Chương 37: Chapter Thirty-Seven: Odds and Other Comforts

The cup lay in pieces on the floorboards, tea already soaking into the wood, and for a moment neither of them moved.

"Alice?" Nell was watching her closely now, she knew, something sharpening in her expression.

"You've gone odd on me." At those words, by some miracle, Alice felt her body unfreeze.

"I'm so sorry," she said, already crouching, reaching for the shards with hands that weren't quite steady enough to trust with broken porcelain.

"I'm so clumsy, I–" the lies that would usually come to her easy, felt too large to swallow now. She couldn't do this now. Not like this. Not unprepared. She got up from the floor slowly this time and took a deep breath, before smiling politely.

"I am not feeling well," she said, voice trembling.

"Excuse me, just a moment." Alice was up and out the door before Nell could properly answer, down the narrow stairs two at a time, through the kitchen where Mrs. Hatch glanced up from her bread and got nothing but a mumbled apology in return, and into the small scullery at the back of the house where the washstand and the pump lived alongside the mangle and the drying lines. She shut the door, braced both hands on the cold stone of the sink, and breathed.

It doesn't mean anything, she told herself, working the pump handle with more force than it needed until the water ran cold over her cupped palms. It's information, the same as any other information. You have survived worse revelations than this one. Cancer for one. Dying for another. It didn't feel like just information. It felt like the floor had tilted a half-inch under something she'd once assumed was solid ground, without ever examining it further.

"I'm fine," Alice said.

"I'm fine." She splashed her face. The water felt cool and seemed to wake her somewhat. Mental Skill Resistance, the same skill she'd been dreading over for weeks, sitting at a level she still couldn't account for, still couldn't remember earning, still didn't know how many times it had already activated without her knowledge… until now. It didn't mean Nell had done anything to her, she told herself forcefully.

It could have been something else entirely, some old, unresolved edge of whatever had already been done to her memory once before, stirred up by nothing more than a flicker of the fire, an expected line of thought, an accidental trigger word said in the conversation. What were the actual chances that Nell had been manipulating her mind, likely even her memories over many weeks, without Alice ever once noticing said manipulation?

Considering the fact that Alice would be terrified of a world in which such powerful mind control was common enough to have been done multiple times to her by multiple individuals already… she thought it more likely to assume that [Mental Skill Resistance] would not be triggered often. Odds were that whoever had caused her skill to level up, had triggered it now too. She refused to believe that this was an ability that was easily gained and trained.

Such an individual would need to be Probata or higher; and what reason would that person have to even look at Alice when she passed the street, let alone rearrange her mind? And if that person were Nell, why would they pretend to be a match girl on some poor street? Nell had lived there longer than Alice herself had! She paused in her thoughts. This was her fear of the larger world talking. It was irresponsible to assume that she had only been manipulated by one person alone.

Some lower level of mental suggestion could be more common than she hoped and that alone could trigger her skill just as well as a more powerful ability. That did not absolve Nell, however. Even if she had not manipulated her mind before, there was nothing to say that she was not prepared to manipulate her now. That this was not a new decision on her part. If there actually were weaker versions of mental influences… Still.

'Nell' was the easy answer here. For all she know about the power scale of this world, there could be an invisible person in her room, watching her all the time, triggering her skill on purpose just to see her lose her mind with paranoia and distrust toward the one maybe-friend she had in this world. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. She had no way of separating those possibilities from each other. Certainly not by standing here.

She still knew too little about this world. If she had an idea of what was considered powerful, she would not be making up random scenarios here. But back at the situation at hand. The fact remained, plain and unavoidable: whatever had triggered her skill, it had triggered now, in her room, in front of a person she was beginning to, cautiously, trust. That alone was worth being frightened of, regardless of what it did or didn't prove about Nell herself.

Alice threw the water at her face one more, properly this time, sharp and shocking, and held her breath for a moment before straightening. In the small, spotted mirror above the basin, her own reflection looked back at her, pale, composed enough on the surface, with her eyes giving away rather more than she would have liked. She counted her own breaths the way she'd once counted a frightened patient's, in and out, four counts each, until her pulse agreed to slow down and behave itself.

Whatever excuse you give her, she thought, drying her face on the rough towel hanging by the pump, it needs to be small enough that she doesn't press, and big enough that she doesn't wonder. By the time she climbed back up, she had one ready. Mrs.

Hatch was already in the doorway of her room, a rag and the little tin dustpan in hand, saying something to Nell about not troubling herself over it, dear, these things happen, while Nell knelt awkwardly by the broken cup looking as though she wasn't entirely sure whether she was cleaning up after a friend or a stranger.

"I've got it," Alice said, taking the rag from Mrs. Hatch's hand before the older woman could crouch down herself.

"Thank you. I'm sorry for the noise."

"No trouble at all, love." Mrs. Hatch's eyes flicked briefly, curiously, between the two of them, Nell still kneeling awkwardly by the mess, Alice returned rather more composed than she'd left, and then, apparently deciding whatever was happening wasn't hers to ask after, she retreated back toward the kitchen with a last " Mind the sharp bits" over her shoulder.

Alice knelt and gathered the pieces properly this time, hands steadier now than they had been a minute ago, while Nell watched her with the same careful, unreadable attention she'd been wearing most of the evening.

"You went quite pale," Nell said, once the door had clicked shut downstairs.

"And quite fast off that chair, for someone who just told me she was fine."

"Woman's trouble," Alice said, without quite meeting her eyes, which had the considerable advantage of being the kind of excuse no Victorian woman, however direct, was inclined to interrogate further. Or at least she hoped so.

"It comes on sharp sometimes. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

"Mm," Nell studied her a moment longer, plainly unconvinced but equally plainly unwilling to push a woman on the subject, and let it go.

"Sit down before you drop something else, then." Alice sat. She poured what remained of the tea into her one surviving cup and let Nell have it, but the latter only pushed the cup back. Alice looked at her in question.

"Warm tea helps dull the pain," Nell explained. Alice accepted the cup and took a sip. They talked for a while longer about nothing in particular, the hen dispute revisited lightly, a customer who never once said thank you, another who bought every week and was accompanied by a different woman each time… It was in the middle of one such ordinary sentence, with Nell laughing at something only half funny, that Alice made up her mind.

"Funny thing, though," Alice said, once the customer story wound down.

"The fellow two doors past the greengrocer's, constables came round last week, though you weren't there to hear it at the time, but by evening half the street had him robbing someone at knifepoint. Turned out he'd only watered down his cider past what the excise men allow."

"Small wonder," Nell said, shaking her head.

"People'd rather have a story than the truth of it, most days."

"You'd think," she said, watching Nell's face carefully while keeping her own tone light, "people would observe a bit more before making up their minds about someone." [Observe] – Active. She half-expected nothing to happen, thinking that her abilities would be hindered somehow and they were, but they revealed enough to have her gasp, which she quickly hid by putting the tea cup to her lips.

Eleanor Race: Construct Type: RESTRICTED Evolution: RESTRICTED Level: RESTRICTED Attributes (RESTRICTED) Skills (RESTRICTED) Traits (RESTRICTED) Weaknesses (RESTRICTED) Quests (RESTRICTED) What on Earth was she looking at?!