Chapter 196: Afternoon Machinations
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Chapter 196: Afternoon Machinations
With the room cleared out, Erani and I were free to rifle through the documents as we pleased. We quickly located the correct metal drawer and looked through the contents until finding the stack of future job postings. They ranged from being slated to go up the next day—that was the majority of them—to a few from people like nobles or business owners being planned to go up weeks from now. Those were for things like construction projects, pushing out monster populations in certain locations or leveling out some terrain, that way they could start building the moment the job was done.
We looked around for the best jobs we could, committing them to memory, plus having Index read through them to memorize the jobs for good measure. Pretty much anything high-paying we paid attention to.
It wasn’t long before we found everything worth noting, having Index go through the much more manageable pile of papers to read. And then, we left.
The man we’d tied up was also left in the room behind us, of course, lying in the corner, bound and gagged as thoroughly as we could get him. Obviously, someone would eventually come across him, but due to the extremely long nature of his task, I hoped nobody would go looking for a while. At least, not for the next six hours.
So we exited the room and the guild lobby, heading out of town. Our mission hadn’t taken long at all, so Ainash was still nearby.
Soon, we saw her approaching, answering our call to meet up.
“Did you find important paper?”L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Ñøv€l--B1n.
“Yeah,” I responded, “we got everything we need. We should go ahead and transfer our memories now, though.”
“But why?” Ainash asked. “There is still lot more time before have to go back, correct?
“Yeah, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from having this ability, it’s that you can never actually predict when you’ll need to use it. We hope we’ll get the full six hours before needing to go back, but it’s best to get the most important information transferred now, while we still can.”
“Okay!”
“So I go first, right?” Erani asked.
“Right. You transfer your memories to Ainash, and then she transfers both yours and hers to me, that way I can give them back once I’ve activated Time Loop.”
Erani stepped forward, placing a hand on Ainash’s head and closing her eyes. I could see her facial expression change as she mentally exerted herself, pushing the memories through in as much detail as she could while still trying to keep things fast. What we’d found with our experiments beforehand was that, while you did need to put in a lot of detail in the transferred memory, you could still cut certain corners, if you knew what you were doing.
In general, the longer a memory was, the less detail it needed. For example, if you were trying to transfer your memories from a twenty-minute time span, you wouldn’t need to go over all of your individual thoughts and emotions during that time—unlike how you would need to go through those details if it was just a single moment you were trying to transfer.
So with Erani transferring over the memories of our entire mission, even though they were of a decently lengthy period of time, it still didn’t take too long to do. Only a few minutes before Ainash had received everything. And then Ainash went over to me and pushed the memories into my mind.
The sensation of receiving memories was like nothing else. And the sensation of receiving the memory of someone receiving another memory was somehow even stranger. When I got them, I effectively had them implanted into my mind, but I didn’t actually ‘see’ the memories until I made the conscious effort to do so. Until then, they were sort of like a wrapped package in my peripheral vision. Still certainly there, but I’d need to go over and unwrap them to actually know what was inside.
It felt sort of nosey to go looking through the memories of my two companions, especially since these hadn’t been selected as memories they felt comfortable showing me, and more just because it was necessary for me to hold onto them until I gave them back, so I decided to simply not look. We hadn’t technically set down any sort of ground rules regarding that sort of thing, so as far as I was concerned, I’d have rather stayed on the cautious side and not invaded anyone’s privacy.
I took a step back once Ainash was finished. “Okay, Erani, you ready to head back to town?”
“What are we even gonna do? Wouldn’t it be better to just stick around outside the walls? It’d be safer, that way we’re far away in case anyone ends up finding out we stole those documents.”
“At this point, safety isn’t a concern, remember? We’ve done the important stuff, and we have the memories transferred and ready. So even if we all die horribly, we won’t lose much. So then, why not go and do some insanely risky shit we would never otherwise do?”
Artil looked in its direction, seeing that it was...that adventurer pair! The armored man had gotten up onto a poor couple’s table—Lin and Ana’s, the two that came every three months and change, ordering the Alabaster Squid and the...was it the hyggleberry salad for Ana, normally? They’d recently bought out a local Cleric’s center, he believed, turned the place into one that was actually profitable. The poor things had their dinner totally ruined by this raucous fellow! He stood right there over them, on top of their plates, having kicked their drinks aside as though Nin and Ana weren’t twenty times as important as he.
The patrons of the restaurant stared at the man, not sure what to do. Artil was the same.
“Hey!” the armored adventurer shouted again, louder this time. Any conversation that was still going on in the restaurant stopped. “I’m telling you all right now, get on the fucking ground!”
A couple people shakily got out of their seats and got down to the floor. The employees had clearly made the decision to stay out of this, all fleeing to the kitchen—presumably to call for some law enforcement. But in the time before they arrived, the patrons of this establishment were left to fend for themselves in this strange situation.
The adventurer hopped down from the table, walking around and up to each person who hadn’t yet sat down on the floor.
“Get down, man,” he said to one in his crude accent. “It’s for your own good. I’m doing you a favor, really.”
“D-don’t tell me what to do,” the well-dressed man responded. “Why should I even—”
The armored man grabbed his arm and yanked him out of his seat, taking clear advantage of the Stats of a Classer to exploit the citizen’s weakness. He tumbled to the floor, no harm being done to him, but the implication left plain and bare.
Mutterings filled the restaurant as the armored man worked his way through the room, throwing people to the ground or—as it became clear what he could do—simply looking at people until they got down on their own.
But one man stayed sitting straight up.
The armored man walked up to Artil. “Get down.”
“I will not!” Artil proclaimed. “You think that just because you’re stronger than us, you can order us around?! I will have you know, I am a very important man. And to lord your strength over us like you are some sort of king, it is nothing but a charade! You will come crashing down, you hear me?!”
The man nodded, and suddenly, from behind him, Artil found a hand grabbing his head and pulling him back off of his chair, to the ground. It was that monster woman! She’d somehow snuck over behind him in the darkness created by the man’s armor, and grabbed him from there!
Artil attempted to fight the overwhelming force, but it was clear that this woman, too, had a set of truly devastating Stats. He could do nothing to stop it.
“W-what happens when you try this, and one of your kind is dining among us?” Artil demanded. “What happens when you get unlucky?! You cannot expect to get away with this forever, you know?”
“Okay,” the man called out to the room, ignoring Artil. “Now that everyone’s down, I’m just gonna make sure you all know that you need to stay down.”
In an instant, a calamitous force crushed down on Artil’s entire body. It was as though the world itself were pulling him closer to its center, while at the same time the muscles in his body had shrunk to half their size. He’d been originally trying to at least keep himself propped up on his hands, but the moment the force hit him, he was instantly forced flat on the ground, completely unable to pull himself back up from lying on his back. And judging by the chorus of shouts and surprised yelps coming from the room, everyone else seemed to find themselves in a similar predicament.
“Alright,” the man said, “see? Now you’re glad I got you all on the ground before I did that. No injuries this way. And that’s how I wanna keep it. Just listen to me, and we keep everything clean and bloodless. Really, there shouldn’t be any problems at all. Here, I’ll let it up now.”
The man waved his hand, and suddenly the force was gone, as though it had never been there in the first place. Artil could move freely again. He could get to his feet and attack those people, if he really wanted.
But a part of him reluctantly recognized that the man was right in what he’d said. If Artil had bad footing when the ability had gone off, he could’ve easily tripped and fallen, hit his head on a table...He’d technically been done a favor by being told to get on the floor first. Of course, the man himself had been the one to use the ability in the first place, but Artil certainly didn’t want to give him a reason to do it again in an unsafe scenario.
“So, yeah, anyway,” the man continued casually, “this is a robbery, I guess.”
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Chapter 196: Afternoon Machinations
With the room cleared out, Erani and I were free to rifle through the documents as we pleased. We quickly located the correct metal drawer and looked through the contents until finding the stack of future job postings. They ranged from being slated to go up the next day—that was the majority of them—to a few from people like nobles or business owners being planned to go up weeks from now. Those were for things like construction projects, pushing out monster populations in certain locations or leveling out some terrain, that way they could start building the moment the job was done.
We looked around for the best jobs we could, committing them to memory, plus having Index read through them to memorize the jobs for good measure. Pretty much anything high-paying we paid attention to.
It wasn’t long before we found everything worth noting, having Index go through the much more manageable pile of papers to read. And then, we left.
The man we’d tied up was also left in the room behind us, of course, lying in the corner, bound and gagged as thoroughly as we could get him. Obviously, someone would eventually come across him, but due to the extremely long nature of his task, I hoped nobody would go looking for a while. At least, not for the next six hours.
So we exited the room and the guild lobby, heading out of town. Our mission hadn’t taken long at all, so Ainash was still nearby.
Soon, we saw her approaching, answering our call to meet up.
“Did you find important paper?”L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Ñøv€l--B1n.
“Yeah,” I responded, “we got everything we need. We should go ahead and transfer our memories now, though.”
“But why?” Ainash asked. “There is still lot more time before have to go back, correct?
“Yeah, but if there’s anything I’ve learned from having this ability, it’s that you can never actually predict when you’ll need to use it. We hope we’ll get the full six hours before needing to go back, but it’s best to get the most important information transferred now, while we still can.”
“Okay!”
“So I go first, right?” Erani asked.
“Right. You transfer your memories to Ainash, and then she transfers both yours and hers to me, that way I can give them back once I’ve activated Time Loop.”
Erani stepped forward, placing a hand on Ainash’s head and closing her eyes. I could see her facial expression change as she mentally exerted herself, pushing the memories through in as much detail as she could while still trying to keep things fast. What we’d found with our experiments beforehand was that, while you did need to put in a lot of detail in the transferred memory, you could still cut certain corners, if you knew what you were doing.
In general, the longer a memory was, the less detail it needed. For example, if you were trying to transfer your memories from a twenty-minute time span, you wouldn’t need to go over all of your individual thoughts and emotions during that time—unlike how you would need to go through those details if it was just a single moment you were trying to transfer.
So with Erani transferring over the memories of our entire mission, even though they were of a decently lengthy period of time, it still didn’t take too long to do. Only a few minutes before Ainash had received everything. And then Ainash went over to me and pushed the memories into my mind.
The sensation of receiving memories was like nothing else. And the sensation of receiving the memory of someone receiving another memory was somehow even stranger. When I got them, I effectively had them implanted into my mind, but I didn’t actually ‘see’ the memories until I made the conscious effort to do so. Until then, they were sort of like a wrapped package in my peripheral vision. Still certainly there, but I’d need to go over and unwrap them to actually know what was inside.
It felt sort of nosey to go looking through the memories of my two companions, especially since these hadn’t been selected as memories they felt comfortable showing me, and more just because it was necessary for me to hold onto them until I gave them back, so I decided to simply not look. We hadn’t technically set down any sort of ground rules regarding that sort of thing, so as far as I was concerned, I’d have rather stayed on the cautious side and not invaded anyone’s privacy.
I took a step back once Ainash was finished. “Okay, Erani, you ready to head back to town?”
“What are we even gonna do? Wouldn’t it be better to just stick around outside the walls? It’d be safer, that way we’re far away in case anyone ends up finding out we stole those documents.”
“At this point, safety isn’t a concern, remember? We’ve done the important stuff, and we have the memories transferred and ready. So even if we all die horribly, we won’t lose much. So then, why not go and do some insanely risky shit we would never otherwise do?”
Artil looked in its direction, seeing that it was...that adventurer pair! The armored man had gotten up onto a poor couple’s table—Lin and Ana’s, the two that came every three months and change, ordering the Alabaster Squid and the...was it the hyggleberry salad for Ana, normally? They’d recently bought out a local Cleric’s center, he believed, turned the place into one that was actually profitable. The poor things had their dinner totally ruined by this raucous fellow! He stood right there over them, on top of their plates, having kicked their drinks aside as though Nin and Ana weren’t twenty times as important as he.
The patrons of the restaurant stared at the man, not sure what to do. Artil was the same.
“Hey!” the armored adventurer shouted again, louder this time. Any conversation that was still going on in the restaurant stopped. “I’m telling you all right now, get on the fucking ground!”
A couple people shakily got out of their seats and got down to the floor. The employees had clearly made the decision to stay out of this, all fleeing to the kitchen—presumably to call for some law enforcement. But in the time before they arrived, the patrons of this establishment were left to fend for themselves in this strange situation.
The adventurer hopped down from the table, walking around and up to each person who hadn’t yet sat down on the floor.
“Get down, man,” he said to one in his crude accent. “It’s for your own good. I’m doing you a favor, really.”
“D-don’t tell me what to do,” the well-dressed man responded. “Why should I even—”
The armored man grabbed his arm and yanked him out of his seat, taking clear advantage of the Stats of a Classer to exploit the citizen’s weakness. He tumbled to the floor, no harm being done to him, but the implication left plain and bare.
Mutterings filled the restaurant as the armored man worked his way through the room, throwing people to the ground or—as it became clear what he could do—simply looking at people until they got down on their own.
But one man stayed sitting straight up.
The armored man walked up to Artil. “Get down.”
“I will not!” Artil proclaimed. “You think that just because you’re stronger than us, you can order us around?! I will have you know, I am a very important man. And to lord your strength over us like you are some sort of king, it is nothing but a charade! You will come crashing down, you hear me?!”
The man nodded, and suddenly, from behind him, Artil found a hand grabbing his head and pulling him back off of his chair, to the ground. It was that monster woman! She’d somehow snuck over behind him in the darkness created by the man’s armor, and grabbed him from there!
Artil attempted to fight the overwhelming force, but it was clear that this woman, too, had a set of truly devastating Stats. He could do nothing to stop it.
“W-what happens when you try this, and one of your kind is dining among us?” Artil demanded. “What happens when you get unlucky?! You cannot expect to get away with this forever, you know?”
“Okay,” the man called out to the room, ignoring Artil. “Now that everyone’s down, I’m just gonna make sure you all know that you need to stay down.”
In an instant, a calamitous force crushed down on Artil’s entire body. It was as though the world itself were pulling him closer to its center, while at the same time the muscles in his body had shrunk to half their size. He’d been originally trying to at least keep himself propped up on his hands, but the moment the force hit him, he was instantly forced flat on the ground, completely unable to pull himself back up from lying on his back. And judging by the chorus of shouts and surprised yelps coming from the room, everyone else seemed to find themselves in a similar predicament.
“Alright,” the man said, “see? Now you’re glad I got you all on the ground before I did that. No injuries this way. And that’s how I wanna keep it. Just listen to me, and we keep everything clean and bloodless. Really, there shouldn’t be any problems at all. Here, I’ll let it up now.”
The man waved his hand, and suddenly the force was gone, as though it had never been there in the first place. Artil could move freely again. He could get to his feet and attack those people, if he really wanted.
But a part of him reluctantly recognized that the man was right in what he’d said. If Artil had bad footing when the ability had gone off, he could’ve easily tripped and fallen, hit his head on a table...He’d technically been done a favor by being told to get on the floor first. Of course, the man himself had been the one to use the ability in the first place, but Artil certainly didn’t want to give him a reason to do it again in an unsafe scenario.
“So, yeah, anyway,” the man continued casually, “this is a robbery, I guess.”
Chapter 196: Afternoon MachinationsWith the room cleared out, Erani and I were free to rifle through the documents as we pleased. We quickly located the correct metal drawer and looked through the contents until finding the stack of future job postings. They ranged from being slated to go up the next daythat was the majority of themto a few from people like nobles or business owners being planned to go up weeks from now. Those were for things like construction projects, pushing out monster populations in certain locations or leveling out some terrain, that way they could start building the moment the job was done.We looked around for the best jobs we could, committing them to memory, plus having Index read through them to memorize the jobs for good measure. Pretty much anything high-paying we paid attention to.It wasn't long before we found everything worth noting, having Index go through the much more manageable pile of papers to read. And then, we left.The man we'd tied up was also left in the room behind us, of course, lying in the corner, bound and gagged as thoroughly as we could get him. Obviously, someone would eventually come across him, but due to the extremely long nature of his task, I hoped nobody would go looking for a while. At least, not for the next six hours.So we exited the room and the guild lobby, heading out of town. Our mission hadn't taken long at all, so Ainash was still nearby.Soon, we saw her approaching, answering our call to meet up.Did you find important paper?L1tLagoon witnessed the first publication of this chapter on Nvl--B1n.Yeah, I responded, we got everything we need. We should go ahead and transfer our memories now, though.But why? Ainash asked. There is still lot more time before have to go back, correct? Yeah, but if there's anything I've learned from having this ability, it's that you can never actually predict when you'll need to use it. We hope we'll get the full six hours before needing to go back, but it's best to get the most important information transferred now, while we still can.Okay!So I go first, right? Erani asked.Right. You transfer your memories to Ainash, and then she transfers both yours and hers to me, that way I can give them back once I've activated Time Loop.Erani stepped forward, placing a hand on Ainash's head and closing her eyes. I could see her facial expression change as she mentally exerted herself, pushing the memories through in as much detail as she could while still trying to keep things fast. What we'd found with our experiments beforehand was that, while you did need to put in a lot of detail in the transferred memory, you could still cut certain corners, if you knew what you were doing.In general, the longer a memory was, the less detail it needed. For example, if you were trying to transfer your memories from a twenty-minute time span, you wouldn't need to go over all of your individual thoughts and emotions during that timeunlike how you would need to go through those details if it was just a single moment you were trying to transfer.So with Erani transferring over the memories of our entire mission, even though they were of a decently lengthy period of time, it still didn't take too long to do. Only a few minutes before Ainash had received everything. And then Ainash went over to me and pushed the memories into my mind.The sensation of receiving memories was like nothing else. And the sensation of receiving the memory of someone receiving another memory was somehow even stranger. When I got them, I effectively had them implanted into my mind, but I didn't actually see' the memories until I made the conscious effort to do so. Until then, they were sort of like a wrapped package in my peripheral vision. Still certainly there, but I'd need to go over and unwrap them to actually know what was inside.It felt sort of nosey to go looking through the memories of my two companions, especially since these hadn't been selected as memories they felt comfortable showing me, and more just because it was necessary for me to hold onto them until I gave them back, so I decided to simply not look. We hadn't technically set down any sort of ground rules regarding that sort of thing, so as far as I was concerned, I'd have rather stayed on the cautious side and not invaded anyone's privacy.I took a step back once Ainash was finished. Okay, Erani, you ready to head back to town?What are we even gonna do? Wouldn't it be better to just stick around outside the walls? It'd be safer, that way we're far away in case anyone ends up finding out we stole those documents.At this point, safety isn't a concern, remember? We've done the important stuff, and we have the memories transferred and ready. So even if we all die horribly, we won't lose much. So then, why not go and do some insanely risky shit we would never otherwise do?Artil looked in its direction, seeing that it was...that adventurer pair! The armored man had gotten up onto a poor couple's tableLin and Ana's, the two that came every three months and change, ordering the Alabaster Squid and the...was it the hyggleberry salad for Ana, normally? They'd recently bought out a local Cleric's center, he believed, turned the place into one that was actually profitable. The poor things had their dinner totally ruined by this raucous fellow! He stood right there over them, on top of their plates, having kicked their drinks aside as though Nin and Ana weren't twenty times as important as he.The patrons of the restaurant stared at the man, not sure what to do. Artil was the same.Hey! the armored adventurer shouted again, louder this time. Any conversation that was still going on in the restaurant stopped. I'm telling you all right now, get on the fucking ground!A couple people shakily got out of their seats and got down to the floor. The employees had clearly made the decision to stay out of this, all fleeing to the kitchenpresumably to call for some law enforcement. But in the time before they arrived, the patrons of this establishment were left to fend for themselves in this strange situation.The adventurer hopped down from the table, walking around and up to each person who hadn't yet sat down on the floor.Get down, man, he said to one in his crude accent. It's for your own good. I'm doing you a favor, really.D-don't tell me what to do, the well-dressed man responded. Why should I evenThe armored man grabbed his arm and yanked him out of his seat, taking clear advantage of the Stats of a Classer to exploit the citizen's weakness. He tumbled to the floor, no harm being done to him, but the implication left plain and bare.Mutterings filled the restaurant as the armored man worked his way through the room, throwing people to the ground oras it became clear what he could dosimply looking at people until they got down on their own.But one man stayed sitting straight up.The armored man walked up to Artil. Get down.I will not! Artil proclaimed. You think that just because you're stronger than us, you can order us around?! I will have you know, I am a very important man. And to lord your strength over us like you are some sort of king, it is nothing but a charade! You will come crashing down, you hear me?!The man nodded, and suddenly, from behind him, Artil found a hand grabbing his head and pulling him back off of his chair, to the ground. It was that monster woman! She'd somehow snuck over behind him in the darkness created by the man's armor, and grabbed him from there!Artil attempted to fight the overwhelming force, but it was clear that this woman, too, had a set of truly devastating Stats. He could do nothing to stop it.W-what happens when you try this, and one of your kind is dining among us? Artil demanded. What happens when you get unlucky?! You cannot expect to get away with this forever, you know?Okay, the man called out to the room, ignoring Artil. Now that everyone's down, I'm just gonna make sure you all know that you need to stay down.In an instant, a calamitous force crushed down on Artil's entire body. It was as though the world itself were pulling him closer to its center, while at the same time the muscles in his body had shrunk to half their size. He'd been originally trying to at least keep himself propped up on his hands, but the moment the force hit him, he was instantly forced flat on the ground, completely unable to pull himself back up from lying on his back. And judging by the chorus of shouts and surprised yelps coming from the room, everyone else seemed to find themselves in a similar predicament.Alright, the man said, see? Now you're glad I got you all on the ground before I did that. No injuries this way. And that's how I wanna keep it. Just listen to me, and we keep everything clean and bloodless. Really, there shouldn't be any problems at all. Here, I'll let it up now.The man waved his hand, and suddenly the force was gone, as though it had never been there in the first place. Artil could move freely again. He could get to his feet and attack those people, if he really wanted.But a part of him reluctantly recognized that the man was right in what he'd said. If Artil had bad footing when the ability had gone off, he could've easily tripped and fallen, hit his head on a table...He'd technically been done a favor by being told to get on the floor first. Of course, the man himself had been the one to use the ability in the first place, but Artil certainly didn't want to give him a reason to do it again in an unsafe scenario.So, yeah, anyway, the man continued casually, this is a robbery, I guess.
