Wilhelm wasn’t the only one either. True, that he was the only fool who received judgement that night, but the vampiric guard of the castle nearly shared the drunkard's fate. Exhausted and jumpy, I rushed to punish him, but in a way that had depended on him not being stopped by his fair lady. Indeed, Constantine would have attacked me had Kiyomi not stayed his hand, but my subconscience had already predicted where he would have attacked and assumed that he was. Summoning Toirneach from the void, I grasped the weapon by the barrel and slammed the stock in that direction, but all I heard instead of crunching bone was the sound of cracking stone.
“Odd,” I remarked while looking down at the section of the floor I had just massacred,
“that wasn’t the sound I was expecting.” And, of course, that was the moment that SAI – my enigmatic doctor – broke her usual silence.
“Natsumi, your energy reserves are dangerously low. You require sleep.” She wasn’t wrong. Even a blind hermit could have seen how stretched thin I had become in that moment, and no one was more connected to my health than SAI (literally). If she said I needed to rest, I definitely needed to rest.
However, as you can probably imagine, my stubbornness is inversely proportional to my energy level. I didn’t want to listen, and I tried to argue.
“I’ll sleep when I finish,” I said, referring to the many tasks still left on my list for the days ahead. SAI, however, wouldn’t hear of it. She showed me a “diagnostic screen” right over my left eye, causing it to light up for everyone in the room, and then proceeded to chastise me in her own, hyper-logical way.
“My sensors indicate that, at this rate, you won’t complete any task. You must rest if you wish to succeed at anything.” To emphasize her point, SAI even displayed a giant, flashing, red zero next to my success chance for the diagnostic screen. I got her point. I didn’t like it, but I got it.
“Fine,” I remember relenting, and so the decision was made that I would rest in Katerina's castle for a time.
Midnight Dreams
Up until the conclusion of that argument with SAI, I had largely ignored my host, having only paid her a brief glance before moving on. I was in no mood for pleasantries, especially since I had focused so squarely on my immediate concerns. In fact, I began that path by pointing at the two troublemakers in chief who were looking up at me with innocent smiles from a far couch.
“I’ll deal with you two in the morning,” I told them, and then shuffled off toward the main entrance of the parlor without even so much as a hello to the Silversteins.
Lucille had entered the room by then, cowering in the doorway and hoping no one would see her. Unfortunately for her, though, her hiding place was pretty bad. I easily spotted her, but only in the way a brute sees the help for their current establishment. In fact, I rather rudely walked past everyone in front of me and grabbed her by the collar before telling her the task I was arbitrarily assigning.
“You’ll be showing me to a bed,” I remarked, dragging her behind me as my outfit changed into more nighttime-appropriate robes.
An uncomfortable silence fell on the room shortly thereafter: marked by our disappearance. Elizabeth, looking slightly bewildered from the previous events, was shocked that I had arrived so quickly, but possessed just enough composure to regain her courtly presence.
“I do believe a hurricane just traveled through here,” the buxom beauty chuckled uneasily.
“Well, I’m not looking forward to the morning, but at least the night is still young.” She stood up from her sister’s embrace then, and was about to help free Luella from the same fate until Anabelle decided to stop her. Typical of the rather childish snake woman, she returned to her lamia form as soon as Luella was the only one left in her grasp. She wrapped her snake body all around the girl again – as well as the whole damn couch – and covered them in the blankets she had recently acquired. The furniture sagged under their collective weight, and Luella soon found herself positioned perfectly next to Anabelle’s face just before the latter fell asleep entirely.
“Uh, looks like my sister disagrees,” Lizzie commented as soon as she heard the internals of the couch groaning under her sister’s weight. She turned around to face the bewildered Luella, whose head was still peaking out from underneath the blankets and very much awake; but then was forced to deliver the bad news.
“Sorry, Miss Luella,” she said while taking another sip of tea,
“Seems Ana’s chosen you as her nightly pillow, and, unfortunately, there’s nothing any of us can do about it. If we even try to free you while she’s in that state, we could end up suffering the same fate or worse. You’ll just have to bear with it till the morning.” Katerina was still there, thankfully, and was probably all kinds of surprised. Unsatisfactory excuses had brought her a huge amount of unexpected guests on that Venti night, and it was only about to get worse. The wolf matriarch would soon experience the feeling of an extended, spontaneous, family gathering.
