“I… I’m sorry. For misunderstanding…”
Regardless, it was my fault for treating a perfectly sane person like a psychopath, and he seemed quite angry. Suppressing my doubt and embarrassment, I offered an apology first.
The wrinkles on his brow smoothed out, and his stiff facial muscles relaxed into his usual smiling expression.
“It’s okay. You thought that because you saw me as an incredibly skilled professional informant, didn’t you, Senior? Ah, of course, I am that kind of person. However, you overlooked something.”
“Overlooked what?”
“That to analyze someone’s information, you must understand their emotions.”
He meant that a proper informant should never lose their emotions. Hearing that, I felt a jolt of realization. I was well aware that emotions contained a vast amount of information.
Action is a result of human psychology, and psychology is the outcome of a complex interplay between the life one has lived and the emotions of the moment. Even when writing a novel, a character’s ’emotions’ are a factor that must be considered.
That is the only way to describe how a character will react and behave in a specific situation.
If one writes based on the ‘situation’ rather than the ‘character’ without keeping this in mind, the work might progress according to a pre-planned plot, but it will lose plausibility and fail to bring out the character’s charm.
‘Even though I’ve been using the [Character Analysis] skill to analyze human behavior and predict next steps, I was fully aware that such concepts applied…! As a writer, I feel ashamed for overlooking such basic common sense.’
“Why is your face turning red? Are you embarrassed? Because you overlooked the fact that you need to understand emotions to analyze information? You must have the soul of an informant, Senior!”
The way he forced a connection to something trivial and recommended a career path felt strangely familiar. It was no coincidence that Professor Radvicin’s face flashed through my mind for a moment.
“Enough nonsense…”
“To stop? I was planning to do just that. I intended to wrap up today’s Q&A around here anyway, but I don’t want to be kicked out by force like Senior Reysir Daudabina.”
Pret cut me off and unexpectedly winked with one eye. Out of all things, he chose to mention Reysir being kicked out of the room while doing that. A suspicion arose that he might actually know the reason.
However, asking about it would be no different from admitting that the reason I kicked Reysir out was because of the wink. I pretended it was nothing and asked about something else instead.
“I thought you’d want to get more information from me?”
“Yes, there’s more. A great deal more.”
“And yet you’re ending the session?”
“I didn’t say I was ending it forever. I said I’m stopping ‘for today.’ After all, don’t we have a reason to hold secret trysts away from the prying eyes of others?”
Pret said with a sly expression. He meant he would finish his questions after finding out if Karbaldr had actually purchased the poison himself, and if so, whether Tridric had truly egged him on. That didn’t matter to me, but…
“Then what about the price for the information I’ve already given? Are you planning to pay that later too?”
“Since it was my decision to postpone the questions, I should pay the price right now.”
If nothing else, I wanted to check the information on Svein as soon as possible, so I intentionally furrowed my brow to show my dissatisfaction. Whether it was because of that or because he had intended to all along, Pret quickly pulled a stack of documents out of his [Inventory] and handed them to me.
Unlike the information on Karbaldr, which was covered in red crystal symbols and comments, the content of these documents was clean and concise. Though they were still filled with all sorts of things…
In *Nas-e*, supporting characters were nothing more than beings who appeared briefly to facilitate an episode based on a specific setting and then were killed off. Therefore, Author Senna would not have set detailed backgrounds for every supporting character.
It would be a different story for characters like Karbaldr, Vigdis, or Professor Skadi, where the background itself was a crucial element of their design.
‘But many of the people in these documents aren’t like that, are they?’
Even so, as long as they were human, the process of being born and growing up had to exist. It seemed the gaps in their lives that the original author hadn’t set were filled in automatically, and that information was now in my hands.
Perhaps that was why? For characters whose backgrounds weren’t particularly important, their lives could be summarized in a single sentence: ‘Born into a normal family, they lived a normal life like anyone else.’
‘At least until the turning point in their lives, caused by the details Author Senna actually bothered to set.’
To use an example my readers would find easy to understand, Vanahilda’s loss of her family was one such case. Before that incident turned her into a vengeful bounty hunter, she was born as the daughter of a normal family, married a normal man from the same village, and lived as a normal housewife.
Bjorn was a case where he naturally became a mercenary because his father was one. For the record, his father was said to be a common mercenary with average skills. The mercenary group was formed when his father and some like-minded individuals decided to work together.
Being a supporting character in the *Original Work*, Bjorn’s martial prowess was excellent, so the group grew quickly and became quite famous.
But in the world of this fantasy novel, having a mercenary father and the process of forming a mercenary group wasn’t special at all.
“There isn’t much information on Professor Skadi… You know that can’t be helped, right? Information about her is actually very expensive, but I included it as a generous bonus since I figured you already know most of it.”
“Are you acting smug while giving me information that is not only sparse but also things you assume I already know?”
“Aha! My motto is to act as smug as possible whenever I can!”
Just as Pret said, everything about Professor Skadi was something I already knew. Things like her being the chosen successor to the head of an assassin guild, or how she killed that head herself and provided the guild’s information to the Imperial Family.
The ‘turning point’ of her life that I had read in the *Original Work* was written there. However, there was no record of anything before that—how she ended up being trained in an assassin guild, what her life was like before then, or her exact age and birthday. There was no mention of the decisive event that made her decide to betray the guild.
The information regarding the time after was nothing new either. It mentioned how she was ostracized by her colleagues after becoming an Academy professor, or what happened after the students found out she was a criminal. It even noted that during vacations, she lived on frozen and instant foods she had bought from the snack bar.
“I expected some kind of reaction, but seeing as you didn’t even bat an eyelid, you really must have known everything. How disappointing.”
I responded to Pret’s comment with a snort and turned the page. Finally, the information on Svein came into view. His setting in the *Original Work* was simply that he had lived a normal life in a city that was neither large nor small before following Reysir out of admiration.
‘I suspected he was a character thrown in without much thought, just because the author wanted someone by the protagonist’s side to praise him!’
However, there was no way Author Senna would have brought him back for the remake version without setting a single thing that could serve as a main narrative. Especially if she intended to make him a traitor again. After writing a plot where Svein betrayed the protagonist out of the blue for no reason, the author had already experienced the comment section being flooded with criticism.
‘I see…’
As expected, I found a turning point that had never been mentioned in the *Original Work* I had read. And it was the kind of content that made me frown automatically.
‘In the *Original Work*, Svein was set to have several older brothers…’
Those brothers had vanished, and in their place, a younger sister had appeared. If that were all, I wouldn’t have been so grim.
‘A younger sister suddenly caught an incurable disease, which ruined the family. And now, debt is piling up every month to pay for her treatment…?’
In order to make a specific character a ‘traitor with a reason,’ Author Senna had added a suffering person with an incurable disease and plunged Svein and his family into a pit of misery and poverty.
In fiction, a character who betrays someone to afford a sick family member’s medical bills is a common trope. But because the sick younger sister was a person who hadn’t existed before—and because it seemed the original author intended to have Reysir take Svein’s life again despite these circumstances—I felt a wave of disgust.
‘And I am no longer just a reader of a fictional story made of text!’
To me, every component of this world was real. I couldn’t help but feel revolted by Svein’s newly added setting.
‘Still, if the setting is that Svein is going to betray Reysir for money and harm those around him…!’
A moment of relief washed over me at the thought that this was a problem that could be solved simply by providing money. And the moment I realized that, a sense of self-loathing followed.
Even though I knew Pret was observing me, I couldn’t help but scowl and even tightly shut my eyes.
“Why that reaction?”
“……”
“Do you suddenly regret being mean to a junior whose family is in trouble?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then why?”
He kept prying despite noticing I didn’t want to talk. His persistence was no less than that of the Protagonist of Another Novel.
“……Didn’t we agree not to ask any more questions today?”
“Will you answer if I ask tomorrow?”
“I won’t.”
“Why not? You were rattling off much more difficult things earlier.”
“Hmph!”
“Well, it wouldn’t be fun if you told me everything just because I asked.”
It was a declaration that he would figure it out himself through observation.