I'd rather be doomed to Antoinette’s fate of a dank, dark prison than go anywhere with Sylvain.

See, even if Antoinette and Sylvain were friends, when it came to my goals, they were a match made in hell. That snob would make her act about a thousand times worse. Besides, his family started off Love Blooming disgraced and he barely picked up the pieces, even when you played his route the whole way through. I fully intended to just ignore him entirely.

Unfortunately, Sylvain's first private event was unavoidable because it was tied up in the potion project.

We organised the meeting via a random run-in in the hallway. I spent the rest of the school day begging the other love interests to come with me. Étienne had his private German lessons (did Germany even exist in this world?), Lou had his Dungeons and Dragons game (did Wizards of the Coast exist?!), and Rémi had a date with an NPC that he teased me about wanting to crash.

Antoinette was my last hope.

After changing out of my uniform, I found her braiding her hair at her vanity and washing off her makeup.

"Hey, Antoinette?"

"Hm?"

"Do you have anything going on this evening?'

She gestured at her makeup remover, as if to say, What do you think, you unfashionable wench?

"I have a meeting to mock up a budget for the potion project. You'd really help Sylvain and I out if you came."

She scowled at me in the mirror. Better the scowl you know than the blank, dreamy, paint-splattered stare you don’t, I guess. "You don't think that would be cheating?”

"You're supposed to be giving us all feedback.”

She wrinkled her nose. "I wanted to read tonight."

"It won't take that long–"

"No."

So off I went to Sylvain's house.

I did think about skipping it. But I wasn't a coward. And I was here for Antoinette, and that meant I needed to take this project seriously. As much as I hated him, Sylvain was my best ally when it came to getting to the winner’s podium at the celebration where the Delphines would be implicated in their crimes.

He didn't live in the dorms, but instead in the hamlet next to the Academy where students did their shopping. He was close enough to commute every day, and it wasn't like he attended any clubs or sports that required him to be around after classes. (Or had any friends besides Antoinette.)

Sylvain had money–he needed to, in order to attend that school. However, his house was a modest two-story with a neglected garden and kichtsy porch decorations that must have belonged to someone else.

Yeah, he definitely had money. Even if I'd never let Sylvain get close enough to tell me the story himself, I knew from playing the game that a few years ago, Sylvain's father suddenly came into a ton of money from an unknown source. He swore it was legit despite all the caustic suspicion swirling around him. No one believed it. Least of all the shadowy officials who framed him of financial fraud and tossed him in jail.

At this point in the game, Marie’s doorbell rings weren’t answered. So in true protagonist fashion, she walked right into the house and found Sylvain…helping a bedridden woman, clearly knocking on death’s door. It was Sylvain's little sister, Amélie, whose sickness couldn't be cured by all the ill-gotten fortunes in the world.

Chloé stood patiently on the porch and waited.

And waited.

And waited…

I looked up with a groan.

[https://64.media.tumblr.com/c1f683ff7defbca3259836d4cf7f64eb/38da916db2289870-1b/s2048x3072/c5cf2dd151ecb0b84e8eaa475e1937cd478904d4.jpg]

Sorry, Marie, I should have given you more credit.

I remembered that 1 and 2 would make you wait longer, giving you little clues about the house, until the only option left was to head inside.

Marie entered the house like she was trying to sneak past a cabaret of masked killers. I practically kicked open the door and called, "SYLVAAAIN! IT'S CHLOÉ! HELLOOO?"

The art of Sylvain’s house in Love Blooming was pretty, though stiff and stilted and too obviously meant to stand in for any generic living room–here, that stiffness showed Sylvain’s regimented personality. I was nervous to even knock a chair out of place. It was simple, unadorned, not in a minimalist style…instead in the style of someone who didn’t know how to make a house feel like home.

I stood in the dining room, listening for noise upstairs. Just as I was fearing that the game would force me to barge into Amélie’s room to be free of this time-stands-still predicament, Sylvain came down the steps.

His long, pin-straight black hair was in a low ponytail and he wasn’t wearing his uniform; still, he wore a collared shirt and tightly-tailored slacks, the suspenders neat and tidy on his shoulders. At least he wasn’t wearing shoes. I’d take any indication I could that made him seem more relaxed.

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“Sorry. I was waiting on the steps for a while and didn’t know if you heard me knock.”

“I heard you. You could stand to be more patient instead of barging into someone’s house whenever you please.”

“I didn’t have a choice…” I turned for the door, not wanting to spend another second in unnecessary conversation with him.

"Let's work here," he said. "There's no point walking all the way to the school and then all the way back."

Crap. He had a point. Especially now that the game events had to pay attention to things like travel time and the revolution of the earth.

I blushed, turning back around.

"Don't tell me you left your notes at school?"

"Um…I did." I'm used to seeing this event in the library a 3 second loading screen away, okay?!

Sylvain sighed. “Fine. I have enough notes to make this work. I doubt yours would have helped anyways.”

Harsh but fair. I spent this morning’s advanced magi-botany class trying to beat Rémi at hangman. Rémi kept using more and more elaborate French swearwords that I still wasn’t sure were actually real or not. From his imagination, or from the game writers, who seemed to use Google Translate most of the time? IDK.

I sat at the dining table as Sylvain brought over a notebook, a textbook on plants, and a clipped-together, inch-thick stack of handwritten paper.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My own research on ingredient pricing,” he said. “I asked Antoinette to provide some overview of their budget and sourcing. She refused. Understandably, I suppose; they’re classified.”

Thankfully, the session went by pretty smoothly at first. Sylvain said he didn’t trust me to know a dicentra spectabilis from a leucadendron (and I sure didn’t), so he put me in charge of writing out the wholesaler prices and multiplying them by how much we’d need.

“Where did you even get these prices?” I asked. “You didn’t run around to stores or something, because it says they’re out of date.”

His voice was tight. “It’s the best we’ve got, Chloé.”

“No, I mean, that’s not an issue. I’m just commenting on it. Does someone in Aconitum release this info after an NDA is up or what?”

“Can you please stop asking questions and write the cost for eryngium?”

I mouthed, “Okay, jeez louise,” and did as asked.

Given that the prices were in some random currency and from a random, aesthetically-pleasing point in time, I wasn’t even sure if the prices adhered to any economical rules. Maybe they didn’t. I still hadn’t figured out where the game developers’ influence ended, now that their world had become real.

Real to me, at least.

I once again saw Antoinette’s bizarre stare when she poured the paint, like she was being puppeteered by an all-powerful sour!Antoinette to punish people who were mean to Louis. But thinking about that too hard made my head hurt. So I dutifully kept writing in the charts.

And then my blissful numbers were blown apart by Sylvain saying, “You’re trying to get Antoinette to make new friends.”

I seriously just stared at him. This was his new bone to pick?

“Um, yeah? And?”

“You’ve been pulling her around to all these little events with them.” He wasn’t looking up, still flipping through the textbook. I sensed the serious edge to his voice. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Think of this from my perspective for a second. I’m brand new here, I hardly remember my own name, and guys like the literal prince are asking me out. Of course I want my girl friend to come with me. She knows this world better than I do.”

“You’re sure that’s the only reason?”

“Obviously. What could my ulterior motive possibly be for bringing Antoinette to an art class?”

“It’s not about the art class, it’s about Louis Chapelle.” He finally looked at me, gray eyes sharp as obsidian. “And Rémi Fontaine, and obviously, most of all, Étienne Alarie.”

“Yeah, those are sure their names, Sylvain Laflamme.”

“These are people with more than enough power to disenfranchise her if they please. They’re petty, spoiled, high society brats. We both know Antoinette is abrasive. If you push her into a situation where she says the wrong thing to them, her whole reputation could collapse around her.”

My retort of, “You can’t be serious,” was quieted by the storm of deja vu going on in my head.

Where did I hear this rant before? Sylvain wouldn’t have had a reason to say anything like this in the game. In fact, I got the sense that Sylvain was trying to get himself out of Antoinette’s clutches. Any efforts to disempower her would work in his favour.

Sylvain said, “You’re a strange meddler, Chloé. I don’t think you lost your memory at all. I think you’re playing some game, and I intend to figure it out.”

It zapped me like a static shock.

This was Antoinette’s dialogue!

In Étienne’s route, she gave Marie a lecture about Étienne’s wobbly reputation and how Marie and all her fun route mini-events were wicked temptresses, about to blow up his life.

What the hell?

Marie fought off Antoinette by professing her pure affection for Étienne, catapulting the villainess into her man-snatching stage. I couldn’t exactly do the same tactic here.

If I was gonna get through this conversation, I had to think like Sylvain’s writers.

No. I had to do better.

I had to think like a Sylvain fangirl.

“Sylvain, you might not really know this, because it’s kinda the sort of thing only girls can sense about each other…but Antoinette is really lonely. Think of it like…um…if you were…always trapped in a room. Like, a bedroom. Let’s pretend you’re sick or something.” Like your sister, Sylvain, like your sister!! “And you’re always watching the world go on outside your window, but you can’t join them, because you’re stuck in your room. And the room is reputation and responsibility, actually. She’s been having a fun time being free for once. Why act like I’m a bad person for opening her door?”

He squinted at me.

I added, “At least trust Antoinette. She can take care of herself.”

He closed the book and took the notebook from right under my pen, saying, “We have enough to work with next class. You should walk home before it gets too dark.”

Gladly! I shrugged on my jacket and shuffled into my shoes.

Sylvain fans hitched his every little flaw and scrap of sympathy onto his issues with his bedridden sister. Hopefully I got through to him. Even if that dialogue wasn't his own.

Even if he was giving me the creeps, trying to control Antoinette and her friendships like that.

So despite my best efforts to tread lightly, at the door, I said, “By the way? I asked her to come work with us tonight. Looks like the only guy she doesn’t want to spend time with is you.”