Min-Maxing My TRPG Build in Another World - Volume 9 - Chapter 6

Middle Act

GM Soliloquy

From time to time a GM might take a real shine to an NPC. Beyond involving them in the main story, they sometimes create reams of background text for them. At tables where character information is shared on cloud-based services, the players may stumble upon such troves. While this is good for world-building, players can sometimes be taken aback by just how much love and time is poured into what is, in their eyes, some random NPC.

Schnee knew nothing of her origins. She had probably been born in Marsheim, but she didn’t know exactly where or when, or even who her parents were. All she knew was that she was found abandoned in a dirty alleyway, mewling all the while.

Her adoptive family was perennially strapped for funds but rich at heart. Their home was a cozy little neighborhood called the Gutterwalk. A fair part of Marsheim’s sewage system opened up onto it; the locals, hoping to spare their poor feet, laid down an ever-shifting, ever-renewing network of loose plank walking paths. The stench of the place kept the authorities and the city’s money at a distance, and so the shantytown had remained basically unchanged for generations.

It went without saying that the locals didn’t have the best prospects. Just like the tent grounds outside the city, it was a nesting ground for penniless newcomers and those who could not or would not dare name their hometowns or their legal parents. All the same, these were not mean folk. They found it in their hearts to take up such a small bundle of white fluff—scarcely more than an ordinary kitten, really.

The Gutterwalk was no place to get an education—nor even to pick up a confident grasp of standard Rhinian, given from how far and wide its people had come. Still, despite the gallimaufry of foreign tongues in which she would be raised, Schnee’s adoptive family had chosen to give her a name that, to the best of their knowledge, sounded suitably Rhine-ish and reflected her snow-white coat. They had no notions of the name’s grim implications—snow’s painful chill or fleeting nature. Many had never seen snow before.

Schnee treasured her name in spite of the cruel laughter it attracted. She might have been born into humanfolk society and forced to deal with all the suffering that entailed, but the short, sweet nature of her name felt like a mark in common with her smaller feline kin. People liked to name cats based on first impressions, and so in the Empire you would get cheeky cats called Schelm or sweet ones called Hubsch; many black cats ended up being called Schwarz and white ones, naturally, tended to earn the name Weiss. Schnee saw no shame in receiving the same treatment. People liked strays and ferals better than people in the same conditions.

Schnee had a rough and deprived upbringing, but she’d been raised, not merely tolerated. Her family taught her to read and spell in spite of their rugged port speech. She felt blessed. From the Gutterwalk, one could see quite clearly the multitude of worse fates that could have befallen her.

Fortunately for Schnee, bubastisians could stomach raw meat and spoiled food better than mensch. What stunted her peers let her flourish, to some limited extent. Her fellow orphans came from a whole range of different races—poverty showed no favor to any particular race, it seemed. By the time Schnee was eight, she had the strength of an adult. Bubastisians lived to about fifty years at most, but that meant they developed faster too.

Despite the plethora of races in Marsheim, none of them seemed to know the trick to guessing at a cat’s age—one could speculate based on coat quality or size, but at the end of the day it was all speculation. It was no easier with Schnee. Most couldn’t even discern her sex. From early on, she never struggled blending in with folk who were far older than her.

More than anything, it was her height that let her pass unnoticed among the adults. She hardly had the stature of an eight-year-old. Again, Schnee didn’t mind so long as it meant she could start giving back to her family all the sooner.

They might have lived in filth and squalor, but the people of the Gutterwalk fought to live upright lives. To Schnee, the whole neighborhood was like one big family. It was only fair that she give back. Her whole life had been defined by a community where everyone shared all that they had.

When she was finally old enough to do more than simply mewl, Schnee decided to find a job more suited to a bubastisian than stealing or scrounging. The first jobs she took on were naught more than pest control. It paid poorly, but no one else wanted to do it, so the orphan quickly found herself a niche. Marsheim had a dense population and many a bolthole where vermin hid and bred. Most were happy to pay a few bronze pieces to make their problem go away.

As she worked, Schnee noticed something. When she called out to people they often jumped. Even when she was standing in front of someone, they would often look right through her. For some reason or other, people found it difficult to pick up on her presence. Her inborn lack of presence was further muffled by her quiet step (thanks to her paw pads), her nearly nonexistent scent (thanks to her grooming), and something ineffable in the way she moved.

She’d begun life as a vanishingly small thing, easily crushed underfoot. To walk anywhere in Ende Erde, she’d had to learn by heart how to be out of the way.

Even if she didn’t know the logic behind it, the young Schnee soon put together that a girl of her talents could make a real profit.

“Listen up, Schnee. No matter how teeny somethin’ may seem, hardworkin’ folk have scrabbled together to work and get it. Don’t you be goin’ and doin’ anythin’ underhanded, y’hear me?”

Old Man Stump, a mensch gentleman who’d come by the name thanks to his missing right hand, had told Schnee—and anyone who would listen—that it was the gravest of wrongdoings to steal from another. His hand had been taken as fair and legal punishment for thieving—no one knew the exact details, but it couldn’t have been worth more than nine drachmae, or the law would have taken an arm—and although Schnee would only learn as much when she was older, she’d taken his words to heart from the beginning.

Evil only begat evil—such was the gospel of the Gutterwalk, and so she never dared to set foot on the darker path.

Her community understood all too well that the moral axiom “first, don’t get caught” only applied to those with a degree of social cushion; among their own, any misstep could end in lifelong regret. All that they could cling to was the prospect of a just life, albeit a humble one.

“Schnee, you be careful of what you say, okay? Words are easy to say but impossible to take back.”

So she’d been advised by an older girl with cropped hair. She’d told Schnee to never speak ill of a person’s demeanor—to their face or otherwise. It was a foolish gaffe, and it had cost her a head of hair she’d prized and cared for her whole life.

“Don’t be fightin’, brawlin’, or thquabblin’ with folks. Screw up and thith ith what it’ll get ya.”

So an older boy had told her, pointing to his missing front teeth. He had lost them when he had tried to break up a fight among some other kids. He was a tough lad, and he’d come out on top and in one piece—but a few days later they’d jumped him and plucked all four of his incisors as penance.

“It’s a sad fact o’ life that ya can’t buy trust, friendship, or someone’s life with pocket change. But you can sell yours. If you sell somethin’ that you can’t buy back, then it ain’t ever comin’ back,” so on went the advice she received.

Everywhere you went in the Gutterwalk, there was family to be found who were marked or missing parts or both, and they always had some kind of moral lesson to impart—the tattooed uncle, a young man with only one eye, an older girl with only three fingers. It was common practice in the community never to shy away from one’s ugly history. Like everything else, it was to be shared to the benefit of one’s neighbors and one’s children, that no one should repeat their mistakes.

At the heart of their stories was the lesson that never stepping off the straight-and-narrow path was the best and simplest solution.

Schnee never doubted the truth of these lessons, but she thought that it would be far more difficult to accept your failings and mistakes. How painful must it have been to bear a permanent reminder of your crime on your body, for you to reappraise every single day of your life? And then to not even be ashamed or grow depressed, but to announce that it was only the cost of your own foolishness?

Schnee had vowed to never taint her hands with evil and to use what skills she had to make an honest living. Her decision was to deal in rumors.

Schnee had often listened in secret to the songs in the plaza. She knew quite well that information could fetch a high price depending on who it was sold to. The poets and the muckrakers were always hungry for a choice cut of verified gossip.

Schnee had earned her first payout proving that a tavern owner had been falsely accused of watering down his drinks. She would never forget the generous weight of the silver coins that the newspaper reporter had given her.

The people of Marsheim always had cash to spare for trustworthy dirt. But there was never enough time to double-check everything. The legwork, the endless background checks of one’s sources, it was a complete job in and of itself. There was a market for trust, Schnee had realized. Everyone wanted a specialized informant—someone who could keep them a step ahead of their rivals and unburdened of doubt.

Of course, she remembered the advice of her friend with the cropped hair and always made sure to keep a wide berth from the world of scandal. She would have been more than qualified to sneak into even the most guarded of manors and collect all sorts of dirt on various nobles’ affairs and love lives, but this was not the upright work that she valued.

Schnee was happy with her coat—her current life, in bubastisian terms—and her town. She made it her mission to never bring shame to her family and to make sure Marsheim was always plentiful with cozy places to nap.

It was perhaps two years into her career as an informant when it happened. She was ten years old and proud of the work she did, never having once stuck her nose into a dirty affair even if the payout was big, yet she would never forget that summer. It was sweltering; she was grateful for her white fur.

That day had been as brutal as any before it since the season turned—the day her whole family was killed at the hands of a group of adventurers.

Schnee knew that her good luck alone had spared her. No, she hated to call this turn of fate good. By the time she’d got wind of what had occurred, it was already too late.

She had been working. The heat of the day had worn her out, and so she’d taken a quick nap atop a tower on the other side of town, enjoying the reprieve of the evening breeze. When she had returned to the Gutterwalk the next day, she saw the blood and the bodies.

Schnee had lost everything she loved in one short night. The safest, most comfortable of her places to rest, among her family—nothing remained of it.

It wouldn’t have taken a talented informant to put the story together. By the time she had reached the truth, she almost wished that it had been harder—at least then she could have buried herself in the work. It only took a quick circuit of the neighborhood to check for survivors, noting the people from neighboring residences peeping through their windows at the scene.

The cause of the incident was painfully, heartbreakingly dull. Another informant working in Marsheim had done a poor job, to put it lightly.

A string of merchant families had been robbed, their storefronts burned. Arson invited severe punishment for people of any class. What was more, the fires were merely a cover for the murders committed within. The government had handed their sentence down plainly, severely, and in public, to be carried out the moment the perpetrators were found; the Adventurer’s Association piled in as well, offering the princely sum of thirty drachmae for the bunch, dead or alive. It’d been more than enough to put a thrill in the heart of your typical adventurer.

And out of all the adventurers who’d come out of the woodwork to find the culprit or culprits, one group had come to an informant who, for lack of a better idea, pointed them along to the Gutterwalk. Her people. Her home.

Schnee knew that all but the children of the Gutterwalk had well-known criminal records. They’d made an easy scapegoat for an information broker looking for a quick payout. His own lack of forethought had sent all her family to an early grave.

The adventurers had blindly believed the informant and assaulted the neighborhood without even bothering to talk to the residents. People were cut down indiscriminately as the party raided homes in search of evidence. They must have been certain the evidence was there. The culprits had been sentenced to the chopping block anyway—better, then, to silence the rabble so they could search for the stolen goods in peace.

Yet no matter how much they looked, they couldn’t find a scrap of evidence. The people of the Gutterwalk had been poor, but never quite so poor as to repeat old mistakes—certainly nothing so dire as arson, murder, and grand theft. It went without saying that they were innocent.

All the adventurers found was a little bit of money squirreled away during the summer so that they could buy firewood come winter.

One lie had killed an entire community. An incompetent rumor peddler and a pack of credulous state-approved murderers had cost Schnee everything she held dear. She didn’t even get the catharsis of claiming her revenge on the informant—he had already died before she had the chance. The adventurers had panicked when they’d failed to turn up any evidence, and so in a fit of madness they dared not leave a single witness alive. This included the foolish informant. There he was, a man she had never seen before, lying in a pool of blood in her family’s home, his face frozen in an expression of utter disbelief.

The world was a cruel and unjust place, to take away the prime object of her hate, his life snuffed out by the close seconds.

Schnee was in no position to claim what little of her justice was left. She hardly measured up against a pack of unhinged career killers.

And so, before her dead family and all the evidence she needed to grasp how the deed was done, she could do nothing but cry—just as she had done on the day they had found her.

Yet the world was not built upon tears alone. Sometimes when everything is lost, something new is given back. Just as the adventuring community had taken her home from her, so too was it an adventurer that had reached out a helping hand in her darkest moment.

“I wouldn’t advise leaving the poor souls like this. We should give them a proper send-off.”

“Who...are you?”

“My name is Fidelio. Fidelio of Eilia. I’m an adventurer.”

The one who had stood before the weeping Schnee was a young saint, Fidelio. This was not yet the Fidelio of legend. He’d not yet had his fabled night of righteous justice. From his frayed sleeves and simple spear, he looked, to be frank, quite the scruffy man of the cloth.

Fidelio, the saint whose virtuous heart had set him apart from any parish, had shown his kindness through his deeds—he’d gathered up the bodies, already starting to decay from half a day in the merciless sun, and carried them to an empty plot.

“Quite the group of excited youths had left the Association, chatting of hitting upon quite the important job, but none of them came back,” Fidelio said as he worked. “It seemed strange, so I came to see the situation for myself. To think it would come to this...”

Bubastisians were hardly the sturdiest folk, and so Schnee could only watch Fidelio carry the bodies, unable to lend a hand herself. It was evening by the time Fidelio had brought all the bodies to one spot. He was covered in sweat and grime. The sweat was unavoidable in the heat, but Fidelio remained steadfast as the blood and offal of the poor souls that he transported covered him.

Through it all, the young adventurer never muttered a single word of complaint, nor did he treat the bodies with less care than they deserved. After all, Fidelio knew most of all that the bodies of the deceased were not dirty things. Funeral rites were performed for both the dead and for the living who were left behind.

As he’d carried his load, Schnee had told him what had happened. Her voice faltered. Now and again she broke down midsentence. She’d never have behaved this way in front of a client. Fidelio’s heart burned as he listened to the tale. The saint knew quite well how arrogant one had to be to offer sympathy or pity; it was too awful. Even he, a stranger who had come by chance, knew that nothing he said could ever be enough to fill the gap in Schnee’s soul.

It pained him still to say nothing at all. He’d come on a whim, and what he’d seen was beyond the worst he could have imagined. People would have called him callous and cruel for staying silent. It was a heavy trial indeed for the saint who worked diligently to live an upright life, spread the creed, and build a better world.

Despite it all, even the God of Trials did not hand down such burdens without some faint sliver of hope.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I don’t think the authorities will put much manpower into investigating this,” Fidelio said. “Any amount would surprise me, really.”

Marsheim’s guards were for display only, to put it bluntly. Adventurers filled the gap in many cases, but it was a sad fact of life that many citizens of Marsheim, often the poorer ones, were left by the wayside. That went double for the social pariahs of the Gutterwalk. The local guard would not only refuse to investigate, but any complaints or requests to do so would fall on deaf ears.

Not a single guard had come to investigate the killings, despite almost an entire day having come and gone since the inciting incident. It went without saying that those who lived nearby had filed at most one or two reports and were simply ignored.

There was no glory or reward to be gained from an investigation. The facts were plain; nobody who cared mattered, and no one who mattered cared.

Even the Adventurer’s Association—led by Maxine’s predecessor, as she’d only been an assistant manager at this time—didn’t want to associate itself with such damning incidents, so there was little hope of them being proactive.

It would only have amounted to any sort of scandal if there was a losing side. In this case, there was no losing side—anyone who might have lost anything was dead. As long as Schnee kept her mouth shut, everyone could move on as if nothing had happened. The foolish adventurers would receive their due punishment, so the wisest thing for her would be to avoid losing face.

All the victims were beneath notice anyway. It was an accident. Condolences were given. This was a vice that lay in the bureaucracy of Marsheim, but the death of ex-convicts wasn’t worth labeling as a crime.

Such incidents weren’t rare. It was hardly unprecedented for a bad tip-off to cause a few civilian casualties; sometimes a few bloody-minded fools led a raid they shouldn’t have and racked up collateral damage. This was no just world, and given the choice between punishing the occasional wrongdoer and protecting lives, the Empire chose the former every time. Unless you had the power to stand up and do something about it, then it would be swept under the rug as if nothing had ever happened.

“I may be an adventurer, but I am a priest of the Sun God first,” Fidelio said. “His word is quite clear in this matter: no light shines without casting a shadow; the just have no place without an evil to conquer.”

“That’s a pretty cruel motto,” Schnee replied.

“Unless you yourself claim your justice, those who glut themselves on evil will inevitably run free. We are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. All that is left to us, perhaps, is meditation and enlightenment.”

The Sun God, and once upon a time even all of the good gods of the world, saw mortal suffering as the entry fee for one’s place in the world. Whether you cried or prostrated yourself, the gods would merely continue to claim that human affairs were for humans to manage—save for those situations the gods could not afford to ignore.

Some called such cosmological conditions a state of absolute freedom. Others denounced the pantheons for Their irresponsibility. However, the fact remained that humans were the arbiters of their own paths.

“I heard that in the myths the gods made us folk, Their final children, out of all Their best qualities. In light o’ that, this whole thing jus’ seems like a cold slap in the face. ’S a damn shame ta think that creatures with all the gods’ best parts could do...all of this.”

Some would have raked Schnee over the coals for her blasphemy, but there were people of the cloth who did not turn a blind eye to the cruel realities of the world. They understood that the world was full of suffering, that people weren’t equal—some races were fated to be weaker than others, or were only given shorter lifespans than others—and saw where the blame fell.

Fidelio was one such person. He did not blindly recite the passages of his god’s scripture; real faith demanded sharper thinking and a more studied understanding of the substance of his creed. He couldn’t say a thing to this poor laywoman who berated the gods for leaving the people of this world with its inherent suffering.

Fidelio believed that the gods didn’t want to pen a tale of a world where everyone lived in peace and happiness without complication. No, They wanted to make a world where those who lived in it understood the heavy responsibility that came with life itself.

“I mean, it’s true that all my folks...did some bad stuff. They knew that most of all. But...it’s all too much fer me to take, y’know? The gods sure are cruel...” Schnee said.

Fidelio was a devout believer in the Sun God, but he’d felt no desire to sermonize to this poor young woman. The parental gods had created this world as a place which would passively permit tragedy—which would, in fact, create tragedy as an inescapable fact of life, and the reasoning behind this intention was far too grand, a truth that was too distant for even the most sage theologian to ever reach.

Bubastisians did not usually shed tears in times of sadness, but still Schnee cried.

As a mere mortal, Fidelio decided that fulfilling his role was the only way he might bring her peace.

“O Sun, Great Father of us poor and lowly beings... In the fading twilight of Your shining rays, please hear my prayer.”

Funerals in the Empire were always held at dusk, when both the sun and the moon occupied the same space in the heavens. This fleeting period of alignment was the moment that the power of the parental gods, They who presided over time and life, was at its fullest. There was no time more fitting for Their children, the mortals of this world, to receive their send-off.

Fidelio laid down his spear and knelt upon the ground, praying to the evening light that bathed the ridgeline of the city. He did not have a staff, but his right hand, laid over his chest, clasped at a holy seal. He jangled its ornamentation.

In his left hand was a bag of cheap incense, which he carried with him at all times. Even without his incense burner, his god answered his prayer; it lit with a flame that did not burn to the touch. As the heliotrope crackled in the Sun God follower’s palm, the incense began to burn with a sweet smell.

“For these people who lived their lives to the fullest, striving with ceaseless labors just as the Sun rises in the sky, I beg that they may receive Your everlasting accompaniment and a moment of repose at our Dear Lunar Mother’s breast.”

Fidelio had placed the bodies of all the deceased with their heads facing west, into the sunset. In an official funeral, their appearances would be cleaned up, an item they held dear would be placed alongside them, and then they would be cremated or buried. Each one of these people had lived in poverty, and so they would have to receive their last rites as they were. Fidelio’s request for a miracle had been answered—both the Sun God and the Night Goddess must have smiled on this act, even if another priest might have thought otherwise.

“As the Sun sets on this day, just as You settle down to sleep, I pray You give these souls rest and Your mercy. In the name of Your everlasting teachings, amen.”

In answer to Fidelio’s prayer, just as the sun passed under the horizon, in that moment where the red sky transitioned into a deep blue, the bodies burst into flame.

It only lasted for a moment. Such funereal miracles were conjured by His most devout and highest-rank priests. A priest under another god would have taken thirty minutes to do the same, even with a pyre. In Fidelio’s case, it came and went in a blink of an eye. The poor souls’ bodies were reduced to ash before Schnee could remember to breathe.

“Ohh... My family...”

“They met with an unexpected end. Let it be some small comfort that their souls will be guided without fail to my God.”

Neither of those two would know, but in a world far from theirs there was a religion that believed that when the souls of the most moral went to heaven, they would be exempt from the journey after death and be welcomed by their god directly. The scene before them was quite similar.

This did not come without cost, however. The request had required quite some obstinance on the priest’s behalf. Fidelio would keep this secret from Schnee, but in the ten days afterward he would take on a personal ordeal to go without sleep and stay upright the entire time.

“Now... All that is left is to decide what to do with your soul,” Fidelio said.

“Mine?” Schnee replied.

“Yes. Your desire for revenge drove you to tears. But the ones you wish to punish will probably have already received quite the punishment in the lap of the gods by now.”

The priest pointed at the piles of ash that had once been a community—strangely enough, despite the evening breeze, they remained still—revealing that the body of the informant, killed in the adventurers’ tantrum, had remained unburned.

Fidelio’s finger was, most likely, not an invitation to pray for him.

“They are still out there—those fools that I loathe to call my fellows in business,” Fidelio went on. “What shall you do about them?”

Schnee wanted to give in to her sadness and her rage and cut them down as they had done to her family, but seeing what the priest had done for her family, she realized something.

“I’m gonna get my revenge. Them fools ain’t worthy of walkin’ under the heat of the sun nor the cool of the moon.”

“Then...”

Schnee cut Fidelio off. She presumed he was about to announce that he would join her. Schnee was an informant—she had her own way of finding revenge.

“I’m gonna lay every li’l thing about what happened clear. The ones who did this and the ones who looked the other way—they’re all gonna fess up to what they did and apologize fer it.”

Schnee vowed to bring to light every baldfaced lie and ugly truth that had led to this moment. She would identify every single adventurer who had played a part in this vile tragedy and let the wave of public scorn that would be sure to follow consume them. For those who would look away, who would write it all off as too much to bear, then she would annihilate them in her own way, to punish them for not doing the right thing when they had the chance.

It was no excuse to say they didn’t know. Willful ignorance was a crime in and of itself. To choose the easiest solution without a thought for what horrors it might incur was lower than low.

Schnee would dole out a punishment worthy of their crimes. She’d drop them into a living hell. When she returned to her trade, she would do it knowing that she’d embodied the highest virtues of the calling.

“I grew up blessed by their lessons—not t’steal, not t’be violent, not t’speak badly of people, not t’do anything I’d be ashamed of. If I killed ’em, whether it was by my own hand or through another, my folks’d be spitting nails and hellfire.”

Schnee’s sole path forward had to be one that only the truly evil could cast doubt upon.

“Very well. You have quite the stout heart.”

“I ain’t strong at all... Jus’ can’t let go of my good learnin’. But I’mma try ta do my best to make sure nothin’ like this happens again. That way, I bet they’ll tell me ‘Well done’ in the moment that I change coats and move on to a new life.”

The laypriest of the Sun God kept silent. Though he couldn’t quite square it with his own faith, he knew the bubastisian creed well enough, and he too had seen in the cat lords some spark of the divine. He had even heard that the calamitous great wolf, dressed in the great cloak of the Imperial house, exuded a divine aura of its own. There was more to the world than any one notion of it could hope to contain; if her beliefs gave her peace, Fidelio had no cause to complain. He was an advocate for his religion and its virtues, but evangelism was a step too far.

“Good point. I suppose I ought to make sure my own information networks are as reliable as you,” Fidelio replied. “And if it’ll help, I’ll crush every guy I meet peddling junk intel.”

The informant laughed.

“What’s goin’ on? You helpin’ a gal out ’cause you got a bone ta pick with the authorities?”

“My moral compass is my own. No state holds a higher place than the sun and the world it shines down on. Now then, there’s someone you ought to meet. She’s a hard worker in the Association, and she’s got the gray hairs to show for it. She’ll get your story straight with the bureaucracy.”

“Hah, now that sounds like a party. Give her hair some more time an’ we’ll be two peas in a pod.”

Schnee was sure that her family would approve of these methods.

She had lost her home, and it would never come back. But there were still places in the city where she could nap in peace. It would be her job to protect them from the ravages of all the other liars and craven killers.

“Ngh...”

Schnee felt her consciousness bob back to the surface. The last traces of that dream of her past faded into the sight before her. It was evening, and the room was lit by candlelight. The sky was a blend of crimsons and navy blues; just like the night that she was born.

“Ahh... Guess I’m still kickin’, huh...”

All the pain she’d been unconscious for registered in one fierce jolt, but it was nothing compared to the fatigue pinning her to the bed. Schnee put on a gently weary smile as she realized that, once again, life would go on.

Long ago now, she had gathered up her family’s ashes, placed them in an urn, and buried them in the home that had brought them all together with a simple grave marker. From afar, she could almost hear them saying, “It’s not your time yet.” When she’d dragged herself through that trash-filled lot, she’d thought her time was up. Her wound had throbbed and her body had ached with exhaustion from the endless pursuit, but here she was. Her body was so heavy that it didn’t feel like her own, but her heart still forced blood through her veins.

The dream had been bittersweet. Your life was supposed to flash before your eyes right before you died, not when you barely hung on.

Schnee sighed. “No good... Still gotta get some more good deeds in, huh...”

Schnee had picked up some valuable intel, and it was a blessing that she had survived, because she hadn’t had the wherewithal to write it down at the time. All the same, she felt an incredible weariness at the prospect of having to carry on another day. She had worked on a number of cases which had saved the margrave’s hegemony in the past, but it had been a while since the last time she had faced such evil and resentment.

“Dammit, Fidelio...”

Of all the new adventurers in Marsheim, he’d had to ask her to befriend that one.

The first time Schnee had laid eyes upon the gold-haired adventurer, she had sensed a similar aura to Fidelio’s. The one difference was that she sensed that even nine lives wouldn’t be enough to take on the man’s heaping misfortunes.

That wasn’t all. Fidelio and Goldilocks were both zealous in their pursuit of justice, but it seemed that where Fidelio imposed endless strictures upon himself to embody his ideals, Erich would do anything to achieve the ends he believed were best.

No, that wasn’t quite right, Schnee’s feline senses told her.

Perhaps Fidelio and Erich had different goals altogether.

Why else would he, a lowly amber-orange newbie, decide to build a clan and drag her into this realm of danger and subterfuge? The normal sort of rookie that came to Marsheim would know their place—they would run crying to Fidelio and ask him to sort things out, asking for a job that was actually suitable for them.

Schnee let out a little yawn as she reflected on Erich’s propensity for chaos. Nevertheless, she came around quickly. Ever since that day, she’d known that she had chosen a life that brought more loss than gain. If she started complaining now, how would she ever be able to rack up good deeds to put forward when she changed coats?

Schnee tried to move, in vain. She was simply too beat and too doped up on painkillers. She tried craning her neck for a better view of her situation. On the bedside table was a pitcher of water, a glass, and a little brass bell. Affixed to it was a little piece of paper that read “Ring me when you wake up.” The penmanship was clearly Goldilocks’s.

“Jeez, fine, fine... He did save my hide, so I should at least show him what I found out.”

The bed wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t quite to Schnee’s tastes. Schnee pushed down her feline urge to lounge and rang the bell.

[Tips] Violence is the simplest way to solve a situation. However, should the target of your violence ever be misplaced, you can find yourself going from adventurer to criminal in an instant. An upstanding PC should take care to note that not every piece of information supplied by the GM is meant to be taken on its face.