A Day Off

I step out of the cart, following Leah. I look around, and see things that neither Rain or Lilith have ever seen before. A simple village in this world. Rain lived in a fairly urban area, and her world is a whole lot more advanced than Lilith’s. Lilith’s a noble too, so she would have had no reason to walk around like a peasant.

“Stick close to me, Lady Lilith.”

“Shhh!” I hush at her.

“Er, I mean… Lily…”

There is a fair bit of prejudice against my name, so I’d rather keep that a secret. Also, coming here as a noble would only complicate things, so right now I’m pretending to be the daughter of one of Leah’s friends that she’s watching over. I’m dressed in normal peasant clothes, and a wimple to help cover my face.

“I still can not comprehend why you wanted to come here on your day off…”

“Not now, Leah. Onwards!” I yell, walking off away from the stables.

“Lady- er, Lily! Please do not go off on your own like that!” Leah yells as she runs up to catch up with me.

“I only have a short day here, so I want to see as many things as I can. You should be able to keep up with an 8 year old, right?”

We walk into the village from the stables. I look around me taking up all the sights I can. Children playing in the village square, several carts driving around the street, some farms in the distance.

The reason I’m doing this is to take up as much of Osnye culture as possible, and to get a general feel for how not noble children here normally act. This is mainly to understand Osnye culture more, and an effort to try and come off more friendly in the future.

That last part’s pretty important since neither of the people in my head generally have the best track record with that. Lilith’s pretty closed off given her upbringing with her name, and Rain’s a fairly cold and unemotional person.

Basic social skills are a very important thing to have. If you can’t interact with people, you’re practically useless in every other regard. Rain and Lilith could interact with people, but not in a way that generally comes off as friendly. Rain’s only friends were her mother and Bliss, and Lilith’s only friends are all in that mansion.

I’m going to have to open up at some point, and the sooner I start the better. Of course, just in case I have my Gift with me, but it’s in my clothes, and not hanging over my left eye like it should be. That means I am operating without depth perception again, but I got used to that a while ago so I should be OK.

“No fair! I hit you! You’re dead!”

“I just powered through it! Will power!” a young boy about my age yells, hitting a girl in the face.

“Hey! Hey! That isn’t nice! Stop that!” Leah yells, running up to the boy.

I look over to the commotion, and see about six or seven children all playing around with sticks on the ground in the yard of one house. They all stop playing once Leah comes up and yells at them.

“Huh? Go away, I killed her!” the boy yells at Leah.

Some of the other children also start telling Leah to leave. I just walk up to them. I notice that they have a whole bunch of different sticks on the ground.

“And just what are you doing?” I ask.

“Playing war! Humans vs. demons!” The girl who got smacked in the face yells.

“Hm? Maybe I can play too then?”

“Huh? Lady- Lily, I don’t think that is a very good idea…”

“Who are you? I don’t recognize you.” One of the boys says.

“I’m Lily, I’m not from here. My mother’s sick so Leah’s taking care of me for now.”

The kids start pestering me with questions, ranging from why I’m hanging out with a maid from the scary Amber family, to why my eye looks so stupid. I try to remain calm. This experience is all about staying open, remember?

“Enough, can I play or not? If you keep being annoying, I’m just going to leave.”

“Alright, alright, you can play as one of the demons then.”

“Um, children, that isn’t-” 

“It’s fine, Leah.” I assume that she was going to say something about playing a demon bothering me, because of my name.

I walk over to the pile of sticks, and look for a durable one. I pick up a durable one that’s about as long as I am tall. I grab another twig thick enough to not break and tie it to the longer one using earth magic. I just take some pieces of stone I made and connect them together using magic.

I hold up my makeshift halberd, although it’s more of a scythe. I hold it down to the ground trying to get a feel for its length. Since I can’t use my Gift for depth perception, I’ll just have to go by earth manipulation and pure math.

“Children, Lily here actually has a sword instructor. She can actually fight, this isn’t fair for you.” Leah tells the children.

“Don’t worry about it, Leah! I’ll play the part of a demon lord, and you can all be legendary human warriors. Now come at me.” I say, holding my weapon towards the children, my stance exactly the same as with Wolstan.

“Uh, hey! Don’t get cocky!

“Yeah, there’s seven of us and one of her!”

“Surround her! She can’t stop all of us!”

“Someone just grab it from out of her hands, she can’t be that strong!”

***

“Is that all you humans have?! Is this how you perform in front of a demon lord?! You grovel?! Come on, you can do better than that!” I yell

All the children are on the ground. They didn’t manage to touch me once, it’s quite sad, really. Still though, I was expecting this.

“Please! No more! Spare our lives!” One of the boys yells.

“Alright, I accept this. Run off back to Cralia, licking your wounds! Tell stories of just how strong a demon I am!”

“Yes ma’am!”

“Ahem, Lily…” Leah looks at me, looking rather disappointed in me.

Huh? What’s wrong? Oh… oh no, did I overdo it?! Yes, of course I did! The entire reason I even came here was to gain social skills, and the only thing I’ve done is beat a whole bunch of children. God damn it! I got way too into the role!

“Er, I did go a little hard on you guys. I’m sorry, are you all OK?” I walk up and hold my hand out to one of the boys.

“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine. It’s just that-”

As the boy gets up, he grabs my wrist and tries to pull me down with him. I kick him in the throat before he can do this.

“Argh! The pain!” He collapses back to the ground.

“If you can still fight back, then you’re fine. I am sorry for absolutely crushing you guys though. I’ll pay you back, if you want.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” One of the girls says.

“How do we get as strong as you, Lily!?” Another one of the boys yells at me.

“Um, well, practice mostly. Right now I basically just keep fighting my instructor over and over while asking myself what I’m doing wrong, and what can I do differently that will make me fight better. Just do that I guess.”

“Alright, got it! You hear her guys, let’s all go fight some teenagers!”

All the children let out a battle cry and run off before I or Leah can say anything to stop them. I feel Leah’s gaze blazing into the back of my head.

“Lady Lilith…” she says in a stern tone.

“Hey, that wasn’t my fault! They just took my advice the wrong way! I gave them the best answer I could, too.”

***

“May I take your orders, ladies?” A male waiter walks up to Leah and me.

“Yes, I’d like a slice of chestnut pie, and she would like-”

“I’d like the vegetable stew, please.” I say, cutting off Leah.”

The entire point of this trip is to gain social skills, I can’t have Leah taking care of everything for me.

“Yes ma’am, I’ll have them out right away.” The waiter says before walking away.

“Lady Lilith, are you really sure about this?” Leah whispers to me.

“Don’t worry about it, really. We’re both humans, aren’t we? If it’s good enough for you to eat then it’s good enough for me.”

“Er… I really don’t like the fact that a noble lady like you is eating from such a common place restaurant.”

“Don’t worry about it, really. And besides, I’m not a noble lady. I’m Lily, the daughter of one of your friends, remember?”

“Y- yes, Lily…”

“Besides, regardless of how the food tastes, I could get used to this. I mean look at me. I’m walking around in public and not one person has looked at me with fear or hate.”

“Your… your standards are a bit low, Lily…”

“And who’s fault is that? It isn’t mine, and it isn’t yours.”

“I recognize that it makes sense for you to be happy that no one is afraid of you, but I really feel as if you should be expecting better from people.”

Hm, expect better from people? But the whole point of this trip is that I speak with people who have no prior opinions about me.

“What do you mean, Leah?” There should be no harm in asking for clarification.

“I mean that you should be saving that happiness for people who like you Lilith. For people who treat you right instead of people who are merely not afraid of you. I feel like the bar people have to reach to make you happy is way too low to be healthy.”

Wait, she’s right. If people don’t seem afraid of me, that’s enough to make me happy due to Lilith’s experiences. Rain’s knowledge tells me though that that makes me easy to manipulate. Yeah, I let my guard down too easily as is right now.

That woman who poisoned me too. Lilith back then was so happy that she wasn’t afraid of me, and it nearly got me killed. If something similar were to happen, would I start dying again? I only lived back then because I got my Gift. Would I be able to live through such an event a second time?

Damn it, all this talk about preventing my own death, and I have every opening imaginable showing to potential enemies. How could I be so stupid? Yes, at the end of the day, there are many people out there who want me dead, I can’t be so ridiculously open.

I’m not wrong about working up social skills, I don’t think. There are still people I can trust, and I’m sure there are many people out there who have no issue with me, like Wolstan. But if I start trusting people right away when I don’t sense any hostility I might as well kill myself to get it over with.

Yeah, that’s the approach I’ll go with. I’ll preserve a somewhat friendly facade while still keeping that wall up so I don’t get manipulated. Only when I truly trust someone is when I’ll let them in, like with my family, Leah, and Wolstan. What would someone have to do to earn my trust though?

My family is my family, Leah, helped in the effort to keep me alive, and Wolstan’s been with me for weeks, hasn’t tried to hurt me once, and done his best to help me get stronger. I’ll think about it later, but right now I think that the best answer is somewhere between Leah and Wolstan. They don’t have to save me, but they have to do a lot more than just help me.

“Thank you, Leah. That really opened my eyes.”

“I can’t shake the feeling you somehow took that in a really horrible way.”

“Of course not! Thank you really, that was really helpful.”

***

I walk back into the mansion after a pretty long and eventful day. I finally have my Gift back out, so I’ve reclaimed depth perception which is nice. I’ll stay true to my word though and not train on anything until tomorrow.

Still, trying to increase the resolution of the sight my Gift gives me won’t hurt right. It’s definitely getting better, so I’m proud on that front. Rain’s comparison for how good it is right now would be something like… if my right eye could see in 4k, my Gift shows me something in 144p or so. Expanding on that, my left eye is probably just all one pixel that only shows one color at a time.

Maybe I could try and set up some seeing eye tests with it? The ones that Rain knows of, where you have to read smaller and smaller letters from a board a while away? Yeah, that should be good to mark my progress with it.

Yeah, I think that's what I’ll do. I also want to keep writing with my Gift alone, like I was doing before Leah made me sleep. I think my main goal for that will be to make writing done with my good eye, and with my Gift completely indistinguishable.

Oh, and I also have to figure out just what kind of facade I should be putting up towards other people, and figuring out how to trust other people. And I’m going back to halberd training, and trying to get the “Earth Golem” skill tomorrow.

This is why Rain hates days off… you get a nice break sure, but there’s always so much to do when you get back into the swing of things.