Chapter 20: Ratings Sweep
Three things went wrong simultaneously.
I was in the kitchen, making coffee with the particular exhaustion of someone who'd spent the night thinking about a woman who'd teleported away, when the system decided my life had become too stable.
[EPISODE 8 RATING: 5.0/10]
[Feedback: Insufficient conflict. Narrative momentum stalling. Deploying corrective intervention.]
[NARRATIVE ACCELERATION ACTIVE]
"Arthur!" Nandor's voice boomed from the second floor. "Arthur, come here immediately!"
"Arthur!" Nadja's voice cut in from the parlor. "What is the meaning of this?"
"Arthur!" Guillermo appeared in the kitchen doorway, holding something. "We need to talk."
Three fires. No extinguisher.
[+15 VEP: Multi-Character Crisis]
Guillermo was closest. Guillermo was also holding my fake blood bank ID — the one I'd forged in my first week, the one that should have been destroyed after we used it.
"Where did you find that?"
"Fell out of your clipboard when I was looking for the supply inventory." His eyes were sharp, suspicious, cataloguing. "This isn't a real donation center ID. The font is wrong, the security watermark is missing, and I've been to that blood bank. They don't use laminated badges."
Identity questions lead to dangerous territory.
"Cover from my last job," I said. Half-truth. Marcus Webb had been a petty criminal — forging IDs was probably in his skill set. "Before I came here. The familiar network isn't exactly above-board."
"You had a last job?" Guillermo's suspicion didn't diminish. "You arrived from a Council execution. What job requires fake blood bank credentials?"
"The kind that gets you put on a Council execution list." I met his eyes. "I'm not proud of everything I did before. But I'm here now, and I'm not doing that anymore."
[+8 VEP: Half-Truth Accepted (Barely)]
He studied me for a long moment. Then he pocketed the ID.
"I'm keeping this."
"Fine."
He left. One fire down.
Nadja was in the parlor, holding my nightclub research notes — the ones I'd been compiling secretly for weeks.
"You are trying to steal my idea!" She brandished the papers. "My beautiful vampire nightclub, and you are researching it behind my back!"
"I'm researching it for you," I said. "Look at the headers. 'Nadja's Nightclub Concept.' 'Venue Options for Nadja's Vision.' 'Investor Profiles for Nadja.'"
She looked at the papers more closely. Her expression shifted from fury to confusion to something almost like pleasure.
"You wrote 'Nadja's Vision' in the title?"
"It's your vision. I'm just helping organize it."
"This is..." She flipped through the pages. "This is actually quite thorough. You have researched the old Council building. You have identified potential investors. You have—" Her eyes widened. "You have created a projected revenue model?"
"Ballpark estimate. The margins on blood-cocktails are surprisingly good."
[+12 VEP: Crisis Converted to Opportunity]
Nadja sat down on the settee, reading through my notes with growing excitement. "This is real planning. Professional planning. Not just Laszlo saying 'we should have a nightclub' and then getting distracted by his films."
"If you want, I could—"
"You are promoted." She waved a hand. "From now on, you are my official familiar consultant for the nightclub project. Guillermo can handle the boring household things. You handle this."
Two fires down.
Nandor was not down.
I found him in his chamber, surrounded by capes, the Djinn's lamp clutched in his hands like a talisman. His expression was hurt in a way that made him look younger than his eight hundred years.
"Marwa told me," he said. "You were there for every wish. You asked questions. You... influenced things."
This is the one I can't fix quickly.
"I asked one question," I said. "Before the Marwa resurrection. I asked if you wanted her as she was or as you wished she was."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't want you to regret it. Because wish-granters are tricky. Because—" I stopped. Took a breath. "Because you deserved a real person, not a puppet. Even if that was harder."
Nandor's grip on the lamp tightened.
"You manipulated me."
"I asked a question. You made the choice."
"But you knew. You knew what the question would do."
I couldn't deny it. I couldn't explain it without revealing everything. So I stood there, silent, while Nandor's hurt curdled into something colder.
"Leave," he said. "I need to think."
[+6 VEP: Unresolved Conflict]
Three fires. Two down. One still burning.
Colin Robinson was sitting at the kitchen table when I stumbled back downstairs.
He was physically a teenager now — gangly, acne-free in the way of supernatural creatures, wearing a sweater vest that looked borrowed from a middle-school teacher. His eyes, though, were ancient.
"Rough night?" he asked.
I collapsed into a chair. "You could say that."
"I watched the whole thing." He ate a spoonful of dry cereal. "The way you handled each confrontation. The calibrated responses. The way your body language shifted depending on who you were talking to."
[-15 VEP: Energy Drain — Colin Proximity]
The drain hit hard — I was already exhausted, and Colin's feeding didn't help.
"You've been doing that since you arrived," he continued. "Performing for cameras that don't exist. Playing to an audience nobody else can see."
My blood went cold.
"I can taste the difference between genuine emotion and manufactured content," Colin said. "You're about sixty-forty in favor of performance. Higher when you're stressed. Lower when you're alone or with The Guide." He tilted his head. "Lower with me right now, actually. Fear tastes authentic."
[+10 VEP: Truth Revealed — Critical Threat]
"What do you want?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.
"Nothing yet." Colin refilled his cereal bowl. "I just wanted you to know that I know. And that I remember everything — including the fact that you started performing from the moment you arrived, like someone who expected to be watched."
He didn't say anything else.
He didn't need to.
I sat there, hands shaking from exhaustion and fear and the certainty that the next conversation with Colin Robinson would determine everything.
Get Early Access to New Chapters
Thank you for reading. For those who want to skip the wait, my Patreon is currently 21 chapters ahead of the public sites.
Schedule: 7 new chapters released every 10 days.
Benefit: Gain a significant lead of 7 to 21 chapters depending on your tier.
Support the project and start reading the next arc now: Patreon.com/IsekaiStories