THIRTY-THREE: Falling

“You have a knack for arranging possessions so that they suit their owner.”

Alden reread the skill description. In his message, Boe had added that the Level Two version of the skill had the exact same description, but with knack replaced by “strong knack.”

“If anyone has leveled it past that, they haven’t posted the details online,” he’d written.

The foundational supplements were in dexterity, processing, and strength. And they were small, just like Alden’s had been.

C-ranks who chose the skill had three traits to choose from, all active only during skill use. One would increase the accuracy of their movements. Another muffled sound in their immediate vicinity. And the third was Rose Rabbit, which Alden himself had been offered. It was the one that increased attention to detail.

As he headed up the hillside toward his destination, his cart trundling along in a line behind others that were filled with examinees, Alden tried to add up everything he knew about skills, Manon, and the boater.

It wasn’t a lot. But it was enough for him to be more nervous than ever about the other Rabbit.

The skill was obviously intended for the use most people put it to. The traits would all help you beautifully arrange physical objects for their owner. The one that muffled sound was probably for those who wanted to maintain a quiet presence while they did their work.

Having had a lot of experience watching students in the lab recently, Alden could even see Tailor Environment being a valuable skill in that setting. The assistants the examinees brought with them seemed to spend half their time making sure supplies were prepared, organized, and close to hand for their junior wizard.

Manon would be amazing at that.

Alden could think of a dozen other uses for the skill as well. Boe had said she did event planning and weddings in addition to interior decorating. But she’d be able to streamline almost any busy setting. Having exactly the things you needed in exactly the place you needed them at the right moment would be fantastic.

The skill even had obvious support hero applications. If Alden had been a C-rank, he might have chosen it himself.

It was a very Rabbity talent. And a versatile one, too.

So it’s a little dark that Manon said she wanted to use it for human resources in that interview. I mean I get it…if you’re good at knowing where things fit, you could theoretically be great at placing people inside an organization, too.

But when Alden read a skill description about arranging “possessions” for an “owner” his first conclusion was definitely not that he should try it out on people. The morality of it would depend on how the skill worked on living things in the first place.

If Manon just had a general sense for where people would be most useful to their employer, that was okay. She could take Bti-qwol’s job and do it twice as well.

But if her knack gave her insight into why people fit in certain places, then it was getting closer to mind reading than most humans would be comfortable with. And if the “arranging” was an active part of the skill, maybe at higher levels, and gave her some additional ability to directly manipulate the things she arranged… would it apply to another person’s thoughts or actions?

Wouldn’t that would make her a knock-off version of a Sway?

Alden grimaced.

Knowing what he did now about how a person’s perception influenced what they could do with their skill, he thought it was definitely possible that Manon was doing at least a little bit of freaky mind control stuff with her power. And knowing that she’d quit her job and leaned hard into decorating like it was her dream career as soon as the skill started getting popular made it seem even more likely.

You could keep info about your skill private and spin it however you wanted when it was just yours. But when it became popular and lots of other people picked it up, somebody who cared more about their follower count than trade secrets was bound to start showing off all the little nuances you’d prefer to keep to yourself.

Especially at C-rank, when your peers made up more than thirty percent of all Avowed. Even a rare class like Rabbit had enough representatives for people to start figuring everything out.

Manon had the advantage of being a full generation or more ahead of most of the skill’s users. She probably had several levels under her belt. And luck or natural talent might have played a role in her figuring out alternate uses for the skill when she was young.

But one day, other people who were a little twisted were going to think, “What if I could somehow use this thing on humans, too?” And as soon as one of them was careless enough to let it slip, all the other users would suddenly be subjected to intense scrutiny.

There was no reason for her to drop her old job like a hot potato if the skill didn’t have something similar to a mind control element. I mean…unless she really did just discover a sudden love for tablescapes.

For a while, Alden toyed with the idea that LeafSong had even hired Manon for the purpose of keeping their other employees in line. But then he dismissed it.

The Artonans weren’t allowed to use mind control on Avowed humans unless they presented an immediate, life-threatening danger to themselves or their summoner. And if they were going to violate the Contract, they would probably do it with a real, S-rank Sway hidden in the shadows.

Not a middling Rabbit using her skill in her own personal off-label way.

So she must be doing it for herself, right? But how? And how would she become an “owner” of other people? Even if she was a megalomaniac who imagined that others belonged to her, that probably wouldn’t be enough. Not for controlling other Avowed. Not with a skill that wasn’t exactly designed for it.

He stared at the carnivorous plants along the pathway without really seeing them. Authorities would clash during mind control, right?

For the past two nights, under Joe’s tutelage, Alden had been grappling with a concept the professor usually translated as authority, dominion, or influence. Though he assured Alden that none of those were ideal word choices.

It seemed to have no perfect translation in human languages, but it was the ability to impress your own desires upon…everything. The fundamental essence of magical power. According to Joe, Artonans could feel this ability from birth and train it like a muscle. Most other species couldn’t.

As an Avowed, Alden had the ability. And he could use it. But as a human, he lacked a conceptual framework—and possibly the actual anatomy—that would allow him to feel it in the same way Joe did.

Even his subconscious kept misinterpreting it as willpower, or a lack thereof. That flaw was fairly normal for humans, and it was also what Sophie had been getting at when she was trying to make him stop doing his rag-doll impression in front of the lab cabinets the other day.

Alden had decided it was like trying to control your own internal organs. Yeah, they worked for you. But for the most part you couldn’t will them to do things.

As for how that applied to Manon—when one person’s authority came into conflict with another’s, the stronger party would win. That was how Alden had lost a fight with a tree he hadn’t even known existed.

Joe was surprisingly unwilling to discuss how Avowed ranks worked, but he’d indicated that they were heavily correlated with authority. And it was well known that Sways had more difficulty mind controlling other Avowed. Higher ranking Sways could usually suppress lower ranking ones.

It stood to reason that Manon, as a C-rank, couldn’t truly mentally enslave more than a dozen other people. And she couldn’t really own them without them somehow…yielding themselves to her?

Does it work like that?

There was no way to know for sure. Probably it had something to do with all the gifts. She was in charge of the boater. She got most of them their jobs. She fed them treats and paid for their phone calls and…volunteered to cover Pineda’s entire salary out of the goodness of her heart.

Yeah. There’s something there. Maybe she didn’t own them in the most obvious sense of the word. But she’d been taking care of them all in a really overboard way for years.

They were used to it. They liked it.

They hadn’t been able to shut up about how wonderful she was that day at lunch.

Is she working on me, too? Alden felt a chill.

He didn’t remember when he’d started feeling grateful for Manon’s help. He hadn’t the first day. He’d thought it was weird.

Now, after having his friends remind him that he didn’t like the other Rabbit, it seemed obvious that she hadn’t done anything for him at all.

So let’s go all in on assuming she arranges people as well as furniture. How much can she actually do?

It wasn’t like Alden, or the boater members, were zombies. Maybe she couldn’t even give them specific thoughts. Maybe she just…pressed little by little on their emotions and made suggestions they were predisposed to agree with because they were weak to her influence.

More like a cult leader than a full-on Sway.

That would explain a lot actually. Wasn’t separating your members from outsiders basic cult psychology? Alden had begun to feel more kindly toward Manon, but only her. He and the other members of the boater went out of their way to avoid each other. And Thwart Hog said she felt like she should stay away from them, too.

It had started that first day. They’d naturally been upset about the loss of some of their coworkers for this event, but it shouldn’t have made all of them hostile to Alden. One or two people incorrectly assigning blame in such a simple situation might be normal. But fourteen of them?

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

It was crazy to imagine a Rabbit altering people’s minds, but didn’t it actually make more sense if all that unnecessary hostility was manufactured.

It would have been so easy for Manon to just casually point out all the unlikeable things about Alden.

Isn’t he too young? Isn’t he unqualified? He’s a higher rank than we are. Maybe he thinks he’s better than us. He’s rich. He got Pineda fired. He doesn’t even need a job, and he got a double quest.

Something like that.

I would resent me, too.

And if someone who’d had little hooks in your brain for years made those same suggestions… you ended up with an even more warped perspective. Alden wondered if Manon had actually wanted her cultists to hit him up for money so that she could save the day for everyone. Or if she’d just pushed a little too hard, and that was the direction they’d headed in on their own.

Personally, if I was manipulating everyone I would have tried to lessen drama, not fan the fires.