She didn’t feel well. She was curled up as a small bundle of confused emotions on her bed. It was a nice bed, nice soft, the feathers in there and such, she closed her eyes slowly but she had no intention to sleep. Something was wrong with her and there were obviously too many answer to the possibility of what was going on and what was happening. She doubt she would find an answer as she didn’t want to think about anything at all. She wondered why she was alone at this time but there were again enough reasons for that and they didn’t all make her very happy. She bit the inside of her cheek to not cry again about Ophelia, god she hated crying so much. There was nothing more than showing weakness and she had worked two whole years maybe even more to never cry again. She didn’t cry when she figured out answers, she had always had a tough mask, she had an armour, she would always wear armour if it would protect her from crying when she didn’t want to but it didn’t feel like a solution but it sure as hell would be now. She bit a little harder on her cheek because the emptiness that seemed to be a part of her since the loss of Ophelia had made her weak, angry and mostly alone. There were lots of moments that she tried to forget and it would work if she didn’t have much other things to worry about and she wondered if that is why she was still close to tears. She didn’t cry for Lacie, she didn’t cry for many things but what finally broke her was the inability to be there for the one she loved, sure it was his own decision but it was hard for her to accept in two ways. One that it was just that he didn’t trust her with the information but he had explained and two she couldn’t forgive herself for letting someone get so close to her that she would break her mask in front of others to cry. Every fibre of her believed that she would be able to make the right choices still but she also wondered if this was true as she had made the easiest decisions too, it was when she was younger but also not too long ago. Had she only left Oak at the end of the winter and had she ran towards Marigold, the option the furthest away to get to a point of no return, yet she knew the itchy feeling when she wanted to have something and stealing was too easy, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t.

The fact that she still ran away from battle was what made it even more horrible perhaps, she wouldn’t be able to focus and she would lose, every damn time and thus she pulled up her knees a little higher and rolled even tighter up like a little ball.

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Shouldn’t she talk to someone, instead of cryptic to people about advices such as asking Evangeline, saying it wasn’t about her to Konstantin while it was also a part of her feeling bad about many more things than just hurrying off to Orchidia for him. She was running away again, as she had done so many times and yet she had thought that becoming a knight would make her stronger, would make her fight for justice and not do things that she couldn’t stand. Here she was making decisions not out of justice but out of her heart’s most desire and she was afraid that she would make a mistake in that and it would haunt her down because let’s be honest it wasn’t always the smartest decision. She liked to call her own justice but she was still a knight and she had a responsibility coming with that and with that she would have to figure out answers instead of being so weak. She was afraid that Tori would still tell and that the world would figure out that she was covering it up all the time. She grumbled to herself and the hollow feeling came out of her stomach, she placed one of her hands on it before relaxing her knees a bit and dropping her legs. It wouldn’t really work too much to sob and cry and drown in her own tears, which was another reason why she hated crying so much.

But there was also a huge amount of anger for the same matters, most of it was channelled to wards Lacie and she was sure that if she would bump into her sister at some point that it wouldn’t be a nice cat fight, it would actually make her itch with a need to strangle Lacie and she knew that was bad as well but the consequences that Alice had thanks to her twin sister were enough to not being able to forgive her. Problem was that she needed Lacie for answers because of her memory. There was only a small portion because as she understood she was quote unquote killed when she was eight but that meant most of her childhood. The orphanage had told her a little but it wasn’t a really interesting teenage years but she wanted to understand her heritage more than anything and she needed to know if her father was alive. She grumbled towards herself for being so dramatic about Lacie, she would not kill her perhaps, she would have to throw her in jail and have a sentence put on her, she was probably free spoken because Lacie was eight when she joined the ritual her mother created and she wouldn’t understand the consequences of her sick joke. With another sigh she realized that if she wanted to do something instead of being a crumbled up bundle of sadness that she would have to get out of bed. She stretched her legs a little more and stood up.

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She was wearing shorts and a white top with lace at the end that ended below her ribcage on the front and longer on the back till above her hips. She walked past a mirror and did a few steps back, for a second she thought she looked different but when she looked in the mirror again there was nothing to see, she turned this way and that but there was nothing and she shrugged to continue to the bathroom. She had thought too much about too much things, she saw ghost.

She checked her face up closer in the bathroom mirror and still didn’t see much different apart from looking tired. She went to sit on the stool that was there to untie her long orange hair that was in a messy ponytail and grabbed her brush from the surface of the sink and started to brush her hair slowly from the tips of her hair to short pieces up to avoid pulling her hair and head down because of knots she couldn’t get out. She loved her hair, it was a bright orange colour and sometimes that was a problem as she didn’t wanted to be spotted but it was very bright and she would have to just deal with. She looked at herself in the mirror all the time and she still had the feeling it was still different than her normal reflection but she didn’t always have the time to simply check herself out for so many hours, she might be arrogant but she wasn’t that vain. Another brush through her hair and so on, she at least had already had breakfast, she had ordered room service, there was no shortage on jewels in her pocket so she wouldn’t mind it and she simply hadn’t felt the need to go downstairs. She wanted to now, she wanted to work on something so she could be distracted by her own sad memories and sad thoughts which didn’t make anything better. It was distracting to work on her hair, she simply thought about moving her hand up and down and hold the top of her head with her other hand to not pull to hard on her hair and that’s how she went on, like some sort of trance, a zombie like that she had avoided for so long. When she finally was done, she let her arms drop and place the hairbrush back on the sink surface as she stood up slowly to get dressed into something else.

She wasn’t sure what to wear as she planned on wearing her armour, she would find a pair of jeans, black coloured, in the wardrobe and put them on after throwing the shorts off and in the laundry basket. She took a simple t-shirt in a green colour and closed the wardrobe again. She would have to go out on the streets and interact with people, which she didn’t feel like doing, but what other choice did she have.

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She would check for her backpack, which she didn’t take with her for today, which was a risk she was actually not ready to take but it wouldn’t work with the armour. She simply walked out of the door, pocketed her keys in the dimensional pocket after she locked the door and hurried down the stairs. She said a short hello to the people in the hallway that were staff from the inn as she stepped out of the front door of the building she changed into her scarle armour. Some people stared at her but as she was not in the mood, her golden brown eyes stared angry in front of her and people left her alone and stepped aside as she made her way to the office here in Orchidia. She needed to do something and as she had not seen her team and it might not be smart to yell at them at this point, she had to do something else. Paper work would be too boring as well as a patrol so as soon as she heard there was nothing, she went to check the quest board in town.

It was lovely that her foul mood could be felt by the people, it had probably to do that people stepped aside from her, her aura maybe lashing out, her cat ears flat on her head that made people aware that they shouldn’t approach her, besides the armour might be impressive as well, including the diadem that gave her some sort of demon horns. Maybe today she would again be described as one but for today she didn’t care. She just needed to do something to not turn in one. She stood there alone, most people stepped away as she showed up and she wondered if she really felt so for such an influence for people with the amount of magical powers she possessed, which wasn’t so much compared to some others. Before she could grab a quest from the board someone came up to her with a letter and a very much shaking hand. She grabbed it without saying anything and noticed it was a quest to her personally written by Dex Miller, for god sake she couldn’t stand that guy as she had done two jobs for him at the same day. She couldn’t stand that guy especially at times like today but fine there was a nice reward hanging on it and she was sure to punch him if he didn’t give her that.

There was an address in the letter so she decided to go there to see more of the story that he was telling. He had only said he had a great plan to make people believe him and his private investigator story. She did not even believe that but she would do everything for the jewels and a job to kill this mood. So she went there with only that in mind, when she arrived, he immediately started to tell her in hushed whispers that he knew exactly what to do by creating a fake crime scene.

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She only took a deep breath to refrain herself from rolling her eyes as she simply accepted. He asked her to get a bag of blood from the butcher, he couldn’t be seen picking it up as it wouldn’t be sold to him as well as that the butcher would immediately know it was fake. She gave a wry smile and nodded because if she would talk, she would offend him too easily. So she turned around, out of the alley and headed to the butcher. She still was trying to find an excuse as why she was retrieving one but maybe there were no questions asked and maybe it would all be a lot easier than she expected, which would have been nice, she doubted it but there were always options. She opened the door to the butcher and waited in line, there were only two people before her and no one seemed to enter after her, what a luck. When it was her turn she would have waited for the others to be gone before she asked for a large bag of animal blood. He frowned at her and she simply shrugged as she closed her eyes shortly and stared at him with a gaze that didn’t want to be asked any questions. So he gave her the bag, and didn’t needed any jewels for it. Of course not, there was no use for the blood anyway and perhaps he thought the Rune Knights would do something with it. She gave him a short smile before turning around with the bag disappearing in her dimensional pocket, hoping it wouldn’t make anything dirty in there because she didn’t feel like summoning weapons already dirtied by that disgusting amount of blood. She walked back to Dex Miller, whom seemed to be too happy about all this and her help, which was a disaster if you asked her. She placed the bag of blood on the ground softly, making sure it wouldn’t stand on something sharp and break the plastic around it.

Her next task was to go out of the alley again and steal several weapons. She hated this more than anything but her foul mood and her thinking had no refrains on doing this at the moment, she would bring them back when it was necessary. She would go to the forge, talk to the smith about being interested in new weapons and let a few disappear in her pocket, this was easier than when she was younger and just a pickpocket but thank god it didn’t give her the satisfying feeling anymore as it had done when she was still in Phantom Lord. She walked back towards the meeting point but before she arrived there, some other knight stopped her, , ”What do you think you are doing?” she glared at him and she hated how she had to look up because he was taller, ”I plan to bring them back if that’s what you are wondering about. It’s for Miller, he has a plan and he needs this. I thought it was better that I did it so the smith gets them back than let him handle it all by himself and nothing goes back where it belongs, what do you think?” she summoned the weapons and showed them, the smith wouldn’t miss them yet for a day or two, too busy finishing off other business, she was sure of that.

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”That’s a point but it’s still not explaining why.” so she did. And he shook his head as she had agreed with it but she was surprised that he agreed as well and that he made her tell that the Magic Council was investigating it as well before Miller would use more of those fake crimes and she was glad for a second that she had bumped into this man. She had not thought about that in this state of mind that she was now in.

The knight would come along to see if everything was going alright. Apparently someone that could stand her grumpy mood and simply shut his cake hole instead of talking to her about this whole case the whole time. When she finally arrived back at the place, she threw the weapons around and dropped blood around it from the bag that she had hidden. She was done with that and hid the bag in her dimensional pocket again and summoned her spear to hit one of the bins and so on to get a noise where people would want to come to. She simply disappeared into the crowd, no longer wearing her armour even though it made her feel naked and vulnerable, but she was sure people would recognize her on that more lately than her hair at this point. She made her way through the crowd, she wasn’t going far because she would get the weapons back, she heard her colleague scream that it was under Magic Council investigations and no one should interfere. She simply passed Dex Miller to grab the jewels he handed her and she would be out for now. He would pass her as he would go to the front of the crowd, she would watch from afar how this would go, maybe the other knight would return the weapons and she could enjoy her moment of freedom again. Maybe a walk would be nice instead of sulking and being grumpy because of people and she decided to see how the anklebiters were doing, if they were gone she would be relieved and had a walk into a forest all by herself, if they were there she had something to fight at this point and she wouldn’t mind that at all at this moment.

From one step onto the other she changed back into the black and red armour with the demon horns that hid her cat like ears from front view and she stepped into the city part that was desolated from humans to find the goblin things and to get rid of her frustration. She knew she should do something better, something for the greater good or so but she didn’t want to. Not today, she had felt horrible, her body wasn’t reacting perfectly and so on, there was no explanation that she could find but she was sure as hell very grumpy about it. If only she would feel alright physically, she was sure as hell going to feel fine mentally, she was sure of that.

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