Isse and Albert walked out of the 'Empty Hearted's Rest' without smiles on their faces.
There were reasons to smile, naturally, but they didn't feel like it. Isse had been given the chance to see the best memories of her past one last time with the happiness that was theirs, the bad moments taken away for a few too-short moments, seemingly completely forgotten, only for her to then drink that tea and get everything back. Now, it was all gray: the good and the bad had been mixed together, making everything look like a black and white film. The sadness, the pain, the sorrow, everything was still there but... milder. As if someone had forced the good moments to give up something theirs to make the bad ones better.
All in all, now she just felt nostalgic.
As for Albert, he didn't smile because he knew exactly what had happened. He knew that this had helped, but the price had been high for the girl. An equivalent exchange that would make most [Alchemists] want to retch and throw the concoction out of a window, never to be seen again. Because this was wrong. And, at the same time, it was the only way to help her, because Time has the bad habit of taking her sweet Herself when it comes to helping heal this kind of wounds, and if Grazia's reaction was anything to go by, these ones were even deeper than some of the ones some [Veterans] there had.
"Will you teach me?" she suddenly asked, getting Albert out of his thoughts.
"To become a [Spy]?" he asked.
She nodded.
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he took a deep breath, and wondered if it was worth teaching her the ways of the job he had done so much to leave behind.
Then, he sighed, nodding, and promising himself he'd do all that was in his power to keep her away from the Game itself.
"Yes. I did promise you, after all. Are you sure?"
He still gave her a chance to back out. He would give her plenty of those, he promised himself.
"I'm sure. I will avenge them. All of them."
Albert nodded. Her reasons... they weren't good. They were more an [Assassin]'s reasons than a [Spy]'s, but that could be worked with.
"It will take time."
"Time is the only thing I have plenty of."
The two of them walked slowly, in silence.
"In that case, we'll begin tomorrow."
----------------------------------------
Once upon a time, the gods interefered. This was, naturally, before the arachne, before the deal with Death.
This happened only a few centuries after the birth of the First Dealmaker. Precisely, it happened after Rodar was cursed with Misfortune, after the Goddess of Luck was slain in battle by the Traitor. All thanks to that being's Skills.
The gods, furious and outraged, attempted to do something so incredibly stupid, so grandiose, that if it wasn't for the Purge that happened another few centuries later, the world would still be writing comedies about it and laugh about it. In short, they attempted to regulate what Classes and Skills the people could get, since they couldn't find a way to reach the System.
They communicated their desires to their churches and [Priests], telling them what to do, what to allow, and what to deny. And, naturally, they started to work. Because of course that mindless flock would always act first and ask questions later.
And while people who were deemed to have 'unsuitable' of 'forbidden' Classes and Skills had them forcibly removed or were removed, while criminal organizations all over the world found themselves swamped with [Dreamers] and [Storytellers] and high Level individuals who were attempting to hide their hard earned Skills, a single person decided to add chaotic fuel to this raging inferno.
That person being the previously mentioned Mina, the First Dealmaker. The girl who'd become one with the most powerful devil to ever be created by the gods thanks to a misused Skill, the new immortal who was still learning just how much power she had. She decided to have some fun at the gods' expenses
Let's say this first though: Mina had nothing against the gods at the time. Sure, she thought of them as stuffy old coots who really should get a hobby or fuck a bit more, and sure they had given an entire continent to the Goddess of Luck to rule over because they had lost a bet with her (no, really, they should've thought better than to play a game of dice with the incarnation of Luck), but they weren't really all bad. Mina was just chaotic, and still very much drunk with power.
So it was that she created something that would, in the millenia to come, cause the gods to wonder whyever they had decided to create Devils. She created Skill Scrolls.
The concept behind them was oh so simple: they were deals. Deals with the System itself. Or rather, deals forced upon the System. A way to seal a Skill inside a piece of paper in exchange for losing a few of your Levels.
A perfect little thing for all those that desired to hide their own Skills and Classes from the Church. And, in the millenia to come, an instrument in the hands of criminals and honest folk alike to pass down knowledge and abilities that would otherwise be most probably forgotten or lost.
Safe to say, thanks to Mina's little prank, the gods' plans were twarted.
----------------------------------------
The next morning came fast as both Isse and Siidi slept, welcoming the darkness of oblivion, of a sleep without dreams.
When they woke, it wasn't to the usual mix of sadness bordering on depression and a desire to just close their eyes again and either fall asleep again or spend some time together in their Mind Castle.
Instead, that morning, they woke to up to... nothing at all.
They remembered the deaths, the fire, the little spider that had given them a second chance. They remembered everything. But, instead of the usual sensations the memories brought normally, there was just a feeling of sadness comparable to, say, someone giving you a bad present on your birthday. It was bad, but it wasn't the end of the world.
She knew, deep down, that this was wrong, that she shouldn't feel only a bit sad for what had happened, but she just couldn't bring herself to feel more than that, her mind seemingly incapable of even understanding why she should feel sad.
I don't know how to feel about this, she thought.
It's probably better then for us not to think about it at all, replied Siidi.
...Agreed.
She skittered down her hammock (there was no pang of hurt at seeing it empty, Anda not following at her side) and went out of her room.
Immediately, she picked up the shent of some cooking meat coming from a door at the end of the corridor that passed through the whole first floor. Again, she marveled at the total lack of decoration in this floor, at the empty walls devoid of pictures (which, actually, wasn't unexpected. She was pretty sure they hadn't yet invented photography in this world) or paintings (again, not unexpected. They probably cost a lot). It was positively depressing, and it scared her how much the emptiness of this hall made her feel worse than the memory of her dead sisters and soulmate.
Whatever that woman did, I'll never allow her to do it to us again. I don't care if you'll want to do it again. I'll fight you over it.
Don't worry. I'd probably rather live in pain than feel so alien inside my own mind.
She felt Siidi nod in her head and they walked into the room the good smell was coming from, her clothes having shifted from their 'nightgown form' to their usual 'public appearance form', hiding her spider half.
The room they were in was sparsely decorated. Yes, sparsely, as in there was something on the walls other than the strictly necessary furniture that you'd see in a kitchen. On the far side of the room from the door was a big oven made out of stone, a fire burning slowly inside, hot enough to cook, but not to the point that it would burn the food you put inside. It also made the room feel toasty, which she imagined would probably feel like an inferno in summer. Beside the oven were three counters that, she presumed, were filled with various foodstuffs, while on top of them was a true selection of blades perfect for any cutting needs of any foods you could imagine: vegetables, bread, meats both tender and stringy, skinning, that one knife would look more appropriate at a butcher's, while that other one looked perfect to murder someone.
She decided not to focus on the astonishing amount of cutting implements and instead to look at the one decoration in the room: a small bookeshelf.
"Good morning," she said to Albert, who was staring at some meat sizzling in a pan by the fire, as she skittered towards the wooden bookshelf.
"Good morning Isse. Did you sleep well?" he answered, not looking away from the pan for a single moment. He was so focused that one would've thought the destiny of the world depended on how well done that meat was.
"I slept," she answered, beginning to read the titles in Irevian and... ok, they weren't all in Irevian.
"Why do you have books in something other than Irevian?" she asked before he could ask her what she meant with her answer.
At her question he looked away from the pan and towards her, a small smile creasing his lips as he noticed her looking at the books. Most of them were small and leatherbound, words stamped on the spines in Irevian and what she imagined were either other languages or, possibly, secret codes. It wasn't impossible, seeing Albert's Class.
"Ah, well, I've travelled around a lot, and for my... job, I had to learn several other languages. You'll find books in Irevian, Evarien, Akian and if I remember it right there's also one written in an old harpy dialect. Nothing in Rodean, though. I was lucky enough not to be sent to that blasted continent in my missions, and even when I had to go there... I didn't stay long enough to care to learn it."
She nodded wordlessly and looked at the titles she could read: 'A Brief History of Dragons', 'A Summary of The Saintly Necromancer's Deeds', 'A Kataleptyc Manual on Dimensional Magic and Its Uses', 'The Tides of Passion'... she stopped at that one. The cover was made of simple brown leather and was rather unassuming, and because of that she picked it up immediately and, after opening it on the first page, stopped again.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
The words weren't, as she'd expected, written by hand, like the books she and Pochi had bought that one time in the city. These were printed.
"I didn't know you had printing presses," she said, looking up from her book of choice, then back down as she began reading to see if she could needle Albert about leaving some kind of steamy novel in the open like that.
"I'd expect you not to, since you spent all your life livi -" he stopped mid sentence, realizing something. He had been about to say that she couldn't possibly know about printing presses because she had lived all her life in a forest, but then, how could she possibly know that printing presses were called that way?
"Did you have many books back in your... old home?"
Isse shook her head distractedly as she paged through the book with increasing speed, but never fast enough to risk damaging the pages. She had always loved the little things.
"Not many, no, and they were all hand written."
"Then how do you know what printing presses are, dear?"
Isse stopped paging through the book and put it back in its place on the bookshelf, huffing discontentedly. It hadn't been some kind of steamy novel about starstruck lovers or the like. No, instead it was literally a description on how the tides of a port city called 'Passion' (Stars be damned who in Airm had thought that naming a city that way was a good idea?) worked. They were, apparently, very strange, and sometimes people disappeared in them, and not because they drowned. Just... puff, and gone! There were many speculations and the likes, and she'd probably get back to reading it sooner or later, and she realized in that moment that whoever had written that book had given it that title to try and sell some more. Catch the eye and sell for the joke of it.
"I just do," she finally answered Albert with a small smile, hoping it would make her look enigmatic.
Albert sighed: "Yes, well, I expected as much. Now, eat your breakfast. You're going to need the energy."
----------------------------------------
"What is this?"
She stared at a small scroll in front of her. It looked like it was made out of paper, two wooden dovels holding it closed. A single red string completed the ensemble, sealing everything in place.
"This, Isse, is a Skill Scroll. Do you know what those are?"
She shook her head.
"Skill Scrolls are... well, they're like deals, written on paper, with the System itself. The scrolls contain a Skill, and you can learn it by using it."
Isse frowned: "Just like that? I open this little scroll, give it a read, and I get a Skill. For free?"
Albert shook his head: "No, no reading isn't required. But it's not that easy. You won't just get the Skill. You will earn it. And there are limitations, of a sort. When you'll open up the scroll, you'll enter a... my old master called it an illusory world, which is probably the best way to describe it. One way or another, it will let you earn the Skill sealed inside the scroll."
Isse raised an eyebrow: "Can this be done with any Skill?"
"Any, yes."
"So, say I found someone with a Level 70 Skill, and I managed to get them to sign it over to me. Could I just get that Skill then?"
"Yes, but actually no. You see, time still passes when you use a Skill Scroll, so if you were to try to learn a Level 70 Skill you'd probably end up spending months and months on end trying to do it. There's also the problem of you not being able to just leave a Skill Scroll's world, which means you wouldn't even be able to eat. Finally, I've heard stories of people outright dying when trying to learn from a Skill Scroll containing a too powerful Skill because they just couldn't handle the experience. Their brains just stopped."
And at that Isse immediately dropped the scroll she'd taken in her hands.
Albert chuckled: "Don't worry. This scroll contains a basic [Spy] Skill. I got it at Level 3. It'll be more useful to actually get you the Class than as a Skill."
Isse frowned at that: "Wait, let's take a step back: this Scroll contains one of your Skills? You gave up some of your Levels to make this?"
He shook his head: "Oh, no, I didn't. I'm... pretty high Level. And this, as I said, is a very basic Skill. I didn't even have to lose a Level to make this. Now, open it up and read the first line."
She did just that: she unfurled the string and placed it beside her on the table. Then, with slightly trembling hands, she unrolled the scroll.
The first line read like this:
I, Mina, the First Dealmaker, declare, through the power I bestowed upon myself by -
She didn't get to read anything more as her eyes unfocused and she felt herself begin to fall forwards and at the same time downwards, her stomach doing a flip like it did when she dreamed of falling. She half expected to wake up, but instead she kept falling and falling and falling and falling and...
"See you on the other side dear," she heard Albert's voice, a whisper in the distance.
And then she fell face first into the hard ground.
----------------------------------------
She groaned into the... whatever it was that was under her face. It felt cold to the touch and hard and it scraped unpleasantly against her skin, which should've been all the incentive she needed to sit up, but she felt so nauseus that she'd rather scrape her face into a meatgrinder than move.
"Huh, first time's always the worst," said a voice nearby.
A moment later a shadow darkened her vision and Isse still didn't move because that would probably still make her stomach feel like someone was trying to invert her esophageal sphincter and the pyloric one.
"Come on girl, it's all in your head. If this is enough to knock you out then my student's really lowered his standards."
And then a foot snuck underneath her and somehow managed to turn her as if her spider half alone didn't weigh like three full sacks of potatoes. Her vision blurred and, for a second, she was certain that she was going to throw up, but then the sensation disappeared as fast as a lightning strike in a cloudless sky.
"See? Wasn't so bad."
Finally, she looked at the person whose shadow had been darknening her vision for a while now and she put their face into focus.
"I'll be sincere here, I was expecting to see Albert. Aren't you the old man from the Spell that was hiding his Classes?"
Indeed, the same old man was staring right at her. His hair was gray and his eyes were a deep warm brown, although these ones weren't as kind as the ones he had in the vision of the fog-covered lake. He wore some simple gray robes that made him look more like a [Mage] than what she expected a [Spy] should look like, and in his left hand he was holding the 'bonking stick' he'd used on her and Siidi to get them to leave. He was also still missing his left leg.
"Yeah, no, the System decided that he would've been too kind with you and instead assigned me to your training. He's gone too soft with the years. But then, he probably deserves it, after succeding where I failed."
Isse frowned and, finally, she got up, looking around.
She and the old man were standing in an empty space. Literally, there was just a stone floor in every direction as far as the eye could see, while the sky was a made out of uniform fog through which radiated suffused light.
We're in the Matrix weapon room! Woohoo!, she thought sarcastically.
"Care to explain what you mean with that last sentence?"
"What? The succeding where I failed part?"
She nodded.
The old man seemed to think about it for a moment, then shook his head: "No, I don't think I will, little arachne. You're gonna have to earn that answer. For that matter, any answer to any question you'll make you'll first have to earn. Well, any question other than ones about how to be a good [Spy]."
She sighed heavily as she heard that. Of course it couldn't be that easy.
"Now, tell me, why do you want to become a [Spy]?"
Isse raised an eyebrow questioningly: "Why would you need to know? Aren't you just supposed to teach me stuff so that I can get a Skill?"
The man lifted his right hand and shook it in a so-so gesture: "That would normally be the case, yes, but since you don't have the basic Class required to get the Skill you'll also hve to get that. Which leaves me with a lot of leeway on how to do this. Now answer me."
Again, Isse sighed: "You talk as if you were real -"
"Oh, trust me girl, in here I'm as real as you are. I am, if you will, an exact replica of the man I used to be, without the downsides. For example, this missing leg?" he wiggled the stump of his leg underneath the robes, "I can go back to the me I was before I lost it."
And suddenly a slightly younger version of him stood right in front of her. His hair was slightly less gray, with hints of brown here and there, his eyes were sharper and his face had lost a few of its wrinkles.
"But let's not change the subject. You haven't yet answered me," he said, going back to looking like his older self.
Isse breathed in deeply and summoned all her patience so as not to curse the world and her fucked up luck. Of course it could never be easy. Of. Fucking. Course! For once someone had given her an easy way to get something, but then seemingly everything seemed to try to make it difficult for her! Why could she never get a fucking shortcut?
"Well, if you're so curious, it's because I want to kill the [King] of Scasce, and then, since I'm here, I might as well destroy the College of Memoirs."
The old man nodded, a hand going for his chin in mock-thoughtfulness: "Hmmm, yes, yes, that makes sense. And then, since you're here, you might as well go ahead and kill the gods. Yes, yes, that absolutely makes sense and those are the most fucking unrealistic and wrong words I've ever heard someone utter in my entire life. I've heard dreamy eyed new Players of the Game talk more sense than you did right now, and they wanted to become Kings and Queens of the Board!"
His voice had steadily risen in pitch until he was practically shouting in her face by the end of it.
"And what the fuck might this 'Game'," she did air quotes with her fingers, her voice mocking on that final word, "be? Huh?"
"That's another question I'll answer once you earn the right to it. For now, let's analyze all the wrong things that were in that sentence.
"For starters, you want to become a [Spy] to kill people? What do you think we are, [Assassins]?"
"Erm... yes? Aren't spies fancy assassins who steal information and kill people?"
"If that's what you think then you might as well fuck right out of this Skill Scroll and start murdering people in the streets at night without being seen like a fucking [Rogue] with extra steps.
"[Spies] are much more than people who kill and get information. In fact, if we have to kill someone in our job that usualy means we've failed or someone higher up is a total dumbass. Dead people don't make mistakes that let you get information. They make it rather harder, for more reasons than just them being unable to talk."
"But I don't want to go around getting information! I want to kill the King!"
"And I want to fuck the Queen, but sadly I'm dead and even if I wasn't missing legs don't make you more attractive. We don't always get what we want."
They stared each other in the eyes with such fervor that, had Siidi been standing there, she would've probably seen lightning fly between them.
Until the old man slumped slightly and sighed: "Look, girl, I don't really know why you want to kill who you want to kill. Airm, I died decades ago on Rodar while attempting... it doesn't matter. I can, though, guess: you're an arachne, which, by the way, I don't give a fuck about because I'm already dead, and you're in a city with my old apprentice, which can only mean that someone found you out and sent an army to kill you and your people. I guess the someone who used the army was the King, and I'm certain the College got mixed in because it was the arachne. So I can see why you'd want the man dead.
"But, hear me out: what if there was a way to make the King pay without killing him? Ever heard of destinies worse than death? You could do that. If you were to become a [Spy], you'd get the means and the Skills to find a way to destroy the man's life, make his kingdom crumble under his very eyes. It only takes the one fabricated letter, the one right information in the wrong hands, to do that. Wouldn't it be that much better?"
The words weren't sweet like honey, and the man's voice wasn't silvered and fluid. It was scratchy from the years and tired. Oh, so tired. She could feel the weight of the years in his tone, decades of experiences and regrets enough that were each regret a brick she could've built a house.
But there was sincerity in the words.
"You are young. To you, death feels like the worst thing in the world, the greatest punishment. And you're also an arachne. Now, I don't want to go into the stereotype of your people being killing machines, but you've probably been taught how to kill, and your nature probably makes you like it. But, if you want to truly make a man suffer, especially a man like a [King] who had everything, the best way to do it is to take everything he has away. That's what you'll learn to do as a [Spy]. That's what I once taught to my apprentice. That's what I'll begin teaching you, if you'll desire it."
She looked at him and also not, asking Siidi what she thought about it. But, for the first time since she'd been reborn, only silence greeted her question. Her soul half wasn't there.
"You won't get an answer or suggestion from the other one in your head. The Scroll was used by you for yourself. She wasn't invited. This choice, it will be yours and yours alone."
She looked at him as if he'd just said something blasphemous, then tried to call out first with her mind, then her voice, to her soul half, to her sister.
When no answer came, she began to breath faster, feeling like her lungs weren't getting enough air as her heart began beating a rhytm that would make a rock star proud.
Her rational mind understood that she was panicking and should try to calm down, should breath deeply and slowly, but her much less rational mind told that part to fuck off.
Then she felt a hand land on her shoulder and grasp it firmly.
"I'm not good with this, so either you calm down or I'll start slapping you, alright?"
She looked at him and the panic turned to anger. This was his fault! He had done this to her, to Siidi, to the only one left from that fire, from all the death! He had locked her out, away from her! He -
He slapped her.
"Warned you."
And she felt the anger and fear leave her, drawn out of her at the same speed as when she used the Skill that let her transfer her emotions to other people. And, just like with that Skill, she felt empty then.
"Don't worry, you'll be able to see her again when this is all over. I'm sorry, I really am, but I don't make the rules. The System and the Dealmaker made those a very long time ago. Now, please, choose the path you'll go down from here on."
She looked up at him, her cheek stinging with distant pain, her mind mulling the information over with detachment now.
And she saw the truth in his words.
"Alright. Teach me how to destroy that man's life."
And her training began.