Knock.
Knock.
"Huh? It's almost curfew," Eloisa murmured, glancing at her metawatch. A bathrobe was still draped over her figure, her hair still damp from the bath. "Who could it be?"
She walked to the door and twisted the knob, and what greeted her was a tear-streaked face she knew well.
"Ria?" The name slipped out before she could think, and she quickly pulled the girl inside, guiding her to the bed and sitting beside her. "What's wrong, Ria?" she asked. It had been a long time since she had seen Ariana like this, this broken.
"I remember..."
That was all she said.
Eloisa's expression darkened.
"Y-you... you remember what?" she asked carefully, hoping she was jumping to the wrong conclusion.
"I remember everything!" Ariana grabbed her hand and looked her straight in the eyes. "Why?"
Eloisa couldn't hold that gaze. She stammered, unable to find words beneath the weight of it.
She had done what she did blinded by possessiveness. She hadn't wanted to lose him. She hadn't wanted to lose her friend either. But if things had continued the way they were going, she would have ended up losing them both.
"I told you those things in confidence," Ariana said, her voice shaking with rage. "I told you because I thought you were my friend. I told you because I was scared of what I was becoming. And it turns out you were just a selfish bitch."
"I'm sorry."
"Keep it. I can't believe you used forbidden magic on me. It's forbidden magic, Eloisa. FORBIDDEN!"
"I didn't know what else to do! Everything was falling apart!"
"Oh, shut up. You liar. Just admit it. You're selfish and you knew exactly what would happen if I remembered, so you wiped my memories. You wiped them!"
"Just listen to me, please."
"Stay away from me, Eloisa. I'll only say it once," Ariana said, and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind her.
"I had no choice," Eloisa whispered to the empty room. "I had no other choice."
The voices in her head whispered back, darkening what was already dark.
...
...
"Alright, just say it. What's wrong?" I asked, watching Selena frown at the street around her like someone in the crowd personally owed her money.
"This place isn't safe," she muttered.
"What do you mean? Why?" I looked around. All I could see were students drifting back toward the academy and vendors closing up for the evening, most of them anyway.
She turned and looked me in the eyes, then clicked her tongue and muttered something just below what I could catch. Something that sounded like, "You were already good-looking enough, why did you have to get more handsome?"
"Say what?" I asked.
She looked away.
Right.
Whatever.
Anyway, I had tomorrow mapped out already. There was a particular heroine enrolled in the alchemy class, the one who would go on to make a genuinely groundbreaking discovery. She had developed a potion capable of sustaining a person inside a corrupted zone for a limited period of time. Short, but the fact that it was even possible was staggering in itself.
Entering a corrupted zone was a death sentence under normal circumstances. Instant mana pool combustion, no exceptions.
That potion was exactly what I needed. I already had the formula from the novel, documented in enough detail to work from. What I lacked were the skills to execute it. I needed to be capable of producing it before the semester ended, because without it there was no way into the elven empire. What Nelia didn't know yet was that the corruption had already reached their lands. Though it hardly mattered to her in the conventional sense, given that her people were no longer in this world.
That was the core reason I had chosen alchemy. The problem was that things rarely went smoothly for me, and not only did I need to make the potion, I needed to extend its duration significantly, which would demand a deep and precise command of the craft.
Or, I realized for the first time, I could simply find the heroine and find a way to get her to do it for me.
I had genuinely never considered that before.
"Hey," Selena said suddenly, and pulled me toward a nearby vendor with a bright smile.
"Looking for something?" I asked, then spotted it before she answered. A clip with a small flower design, amber colored, almost exactly the shade of her eyes.
"How much for this one?" I asked the vendor.
"Twenty points," the man said with a neat smile.
Twenty was reasonable.
"I'll take it," I said, made the transfer, and turned to Selena, who was watching me with an expression caught somewhere between surprise and something softer. I reached up and pinned the clip into her hair.
I still fully intended to recover a significant amount of points through her eventually, so spending a few on her occasionally wasn't going to hurt anyone.
She smiled.
Ah, there was the docile version of her. All shy and quiet, looking almost innocent. How she switched between personalities that quickly was genuinely beyond me.
"Thanks," she said softly, but then I noticed she had also been buying something while my back was turned.
"What's that?" I asked.
"My gift to you," she said, and placed an enormous pair of glasses on my face. They were massive, covering nearly half of it, paired with a deeply suspicious looking cap.
"Perfect. Now I can have some peace of mind," she said, looking satisfied with herself.
There was absolutely no scenario in which I was walking around in this.
"Wait, don't," she said quickly, seeing my hands move toward the glasses.
I ignored her completely and kept reaching, right up until she spoke again.
"Five hundred points. Every day. If you wear it."
I stopped.
I stared at her.
"...Do I wear it to sleep as well?"