Let’s review. Tia spoke a lot of magical mumbo jumbo just now, but she also made a few comments that definitely mentioned her having been on Earth. As for the mumbo jumbo she talked about, she has proven it effective by suddenly talking. And, despite going through absolutely none of the painstaking practice the rest of us have, she just spoke perfectly, and I am relatively certain the only reason she sounded like a 5 year old instead of an adult is because of the size and shape of her head.
She mentioned something else as well. Something about that elf guy setting up a magical barrier of some sort. I guess that’s what all the paper banners and sprigs of various sorts of plant starts that were placed around the room were meant for.
Tia was obviously not just a normal human in her past life, though. For instance, being a member of some sort of society of secret magicians. But, if that was the case, then why did she somehow expect that we ought to know the same things she did? There are some weird things that just didn’t add up. I don’t know what to make of it, but we had some questions to ask her. Before I could come up with anything probing to say though, Rolwen had already gotten to grilling her.
“Ok, so… who were you in youur last live? It doesn’t zound like you uwure nowrmal.” he said. He seemed to have forgotten about his soft word limit as well. He was slurring like crazy. Not that it made any difference to how Tia was taking this.
My twin sister who, was now sitting in the hot-seat, squirmed a little bit and looked between me and Rolwen. “Umm… Well, no,” she said and then settled her gaze on me. There seemed to be some kind of meaning behind the look in her eyes, but it just wasn’t quite clicking with me. “I was…” She hesitated. “I was actually not human. I was the daughter of the goddess of healing from a fallen pantheon before we got sucked from Earth into this world.”
“Hah! Seriously!? A goddess?” Rolwen scoffed and chuckled lightly.
A fallen goddess of healing, huh? It might not mean much to Rolwen, but that's a term that definitely resonated with me. I’d heard that before, right before I died, and the situation was rather… Does that mean that Tia is...!?
“Really?” Levin responded to the fallen goddess comment, sounding more like a mix between interest and light skepticism than the incredulity vibes I was getting off Rolwen.
“Yeah,” Tia said, “I, uhh… was kinda attached to Asaren’s soul when we died, that’s how we were born as twins. I met her right before she died. Or rather, ‘he,’ back then. I saved his granddaughter in a big car crash.”
Yep, that removes all doubt. That’s also my cue, I’d better set this straight.
“Yeah. She’s a godd-ess. My gwandawtur awmost died, she helped,” I said.
I decided to keep quiet about the exact manner in which her healing magic took effect. Recounting that bloody scene would make for unneeded friction. Maybe not unwarranted, but definitely counter-productive to us working together to figure out this new life we found ourselves stuck together in.
“So, you seriously ARE a goddess! And from Earth!” Rolwen said. “Were you the one who Isekaied all of us, then?”
Was she the one who what, now?
“Huh?” Tia said, it sounded like she was just as confused as the rest of us.
“You know! Isekai! Like, take us to another world!” Rolwen said.
“Uhh… no… That was Asaren’s meditation that did that,” Tia said. “That was why I offered to heal Asa’s granddaughter, it was because she had the ability to do that!”
“What? How does that work?” Rolwen asked. “You said you were human, right Asa?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I told you! It was her meditation!”
“Her meditation? Sow, she’s got some kind of swuper secwet twain-on-a-mountain technique that awowed her to izekai her-self, kono-suba a godd-ess, and dwag ev-ery… one who’d died recently nearbwy to anover world awong with her?”
“Uhh… I… think so?” Tia said, clearly just as confused as I was at the babbled strange terminology he was using. The more concerning thing, though, was his pointing out how it was my fault that him, Levin, and quite likely even more people got pulled along with us into this new life. That was never part of the deal.
I guess that’s the price of making a contract with a demon, then. Getting uninvolved people swept up in it was definitely not my intention.
“So, how… did you do it?” Rolwen asked, turning his attention to me. “This.. is.. the first time.. I ever heard.. about… a human Isegai-ing other humans."
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He seemed to have opted for more of a stop-and-go approach to his speech in order to keep it clear this time. Crude, but effective enough.
“I don’t know. I didn’ g-now anythin-ning about dis,” I answered honestly, at least starting to get the gist of the meaning behind this ‘Isekai’ term he kept dropping.
“How can.. youu not know if… you were the one who… did it?” Rolwen asked. “You ARE the one who did it, right?”
“I think so.”
“So, what’s this… special… medi-tat-ion?”
“It’s… compwigated” I said. Honestly, that’s the best answer I could give. It would take me a good fifteen minutes just to explain the basics, and that’s if I was able to talk properly. I think I can completely discount my chances of explaining it in anything even approaching satisfactory levels if I’m still babbling like a baby.
“Yeah,” Tia said, “I BET it’s complicated! She had some kind of divine recognition, normally people on Earth were hunted as witches for having meditations powerful enough to allow for magic on Earth! It masked her from being noticed from divine forces, it was just luck that I even managed to see her in the first place. Or, ‘him,’ rather. And then, I had to follow Asa around in her past life all the time until I saw an opportunity to step forward and offer something!”
“So, you were stocking her?” Rolwen asked.
Wait, she said I was capable of magic?
“What’s that word mean?” Tia responded to Rolwen’s question.
“It means exatwe what you were doing!” Rolwen said. “Fowowing her awound like a gweeper! Or, ‘him!’ Sorry! I godda not be a misgendering doutch… even. In. Another world.”
“Umm… yeah… I gess,” Tia admitted after hearing Rolwen’s explanation of what a stalker is. Whether or not she actually understood what the term ‘gweeper’ referred to is an entirely different issue. In fact, she might very well have just straight up ignored most of the second half of what he said along with it, not that I could blame her for it.
This was all going absolutely nowhere, though. I guess it was important to get Tia’s identity out of the way first, before the real discussion could begin. Letting Tia continue to get pressured by Rolwen probably wouldn’t end well, though, so we should probably take this a different direction.
Time to ignore the suspicions of demonism, then. Let's give Tia an out for the sake of working toward a common goal.
“Ogay, so, let’s ged b-ack to how Tia gould talk,” I said. “Gan you teach me? I wanna stop babbling zo much.”
“Umm… sure!” Tia said, sounding quite elated. I guess she really was feeling pressured by Rolwen and was glad for the life-line I’d thrown her.
I literally felt my eyebrow twitch when the very next thing that happened was Tia doing a face-plant straight into the sleeping mat. Her suddenly clear and expressive speech capabilities had somehow made me forget about her bizzare self-propulsion method.
With her face still buried in the mat, she kicked her legs forward and actually shifted all her weight onto her head at a very bad looking angle. She jack-knifed her torso in a crazy demonstration of flexibility and brought her entire lower body so far forward it almost seemed like she was going to knee herself in the chin.
She picked up her head as her legs were coming down, and then flopped like a fish as her limbs went into an oddly controlled flailing while she vaulted over her own leg. This spiraling and tumbling mess of a controlled chaotic mess of limbs that involved a strange sort of rolling continued for about four or five more rotations before she plopped herself down next to me like a dog skidding across a linoleum floor and falling on it’s side. The analogy being all the more appropriate by the way she immediately scrambled to a dignified looking sitting position as though that earlier mess never happened and was nothing to even pay any thought to.
That’s it. Now that she can talk, and she so kindly just gave me the opening, I’ve just gotta ask. “Dia… uay do you move wike dat?” (Tia, why do you move like that?)
“What?” she asked, looking at me like I’m the crazy one for asking. “These bodies are really strong! They’re hard to control, but the muscles are really powerful! That was the best way to move before you can walk.”
“Ogay…” I said with a raised eyebrow. Well, I guess that counts as an answer. Maybe she’s right, but I gotta wonder about how her mind works to even come up with such a thing in the first place.
“So, uhh… how to speak!” Tia says. “You really just gotta think about speaking with your spirit, and then send spirit energy into that part of your spirit body. You… do know your spirit body is connected to and controls your physical body, right?”
“Umm… ginda?” I said. Not really might have been the better answer, actually. I knew some things about how to meditate. Mine was a combat meditation, and so some of it’s principles seemed like things that could be considered parallel to what she was saying, although there was still a pretty big leap in logic from what I knew to what she was saying.
Action follows thought, and thought follows intent. That was a principle used abundantly in my combat style. A concept that allowed us to attain the improbable on a fairly regular basis.
“So,” Tia continues, “you just control your mouth with your spirit first. Your spirit is something your soul creates in order to control your body. Your soul remembers how you are supposed to speak. You just need to feed the energy into your spirit in order to nurture the development of the right part of it. And then, when your spirit’s ability to control your mouth develops, your body will develop to follow it. If you put a lot of extra energy into your spirit, it will develop really fast and you will be able to talk immediately.”
Ok, so… just use my spirit to talk. Those words might as well be meaningless to me. I wouldn’t have the first clue of how to consciously use my spirit to do anything. I also do not know if or in what capacity it is related to using my intent.
Intent can achieve several things that could just as easily be dismissed as demonstrations of highly-trained skill. I have even considered myself that maybe intent is just a concept our style teaches to perform a sort of self-hypnosis in order to stop one’s own over-thinking brain from getting in the way of doing something you were always capable of doing.
I do not know. For all I know, what I am calling intent and what Tia is calling spirit could be the same thing. Or, they could be different and completely unrelated. Either way, a part of me just knows that if I follow the same steps I usually go through in mobilizing my intent I will be able to do this.