Why, yes, give me permission to do what I was going to do anyway.
Malwine felt herself genuinely struggle to contain her amusement—on the bright side, Anna Franziska would likely misunderstand, assuming Malwine was just excited for her ‘first’ The Harvest outdoors.
She suspected her little sister didn’t have to fake it, however. While Adelheid had stol— borrowed many harvestables with little to no intent of ever making up for it, the girl had never actually harvested them herself.
“I insist this is inappropriate,” their teacher voiced her concerns, and not for the first time. She’d been opposed to the outing from the start, but Malwine’s uncle had proven surprisingly persistent.
Alaric shrugged. “I’ve heard you the past dozen times. But the girls cannot be cooped up their entirely lives.”
Malwine had her suspicions—namely, that Adelheid had put him up to this. It didn’t help that her little sister kept shooting Alaric conspiratorial looks, much to the teenager’s chagrin.
“They can begin to harvest once they are older,” Anna Franziska countered, for all she had brought them outside anyway. “They can hardly do anything as it is.”
“Then they’ll have started building their stockpile for reveals early,” Alaric continued shrugging, even once their teacher’s complaints had quieted down to grumbles. It almost seemed like an instinctive gesture.
“I like stockpiles,” Adelheid agreed.
Franziska—who’d simply walked in silence by their side until now—frowned. “Is that a pile of stocks? But what are stocks?”
Malwine nearly had to bite her tongue to keep herself from making a joke out of the question.
“When we have something, we have it in stock. Remember the market Malcolm used to take you to?” Anna Franziska asked her daughter.
The girl nodded.
“If you went to the market and asked for carrots, and they did have carrots, you could say they had carrots in stock. A stockpile is… when you have a lot of things.”
Franziska nodded but did not stop frowning, as if still considering the explanation given to her. “Is it literally a pile?”
“Yes,” Malwine assured her. “You can have your very own pile of harvestables soon.”
Their teacher appeared horrified as her daughter’s expression brightened into a grin, and Alaric was clearly containing a chuckle. He coughed unconvincingly instead.
“What have you been doing these days, Brother Alaric?” Adelheid asked abruptly. “Chess?”
Alaric wiggled his eyebrows. “Certainly.”
Malwine, for her part, shot Adelheid a look. She knew her sister had been visiting him less often, but she’d yet to get an explanation as to why.
It could always be that her friendship with Franziska had her distracted, but Adelheid was not exactly great at subtlety. They were up to something, and Malwine would have loved to know more—not to stop them, but to get involved in whatever it was.
Probably.
She hated being left out of the potential rulebreaking.
“You are to stay within our sight at all times,” Anna Franziska declared as they approached a small patch left over from The Flowers.
Alaric scoffed. “They aren’t even five yet, it’s not as though they could go anywhere without us noticing.”
He must have realized the irony of his statement a second later, as everyone—including Alaric himself—eyed Adelheid briefly.
“What?” the girl asked from behind her older brother despite having been within his sight a second ago, a bit too quick to lean into the joke.
Anna Franziska already appeared exasperated, and their harvesting session had yet to even begin in earnest.
Still, their teacher began her lecture, kneeling next to a flower and explaining her technique for the harvesting process. Malwine barely paid her any attention.
“Will we do this again?” she asked Alaric in a whisper, leaning forward as if she were paying attention to Anna Franziska.
From the corner of her eye, she thought she saw her uncle twitch—maybe the question had caught him off-guard. “I do not believe so—I could hardly get this outing sanctioned… allowed as is.”
“I see,” Malwine nodded, licking her lips. It was a shame. Even knowing she could sneak out later, she saw no reason to waste this opportunity. She could simply harvest more than they expected her to, and act as if she’d ultimately gotten less than she did.
That was probably what Adelheid would do, in any case.
Playing the part of an excited child—not a falsehood in its entirety—Malwine rushed forward to join the other two girls.
----------------------------------------
“Why do I insist on us talking to Franziska so much?” Adelheid asked abruptly, as if repeating the question—not that Malwine had ever actually asked. At least her tone didn’t seem judgmental, just slightly confused. “It’s one of those things great-grandma never said. She thought that, even if it was harder, even if there were no prizes for it, she needed to have mortals to hang out with and talk to. Something about staying grounded, though I never got that part. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“I see,” Malwine nodded slowly. Her own conflicted thoughts about it must have been gotten a bit out of hand, for Adelheid and her {Implicit} Affinity’s ridiculous values to have finally picked up on it.
“I know, it’s weird, and I can’t really explain since even I don’t fully get it,” Adelheid continued her apology. “Still, we should talk to her more, even if you don’t want to tell her anything. If I got what great-grandma didn’t say right, then just hanging out with her every now and then should be enough to keep us from flying away.”
Malwine gaped at her little sister, absolutely forgetting every other train of thought.
“That’s what confuses me, though. I don’t think we have any Affinities that would make us lighter, so why would we need to stay grounded? Maybe great-grandma had another one? But we should keep talking to Franziska anyway.”
As Adelheid continued to theorize with a completely straight—if outwardly pensive—face, Malwine had to hide her mouth behind her palms for the better part of an hour, exercising enough self control to last her a lifetime as she avoided laughing at the little girl.
She’d have figure out how to explain the idiom to her sister in plainer terms… later.
----------------------------------------
As much as she dreaded having to explain herself to Veit, Malwine had mostly come to terms with the fact that she hadn’t progressed as much as she could have after that initial leap.
Of her Skills, [Multitasking] was the only one to have truly progressed. It had reached level 16 by now and with it, had come Malwine’s own Level 68. She sat on three thousand unassigned attribute points now, impatiently awaiting her next meeting with Veit.
Still, she’d been allowing the matter of trials to take up most of her time outside of lessons. She had yet to start another one, but seeing as she’d run out of excuses, she couldn’t really put it aside anymore. Even if she failed, she’d get that 300-day timer running for her next try.
Her attempts at getting a timeline ready for an OBeryl trial had not gone well. The general complexity of it, combined with her own carelessness, had kept her from documenting it as properly as she had Kristian’s, and that only further fueled her drive to go out of her way to leave it for last.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
A Beryl trial… to Malwine, a Beryl trial sounded like a nightmare waiting to happen. At least Anselm had granted her a gift in the form of that locket, for all he’d tried to take it back. She’d seen her mother now.
And that humanized her, somewhat. It kept Beryl from remaining a mere name on a panel, some nebulous figure others spoke of without her being around.
Malwine supposed it came down to what it always did—she was scared to learn what kind of person her mother was.
Afraid of being disappointed, not that this family had done anything to raise her expectations beyond the bare minimum.
In the end, she chose to leave a Beryl trial for last. Whether that would ultimately mean ‘after the new ones but before a repeat of OBeryl’s’, she wasn’t sure.
I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, Malwine decided, and left that matter for her future self to deal with.
The low-hanging fruit would have been an Anselm trial, really. That was the sole reason she briefly hesitated to go that route. She’d gotten lucky with her trial for Katrina being a success—likely due to {Legacy}’s intervention—and helped her rationalize the risk of going for another unknown after Bernie.
It seemed failure was bound to be the likelier outcome, at first, and it hopefully wasn’t some issue on her part.
Besides, she was learning—if she hadn’t failed the trial for Bernie in such a way, who knew how long it would have taken her to connect the dots when it came to the setting being a limited area?
Not that any of that actually kept Malwine from being a tiny bit bitter about the failures.
----------------------------------------
Her oldest uncle’s portrait atop the table took her a moment to find among the index cards. It would have been inaccurate to call it blurry—it was closer to sketched over, the lines of it not matching what a real portrait, let alone a picture, would have looked like.
It troubled Malwine, if only a little. It wasn’t even that the man was weird, so much that he had something weird going on with him, and that put two sides of her at conflict.
She understood the hypocrisy of craving further knowledge so badly when she refused to expose anything about her own situation.
But she was getting really curious, especially after how her abilities had reacted the last time she’d interacted with her uncle.
As she entered the trial, she wasn’t even thinking about what it might tell her about the family in general—in this particular moment, she’d take literal crumbs about the oddities surrounding Anselm over anything else.
Until the next interesting thing comes around…
When she chose the card, directing the power of her Affinities at it with an intangible muscle, what followed wasn’t the mere moment of disorientation she expected. It was closer to a plunge into icy waters, and a wave of confusion that wasn’t her own coursed through her.
As if surfacing, Malwine found herself appearing next to what looked vaguely like a seaside gazebo. Even if her new life hadn’t been telling her to beware the sea over and over, the setting itself would have creeped her out.
Anselm, what the fuck is up with your trial?
She winced and caught an accidental glimpse of her hands—they remained as ultimately formless as her presence next to the table where she picked trial targets was. Nothing had changed as she entered the trial and she had ultimately assumed the place of no one.
Her concerns grew by the second, matched only by her irritation. Were it not for how much explaining she’d have to do if she got caught, the first thing she would have done once this was over was send her double off to throw things at her uncle.
Malwine wouldn’t actually do that, though. Probably. Fantasizing about throwing things at him for undoubtedly being the reason her trial was borderline glitching wouldn’t actually help her in the meantime, so she decided to put the matter aside for the time being.
Instead she focused on the bizarre platform she stood on. It rocked back and forth, her footing uneven as she moved away from the edge. No actual water surrounded it—it was all endless black. A backdrop of stars flickered in and out, like a mirage, too fleeting for her to tell if it was actually there.
If she didn’t know any better, she’d have said it looked like a slab of concrete that had been ripped off a building. Tiled flooring, with missing chunks, covered it. There did not appear to be a pattern to the design, all seemingly put together haphazardly.
Beyond that, there was nothing else of note, at least at first glance. The top of the platform was empty save for her own wavering form, and everything about the scene felt off.
Neither Malwine herself nor the trial itself wanted to be here—the whole thing shook, and she felt a tug at her very center, combined with a distinct impression of [Imitation Beyond Filiality] trying to withdraw.
Her Trait’s tactical retreat was clearly not going well, and Malwine grit her teeth.
Why does all this bullshit keep happening to me?, she whined, as if at least half of her troubles so far hadn’t been the direct result of her—rightfully!—sticking her nose into her family’s business.
She wisely chose not to ponder the matter of culpability any further, then.
Reaching for her Affinities, Malwine… she wasn’t entirely sure as to what she meant to do, actually. She simply reached for them in a simplified version of what Veit had taught her, imagining their layers expanding before her.
Did any of them feel like helping her out for once?
As was almost always the case, the only response she got was silence, despite her knowledge that Affinities could clearly act on their own if they so felt like it.
Something cracked, and Malwine found her form within the trial shifting. She turned, trying to look in as many directions as she could manage. With the utter darkness around her, super-black levels of nothing, it was almost impossible to tell if she was moving, despite the looming sensation that she was.
The trial seemed to come apart at the seams as bright light flooded it, as gold and multifaceted as sunlight, and Malwine found herself forced to close her eyes, crouching over the tiled floor to hide her head behind her arms.
It was as if a flashlight had been pointed directly at her face—no, worse. It permeated everything in the scene, and she was little more than unlucky enough to be caught up in the crossfire of it.
The cracking noises intensified, and she could no longer search for the source. Within the confines of her mind, she tried to visualize a panel, if only the memories of one. Her Skills had always seemed to be disabled during her trials, but this one had clearly gone wrong from the start.
She tried to imagine the night sky of panels, dark yet actually graspable, and superimposed that with what she saw, still, through her eyelids.
Malwine felt no results for it, but she reached out to {Vestige} as well, its chill a brief reprieve from the sweltering heat that had overtaken the trial.
It was then that she noticed how [Imitation Beyond Filiality] pulsed, again and again.
In tandem with the cracks.
The motion intensified further until a deafening snap roared out, and the trial dissolved as if it had never been attempted.
A single panel flashed before her—
Goodbye.
—before the actual notification from [Imitation Beyond Filiality] popped up.
You have yielded on your trial to copy attribute points from Anselm Rīsan!
You may not use [Imitation Beyond Filiality] on Anselm Rīsan for: 300 days.
That ‘you’ is misleading. Malwine grumbled despite her relief. I didn’t yield shit.
Whatever had happened was probably related to the Status Effect that kept her from seeing Anselm’s information all the way back during her first moments with the family, but it was still baffling. Not to mention, it did little to calm her down—this was the second time one of her trials had gone completely off the rails. Once, she had been fine blaming it on her Affinity. But for it to have happened twice, regardless of circumstance?
Seriously? Just when things had been getting better, and her confidence with running trials had improved, the Trait went and pulled another stunt like this? It was letting secondary forces do whatever they wanted! Her attention shifted to the first panel, and before she could think better of it, she went forth with [Write Anywhere] to express her discontent.
Goodbye.
LISTEN HERE, YOU LITTLE TRAIT WITH AN AGENDA. DON'T YOU 'BYE' ME WHEN YOU'RE THE REASON EVERYTHING DROPPED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Malwine’s smug satisfaction at that only lasted for a mere second, as the panel shifted a second time—and this was not her doing.
Goodbye.
LISTEN HERE, YOU LITTLE TRAIT WITH AN AGENDA. DON'T YOU 'BYE' ME WHEN YOU'RE THE REASON EVERYTHING DROPPED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Who goes there?
In all her time yelling at inanimate system functions, she’d gotten so used to basically screaming at the heavens that she was utterly at a loss as to how to respond when her complains were, in fact, reacted to.