Candlelight Back Home
Candlelight goes back home to his little village, meeting a more-than-friend along the way. Incidents happen and the once-friendly villagers are turned against each other.
Candlelight, disillusioned and worn-down from his SPF job, decided to quit and go back to being a farmer. He moved from Area 1 back to the nameless village near Area 29 in which he was born.
At the train station in Area 1, he met a nervous little guy, apparently new to Westavia, asking around for directions.
Ticket salesperson
Uh, there's a health center near the station. You can go ask them.
The man left the ticket counter, brows furrowing.
Well, actually, I don't know anything about this place. I grew up in Bauhinia, you see. I only know that my grandparents were from there, having came to Bauhinia during the war; and that I have some distant relatives there.
Whelp, that doesn't really narrow it down. I know in my village — I'm going there and the train is in like four hours — there used to be a story about two people eloping, heh. Maybe they are your grandparents. The age checks.
The man fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a wad of papers. Old and crumbled, were these his grandparents' documents?
Candlelight watched as the man pulled out a particular piece of paper that said it was a "travel permit."
He shoved it back into the pile and pulled out another, a booklet. It was coming loose, and poorly bound in the first place. A passport of old. The man opened it to the appropriate page.
This is the city the passport is issued in. It's a little faded, but the issuing city is still visible. I wasn't sure how far the city is from the village so…
It was very clearly, the very banned, very illegal name of Yigirme Toqquzinchi. Area 29.
My village was right near this city. It could be very possible that the stories I heard were about your parents… But what are the chances?
No. And I can't be sure; how about you come with me to my village and let's ask around for some older people there? You have their names so it should be quite easy.
When they got home, he met his childhood friend Mooncake, who was also a cop and faring way better than him. Curly also met his distant relative, Helsinki. Candlelight found that the other villagers had long ago sold every removable furniture at his house, including the pot of wine in the basement, and divided the spoils which had again long ago been spent.
So for the time being, they stayed in Helsinki's.
Candlelight noticed that many families he used to know had similar things happen to their houses — run-down and sold empty. He wondered why. The curt answers Thyme gave him was that the old members had died and the young ones were away in eastern Westavia.
A couple days later, Thyme got a call from the police, saying that Ember was due to be released from reeducation soon. Not because he actually changed his mind or anything, but because he was the last person in the camp and they couldn't afford it running anymore. They asked him whether Thyme could find Ember's relatives to go get him.
What a coincidence, his son had just come back!
So apparently, Ember and the band of terrorists he ran away with got caught. The other members were either sentenced to jail or executed, but as Ember didn't directly participate in the attack on the Area 29 market, he was only sentenced to reeducation. Candlelight never knew this, but he knew he would absolutely refuse to meet Ember again. It took the entire rest of the already-quite-empty village — the same people who stood by and watched as Ember slowly forced Muscat to her death — to convince him to at least go get him home from the camp.
So he did. And boy was he still the same. After he learnt that Candlelight was a cop in Area 1, he tried getting Candlelight to send him money every month; but immediately grew mad again when he told Ember that he quit already.
At one point, Pumpkin and Thyme conversed about the original name of Nameless Village. Turns out, with all these leaders whispering, the name had long been misheard. Thyme thought it was "A Mocking Silence," when it was in fact "Amoxicillin," as evident from Pumpkin's grandparents' documents.
Later it turned out that Thyme had murdered many families to steal their land for himself.
In the end, Candlelight murdered Ember and framed Thyme for that.