The Weight of Legacy

As the panel manifested, her little sister beamed. Her expression swiftly shifted, as she turned to check their surroundings, as if anyone other than the two of them were going to look at it. "Now what?"

"…I honestly don't know," Malwine admitted. She reached forward, imagining the projected panel as something she could physically touch. Strangely enough, it had more substance to it than her personal panels did—closer to the versatility of those she made with [Blank Panel] than to actual system messages.

Is it because they can both be made visible? Malwine scowled. Or was Veit's dad thinking of this when he made it?

She didn't know whether the journal or the projector had been made first, and neither did Veit—she'd already asked.

The answer to just how she could edit other people's panels had to be connected to this, somehow. Manifesting them into reality was clearly possible.

Closing her eyes, she tried to reach into the projector's power, to make sense of how it worked. It was a foreign thing, its insides organized in a way that had almost nothing in common to how Skills were set up.

Exactly what I needed—another reminder that I still barely have any idea what I'm doing. Malwine allowed herself a moment to wordlessly mumble before refocusing on the task at hand.

The sooner she could figure out how to edit other people's panels, the sooner she could flip things around with Veit. Right now, she sort of owed him—she wasn't yet in a position to ask for favors… let alone favors involving those tens of millions of [Toll] he apparently had.

And, oh, how she wanted to ask for things involving that.

Though she couldn't make sense of the core of what made the projector worked—beyond it obviously being starkly different from Skills—she could see what felt like flows of energy. Out one way came a prompt of sorts. Establishing a connection with it, even before commanding it to display Affinities, made the projector reach out.

From there, [System Eye] told her the projector would wait for input on just which details it would be allowed to access, perhaps indefinitely. Certainly, she couldn't detect any conditions for a time limit in that wait—or anything that implied this thing had limited power at all.

That was slightly concerning.

Once the command was given shape, the projector's prompt would proceed, reaching for the information it was allowed access to. Those details would then be taken and displayed on the panel the projector created.

By all accounts, that panel belonged to the projector, much like Malwine's [Blank Panel] created panels that were distinctly hers regardless of how she used them.

Now, now. How was she to implement something like this? With [Stylus in Style], she'd be able to alter any tangible panel she could access, so the biggest hurdle before her was the matter of actually getting to that point.

Somehow making others momentarily capable of creating panels like this felt plausible, yet Malwine could tell that probably wouldn't be what she needed. The panels she could display to others weren't the same panels her system information was on. She had to manually copy anything she wanted to show.

That was the problem, wasn't it? She couldn't think of just how to make a panel visible—a real panel. Not even those that were her own. The journal was also of no help there, with Veit's father having been unable to uncover specifics for it. The man had theorized there must have been a Skill or Trait he'd simply failed to learn of, meaning the missing link could be something surprisingly simple.

Still, all she had was speculation, and she did not like that one bit.

"When The Harvest comes, can you sneak me out to grab some extra harvestables?"

Veit raised an eyebrow at that. "Does your teacher not take the three of you out for that anymore?"

"She does, but I can only grab a handful without things getting weird," Malwine sighed. She could have also asked Adelheid, but she mostly wanted an excuse to try and figure out what his thoughts on best practices for harvestables were. That was a topic they'd barely touched on throughout their conversations.

"…Fine, then. It's not as though it would get in the way of my duties," the forester conceded, though he did continue giving her an odd look. "What do you need more harvestables for?"

And just like that, he'd fallen for the bait—at last!

"I need to get some Traits with positive bonuses, of course. And stuff," Malwine shook her head. "It'd be easier if there were any rhyme or reasons to how harvestables work. I once got like ten [Toll] restoratives in a row."

"My mother was of the mind that revealing too many at once would lead to low quality reveals, though I cannot stress enough just how uncommon it is for people to have this easy a time stockpiling them," Veit noted anecdotally. This might have been the first time he'd quoted his mother instead of his father.

While undeniably curious, she hadn't built up the courage to touch that subject. The forester clearly had something against both his parents, but she didn't get the impression that he outright hated either of them.

"How much did she consider to be too many?"

"Hm," Veit looked off to the side. "That a tenth of your Luck, in just as many days, should be the maximum. It's theoretical, but as valid as anything else."

So… five every fifty-two days? Ugh. That would have almost doubled the wait period for her. On the off-chance Veit's late mother might have been right, though… Malwine would consider it.

The verdict was still out on whether the woman who cheated on Veit's dad with a literal demon had been a reliable source of information, though.

Speaking of matters of importance, Malwine took the time to update the panel that basically contained her life plans at this point.

People were not a monolith—or at least, Malwine refused they could be. While she didn't doubt Veit believed what he'd told her, to her it sounded like he was saying a world view could be universal for a whole Kind. She certainly wouldn't have believed that for humanity, and she refused to believe that even for the fell.

So what if they were overzealous over their Affinities? If they were living and thinking people, there had to be variations in how they thought. As far as she could tell, one wouldn't even need to be of the same Court as Flōsblome to defeat her Curse—they'd just have to be stronger than them when it came to {Psyche}.

Maybe getting one who had no stake on the {Foresight} debacle would be enough, unless they'd consider the curse valid on principle. Knowing for sure would require additional understanding on how their culture worked, and even Veit's commentary on them was undeniably narrow. The fell didn't seem to be a well-understood group at all.

That left one option Malwine felt must have been at least minimally plausible—bribes. Of any Kind, there had to be at least one person who'd do anything for their own benefit, and she wasn't about to rule that possibility out due to some misguided inkling of morality on the matter.

Was that likely to work out? She honestly didn't know, and odds were, she might never find herself in a situation where she could safely put that to the test. It wasn't something she'd try lightly.

Considering how the alternatives amounted to expecting to randomly get enough appropriate Traits to stack positive bonuses, or actually trying to reason with one of them, Malwine would stand by the idea—at least hypothetically.