"What's your name?" she asked to the apparition.
The old, broken in body but not in spirit, man looked at her with a raised eyebrow and, after a moment of silence, snickered: "You may call me Master."
This time around it was Isse's turn to raise an eyebrow: "Master? Really? Admit it, you've been waiting to say that for a long time."
'Master' shrugged: "No, I haven't. All my apprentices call me that. Well, called. My name is another thing you'll have to work to get the right to know."
"You speak as if that's of any use to you now. You said it yourself, you're just a fragment, a memory of the man that was. Nobody could do anything with your name."
"You are absolutely right apprentice. But here's the thing: I don't give a flying fuck about that. I am me and I can goddamn well do whatever the fuck I want, especially now that it's consequence free. Which reminds me," he snapped his fingers and a table, chair and glass of something yellow and foamy, probably a beer, appeared out of nowhere. He then sat down and proceeded to drink the whole glass without needing to stop for air.
When he was done he slammed the glass back down on the table and smacked his lips in approval: "Haaa, been a while since I could do that. Too many failed poisonings may have given me [Poison Resistance], but they did a fucking number on my liver."
Isse did not know what to say to that, so she just stared intensely at the man as if that could will him to move faster and start teaching her.
Instead he just summoned another chair and set his feet on it, while turning the one he was sitting on into a much more comfortable armchair. A moment later a woman, probably some kind of [Server], wearing an extremely skimpy outfit that left little to the imagination, appeared out of nowhere and set a platter of assorted cheeses and meat cuts, together with some bread, in front of the old man, who smiled and put a gold coin in a little pocket of her... 'outfit', around her waist.
"This is the life," he said as he made himself comfortable on the armchair and began eating as he stared unabashedly at the woman's swaying hips before she disappeared into a puff of smoke.
Isse waited a moment for Siidi to make some sarcastic comment or jokingly suggest she 'bang the chick' the next time she appeared, before remembering that, here and now, Siidi couldn't reach her.
"So... when are we starting?" she asked, trying to ignore the consistently satisfied faces the man made as he ate from the platter.
He stopped for a moment, looking at her with a raised eyebrow: "What did I tell you to call me?"
She crossed her arms: "You're not actually expecting me to call you Master every time we talk? Especially when all you're doing is eating and drinking."
"Well, first of all, calling me Master is probably more convenient than 'Amazingly good looking old man wearing gray', but I'll understand if you'll ever call me that. Second, and arguably more important, I'm the one who's meant to teach you. I could easily just... not teach you, keep you here for a while, probably five days so that you don't suffer too much from dehydration, and then boot you out of here having learned nothing. So, yes, I expect you to call me Master when refering to me. You'll have to learn to show some respect to those older and wiser than you."
Isse's eye twitched as she answered back, teeth slightly gritted: "I know how to show respect to my elders. I'm an arachne, remember? But those elders had gained my respect. You, on the other hand, are just eating and eyefucking random apparitions. There's not much to respect in that."
He raised an amused eyebrow and sipped from a newly brought glass of beer: "'Eyefucking'? I'll admit, I never heard it described like that," he chuckled.
Again, Isse's eye twitched.
Still, she needed this, so she decided to let it go. The man could do whatever he wanted so long as taught her.
"When do we start, Master?"
The man nodded: "That's more like it. And to answer your question, I don't know. For now, how about a beer?"
Her eye started twitching uncontrollably.
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Isse couldn't tell how long she'd already been in this illusory plane. There was no sun moving in the skies, no moon and stars, no clocks, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Nothing except for the ever expanding revel the old man was having fun at. What had started as a man enjoying some snacks at a small table had evolved into a full on celebration with a giant table that was probably a hundred meters long and was completely packed with people. Women wearing skimpy outfits went from unknown person to unknown person offering food and... other services, while the old man sat at the head of the table and kept on drinking and eating and being merry. All the while music played from somewhere.
Isse didn't know how long she'd been there, sitting on the ground, looking away from the revelry and damning the System for not allowing her to do something like what Master (ugh) was doing. If only she could've created even a single tree she could've found a way to waste some time. Instead she had to listen to the people behind her having fun, which made her already unstable and generally foul mood even worse.
Isse didn't know how long she'd been sitting there before she snapped.
She only knew that, at one point, she decided that enough was enough and turned around, beginning to call upon her only real attack Spell: [Colorful Water Arrow].
Her first target was a man who was currently being pleasured by one the servers: she pointed a finger gun at him, even though she didn't actually have to, and with her middle finger she pressed an imaginary trigger.
The Spell was actualy a bit of a misnomer: what formed in front of her and flew towards the man wasn't actually an arrow. It looked more like some sort of... spike? Whatever the name of the form was, it had two pointy ends and became bigger as you neared the center. The colorful part, though, was absolutely true. Had she not known better she would've thought she was shooting arrows made out of paint.
The arrow moved at the speed of, well, an arrow, towards her target, and made contact.
The man's head opposed some resistance at first, and she watched as the flat bones of his cranium bent inwards, as if they could then just rebound her projectile back at her, until she saw the point pierce...
The head popped like a ballon and confetti rained down all around him.
The revel stopped, the music grinding to a painful halt.
And then it all disappeared.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
"That was uncalled for," said Master.
Isse breathed in and realized she'd been taking deep, hard, breaths, for a while, her heart was beating out of her chest. She took a few more steadying breaths before she turned to look back at the old man, lowering her hand.
Then: "That was very much called for and extremely satisfying."
Master sighed: "Yes, I imagine it was. Sadly, you also just failed the trial. Which, by the way, is the simplest one among the ones I made my apprentices go through back in the day."
Isse's eyebrows slowly furrowed as she registered what the old man had just said, her eyes asking a very clear quetion of 'What the fuck do you mean?'
"Do you know what's the main quality a [Spy] needs to have, always, in any situation, no matter what? Patience. Lots and lots and lots and lots of patience. If you ever think you're patient enough then know this: it's never enough. There's always space for more.
"You need patience for everything in our job. You're scouting out a place? You have to be patient. You're working undercover in someone's house? Even more patience. You have everything you need from someone and can finally leave? Patience patience patience until the right time comes, and even then you probably wait some more because maybe you'll find something more.
"Now, imagine this: you're sent to a nobleman's house, let's call him Fido. Now, you work under Fido, and he's a terrible boss. He overworks you, he screams at you for the slightest mistake, and in the best days he hits on you because he thinks you're cute. And you want to punch him, you want to plant that knife you have hidden in your sleeve right into his throat and watch him bleed out on the floor in front of you, but you have a job, you have to be patient and get through this. One night, Fido throws a big ass party, and you have to be there, you have to watch other people have fun while you work your ass off. And to that add the fact that Fido's friends are very much like him, so they grope you, they hit on you, they're loud and obnoxious and you have to be patient and let them do whatever they want because if you don't there could be repercussions that could, potentially, make your job more complex or outright impossible. And maybe, just maybe, if you do what they want, to a certain degree, these people will reveal something useful to you, because you're unimportant, because you're nothing, you're no one.
"Now, you can see why killing one of the guests in a fit of rage wouldn't really work in your favor."
And at that very sudden, lenghty, and extremely serious explanation that was completely at odds with how he'd been acting up until a few moments ago, she blushed.
"Well, I wasn't prepared. I thought you were just making fun of me."
"And that's another thing: you must always be ready. You can't know when shit's gonna hit the [Wind] Spell and fly right in your face. You must always be ready to dodge.
"Now, we'll start by working on that temper of yours."
Isse frowned: "I don't have a temper."
Master sighed: "They always say that."
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Turns out, Isse had a temper.
Not a bad one, mind you, but still enough to make the old man's training extremely unpleasant. Siidi had rubbed off on her, apparently.
"Stop. You failed," said Master from his usual chair. He wasn't eating or drinking anymore now. Instead, from a small podium he'd summoned out of thin air, he looked attentively at her every move and at every single expression, its every twitch and fake smile and you name it. Yes, it was as uncomfortable as it sounded.
She groaned: "What was it this time?"
"Your smile. It was more a grimace than a smile. A nobleman could very well be offended if you showed him or her such an expression. And we don't want that."
This time she actually grimaced: "You speak as if every single noble in the world is a horny pig."
"No, not every single one of them, but in my experience the worst ones are always the ones with the useful information. Maybe you'll get lucky, maybe the person you'll have to extract your secrets from won't be a complete asshole. Maybe you'll even grow to like them and decided, when all is said and done, to join them and start working for them. Or maybe, if you'll be extremely lucky, you'll never have to go undercover and form attachments."
Those last few words were filled with nostalgia and bitterness. Had he come to know someone during a mission? Had -
"I'll tell you this one for free. Won't be of any use to you anyway. She was a [Maid] in a nobleman's house in Eva, not two years before the fall of the Kingdom of Crizia, the so called 'Kingdom of Storytellers'. Idiots should've known better than to name themselves after something so controversial. Anyways, I had to leave her behind. There's no place for love in the Game. It will be used against you, one way or another. Don't forget that. Never, ever, forget it."
"...Alright."
She thought there were close to no chances of her falling for someone, not after all that had happened to her, not with the Anda-shaped scab on her heart. And even if, for some strange reason, she did, it would never work out, because she was an arachne.
"Anyways, another time! I'll teach you to keep your temper in check if it's the last thing I do before the Scroll decides you've done enough to learn its Skill."
"I don't have a temper!"
Master raised an eyebrow, incredulity written on all of his features.
"Ok, alright, I have a bit of a temper, but if I had Siidi with me I would manage to keep myself in check."
"Well, that's where you're wrong: you're not going to have your little -"
"I'm gonna stop you right there old man: she'll always be with me. She's part of my soul, my other half. The only way for anyone to get rid of her would be to use Soul Magic to rip her out of me, which would probably kill us both."
Master batted his eyes several times at the revelation, before sighing: "Right, arachne bullshit, had forgotten about that. How would she even help?"
She shrugged: "She'd probably find a way to make me laugh, which in turn would make me smile in the event of working with shitty people."
Master looked at her with a cocked eyebrow, his head slightly tilted to the side, as if looking at her from a different angle could help him understand her better.
"It's a shame I don't have my Skills in here, you know? I used to have one that would help me detect the things my students were worse at. I understand only now how much I relied on it."
He sighed, shaking his head: "That's what I get, I suppose. Alright!" he clapped his hands together and the party around her disappeared, "Let's train you with something else."
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She opened her eyes, her stomach attempting to fall out of her mouth and, failing that, to throw its contents out.
It failed miserably because there was absolutely nothing inside.
When, finally, she settled down, she realized she was lying in something very comfortable. A cursory passage of her hand on the surface revealed it was her spidersilk hammock.
"Ah, you finally came out! I was starting to worry," said someone to her right.
Turning that way, she saw Albert, although her vision was blurry.
Isse? Isse! You're back! Finally! shouted Siidi in her mind, her voice filled with joy. She felt a strange sensation of being hugged, and she really liked it.
"How -" she tried to say, but the sound that came out was raspy and she realized just how thirsty she was.
"Five days. Now don't overexert yourself. Here, take this and drink slowly," answered Albert, standing up to hand her a big glass of water.
She tried to do as he said and sip it, but the moment the first drops touched the back of her throat she couldn't contain herself and began drinking greedily.
"What happened?" he asked her ten minutes later, after two more glasses of water and in front of a plate of bloody meat at the kitchen table.
"I met Master," she answered.
Albert froze as he heard the name, then chuckled: "That fucking old man? He really doesn't know how to die, the bastard," he put his face in his hand in exasperation and shook it, but she could clearly see his fond smile.
"Let me guess, he made things outrageously difficult because he wanted to make a point, right?"
She nodded: "He was a real piece of shit."
Seeing your memories of the training, yes, I agree.
She chuckled.
I missed you, she told Siidi.
Me too, and she attempted to mentally hug Siidi and give her a noogie. From the chuckling, she succeeded.
"So, did you learn the lesson at least?" he asked her.
She nodded: "Yes. It was... interesting."
"Care to elaborate? He always had a different one for each student of his."
She chuckled and nodded again as she answered, doing her best Master-voice: "That, old chap, you're gonna have to earn."
Silence fell for a moment in the room and she began bringing a forkful of meat to her mouth. But she had to stop when Albert snorted in amusement, before he burst out in laughter. She followed him a moment later, the fork falling from her hand and clattering noisily on the plate.
Meanwhile, she remembered: Never join the Game girl, for it has become something for the desperate, for those that have nothing left to lose. It has become a hungry beast that feeds on suffering and sin and death, and once its teeth hook on even a bit of your flesh you will never be able to escape from its mouth. So, whatever happens, never. Join. The. Game. Even if it'll look like the only alternative you have left. Promise me this.
She had promised.
And someone had noticed.
[Spy Level 4!]
[Skill - Hide Emotion Obtained!]
[Skill - Fake Smile Obtained!]
[Skill - Dodge Responsibility Learned!]