Chapter 182: A Game of Questions

More time passed without much trouble. Mercury practiced smithing with Yasashiku, getting better bit by bit. Was he still making nails? Yes. But, to be fair, he was making them rather quickly now.

Occasionally, Yasashiku would also have him work on more complicated projects, such as hinges. He did decently on those, too. Having many ghost-hands to work with ended up giving him quite a distinct advantage, really.

The days ticked by, with him gaining another level in his crafting Skill. They’d slow down now, because of course they would, but that was fine, too. He was at the point where the things he made were satisfactory, mostly. His basics were solid. Anything more was about dedication and practice.

Mercury had enough dedication for it. All he needed was time. Which, for once, he had.

Another page passed, and the winter chill was slowly driven away by a few warm days. A couple flowers sprouted from the ground.

Strangely, it felt like he was seeing an old friend again. Occasionally, Mercury would take strolls through the forest, his paws upon the grass, and feel it brush through his fur in greeting.

The iridescent sheen on it was greener than everywhere else, and it made him feel more at home these days. Of course, it was only a small thing, but small things added up.

He could tell that was doing something very similar. Made him aware that he wasn’t real. Honestly, without it, having pierced the veil of iridescence would probably have been much more uncomfortable.

Maybe he would’ve even thought he, himself, was fake? Unreal? He shuddered, because the thought was uncomfortable.

“Reality is what you make of it,” a voice chimed. It was soft and calm, like a spring breeze.

Mercury flinched for a moment, then followed the sound, looking up at a nearby tree. A girl sat high in the boughs, wind rustling through her wild hair. Perhaps calling her a girl was unkind, she seemed like a young adult, though.

She wore a dress made of autumn leaves, and ate from a loaf of bread, except when she took a bite and removed the bread from her face, the bit she ate reappeared a moment after. Her eyes were spring-green, and her hair pale as snow.

“Who’re you?” Mercury asked, tilting his head.

The woman giggled, her legs dangling in the air. “Why don’t you tell me, hmmm? Look real close, I promise I don’t bite!”

“I might,” Mercury said, shrugging.

“Look?”

“Bite,” he said, giving a small chuckle and flashing his canines. Or were they his felines?

Once more she laughed, then swung down the tree with a small flourish. Mercury blinked, and then the wind and grass caught her, placing her delicately onto the ground.

They whispered to him, too, that this was their friend. Strange.

“I’ve been meaning to meet you for a long time now, you knoooow~?” the girl said, almost pouting at Mercury. “But you’re ever so busy! Busy busy!”

Mercury raised an eyebrow. “Meaning to meet me? Do we know each other?”

She smiled, warmly, and shook her head. Her hair rustled like leaves. “No, I doubt we have. But I have looked at the night sky, if that counts?”

“Why would it?”

She cocked her head, then blinked at him. “Hmmm,” she hummed. “Why indeed.”

There was a momentary pause as Mercury waited for her to say something more, but when she didn’t, he spoke up again. “So then, why were you interested in meeting me?”

Once more, the woman smiled, that same radiant expression. “Let’s play a game, you and me!”

“Will one of us get hurt?”

She huffed, then pouted. “Of course not! The game is about questions!”

“What kind?”

“Stop asking so much before we even start!” she protested.

Mercury smiled, but rolled his eyes in mock annoyance. “Alright, then. Tell me about this game.”

“It’s a game of questions,” the girl said, whispering it conspiratorially, and wagging her finger at him. “You see, I get to either ask you a question or to do one thing, then you get to ask me a question, or ask me to do one thing.”

“It’s… truth or dare?” Mercury asked.

She cocked her head. “No, not quite? See, you don’t choose what I ask of you, whether it’s a question or a thing I’d like. But in exchange, we’ll make the penalty really small, yeah? How about the penalty is revealing one of our Skills?”

So she had Skills, that was good to know. didn’t flag her as immediately suspicious, and she didn’t seem like she was gonna attack him. Really, if he upset her, she seemed like the kinda girl who would stomp her feet and pout and complain and then do what he asked her to, anyway.

“Alright, sure. Do I get to start?”

“Yep! So then, since you asked your question, it’s my turn!” she said, sticking out her tongue at him.

“I wasn’t ready yet!” Mercury protested.

“Well who said you had to be?”

“No one, but since you asked your question, it’s my turn again,” he said, sticking his tongue out at her.

The woman gasped, then laughed, sat down on the grass, and leaned against a tree. Mercury would swear he saw the wood move to make a backrest for her.

“Fiiiiine,” she grumbled in mock-annoyance.

“So, let’s start simple. What’s your name?” he asked.

“Hmm,” she hummed, laying a finger on her lips. They were pale, too, kinda like her hair, really. “How about you call me Alice? The white hair, white rabbit kinda thing.”

“Sure, I can call you Alice. That was your question, then,” Mercury said with a sly smile.

“No fair!” Alice protested. “You can’t do that!”

“So you’re saying you want an extra Question,” Mercury said, purposely ending the sentence without intonating upwards.

“... Yes,” Alice nodded.

“Alright, you can have one free question, but I gotta ask something of you in exchange, you know. If you take a free question, then you’ll have to give me, say, one small gift.”

The woman looked at him expressionlessly for a moment, her green eyes seeming almost frosty as he spoke, but then he made his request and she turned bright. “Okay, I can do that!” she said. “Then, my first question becomes a demand! I want you to look at me, properly this time!”

“What’s properly mean?” Mercury asked.

Alice smiled. “Is that your question?”

He shook his head. “Surely, asking you to clarify on your task doesn’t count.”

She giggled. “Alright, alright! Look past the veils, and try to really see me.”

Mercury smirked, and gave a small sigh. “I was thinking you were about to ask that.”

But he didn’t see any harm in it. He… hardly ever looked at people when through the veils. It was a rather strange experience, since they untethered his thoughts from logic. He came up with strange, wild ideas for other people.

Some of those more comfortable than others. And some of them would lead him to the truth about his friends, and frankly, he wasn’t ready for that, not really.

But this girl had explicitly asked him to, so he wanted to oblige. He already knew that, somehow, she knew about Alice in Wonderland. Which was a definitive Earth reference. But then again, she really didn’t seem like someone from Earth.

With barely any effort at this point, Mercury entered a few steps deep into meditation. First, he activated , and the world around him became sharper. More defined, clearer edges.

Then, he slipped into ihn’ar, and things became connected. The sea of green around him was grass, and the air all around him was wind. He broke through the first veil of gold, and the girl in front of him didn’t change. No eldritch maws, no endless teeth, no head out of stars or multiple tails. A plain girl.

Plain, he now realized, in the way that he didn’t see a sheen or iridescence or aura around her. A moment later, he pierced the veil of iridescence.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Ah.

That was why he hadn’t seen an aura.

When he peered past what should reasonably be possible, past the parts of a person that were real and truly there, he saw Alice for what she was. So much more than a person.

She was heroism, packed down into the form of a person, imbued with love and being loved. She was fall and winter and spring and summer, she was the kindness of the world all around.

Her aura wasn’t wrapped around her skin like it was supposed to be for most people, it was spread all around. In the grass on the ground, in the wind in the air, even on the faint droplets of water still hanging on the leaves.

It was all around and nowhere at all.

“You’re a little bit more complicated than most people I know,” Mercury remarked, calmly. He felt himself slip a little bit as iridescent cracks in reality seemed to try and crush him, but smoothed them over and the world was whole, for now.

Alice smiled. “Says you.”

“Indeed, so sayeth I,” he replied, giving her a nod.

She chuckled at his antics. “Do you see now why asking me for a name was kinda pointless?”

He smirked. “I don’t think so at all. Calling you “the hero” would be quite rude, I think.”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“But you prefer Alice,” he said, neutrally.

“I do like Alice quite a bit,” she said, smiling a little crookedly.

“Then asking was worth it. Plus, it’s my turn anyway. Why’d you wanna meet me?” He asked.

By now he’d laid down in the grass as well. It was soft underneath his fur, and Alice didn’t seem to look down on him, which was nice.

Alice leaned back, and yes. The tree definitely shifted to accommodate her. Actually, Mercury saw the whole world shift as her aura moved, and the unreality of the wole world struck him again. He decided to cancel his ihn’ar, then, listening to Alice instead. “Well,” she started, rolling the word on her lips as if to see where it would take her. “You see, my friends have been telling me about you.”

“Your friends?”

She rolled her eyes. “We’ll count it as part of your first question. The , the , the , you name it. They rarely make friends, you know?”

Mercury smirked. “They are the quiet type,” he joked.

It elicited a chuckle from the woman. “So yes, that is why I have been wanting to meet you.”

“And why have you met me now?” Mercury asked.

Alice held up a finger with a triumphant grin. “That sounds like a whole other question, mister friend-of-my-friends. I should ask for your name, maybe. But I do kind of know it already?”

Mercury huffed. “Now that seems plain unfair.”

She shrugged. “Well, maybe you should have picked a less fitting one, then. Or gotten people to give you less fitting nicknames.”

He frowned. “I do actually mind people looking into my privacy that much.”

“Oh,” Alice said. She looked at him for a moment, not knowing how to react, then blushed slightly for a moment before her face fell. He could almost imagine her with drooping rabbit ears. “I, uhm. I see. I’m sorry. Would you mind telling me your name, then?”

“You can call me Mercury,” he said, extending an olive branch. “My full name is Mercury Rainfall Starlight, but that’s a mouthful.”

“Starlight,” she said. Her face had a strange, surprised expression, and for a moment she gazed upwards into the sky. She stared through the canopy into the blue high above for a full thirty seconds, then smiled at him. “Starlight suits you,” she said.

“Thanks,” he shrugged. “Picked it myself.”

“So did I!” Alice said with a giggle.

“Okay, my turn. Why did you meet me right now?” Mercury asked.

She frowned. “That’s a bad question. It has a bad answer. I don’t think you’d like to play this game anymore once you’ve heard it.”

Mercury looked at her, for a long moment. told him she was honest. He knew she was telling the truth. He wouldn’t like the answer to the question he’d just asked, and that was, in and of itself, annoying. But his Skill also told him that she meant well.

So, instead of pushing the issue, he sighed. “Fine, fine. Then you gotta tell me one of your Skills. And you better not say something like , alright?”

Alice grinned, then stuck her tongue out at him. Yes, she had been meaning to do exactly that. “Alright!” she said instead. “One of my most often used Skills is called . When both parties consent to Skill use, and only with both parties’ consent, will they know what exactly the other person means. No lies, no trickery. It’s painfully honest sometimes.”

That certainly was a strange Skill. Mercury nodded, satisfied with the answer. “Alright, your turn then.”

She smiled. “You have an item, right? A bound one? Can I see it?”

After regarding her for a moment, Mercury shrugged and summoned the Dream of Starvation. The dark metal wrapped around his front paws, darker than previously. He had noticed it was siphoning off a tiny amount of his mana regeneration whenever he was topped up, so it must have been using that to grow itself a little.

Alice’s mouth opened a little and she let out a small whistle. “Whoo! Sinister,” she said, smirking.

Mercury could actually feel that the weapon wanted to grow more. It would be easy to misconstrue this as a desire for blood, because, yes, that would allow the weapon to grow. But really, over his time crafting things, Mercury had learned that the crafter’s intent for an item would decide a lot of its future potential.

A desire to grow was normal, for most things. Hopefully it could become a little kinder, as time went on, or otherwise it would have to subsist of mana while he didn’t have anything to fight.

“I think it’s quite nice,” Mercury remarked.

Alice gave a small chuckle. “Sure.”

“So, Alice, how’d you learn ihn’ar?” Mercury asked bluntly.

She stared at him for a moment, blankly. Then she blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh! Is that what you call it? Making friends?”

He cocked his head. “Yeah?”

“Where I’m from, we call it the path of empathy. Since it’s about understanding and seeing commonalities among very different people and things.”

“Huh. That’s a unique viewpoint.”

She smiled. “I think yours is unique, rather. Though, even where I’m from, no one really learns the art anymore at all. I learnt it in the forest, you see. It’s cuz of my unique Skill, .”

Mercury raised an eyebrow. “A unique Skill to help you with it?”

“Yup!” Alice said, beaming.

“Cheater.”

She gasped. “What! No! If anything, you’re the cheater, being taught and all!”

“How’d you know I’m being taught?”

She froze. “Uhm. Uh. That’s a question, and it’s… not your turn.”

“One of my Skills is . How did you know?” He was on his feet again, and the claws on the Dream of Starvation were extended, digging into the ground.

“Mercury…”

“Alice. I want to know the answer to my question,” he bristled.

The woman in front of him let out a deep sigh, bone weary. “I can’t help it. I see some of the history of people. When you use Skills you share a part of yourself with the world. I know you have a teacher. I know they’re kind to you. That is the extent of it, I promise.”

She seemed so old yet so young at the same time. The image of it was disjointed, and the dissonance almost tore the iridescent veil apart again. Mercury felt his fur stand on edge, then he breathed in deep, and the bristles settled.

Slowly, under the effects of , the world came into focus again. Mercury breathed in, then out. “That’s… kinda messed up.”

Alice gave a sad kind of smile. “Sometimes, yes. But usually, it just helps me understand people better. It’s more getting vague ideas. I have some Skills for that, and does it too. I haven’t used those on you. Our common friends have just had a lot to say.” To accentuate her point, she ran her hands through the grass.

Mercury calmed, slowly, his heartbeat returning to normal. “Right,” he said, slowly laying back down. “Right. Your turn.”

“Thank you,” she said, genuinely. Then she paused, as if thinking on what to ask. “That Skill you used to calm down. What was that about?”

The mopaaw regarded her for a few moments, then sighed, a small kinda sound. “It’s . Lets me smooth over waves in my mind. It’ll settle anger, disgust, fear, all of that. Brings me back to neutral.”

She nodded in understanding. “It reminded me of a lake I saw once.”

“Sadly, Quietlake isn’t one of my names,” he tried a joke.

Alice smirked. “Could be.”

“Could, but isn’t. Hmmm. What’s your species, Alice?” he asked.

Her brows furrowed for a moment, then she sighed. “That’s a loaded question. It’s changed over the years, too, but right now it’s, uh, ‘Worldly Fae’.”

“Ah. Yes, that seems… charged.”

She gave a lopsided grin. “In your world too, huh. I never knew people were so terrified of fairies.”

“... Should they not be?”

At that, her expression turned pained. She really did wear her emotions on her sleeve. “No, they should. Really, really should. I know some of the others. They can be quite cruel.”

“Yeah, they can.”

There was a moment of quiet between the two, before Alice sighed. “I was hoping this would be more fun, you know?”

“I am sorry to disappoint?”

She frowned. “No, I don’t think this is your fault. The situation is bad, hence why I needed to meet you.”

“Oh? Are we talking about that, now?” Mercury intoned.

Alice cocked her head to the side. “Hmm,” she hummed. “We have a little more time, I suppose. Then, Mercury, what is it you most want to do?”

He smiled. “See the world, spend time with my friends. I want to live, simple as.”

Alice looked at him for a moment, then smiled back. “That is something I can relate to.”

“Next question for you, then. All these items, how did you get those?” Mercury asked.

“Those? Ah. Also my Skill. Freely given gifts are turned into little treasures, that is all. A bread that wants to feed people, water that wants to quench thirst. A dress that wants to keep the wearer comfortable, a belt that wants to store all my things. Simple things given meaning,” she said.

“So, your Skill turns favours into rewards?”

She waved her hand. “Only when I do them without expecting a reward.”

“Hm. I see. Your turn.”

“I’m guessing I shouldn’t ask about your teacher?” she asked.

Mercury looked her in the eyes for a long moment. The questions was genuine. She simply wanted to ensure she didn’t ask something uncomfortable. He sighed. “Haaaah. Let’s say I’m… protective of them. They have done me many favours. I have done them just as many. I would not give up their secrets, and so they trust me with them.”

Alice nodded. “I see. That’s okay. I can tell they mean a lot to you.” She smiled. “Then, instead, how about this. Is there anyone you miss a lot?”

“Yes,” Mercury nodded. “My brother. My niece, my sister in law. Cherry, and Second and Gladiator. And a few more than that.”

She nodded. “I see.”

By now, Mercury thought he had a decent grasp on what kind of person Alice was. She’d come to see him for a reason, but wanted to get to know him ahead of time. Not because she thought he was a terrible person, but because she thought he was a good one and wanted to know more about him.

It stemmed from the genuine desire of wanting someone else to speak with.

Then, a few more things clicked into place, suddenly lit up by . She was a hero, and she was often idolized. People didn’t talk to her like any other person, and didn’t want to play these kinds of games with her anymore.

“Oh, you’re terribly lonely, aren’t you,” he said, thinking out loud.

Alice froze.

Her face turned blank, as if all thoughts fled. She’d been having a pinched expression, the kind that came before bad news. This was probably the last question he’d get to ask, in fact. But he still said that.

She looked at him, for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said, then hugged her legs. “I think I am.”

Mercury laid a soft hand on her shoulder with . The Skill was powerful, but it could also be used for comforting. A small twist of magic even made it warm. He could feel her skin, too, and it was cool. Which made sense, it was winter after all.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you still enjoyed our talk, despite my outburst.”

She stared at him again, then gave a tiny, wispy smile. “You’re fine, Mercury. You’re… you’re fine.”

He nodded, once, then gave her time to speak.

For a few more moments, they sat in silence. Alice took deep breaths. The rhythm steadied. She sighed. Shook herself, then opened her eyes again, locking onto Mercury.

They were firm with resolve now, the eyes of a hero rather than an overwhelmed woman.

“I came to seek you out for one major reason. You stopped the blood eclipse. Now, what you do not know, is that it is what one may consider a ‘wandering archway’. They’re rare forms of the usual tunnels that move, and can sometimes even respond to outside stimuli,” she explained.

“What you probably also didn’t know is that the one you cleared, the realm of the crimson court, was the nascent remains of the sin of gluttony. The bearer of gluttony had long since abandoned that realm, and it has since fallen into decline. But you broke it, finally, and thus have attracted the eyes of the other, very much so still active, sins.”

“Oh fuck,” Mercury said.

“Additionally,” Alice said through gritted teeth, “this destruction of an ancient corpse has drawn the eyes of the fae courts. They will be sending an envoy, and I mean within the next few hours. They see you as little more than a fancy new toy to mess with.”

“Oh. Fuck.”