“So, how’s your progress been going with Jamie?”

I looked up at Marten from my breakfast as he stood at the entrance of our kitchen, casually standing there like he hadn’t just barged in unannounced, just like he had a few days ago. Sitting on either side of me, my parents gave him a death glare, but said nothing.

“I guess Mediators don’t know how to knock,” I grumbled, mostly to myself before swallowing the piece of bread that I’d already chewed off. “Can’t this wait?”

“Nah. But I’m not so cruel that I’ll take breakfast away from anyone,” he said, strolling across the kitchen and grabbing a piece of bread from the basket on the counter. “You can eat while you talk. I don’t mind.”

I sighed, but got up despite his offer. “My appetite’s ruined anyways,” I said.

“Where are you going?” my mom asked, grabbing my sleeve before I could get too far from the table.

“Just outside the house, mom,” I said. “I assume we’re going to talk about stuff that you two can’t hear.”

I wasn’t sure that was true, but I didn’t want my parents listening in to our conversation regardless. Marten raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t seem to care enough to protest.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “Outside it is. We’re coming back in if it starts to storm, though. Clouds are getting pretty bad and I’m not going to get rained on if I don’t need to.”

Gently shaking my mom off of me, I walked out of the house, not bothering to acknowledge Marten until I heard him step outside with me.

“I was serious about that rain,” he said, taking a bite of his bread as he looked up at the dark sky. “One drop and we’re going back in.”

I looked up at the sky. Judging by how bad it looked, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it rained in the next ten minutes. I wondered if that would be enough time.

I sighed.

“Pretty heavy sigh you got there,” Marten said. “You holding up alright?”

“Your character’s breaking,” I said. “Weren’t you supposed to be a rude asshole?”

“Even rude assholes can be pleasant sometimes,” Marten grunted, giving me a shrug. “And I don’t play characters. It’s beneath me.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Why would I want to change perfection?” he asked, brushing a large handful of breadcrumbs off his stubble.

I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you make a joke either. This seriously doesn’t suit you.”

“It’s called a good mood, girlie,” he said, looking up at the sky and reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a pipe. “And I don’t really give a shit what you think.”

“Then why are you here?”

Marten gave me a glare, but was quick to follow it up with a chuckle.

“Fair enough,” he said, shaking his head though he did it with a wide grin. He took a puff of his pipe and tilted his head back to blow the smoke up into the sky. “You got me there.”

I didn’t know what his game was. Was he really just in a good mood?

“Honestly, if you think this new personality of yours is endearing, it’s not. I preferred it when you were an asshole. At least then I didn’t have to worry about letting my guard down.”

Marten simply shrugged.

“Sorry,” he said. “I am who I am. Always have been. Can’t change that.”

“Hard to believe that when you belong to an organisation filled with liars and manipulators. You haven’t convinced me that you’re not the same, and this is just making it more obvious that you are.”

Marten sighed out a large cloud of smoke. He stared down at his pipe, inspecting it like it was a foreign object that had suddenly appeared in his hand without warning. After a few more seconds of quiet introspection, Marten held out the pipe to me.

“You smoke?” he asked.

“No,” I responded.

Marten stared at me for a few seconds, before turning his pipe upside down and tapping the still burning ashes of his tobacco onto the floor and stomping it out.

“Don’t feel like it today,” he said, stowing his pipe back into his pocket. “Just wanted to know if you wanted it, so it wouldn’t go to waste.”

I didn’t know how to react to that, so I didn’t. Marten didn’t seem to care about my lack of reaction, as he looked back up into the sky.

“Our organisation is a lot of things,” he said. “We are liars and we are manipulators, yes. But we do what we need to, for the good of the Otherworlders.”

“Bullshit,” I said, crossing my arms.

Marten didn’t seem upset by my reaction, simply shrugging.

“Not my job to convince you.”

“You’re right. Your job is to manipulate and lie to a kid to make him do what you want,” I said. “For the good of the Otherworlders.”

He shrugged again.

A tense silence fell between us, though Marten didn’t seem to care. He was still looking up at the sky, like he had been for the majority of our conversation.

“So,” he said. “What are you stalling for?”

I flinched involuntarily at the question. “What?”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Marten glanced at me and fixed me with an unimpressed look.

“C’mon, girlie,” he said. “My job involved me interacting with my colleagues who are, as you say, liars and manipulators. It would be cute if you actually thought you could get away with it, but I assume you didn’t.”

I grimaced. Off in the distance, thunder rumbled.

“So?” Marten said, not letting me have the few seconds to gather my wits. “What is it you don’t want to say? What happened in the past three days that I don’t know about? And I’ll have you know, I know everything that’s been going on, except for what goes on in that little head of yours. So spill it.”

Before I could think to speak, rain started to fall, the first drops accented by the distant rumbling of more thunder. Marten frowned up at the sky and sighed as he pressed himself back against the wall of my house. I did the same, and though the eaves of the roof protected us from the rain, it wouldn’t be long before we were soaked. The wind was howling, and though the rainfall wasn’t that bad yet, it looked like it would get much worse soon.

“Did you want to go back inside?” I asked, glancing back at my house, where my parents were no doubt waiting anxiously for my arrival.

“I do,” he said. “But you don’t. Just get it over with so I can leave.”

I frowned, but seeing no other way to delay the inevitable, I sighed and spoke.

“Would I be allowed to stay as a Follower?”

Marten glanced at me and raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t quite the large reaction I expected, but the judging look was enough for me to look away from him, refusing to meet his gaze.

“I thought you hated being a Follower,” he said.

“I do,” I protested, a little faster than I wanted to. “I just… I feel bad for Jamie. I want to make sure he’s treated right.”

“And you don’t trust us to do that? Treat him right?” Marten asked, with no real heat behind the words.

“No,” I said, as frankly as I could. “I don’t.”

Marten didn’t seem offended by the admission in the slightest. He simply shrugged and looked up at the sky, his face already wet with rain.

“And you’ve set your mind on this?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I haven’t made a decision. I just want to know if I would be allowed to do it without being assassinated in my sleep or something.”

Marten gave me a hard look.

“You would be allowed to continue on as a Follower, without being assassinated for it, as long as you have approval from the Mediators. That was always allowed.”

I gave him a nod.

“That was all I wanted to know,” I said. “Thanks.”

The rain had quickly grown into a deluge, each raindrop hammering at the ground with an intense fervour, creating large splashes of mud wherever they landed.

“What changed?” Marten asked.

“Not much, to be honest,” I said. I had thought about the question for too many sleepless nights to not be ready to answer it. “I mean, looking back on how we first met, it’s pretty obvious in hindsight that Jamie’s just a kid. I mean, yeah, he was a bit of a weird idiot when he first got here, but he was in a new environment and didn’t really know what was going on. But especially after I just spent a few days hanging out with him and some of my friends… I guess once I realised he wasn’t someone to be feared, I also realised he was just hurt and lonely.”

“I see,” Marten said.

I waited for him to continue, but as he stayed silent, I could tell that he was being pensive for some reason.

“Do you know about Affection ratings?” he asked.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering how that was relevant in any way.

“Do you mean how some people like to judge a person’s appearance and rate them out of ten?” I asked. “I’m not really into that kind of thing.”

“No, not that,” Marten replied. “Back in Redstone, you told Sera about how the Guide would occasionally tell you that your affection level was going up. Do you remember this?”

“Oh.” It hadn’t happened in a while, so it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind when Marten brought it up, but it wasn’t hard to remember. “Yeah, I remember.”

Marten gave me another hesitant look, though he didn’t wait nearly as long to talk this time.

“There was an Otherworlder that we dubbed as the Harem Lord,” he said. “Not many people outside of the Mediators know about him, since he died several centuries ago, and he wasn’t alive for long enough that he could do widespread harm, but he’s one of the largest cautionary tales we have in our organisation. To keep it short, he had the power to turn any woman he fancied into a soulless doll that he would add to his little harem. A lot of Mediators and some civilians had their minds irreversibly altered into thinking that they loved him to the point that when he passed on, they committed mass suicide.”

The rain was heavy enough that if I deluded myself enough, I could almost convince myself that I hadn’t properly heard what Marten said. It was the heaviest rain that I’d seen in a long while, and a small part of me was focused on how sheets of water fell from the roof of my house, creating a wall of water as it poured off the eaves in front of where Marten and I stood. The sound of it hitting the ground was rapid, erratic, and deafening and it took me a while to separate it from the pounding of my heart in my ears.

“What? You’re joking, right?”

Marten looked away from me, staring up into the sky once more with a stoic expression on his face.

“Jamie wouldn’t do that,” I said, more quietly than I expected to. “He’s a good kid.”

But did I actually think that, or was I being coerced into thinking that by some amoral God?

“For what it’s worth, I agree with you,” Marten said. “The child’s a bit of an idiot, but he’s just lost his way. As far as I can tell, he’s got a good soul. Even though I will say that Sera did a piss-poor job at being the leader overall, letting him know about the Mediators and cooperating with him wasn’t a bad decision on her part. She wouldn’t have done that unless she had reason to.”

I could barely register the reassurances as I thought about the possibility that I wasn’t in control of my own thoughts.

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” My voice barely came out in a squeak, drowned out by the sound of rainfall.

“We expected you to leave,” Marten said, taking out his pipe again and filling it with tobacco. “You were forced into this life for a while, and we didn’t want you to think about whether your mind was permanently altered while leading your civilian life after you left. But now that you have the freedom to actually make a decision, it’s only fair that you know everything that might affect it.”

Marten pressed his finger into the pile of tobacco that he’d made. The leaves turned red with ember, and he took a long draw out of it.

After blowing the smoke out into the air, he held the pipe out to me.

“Calm your nerves?” he asked.

I looked at the pipe for a second before nervously plucking it from his fingers. I doubted it would do much, but at this point I needed anything I could get. Holding it to my lips, I could only take half a shaky breath before I bent over and let out a hacking cough, almost dropping Marten’s pipe in the process.

“Tastes like cat shit,” I said, once I found my breath again. “Why do people smoke?”

Marten let out a quiet chuckle before nodding quietly.

“We talked to the boss last night,” he said, reaching over to pluck the pipe from my still shaking fingers. “We’re getting a new leader and a second teleported to us soon, probably by tonight. You’ll have to get the new leader’s approval once they get here if you make the decision to stay, but I’m sure they’ll be reasonable if you want more time. It’s a big decision. I suggest not rushing into it. Take your time.”

He patted me on the shoulder twice and before I could react, he stepped forward into the rain. Seemingly not caring about the same rain that he’d been complaining about not too long ago, I could swear he was whistling a jaunty tune as he made his way away from my house.

“Creepy bastard. I still preferred when you were an asshole.”

I doubted he could hear me over the thundering rain, but it still felt a little good to get the last words. Just a little bit. I looked down at my shaking hands and clenched them in an attempt to stabilise them, but all that achieved was to make my entire body shake instead. I folded my arms around myself in a half hug before turning around and walking back to my house.

I fumbled with the doorknob to the entrance a few times before I let out an angry groan.

I hated this. Fuck taking my time. Maybe the Mediators had been right to hide this from me, just like they hid things from the rest of the world, but I didn’t care what was wrong or right at this point.

All that mattered was that I knew, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let this rot and fester for any longer than I needed to.

I pulled the door open for long enough to yell through it and nothing more.

“I’m going out!” I shouted into my house, before letting it slam back closed and marching into the rain, towards the tavern where Jamie was staying.