A week after Locke’s medal ceremony, Elise returned home from Region 1, and Adah finally got her chance to meet with her Secretary. Apparently the extra time she had spent in the capital was dedicated to explaining the improved detection system she had hinted at during that press briefing a little while ago, as well as developing an early plan to put that system to work across all four of Letria’s regions. The details of that plan were yet another bit of information that Adah wanted Elise to share, now that the two of them could meet again.
Elise must have recognized that she’d pushed Adah’s patience to the limit in this matter. Rather than thrust a time of her own choosing upon Adah, she simply said that her calendar was clear for any meeting that Adah would like to put on it. That couldn’t possibly be true, but Adah appreciated the implicit meaning behind Elise’s words. If Adah could choose any time of her liking, then that meant everything and everyone else were being relegated to second priority.
Adah didn’t expect to always be given such treatment—she wanted Elise to do her job, after all—but she indulged this time around and arranged a meeting for the very first morning after Elise returned home.
As such, she and Grace walked through the labyrinthine halls of that gray building in Padoux yet again. This time, they were joined on their journey by a certain winged pig. Izzy trotted alongside them, glancing around at the beige walls and closed doors as they proceeded through the building’s endless corridors. He often preferred to walk instead of fly when in his physical form. Adah found that curious, not that it mattered one way or the other.
“I would have thought creatures who are bound to a plane like this one would take more care in the environments they construct for themselves,” he commented as they arrived at that old, rickety elevator.
“Humans have a talent for making things unpleasant for themselves,” Grace said. “Chances are that, at some point, someone thought they did put a lot of care into this building.”
“Clearly our kind have much to learn about your capabilities,” Izzy said.
They all boarded the elevator and began the ascent to the sixth floor. The box’s shaking and clanking rattled Izzy—physically and mentally—as it climbed.
“You know you don’t have to be out this early, right?” Adah said to him. “You could let us do the walking. I just thought it’d be good for you to be there when we meet with Elise.”
“No, no,” Izzy said, shaking his head. “I must learn whatever is so enticing for Iosk to spend so much of his time here. He sees a value in maintaining his presence, and I will not fall behind.”
Adah had her own reasons for wanting Izzy to show face from time to time, but she was always thinking from a magical girl’s perspective. Izzy helped establish her identity as Twilight Heartbreak. He was a reminder to onlookers of where her power came from. In that way, he became a prop for her. However, Iosk had implied that he also gained something from being by Iris’s side so often. Izzy wanted to understand what exactly that benefit was.
A short ride elevator ride later, the pig learned one major benefit of showing himself to humans, but Adah was fairly certain it wasn’t the same boon Iosk had in mind.
During her last visit to the Region 4’s Department of Magic, all of the Department staff had taken a keen interest in Adah. They had stared at her and whispered her name like she was some mythical figure. Today, all of that attention went straight toward Izzy instead. And rather than curious stares and whispered words, the pig was welcomed by a doting crowd.
The staff members working in the central atrium of the Department of Magic all took notice of Izzy within seconds of his arrival. When Adah had first come here as Heartbreak, it had taken at least a minute for everyone to pay her attention. She was acutely aware of that time differential. The staff swarmed Izzy and showered him in pets and praises. Some even asked him if he liked human food, perhaps hoping to give him some treats from their lunches.
“You shouldn’t treat him like a pet, you know,” Adah said to the crowd. “He can think and talk like a human.”
Though, as if to prove her wrong, Izzy kept his mouth shut and soaked up all their attention with a wagging tail.
The fawning of the Department employees was a roadblock on her trip to Elise’s office, so Adah waited as patiently as she could for them to get their fill of Izzy. They were all oddly comfortable interacting with a mascot. Izzy’s appearance wasn’t as outlandish as other mascots, like that phoenix Lesh, but shouldn’t it have been a shock to see a pig walk into your office? Nevermind a winged pig. Perhaps if you worked in the Department of Magic, you had more exposure to mascots than the average person.
Still, Adah couldn’t understand why they all found Izzy so cute—mascot or otherwise.
Eventually, Elise took notice of the commotion outside of her office, like she had the last time, and stepped out to usher Adah, Grace, and Izzy inside. They escaped the Department employees and walked through the double doors into Elise’s office. Today, Elise immediately closed the doors behind them, which blocked out all noise from the central atrium.
“Please, take a seat,” Elise said to Adah and Grace. Then, upon realizing there was no suitable chair for Izzy, she slid a pile of papers across her desk. That cleared a roughly Izzy-sized space on her desk, to which she held out an open hand.
Was that another joke of hers?
Even if it was, Izzy took the Secretary up on her offer and hopped onto the mahogany desktop. While he settled into position, Elise sat down in her own chair and began rummaging through a bag near her feet. Once she’d found what she was looking for, she placed it on the far end of the desk near Adah.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“Locke asked me to give this to you,” she said, without any further context.
There was no mistaking it—what Elise had set down was a jewelry box. From the rectangular shape, Adah figured it must have contained a necklace or maybe some kind of tennis bracelet. What was less obvious was why Locke wanted Adah to have it.
“Is that all he said?” Adah asked as she reached for the box.
Elise nodded and said, “He gave it to me in passing. He looked to be in a rush to get out of the capital.”
Of course he had been. He hadn’t wanted to go there in the first place.
Adah opened the box to find a thin silver necklace, as expected. The cord was made of a dainty chain, leading to a tiny pendant in the outline of a heart. The silver frame of the pendant was encrusted all around by amethysts, which Adah took as a sign that Locke’s choice of symbol was a nod to her persona rather than a confession of his feelings.
The little, folded up note tucked inside the jewelry box confirmed her assumption. It simply read: Thanks.
This guy… They’d shared phone numbers; he could have called if that was all he wanted to say.
“Where should I begin?” Elise asked, unprompted.
Adah looked up from the necklace and stared at Elise. The question was so sudden, and Adah’s mind was still so focused on Locke, that she couldn’t formulate a proper response. After a few seconds of silence, Grace stepped in on her behalf.
“I’m sure Adah has plenty of her own questions for you,” her manager said, “but let’s start with something that affects us all. How exactly did you know that no more Cruelties would appear after the S-Rank? How does your ‘analysis’ work?”
Elise smiled like a kid who’d been told they could stay up an extra thirty minutes past their bedtime. Adah had never seen her so expressive.
“I knew it’d be impossible to finish before I became Secretary,” Elise said. “You see, it’s a combination of quantitative and qualitative models. I always had access to the data, and I knew we could rely on that half of the equation. The only challenge there was zeroing in on accurate values. We’ve assigned each variant a “weight,” for example, based on their apparent power. From there, we can chart those values across all the relevant contexts: average weight within ranks, average cumulative weight on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, and so on. Then, the trends begin to emerge.
“Another example: if a particular three-day period of Cruelty appearances exceeds the average expected weight of those appearances by more than twenty percent, then you can expect the next three-day period to fall below the average by an equal percent. That was a fairly reliable insight we discovered via the data, but it was incomplete. Even if you know the total average power of the Cruelties you can expect to see in the next three days, you don’t know which variants will appear, where they will appear, or how many will appear. The data couldn’t answer these questions alone. Therefore, we required the qualitative component.”
Elise paused there, as she often did, to look at Adah and Grace. Her smile had drifted away as she grew more intense in her explanation of her process, and her expression was flat once more.
“Go on,” Adah said.
Elise nodded and continued, “We developed the other model through trial and error. We made predictions based on our assumptions of how the Cruelties may think or what their strategic goals may be at a given moment. Notions of that sort. If we return to my previous example, we would ask ourselves what the Cruelties may want to accomplish during the second, weaker three-day period. Our assumption was that it would be a period of recuperating resources—that is, magic essence. Based on that assumption, we made a prediction that subsequent Cruelty appearances would localize to more remote areas of the region and feature variants better suited to assaulting wildlife.”
“And you were right?” Adah guessed.
“In that example, yes,” Elise said, smiling once more. “In other instances, we were not. It was all a matter of experiment, really. Predict, observe, and analyze. Incorrect predictions are more valuable than correct ones, in most cases, and over time our predictions approached reality. Of course, we never acted upon these predictions. We never issued orders or divided our resources based on them. We simply wanted to see if we were right or wrong. Eventually, between the quantitative and qualitative models, we reached a point of complete confidence in the outcomes of certain scenarios.”
“Scenarios such as what might happen after an S-Rank appears?” Grace asked.
“Certain S-Ranks,” Elise corrected. “On that day, we knew no other Cruelties could spawn within thirty-eight hours of the full materialization of that S-Rank. They lacked the mental capacity.”
“Mental capacity?” Adah repeated. “What does that mean?”
“As you know,” Elise explained, “the Cruelties can learn and adapt, which means they can think. At least, they can process information and change their behaviors in a manner more complex than the average animal. That was the biggest challenge for us. Figuring out to what extent—and how—their ‘mind’ works.”
Adah remembered something she had heard Elise say during that press briefing the other day, when she first revealed her system.
“That was the variable you didn’t understand,” she said. “The ‘mind’ of a Cruelty.”
“Or that of the Cruelties as a whole,” Elise said. “I oversimplified my explanation to the press by calling it a variable. It was more of a general understanding that we lacked. It took some discussion with the mascots, but we learned enough to optimize our system.”
Izzy stood up now, planting all four of his hooves on Elise’s desk.
“But we do not know how the Cruelties think,” he said. “They are strange, and in many ways have more in common with humanity than with our kind.”
“Precisely,” Elise said to him. “They share some attributes with humans and some with mascots. Many of our assumptions were necessarily operating from a place of human understanding. We needed to supplement that with a mascot’s perspective. Together, we could create an approximation of the Cruelties’ ‘consciousness,’ if you’d like to call it that.”
The way Elise spoke about her system, both during the press briefing and now, had felt odd to Adah. The woman had kept saying “we,” but had never clarified what that meant. If she had been referring to the Department of Magic, surely she would have mentioned it explicitly at some point. Instead, it was always “we.”
At that moment in Elise’s office, Adah learned who the other half of “we” was.
As if on cue, a creature resembling a lion materialized in the air next to Elise’s head. This mascot was the size of a lapdog, with white fur that covered its body like powdery snow, but otherwise matched its animal counterpart. No superfluous wings or extra tails.
The little lion looked down at Izzy before it paid any mind to Adah or Grace.
“Hello, Izrashell,” it said. “It’s a pleasure to be working with you again.”
Before answering, Izzy hopped off Elise’s desk and floated to the chair Adah was sitting in. He hovered near her head, as steady as if he was standing on flat ground.
“Kodriel,” he said in response to the lion, and nothing more.
Adah turned toward Izzy, but she had no need to.
With the way the lion had called him by that name, and the way Izzy reacted, she already had the answer to her question.
That mascot was another of the Keteriel.