Actually what he’s going to do is run off, because if there’s some kind of time loop situation going on then Lady Areelu should probably know about it—

Okay yeah being that frank with the demon was a bad plan even if it’s not going to have specific consequences. Load save.

“Info.” She can read up on her system some more while she waits.

AARGH RAAR DEMON ATTACK.

And this time when Suture shows up, she repeats her spiel about his continuing to teach her to read a scroll, and appends it with, “yes, this is what I’m choosing to do right now; no I’m not going to explain why.”

“…Uh. I’m not sure I—”

“Does the answer change if I say I know your name’s Suture.”

“Okay, sure, why not.”

(Suture is less sure, this iteration, that this is Lady Areelu’s kid; instead he’s wondering if Lady Areelu herself actually swapped in for her or is Dominating her or something, and is testing him. He’s…not sure what the test is, if that’s the case, but whatever.)

Okay! Cool! And when Suture has to fuck off, Lucy will…find somewhere safe-ish to wait out “someone shoots at Deskari and Deskari breaks the ground about it” and then decides to practice casting from a scroll on the scroll she already has instead of crawling around risking getting stepped on first.

This time, instead of exploding in her face, she finds herself covered with a sort of yellow-green glow that seems to be dripping upwards off of her.

That’s…better? Probably? Even if it doesn’t actually indicate progress it at least leaves her able to complete her originally intended trajectory of looting her own side’s dead until she has the other scroll and then trying it.

She will do that.

…This time, she can sort of feel the magic trying to go haywire, and sort of reign it in before it does anything.

And that…leaves her with an unexpended scroll. So she can try again.

This time she doesn’t quite manage to keep the haywire magic from going off, and she starts shrinking. Which she’s pretty sure isn’t how Shrink Item works, but drippy glowiness isn’t how False Life works, so.

…Going forward, she has three options. One, she can keep practicing with scrolls until she can reliably use one. Two, she can try to loot enough stuff off of corpses to buy the oil after all. Or three, she can think of something else.

…Lucy has a TERRIBLE idea.

It’s an idea that falls under 2 and not 3, to be clear, but still terrible.

She might as well try it, though, since she’s going to make all of this not have happened anyway.

Yep, she can sell the corpses.

She’s going to hell for this Probably she shouldn’t even joke about that until she knows more about the afterlife situation.

She manages to get most of the difference in price between the scroll and the oil before a stray crossbow bolt takes her out.

Okay.

Theoretically, she could keep this one.

Not for sure and certain—Deskari could get lucky and murder Terendelev early, Lucy could get unlucky and catch a stray crossbow bolt or fall into a ravine.

But she has a workable plan, and she wants to keep an iteration of events based on her choosing, not based on when she runs out of time to make new saves in.

So. Consequences are officially back on. Not irrevocably so, if something she says that sounds innocent to her turns out to be an insult to someone’s dead mother she still has enough time to start over about that, but it is officially time to stop saying ominous bullshit just because she has no reason not to.

Terendelev lasts five rounds this time.

The record is still six rounds, so good enough! Crawl around, inventory corpses and all the stuff on them, sell stuff including the corpses that’s honestly pretty disturbing—

“Blimey!”

Tap. “Inventory.” Tap. “Inventory—” wait, what?

The scroll of False Life inventories just fine, but Suture’s shirt doesn’t. Why…?

“What?” he can guess that her saying “inventory” is connected to the scroll disappearing, but that still leaves Many questions.

“Hey, do you have any idea why your shirt would be unusually hard to steal?”

Well, that would be because his “shirt” is as illusory as everything else about his disguise as a halfling. “No idea,” he lies. “What’d you do to my scroll?”

Sorry, I’m not supposed to talk to strange demons.

Unfortunately she has to consider the consequences of her actions now and she still doesn’t have enough local context to be confident that saying that out loud wouldn’t have any.

“Sorry, I needed it. If we both survive I can try to replace it.” She almost certainly won’t, but she would if he weren’t a demon, so it’s a good idea to say so.

“I…okay. Good luck.”