He's Scrooge

The figure was still dizzyingly far off, but measured against where she had started, she had hauled it up by nearly twenty thousand points.

“This might just be doable.”

“Yeah. Open it.”

The sight of points she had never dreamed of set Dong-hui’s heart hammering. Sixty points had bought her the lace gloves that made her fists strong, so just imagining what a thousand might buy pulled the corners of her mouth up on their own.

Dong-hui nodded quickly.

“What’s with this? Sort options like something off an online shopping site?”

Bewildered as she was, Dong-hui selected ‘Lowest price first’ out of pure habit. She had never once tapped a sort order like most popular or new arrivals or best sellers, so there was nothing to think about.

Habit is a frightening thing.

The goods she had already bought had a line struck through them and were marked as sold.

“Awesome!”

Entry after entry scrolled down the screen, and against them a mere pair of lace gloves for strengthening her fists was nothing at all. Thirty items in all could be bought for a thousand points, and the ones that caught Dong-hui’s eye hardest were the Inventory Expansion Packs and the entries that sold information.

“Let’s see now, first! Push the Inventory up to level 4, and with the points left over… terrain characteristics? Underground resources? Which should I buy?”

After agonizing over it a long while, Dong-hui settled on Terrain Information Level 1. If she gambled on the underground-resource entry and the Grace estate turned out to have nothing in the ground at all, she would simply have thrown the points away.

The Inventory level had gone up to 4, and new entries had appeared under Ability that had never been there before. The estate residents’ favorability had climbed a long way as well, and Traits, stuck at 0 until now, had edged up to 0.01. What 0.01 actually meant she had no idea, but it had gone up, and that was what counted.

“But what on earth is mp?”

The blue status window trembled faintly the moment the question left her mouth, but Dong-hui, sunk in thought, did not notice.

That entry she barely understood, mp, had gone up by 10 since last time. She looked the window over for any information hidden in it, but nothing showed.

Dong-hui was studying the status window with a grave face when the letters filling the blue screen wiped away in a crackle of static and a thick, bold typeface flashed up in their place.

“I don’t think that’s something I can do.”

Dong-hui called up the village as she had seen it, hopeless from end to end, and her face clouded with worry.

From that day on Dong-hui carried convenience-store bread and food cooked in the castle out to the village of Morta, and never missed a day.

The villagers took to craning their necks for the carriage from Grace Castle, and with the life back in them they began putting the village in order themselves.

And so, on the morning of the day that made a full week.

At last she could add the jeweler’s to her activated areas.

“Is there a merchant in Grace who deals in jewels?”

She put the question in the carriage on the way back to the estate, shaking awake Delma, who had been nodding off in the seat across from her.

“You mean to buy jewels?”

Sheer horror came into Delma’s voice all at once. She sounded like a woman asking whether her lady had still not come to her senses, a tone that would have gone perfectly well with a smack to the back of the head. The woman who had stood there a week ago overcome with emotion, choking back tears, was nowhere to be found.

“No. To sell.”
“The necklaces? When you have only the three?”

Delma’s voice and face changed again, to pity this time. Her lady must have seen the estate’s struggling residents for herself, Delma decided, and worked out that she would have to sell even the few jewels she owned. The sad ache of it welled up until the tip of her nose stung.

Her tone kept changing as busily as a chameleon’s colors, and a laugh slipped out of Dong-hui.

“There’s more to sell besides those. Call in someone who can buy a great deal all at once.”
“Have you jewels hidden away somewhere?”

This time her face went suspicious. The narrowed eyes traveling carefully over her would have done credit to a detective.

“Details later. If I send word now, when would they reach Grace Castle?”

She asked because there was no transport worth the name in this place, and nothing seemed likely to happen right away.

Delma must have caught the urgency in Dong-hui’s voice, because the curiosity went out of her eyes and she answered with a serious face.

“Well, now. I should think Butler Scrooge would know better than I would.”
“Scrooge? That old miser?”

Another familiar name, hard on the heels of Patrasche, and Dong-hui’s voice went up sharp.

Scrooge was somebody she had never named. Her eyes thinned to long slits as she puzzled over it. She had named Delma and been rewarded for it, and yet here was somebody else turning up out of nowhere as though he had carried a name all along.

Why, though?

Wondering whether some special reason lay hidden in it, she stared hard at Delma. Then Delma abruptly squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a small shh, shh.

“However little regard you may have for me, to rebuke me as a miser with the man himself sitting right here.”

The voice belonged to the butler, dozing in the seat beside Delma, and it came with a deep sigh.

Dong-hui’s mind raced. Come to think of it, she had never once asked the butler what his name was.

So he’s Scrooge.

The small frame, the fussy set of the eyes, the thick bushy beard against the bare bald crown, the slightly crooked hooked nose, the lips full of discontent: all of it. Maybe it was hearing the name that did it, but his face looked very much like the old miser from the storybook she had read as a child.

She was still marveling at the match rate between the name and the face when the butler let out a deep sigh with a look of resignation.

“Sorry. Butler, would you send word to a jewel merchant?”

She had not known, granted, but she felt bad all the same, as though she had badmouthed the man out loud with him sitting right there. Dong-hui asked it carefully, with an awkward smile.

Scrooge screwed up his eyes as though the whole business displeased him, then nodded reluctantly.

“Surely you do not mean to sell the mistress’s keepsakes?”

Scrooge had been watching in silence, and at his words Delma was more shocked still and clapped a hand over her mouth. Meeting the two pairs of eyes full of disbelief and horror, Dong-hui let out a sigh and answered.

“No.”

I’d have to know where the keepsakes are before I could sell them.

The rest of it she did not say out loud, of course.

“Is that really so?”
“Just so. If she does mean to sell the mistress’s keepsakes, we must stop it by whatever means we can.”
“Of course we must. Let us put our strength together.”
“Quite so. Her ladyship will understand as well.”

Dong-hui’s firm answer had not settled them in the least, and for a good long while Delma and Scrooge went on whispering and studying Chloe closely, as though trying to see into her heart.

“I can hear every word.”

Talking that loudly and still pretending to whisper.

The pair of them flinched and then made a great show of looking elsewhere, and Dong-hui let out a small laugh. An uneasy feeling came over her that she was going to grow fond of those two.

Get a grip. They’re not even real people.

Quite apart from the two of them, Dong-hui was itching to get back to the castle and see the activated jeweler’s for herself, and she could not keep still in her seat.

The moment the carriage came to a stop, Dong-hui went tearing off toward her room. Delma, watching Chloe hoist the long trailing skirts of her dress in both hands and pelt up the stairs with everything she had, carried on as though the world were ending.

“My laaaaady!”

Leaving Delma’s long, trailing cry behind her, Dong-hui reached her room. She locked the door at once and called out loudly.

“I’m going to sleep now. Nobody come in!”

That little run and she was out of breath. Dong-hui sat down on the edge of the bed, panting, then drew a slow deep breath and called up the status window. Her voice came out more solemn, more serious than at any time before.

“Status window.”

— Ding!

The words were barely out of her mouth before the blue window floated up, as though it had been waiting. Today of all days, even its alert chime sounded gilded and expensive.