Sera reflected back on her life in Diamond Lake.
The youngest of four children, she had only fleeting memories of her life before her family moved to the small, desolate town. She remembered the excitement she felt for her new home, and the apprehension that followed it as she spent her first few days trying to make sense of her new surroundings.
It didn’t help that mother was particularly anxious about life on the “rough frontier”, as she called it. The money as the new managers of the Able Carter Coaching Inn was too good to pass up, as was the opportunity to build a stable, more secure future for the family. So Sera’s mother sucked it up, and ended up both loving and hating the place that they all grew to call home.
Her mother’s trepidations aside, it actually wasn’t all that bad growing up in the inn, especially since it was one of the few places in Diamond Lake that was not covered in grime, either inside or out. Of course, it also meant there was no shortage of housekeeping and chores to be done. Mom and dad were insistent that running the Inn was a family endeavor, and so the whole family participated whether they wanted to or not. As she got a little older, Sera suspected that some of the chores were really designed to keep her busy in the hotel, and thus not outside around town. Undaunted, she found ways to slip away when she wanted to explore or see her friends.
It helped being the youngest sibling. Her two sisters were five and six years older, and quite understandably wanted little to do with her. Her brother was much closer to her age, but being her parents’ only son meant he had a certain role to fill, and thus with her three siblings otherwise occupied Sera was often left to her own devices. It also helped that her mother had taken a more laissez-faire approach to parenting her fourth child, and as long as Sera was discreet she could pretty much do as she pleased. No one asked how she spent her time, and she didn’t feel obliged to tell.
Case in point: Sera was all but addicted to the excitement of being someplace she wasn’t supposed to be. Her favorite activities while growing up were listening to the guests and their gossip, unlocking the puzzles of what they were doing and why they were in town, and literally unlocking the doors to their rooms. By her thirteenth birthday, there wasn’t a lock in the inn that could keep her out. The advantage of growing up in a place with so many rooms and locks to experiment with was that there was more than enough time to learn how they all worked.
As she moved on to her teenage years, she couldn’t resist the siren’s call of exploration. She’d heard too many stories about the old cairns from both the inn’s lodgers and her friends, and she couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing them for herself. Of course, her parents absolutely forbade her from doing anything of the sort, so it was only natural that she would do it anyway. At thirteen, she joined up with a unique group of like-minded youth in town that called themselves the Night Walkers. Her well-honed ability to silently slip out of the hotel at night, and her natural ability to see in the dark, served her well on their many clandestine adventures both around the moonlit town and along the hills beyond. A year later, she spent the night in the Whispering Cairn–the youngest of the group to do so–and encouraged one of her best friends, Bel, to join.
Running around the hinterlands in the dark was, of course, more than a little dangerous. The fighting lessons her father insisted on arranging for her, and the informal lessons from her fellow Night Walkers, probably saved her from harm–or worse–more than once, whether it was due to an unexpected encounter with a drunk miner or a run-in with the local wildlife. (In retrospect, it was shocking none of them had gotten seriously hurt in those days. Though, not long after she outgrew the group, she learned that a girl had disappeared or died while staying a night in the Cairn, so that streak of luck had finally run out.)
In her late teens, she felt the urge to make a new life of her own. It was Bel that pointed out the obvious: Sera knew the town like the back of her hand, the surrounding countryside almost as well, and she could navigate it all in the dark. These were all useful skills, and all she had to do was match them up with the people who needed them. Fortunately for her, Diamond Lake had no shortage of those who needed things done discreetly, and the cover of darkness was nothing if not discreet. Sera’s first business was acting as a nighttime, freelance courier, with no questions asked. She would deliver what you needed when you needed it, as long as it was done in the dark. Later, when others started to notice the activities of the enterprising, young woman, they learned she was a nighttime, freelance courier who also happened to be armed, and who was not at all intimidated by intimidation tactics.
She later expanded her list of unlisted services to include other useful offerings, such as: retrieving lost property from another person’s possession, creative solutions to missing keys and forgotten lock combinations, and connecting buyers and sellers for merchandise that did not trade well on public markets. As a young entrepreneur, however, she was limited by her ability to effectively market herself to what was essentially a niche audience. Furthermore, her expenses were significant, and much of her potential profit was eaten by the frequent, and frequently random, licensing fees that were imposed by the local constabulary in order to ensure her continued operation. Her work was exciting at first, but now it had become an unpleasant grind.
Sera longed for bigger challenges. She needed a way to test and hone her skills, and a chance to prove her mettle. Something that would pay off with enough gold to finance her departure from town, and equip her for the next chapter in her life. And Diamond Lake wasn’t offering her any of these things: it was just more of the same, with ever-increasing operating costs. It was time to move on.