Chapter 47: ~Chapter 15~ Part 1

I started the day with an enormous yawn. I would've liked to say it was only because of habit, but frankly, I was completely out of it. Spending the entire night frantically scouring the web for information does that to people, I supposed.

It was worth it though. Or so I hoped, at the very least. My deep-dive into symbolism and interpreting names and certain terms the entourage used the day before bore some fruit, though the results were mixed at best. Still, it was a step forward, not to mention getting lost in research let me cool off a bit, which was a good thing. While my shock was quite palpable this time, it was nowhere near as bad as my first brush with existential crisis way back when I first figured out the nature of the world, and the same medicine worked just as well this time.

Anyways, back to the fruits of my research: a good portion of the information I gathered was public domain knowledge about mythology and the supernatural, but there were some juicier nuggets hidden between the lines whenever the island of Timaeus got mentioned. I didn't feel prepared to jump into the supernatural side of this world just yet, but at least I wasn't completely in the dark anymore, and that counted for something.

That said, I limbered up my shoulders as another yawn escaped my lungs and I headed for the shower. It was a bit ahead of my usual schedule, but during our unusually short phone conversation last night, my assistant and I agreed to head to school a little earlier so that we would have a chance for a tactical discussion. With that in mind, I washed up in a hurry and proceeded with my morning ritual capped by a simple but filling breakfast.

I left the house a good half an hour earlier than normal and headed for the usual intersection. Judy wasn't there yet, and while under normal circumstances I would have waited for her, this morning I decided to head straight for her house. When I got close to her place I had to stop and scratch my head though. It's been quite a while since I've last taken her home, and I honestly couldn't remember which of the identical family houses was hers.

I thought for a moment and closed my eyes with a wry smile.

"Far Sight, was it?"

I took a deep breath and tried to remember the feeling. It has been quite a while since I last used this ability of mine, but I supposed it was time I stopped turning a blind eye to it and started exploiting it to its fullest. To my surprise, it came to me naturally. It was like riding a bicycle; the first few seconds were a little dicey, but then it all came back to me, and in a second I could tell exactly where Judy was in relation to my location.

I opened my eyes and glanced at the second house to the left. As if on cue, the front door opened and the familiar form of my assistant stepped through, followed by her awfully youthful mother. I walked up to the gate on their picket fence and waited for Judy to notice me. Instead, it was her mother who suddenly smiled at me and waved in my direction with a familiar-looking ladle.

"Look dormouse, your friend came over to pick you up! Isn't that nice?"

"Mom, not in front of him," Judy protested half-heartedly while her mother kept rubbing her head.

"Ahhh... Looking at you makes me wish I was young again..."

"You are quite young yourself, ma'am," I told her as they got to the gate. I wasn't lying. From up close she only looked a couple of years older than Judy, and she had a figure that would have turned heads even in her filly apron and bunny-slippers.

"Oh, you flatterer!" she answered with a demure smile as she absent-mindedly straightened her daughter's uniform.

"Let's go," my assistant huffed while grabbing hold of my sleeve.

"Goodbye, ma'am," I said with a small wave as I was being dragged away.

"Have fun!" she replied with a bright smile as she watched over the two of us leaving.

Once we were out of earshot Judy glanced up at me and murmured, "I would appreciate it if you stopped flirting with my mother."

"I wasn't flirting. I just told the truth. She is surprisingly young."

"Whatever," she huffed again as we rounded the corner. As we did so, we both slowed our pace, which was a good thing since I was too preoccupied with gazing at my assistant to look forward.

"Are you sulking?"

"No."

"Okay, just checking," I told her with a small smile before I recalled something and it turned into a big smile. "By the way... dormouse?"

My assistant's cheeks flushed red in an uncharacteristic gesture of awkwardness and she refused to look me in the eye.

"... She likes to give me pet names."

"And why dormouse? Does it have some special meaning?"

She thought for a moment, but in the end she shook her head.

"It's probably because I am unremarkable and my ears are big."

I stumbled and nearly fell flat on my face on the sidewalk. She turned to me with an expression saying ‘What?'

"Was that really your first interpretation?!" I exclaimed as I recovered from my absurdity-induced near-faceplant.

"What else could it be?"

"Well..." It took me a few moments to find the right words. "Dormice are... small and cute, aren't they?"

My assistant gave me a flat look and pointedly cleared her throat.

"Chief, I have a new hypothesis."

"Oh? Let's hear it."

"I believe you use flirting as a coping mechanism."

"I am not flirting, I'm just being honest! Speaking of which, I should let you know that you don't have big ears either. They are perfectly normal."

She nodded to herself without looking at me and muttered "Two data points." I decided to ignore her and closed my eyes again, focusing on my Far Sight instead.

"What are you doing?" she interrupted me before I could even get started.

"Just checking where the others are," I told her without opening my eyes and pictured the gang in my mind's eye. Maybe it was because I was trying to keep all of them in mind at once, but I only got brief flashes of their locations and what they were doing at the moment, so I slowed down and focused on one at a time.

First Joshua. He was... well, being literally dragged out of bed by Angie. Josh was sporting some crazy bed hair, while Angie was still in her pajamas. As for how she got into his bedroom, I figured it probably had something to do with the open window and the ladder poking over the sills. I involuntarily frowned. This was one of those things that always bothered me. If it was a guy who used a ladder to break into a girl's bedroom and dragged her out of the bed, he would end up on a list that would force him to introduce himself as a registered sex offender to his neighbors for the rest of his life, but if a girl did it, it's apparently funny.

I decided not to dwell on the double standards of slapstick comedy and instead I moved on to the princess. To my surprise, I found her in a spacious, modern kitchen that looked like it belonged to a high-class restaurant. However, instead of an army of chefs with those funny hats, it was only occupied by the princess and a maid with long blonde braids. She was vaguely familiar, and as I thought about it I bit more, I could faintly recall seeing her from a distance a while back. She was talking with the princess as they were packing a lunchbox, and while I couldn't understand the specifics, it had something to do with cayenne pepper. It was hard to tell and their voices sounded weirdly distorted. It might have had something to do with the distance. I made a mental note to actually try and figure out the range of my Far Sight later and moved on.

A mere thought later I was looking at Snowy. She was in the middle of peeling herself out of her underwear and about to take a shower. She was still wearing her choker though. Weird. I obviously didn't linger, but instead I moved on to the class rep in a calm and very mature manner befitting for a gentleman like myself.

I found her talking to a creepy, white-bearded old man in a creased black robe. Not only that, they were standing in a room that looked superficially like the school library, except its walls were lit by large, glowing blue crystals in cast-iron sockets. I was just about to try and catch the topic of their discussion when I was pulled out of my experiment by a small hand clutched on my forearm.

My eyes snapped open as I nearly stumbled forwards and found myself staring at a crossroad with a red light shining in my face. I blinked and glanced at Judy. She wore an obviously disapproving expression, though in retrospect I supposed ‘obviously' might've been too strong of a word. I was fairly certain I was the only person on this planet who could tell that apart from her usual neutral face.

"What are you doing, Chief?"

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"Ah... Sorry, I lose track of the outside world when I really focus on Far Sight."

She gave me a dubious look but didn't press the issue and we both crossed the road as the traffic light switched.

"What is the plan for today?"

It took me several seconds to switch my brain over to the new track, but once I did I nodded to myself maybe a bit too eagerly.

"Right. Plan." I paused as I tried to remember exactly what we agreed on the previous night and what changed since then. "All right, here are the basics: You ask the class rep. She should be the most knowledgeable about these things. She is the mage after all; she should have a high Lore skill."

"You are stereotyping her."

"Maybe a little, but if I'm right then you would get the most info out of her, and if I'm wrong, it's just a brand new data point for future considerations."

"I see. I still don't know how I should ask though."

"Hmmm..." I actually thought about that a fair bit during the night and I decided to share the idea I came up with. "Make me the bad guy."

"... You need to elaborate on that."

"Okay, here's the idea: Tell the class rep that I'm keeping you in the dark. Tell her you want to know more and I refuse to give you information. If she still refuses, elaborate on how you want to help me, but I don't want to get you involved for your own protection, but you want to help anyways, et cetera. Be creative and tug at her heartstrings."

"I'm not really good that that."

"Would you still try it? Please?" I gave her a puppy look and she rolled her eyes in turn.

"Yes, I will."

"Good!" I clapped my hands and proceeded to rub them sinisterly. "The second stage of the plan depends on the success of the first stage."

"I see. Anything in particular I should ask about?"

"Funny you should ask..." I muttered as I stopped rubbing my hands and took out my phone. A few pokes later hers vibrated in her pocket and she took it out without looking away from me as I told her, "This is a short list of the keywords I gathered that might produce a reaction."

Judy opened the attached file in my mail and scrolled through it with record speed.

"I see. It's a lot though. Anything in particular I should focus on."

"Let's see..." I thought about the question for a few seconds and managed to narrow things down a little bit. "I think the three most important terms should be Celestials, Abyssals, and The Assembly."

I scoured those from an obscure live-chat log. I got linked to it on a similarly obscure image sharing site, and while it was filled with some hard-core conspiracy nutters (the ‘NASA put mind-control chips in my genitals so that bigfoot can monitor my thoughts for the space-jew overlords' type), yet some throwaway posts there seemed surprisingly legit. Judy read the list again, probably to commit it to her photographic memory, and she put away her phone.

"What about you?"

"What about me?" I asked back reflexively.

"What are you going to do while I interrogate Amelia?"

"Well... Uh..." I proceeded to scratch the back of my neck, but it didn't help the awkwardness at all. "I'm going to talk to the princess and come clean. After what happened yesterday, I really want to resolve this love triangle business before it would really get out of hand."

"That's good," she muttered, accompanied with a small nod. "And? How are you going to answer?"

"You know, it's not like I was confessed to. You don't have to put it so directly..." She gave me an impatient huff, so I sighed and told her; "I'll try to let her down gently."

"Good," Judy spoke before I even finished, this time her words accompanied by an even bigger nod.

"I mean, it's not like I don't like her, but by conventional logic, she should be the main heroine. She should focus her full attention on Joshua. I mean—"

Judy cut me off by placing a hand on my arm and shook her head.

"You don't have to excuse yourself in front of me, Chief. I know you don't want to hurt her, but being too nice can cause just as much pain in the long run."

"That was... unusually eloquent."

My assistant narrowed her eyes a bit, a gesture that would've been the equal of an angry squint on anyone else's face.

"What do you mean ‘unusually'?"

"No hidden meaning," I told her with a smile and simultaneously started taking longer strides. "Come on Dormouse, we should hurry up."

She opened her mouth for a quick retort, but then she paused and her eyes narrowed even further, which was probably meant to be an angry scowl, but was made hilarious by the way she was scampering to catch up with me at the same time.

"Did you just call me what I think you just called me?"

"That depends. Did you hear 'Dormouse'?"

She gave me an ‘I knew I should've stayed in bed this morning' look, which I answered by flashing a 200% innocent smile at her.

"Oh, don't look so down. Weren't you the one who wanted to have a nickname on the second day we met?"

"But why dormouse?"

"I told you: because they are small and cute. It really fits you."

She was obviously incredulous at first, but then she looked away with an expression I hoped was fake displeasure and mumbled, "Fine, whatever."

I couldn't help but chuckle at her reaction.

"Don't worry, I promise I will only use it when we are alone or when it would be really amusing."

She didn't even bother to answer this one; she just kicked my shin. I barely felt it as usual, but I still gave her a small "Ow," as courtesy dictated. As she did so, we finally came into spitting distance of the school gate and I couldn't help but smile. This morning was definitely miles better than the last. I could only hope the rest of the day would follow suit.

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