D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

Chapter 1986: Chapter 1986 More Hail

— Kat —

Kat sighed as she glanced over at Lin, smugly meeting her gaze. “Yeah yeah…” sighed Kat.

“Do you often have this problem?” asked Lin. “Giving away that much about your girlfriend?”

Kat wanted to retort that there was no way Lin knew that for sure… but really, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and moves like a duck. It’s probably a duck. “Yeah…” sighed Kat once again.

“It’s nothing to be too ashamed of. Not many are as adept at reading faces as me… but yes that was rather obvious. I suppose the fact that she IS your girlfriend makes it harder in many ways,” Lin grinned.

“Yeah… but question, how did you know I had a girlfriend?” asked Kat.

“Are you already so scrambled Kat? It was just about the first thing you said to me when I did my little routine… were you so stunned by my beauty that you already forgot?” Lin finished with a haughty anime style princess laugh. Kat raised an eyebrow at her. “What? People really do laugh like that you know. It’s hilarious how few notice when they do.”

“I guess?” agreed Kat, though she was still quite unsure. “Let’s… move off of this topic for now. I guess my question is, what exactly are you wanting from… all of this?” Kat waved a hand around. “And I suppose the near future as well. You did say you wanted to tunnel to go forward, and some personal plans but not a lot of the why.”

“Ah, a complicated question. The easy one is that, it simply fits the narrative we’ve built up around the family. Going against it now, when the moment is almost upon us, would be devastating to our credibility. On a personal level, I’d also quite love to explore so that seems ideal. Further… it’s just not something I originally saw a need to meddle in,” explained Lin.

“Wait, so you knew basically from the start? I assumed you learnt it within the last day or two…” asked Kat.

Lin nodded. “Of course. As I said before, plenty of people will share all sorts of things if they don’t think the information is a secret, or that it’s not valuable. The easiest way to do that is to start a few little rumours, use them to confirm the truth, and then bring up the ’truth’ around someone that you know, knows the full story.

“From there if they’re trying to be sneaky you can just watch their reactions, or as often happens, they’ll just confirm things for you at that point. Plenty of guards are tricked that way, even if Charles and Steel are much better about it. Sadly for Steel he isn’t the best at speaking quietly all the time, and Charles has far too many people watching him most of the time. The King has a similar issue,” explained Lin.

“I could go and tell them that you know,” Kat pointed out.

“You could sure… but you probably won’t bother. Not all that much fondness for the council at the moment, nor personal investment in the King. Plus, I’m quite sure they’ve all heard it before. Internalising it is a much more strenuous task though. Still, the refresher might mean more coming from you,” Lin said with a soft smile. Kat hated that while it did register as the truth, it was also quite clear that the ’might’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting where Lin didn’t believe it herself.

Kat sighed long and hard. “Alright, what about the thieving that Jen was doing? Do you know WHY she was even trying to break into Steel’s house?”

Lin shrugged, “Nope. Whoever sent her there has kept it quite a secret from me.”

“Wait you don’t know?” asked Kat.

Lin shook her head, “Oh I WILL find out but for the moment that information hasn’t come up. The thieving section of our not-so-legal business dealings takes their secrecy surprisingly seriously when they’re not being idiots. In this case, I’ve got a few options to poke at, and one that KNOWS what I’d do to him if I found out he was the one responsible. The others are all much younger and don’t quite understand what my anger is going to mean when I catch them.”

*And there’s the terrifying aura once again. I suppose I shouldn’t have asked.* “So… what else do you do?” asked Kat desperate for a change in topic. “You can’t just be known as the spy for the family right?”

“I don’t do much spying myself… but I get what you’re saying. For a lot of people, just thinking of me as a doddering old woman is enough. Except of course, once they see what I look like that’s obviously a lot harder. I spent a lot of time and effort on my personal beauty treatments you know, so that does make convincing people who know me I’m just a doddering old woman hard,” sighed Lin.

“Sounds like the only way,” grumbled Kat. “Though… why not SELL that sort of thing?”

Lin nodded, “Two reasons. The first is that it was a lot of time and effort and frankly I don’t want to share. The second reason is that it would be the same, or more effort to work on someone else. Unlike a lot of the more generic healing that’s partially just convincing your body to go back to the way it’s supposed to be this needs to be individualised. At least, with healing magic anyway.

“The initial treatment is very specific and needs to be regularly applied with different spells for different sections of the body before eventually culminating in a spell that sort of works like a regeneration affinity to keep things stable. Once again, nowhere near as good as a true one, but as a healer it’s a nice holding pattern.”

Kat was nodding along, thinking this all made sense, when Lin whipped around. “So do you have any idea the sort of effort that would require for someone else? Not only figuring out what are essentially new spells, but then either casting them myself OR making sure they kept casting them? What about the final spell that ’keeps things in place’ so to speak? If they stop that for even a day or I don’t cast it on them, a lot of that work just unravels.”

“Sorry, I didn’t realise it would be quite so hard,” sighed Kat.

“It’s essentially an ongoing upkeep. I get your not a mage but it’s the difference between… between buying a horse and carriage to get around or getting fit enough to walk everywhere. I can’t just ’share’ that ability to walk everywhere, they need to put in the work. I suppose I could share parts of the research but that doesn’t sit right with me at all,” admitted Lin.

[I suppose that’s one of the issues with healing long term wounds. Even if it’s not technically a wound in this case. It also explains why healers seem to be able to do anything. More recent wounds are basically time spells, or at least, likely have a connection to them that weakens as time goes on because of a lack of time affinity.]

*Um… alright.*

[Sorry, it’s just fascinating. I never would’ve thought that something like this would be so difficult. It’s possible that part of the reason is that she’s not just doing this as a cosmetic enhancement. Her energy, and the fact it’s based on regenerators implies that it’s more than skin deep but that’s just an implication I picked up.]

[What’s more fascinating is that she needed to perform spells on different parts of the body. I wonder if that’s a limitation of her research or if there was some issue with casting it across her entire body. We know that ’Pebble’ could fix himself by turning his entire body into Earth so what makes healing magic so different in this case? It’s fascinating and I’d love to pick her brain about it…]

[Not sure I’d be willing to get within sight range of her though. Even if she can guess a bunch from your expression she hasn’t seen you in person with me. Plus, it’s not like familiars or pets are unloved so it won’t be entirely obvious as long as she doesn’t see us together.]

*Are you sure you don’t want to come visit?*

[Nope, I’m happy being fascinated by what her spells might mean for my own research. Luckily, life extension doesn’t have to be on that list. Though it does make me wonder how Thyme would do something like that. Would rewinding them backwards to reduce their physical age also reduce their mental one? It doesn’t seem like the answer is yes, but what if it was longer term?]

Kat started to focus back on Lin. Not that Lily’s rambling wasn’t adorable, and super interesting… but leaving the super OP Grandma to get bored because the conversation wasn’t continuing seemed like a massively bad idea.