest thing to seeing family.
“I think I've heard enough about what you can't handle, actually.” Bronev interjects her train of thought, the vehicle tremoring as Emmy takes another sharp turn. “The only thing you needed to do these past several months was stay out of trouble with Scotland Yard.”
Bronev’s mention of her encounter with the police catches her by surprise. “You heard about that?” Emmy tries not to sound timid, she really does, only to fall short on expectations. She can’t help but wonder what else he might know about her time away from the Nest…
Bronev huffs, affirming her question dryly. “Of course I have.”
“That boy wrongly accused me,” Emmy says, defensively, swerving the car. Someone honks from behind, but both Bronev and Emmy pay no mind. “He was a liar!”
“Far from the point, Emmeline,” Bronev's tone grows more stern as he continues, now lecturing her more than he was engrossed in whatever scholarly volume he was initially poring over. Still, though, he refuses to look at her. “If I deliberately asked you to avoid troubling the authorities, you should do as much.”
“It was just a wallet, Uncle Leon. It’s not like they’ll interrogate me about Targent.” Emmy clarifies, attempting to assuage his apparent concerns. She knows him — the true him. Leon Bronev, who lost everything, just as she did, terrified to yet again see it all go to waste. She sees his cause for paranoia, and she won’t let that happen. “Besides,” Emmy adds, “Someone already cleared the whole situation up.”
“Hmph, now did they?” Bronev grumbles incredulously. “Who, exactly?”
Emmy smiles fondly in her recollection of that afternoon — it’s not everyday she’s referred to as a “lady,” after all. With Targent, she’s still proving herself as a trainee — one of them, certainly, but also nothing more than a fledgling to the Nest. And at school, even among friends, there is a desperate attempt to blend in with other teenagers she doesn’t believe she could fully understand. They’re worried about their parents, boys, homework — all of which Emmy finds deeply unrelatable. How many other girls learn to topple a man twice their size before they turn seventeen, she wonders? It’s practically a given where she’s from, but an excessive use of force is not exactly the kind of thing that makes a girl popular in a secondary school classroom. It’s nice, for once, to be seen as a person, not having to prove if she belongs.
“Professor Hershel Layton,” Emmy says, recalling the name. “I’m not sure what Inspector Grosky would’ve done had he not stopped by.”
“An archaeologist.” Bronev remarks, finally shutting the book, as if the conversation has suddenly piqued his interest such that he would give it some undivided attention.
“What, you know him?” Her eyes widen a little, stealing a glance at him before returning her focus to the road. This has her deeply curious, but his tone is so distant that she can only assume disappointment to come of her question. It’s as if to suspect that Uncle Leon just read his name someplace sometime once; a footnote in the academic literature on the Azran.
“...In a manner of speaking.” Emmy gets the feeling this is but another entry on the long list of things he refuses to elaborate on. Again, she’s speaking to a brick wall. For whatever reason, though, he does the unexpected, and continues to keep his attention with her, asking her a question in return.
“What exactly did he say, Emmeline?”
<>∆<>∆<>∆<>
The first time Emmy walks into Professor Layton’s office at Gressenheller University, all those years later, she’s put off by the sheer smallness of it all. It feels unlike any office she’s used to — or, at least, it reminds her nothing of Bronev’s. By no means immaculate, and far less grandiose, it seems almost shocking that the renowned Professor Hershel Layton would consider such a humble working space his own.
“You appear rather knowledgeable on the subject, Emmy.” The Professor continues their ongoing conversation, pouring himself a cup of tea.
Emmy laughs, straightening her bowtie. “Haha! Well, what kind of assistant to a professor of archaeology would I be, if I didn’t know at least a little bit about the myth of eternal life?”
She’s obviously downplaying the true extent of what she knows, and the Professor sees right through her. He recognizes it as an uncommon moment of humility for her, but she genuinely does feel it to be true. She's not truly an archaeologist, or even an academic, and she could never hope to know as much about the Azran civilization as her Uncle Leon.
“I am excited by such an idea, though,” Emmy continues. She’s exaggerating the depth of her interest as purely academic, of course, but it still gives her something to work with, a potential lead to uncovering something. “The myth of eternal life — intriguing, is it not?”
“Perhaps it would be of great interest to discuss this with my old mentor, Dr. Andrew Schrader?” Layton asks, a faint smile working its way across his face. “He’s an expert scholar on the subject of Ambrosia.”
Emmy appears almost elated at Layton’s mention of Ambrosia, stifling a tiny gasp. The Eternal Kingdom, The City of Harmony – is it possible? After having already uncovered the Golden Garden in Misthallery, she's confident in her mission’s progress. The second of three Azran Legacies to be secured, feasibly just within their grasp…!
“I would very much appreciate the opportunity to do so, Professor,” she responds, sitting up from the office couch and brushing off her trench coat. “I'm surprised Dean Dalmona hadn’t introduced me to Dr. Schrader already!”
An excited pride begins to bubble in Emmy’s chest, and she feels a bit relieved that she can suppress it down as mere intellectual curiosity. But this is about more than simply making her Uncle Leon proud — this to save him, to prove his efforts were never vain.
To return the favor of saving her, all that time ago.
“I should better get going right away, actually!”
There's no time to waste – she must write to Bronev as soon as possible, updating him on her mission and the status of the next Azran Legacy.
“Oh, Emmy?” The Professor prepares a question, standing up just the same, as she approaches the door. “Before you go…”
She stops in her tracks, turning back to him. “What is it, Professor?”
“Ah, nothing, I suppose…” He trails off, as if uncertain as to what he really wants to say. It’s almost uncanny to see him, of all people, struggling to put together his words. Soon enough, though, he settles on a sentence. “Your efforts, in Misthallery, that day… they were most impressive.”
It takes a second, but then it strikes her as to what he’s eluding to specifically — that hired group of thugs. They had made a mistake in daring to approach, that's for sure.
“I told you, I just know a bit of self-defense.” Emmy reiterates, shrugging it off just the same as she did before.
“Yes, right,” Layton responds directly. She knows he’s holding back — there's something about her explanation he can't quite believe. Thankfully for Emmy, however, his intuition is often only matched by his tact.
“I would like to thank you for protecting Luke – and, I suppose, myself, of course. I'm not quite sure what we would have done had you not been there.”
Emmy nods in response, feigning a smile. She’s not quite sure what to say, truly. “Of course, Professor.” She then promptly closes the office door behind her.
Layton’s words echo in her head on the walk off of the university grounds.
Somehow, that final comment disparages her immediate desire to write to Bronev on her findings.
<>∆<>∆<>∆<>
“Professor Layton?” Dariya asks, examining the name scrawled across the envelope in Emmy’s hands. “What did you write to him about? Your adventures?”
“Oh, yes, of course. The thrilling life of a camerawoman for the World Times,” Emmy giggles softly, glancing down at the camera around her neck. To not just see the world, but capture it.
There's a lot she wishes she could say. That she still thinks of Professor Layton and Luke so often, that her driving has (somewhat) gotten somewhat better. Mostly, though, what she wants to say is that she's truly sorry, that she couldn't find it within herself not to betray him that day. And that sometimes, yes, she wishes she could mention the faceless man and little girl, how they still visit her, story rewriting itself over and over. This time, though, the man is not faceless, the people in ugly coats have all but disappeared, and the little girl isn't so little.
But she finds it best to keep it far more simple.
“And, you know,” Emmy continues, shoving the letter into the mail slot, “I also wrote a lot about what it’s like, living as a normal girl.”
Dariya chuckles a little, uncertain of what to make of that.
“Oh, don’t laugh!” Emmy rolls her eyes, even though she ends up finding herself laughing, too. She knows the phrasing is inadequate. Too vague.
“It’s just… the best way I can put it.”