Chapter 86 - Play The Picture

"Here's the plan," Venedette said and stood abruptly, holding the Prophecy tablet in her hands.

"Is that Prophecy-?" Fily gasped when she recognized the tablet.

"Yes." Venedette simply said before giving it to Sir Grand.

"This is where we found Von and Lei," she said and showed them the picture of a Crone beside Von and Lei in front of a burning village.

"Gamora's Village," Fily uttered under her breath, recognizing the place from her mind map.

"Yes and we already put an order for the people there to evacuate silently, one by one being replaced by our palace guards to make the picture complete. Although some of them doesn't want to cooperate, we made sure to fireproof their houses for prevention. But now that you're telling us Crones travel in pack, this means they might have gotten wind of what was happening in that village already so we need to move quickly."

"What do we need to do?" Petunia asked.

"Are we going to play the picture like what Dr. Lectric and his team did?" Fily said, seemingly excited about the fact that they would do something that the legendary savior did for them generations ago.

"Yes! Exactly! See, the picture does not show Von or Lei being captured by the Crones, and since there is only one Crone in the frame, we could capture one Crone and take care of the others behind the camera."

"Camera? Wait, are you saying we're really going to take a picture of that exact same moment with the Village burning and a Crone next to Von and Lei?" Petunia asked, confused.

"Yes. That's right." Venedette said.

"Well, technically, no," Fily said, stepping into the discussion with her knowledge. "Tricking destiny is tricky. And we all know how pictures could be easily altered, right? This means we can't just take a picture of them in this exact same pose and call it a day. We're going to need a lot of people's raw and innocent memories without the knowledge of the Prophecy to make it work."

"Okay…" Venedette said, paying attention to Fily's plan this time.

"To call it destiny, we need people to believe this actually happened by chance and not because we let it happen-"

"Wait, why can't we just rescue Von and Lei from those lowly creatures and kill them silently without the people's knowledge? I mean that's going to be an easier task for us, right?" Petunia chipped in, still having no clue of how Prophecies in that tablet works.

"We can't. Once we prevent this picture from happening, something worse will happen and we wouldn't have enough time to prepare for it anymore." Venedette explained.

"Also that, aren't we supposed to be there already? Who knows if this is happening now?" Petunia said frantically, looking at the monochromatic picture that was supposed to be colored brick red for the normal human eye but since Petunia is a cat, all she could see was a faded and low contrasting red color.

"I can't believe this is happening now, why do Crones move so fast? It's so annoying." Venedette complained while Fily was explaining the picture to Petunia.

"See the contrast between the fire and the sky? It's so far, right? Which means this prophecy will happen at night. Although we're unsure of which night, tonight's the most probable day as what Venedette said, Crones move fast. They don't like wasting time."

"Okay. So what's the plan?"

"We're going to play the picture," Fily said.

"And what does that exactly mean?"

"We're going to let it happen."

"We're not going to do anything?"

"Of course we're going to do something…" Fily said and smiled before spilling the plan to them.

***

"Where are you taking us, Sir Fred?" Lei asked when he felt something wrong with the way that Sir Fred was walking.

"To the meeting place." He said without looking back at them as he continued leading them to the most secluded area in the castle that was supposed to be a dead-end if Lei could remember clearly.

"Those two are really dumb, they didn't even see us disappear from behind them!" Von laughed while they were walking along the hallways.

But the weird thing was, even if Lei tried signaling the maids to come to them, none of them responded or even saw them. It was as if they became invisible, disappearing from other people's vision and senses completely even though they were just in the same space without any sense-defying structures.

'Could this be some kind of a magic trick or new technology?' Lei thought while moving closer to Von who snickered at him for getting too close.

"I think there's something wrong here," Lei whispered to Von which he just ignored.

"You always say that," Von said, paying no attention to where they were going or what was happening around him.

"This is not the way to the library and that's not how my uncle walks!" he said, trying to convince Von even more but the boy was just too annoyed at him to even care about anything else.

"You're so overreacting, Lei. And what do you even mean he's not Sir Fred. That's completely Sir Fred, alright?" Von said and tried floating to get away from Lei but the moment he reached Sir Fred's head level, he suddenly bumped into something in the air although there was nothing there. 

When Lei saw this, he immediately grabbed one of his smoke grenades from his tool belt and threw it to the ground just before the fake Sir Fred could turn around.

And although Lei had Von in his arms already like a kid running away with a balloon, they both stumbled in the ground when an invisible wall suddenly appeared before them, just two feet away from the fake Sir Fred who was now scratching his face, revealing the face of an old ugly woman who they both recognized immediately as the old lady in the shop where they sold their Stat-huts at.

"I knew it," Lei muttered as he noticed the smoke from his smoke grenade being secluded in a square space only.