Peace, I was discovering, was a lot like a still pond. The slightest pebble, no matter how carefully thrown, would create ripples. And I, in my quest for absolute stillness, had just hurled a boulder the size of a small nobleman's ego into the center of my pond. The Viscount's downfall was the splash. Now, I had to wait and see how far the ripples would travel, and what they would wash up on my shore.
The initial wave was one of pure, unadulterated schadenfreude. Maplewood celebrated the fall of Viscount Scribehold with the kind of festive vigor usually reserved for the harvest festival. The taverns were full, toasts were made to Baroness Sharpe (who was suddenly everyone's favorite noble), and the story of the clown-nosed portrait grew more elaborate with each retelling. The "Ghost of the Treasury" was a folk hero.
For three days, I basked in the afterglow of a perfectly executed plan. I tended my hidden garden, I read, I napped. I even managed to mostly ignore the relentless thwack-thwack-thwack of Leon practicing his sword forms against a stubborn oak tree. The sound was no longer a nuisance; it was the white noise of a contained problem. My world had righted itself.
But on the fourth day, the second ripple arrived. And it came in the form of a pair of perceptive, emerald-green eyes.
I was at the Adventurer's Guild, engaged in the sacred ritual of selecting the most boring quest available. Today's masterpiece was titled "Inventory Reconciliation." It involved counting sacks of grain in the town granary against a master list. It was a two-day quest that paid in pocket lint and existential dread. It was perfect.
I was just about to pluck the quest slip from the board when I felt a presence at my shoulder.
"Thinking of taking the granary quest, Bob?"
I turned. Lily stood there, a ledger tucked under her arm and a casually inquisitive smile on her face. It was the same smile she used to calm down angry beastkin or gently steer new adventurers away from suicide-by-goblin. But today, there was a new depth to it. A spark of analytical curiosity.
"It's… steady work," I said, employing my full arsenal of blandness.
"It is," she agreed, her eyes scanning my face. "You seem to have a knack for finding steady, unassuming work. It's a rare quality in adventurers. Most of them are all flash and no substance." She paused, tilting her head slightly. "Like that courier quest to Oakhaven. You completed that remarkably quickly. Got a lucky ride with a merchant, didn't you?"
The question was delivered lightly, but it hung in the air between us, a perfectly baited hook.
"That's right," I said, my internal alarms blaring at a frequency only I could hear. "Very lucky."
"Mmm," she hummed, a non-committal sound that somehow conveyed volumes. "And then there was that business with the Whispering Caverns. Quite the coincidence, you finishing your mining quest just before that strange collapse. And those three adventurers who were inside… they told a wild story about being miraculously teleported to safety. No one can make sense of it."
I kept my expression a masterpiece of mild interest. "That is strange. I just mined my ore and left. Didn't see anything."
"Of course not," she said, her smile not wavering. "You're very focused when you work, I've noticed. It's one of your most admirable qualities." She shifted the ledger in her arms. "Well, I won't keep you from your grain counting. Good luck, Bob."
She gave me one last, lingering look—a look that said 'I see your carefully constructed facade, and I am fascinated by the architecture'—before turning and walking back to her counter.
I stood frozen for a moment, the granary quest slip forgotten in my hand. That hadn't been a casual conversation. That had been an audit. She was cross-referencing events. Bob completes a distant courier quest impossibly fast. Bob is in a dungeon just before it has a mysterious, non-fatal collapse. Bob is present when the Viscount's thugs are humiliated at the bakery. The Viscount, who threatened said bakery, then suffers a cosmically convenient and humiliating downfall.
To anyone else, it was a series of unrelated events. To a sharp, intelligent person with a [Keen Eye] and a head for patterns, it was a constellation. And she was starting to connect the dots.
This was a problem. Lily wasn't an enemy. She wasn't greedy or corrupt. She was… good. And good, curious people were far more dangerous than simple villains. Villains you could defeat. Curiosity you could only hope to evade.
I took the granary quest—I had to maintain the pattern—and left the guild, my mind racing. I needed to throw her off the scent. But how do you mislead someone who isn't even sure what they're hunting? I couldn't act suspiciously. I couldn't suddenly become incompetent; that would be just as telling. I had to be Bob. Just Bob. Only more so.
For the next two days, I became the living embodiment of the granary quest. I showed up exactly on time. I took meticulous, painstakingly slow notes. I asked the granary master inane, overly detailed questions about the different types of wheat and their respective moisture content. I was so boring I made watching paint dry look like a extreme sport. I was a human sedative.
On the afternoon of the second day, as I was turning in my completed (and perfectly accurate) inventory report to Lily, I decided to deploy a new tactic: strategic oversharing of mundane details.
"All done," I said, placing the report on her counter. "It was very… granular work. Did you know that the northern stockpile has a 0.5% higher incidence of weevils than the southern one? Probably due to the slight difference in humidity. Fascinating."
Lily blinked, her professional smile faltering for a fraction of a second. "I… can't say that I did."
"Well, it's all in the report," I said with an enthusiastic nod. "I included a footnote. Page four. You should really look into better silica gel packets for your long-term storage. The ones you're using are clearly subpar."
I saw the flicker of doubt in her eyes. The Bob she was theorizing about was a shadowy, powerful figure who moved like the wind and toppled nobles. The Bob in front of her was passionately lecturing her about desiccant quality. The cognitive dissonance was my ally.
"I'll… be sure to pass that along to the quartermaster," she said slowly, stamping my quest slip a little harder than necessary.
As I collected my meager reward, I saw her staring at my report, a faint crease between her brows. I had successfully introduced a confounding variable into her data set: the possibility that I was just an incredibly, mind-numbingly detail-oriented weirdo.
But I knew it wouldn't be enough. A mind like Lily's wouldn't discard a pattern because of one anomaly. It would just dig deeper.
My suspicion was confirmed later that evening. I was on my way back from The Crusty Loaf (the sourdough tasted sweeter than ever now) when I saw her. She wasn't at the guild. She was in the market square, talking to Old Man Hemlock, the fisherman whose net I'd "mended." She was showing him a small sketch—probably of me—and asking him questions. Hemlock, who was about as observant as a sunbaked rock, just shrugged and shook his head.
She was conducting field research.
I melted into the shadows, my [Absolute Stealth] activating on instinct. I watched as she moved through the market, a quiet, persistent investigator. She spoke to the fruit seller whose apple I'd replaced. She chatted with the guards who'd been on duty at the dungeon. She was gathering testimonies, building a profile.
She wasn't doing it with malice. Her expression was one of pure, intellectual fascination. She was like a mathematician who had found an elegant, unsolvable equation. I was her Fermat's Last Theorem.
This changed everything. I couldn't just be passive. I had to actively manage her perception. I needed to become a paradox she couldn't resolve. A background character so firmly planted in the background that the idea of him being a prime mover was laughable.
My next move came to me a day later, courtesy of Leon. The relentless thwack-thwack-thwack had been replaced by the sound of splintering wood and a frustrated cry. A quick appraisal told me he'd finally succeeded in hacking his training post in two, and in the process, had sent a large, jagged splinter deep into his own thigh.
He was lying on the ground, pale and bleeding, trying and failing to stem the flow with a dirty rag.
It was a pathetic sight. It was also an opportunity.
I didn't help him. That would be a deviation from my established character. But I could use his misfortune. I waited until I saw a couple of other people notice his predicament and run to his aid. Then, I made my move.
I walked out of my cottage, making sure to look startled and concerned. I approached the small crowd gathering around the groaning Hero.
"What happened?" I asked, my voice laden with appropriate concern.
"He hurt himself," a woman said, stating the obvious. "Someone get a healer!"
"I'll go!" I volunteered, injecting a note of panicked urgency into my voice. "I'm… I'm very fast when I'm scared!"
And with that, I turned and ran. Not with the effortless, ground-devouring speed of [Physical Apex], but with the clumsy, flailing-limbed sprint of a genuinely terrified civilian. I kicked up dust, I almost tripped over my own feet twice, and I made sure my breathing was loud and ragged. I was the picture of a man pushed far beyond his physical capabilities by an emergency.
I "ran" all the way to the temple of the local healing order, burst through the doors in a dramatic fluster, and stammered out a barely coherent request for help, panting and wheezing like I was about to have a coronary.
The priestess, a calm woman with kind eyes, gathered her things and followed me at a brisk walk. I "struggled" to keep up with her on the way back, still gasping for air.
By the time we returned, Leon was being patched up by a local herbalist who had arrived sooner. My "heroic" sprint had been entirely unnecessary. But it had been witnessed.
I stood at the edge of the crowd, hands on my knees, pretending to recover my breath. I saw Lily there, having been drawn by the commotion. Her eyes were on me, taking in my disheveled state, my heaving chest, my look of helpless concern.
The equation in her head just got a lot more complicated. The mysterious force that toppled nobles and teleported adventurers to safety wouldn't have a panic attack and run for a healer for a simple splinter wound. That force would have simply… fixed it. The man she was looking at was just a scared, out-of-shape young man who'd tried to do the right thing in the only way he knew how.
I had given her a new data point: Bob, the well-meaning but physically unremarkable coward.
Later that day, as I was "resting" from my exhausting run on the porch of my cottage, Lily appeared on the path. She walked up to me, her expression unreadable.
"That was a brave thing you did, Bob. Running for help like that."
I waved a dismissive, still-trembling hand. "It was nothing. Just… panicked. I'm not much good in a crisis."
She was silent for a moment, looking from me, to my dilapidated cottage, to the distant stable where Leon was now resting. The skeptic in her was warring with the evidence of her own eyes.
"You know," she said softly, "strange things seem to happen around you, Bob."
I met her gaze, letting a flicker of confusion and a touch of fear show in my eyes. "They do? Like what?"
She studied my face, searching for a crack in the mask. I gave her nothing but genuine-looking bewilderment.
Finally, she smiled, a real, warm smile this time, though the curiosity in her eyes wasn't completely gone. "Never mind. I suppose it's just a coincidence. Get some rest, Bob. You look like you need it."
She turned and walked away, leaving me sitting on my porch.
I had done it. I had successfully muddied the waters. I had presented her with two conflicting versions of Bob: the inexplicably lucky enigma and the utterly mundane, slightly pathetic herb gatherer. For now, the mundane was winning.
But as I watched her go, I knew this wasn't over. I had stopped the ripple from reaching me for now, but I hadn't calmed the pond. Lily's curiosity was a slow-burning fuse. And I had a feeling that in this world of prophecies and demon lords, it was only a matter of time before something forced my hand and showed her exactly what kind of power was hiding behind the face of a background character.
The first ripple had been contained. But the storm was still coming.