inspire-indiana Chapter 444 - Fair play
Chapter 444 - Fair play
“Patience, Baroness,” Yamina’s voice answered. “It shouldn’t be long now.”Scarlett stilled at the familiar name, one she hadn’t heard in some time.
Scarlett watched as the younger Yamina crossed the tavern and walked towards the exit, but she didn’t move with her, and the scene didn’t begin to fade. The people around the tavern carried on as normal.
She turned her eyes back to The Other.
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Scarlett watched him, not moving.
Eventually, Scarlett stepped over to Yamina’s empty chair and sat down. It was an odd experience. Unlike other Memories she’d been drawn into, she didn’t have the sense of a proper body here. In part, she’d felt like she was observing through the younger Yamina’s perspective, but at the same time, she’d been observing from the outside, and now that the girl had left, she felt almost like she was dissolving slightly at the edges. Things weren’t quite solid, and that included the chair beneath her.
“You lied to her,” Scarlett said.
“You claimed you could not see the future.”
“Yet you are currently speaking with me. In the future.”
At first, she had thought he could see her simply because this was similar to a Memory, and past experiences had already shown that certain existences could at least partially perceive when they were being recreated in those. But the older Yamina telling her the outcome of the coin flip beforehand had confirmed that this was something more than that. Scarlett had, through The Other, directly interacted with the past.
“Are you claiming that you are merely predicting what I will say right now?”
Scarlett thought about disputing him, but then shook her head with a quiet exhale. “Did you plan today?”
“I find that hard to believe,” Scarlett said.
She frowned slightly, but didn’t rise to the jab. She was aware that Yamina and the others could hear her.
Her gaze went to the coin moving over his fingers.
“What is the significance of that coin?” she asked instead. “Do you use it to decide between your personas? Between The Other and Aurelian?”
“I do not know what to think. I still have no real sense of what your motivations are, or what your purpose even is. They do not follow any logic I can make sense of.”
Scarlett looked away from the coin. “You have no intention of answering any of my questions today, do you?”
She could tell. He really was just ‘being polite’.
Her eyes stayed on him, then moved to the tavern’s exit. “You gave Yamina a book.”
“Why?”
“It told me nothing I did not already know or suspect.”
Scarlett turned back to him.
“I still do not know what mine contains,” Scarlett said.
She was quiet for a moment. Distantly, she was aware of her hand resting on the table, drumming without thought.
“Perhaps I will,” she murmured.
Scarlett’s expression stiffened. “It has not.”
“…I presume you were the one responsible for that Echo,” Scarlett said.
“Did you choose that Echo for a particular reason beyond improving my mana?”
“A system you designed.”
Scarlett made a low, dismissive sound. “I do not see how I am supposed to take that on faith.”
“You expect too much.” Scarlett studied him for a while. “Tell me the criteria for unlocking the other Echoes. They are currently dormant.”
“No, you were here simply to ‘meet’ with Yamina Ward. Out of ‘genuine interest’.”
“Would you not?”
Scarlett wondered whether she could believe that. Whether she could believe there wasn’t some design behind his involvement with Yamina that she simply couldn’t see yet.
It was difficult because she still couldn’t place him. From what she’d seen, The Other could be the kind that deceived purely for its own pleasure. Or the kind that arranged things from a distance and dressed the outcome up as fate. Or simply the kind that was entirely candid about what it wanted and had long since stopped considering what that cost anyone else. She’d seen something of all three, and none of it had resolved into anything she could fix a name to, not least because his actual motivations remained somewhere she simply couldn’t reach.
“What do you mean by that?” Scarlett asked.
Scarlett didn’t follow that. Her attention had already fixed on the quest window that had appeared in front of her.
[Side questline: Spectre of the Unseen — Eidolon of the Void]
{The forays of the divine draw near the Material Realm as they once did in ages past, but far too slowly. Meanwhile, the shadow of a divinity that should not be stirs ahead of all else, and with it, something is foretold}
[Objective: Learn Eidolon’s identity]
[Reward: —]
[Failure: —]
Eidolon. It was the same name that Adtia, goddess of the night and the moon, had warned her about. The supposedly dead god-pair that wasn’t dead.
Now even The Other was pointing her towards it?
She turned back to him and found a pair of dark eyes already watching her.
Scarlett stilled.
“Unfair advantage?” she repeated. “You speak as though you are supporting this Eidolon.”
Her eyes narrowed. “…What is Eidolon?”
Scarlett moved to follow, but before she knew it, she was simply standing in an empty tavern. The noise, the people, the hearthlight — all gone, save for the system window floating in front of her.
She stood there for a few seconds, then let out a slow breath.
She needed to go to Elystead.
Setting that aside for now, she glanced around the hollow shell of the tavern, expecting it to dissolve at any moment. The scene had clearly run its course.
Her thoughts drifted back to what Yamina had said before this started, and she paused. Hadn’t the woman expected this to take days? It hadn’t even been an hour. What exactly had she been so worried about?
“Yamina,” she called, testing the air.
There wasn’t any response.
She blinked.
Oh.