'Menu' 3.4

568-9-23a

Evening Continued

Home of Raphael Whitebuckle, Tanzar, North West Coast, Mrilchift, Riches of Renfros

Stoni ran for the kitchen as safely as she could while holding a candle.  The expected amount of mess greeted her senses: the aged scent of wine and the sight of glass shards in a bubbling puddle, surrounded by splatters of liquid.  Some drips still ran down the bottoms of the cabinets.

Notably, there was no one and nothing present that might be considered responsible for the bottle's fall.

"Once is weird, twice is worrying," Stoni muttered, checking over her shoulder for anything that might be creeping up on her.  Still nothing.  "And it's the 557 bottle I tried earlier.  I definitely left it in the middle of the bench."  Four other bottles remained untouched.  One was from an earlier year and the other three were more recent.

Stoni looked around uneasily.  Nothing else looked out of place, not counting her right eye's entire visual field.  She waited a minute, but no further sounds made themselves known.  She decided the best course of action was to clean up the mess.  If the situation developed and she found herself fleeing through the house, a wet floor littered with broken glass could be a major hazard.  Sweeping up the glass and dumping it in a metal mixing bowl wasn't too difficult, though she had to keep the dustpan in place with a foot.  Mopping with one hand felt awkward, but it was over soon enough.  She didn't bother cleaning the wine-splattered cabinets, and felt that Granny V would have left that task to her son too.

• New skill: Handiwork.
• Handiwork reached tier 40 of Dreadful rank.

After messily ripping off chunks of white bread to eat, a second search of the house yielded nothing further out of place.

• Handiwork to Dreadful-50, Footwork to Poor-6, Observe to Poor-20

"Thanks ALI, that's much better.  But did I really get ten tiers of handiwork just for eating some bread?"

Correct.

Stoni sighed in frustation at the simple answer.  "Why?"

Reaching Poor tier represents the skill of about an hour of training.

"Ah, I think I follow.  So going from poor rank to sufficient rank would be, what, about ten hours?"

Correct.  Each rank represents approximately ten times as much training time as the previous.

"And that requires actual improvement, not just repetition, right?"

Correct.  This can be expedited by training with a teacher of higher skill.

"Thanks for the tip.  If you're in a helpful mood, could you tell me what's going on in this house?"

No response was provided.

"Ah."

Stoni checked the entertainment room again, but it remained undisturbed.  "This is getting tiresome."  She seated herself in a tall armchair by the displayed musical instruments.  "Before I forget again, it's time I asked for that list of available classes, ALI," she said as she swung her legs in the air and kicked off her shoes.

A few seconds passed without event.

"Oh."  She rolled her eyes.  "Show me a table of classes available to new characters, please."

"That's a lot to unpack," Stoni said as she glanced throught the multiple lists.  "So many options and possibilities, though a lot of them aren't available to me with 2 Mind and 1 of the other stats.  I'm left with Scholar, Acrobat, Teacher, Strategist and Trader."  Her mind began to wander as she considered what she might do with each class.  Idly, she plucked the strings on one of the musical instruments a few times.  After the discordant notes died away, she heard them echoed at a distance and with even less musicality.  "What was that?"

Nothing.

She plucked a single string.  On closer inspection, it was a thin metal wire, not technically a string.

Again, she heard a sound from outdoors.  It seemed like a much longer metal wire had been plucked.

Stoni plucked a few more notes and listened to the responses.  "It's coming from... the garden?"  She remembered seeing wires marking out the individual beds.  "Guess I better take a look.  Reading up on classes will have to wait."  She considered also taking a weapon, but decided light was a higher priority.  She'd found a lantern in a storage cupboard, which had glass sides to protect the internal candle from the wind.  After lighting it with her candle she blew the candle out.  Given what had happened to the book and the bottle, she knew that leaving the candle alight in its holder was just begging for an inexplicable fire to break out as soon as she left the house.  As well as protecting her light source from the wind, she gave herself some protection by slipping into a hooded fur coat.

As she approached the garden, she did not see anyone else present.  The wire all looked normal, with nothing attached to it.  She plucked it a few times and recognised the sound as what she'd heard from the entertainment room.  "Good to know I was right about that at least.  This still makes no sense."

The ony thing that she considered might be out of place was a common garden rake.  It was resting between two beds with its teeth pointing up and looked like it had been dragged through the dirt, not simply dropped where it was.  She eyed it warily.  "What secrets do you hold, rake?"

The rake didn't answer.

With a shrug, she continued walking to the end of the row and looped around to walk back between the next two beds.  The next bed over was empty and appeared freshly raked.  Some of the soil had been disturbed since.  "Weird."  She walked to the middle of the row to get a better view and slowly realised the shapes were intentional.  "Someone wrote in the soil.  But why?  And where are their footprints?"  Although she was certain the lines were letters, she could not actually read them.  "Stranger and stranger.  I've been able to read everything else in VIVID.  Maybe I'm looking at it upside down?"

She tried looking at it from the other side, but that didn't help.  "What am I missing here?  Words... book... bottle... glass... mirror?"  She imagined what the lines would look like if they were reversed in a mirror, and immediately she became aware of the meaning of the word.  The knowledge sent a chill through her body that the coat could not keep out.

MURDERER

Involunarily, she took a step away from the word and closer to the house.  Her foot landed on something hard that hadn't been there a minute ago.  The rake handle leapt up and smacked her square on the nose.