Saintess Theodora. Alongside the lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia, she was one of their chief suspects. And now there she was, sitting in a room alongside another suspect… and, if the rumours were to be believed, her chief love rival.
After a protracted moment of silence Death had recovered enough presence of mind to realise that standing about silently and invisibly was probably doing no great wonders for her public image, and properly manifested herself. She leaned down in a full curtsey. Connor, taking the cue, also materialised himself, bowing.
“You must excuse my compatriot and I. We did not mean to be rude. We have been asked by the king to investigate the strange occurrences around and about the kingdom; we had attempted to contact you by legal means, but as these were rebuffed, we set about doing so through less laudable methods.”
The saintess was about to say something in reply (and it probably wasn’t a pleasant something) when the lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia rushed forward. She began to squeeze Death’s cheeks, gushing all the while.
“Oh. My. Gerd. You. Are. So. CUTE. Oh, I could just squeeze these cheeks endlessly.”
“Mrr mrr mrrph.” Death got out. The saintess groaned. “Excuse her. She’s absolutely obsessed with all that is cute and adorable. Now, you’ve told us why you’re here. I don’t accept it - it was still rather rude - but if Rie accepts you then I suppose you’re a good person. What’s your name, though?”
Death blushed, realising she had completely forgotten to explain who she was… or even to come up with a fake name. Now that she thought about it, things had been proceeding awfully quickly. The king had accepted their explanation with no questions; they had set about their task, with no real worries or considerations; now here she was, in the thick of it.
She politely ground out, in between the lady Irene’s impressive display of the Overbearing Auntie Secret Technique, “De- Desdemona.”
Connor coughed. “You can tell them the truth. They’ve never met the Otome Game Villainess.”
Saintess Theodora half-stood up from the couch. “So it’s true? There’s an Otome Game Villainess plaguing the Kingdom of Yore?”
Death finally extricated herself from the lady Irene, who let go with a pout. “Yes, as my companion has so… wisely… revealed.”
The saintess sat back down on the cushions, looking shaken. “So it’s true. I’d hoped… I’d feared… well, it’s too late now.”
The lady Irene gave her a pat on the head, then, deciding that wasn’t enough, a full hug. “I told you, Dora. If it wasn’t you, it would be someone else.”
“…’Wasn’t you’?” Death asked. The saintess looked at her sympathetically, craning her head out from under the hug.
“It seems we have much to talk about. Sit down.”
“Yes, please do so. Our tea parties are always so enlivened from having another woman, especially such a cute one… and you’re welcome too,” the lady Irene said to Connor, as if he was an afterthought. The saintess gave a sharp and ironic bark.
“Don’t take it personally. She isn’t aware of the existence of any man, save the prince.”
Lady Irene cast her a sharp look. “That’s not true. I acknowledge his father, and mine.”
“But you affirm that you acknowledge nobody else?” The saintess asked.
“Potentially.” Returned the duke’s daughter mischievously. Then she left the room momentarily, politely asking a maid to bring more tea and snacks for their unexpected guests.
Once they were all properly settled with their cosy tea and delicious snacks, the lady Irene turned to Death and Connor.
“So… why are you here?”
Death looked at Connor. “They’re really not the Otome Game Villainess?”
Connor sipped his tea, eyeing the meringues. He desperately cycled his qi, internally whooping as he finally got a stomach linkage. Verbally, however, all he said was, “the Yang Eyes wouldn’t lie - at least not per what you said. They have no flowers or shalalas floating about them.”
Death nodded, then proceeded to tell them everything.
Everything.
She started with her Task, then proceeded through meeting Connor, and receiving the Body Regeneration Technique from Art, followed by their journey to the Kingdom of Yore and convincing the king. At the end of it the noble lady and her saintess friend were agog.
“So you’re really, like, Death?” The saintess asked.
“That’s right,” agreed Death, nibbling on a strawberry.
The lady Irene leaned forward. “So what’s the afterlife like? I hear there’s free unlimited ice cream and cake.”
“Sure, if you can swim the river of the afterlife,” Connor noted. Death coughed to distract them from uncomfortable Underworld realities.
“More importantly, what’s your story? Why are you two friends? And what did the lady Irene mean, ‘if it wasn’t you, it would be somebody else’?”
The lady Irene and the saintess examined each other. The former gave the latter a comforting pat on the hand. “Don’t worry. You got this.”
Saintess Theodora’s face, which until then had been drawn and suspicious, suddenly cleared up. She smiled, then addressed Death.
“To tell you the truth… Your friend Connor is not the only one in this room who’s a transmigrator. I am too. Not an ‘Otome Game Villainess,’ though, whatever that is - at least I don’t think you’re using that word the same way I am - as I’m not a villainess. Well, not according to the hit otome game Time to Seduce the Prince, at any rate; obviously, I wouldn’t know if I really were a villainess, at a moral level.”
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She took a deep breath of air, the difficulty of her task weighing down on her. Death gave her an encouraging smile, preserving her silence to let the saintess speak. The latter smiled wanly.
“Shortly before my death, I played an otome game called Time to Seduce the Prince. It was, to be perfectly frank, an awful game. It was about a witch from the boonies who, one fine day, met the kingdom’s prince while he was galloping through the woods. As she had a medicine he needed, he took her back to the castle. There, the two of them slowly fell in love with one another, a process aided by the designs of the game’s villainess - the wonderful lady Irene Isabelle Isadora de Potencia here - to keep them apart.
“The lady Irene was, as she is here, the prince’s actual fiancée; the game did nothing to address the apperception, entirely correct in my mind, that she was completely innocent of any real wrongdoing, and was simply being screwed about her cheating bastard of a fiancé.”
“She’s being too nice to me. I can assure you, I’m a thoroughly nasty woman,” said the lady Irene, her serene and angelic features containing not a hint of irony. “Why, once I caught a woman attempting to seduce my future husband, and you should have heard how I tore her apart.”
“Which was entirely merited,” the saintess snapped, “she was attempting to get your fiancé to cheat on you, Rie.”
“She was a sweet girl, in her own way. Just desperate. I later apologised to her; she apologised to me in return, and I was able to set her up with a cute baron’s son.”
“Which proves my initial point. You’re not the villainess.”
“Aww,” said the lady Irene, and petted her best friend, “aren’t you cute.”
The saintess grumbled, but realised she was getting woefully off target. “But as I was saying. I have no taste for cheating and even less for being the cause of a dissolved engagement, and as such my relationship to the game was purely one of contempt. Filled with distaste upon completing it, I left the house to clear my head… and was promptly hit by a speeding steamroller.”
“Always a danger, speeding steamrollers,” Connor observed.
“Precisely! But as I was saying, moments after being hit by the speeding steamroller, I awoke in the game I so despised… as its main deuteragonist. The saintess Theodora was, in the game, a loyal crony of the witch; and it was she who was directly responsible for 'removing,' as it were, the lady Irene upon the latter's ignominious defeat. You can imagine my horror. I immediately resolved to have nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with the plot, a resolution that was easy to keep, because I’d been reincarnated into the game when I - err, the saintess Theodora - was first born.”
“And yet you’re still a saintess,” Connor remarked politely. “I presume that was part of the game?”
The saintess blushed, prompting a laugh from the lady Irene. “Yes… maybe ‘absolutely nothing’ was too strong a term. Truth be told, there was one thing I liked in the game.”
And here she became uncomfortably silent. There was more laughter from Irene. “Come on, Dora. You can’t lead them this far and not reveal the whole, sordid, terrible truth.”
The saintess blushed furiously, her face screwing up in rage. “Oh come on. ‘Sordid’ is a little harsh.”
The lady Irene smirked, waggling her eyebrows at Death and Connor. “Got her.”
If it was possible for Theodora to blush harder, she would have. Nevertheless, she had dug her own grave; she had to lie in it. “The truth is… there was one character I absolutely adored. Well, two - Rie here is wonderful, even if she can be a little so and so on occasion. But the other one, the one who I adored, who I still adore, is… Berthold.”
Death and Connor stayed completely silent. They had no idea who Berthold was. Picking up on their confusion, Theodora coughed in embarrassment. “Berthold is the prince’s loyal and much abused adjutant. I first noticed him in Time to Seduce the Prince when I saw how every time the prince wanted to go off with his witch 'protagonist', he unloaded all his workload on the poor, undeserving administrative assistant. This grossed me out, but I also admired the poor servant for receiving such an utterly unacceptable workload and still, somehow, someway, managing to carry on - to do his due duty, in spite of the excessive workload.”
“So you became the saintess to get his attention?” Connor asked. The saintess gagged.
“No. I became the saintess to have a viable excuse to visit him - since I can’t visit him without visiting the prince.” And she sighed with unabashed pleasure. “What a great man. He hasn’t returned my affection yet, but once he learned who I was - I have less patience for liars than I do cheaters - he helped me register myself with the Oktoberlander Transmigrator Bureau.”
Death groaned, leaning back in the chair. “Which explains why we didn’t know you were a transmigrator - they model their classifications, legal protocols, and ethics on the Bureau for Transmigrator Affairs of the nearby Great Xuan - including their privacy policies.”
Connor nodded, eating another meringue. (If you have a stomach, flaunt it.) “And it also explains the rumours about the saintess trying to seduce the prince.”
Theodora gasped. “I? Seduce the prince?”
“Well you got to admit, Dora, you spend an awful large amount of time around my destined love,” Irene teased. Theodora gagged.
“Which is the one thing I don’t understand. Why are the two of you such close friends?” Death asked politely.
“Who wouldn’t want to be friends with this cutie?” Irene replied.
“So basically everything out there about you is a blatant falsehood,” Connor said, chuckling.
“Basically,” agreed Irene pleasantly, “although I wasn’t lying about being a right proper arse to anyone who tries to steal my fiancé.”
“Which is entirely unnecessary, given that he’s a cheating bastard,” the saintess remonstrated, prompting Irene to snort.
“Nonsense. He’s under the sway of dark isekai magic - that’s what I’ve always said, and that’s what these two lovely secret agents just confirmed.”
“Yeah, he is - and he succumbed to the sway of that dark isekai magic, because he’s a weak man… see my earlier comments.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“Pfft- No, I-”
From there the conversation degenerated rapidly, and neither Death nor Connor learned much of anything at all. They did, however, enjoy themselves tremendously, agreeing to meet the saintess and lady Irene again the next day at lunch. At the end of the evening they were shown out to great aplomb (if to a moderate amount of confusion on the part of the staff, who had never seen them sneak in), leaving the house with firm handshakes and many profusions of friendship.
“Well they were astonishingly wonderful people,” Connor said, as they exited the gate.
“Hardly surprising,” Death observed, “rumours are usually the opposite of reality.”
Connor was about to say more, when they found themselves interrupted in a rather… rude… fashion.
“Die, demons!” The black haired young man cried, charging the intrepid pair with his sword raised, “die to the blade of my epic Cheat Skill!”
“…Huh?” said Connor, moments before the youth ran him through.
Connor’s Stats:
Name: Connor Crinkle (formerly known as uPhone 12 model MX0169)
Age: 22
Race: Ghost of a Demon
Occupation: Exorcist
Physiological Stats:
[Leaves] 0 [Fruit] 0
[Xylem] 1 [Phloem] 1
[Bark] 1 [Heartwood] 2
[Roots] 5
Physical Stats:
[Geocaching] 0 [Lacrosse] 1
[Pole Vaulting] 1
Other sports to be unlocked later
Master of the Leifu Exorcistic Arts:
[Master of Exorcism] 1
[Master of the Storm] 0
[Yang Eyes] 0