The Weight of Legacy

“I will have to insist my proposal was better.”

“You wish,” Theo scoffed. As much as Alaric’s second choice truly was to just ask Theo to come up with other ideas, he still thought his own first suggestion had merit to it. As far as he was concerned, it could and would have worked… in theory—an opinion his friend made a show of confirming he did not share. “Worst plan I have ever heard.”

“We could have convinced them to be patient.”

“Oh, good luck with that. Me, I refuse to be hounded by impatient children for months on end.”

As if! An explanation would have sufficed. Eventually. Alaric couldn’t help it, feeling quite offended on behalf of his sister and niece. “I would argue they are surprisingly mature for their age, when it comes to their understanding and their concern for others.”

“I won’t refuse that—in fact, that is precisely the problem.”

“How so?”

“They’re not just impatient children, they’re impatient children smart enough to argue with me if they don’t believe me.”

Alaric found his shock lasted only long enough for them to turn another corner, at which point a chuckle escaped him. His friend truly focused on the stupidest things.

“You must not know the most reliable defense of all, then. Appeal to emotion!”

Theo shot him a glance over his shoulder, not slowing his stride. “Okay, now you’ve lost me.”

“They’re young, but most importantly, caring. Just explain that arguments make you quite sad. Empathy will probably win over curiosity and impatience then.”

“You know what, fair. That might actually work on your menace of a sister, at least.”

They shared a laugh at that, for all one detail went unsaid. What Adelheid had done to him, even if only once, was something the girl had clearly understood had hurt him, even if he avoided bringing it up. She was smart enough to know—or perhaps knowing that type of thing was just specifically within her capabilities.

That didn’t change the fact that she had acted in ignorance, and might do so again. The little girl hadn’t meant to leave him terrified of how thoughts and knowledge could just be made to disappear from his head, but what else could she do that might seem harmless to her yet deeply impact people?

Alaric loved little Adelheid, he truly did.

But that wasn’t enough to keep that fright from lingering on the back of his mind, as much as he tried to keep it at bay.

He shook his head. Perhaps going along with Theo’s suggestion had been the right call, after all.

They weren’t headed in a particular direction so much as just canvassing the town, on the assumption that they would arrive eventually if they were persistent enough.

“No idea what her shop’s supposed to be called?” Alaric asked. Despite his relatively short time here, his friend visited Beuzaheim’s shop’s far more often than he did.

“Not in the slightest.”

They probably should have started with that, but it was a moot point, now. It wasn’t as though they would stop, for all Alaric found himself thinking about something Zayden’s journals called ‘sunk cost fallacy’. The concept of sinking was one of those things that didn’t transfer too well between their worlds’ phrasing but he avoided putting too much thought into the matter, because that would have been a nice way to waste time.

Beuzaheim fell on neither end of the spectrum as far as small or large towns went, somehow toeing the line enough for them to not feel utterly lost despite the unfamiliarity of some streets. There was always at least something vaguely familiar just around the corner.

“It just now struck me that I’d never considered what the normal amount of tailors and the like in a town should be,” Theo mused, his gaze distant—it seemed like the type of idle commentary he wouldn’t expect an answer to, not that Alaric let that stop him.

“Perhaps it scales with the size of the town? No one can have all the customers when there are so many people. More people, more competition.”

Theo shot him a glance, raising an eyebrow.

“What?” Alaric returned the glare. “I will have you know, I’ve got you beat there. I… might have given the idea of making a shop or something some thought, once.”

“Making a shop for what, for fun?” His friend was doing a terrible job at understating his confusion. Neither of them were exactly familiar with any real need to work for a living, but the high noble clearly found the idea absurd.

“Yes, for fun,” Alaric said, gritting his teeth a second later as he realized just how defensive he likely came off as. “No offense, but I would very much rather not spend my entire life at home. I want things to do, places to be. Not that it’ll pan out, anyway. With our history, I doubt anyone would come anywhere close to anything owned by me. I still overhear people every now and then talking about what Thekla did to their walls.”

He flinched as he finished speaking—then again, this was why they were out here. If they were to get his sister out of this supposed stasis, they needed to figure out the cause.

“Had I not met your family, I would have thought that story a joke,” Theo snorted, his hands sliding into his pockets. “You know, as much as I hate the risk of it, I’ve half a mind to just start using Skills.”

That was not a topic they had spent much time discussing, truth be told. Alaric tried his best to respect how badly the noble seemed to want to avoid anything that could point towards his past, curious as he was.

“I thought you said you didn’t have anything for tracking people down?” Alaric’s eyes narrowed. One thing Theo had said was that there was nothing he could do for the matter of Beryl’s whereabouts.

“I do not,” Theo agreed. As he withdrew his right hand from his pocket, his closed fist seemed to almost flicker in place, until he opened it to reveal a translucent sphere. It shifted within seconds, squished until it became a flat film against his palm—with a flick of his wrist, it dropped to the ground without losing its form. “This is… something I’ve been working on. For observation purposes. It’s nowhere near as efficient as I wish it were, but I want to have a way to know what’s happening if and when I have to hide.”

“You better not have been ‘working on’ that in my rooms,” Alaric muttered, quite certain his rugs were not waterproof, for all he was more than a bit intrigued by the implications there. Though he’d yet to confirm it, Theo almost certainly had an elemental Affinity. Perhaps even {Water} itself, absurdly unlikely as that sounded. “Am I right to assume your goal is to use those to see?”

Theo shrugged. “I can already do so, to an extent. It’s the range that leaves much to be desired. No one would find themselves growing suspicious of a nearby puddle, and I can scatter enough of them about, I can swap between them to keep track of people.”

“What if someone sees them and gets a mop?”

Alaric didn’t even bother to hide his grin as Theo predictably glared at him for that.

“I’ve yet to find a consistent limit in distance, believe it or not. It changes enough that I know I must be missing a variable,” Theo continued after a moment, seemingly choosing to ignore how his plans might easily be foiled if someone felt like cleaning the floor. “Another issue is how I can’t get it to work with preexistent liquids of any kind. I have to create it of my own power, else whatever I’m using starts to evaporate at an accelerated rate.”

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“No lie, having to put the water there yourself sounds like quite the hurdle,” Alaric admitted. He hadn’t meant to go out of his way to start poking holes on his friend’s technique, but there were just too many low hanging fruits on this. “Wait, would it work on something like the leftovers of The Rain?”

Theo paused, scowling as he turned, the puddle of his own creation momentarily forgotten. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t at least activate, though I fear what trying might expose me to—so I would rather not.”

Despite his words, he certainly sounded like he was at least considering it. That alone told Alaric all he needed to know about the other possibility that had crossed his mind—it would be best to just never put it out there, lest Theo do something dumb.

…Dumber than the usual things he got up to while unsupervised, anyhow. He wouldn’t claim to excel as the voice of reason, himself, but his friend had a singular talent for ignoring common sense in the most niche and creative of ways.

Oblivious to Alaric’s self-made spiral of concerns, Theo sighed, nodding to himself. “Well, I’m doing it.”

The ground next to his feet shimmered at points, puddles he had at some point formed now shifting to move away from him. Their utter lack of subtlety was immediately obvious, but they were alone in this section of the street, and the puddles were probably harder to notice inside buildings with less illumination.

“…Are we supposed to just stand here while you work on that?” Alaric asked after a moment. Theo’s eyes has fluttered shut, his face now angled upwards as he presumably kept his gaze on whatever his Skill was showing him.

“I would very much struggle to walk without seeing right now.”

He almost offered to lead Theo through the streets, except that would have likely been seen as odd as them just standing there might. He stumbled for a moment before settling on something else. “Let’s lean against a wall or something?” It was as acceptable a suggestion as any. “I’ll check my notifications in the meantime.”

“Why, though?”

Alaric took the chance to make an expression that would go unseen, if only to let his frustration out for a second. “Because we look like we’re up to something!”

Which they, admittedly, were—but that didn’t mean they had to be so blatant about it. Seeing as his friend seemed too focused on his search to deign to answer again, Alaric all but pushed him against the nearest wall, distant enough from doors and windows to be a reasonable spot to lean on. Better to look like idling teenagers than potential ruffians, he thought.

As he joined Theo, Alaric brought his status up.