A Sinner’s Chance

I suddenly found myself standing before the white robed statue, my hand still placed upon the dais. I could feel the hands of Marian gently touch me as her worried voice found its way to my ears. "Vell-chan, are you okay? What happened? Why did you suddenly scream out?"

I leaned back into her as I let out a sigh and shook my head. "It's nothing, I just got a sudden jolt and it scared me that's all." I had conflicted feelings about Marian. On one hand, she was kind, gentle and reassuring, on the other, it made me feel the loss of Ashara all the more keenly. After taking a moment to relax, I pulled away from Marian and pulled my Status Plate from the dais. I could barely hide my shock as I looked over it. It was quite a bit different than the one I could see internally.

While overall it was nearly the same, the few key differences it had made me feel relieved. The fact that I wouldn't need to try and explain my multitude of strange Gifts, and Skills made things quite a bit simpler. Though I couldn't figure out why my Wisdom and Life Affinities had also been masked, but I wasn't in a position to complain so I simply accepted it for now.

At some point it seemed that Alcrem had come over and was inspecting my Status over my shoulder. There was a large smile on his face as he looked at. "Congratulations on your Awakening Vell, it seems your future is gong to be quite promising, though it is a shame you won't be able to cut it as a magician." He paused a moment before shaking his head. "No matter, tomorrow you'll need to start taking lessons so as not to shame the name of Eldur as one of its daughters."

I wanted to rebuke his unfound confidence that I couldn't be a magician, but when I looked at myself objectively I figured he was probably right. I didn't have any affinity for the four elemental magics, and while both Life and Vibro were S, I didn't exactly picture the spells belonging to them to be like magician like. I mean, Life was definitely the domain of priests and healers, so while I'd probably get a decent use out of it, my Status Plate said something different from the reality, so it would likely be difficult to learn it through conventional means. As for Vibro, I didn't even know what kind of magic it would be. Presumably something with vibrations, but that didn't really give me a concept to work with when I thought about magic.

I was however quite excited when I saw the new Skill I'd gotten from the mysterious woman, Inspect. If my loner years in high school had taught me anything, it was that an inspection skill was extremely potent. I didn't want to test it out in public, especially since it was appearing on my Plate, but I could feel my tension rising as I thought about it.

Much to my dismay, I was unable to go back to the estate right away, rather, the rest of the day was spent in probably one of my least favorite ways, shopping and dealing with familial acquaintances. Well to be precise it wasn't exactly shopping, but I was left in the care of Marian while the duke separated ways to take care of other things. What followed was a trip around the city, hitting what I felt was an excessive amount of tailors, on top of being dragged into all sorts of boutiques and was forced to meet many of the other noblewomen in the city. By the time the dusk began to fall and the carriage was heading back to the duke's estate I was mentally and physically exhausted and wanted nothing more than to fall into bed.