Bernadette swallowed down the surge of outrage rising in her chest. You knew it was a Fallen Creator and you joined Its organisation anyway — are you trying to get yourself killed?!
"It isn't that I wanted to join without regard for my life. The reality is — when facing the invitation of a Fallen Creator, did I truly have a choice? Accepting may mean misfortune at some point in the future. Refusing may mean dying on the spot."
Bernadette went quiet.
She took a slow, steadying breath. All right. Calm down. The Hidden Sage had been watching her for years. And It had never managed to do anything about it.
As for "the Fool" — if she recalled correctly, Sequence 0 of the Divination Pathway was named exactly that. So this being might be a deity of the Divination Pathway?
"Next, 'the Fool' asked me to choose one of twenty-two Tarot cards as my alias. I chose 'the Lovers.' The Fool told me that every Monday, It will summon my spirit into Its divine realm for a gathering called the Tarot Club."
Bernadette felt a chill settle in. Did this mean the mysterious being called "the Fool" could locate them — locate Vincent — at any time and forcibly pull him into Its divine realm?
From what she knew, even the Seven Gods couldn't do that. What exactly had that man stumbled into? What kind of being had they tangled with?
She stopped herself from drawing the line between "you" and "me." Assigning blame to the other person solved nothing and only created resentment. What mattered now was how to handle the Tarot Club gathering.
And then there was the mysterious room with the scales — did it have some connection to "the Fool" as well? What was this being trying to accomplish?
"The next Monday is two days from now. Yes — the one attending the gathering will be you."
Vincent continued: "You've surely already thought of it: at that gathering, the Fool will discover that the last time we met, I appeared as a man — and now I've become a woman.
The explanation I've come up with is that we are both under the effects of some kind of curse, forced to share a single body. Every three days, one of us falls into a deep sleep and the other takes control, in a continuous cycle.
The reason I joined the gathering in the first place was to find a way to lift this 'curse' — it's logical, it's reasonable, and the only question is whether the Fool will believe it."
(As Vincent had been thinking while he wrote this: at Klein Moretti's current level of understanding, he will absolutely believe it.)
"If you have a better explanation, please feel free to use it."
A curse.
Bernadette rested her chin in her hand. Could the soul exchange between them truly be a cross-dimensional curse of some kind?
If so — what was the purpose of whoever had cast it? Were the two of them chosen by chance, or had they been selected deliberately?
She sat with it for a moment, then sighed softly. Whatever the answer, it wasn't something she could resolve at present.
As for Vincent's proposed explanation — it was plausible enough, she had to admit. Multiple souls sharing a single body wasn't unheard of in the extraordinary world. The most familiar examples were the Thief Half-God's parasitism, and possession by a Wraith. As long as "the Fool" couldn't see through to the truth of the exchange, it should hold.
What she was more concerned about was whether she could resist the Fool's forced summoning. Once her spirit entered another being's divine realm, she would be entirely at Its mercy — no recourse at all.
A thought came to her quickly: if she were at Sequence 2, as a Visionary, she could fragment her body and soul into countless streams of information and send a portion of herself in her place. Any danger encountered would only consume a fraction of her soul.
She wasn't quite at Sequence 2 yet — but she did have the Visionary's Frontlet in her possession. She could draw on its ability to achieve partial information fragmentation.
Of course, that was all wishful thinking. The Fool might see through it immediately, become angered, and the consequences could range from punishment to death.
She looked back down at the letter.
"Oh — I almost forgot. The Fool seems to have some interest in Emperor Roselle's diaries. If you can find them, you might commit a few pages to memory and manifest them at the gathering."
Emperor Roselle's diaries.
Bernadette's pupils contracted.
Why would an unknown being take interest in Father's diaries? Was It trying to decipher Father's invented script — or did It already know how to read it?
That was impossible.
Her mind spun through a dozen possibilities at once before she gradually steadied herself. Perhaps she was overreacting. Roselle's script was difficult for ordinary people, but for a deity — perhaps it was no great challenge.
"On the matter of the next exchange, I have one small suggestion I'd ask you to consider carefully.
I understand that keeping me on the island was for my own safety — just as I hoped you would stay inside the flat. But the sequence of events in these three days has shown that staying here doesn't necessarily mean staying safe.
Furthermore, the ability given to me by the mysterious room requires me to facilitate transactions and cooperation between others — which means I need to be somewhere with people.
I know you may be concerned about the dangers involved. But since the fact of the room being bound to my soul is already settled, avoidance won't solve anything. My personal suggestion would be to try going somewhere first and see. I think you understand what I mean.
That is the full account of these three days. Until next time — well, I suppose 'next time' isn't quite the right phrase, since we won't actually see each other."
Bernadette's first instinct at Vincent's final suggestion was to frown — then she remembered that she had made an almost identical request herself.
It was a little unsettling, how often their thinking aligned.
She considered it carefully and found that he wasn't entirely wrong. Emerald Island was safe most of the time — but if someone had already breached it once, any future intruder would have to be at roughly her own level of power. Against that, the body's instincts alone would offer no escape.
And against a genuinely powerful Fallen Creator, even less.
The great cities under the control of the True God churches — Loen, Trier — were in many ways safer, as long as one kept a low profile and avoided trouble. The issue was her identity. Moving through a city like Backlund or Trier without being recognised required a disguise that could hold.
She had the ability to alter appearances — but that was an illusion, Cinderella's domain. Sustained impersonation over time was far better served by a Faceless's transformation. A Faceless changed the face at the physical level: not even an Angel could detect it, as long as no slip was made. An illusion was a mental and visual falsification — a sufficiently attuned mid-Sequence extraordinary could feel the wrongness.
And the man currently in her body couldn't use any of those abilities properly, in any case.
So she would need to procure a Faceless extraordinary item for him?
What a nuisance.
She pinched the bridge of her nose.
As for the mysterious room and the scales…
Bernadette considered for a moment, then raised the compass and held it, her blue eyes going deep and still.
In an instant, the colours drained from her vision. A faint, formless grey room floated into view — its furnishings exactly as Vincent had described, the window a pane of black, and at the centre of it all, a set of ancient scales.
She was not inside it. She was only catching a glimpse through a crack in the weave of fate.
When she tried to look more closely at the scales, a pain like a blade driven into bone split through her. The vision vanished. Something hot and liquid spilled from her eyes — blood.
Her body turned translucent and twisted, as though dissolving into streams of flowing data on the verge of collapse. Bernadette had enough experience with near-disasters to stabilise herself quickly — but the spirituality in her body had been nearly drained dry in those few seconds.
"This feeling… it's exactly what happens when you catch a glimpse of a high-Sequence being. That mysterious room — can it truly involve another Fallen Creator?"
Together with "the Fool" — two Fallen Creators provoked in a single go.
That man…
Really was something.
To be continued…