Edge Cases

As it turned out, the decision to not cry for a third time was a stupid one. Misa decided to give herself a pass. Her mother was holding her again, sobbing into her shoulder, and as much as she hated seeing her cry, she was alive.

She never thought she'd be able to hold her mother again. Of course, she'd never imagined her mother being the one to cry, either.

"Mom," she said softly. "It's good to see you." Again, she wanted to say, but then she'd never seen this version of her mother before, had she?

"Misa," Charise cried, clinging tightly to Misa's larger form and refusing to let go. "I knew you were back — I knew as soon as you were here — But I thought I might have been going insane..."

"You weren't." Misa's tone was gentle, and her voice was steady, though her eyes were still wet. Orkas had said it was difficult for him to truly be her father, since he'd missed so much of her growth; by contrast, with her mother, it didn't seem to matter. Charise was just... glad to have her there.

It hurt her heart to see the way her mother trembled. Misa was used to seeing her mother as a whirlwind of energy; she was a woman who always seemed to know what she wanted and what she needed to do to get it. It had something to do with her class, from what Misa understood — she'd never been told exactly what it was, but it seemed to give her a powerful and unmatched intuition that paired perfectly with her attitude.

From the stories she'd heard, Charise had been the one to pursue Orkas, back when they first met. She'd beaten him in a duel to do it, and when asked what she wanted for a prize, she'd requested a kiss.

Apparently, no one in the village had ever seen Orkas blush before. Or since.

That was the confidence that Charise once had. Misa had never seen her mother like this, on the cusp of breaking down entirely.

"I knew something was wrong," Charise told her. "I had a skill. I saw the world split, when you died... and something impossible happened. But I didn't understand. I still don't."

Misa hesitated. Orkas hadn't explained anything when he dropped her off, only said her name.

"It's... complicated," she hedged at first — but she saw the way her mother sagged. She needed answers; she'd gone twenty years without them, working only with an intuition that told her what had happened was impossible. It was a wonder that her mind had stayed intact at all.

So Misa gathered herself, and explained what had happened. Less angrily than she had with Orkas, of course. Charise was mostly silent as Misa spoke, but rather than distressed, she seemed relieved. Her tears abated somewhat during Misa's explanation, though she continued to hold her daughter close.

"It... doesn't answer all my questions, but it explains a lot," Charise said. She smiled gently, wiped her tears away, and then sat down on the mossy ground; she patted the space next to her, and Misa took a seat. She didn't fail to notice the way her mother still shook slightly when she moved, but she was rapidly regaining her confidence, at least. "My skills... Did I ever explain my skills to you?"

Misa shook her head. "You always said you would one day, but you didn't want to do it yet."

"Yes, I wouldn't have." Her mother managed a weak smile. "[Intuitionist] is a strange class, and talking about it will sometimes grant listeners the class directly. It's not something I wanted to inflict on you. I wanted you to be able to get a class of your own."

"There's a class you can spread just by talking about it?" Misa asked, sounding a bit alarmed. Her mother chuckled, though the sound was a small.

"I know what you're thinking. It's a self-solving problem. It doesn't work if you're intentionally trying to spread it," Charlise told her. "It has... an intuition about it, you could say."

"Mom," Misa groaned.

"It's a common class, but people don't talk about it much because it's mostly uninteresting, besides its ability to unintentionally spread. I don't know for sure, but my intuition tells me —" here Charlise gave her a wry smile "—that the class is granted to you if you intuit something about it. Or if you intuit its existence, which is how I got the class, even though I didn't want it."

"It still feels like some kind of trap," Misa mumbled. "Wouldn't there be some way around it? What if you told someone to go talk about it in the middle of a village, without telling them what talking about it does? What if you put up posters about it? What if—"

Charise blinked as Misa rambled, and then openly laughed.

"You always did love exploiting the system," she said with a grin. Misa smiled back at her, momentarily feeling like everything was normal and right in a way that it hadn't been for years —

— and then her mother just paused, as if struck. Realization hit her, Misa stared at her, too, feeling like her heart had stopped for a split second. Her mother blinked once, twice, falling completely silent; she seemed to strain, reaching for something Misa couldn't see...

And then a tear fell from her eye. "Ah, shit," she said to herself, shaking her head. "I almost had it."

"Mom?" Misa asked softly.

"[Intuitionist] comes with a skill, [Intuition of Truth]. It's not a lie detector, exactly, but it gives you a gut feeling about the underlying nature of things, and I've trained mine carefully. It keeps... trying to give me the 'true' version of events. What really happened, not what happened here, wherever 'here' is. But it's an intuition skill, not a knowledge skill; it can't tell me everything. It can just give me... glimpses."

Charise blinked, then sniffled. "...I want to know what your childhood was like very badly, Misa. I want to know what kind of mother I was. What kind of father Orkas was. But that knowledge is so distant to me, and yet it is just out of my reach, and I feel like if I could just grasp at the truth..."

Her mother sighed, looking tired. "At least now I know I was right," she said softly.

Misa reached out to take one of her mother's hands into her own. She didn't say a word. This woman was her mother — she wore her face, her mannerisms, her clothing, and yet she didn't know this version of her mother at all; she didn't know what she had been through.

Charise shook her head. "Everyone told me I was lying to myself, when I said that you should be alive. And the truth is that I, too, thought that that was what I was doing. It didn't make any sense. In any ordinary situation, [Intuition of Truth] would have forced me to confront the truth of your death. But... whatever the nature of the skill is, it seems that it doesn't care for simulated reality, only the true one."

"I mistook the voice of the skill for my own voice, and I didn't understand why my skill wasn't helping me confront what happened to you. It was... difficult to stay sane in the face of that, let me tell you." Her mother gave her a small, weak smile. "Though I'm glad I did."

"I can't imagine," Misa admitted.

There was a small silence, and then her mother spoke, her voice soft. "Once this is over... You don't know what will happen to this place, do you?"

"I wish I did," Misa said, tightening her fists. She'd sent a message to Vex some time ago, but there was no response yet. "But I don't."

"Then I better say what I never had the chance to say in either lifetime," Charise said, slowly getting to her feet. She smiled the warmest smile she could muster, through the tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes. "I am proud of the woman you became. You did everything you could then, as I know you will do everything you can now; no matter what happens now or what happened then, know that I love you, and that you will always be my daughter."

Misa swallowed the lump in her throat. Did this count as another pass to cry?

...Fuck it. She felt the tears come, and saw her mother lean down to gather her into a hug.

Just a few minutes, in the arms of someone she never thought she'd see again. She'd thought it was a cruelty, that the dungeon was doing this to her.

But perhaps it was something of a kindness, too.

"Now, before you help save us all," Charlise said, smiling gently at her. Misa's heart ached at the sight — it was so familiar, but it was so much more tired than she remembered. "Do you want some fish stew?"

Misa choked back a tearful laugh. "Yeah. Sure. It's been a long time since I've had any. It was my favorite, you know."

"How could it not be?" Her mother said with a chuckle. "It's mine, too."

And when she took her first sips of the stew, she had to stop briefly. The rich smell brought her back to the days of old, when everything was simple, and at the same time...

It made her think of her home. The new one, the one she'd found with Vex, and Derivan, and Sev.

"Hey, mom?" She asked, her voice rough. "Can you teach me this recipe?"

Charlise looked at her, surprised. "You like cooking?"

"No," Misa chuckled. "But... I want to share this with some friends. A little piece of home."

"Ah." Charlise paused and smiled. "Of course. And I'm glad you found some friends. If you get a moment... Perhaps you could tell me about them?"

Misa looked to the horizon. The village would take time to prepare for everything, and if she understood the timeline right... they had almost a day left before they would be attacked. She had her plans, and she'd given them to Orkas; she'd had her plans for years.

So she had a little bit of time.

"I'd like that," she said quietly. "I'd like that a lot."

Everything was prepared.

Misa had told Orkas everything that she remembered of the invasion that would come. She'd explained the countermeasures she'd thought of, in the days and weeks following the attack, when she was wandering listlessly and carrying the village's store of mana crystals on her back. She'd further explained the details of the dungeon they were in, and how that might change the attack.

They'd both agreed that if they were meant to fight off Platinum monsters, they would have no chance, no matter how good their preparations were. The original horde that had attacked their village had been Iron-ranked, with the elite monsters in the low tiers of Bronze. With their best warriors and mages only at low-Bronze, they'd been very quickly overwhelmed.

This time, with Misa at a higher level and this being a dungeon... whatever it was, the horde might be up to Silver. That was as confident as they were about the array of traps and walls they'd made. The horde would, if everything went the same way they did the first time, abate by itself within a couple of hours. Misa still had no answers about what had triggered that attack, for there had been no indication that a dungeon break was near — nor did she know where the monsters had gone after it.

But the information they had was enough. It meant that at worst, they simply needed to endure and keep the walls of the village strong for a few hours.

The first signs of the attack would happen soon, Misa knew. It had started with a bright beam of light in the sky, accompanied by a tear in space that felt wrong, even as far away as their village was from that tear. Then there was a great rumble of the earth, and a darkening of the sky.

Hopefully, they were ready.

Hopefully, Sev and the others would be here soon, too.

Her grip tightened on her mace, and she watched the horizon, waiting.