Editing The Tragedy of Thing-tan (section)

== Part 2 ==

One of the things Annabelle taught me is how to hide in plain sight. Before she joined Pelor’s clergy, she had lived the city’s slums, working the streets every night under the auspices of a cruel Dwarven slavemaster named Orik. Orik had a love of drink that went beyond even a Dwarf’s pathological affection, and a mean temper that liquor stoked to murderous. Annabelle saw many of her sisters lose an ear, nose, or worse to Orik’s temper – often over the most basic of slights, and sometimes over nothing at all. She couldn’t run, so she learned to make herself small. To be right in front of Orik, but to be overlooked in favor of a less fortunate target. When I found her, she had managed to escape the Dwarf, who was still looking for her, by joining the clergy. Her faith was insincere at first, but it grew honest with time. As the saying goes, she faked it until she made it.

She was – is – like me in that sense. When I embraced her flesh into mine, became her, I assumed her duties at the church. She worked as a nursemaid, and each time a sick patient gave praise to Pelor in thanks for her – for my – ministrations, I felt her emotions swell with a confused sort of joy. Part of it was the simple pleasure at doing her duty, at spreading the faith – the other part is a strange sort of guilt at this pleasure. She – I – still remember a time when the psalms I – she – read were insincere and so it feels wrong to have acquired a genuine joy at reading them now. Can a fake emotion really become real? Can a fake person? 

For these past months in hiding, I struggled with that question; just as Annabelle’s faith was a fake thing turned real, so was my affection for the women I consumed – became. At first they were my victims – meat to sate my hunger, and I feigned empathy for them to better pass among them. And yet, over time…

The old me wouldn’t have cared about preserving Annabelle’s life after I consumed her. The old me certainly wouldn’t have tracked down Orik to sate Annabelle’s guilt at leaving so many of her friends behind when she fled his “service.” Instead, the new me used Annabelle’s skills to follow Orik back to his new base of operations one day after passing him in a marketplace. I didn’t even need to hide – I made myself small and he didn’t care to notice me. 

After I devoured his biomass, I spat out his memories and essence like a bad applecore. I could use his flesh to keep Annabelle intact, but I didn’t want his evil thoughts fouling up my memories. The old me wouldn’t have cared. Nor would the old me have gone from there and freed those dirty frightened girls from his warehouse. And when the one-eared Elf girl, my – Annabelle’s - best friend, Celty embraced me gratefully, the old me would have simply devoured her and everyone else in the warehouse.

But I must have faked it long enough. I must have “made it” because when Celty hugged me tight and asked why I came back, I simply smiled with Annabelle’s lips and, with real warmth in my voice, replied “Just keeping the faith, sister.”