Knowing when something had gone wrong wasn’t always enough to understand why it had gone wrong.
Adelheid was still off doing whatever it was she did these days—presumably, she was up to the usual toddler misadventures with some teleportation thrown in. Malwine was alone in their room, for now, and she couldn’t be gladder.
After all, this gave her the freedom to pace around the room for nearly an hour without being forced to answer any questions.
As much as she wanted to believe [The Way of the Clave] had come in clutch for her, the fact remained that, during the trial, she’d been riffing hard. Malwine didn’t often find herself having to respond to a situation she knew nothing about—for fuck’s sake, the most prominent example in her recent memory was how the widow had made Margaret Smith talk around in circles on the day of her death.
She puts me to shame, Malwine sighed before flinching. My past self puts me to shame.
While she saw no issue in referring to the widow as, well, the widow—for her past life’s name remained lost to her—there was simply something wrong about the idea of treating the widow as a person different than herself in truth.
Even if she had been having her doubts as of late.
Bernie trial, Bernie trial…
Malwine pushed her thoughts back into the right track, focusing on the matter at hand. Certainly, the trial hadn’t been going well, but none of the reactions she’d gotten out of the stranger seemed the type to evoke disaster. Her portrayal of Bernadette wouldn’t have held up to scrutiny, yet she’d managed to avoid setting off any alarms, as far as she could tell.
While she was quite familiar with her guardian, impersonating well her was a different matter entirely. Bernie had this practiced, almost exaggerated poise that she wouldn’t have trusted her acting capabilities to mimic, and probably a lot of noble social training Malwine wouldn’t even know the start of.
On one hand, this helped to ease her concerns about whether her act was good enough—it didn’t need to be perfect. Malwine could have guessed that from how poorly she must have played the role of a young Kristian the first time she attempted a trial, but it hadn’t felt this clear until now.
No, the trial for Bernie had ended when she moved away from that room. Had it been meant for a specific setting? Was that it?
That was among the first possibilities that came to mind, and the one Malwine found the likeliest, for it simply made sense.
[Imitation Beyond Filiality]’s very description had warned her that the trials required would vary by target, and she’d been interpreting that as a reference to how they would, naturally, follow a different series of events from her target’s life.
But that hadn’t been what happened with her trial for Katrina, had it been? No, for all she’d spent the aftermath of that trial complaining about {Legacy} clearly acting on its own, that trial had not been in line with her expectations in the first place. It hadn’t even been confined to a single scene.
Malwine felt she could go on blaming such inconsistencies on her Affinity, yet it stood to reason that the easiest solution could also be the correct one—[Imitation Beyond Filiality] claimed its trials could vary, and so they did.
While {Legacy}’s influence was undeniable, she suspected expecting trials to follow a formula would just be a hindrance. They clearly each had their own requirements, be it for how they played out or for their success, and she was going to have to keep that in mind.
In her most recent trial, her mistake had been asking to be led to her chambers. In changing the setting, she must have somehow made it impossible for the trial to continue, therefore earning herself yet another ‘fail’.
Unless it was because I didn’t drink the tea? The intrusive thought hit her like a truck. Malwine had all but forgotten about the tray once the old woman had started basically dropping bombshells on her. If it was the tea, I swear…
Bernie having been engaged to one of her uncles was something she hadn’t quite expected—Kristian marrying a random 22-year-old made perfect sense, but him marrying one of his kids’ betrothed?
There was no going around it. Who the fuck does something like that?
Still, the pieces clicked within her mind. Bernie and Anselm were around the same age, and they’d clearly been close at one point.
Malwine couldn’t decide whether she didn’t want to know how Bernie’s marriage affected the father-son relationship there, or if she would very much want to find out, preferably while procuring a nice bag of popcorn.
Can harvestables be revealed into items from other worlds? Malwine found herself hoping they did—she certainly wouldn’t pass on the chance to get herself a non-perishable bag of popped corn that she could keep around, waiting for a fitting moment. She eyed her Luck as well as her Affinities, still unsure as to which was the most responsible for her harvestable reveals so far. Wink, wink.
With that near-daily ritual of attempting to influence her panels through pointed glances done, she got the rest of her questions sorted.
Who was that woman? Was she close to Bernie? It would have been awfully convenient timing for it to be Hildegard—and on brand for the system, to boot—but this wasn’t the type of thing she could guess without actually seeing the woman in the real world. As for Lord Bernard and Old Martin…
Yeah, no clue.
Then there was the matter of Katrina. From her trial for the woman herself, Malwine knew this Metalbreaker title must have come from her grandmother’s
Class, and despite how she had most people convinced she was mortal, even retainers of Bernie’s house called her that.
Sometimes I feel like Katrina was trying to play 4D chess with the world itself… Malwine exhaled slowly—while she could guess why her grandmother tried to maintain secrecy, given how she hadn’t even planted a {Foresight} Root, it was still quite annoying to be on the receiving end of it. Hell, I don’t think even Mom’s siblings know about her.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
However she managed to get found out by the definitely-elves, it must have been quite the tale, and Malwine fully intended to ask about it when she resurrected Katrina.
Assuming she managed that at all.
Failing the trial for Bernie—probably directly because of her choices as opposed to any of the reactions she garnered within it—had left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Despite herself, Malwine found herself wanting to start another trial. It wasn’t as though anything was stopping her, and {Legacy} hadn’t acted up this time. That willful prick of an Affinity probably saved its aid for special occasions.
And with that out of the way, Malwine had no true excuse to continue refusing to use the Trait.
But if she did this, which trial was she supposed to go for? A new one, or a repeat of any of the old ones?
An older one sounded easier—she’d know what to expect, and could spend more time trying to grasp what it might want of her instead of taking in the setting for the first time. Considering her foul mood after practicing with [The Way of the Clave] and failing the Bernie trial, she had no desire to listen to Teach go on about seafarers and how she should never plant {Foresight}.
Malwine brought up the panel containing her notes from her trial for Kristian, the one which—most of all—felt like it had happened a lifetime ago.
Timeline:
Scene (school courtyard?) 'loads'
--Might have some spare time here--
Kid shows up with the stolen barnacle
Kid tries to distract(?) the headmaster and gives me the barnacle thing
--Might have some spare time here--
Headmaster drags me back inside
The Magister is waiting for us inside
Need to find out:
What's up with the barnacle???
Who's the kid? It's probably this Zayden otherworlder Kristian talked about, the Champion Saint. This is also probably where they met and I suspect the trial takes place prior to them forming that party of theirs.
Sea likes to eat things? It most certainly does, and it makes zombies to boot.
Why does Hanß exist? Just why?
Is violence the solution?
Indeed, since then, she’d even managed to find herself some answers, brief as they’d ultimately looked once she noted them down. The boy almost definitely been Zayden, and the sea did indeed like to eat things.
How did they even go from this, to being a party? Zayden certainly didn’t look the part of a hero, even if most otherworlders here were Champions by default. He clearly did not have a great upbringing and had presumably been summoned young. There was a disconnect between this younger version of the Champion Saint and the kind of figure he became, however obscure they might have all ultimately been—would people really just dump otherworlders in random orphanages regularly? Or had Zayden somehow fallen through the cracks?
The other matters were far less clear to her—without knowing where the orphanage had been located, looking into specifics felt nearly impossible.
Malwine might have had access to Beuzaheim’s records, odd as they were, but nothing there could tell her who Hanß had been or otherwise provide her with any information that could narrow it down. Throughout her browsing, the only references she’d found that validated Kristian and Katrina’s connection to Zayden at all had been the entry for Katrina’s death.
Reflexively, she’d found herself falling back to the same instincts the widow once utilized—she had to accept that while these people were relevant to her, they were clearly not as well-known as she would have expected for people whose Buff literally called them part of ‘the Hero’s party’.
Beuzaheim’s library was also somewhat lacking in resources for their recent history. For all her new world’s environment seemed to foster the preservation of information, it seemed awfully slow to keep up.
Granted, she had mostly skimmed the books she encountered—and the majority of them were for Grēdôcavan history as opposed to local—so the possibility that she might have missed something remained. The library’s non-existent organization system only compounded that chance.
The thought reminded Malwine a bit too uncomfortably about how she’d been meaning to cross-reference what both Fastēn and Veit had told her with whichever books she could find on the fall of the Devils’ Empire, but she’d been putting it off.
That last book she’d tried, with its agenda to shift the blame unto {Descent}’s Executor for existing instead of simply condemning the guy who basically pulled a coup had left a terrible taste in her mouth. Sources there were undoubtedly bound to continue being biased, and she wasn’t quite in the right headspace to deal with that right now.
Then there was the elephant in the room—well, the barnacle in the room. Malwine felt as though it was something impossible to look into without more information. Finding random references to barnacles—well, the existence of barnacles—was easy enough with how many sea-related books they had in Beuzaheim, but none of that helped her with her trial for Kristian.
Zayden had clearly stolen a specific barnacle, and while it had some value to Hanß—enough for him to call the Magister over it—Malwine couldn’t make the leaps in logic it would take for her to attribute that to one reason or another. She had a feeling it might have been the world’s frailest artifact or something like that, but that was simply her own theorizing. I mean, I did kind of smash it. Perhaps it hadn’t been that frail on its own, but the point stood.
It had been an object of relevance, but in a niche—or at least limited—sense. The widow wouldn’t have expected people in Nightsky to have known about the frog statue Margaret Smith put on her windowsill every Friday, and Malwine didn’t expect anyone in Beuzaheim to have a single clue as to what the item Zayden stole from an orphanage over at who-knew-where had been.
Perhaps that had kept her from putting any genuine effort into looking more deeply into the matter all this time, but short of asking her grandfather himself, she doubted she could learn anything, and speaking with anyone was off the table.
For a moment, she considered whether she should speak of it to Veit when she next got the chance to. He’d allowed her to keep the specifics of her abilities under wraps, and Malwine wasn’t about to deny she’d grown to trust him at least a little by now. Maybe.
Her thoughts wandered to the most important question of all, as far as those she’d kept in that panel went…
I wonder if violence could truly be a solution for this one… Malwine recognized she was a bit too eager to try. With her newfound confidence in trials each following their specific rules, she was incredibly curious as to how far she could push the boundaries of the trial. If there was nothing forcing her to simply let things happen, she might have a chance at finally figuring out just where her grandparents had grown up, and, with that, would come the possibility to further investigate, now that she knew Beuzaheim’s own records wouldn’t contain information about their ancestry.
If she saw where the orphanage was, she might find it, or at least whichever city it was in. For all [Once and Forever] had told her Kristian’s own parents were unknown to him, what was to say people at the orphanage hadn’t known when they took him in? It wasn’t that much of a stretch, especially given how he’d seemingly had a surname even as a child.
Malwine sighed. As tempting an option as choosing violence was, there was an easier option—one that both allowed her to avoid unwanted conversations and didn’t require her to try and see if her new Strength would somehow make a different inside the trial when it came to Hanß’s facial bone structure.
Namely, she could avoid Zayden and his whole thing with the barnacle. She could avoid Hanß, even if that meant not getting a rematch she’d probably lose. Acting confused the first time around wasn’t what had led to her failure, and she’d gotten away with punching the headmaster.
No, the trial failed when the Magister noticed something was off—that meant the man had to be important. Whether he was important to the trial’s actual success conditions remained to be seen, but tipping him off would make her fail.
The trial for Katrina had involved her death, after {Legacy} took the reins. Yet the central moments must have been meant to take place in the orphanage, as she’d been shown scenes of her grandmother’s life there.
Malwine narrowed her eyes and brought [Once and Forever]’s panel up in full.