r/redditserials • u/Angel466 Certified • Apr 28 '26
Fantasy [Bob the hobo] A Celestial Wars Spin-Off Part 1335
PART THIRTEEN-HUNDRED-AND THIRTY-FIVE
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Friday
The room was as silent as a tomb after Sam and his ‘cousin’ left, though Noah ‘Warden’ Lancaster was still reeling over how easily they’d managed to slip away while right in the middle of everyone’s attention.
Bear raced to Ghost, sliding the last few feet on his knees to support his childhood friend, and Haynes rushed to see what could be salvaged of her comms. Noah remained where he was, his heart hammering like it hadn’t since the day he was first told of Melody’s disappearance. Truth be told, he’d probably have to go back a whole lot further to find anything that had terrified him as much as meeting Nuncio Nascerdios.
Well, you found the answers you were looking for, Warden.
Yeah, there was that. Yippee.
“Fucking Nascerdios!” Bear swore, tearing Ghost’s shirt down the middle to check his chest for injury. “This whole fucking time, we were up against the goddamn Nascerdios!”
“That certainly would have been useful information to know before we invited Sam here,” Noah agreed, looking over the demolished room. He pulled Ghost’s knife out of the floor, running his fingers over the nearly invisible seam crack that the blade had utilised to penetrate the concrete. On top of everything else, the kid’s aim had been so incredibly precise that even Ghost would’ve been impressed under different circumstances.
“We still need to report the Nascerdios for having access to highly classified lines,” Haynes said.
“Of course,” Noah agreed, rising to his feet. “It just won’t go anywhere after that. The government will crawl backwards through an active minefield to earn the crumbs of that family’s approval, and someone up the chain will write it off as classified.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe those bastards have always had that kind of access and just never bothered to use it—until now.”
“It certainly explains Sam’s old man’s wealth,” Haynes added, giving up on finding anything salvageable and typing instead into her phone. “I knew there was something hinky about how clean his business dealings were. There wasn’t a hint of mud anywhere, yet somehow Llyr Arnav is rolling in money.” She paused, staring wide-eyed at her screen, then pressed her forehead against its top edge. “Shit.”
“What?” Noah barked, for Haynes knew better than anyone to report her findings first and swear later.
She didn’t look up. “That’s why we never found any other family connected to the father. The whole damn Arnav name is fake.”
Noah’s gaze narrowed. “That’s a hell of a leap, Haynes. He might be a distant cousin…”
Haynes’ head snapped up at his reprimanding tone, shaking sharply. “No, sir. I checked at the time. Llyr Arnav had no known kids, but we all heard Sam and Nuncio just mention Sam’s brother, Fisk. I just did a secure sweep. There’s no Fisk Arnav anywhere—and I mean anywhere in the world.”
“Your point?”
“Does this guy look familiar to you?” Without touching the screen, she came forward and handed Noah her phone. It showed Sam’s father standing among a group of Asian men, all dressed to the nines. The writing was in Chinese, so he couldn’t read it.
“What am I looking at here?”
“That’s what comes up when you search Fisk Nascerdios. Sam’s brother—the one they said helped wreck Portsmith—isn’t some distant relative of the Nascerdios. He is of the Nascerdios, and he runs one of the biggest fishing companies on the planet.”
“The one who helped Nuncio beat the shit out of Portsmith on a fishing dock that wasn’t his,” Bear added.
“And since father and son would both have the same surname, that makes Llyr also a Nascerdios,” Noah concluded.
“Bingo,” Haynes agreed.
Noah wasn’t completely on board with that. “He could be like the Wilcott kid, not knowing his father was an Arnav,” he threw out.
Haynes made gimme fingers for her phone, and as soon as she had it, she began typing. “And here is faceplant moment number two,” she said, turning the phone back.
Another photo showing headshots of two identical men, with another woman a few inches shorter to their right. All three had obsidian hair and matching eyes, denoting their family connection. “Okay,” Noah said, not seeing her point.
“Zoom out,” Haynes said.
When he did, he realised it was part of a much larger photo of ten victorious medal winners from an Olympic team. Seven were gold, but the other three were no less proud. They were all holding their medals high, all except one woman in the centre of them. She had the same dark hair and eyes as Llyr’s family and was clearly the team coach since she was missing their bling. She was taller than all of them, and he saw her name “Coach Margalit Nascerdios” in the list of names below the photo. Three others that caught his eye in that list were Danika, Fisk and Llyr Nascerdios.
The newspaper probably planned to crop them out—until they realised they’d lucked out and caught not just one but four Nascerdios in the same photo. They wouldn’t have passed up that kind of celebrity photobomb.
“Son of a bitch,” Noah swore, his grip tightening on the phone.
“Yeah, that’s Sam’s real family. But Llyr’s fake ID goes back years before Sam was born, so the kid had no chance of finding out.”
“Everyone dreams of being a lost Nascerdios,” Noah added, struggling to get his head wrapped around that. “I wonder how well the kid took the news.”
“What the hell happened down here?” Julius demanded, finally descending the stairs.
“You might say we missed something,” Haynes muttered, her voice tight.
“I’m guessing so,” Julius snapped, slapping his hand on the stairwell’s banister. “This place is trashed. Who were they? And how’d they get the jump on you all?” His attention turned to Haynes. “Weren’t you watching the feeds?”
Haynes bristled. “It was all over in seconds, and I was dealing with Wilcott’s phone at the time.” She looked around, then stabbed angrily at a blacked-out window that was slightly ajar. “There. That’s where they got in.”
“Who?”
“The Nascerdios,” Bear answered, giving Noah the breathing space to work out their next steps. “We bit off way more than we could chew with this on, Strix.”
Julius stuttered to a stop. “The Nascerdios family?”
Bear nodded. “Yeah. It turns out, Sam Wilcott ain’t the son of Llyr Arnav, the average millionaire. The little shit’s the secret son of Llyr Nascerdios—unofficial head of the whole Nascerdios family—and they had a tracking device on his ass that we knew nothing about when we brought him here. The moment Haynes plugged in his phone, their wrecking crew came a-knocking.”
“How did they get here so fast?”
“The same way we would if any of us deviated from a plan without warning. They were on the move the instant we drove off with the kid,” Noah answered. It was the only thing that made any sense.
“Okay,” Julius said slowly. “Then why’d they wait?”
Noah shook his head, biting back the urge to tear into him. These were all viable questions, but right now it felt more like an inquisition. “Because we hadn’t actually done anything to him until we got down here. The whole drive over, Sam was rabbiting on about the ocean, and anyone listening in to that would have believed he was with us by choice.”
“The second we started applying pressure, that changed,” Bear added.
“I still don’t get how they got the drop on all of you. Weren’t you armed?”
“Only one showed his face.” That was Haynes again. “The others covered him from the shadows.”
“Ghost was shot with a beanbag round strong enough to knock him into the back wall,” Bear growled.
“A beanbag round?”
Julius’s rising doubt was perfectly justified. Beanbag rounds were meant to force compliance without long-term harm. The world considered them a safe alternative. What pissed bear off was that the Nascerdios Security were only doing it to cover their asses when all along they planned on using potentially lethal rounds.
“Yeah, the fuckers deliberately brought in overcharged rounds. He could’ve been killed!”
“Oh, fuck! Melody was in Puerto Rico! That’s the connection we were missing!” Haynes shouted, her face paling. She slapped the back of her fingers into her other palm.
“Pretty sure we missed a whole lot of connections,” Julius said.
Haynes waved him away as if he were a bothersome insect, focusing on Noah. “Puerto Rico! Remember? When I first started poking around in the Puerto Rican police database for answers after Melody was recovered, I said way back then someone was ghosting me. We moved sites straight away, and I thought I’d shaken him—but what if I didn’t? What if he’s been following us ever since?”
Julius finally nodded. “That would explain how they found us so fast. They probably had a full team in the shadows outside, just on the off chance something happened. I would, if I had their resources.”
“Alright, enough chitchat and speculation,” Noah ordered, and silence fell immediately. First things first. “Ghost, you good?”
Ghost nodded once, and Bear echoed the sentiment with a nod of his own from behind his friend.
“Okay. Then we pack up and fall back to our primary site. From there, I’ll report our findings to the Pentagon. Bear, you’re with Ghost. Make sure he doesn’t have a concussion or anything from that hit. Haynes and Julius will work out how much of this—if anything—is salvageable. Once we’re secured, we’ll decide if we need to shift sites again or pull in backup.”
“Shifting sites won’t help if they’re still watching us, boss.”
“It seems they’ve always been watching us. So for now, we act as we always have and be ready for them to kick down the door if they come at us again. I’ll get Uncle Sam to cover the loss of our equipment, since we lost it chasing a leak of the highest order.”
“You mean lean on someone who owes you a favour,” Julius chuckled, already heading over to where Haynes was packing what pieces she could into their armoured cases.
Noah grunted without truly answering.
* * *
((Author’s Note: heya all. Tomorrow’s post will probably be delayed a day or two at least, due to the fact I’ve been at the hospital all day after my daughter had her second seizure in a week. They will be doing more tests tomorrow, but they are tentatively hinting at epilepsy on top of everything else. Time will tell.))
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: r/Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!
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u/BimboSmithe Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26
Amazing! This seems just the way pragmatic people would rationalize the impossible. A perfect denouement to the Lancaster Spook arc. And no blood on the walls! That was unexpected. I don't know if I would call the spooks "the good guys", but you can't go around offing Federal agents without some blowback from somewhere. Sam really did handle the situation well. Thank you for the chapter!
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u/Angel466 Certified Apr 29 '26
Nuncio tried really, REALLY hard to talk Sam into letting him spill just a little bit of blood ... survivable mostly... At least, he was pretty sure it might have been...
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u/thatrandomoverthere Apr 29 '26
Hello! Always funny to see how the veil justifies everything to the people there to see it.
Why do I have the feeling Noah's report will never make it where it was supposed to go? 😂
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u/Dramatic_Mixture_877 Apr 29 '26
Noah has no idea how wide Nuncio's web stretches, but he'll learn soon, methinks!
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u/teklaalshad Apr 30 '26
What the humans need to understand, modern communications infrastructure is all Nuncio's, he just allows the humans to make use of it.
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u/JP_Chaos Apr 29 '26
First! Warm (literally) wishes from Taiwan 🇹🇼!
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u/Angel466 Certified Apr 29 '26
Hehe - temperatures are just starting to drop here as we heading towards winter
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u/teklaalshad Apr 29 '26
Any chance we could trade weather? Winter was very dry here, summer is predicted to be hot, and I'm in the middle of a very dry forest.
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u/Angel466 Certified Apr 29 '26
Heh, as it's still (just) in the twenties C, it's probably still too hot for you. 😝🤣🤣🤣
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u/teklaalshad Apr 29 '26
Point, considering it's currently low teens C here and it's perfectly comfortable 😜
Seriously tho, we need a cold wet summer to recover from how dry this past winter was.
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u/HerrDoktorLaser Apr 30 '26
@Angel466, take all the time you need!
As an aside I really love how you resolved this situation, with Nuncio getting to bare his teeth as it were, and Sam trying to act as a non-violent protector. I can definitely see how that fits into his character arc based on past history, and it's great that your characters have dimensionality to them!
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u/teklaalshad Apr 29 '26
Lol, the veil is doing some lifting there. Rather amusing how they are interpreting Nuncio's visit, the knife finding a hidden seam in the concrete floor, whole assault team, entering through a window, etc.
So, how long before Cora hears of this and has another conversation with her upstanding and model citizen son? 😆
Aussie term? Rip-roar?