Chapter 31: The Historian

There was no time to do more than think fast and act quickly. The instant Scarlet brushed against that foreign presence, it moved.

She disappeared the last of what she’d been handling into her storage bag on instinct, snatched up her cane, and had barely slipped her jacket over her shoulders before it was at the inner door.

There was nowhere to hide, and she doubted something that could lock on to her through walls would fail to find her in the small room anyway.

The being did something that made all the energy in the room flare up for a moment. Then the door swung open.

Scarlet was backed up against the wall, her hand clenched around her cane, the other on the strap of her bag.

Then the door swung inward.

What stood there was not like any creature she had seen before. Not remotely.

It was not particularly tall, standing at nearly 4.8ft or 146cm. It was bipedal, one might even have called it a humanoid. But to Scarlet it was too obviously its own creature for her to feel accurate calling it a human derivative.

The being was covered in immaculate white fur, save for subtle gradients of silver around the ears and shoulders, with a long, elegantly groomed tail flicking behind them in a way that somehow managed to convey both eagerness and refinement. They wore layered robes in rich creams, and browns, and muted golds, embroidered with symbols Scarlet found enchanting, though she did not recognize it.

The person – and it appeared they were a person – carried themselves with the kind of casual, effortless dignity usually reserved for people who had never once questioned whether they belonged, regardless of where they found themselves.

The creature looked like a fox. Like an anthropomorphic fox.

That tracked; ‘Vulpian Empire’, ‘Earthen Fox’. Scarlet had been through much bigger revelations just that day, and her exhausted mind was happy to accept a fox person was just a ‘thing’ now with much less resistance than perhaps it should have.

Almost reflexively she threw out an Inspect. Firing the Skill was almost an instinct.

[██████ “The Historian” ██████
Tier: 2
Level: 2x]

A lance of pain drove directly into her mind. It felt like someone had shoved a spoon through the back of her skull and then begun churning. The pain was overwhelming, and invasive. Her vision swam. Nausea rolled through her so hard she had to catch herself against the sink to stay upright.

“Oh,” the creature said, voice rich and articulate, and slightly lower pitched than Scarlet would’ve imagined. “Oh dear, my dear,” the creature tutted, then nodded to itself. “Skill backlash. A truly awful thing. Though a lesson in etiquette that we must all learn for ourselves apparently,” they said, more to himself than to her. She wanted to say the creature was male based on the timbre of their voice, but what the heck did she know about fox person physiology?

Scarlet stared at him through watering eyes. He tilted his head, studying her back with open fascination.

“Don’t you worry. It should go away quickly. The contract capped my power, so the backlash shouldn’t be too bad.”

What? Scarlet swallowed against the nausea, lips thinning as she straightened herself back up. For all their other strangeness, the fox person, The Historian she supposed, had not lied about the pain from the backlash going away quickly.

The Historian shook their head, before focusing on her. If she’d thought the look it had given her before was intense, this one felt like they were trying to peer through her. Their expressions had shifted so many times that for the first time in her life, she was aggrieved her natural empathy wasn’t screaming his emotions to her.

“Oh,” The Historian breathed, and Scarlet could feel that there was meaning layered into the word. “Oh my.”

Scarlet began to feel it. There was a strange pressure around her. It was something she’d sensed before, but hadn’t actively registered in her panic. The energy was both foreign and familiar, and decidedly not mana. And it was surrounding her. It was mostly focused on her solar plexus and brain, which didn’t reassure her in the slightest. Her brain was important for obvious reasons, and her solar plexus was where she’d discovered her mana heart was. Not exactly places you want strong foreign energies probing about.

She stiffened instantly.

It was obvious the energy wasn’t doing or getting whatever it wanted. So, the fox person just kept increasing the concentration of energy. That there was enough for her to feel it was proof of that.

From what she could tell, the energy wasn’t failing at its task due to lack of access. There was no doubt in Scarlet’s mind that if this being had wanted to do something malicious to her with that energy there was nothing she would be able to do.

Scarlet couldn’t feel anything nefarious going on, but that was hardly reassurance considering that even with all that perception she hadn’t felt what the fox person was doing in the first place.

Eventually, The Historian stared at her, pouring in more and more energy until they flinched.

One hand came up briefly to touch the side of their head. “Well, that is a nasty little skill,” they said after a beat, sounding almost delighted. Scarlet did not respond. His gaze narrowed, not with suspicion, but analytically.

“Where are you from?” he asked. The smile on The Historian’s face dimmed for the first time since the conversation began, and his face transformed into something serious and intense. “Tell me, is it a newly integrated world?”

Scarlet just looked at the creature as she sorted through calculations in her mind. That question spiked half a dozen fresh questions and concerns that she couldn’t help but catalogue and sort through. However, what struck her more immediately was what she heard when the creature spoke.

The actual sounds entering her ears.

For a moment she could comprehend a thing the false person was saying. Her mind had separated the sound of his voice from her understanding of the actual words. Because while she did understand the actual words, they were not in English, nor were they in Mandarin, or Swahili, or any of the other languages she spoke. In fact, this wasn’t like any language system she’d brushed upon before. The phonetics were wrong. Entirely alien. Some of the sounds might have even been structurally impossible for human vocal cords to replicate.

Her silence to whatever they’d said last was apparently all the signal the creature needed that she was not entirely present.

The Historian’s ears twitched. One of the fluffy ones. From on top of their head. Scarlet’s day got stranger by the second.

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“Yes,” The Historian said, stretching the word out as he did. “I can say with almost 100% certainty that you’re probably from a newly integrated world.”

Scarlet’s grip on her cane tightened. “What would make you say that?” She asked.

They barked out something between a laugh and a delighted cough flashing some very sharp teeth.

It occurred to her that, to the best of her knowledge, she was isolated with a strange creature of unknowable power. Though all she really needed to know about it was that it was, at this point, was that she wouldn’t even be a match for this person. And if nothing else, she was sure of that. She suddenly, intensely, missed Maus.

She didn’t worry about any potential repercussions as she took firm control of her emotions. She recognized on some level that she was essentially adjusting the dosages of chemicals flooding her system, that or she was somehow manipulating the parts of her mind and body meant to fire off certain signals. She didn’t care. This apparently non-hostile creature could be a terrible threat, but also an incredible potential resource.

Scarlet did not lower her guard.

The fox person’s gaze traced over her briefly, noting her cane, first, and eyeing the bandages peeking out of her cuff.

They tilted their head. “Do you believe I will hurt you?” They asked, rather pragmatically.

“I believe that we all have a capacity for violence.” Scarlet replied, tone even as she went about literally forcing calm.