Chapter 74: Chapter 74 – Captivated Audience

I’m settled into the arm of an all-but-throne, looking down at Lily and marveling at how she towers over me nonetheless. There’s nothing inherently magical about it; her aura brought a room to its knees effortlessly, but this is pure body language.

Well, possibly also decor and clothing. There’s a moment of breeze that pulls at the slashes in my sleeves and laps gently at my legs, reminding me of the ridiculous getup I’m wearing, whereas Lily seems perfectly comfortable and at home in her own eye-catching attire. Flames dance in the seams and folds, a few shades darker and more violet than the purple of her dress, and there are countless tiny gemstones woven into the fabric. They’re small enough that I can’t count them, but just barely big enough that their glinting, at least in aggregate, is strikingly noticeable and draws the eye towards where the dress clings along her waist and towards her breasts.

Her skin is a dark bronze with the barest hint of green, and the contrast between her and the deep, dark browns of the chair is deeply soothing somehow. Though that might be helped by the surreality of where I’m sitting; the arm under me is curved and carved to be more comfortable than almost any chair I’ve sat in, except for the subtle feeling that I’m going to slide off the arm into… into Lily’s lap, given where she’s sitting and the way she’s turned to face me, one leg showing through a slit in her dress from low on the thigh downwards, right ankle hooked over left knee and right elbow propped against a piece of her chair-throne.

Physically comfortable and an emotional predicament, with my hands naturally resting at my sides in little angled, slippery-smooth divots that give me no traction, and my legs resting on similar ones.

“How long have you even had this carved?” I can’t hide the awe in my voice. “It’s amazing. I’m perfectly stable and yet also feel like I’m about to slide, at the same time. Who even designs something like this?”

“I did.” Lily’s voice is deeply smug. “There’s a technique, a way to turn a defined nature of an object into reality.”

“Sure.” My mind races. “Presumably not just an object? I mean, you wouldn’t want to have to manually recreate rooms, you’d want to be able to… to template things. Define the nature of a Coliseum, even, turn it into reality. But there’s too much craft here; still, a walkway, a closet, a room?”

“And a chair. You are clever.” Her smile flushes heat through my entire body like I’m twenty again. “You were going to reinvent the technique against Ty, had they survived your opening.”

“Huh. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do, barely a step beyond what I did to Zidanya.”

“Barely a step,” she says with a soft laugh. “Barely a step beyond how you defeated Zidanya with runework.” She leans forwards, and does something with her posture that artfully draws my eye and gives the illusion, or maybe not illusion, of her hips swaying. “I’d bet you have tricks aplenty in store, too.”

I grin at her. “And if I were thirty years younger, you’d have them out of me for a smile.”

I’d expected a pout out of her, something devastatingly cute. She smirks instead, slow and lopsided, one eye narrowing just a little from the breadth of it. There’s an intentness in her gaze, and the sensation of her looming over me intensifies. “And thirty years later, what ever shall you offer them up for?”

I suppress the ludicrous urge to squirm. I distract myself instead with trying to piece apart her body language and intonation, to figure out why she’s affecting me so much. Part of it is, I think to myself, the way that she’s mirroring me so effectively on language and conversational tone to put me at ease, but knowing that isn’t going to make it less effective. “I suppose,” I say after a couple of beats, “you did ask me to show you something interesting.”

“I did, didn’t I.” The intensity in her eyes redoubles. “Though that’s not an answer to my question.”

“You know, it’s pretty funny that this chair is in my size, isn’t it?” I grin at her. There’s a lightness in my head, and the heat in my body is really distracting. I can place her body language and her tone, the slight burr of her accent, come to think of it; what had been a way of trying to distract myself, deconstructing the components of her affect, isn’t so much of one now. “Will you tell me what Skill that is? The one that you’re using for the, for that.”

“That,” Lily says with a very different kind of intentness and seriousness, “would cost you. What would you barter, for such a secret?”

“Will it, though?” I grin at her. Showing someone up is exactly the kind of bad decision I’ve never been able to pass up on, a need to show off and bask in the validation that hasn’t dimmed over the decades. “Will you bargain with me on that, wager? If I can answer my own question from my own tools, you’ll have whatever you learn from my doing so and you explain them to me. If I can’t, I’ll give you fair value. Maybe an explanation of one of the tricks I’ve used?”

“An explanation of one of the tricks you haven’t. I’m not Zidanya, to have the talent to reconstruct System-defying runework from first principles, and everything else you’ve made use of, I understand well enough.”

“An explanation of one of the tricks I haven’t used, then.” I tilt my head slightly.

She smiles, and her presence doubles, and redoubles again. “Bargain is struck.” Her eyes bore into me, like they can read the neurons firing in my brain and see every capillary in my skin; it’s dizzying, it’s heady, and I realize that the pressure she’d exerted at the beginning of this party or audience had been a fraction of her attention, or a fraction of the Lily that is attending to me right now.

“[Conjure Visor],” I say out loud, unnecessarily. The mana flows through me, dropping me probably to zero, not that I can tell anymore. It deploys with its new near-instantaneous mode, sliding out from the earring, and with my eyes momentarily closed I make sure it’s not going to repeat my previous errors and blind me with visuals.

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The usual and expected details pop up when I open my eyes. Lily’s power magnitude is literally off the charts, too high for the Visor to even read it, but the Skill is right there. It’s not, admittedly, right there in a way that has a word, but there has to exist some sort of words-based representation for the Skill, for all of the different Skills that dance around her, almost all banked like they’re slow-burning, but there’s a few that blaze.

My eyes snap downwards. Lily’s tail has flicked over and I’m pretty sure it brushed, delicately, the back of my leg, working upwards towards my knee. It’s … distracting, I’m going with distracting, and she just quirks an eyebrow at me when I try to glower, blushing furiously.

Alright. If she wants to play that game?

My eyes go back to the Visor. My fingers flicker, guiding my mind hither and thither, or maybe it should be hither and yon, and there’s something there in that thought that I firmly set aside for not right now. My lever here is the fact that Lily has to, or at least at one point had to, interact with the System through words, through some sort of language representation, if she has a System-granted Skill. So, that Skill, that strand of soul-interface, contains or represents words that Omniglot knows and recognizes, and I’m pretty sure at least one of those words has a high-cromulence meaning-convergence with the act of mirroring.

I almost lose focus when Lily’s tail slips under the gathered cuff of the pants. Well, shorts, really, and it’s sort of astonishing that she has such precision and delicacy in such a slender tail, but magic is a pretty obvious answer, and okay maybe I did lose focus. I manage not to jump, manage not to physically react much at all, and she just smirks and my heart races like I’m running a marathon.

I give her a grin right back, trying for nonchalant and failing. She’s wildly distracting, and she gets more than one full-body shiver out of me as she traces circles up the inside and underside of my thigh without lifting a finger. Still, if she thinks that’s enough to win the wager...

“It’s two Skills.” About thirty six seconds after she started trying to distract me, maybe three times as long as it would have been otherwise. Finding and isolating the two Skills had been the hard part; feeding them into, in sequence, the identification/recognition connection to the System that Sara had re-rigged to my Visor earring and then through that into my own Omniglot connection and then back into the display was as easy as figuring out which parts of the Skill’s manifestation contained a sufficiency of its essential nature. “You’re somehow not just chaining them, but flowing them one into the other. Rivers Manifold Flow and Placid, A Mirror Eternal?”

“Now that,” she says softly, “is a Skill put to use.”

“That,” I say with an annoyance that came from I-don’t-know-where, “is skill put to use.”

“Granted, granted, of course.” She waves a hand vaguely. “A tool without the knowledge is hardly useful.”

“And a tool with the knowledge is something interesting, now, isn’t it.”

She meets my smirk with a laugh, low and throaty, shaking her head. “Bold. No, you bargained for that on its own merit. You’ll have to grant me the guest-gift still, but I really don’t mind losing that wager.”

“Pay up, then.”

She nods. The stillness and seriousness that comes across her face draws me in, almost unbalancing me; she snickers quietly, ruining the effect, when I stop myself in a jolt as my balance shifts on the smooth wood. “Rivers,” she says matter-of-factly, “is a Skill to control flows and motion. Anything in those abstract domains, really. A guest arriving at the correct time to a party; mana flowing through a Skill; the path an arrow takes, flowing through the river of the air.”

“That’s… incredible. I’m not calling you a liar or anything,” I clarify hurriedly. “It’s just… that’s nothing like anything I saw, back when I could see descriptions. Everything was all concrete and narrow, except for the Outsider skills. Which, uh. You’re not, right?”

“The higher your Tier,” Lily says with a certain amount of flatness in her voice, “the more your Skills evolve into the abstract realm. I have had those two for a very long time.”

“Okay, okay. Like I said, I’m not calling you a liar.” I make pacifying hand-motions. “And the other one?”

“Reflection. Reflect an attack, create a mirror, mirror body language. It can go some distance into the past, as well.” She leans forward, eyes bright with humor. “Would you like a demonstration of some things it can do?”

“Oh, I think so.” My eyes are wide, probably, and I lean forward too, heedless of the sliding risk. “I do think so.”

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