Chapter 53 - Deliberating
Scarlett felt the onset of a headache as she languidly leaned back in her chair. She had been feeling stressed out the whole morning now.
Right now she was in one of the offices in the capital mansion. It was mostly empty, the only decoration here a couple of bookcases at the edge of the room and the desk in front of her. She didn't really need more than that right now, so the plain nature of the room didn't bother her much.
The ball had already ended the night before, so that wasn't what was stressing her out now. While it had been far from a pleasant experience— by any definition of the word—and the only true silver lining was that she appeared to have managed to avoid committing any further large mistakes during the ball itself, she didn't feel the need to excessively worry about it now that it was over.
The ending of the night had also turned out relatively calm, all things considered. After her interaction with Leon, no more people had approached her, and when things had finally started dying down and people started leaving she had been led back to the carriage and been allowed to leave the palace without any real issues.
She had been a bit surprised over the whole divorce talk Leon had brought up with her, but it wasn't really something she cared that much about. From what she remembered he wasn't a bad man, but she hadn't been planning on actually marrying him to start with. He was still essentially a stranger to her, and one who had a pretty poor image of her. If their end decided to end things that just made it easier on her.
No, the current problem was none of that, but rather Evelyne.
To say that their ride back had been comfortable would be a straight-out lie. Their current situation was...awkward, at best. Scarlett had fully expected Evelyne to tear into her about what she'd done during the Proclamation ceremony, but instead, the younger woman had stayed quiet the entire ride back to the mansion.
Scarlett wasn't entirely sure how to interpret that.
While she had managed to get a decent night's sleep despite the events of the previous day, that hadn't meant much this morning. Evelyne had been missing during breakfast—not that unusual of an occurrence between the two sisters, if Scarlett were to guess—but her absence had been especially noticeable today. Doubly so as she had been spending a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what she should say to her.
To keep her mind off of things for a bit, Scarlett had spent a couple of hours after that going through the [Bag of Juham] to create an account of all the loot they'd picked up from Temisbrook Glade, but that had only gotten her so far.
After that, she had started scanning through her little red book, going through her notes and trying to get a sense of which of her current plans might get affected by or derailed because of what happened at the Elysian Proclamation. Unfortunately, there were a lot of things she was still unsure of when it came to how far-reaching the consequences of that were, so she had been somewhat limited in her conclusions.
One upside was that attending the Elysian Proclamation had apparently been considered a quest by the system—which it definitely hadn't been in the game—so she had gained five skill points from that on her way back at least. That meant she now had 12 skill points, which would be enough to upgrade her [Hydrokinesis] to [Greater Hydrokinesis]. Her hydrokinesis was a bit limited in what it could do right now, but considering the increase in effectiveness that she had seen after upgrading her pyrokinesis she had high expectations.