One sure way to get Antoinette to come along with me, wherever I wanted?
Leverage her programming against her.
I knew she’d instinctively need to compete with me for any boys who caught my attention, so it only took a few too many pointed compliments of Rémi’s smarts and hair and athleticism before she accepted my invitation to the totally lame trivia night with a grumble.
She made me wait for her as she coordinated the perfect knee-length tartan pleated skirt, kitten heels, and a drop-shoulder wool top. I recognised the top half of the outfit from her game sprites, but the hair was totally new: a high ponytail, cascading down her back in a sweep of bright red–my heart fluttered at the sight of her elegant neck and dainty ears.
We walked into the campus pub as the teams were assembling at their respective tables. Exactly as Love Blooming had originally coded, a few members had bowed out tonight to cram for a super-tough politics exam, so there was a free space on Rémi’s team for me. When he waved me over, unlike Étienne, he made no secret of his surprise at Antoinette’s appearance.
“Princess, what brings you here? Sure it’s not for a drink, is it?”
“This one dragged me out.” She flicked a hand at me. “I wouldn’t have expected you to be into something so…gauche.”
“Hey, I contain multitudes. I saved you a seat, Chloé; want a drink first?”
Ping!
[https://64.media.tumblr.com/6dd495e712a1692b8c93932a73577e90/38da916db2289870-5d/s2048x3072/aac74075ef33fac9f583a30791519cc797e2de9c.jpg]
Maybe Antoinette wasn't in the original script, but Rémi's generous offer was.
“I’d love one! Get me your favourite, how about? I’ve never been here before.”
Rémi grinned and loped over to the bar. Antoinette’s nose crinkled. She muttered, “He didn't even offer me anything.”
With any of the other guys, this would be a problem. But with Rémi, any chance I had to put Rémi and Antoinette at odds, the better.
“Maybe he didn't want to insult you? I mean, this place isn't exactly…classy.”
“What, do you think I sip champagne and pinot noir on movie nights?”
I'm sorry, what movies? You guys still use carriages!
I was distracted from questioning the game's anachronisms by two empty seats at the other team's table. I sidled through the crowd to greet them. “Hey! Are you guys missing members too?”
A round-faced, pockmarked girl, the exact portrait of a nerd that the game would sketch up, seemed surprised at my outburst. “Um, actually…We just got a text that two of our members can’t make it.”
It was so perfect that it may as well have been part of the game’s pre-written magic. “Can we join? We’re new, so we might not be too much help, but what’s the downside to having an extra two heads?”
The prototypical nerds glanced at Antoinette and then at each other, like I’d asked if they wanted a wild tiger on their team. They hesitated for long enough that Antoinette groaned, “Oh, admit it. You need help for your dumb game. Who knows how much help Chloé will be, but haven’t you seen my class rankings?”
Antoinette dragged me to a seat by the sleeve. No way would she let me sit on Rémi’s team, leaving her stranded while we flirted all night. Perfect!
We squeezed into the free seats. The bar was pretty crowded, considering how little other nightlife there was on the campus; Antoinette and I were pressed shoulder to shoulder. She smelled like lavender and a hint of something woodsy and more masculine, a smell that made me almost giddy.
Rémi came back from the bar, hesitated a second, and then spotted me with a growing smirk. He set down a bright blue drink in front of me. A white flower was charmed to float slightly above the rim, lazily bobbing around the glass. “Something that reminded me of you. So, you’re planning on taking me down, is that it?”
Antoinette said, “I certainly am.”
Rémi laughed. “Well, best of luck, ladies.” He put out both his hands, crossed over each other, and we all shook his hand at once. Once he got back to his seat, a young man climbed on a chair ahead of both our tables and called us into the game.
As questions and answers were volleyed around me, I was caught in a bizarre situation of half-understanding. Marie’s amnesia was an excellent cover for my own born-in-another-world problem. I knew some of the answers from playing Love Blooming so many times, but we were having a real game night with way more questions than the game ever bothered to write in.
Many of them were related to Aconitum and magic of the world (which the opposing team loudly demanded Antoinette not help answer). Some crusty old Delphine had discovered a strange result when he crossed some plants together, and after years of experiments, made the ultra-sensitive, ultra-powerful plants that we’d now recognise as magical. Magical people started cropping up after that, in very rare numbers. All things considered, magic was brand new to the world of Eavredor, and the Delphines were luckily positioned to capitalize on it first with their inventions.
Meanwhile, neither Marie nor I knew the chemical compounds in Silverbriar, or the first man to lay the first brick in Altolia, or the name of the supposed ghost that haunted La Belle Lavande–or the ghost hunter who debunked the whole debacle as a Scooby-Doo-esque prank by students.
But Antoinette did. She was a regular Hermione Granger, her hand flying to ring our team’s bell milliseconds before the questions were even finished being asked. Rémi was struggling to keep up. Half an hour in, he had legitimate beads of sweat on his forehead and Antoinette had burned through our team’s chip bowl.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
I sipped my drink, pleased with myself (and with the delicious drink).
Rémi loved a challenge. In the game, the battle of wits that would draw Rémi to Marie was isolated on a single team, the game even giving you a quicktime event to press the button and say the correct answer before him. I guessed this was so you could attend the winner’s celebration afterparty together or walk home together in failure, depending on how you performed and how good you were at memorizing the random facts given out in the environment and dialogue in the previous scenarios.
Now, the stakes were upped, and hopefully so were Antoinette and Rémi’s heart rates. The team game had morphed into a one-on-one deathmatch between them.
Hopefully they’d thank me for creating this weird situation, too?
If not, I guess I was pleased enough, pressed next to a passionate Antoinette. I was seeing her with her walls of propriety and finesse down, angrily chomping salt-and-vinegar chips and with a tendril of hair having fallen out of her ponytail. She was still fierce, sharp Antoinette–when a teammate beat her to the bell and then got a question about literature wrong, she actually shouted, “Oh my god, YOU’RE KIDDING!”--but all her refined edges were roughed up.
At last, we were in the final round. The teams were each given the same complex question to discuss in whispers and answer on paper. It was so challenging that the emcee bragged that surely, only one person would get it right, so they wouldn’t need a tie breaker.
And just like in Love Blooming, I couldn't follow it for the life of me. It was one of those word problems that went like, “If the man with the blue shirt is in the red house, and the last house has a purple dog…” One with tons of random details to keep straight. He only repeated the incantation twice, one of our team members writing down every detail at lightning speed in her notebook.
We all ducked our heads together. I was less concerned with the game and more concerned with the way Antoinette’s wavy red ponytail was draped over my shoulder.
“If this house is yellow, then…”
“No, here.” Antoinette stole the notebook and the pencil, scribbling on the page as she whispered, “This one is yellow. And they said these two can’t get along, so–”
The whispering went back and forth. Something wasn’t making sense. Even I could tell. The order was off and we were all slowly figuring it out. Sucked for us: the question wouldn’t be repeated a third time.
And then it hit me.
“Wait, can I see that?”
Everyone stared at me. I hadn’t said a single word this whole night, besides cheering and congratulating my team on our points. I held out a hand for the notebook.
Antoinette slid it over, clearly reluctant. I took the pencil and quickly read the notes for the original question under my breath.
“The…no, I’m pretty sure he said the third king gave the lord barley, not the first.”
“If it's not the first, then who has the white cows?”
“I don’t…” A tumblr post came back to me in near-perfect clarity–a fan was trying to figure out the solution to the question. The game said one thing, but no matter how she tried to solve the puzzle, she couldn't get that answer. We all decided that clearly the writers chose wrong or it was translated wrong or something.
Would the real right answer work in this world–the answer Antoinette was insisting upon–or would it be broken like the game?
For once, I'd trust Love Blooming.
“It was the second king who went to heaven, see?”
“No, it’s the third. I’m certain,” Antoinette said firmly.
“Trust me. I, uh, I’m good at these games.”
“Chloé, you wouldn’t even recognise your own father. It’s the third.”
“Second!”
“Third.”
“Second, seriously–” I wrote the number 2 as quickly as I could.
“GOT IT!” Rémi yelled over the noise of the bar.
Antoinette rolled her eyes at me, pulling the notebook away.
The emcee pointed at Rémi’s table. “Go for it, Team Crimson.”
Rémi glanced around at his teammates, who all gave him nods. “It’s the third king.”
Was the error fixed? Could I even call it an error in this world?
The emcee smirked. “Team Gold, what’ve you got written down?”
The round-faced girl who first spoke to us stared at the notebook, then at me, then at Antoinette. The sheet looked like a mess, full of notes and tugged by chip-fingers and spotted with drink droplets. But right there, clear as day, was the 2 I wrote like a madwoman.
She carefully lifted the notebook. “The second king?”
The emcee pretended to consult his notes, really dragging it out. “Hmmm. Looks like the winner of tonight’s game is…”
Antoinette folded her arms, pissed. But even she couldn’t keep a straight face when the emcee announced, “With a bonus of 100 points for that last question…TEAM GOLD!”
Our table erupted in cheers. I swear that the round-faced girl flipped over her chair. Antoinette’s mouth dropped open.
Rémi groaned, throwing his head back. Still, he wore a huge grin on his face. My heart pounded. I did it!
“Told you!” I teased Antoinette.
She sighed. And stuck her hand out to me. “Well done, Chloé. You outsmarted this table, that’s for sure.”
I grasped her hand and squeezed it tightly, my cheeks hurting with my smile.
The teams split up to chat and grab drinks. Rémi sauntered over to our table and leaned between Antoinette and I, a hand on the backs of both our chairs.
“Damn, Antoinette. You’ve got me feeling like I ran a marathon.”
He was grinning like a total goofball, looking just as thrilled as a winner would have.
Antoinette smirked back. “You put up a good fight, Fontaine. Now, how about you make up for all the stress you caused a young lady and buy her a drink to end the night?”
“Happily.” He turned to me. “Great game, Chloé! Sorry if you felt left out, though. You were quiet.”
“Actually,” Antoinette said, “she solved the last question for us.”
I blushed. Antoinette, bragging for me, to Rémi?
Rémi squeezed my shoulder. “Good one, Chloé! You swept in at the last minute. Let me grab that drink.”
I released a breath as he vanished. Thank god he didn’t offer to buy me another. I wanted him to focus on Antoinette alone.
The emcee passed out our winner’s prizes–vouchers for free daily coffee and pastries at the campus cafe for a month–and congratulated us all.
Antoinette passed me her voucher. “As if I need it. You’re the one without money, and you look so tired all the time. Have a latte every once in a while.”
And as she passed me, sauntering off to Rémi at the bar and sliding up next to him with a smile, I couldn’t help but think that she’d already given me a much better gift.
Rémi took her hand like how Étienne helped her from the carriage, but it was to help her sit on the barstool. The room was much louder now, so she had to lean close to speak to him, and where I was at, I could see her lifting purposely off her stool to get close enough to press against his arm.
My chest felt tight. I was doing the right thing. Rémi could protect her, and he was so fierce about those he loved that he would do anything to help her. Plus he came from a business family, so he could help her navigate the upcoming media storm, right?
This was good, I promised myself. This was what I was here to do.