Chương 32: Chapter Thirty-Two: In Which Information Becomes Power, and Then a Liability

The next day, Alice sat in the public library with a borrowed book open across her lap, the light going grey through the high windows, and pondered over what it hadn't said as much as what it had. No one, in all her careful reading, had so much as mentioned status screens. That was simply confirmation on what she'd worked out for herself already. People spoke about levels and ranks but never once at actual displayed numbers, the way they would if they could simply see them as she did.

On that same note, as she had been gaining in levels and learning more about the so-called Angel's Gift, she kept noticing more disparities between what she knew to be true about the system and what the people of this world believed to be true. The worst disparity so far concerned creatures other than human.

No one, not the pamphlet, not the sermons, not a single one of the dozen other volumes she'd already worked her way through this past hour, had ever mentioned once that the beasts and creatures of this world carried the Angel's gift as well. Alice knew that they did. She'd killed enough of them to know it with total certainty; whether Boggart or Riverwrack or anything else she'd fought, [Observe] gave her a status screen exactly the way it would have for a human opponent.

And yet the common wisdom, repeated so consistently across every source she'd read that it had to be doctrine rather than accident, held that the Angel's gift was a human gift. That beasts and demons alike stood entirely outside it, unclassed and unchosen, brute nature untouched by divine grace. She did not understand how that belief survived contact with reality so cleanly.

Unless, she thought, turning the pages of the book over gently, most people simply never got close enough to a dying beast to notice what she'd noticed. Or unless something quieter than an outright lie was doing the work instead, something that was actively working to keep that information undisclosed. Alice closed the last book without finishing the chapter, as it was simply more regurgitated material.

According to this, she thought, the heavens themselves had descended upon this world sixty years ago, and yet this was all a public library had to offer on the matter. Sitting there, surrounded by useless books, it certainly did not feel like an accident. She had never been one for conspiracy theories, but too little was known as a whole about something that ruled the lives of everyone on the planet, for her to believe it was a coincidence.

Alice could not yet tell whether this type of censorship existed to keep people from levelling too far, too fast, too dangerously; or to keep them from asking exactly the kind of questions she was asking now; or for some third reason she hadn't thought of yet, tangled up somewhere in why the Crown and the Church both wanted first claim on anyone who got too strong to ignore. She was close, she realized, to simply giving up on this particular avenue of information gathering entirely.

Another hour here would likely yield the same lackluster result the last several had. Even the Compact's own restricted material, she thought ruefully, I don't even know what that contains, but somehow, I don't expect it to be much. This changed things. She set the book aside for good and stood up. She would need to take a new approach on this.

Alice spent a while longer in the library, looking at the shelves just in case anything interesting caught her eye. But no, nothing did. She had already exhausted most of the reading material already, and confirmed only what she'd already feared. She set the last book back in its proper place with more force than it deserved and decided, walking out into the afternoon light, to take matters in her own hand for now. She'd learned, by now, how to use [Observe] without looking like she was doing anything at all.

Merely a glance held half a second longer than usual, the word said so quietly under her breath she could barely hear it herself, timed to a moment when she had some other reason to be looking at a person anyway. Perhaps, there was a cart passing or a crossing to think about. Anyone watching would have seen a girl waiting for traffic, nothing more. Sometimes, she didn't even need to vocalize the skill.

This was her best skill after all, and she could trigger it passively well generally, but Alice still hadn't figured out the principle behind using a passive skill consistently every time. However, she'd only dared use it out in public on living humans, a handful of times so far, and always quite carefully, on strangers she judged safe enough not to matter if it went wrong. Nobody she knew, nobody who might later connect a flower girl's odd glance to anything worth remembering.

She'd watched, the first few times, for any flicker of reaction in the people she tried it on: a frown, a hand pressed briefly to the temple, anything that might suggest they'd felt something. But nothing happened. None of her targets, as of yet, seemed to notice being [Observe]'d, which seemed like a true advantage for once. Information was power. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Alice had yet to try it with her new class upgrade, though, so as she was waiting for a carriage to clear the crossing, she tried it again." Observe," she whispered quickly with barely a glance. Her target was a plain clerk-looking man in a decent coat, and otherwise unremarkable. Still, he seemed to be barely waiting for the carriage to pass, in a desperate hurry to somewhere, and thus the kind of person who wouldn't notice a random stranger's eyes on him for just half a second too long. [Observe] – Active.

The screen that followed had a little bit more information this time. Before she was only able to see someone's name, level, and race, the latter of which was predictably boring each time.

Name: Nathaniel Pryce Race: Human (Common) Class (RESTRICTED) Level: 15 (Rank: Ignota) Title: None Conditions (RESTRICTED) Attributes Vigour (RESTRICTED) Acuity (RESTRICTED) Skills (RESTRICTED) Quests Main Quest: The War of the Worlds Sub-Quests (RESTRICTED) She stood very still on the corner, letting the carriage pass without quite seeing it. The only new things she could see were the Title, in this case being none, and the Main Quest. It was that which shocked her.

It was worded in such a way that snagged at something old and half-buried in her memory. The War of the Worlds. Alice was almost entirely certain she knew it, from somewhere that had nothing whatsoever to do with Londinium or this strange time. She stood there for long seconds, thinking about it, when it occurred to her. Her own Main Quest was a 19th century novel by Lewis Carroll, a book that did not exist in this timeline. There had been a novel from that same century, by H. G.

Wells, that shared its exact title with this man's Main Quest. A hundred questions immediately popped up in her head. As she was still dealing with the many implications of this, unable to turn her head around it just yet, the sound of a small crowd up ahead pulled her attention away from that train of thought entirely. There was a news board up front that had gathered a small, murmuring cluster of women by the time she had spent lost in thought.

"... Dowd, they're saying now, confirmed, not just missing–" one voice was saying, hushed but not quite low enough.

"... my sister-in-law heard from a woman at the workhouse that it's more than the five they've let on–""... and one of them lived, mind, that's the part nobody's saying proper. One of them got away –" They shared amongst each other, each more scandalized and more pleased to be part of the gossip than the next. Alice went very still, an instant wave of panic washing over her.

"Away where, though," said a third woman, older, arms crossed against the cold.

"If she lived, why's no one heard nothing of her?

""Because whoever lived don't want it heard around, is why," the first woman said, with enormous certainty.

"Frightening thought, that. Girl could be walking round this city right now."

"You think the Ripper's looking for her?" asked another. Alice made herself keep walking. She made herself not look at them or the board a moment longer, made her face do nothing at all, though it had likely gone terribly pale, and it wasn't until she'd turned onto the next street that she allowed the meaning of what she'd just heard actually land. They don't have a name, she thought, with a sudden need for warmth. Her whole body had gone cold. It's just rumors. They don't know it's me.

Still, even if the masses did not know, whoever had put the rumour of a survivor out into the world, had drastically reduced her chances at survival in this city. She had spent the past two months, living in ways that would ensure as much as she could, that no one learned of her meeting with the local serial killer. But due to some leak in the police or some awful paper's speculations, by tomorrow, half the East End would know of her existence.

And she was quite sure, her anonymity would be maintained only for so long. She wasn't hiding from a killer who thought her dead anymore. Her arm still ached faintly where the Riverwrack's grip had bruised it, and she pressed her sleeve against it without meaning to. She thought about how little her knife would actually do against a person clever enough to have taken five women without a single witness worth naming. She gave up the pretence at being normal and unaffected and ran the rest of the way home.

Gossip spread like wildfire; that much she knew. This city just became much more dangerous for her.