Chương 17: Chapter Seventeen: A Most Natural Thing To Say

The Boggart came out of the eastern reed cluster at a low sprint, which was exactly where she had expected it to come from, so she stepped left and slashed the knife down in a short arc. [Strike] – Passive. It screamed and twisted sideways. She followed it without breaking her footing, drove the knife down again while it was off-balance, and it stopped moving. [Lesser Boggart] killed. Combat event logged.

"Finally," she sighed, afterwards. This was the first time in the past two weeks that she had managed to make the movement happen without needing to use the skill actively. Training to use a skill passively felt very much like training to learn combat herself, magic removed. She wiped the knife on the grass, but did not put it away. She would not make the mistake of staying unarmed in the Marsh a second time. Just the thought of that made her check her arm on reflex.

It was fine and had healed long ago, but the memory was still there. She had been out of the splint for ten days. Hyde's tonic was either a pharmacological miracle or outright magic or both, and she had long since stopped being surprised by this and was now simply grateful. She picked up the basket and kept moving.

The morning was cold and clear, which was the best kind of morning for this, as she could see everything, the marsh spread flat in all directions with the reed shadows running long and the water catching the sky. It was her third time out this week. She went every other day, coming back with wild stock that she sold the day after at the pitch, which meant she was at the marsh roughly as often as she was at Gant Street Yard, and doing considerably better income-wise from it. She gathered for another hour.

Strawberries, the improbable October ones, out of season by any reasonable reckoning, were easy to spot now, their colour too saturated against the ordinary marsh greens. The orange star-flowers in two clusters near the second waterway. A stand of late violets by the bank she'd found on Tuesday. She had learned to read the wild sections the way she'd learned to read the pitch, noticing where things clustered, what sold first, what could wait.

[Forage] fired passively every ten minutes and she barely noticed it anymore. A second Lesser Boggart found her near the waterway while she was crouching to reach the violets. She heard it before she saw it, as it made a particular noise amongst the reeds that she'd learned to recognise, and had the knife at the right angle before it cleared the stems. Less than thirty seconds later, its body dropped to the ground. She was getting efficient.

This was either maturity or the early stages of overconfidence, and she intended to make sure that it never became the latter.

On the walk back she checked the screen. She didn't do this as often anymore, as there was no point in interrupting her work, whether foraging, hunting or selling, but the return journey from the gate to the Row was an hour of steady walking and gave her enough time to read through properly. STATUS Name: Alice Darling Race: Human (Common) Class: Novice Thief Level: 8 (Rank: Ignota) Title: Chosen One Conditions Minor Anaemia · Persistent Cough · Anathema (Alien) Attributes Vigour Lv. 5 (37/50) Acuity Lv.

7 (32/70) Skills Tier 2 (Uncommon): RESTRICTED Tier 1 (Common): [Arithmetic] Lv. 5 · [Advertise] Lv. 4 · [Bluff] Lv. 4 · [Britannian Language] Lv. 4 · [Convince] Lv. 5 · [Disguise] Lv. 1 · [Dodge] Lv. 4 · [Drop Safely] Lv. 2 · [Feign Ignorance] Lv. 5 · [Forage] Lv. 6 · [Francian Language] Lv. 1 · [Garden] Lv. 1 · [Hide] Lv. 5 · [Intimidation] Lv. 2 · [Latin Language] Lv. 3 · [Lie] Lv. 5 · [Local Slang] Lv. 3 · [Maintain Alias] Lv. 5 · [Map Building] Lv. 4 · [Mending] Lv. 3 · [Notice Detail] Lv. 6 · [Observe] Lv.

9 · [Pick Pocket] Lv. 1 · [Prusijan Language] Lv. 1 · [Reading and Writing] Lv. 5 · [Recall] Lv. 3 · [Silent Step] Lv. 4 · [Spot Tail] Lv. 2 · [Sprint] Lv. 4 · [Squeeze Through] Lv. 1 · [Strike] Lv. 5 · [Tailoring] Lv. 1 · [Threat Detection] Lv. 6 · [Track] Lv. 5 · [Vault] Lv. 2 · [Weaving] Lv. 1 Quests Main Quest: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Sub-Quest: Find the White Rabbit Sub-Quest: Off With Her Head She had finally gotten rid of several annoying conditions like [Malnourished] or [Bruised] as well.

Amusingly, as she had lost the [Malnourished] condition, she noticed that her Vigour reset to full overnight, even when her quality of sleep wasn't as good or she skipped dinner. With that condition, she had to take care of herself perfectly to achieve even half as good a recovery for Vigour or even Acuity. Other than that, the status screen showed a considerable upgrade in personal and skill level, with some skills having seen more use than others. Alice lingered on the social skills for a moment.

She had decided, in the days following Rowe's visit, that staying entirely invisible was not the right answer. The logic was simple enough when she had laid it out. She was a person of interest to the police, which meant she was almost certainly under some degree of observation, which meant the killer, who presumably wanted to remain unidentified, was unlikely to walk up to her on Aldgate Row with someone likely watching. The police were functionally acting as her bodyguard without knowing it.

Being too quiet, too withdrawn, too clearly frightened would signal guilt and reduce the protective effect. Being moderately visible, such as selling well, talking to people, being the flower girl who was making something of herself after a terrible experience, was simultaneously a better cover and better protection. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. This reasoning had its limits. She had not gone near Whitmore Lane.

She was not pursuing the investigation actively in any real way. Yes, she was watching the penny papers for Ripper coverage and had found nothing new in two weeks. But these were the concessions to caution, and regardless of her new appreciation for the value of bravery, she valued her continued existence. With these thoughts, she had started talking to the other sellers on the Row. Rose on the corner with the watercress and the sharp opinions about the corn laws.

Dottie who sold vegetables two pitches down and kept a cat called Marmalade somewhere in her apron. The woman at the adjacent pitch, who turned out to be called Margaret and who had opinions about chrysanthemum suppliers that were both extensive and correct. She had asked questions and listened to answers and carried on with agreeable responses, and all three of these women had her on pleasant terms now, which meant her [Local Slang] and her [Convince] was much better than it had been.

There was one question she hadn't resolved, which she considered at length now on the walk back. The marsh was outside the wards. She went every other day, early, alone, with a basket and barely any weapons. She had never noticed anyone following her there, not the police, not plain-clothed people who kept just out of sight. No one. Just random people going out for their own foraging and hunting, spread out over the great Lea Marshes.

The killer had been killing women somehow connected to the Whitmore Lane market, around the same district area. The original Alice had been found in Greybell Lane, a city street. All the others had been found within the city's ward boundary, but there was nothing to say that they had to be murdered within Londinium proper. Why had no one come for her in the Marsh? The simplest answer was that no one knew she went. She hadn't told anyone beyond Hyde and Nell.

But the killer, who she really didn't want to call by that ridiculous epithet the papers had given, might have eyes on her without being obvious about it, might have noticed the wild stock, and thus followed. She had been going every other day for two weeks, which was a pattern. Patterns were visible. The second answer was that the killer didn't know what she knew. To the killer, assuming the killer's information matched Rowe's, she was an amnesiac flower girl with convenient gaps in her memory about the summer.

Not a threat. Not worth the exposure of killing outside the city, in daylight, where a marsh collector or a gate officer might witness it. The third answer which was probably the more likely one, but her intuition told her otherwise, was that the killer simply did not know she was still alive. Her name wasn't on any papers and the police had not released the list of victims to the public, willingly or otherwise. The only reason Ruth Calder became known was due to her social class.

The rest of the victims had not been interesting enough to be involved in a leak. But was it really so? Did the killer truly think that he had killed Alice Darling on that Thursday night and as a result, moved on?

She was back on the Row by half-past eight. The wild strawberries sold fast, as they always did now for she had regulars, which was a new and slightly strange experience. A woman in a good shawl who came Tuesdays and Thursdays specifically. A cook who bought six bunches at once without haggling and carried them away without a word. The orange flowers for a girl who had started coming with her mother on market days.

She had adjusted her prices accordingly, up by a penny on the premium wild stock since last week, and hadn't lost a single sale. Skill [Advertise] has leveled up! She was making change for the cook, as the good-shawl woman was looking at the violets, when an idea came to her mind. It had been building for a while, if she was honest with herself. Since the church, specifically. The System did not care whether the skill came in English or Latin or any other language. It only cared about the intent and the utterance.

She had been thinking on this for weeks. The priests had built their entire liturgical practice around embedding skill names in prayer, so that the utterance was present without being obviously a skill activation. Nobody watching the service realized what was happening. The congregation just felt the effect. She had been saying her skill names in a murmur for two weeks. Quieter and quieter, barely a breath. But still audible to herself. Still a single word, out of context, that anyone nearby might catch.

What if the word was in context? The cook left. The good-shawl woman looked up from the violets. Alice smiled.

"May I convince you," she said, very naturally, "that the strawberries are worth the extra penny alongside? They're quite extraordinary for October." [Convince] – Active. She felt it succeed, as every active skill did, sharper than the passive, giving her a greater push behind the words. Not a mind trick exactly. More like focus, like temptation. The woman's expression changed slightly, the way it did something of Alice's held her attention a beat longer than she'd planned.

"Oh, why not?" she said, laughing and bought both the violets and the strawberries. Alice took the money with her face perfectly still. I can hardly believe that worked, she thought. She had said the right word, embedded in a completely natural sentence, the kind of thing a flower seller said twenty times a day, and the System had accepted it as active skill use. Intent and utterance.

The system heard her intent, and she'd provided the utterance, and the fact that the utterance was embedded in a sentence rather than standing alone had made absolutely no difference whatsoever. She sold six more bunches in the next forty minutes without thinking about it particularly, just practicing over and over again, and then, when the mid-morning rush thinned, she thought about it more deeply. If [Convince] worked this way, then [Bluff] worked this way.

I'm not bluffing when I say these are the finest strawberries this side of the gate. [Advertise] already functioned as a passive trigger but could presumably be pushed to active with the right construction. Let me advertise to you the particular excellence of the late violets. Strange but workable. [Lie] was harder. She couldn't say I lie at the front of a sentence and mean anything she wanted to be believed.

But she could say I'll tell you no lie, these came in this morning, and that might do it if the intent was there. [Feign Ignorance] was genuinely difficult. I feign ignorance of whether you've seen these before made no sense to anyone, but she could work on it. And [Maintain Alias]... She didn't want to test that one on the street without knowing what it would feel like at active level. She had been using it passively for seven weeks. She set that one aside for careful practice later.

But the implications were significant. The social skill problem was that saying a skill name out loud in a conversation was immediately strange and suspicious. She had been murmuring her way through it, which was better, but still a liability in any situation where someone was paying close attention. Like, for example, a police interrogation. That did not mean that saying skill names out loud was no longer stupid.

It remained one of the most idiotic things Alice had ever heard of, but it was at least somewhat serviceable now. She would still have to be careful for people with more experience with using skills actively, could probably clock their use even in context of a longer conversation. The church had figured it out, after all. So had Alice. And likely, so had many, many other people. Alice looked at the next customer approaching along the Row.

"Good morning," she said.

"May I convince you to look at the strawberries?" [Convince] – Active. Skill [Convince] has leveled up. It leveled up much more easily when she did it actively. Because of course it did. She was going to run out of sentence variants, wasn't she?