Before she could summon Lady Nozomi to fetch the Doctor and begin slicing me into alphabet soup, I shot upright with an overly cheerful laugh.
"Wow! I slept so well!" I declared, stretching as if I hadn't just been staging my own fake funeral.
I turned to Master, feigning shock—as though I hadn't known from the very beginning she was there, watching me like a disappointed hawk.
"Master! What a surprise! What are you doing here?" I asked, all wide eyes and faux innocence.
She merely smiled and said, in that calm, clipped tone of hers, "So you were alive."
"Of course, Master! I'm very much alive. How could you assume I was dead?" I chuckled nervously, the corners of my mouth twitching.
Master ignored the question. Her hand reached out and touched my arm with a strange, contemplative gentleness. "Here," she murmured. "I thought I might make you… useful. For once."
My entire soul recoiled.
I quickly batted her hand away, trying to keep my panic from showing.
With a stiff smile glued to my face, I laughed again—tense and shrill. "Oh, Master! You always know how to tell the funniest jokes!"
But she didn't laugh.
She just looked at me with that serene, unreadable expression that said she was absolutely not joking.
I, in turn, pretended not to notice.
For the sake of my continued existence.
Master let out a long, delicate sigh—the kind that made my stomach drop before she even spoke.
"By the way," she said coolly, "what are you doing out here? Instead of in your cell?"
I froze. My gaze darted to the cell behind me.
'Okay, okay. Think. There has to be a reason—an excuse. Something absurd enough to throw her off, yet believable enough to sound like something I'd genuinely say...'
A lightbulb flickered in my head.
I spun back to Master, clapped my hands together, and said with unwavering conviction, "I wasn't escaping. I was, um… conducting a stress test on the security system! Yes! Very thorough. I even tried flopping over dramatically, just in case it triggers hidden traps."
Master blinked once. Slowly.
"…A what?" she asked, voice as flat as a pressed flower between pages of a grim history book.
"A stress test! You see, Master, I was thinking about the structural integrity of the bars! What if an enemy tried to sneak in and let me out? Or—worse—steal the precious tools inside? I had to make sure the defenses were… structurally sound."
She raised one elegant eyebrow. The kind of eyebrow that said, 'You poor, foolish creature.'
"And what did you conclude?" she asked mildly.
"That the bars are of exceptional quality!" I saluted the air. "Would recommend! Five stars!"
She stared at me in silence. Then looked past me, at the perfectly untouched bars behind.
I grinned.
She blinked again.
Then, with terrifying calm, she said, "It takes an incredible amount of creativity to fail this impressively."
I laughed nervously. "Oh, Master! You flatter me!"
"No," she said. "I don't."
I gulped.
Master gave me a long, hard look. The kind of look that didn't need words. It said everything.
'I know everything. Your excuse will never work on me, you baffoon.'
My shoulders drooped under the weight of that silent judgment.
Then, out of nowhere, Master asked, "What should I do if someone who's important to you makes a mistake?"
I blinked.
'Huh?'
My thoughts spun like a poorly maintained ceiling fan—wobbly, loud, and dangerously close to falling apart. 'What did I do this time? I haven't even done anything punishable… yet.'
A reel of past catastrophes began playing in my head like a greatest hits montage of disaster.
One time, Master asked me to clean the garden. A simple task. Gentle. Peaceful.
Then I spotted a moldy statue tucked beneath the hedges. Thinking I was doing the world a favor, I gave it a vigorous scrub with a cloth—and promptly snapped it in half. Turns out, it wasn't just a statue. It was an ancient intruder alarm, custom-made and irreplaceable.
When Master found out, she didn't say much at first. Just narrowed her eyes and muttered coldly, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
I didn't think much of it. Until she nearly broke my bones.
Another time, I was walking down the hallway when a statue caught my eye. It was beautiful, marble-white, and perfectly chiseled. I wondered what it was made of. So I poked it. Gently.
It crumbled like stale bread.
Later, Lady Nozomi found the fragments and quietly informed me that the statue was a national treasure—one Master had spent decades acquiring.
I still maintain no one in their right mind should place a national treasure smack in the middle of a hallway with no protection. That's just asking for disaster.
Then there was the Great Garden Fire Incident. I was watering the plants when the hose suddenly stopped working. No water. Total silence.
Panicked, I searched for a solution and found a bucket of clear liquid casually sitting on a bench. It didn't smell like anything, so I assumed it was water.
I was wrong.
The moment I poured it over Master's beloved meditation garden, the flowers burst into flame—red flame—rising meters into the sky like a pyromancer's final exam.
I was punished.
The worst part? It happened again. Same garden. Same mistake. Different bucket. Different fire.
Let's just say the second punishment was… not pretty. I wasn't allowed to sit down for three days.
Then there was the time Lady Nozomi asked me to carry a bucket of mysterious liquid to the east wing laboratory. Everything went smoothly—until I stepped onto the freshly polished floor and slipped.
The bucket soared through the air like a graceful, doomed bird and exploded on impact.
The east wing frothed, bubbled, and fumed with smoke and unknown chemistry. The last I saw of that hallway, it was melting.
Master made me scrub the entire east wing. With a toothbrush. While reciting all 137 rules of alchemical safety. Backwards.
Oh, and the time I may have broken into Master's treasure trove to "borrow" a relic because I missed wearing earrings. It cursed me with glowing ears for three days. Master found out. Punished me. Twice. Once for the theft. The second time for the fashion crime.
And let's not forget the Popcorn Disaster.
I missed popcorn. Just a little nostalgic craving. The kitchen had no proper tools, but the alchemy lab? That place had fire and fancy instruments. It felt like fate.
Long story short: five priceless alchemical devices were destroyed in my popcorn pursuit. Master made me transcribe the entire Alchemical Encyclopedia of Elements onto rice paper. With a quill. While sitting cross-legged on a cold stone floor.
Then there was the time I was out running errands and got chased by a neighborhood dog. In my desperate flight, I crashed through several buildings. The final count? Four shops, one tea house, and a shrine roof.
All of it charged to the House of Aum's expense ledger.
Master didn't even scream. She just pointed to a shovel and a pile of bricks and said, "Rebuild them. By hand."
No tools. No help. No escape.
And of course, one of my personal masterpieces: I rewired the golem guards' patrol routes to make them dance instead of attack intruders. Honestly, it was an improvement! They even bowed after their pirouettes.
Master didn't agree.
She made me stand still in the garden for twelve hours, dressed as a scarecrow. In the rain. With birds pecking my head. And I'm fairly certain some of the birds were trained.
The list goes on.
Endlessly.
Catastrophically.
But no matter what I did, somehow—I was still here.
Mostly alive.
Mostly punished.
Mostly... me.
Still, nothing on that catastrophic list of personal achievements felt new enough to warrant this particular question. And more baffling still…
'Am I even the important one?'
The thought crept into my head like an uninvited guest, kicked off its shoes, and made itself comfortable. It sat there, heavy and awkward. My chest tightened. Something felt… off. Hollow, even.
'Was I truly someone Master would consider important enough to consult? Or—far more likely—was she setting me up for a new kind of punishment? One that weaponized emotional manipulation?'
I stole a glance at her, hoping for a clue, a twitch, something. But she said nothing.
She just stood there, silently watching.
Unmoving. Unblinking. Unreadable.
A tear slipped past my defenses and dripped silently onto the floor.
Master didn't react.
But inside her mind—a quiet storm of exasperated resignation brewed.
'Did making potions and pills finally destroy the last functioning brain cell in her skull?' she thought.
Then she sighed, long-suffering and exhausted.
'But then again… it's not like she ever had one in the first place.'
A flicker of pity crossed her features—not for me, no—but for herself.
And perhaps, in a rare moment of solidarity, for every poor, unfortunate soul destined to ever cross my path.
'…May they rest in peace.'