Page and Kalender made eye contact. Somehow, looking at each other felt wrong right now, so they quickly turned away. Georgie cocked an eyebrow, but he kept his thoughts to himself.
“Well!” Georgie clapped. “Let’s look for some clues, shall we?”
***
With the context established, they got right down to looking for clues. It may have been better, however, not to have been informed of the context at all.
Neither Kalender nor Page knew what to feel in that moment. Their brains buzzed with questions like ‘Why would you put preservation magic on this?’ as they, with disgusting curiosity, looked for patterns and clues in the blood splotches on the sheets and the rug.
As hoped for, the bed sheets didn’t hold any clues. Good. No one wanted to touch them.
Kalender looked under the beds, but there were only centuries-old dust bunnies, caught in stasis by the preservation magic.
“Nothing here,” he said. He got up—but too fast, and he found his face unusually close to Page’s. They both pulled back before the distance closed any further.
“Wait,” Georgie said, “do that again.”
“Sorry?” “W-what?”
“There was a pink light coming off of the window.” Georgie pointed at the window between the two beds. “Wait … it could’ve been the curtain.”
He excused himself between the pair and tiptoed over the bloody rug, pulling the curtains closed. He looked back to the two.
“Well? Put your faces near each other. Go on.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?” Kalender said. He and Page eyed each other. There was a glint in the girl’s eye. [+1 Excitement]
“How does it feel?” he asked.
“How does what feel?” [+1 Excitement]
Kalender sighed—then in one step, he brought his face close to hers. She could feel his breath.
“To be this close to getting what you’ve been teasing me for?”
His voice was low and warm, soothing like a fireplace. [+1 Excitement] Wait, what am I thinking! She turned away just a tiny bit. “I-it’s alright.”
Just as her blush was growing brighter, so was the curtain. It was enough that both Kalender and Page turned to look, and there was a glowing imprint of a pink kiss on the curtain.
After a few seconds, it stopped glowing. Georgie looked back to both of them with a ‘See? What did I tell ya?’ kind of look. Kalender just nodded. Page playfully pushed his face away. Feigning rejection, Kalender then lightly slapped her hand, so she slapped his slapping hand. For about two seconds, they were cats.
Kalender looked back to Georgie, remembering that the Guide was still there. Page was a bit disappointed, but she didn’t want to be rude, either.
She gave one last parting paw on Kalender’s back. Heh.
Kalender shook his head and chuckled, before properly facing Georgie. “Any idea how that worked?” he asked.
“Some sort of empathy magic. This room’s probably empathy-themed. You wouldn’t happen to be an expert at empathy magic, m’lord mage?”
“Not sure how that works, but I think I can figure something out from that thing.”
Kalender stepped closer and examined the kiss. It was an embroidery in the shape of a kiss, but one in beige thread, almost blending in with the curtain’s similar color; it really wasn’t obvious at first glance. Looking closer, the embroidery was making irregular patterns inside the area of the shape—patterns which were tripping All-Language Fluency—a non-circle magic instruction set! So there’s more than one way to do it, huh? Interesting.
“Did the Hero have other, uh, harem members? Someone who did embroidery or any other needlework?” he asked. One them might’ve had a Skill to make something like this.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Georgie thought for a moment. “Ah, there’s one, named Three.”
Kalender raised an eyebrow, and not just because of the weird name. “No Occupation?”
“None. She’s only mentioned a few times in journals, and m’Lord Shal-yen keeps quiet about her.”
Weird.
Georgie continued, “We do know, however, that she took to needlework, making many of the high-end articles that the Hero and his members were most-widely recognized in.”
“And she never became a Seamstress?”
“I’ve heard that she considered it a hobby.”
Kalender and Georgie continued to stare at the embroidered kiss. What’s it supposed to mean? Is the curtain itself the clue? The magic instructions amounted to “Glow when someone’s embarrassed,” which didn’t help much. They checked it up and down, but turned up nothing. The meaning of it eluded them.
Page walked up to it. Unlike the experts, it didn’t look like anything to her, so she used an appraisal spell.
***
Kiss and be rewarded. By the way, this message will self-delete. No one will believe you.
***
She blinked, and it was gone, leaving her wide-eyed.
“What is it?” Kalender asked.
“I Appraised it, and it said we have to kiss!”
Kalender did a quick appraisal spell and turned back to her. “Are you that desperate?”
“It also said it’d self-delete!”
Kalender shook his head, even while Page was saying “You have to believe me!”—he just couldn’t. In the first place, if there were such a complicated instruction, he would’ve read it off the embroidery.
Wait, no, can the physical instruction itself be magicked with a Skill?
“Say I believe you,” he said, squinting, “what would you do?”
“The deepest kiss I can possibly—”
Kalender covered her mouth. After two seconds of high-bandwidth eye contact between each other, he removed his hand.
“Just five seconds—”
He covered her mouth, then removed it after a second.
“A peck—”
Cover. Remove.
“On the cheek—”
Cover. He thought about it for a moment, his eyes darting to the side. A peck on the cheek seems reasonable enough.
Remove. “A peck on the cheek,” he said. “A peck on the cheek, okay?”
Her eyes sparkled. She threw herself at him, wrapping him in an inescapable hug, and initiating a full-contact, high-impact kiss—on the cheek.
The inertia, however, was too much, and they both fell on a bed. In one part of Kalender’s mind, he was panicked about having fallen on top of a filthy, filthy bed infused with someone else’s hard evidence, but in the other part, he saw something strange in Page’s eyes. Her own vision was overridden by a mix of emotions that should have been happiness.
Through the eyes of Interpersonal Bubble, she did not—or rather, refused to think of the space that Kalender was in as her own. Even if her physical body was pressed against him, the space which she claimed was not with her. It was hovering maybe 10cm above his skin.
That she threw herself against him, but refused to claim a place beside him—it was as if she didn’t know if she should have been there. If you feel that way, then what’s the wide smile for? He should’ve used his Skill on her far earlier, then maybe he could’ve brought it up much sooner, but hindsight was 20-20.
Before anyone could say anything, the bed itself began to glow. A sheet of purple light lifted up from around both of them and coalesced into a point—shooting towards Page so fast it spooked her.
She received a notification.
***
[Seed of the Wisdom of Three]
Shroud not your worries, lay bare your fears
Home will arrive, loneliness effaced
If in him, your faith, will relegate
***
Huh? Wait wait wait wait wait wait! What’d that even mean? Why was she even seeing this? Well, okay, it sounded wise-ish, but Georgie said this was all probably empathy magic—so, what, this spell knew what Page was feeling deep down?
… But it wasn’t like that! Loneliness? Where?! Her worst thing was worrying about being able to hang out with Kalender in the future! And she already had a solution to that! … Okay, fine, she may actually have reservations with m-marrying him, but it still wasn’t that bad of an issue to earn her this kind of advice!
W-what if … the spell actually could see into her subconscious … o-or something. Was there something she was afraid of this whole time? Like, really afraid of?
She looked up towards Kalender. She was still on his chest. It’s been a bumpy few weeks with him, and she wanted more—but, she knew, with a literal goddess as one of their party members, and some sort of Really Big Main Quest hanging from Kalender’s shoulders, that they’d eventually face danger, the likes of which they’d never seen before.
Adventure and danger went hand-in-hand. It was something she had to face, eventually. She would get hurt at some point, and not just from some slime’s poisons. She’d be okay with that.
She looked up to Kalender.
If he got hurt … she would not be okay with that.
“Page?” Kalender said. “Are you okay?”
“I-I’m fine!”
She jumped off like a spooked cat. Georgie was still looking out the window when he heard her feet hit the ground; it felt quite wrong to see a girl on top of a guy on a bloodstained bed, even if there wasn’t anything untoward happening. He turned around just in time to see Page patting herself down.
Kalender got off the bed as fast as he could. “That magic hit you head-on. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah! I’m fine!” She twirled around with a smile. He smiled, but, he wasn’t convinced.
“The two of you should speak with m’Lord Shal-yen,” Georgie said. “Three is the least known member, and her magic, even less known. He usually refuses to talk about her, but I think he’ll make an exception.”
Kalender still eyed Page with worry, but like Georgie said, Shal-yen would probably help. He shouldn’t have left the place yet. Hopefully, they could resolve this situation quickly.