Chương 98: 96. Making Headway

"Capita," I growl, spear still raised.

"What are you doing here?" She doesn't feel hostile, but emotionally, Capita is one of the most complicated people I've ever tried to read. Something about being two fragments of a person spliced together makes it difficult for me to understand her as a singular entity, as her emotional responses are spread between two souls that demonstrate those responses in very different ways, not to mention the purple ooze between them which sort of acts like a third soul fragment and sort of doesn't.

In short, Capita is just different from every other person I've ever met, to such a large degree that I will need to spend more time around her before I can pick up the skills necessary to understand what she's feeling. In the meantime, she's a wildcard, and I don't trust her. Though in classic wildcard fashion, she immediately does something absurd.

"Who?" Capita asks.

"If you seek to get ahead, you'll find no such head here! I am… the fox!" I blink. Did she forget who she is again or something? No, wait, she called me a friend. And I did sort of promise to be her friend. Mostly because I was getting information out of her, but still. I might be able to just kill her as I am now. But then Sky would come after me for sure, and he would without question be coming for the kill. I'm not ready to fight Sky yet. So… fighting here isn't worth it, I guess.

"I distinctly recall our agreement with your boss being that you would not bother us," Penelope says from behind me, her voice venomous.

"Does a friend bother a friend when saying hello?" Capita giggles.

"I mean…a fox makes no agreements! I know not of this boss you speak, for I am just a wandering companion!"

"I don't think she has her story straight," Penelope deadpans.

"What do you want?" I ask.

"Listen, listen! The work of art... um. I mean, life must listen! The fox has already told you her purpose, has she not? It is a day of celebration. What better time to make merry with friends?" I sigh, putting my spear away.

"Sorry, I don't know a fox. But if you see my friend Capita, be sure to send her my way." She reacts with apparent shock, scrambling to fix her story. What a weirdo.

"I-I am, arguably maybe, if one were to look behind the mask, which may I say is against the spirit of this wonderful holiday, potentially perhaps possibly someone named Capita," she whimpers.

"And therefore, as per the terms of our nonaggression pact, you are supposed to leave us alone," Penelope repeats flatly.

"We were having a nice day."

"But!" Capita retorts, "I might also not be someone named Capita!"

"Why aren't you with Sky?" I ask her.

"Shouldn't you be spending the holiday with him? Isn't it normal to spend holidays with your lover, or something?" Mild surprise and massive amounts of embarrassment erupt from Penelope at that. Why the heck? I don't get her sometimes. What about what I said would— Oh. Oh.

"I will… also spend time today with Sky," Capita protests defensively.

"But is it not also a wonderful thing to—""You can come with," I answer her. Capita absolutely lights up with joy, it's easy to feel even with how strange her soul is. It's also easy to see, because she starts hopping up and down and clapping her hands while making an excited screeching noise. Penelope steps next to me, lips pursed in frustration about the introduction of this third party. So it's as I thought. I make a quick decision, one that I hope I don't end up regretting later.

"I think we might want to introduce her to another friend of ours," I murmur to Penelope. That gets her back on track, picking up on my meaning immediately. Theodora. If Capita really is as friendly as she claims, we stand to gain a lot by having Theodora watch her use her talents. Teleportation magic is unfathomably rare, and Theodora's ability to rapidly convert any magic she sees into a usable spell is equally absurd.

It's difficult to abuse considering that we can't allow most people to know Theodora exists, but since Capita is an animancer she is unlikely to take offense at all of the animancy I've been doing. Speaking of, she is and continues to be our best link to cognimancy, and Theodora's ability to copy that could advance our research tremendously. This has been part of our goal from the start, the only difference being that originally I was going to bring in Capita as a Revenant. Penelope nods back.

So she thinks the risks are worth it? A living Capita that we can't know the loyalties of is a significant risk, but perhaps if we spend the day with her I can figure out her soul enough to know whether she's being upfront enough with her intentions. More importantly, this also turns today into a day about accomplishing goals rather than possibly having a date, which I am so much more comfortable with.

"Such a joy it is for the palette to have the art!" Capita coos, spinning with dance-like movements between strangers in the crowd when we return to the street.

"My every smear evidence of a greater perfection!" We make our way to the next game, where we are apparently supposed to throw discs at targets. The discs, naturally, seem to randomly wobble off course. Obviously the person behind the stall just has a weak kineticism talent, but he's subtle enough with it that people don't seem to notice. Unless those people are watching his soul use it, that is.

"Do you seriously think that I was made artificially, let alone by the same person as you?" I grumble at Capita's sing-song musings.

"We are nothing alike." Honestly, if I'm trying to win her allegiance, I probably shouldn't argue against her assertion that we are both made by some sort of 'artist.' The idea just pisses me off, though. She's two souls chopped in half and glued together. It's a hackneyed job at best, a blind flailing at worst. I can sort of see how it works, the more I look at it. The two souls aren't communicating properly, because they can't.

The way each of them functions, the pathways each of them uses, are fundamentally incompatible with one another, at least on the level required to be a person. The purple goop in the middle acts as both an adhesive to prevent Capita from just falling the fuck apart but also as a translator. A shitty translator. The soul halves send garbled, incomplete messages to each other, expecting to find their actual counterparts on the other end to help complete the thought.

But there is nothing there, nothing that can understand them, so the message has to pass through the middle and get interpreted by something that barely knows the language before getting spat out the other end. It's no wonder she's crazy. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Why would the palette look like the masterpiece?" Capita counters.

"Why would a sketch bear resemblance to a painting? The signature left on us is the same. That is all that matters." I scowl, paying the stall owner with Penelope's money and tossing a disc. As expected, it misses. I still don't like the implication that Capita and I are both created by some singular person. It feels insulting to be compared to her. Besides…

"If what you say is true, we're not really friends, are we?" I wonder out loud.

"We would be more like sisters." I try to toss a second disc, but the stall owner doesn't even need to cheat as my throw is knocked wildly off course when Capita grabs me in a crushing hug, instantly sending my whole body into fight or flight. Danger! Danger danger danger danger —"Sister!?" Capita squeals.

"Oh, yes, yes, yes! For the most beautiful of all paintings to accept a family of sketches, there could be no greater joy!"

"Get off me!" I shout, driving the base of my palm up into her chin hard enough to feel something crack in her face. She just keeps on giggling, though, giving me one final squeeze before I force her away. The commotion earns us quite a few stares from other people in and around the stall, but with her having let go I quickly calm myself back down. There is no danger, she's just weird. I return to throwing and soon the interest in us dissipates. Each disc wobbles in the air before moving realistically off-course.

It's a pretty good con, and I didn't expect myself to be annoyed by it, but I'm starting to get frustrated. When I have only three throws left, I poke a tendril into the body of the stall owner and tap his soul as I throw, causing him to jump in sudden terror and allowing me to get a hit on a target. I grin at him. That'll teach them.

An exasperated and for some reason slightly curious Penelope grabs and sets Capita's jaw as I make my second to last throw, though to my frustration the stall owner has not learned his lesson and he knocks it off course again. Annoyed, I tap his soul a second time and, without really thinking about it, try to push a bunch of my mana into it. I fail at first, but now I'm kind of interested in seeing what happens so I push harder and force myself inside. It's… odd.

I can still move the mana around as if it was in me, although it's substantially more difficult. If I wanted to, I could probably damage or break his soul like this. Not that there would be any point. Pushing mana into his soul took a lot more work than just ripping it out would have, and I bet it would be comparably more difficult for anyone with a stronger soul as well. He places a hand over his sternum, surprised at the feeling but other than the tentacle touch not terribly disquieted by it. How odd.

I throw my last disc and, still somehow not suspicious enough to just let me, the stall owner's soul activates his talent and starts shaping some mana. Specifically, he shapes my mana. It acts just like I've seen the Mistwatcher's mana act, except without the unruly, almost angry vibrations I've come to expect from someone channeling. He executes the talent normally, my mana gets consumed in the spell (which annoys me, but I don't do anything about it) and the disc is knocked off course as per usual. Interesting!

There's even a little bit of my mana left over inside him, since the spell is all finesse and almost no power. The amount left over isn't enough for a second use of his talent, though. I didn't give him very much. He starts channeling mana to activate his talent for one of the other people throwing discs, doesn't have enough of mine, and so pulls in some of the mana from outside. A muffled screech sounds from inside his chest as the two kinds of mana collide and he collapses in pain. Whoops.

"Um, are you okay?" I ask hesitantly. I really hadn't intended to do that. I hope he didn't get hurt. He waves me off, insisting that he is fine and giving me the one-hit prize, some cheap ring made of twine. I give Penelope a pleading glance and she correctly figures out that whatever happened was entirely my fault, so she offers to check the guy anyway. He agrees, because when a biomancer offers you a free checkup you fucking say yes.

Afterwards, Penelope says he "only" had a mild case of something called "heartburn" which sounds absolutely terrifying but she acts like it's not really that serious of a condition. Also, she's lying, presumably because we are in public and the answer isn't the kind of thing we say here. I'll have to ask her about it in private later. Then the three of us leave together, a fascinated Capita having watched the entire thing with apparent glee.

"Experience begets wisdom, wisdom begets progress," she chirps, failing to hold back a few more giggles.

"Have you become wiser, littlest sister?" I scowl. That had better not be a short joke. I'm four foot ten, now! I don't know how tall I used to be, but I'm going to choose to believe that I'm growing.

"Capita. You're going to tell Sky pretty much everything we do today, right?" I ask. She stiffens, with what I think is a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. I'm getting pretty good at figuring people out, so I'll probably crack her soon enough. Er, no pun intended.

"Few secrets survive a lover's bed," she hesitantly admits.

"But so too does a family gossip at dinner!"

"Penelope," I ask my friend, "is there anything we care about Sky knowing?" She thinks for a moment, then sighs.

"No, I suppose not. It's mutually assured destruction if he informs on us, considering how guilty he is of the same crimes. We may as well return now, if this vapid, pink-haired prat is going to ruin the holiday for us either way."

Capita titters, hand over her mouth as she uses her other hand to pat the top of Penelope's head, which surprises the biomancer so thoroughly that I get to witness nearly a full second of her flailing to bat away Capita's arm before she primly steps around to the other side of me and starts plotting revenge like a proper noble instead. I grin behind my mask, because I know Penelope is blushing behind hers.

"Fear not, oh lady of bubbles and glass," Capita coos.

"I would never harm you."

"I'm not afraid of you, mad thing," Penelope hisses.

"I just don't want you to touch me." Capita laughs again.

"Of course, of course! An honor reserved only for one. But how does a mortal catch infinity?"

"By leaving bait without a trap," Penelope counters, and the conversation officially starts going above my head.

"You think a god is like a stray that you can feed until it comes on command?" Capita says, and then suddenly starts laughing even harder.

"So to speak!" The discordant tune of Penelope's soul plays a sliding, rising note of embarrassment.

"With the right food?" Penelope asks, not a hint of her true feelings in her serious tone.

"Yes, if you know what they're hungry for. But that would require some capacity to understand the world around you, wouldn't it?"

"Would the two of you quit with the riddles?" I snap.

"I don't have any idea what you're saying!"

"I suspect the lady knows that well," Capita taunts, but Penelope just scoffs and doesn't rise to what I assume was a jab at her. The three of us soon break away from the bustling festival streets and slink towards our laboratory, letting Capita inside. We make our way downstairs and call out the all-clear to team metamancy. Theodora and Margarette emerge soon after, reacting with surprise when they see us but not for the reason I was expecting.

"Why are you all wearing masks?" Theodora asks, seeming a little worried.

"It can't be Skyhope day already, can it?"

"I'm afraid it can be," Penelope answers.

"Why? Is something the matter?" She scratches the back of her neck, seeming temporarily lost.

"No, I just… it feels like it hasn't been anywhere near that long since I woke up down here." I frown, moving my mask away from my face as Capita and Penelope do the same. I guess my Revenants have sort of been stuck down here for a really long time, haven't they? They have no way to know when it's day or night, they don't get tired, and they have plenty of work to distract themselves with. It must be odd to have the world slip by unannounced.

"Vitamin seems to be blending in okay thanks to the tattoos you gave her," I say.

"Maybe we can get you two some time off as well? Let you see the sky and stuff."

"Yes, let's do that," Penelope agrees, though apparently quite reluctantly considering all the risks for what she sees is very little gain.

"But not right now. Theodora, Margarette, this is Capita. She is a splice and a cognimancer. Capita, by any chance would you be willing to demonstrate your abilities for us?" Capita tilts her head.

"For my youngest sister, I would be honored. But to mold a mind I need a mind to mold; the dead will not do."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry," Penelope says, motioning for all of us to follow her into the room where we keep Sky's gift.

"We have a volunteer." We file in, a bound and gagged man, doomed from the moment he had failed Angelien, looking increasingly terrified as each of us enters. Capita grins a vulpine grin that would have fit just as easily on her fox mask.

"This will do nicely," she agrees, and we start to learn the most illegal of all blasphemies.