10. Demon in a Bottle (16)
10. Demon in a Bottle (16)
The Taming Training Ground building stood in the rear gardens of the Palace of Miracles.
A discipline centered on animal care naturally demanded a broad, open environment.
The auditing students entered the rear gardens and pointed in hushed excitement at the elephant tracks still pressed into the earth and at the claw marks tigers had scored into the stonework.
What manner of animals did they train here, and what kind of training was it?
Taming was one of those disciplines you could enjoy just by watching, even when no one was performing a trick. The children, brimming over with excitement, traded opinions on which animals they expected to see.
At the far end of the garden, a modestly sized tower welcomed them.
A single beast sat on guard at its entrance.
Ella and many of the other students recognized it at once.
An eagle's head crowning a four-legged body with brilliant white wings.
The very same griffon that had been set as their entrance examination task.
"Skree-awk!"
The creature rose to its feet as the cluster of strangers approached, body tensing into a posture of guarded vigilance. Its beak snapped shut with an audible clack, and it expelled a sharp breath through its nostrils. It raked claws across the ground, a threat display aimed squarely at them.
The auditing students, eyes wide with fear, shrank back, retreating step by hesitant step.
A griffon was a predator capable of raiding farmsteads and carrying off a large calf. If it decided to rampage here, a number of them could easily be injured or worse.
"Everyone, stay behind me. This child is easily startled."
Clara spoke in a deliberately grave tone and stepped forward.
This particular griffon was notoriously stubborn; among the student body, almost no one could handle it. Even Clara found facing it far from comfortable.
But she had come here every single day for the past three weeks.
In exchange for covering up what she had done during the entrance examination, she had been fulfilling a number of small requests from the professor.
As a result, she had grown accustomed to standing before the griffon.
By now, if she set her mind to it, she felt she could even surpass the top marks Ella had earned during the entrance exam.
The moment she stepped forward, the griffon's aggression eased a little.
Clara offered the creature a reassuring smile and approached slowly.
The griffon folded its wings and extended its neck.
The posture was unique to the species — a signal that it was dropping its guard and extending an offer of friendliness.
She let her arms hang loose at her sides and approached in kind, easy and relaxed.
The beast, too, moved toward her.
Gasps of admiration rippled from the auditing students behind her.
Clara felt a swell of self-satisfaction as she reached a hand toward the griffon's beak. Stroking the beak was the recognized gesture of friendship with this creature.
"That's it. There. Come on...."
Her attempt failed.
The docile griffon suddenly snapped its head up.
"Skree-ee-awk!"
That was the cry of an agitated griffon.
The creature surged straight past Clara and lunged toward the other students.
"N-No! Everyone, get back!"
Clara shouted.
The griffon had already tackled one of the auditing students. A child in pale-blue gym clothes was pinned beneath the excited creature, thrashing and squirming.
Consternation flooded Clara's face.
She had assured the professor she could control it...!
What an utter humiliation this was.
Clara drew a small dagger from inside her jacket.
The tip had been coated with a sedative potent enough to render even an elephant unconscious.
The instant she hurled it toward the creature's neck —
laughter broke out.
It came from the mouth of the person the griffon had pounced on.
"Ahaha, that tickles. Stop it. It's been three weeks, hasn't it? You remember me. Good boy, good boy. Who's a good boy."
The voice belonged to Ella.
She had not been attacked.
The griffon had spotted her and rushed over in sheer delight.
A tongue slipped out between the beak and lapped enthusiastically at the back of her hand.
The children stood staring, dumbfounded.
Handling a notoriously ferocious predator as if it were an affectionate puppy —
they could scarcely believe what they were seeing.
"Y-You have to stroke the beak...."
Clara was desperate to project even a flicker of control over the situation.
She instructed Ella to perform the standard gesture of friendship toward the griffon.
As though the scene were unfolding entirely thanks to her guidance.
Ella ignored her entirely.
Instead of the beak, she stroked the back of the griffon's neck.
Anyone could see that was what the creature wanted right now.
Sure enough, the griffon let out a string of happy chirps and, following the path of her hand, settled its bristling feathers flat against its body.
Ella possessed no detailed knowledge about griffons as a species.
Yet the skill with which she handled the creature was a match for any dedicated griffon rider.
She could read what it desired from the momentary gleam in its eyes, from its smallest habitual movements.
Clara stared at the griffon, which was now rubbing its head contentedly against Ella's stomach.
She had stepped forward with such confidence — only to have the spotlight stolen clean away.
How did a creature notorious for its stubbornness behave like that with someone it had only met a handful of times?
She herself had attended this school for years and had barely managed to get on nodding terms with it....
Thanks to Ella soothing the beast, the children who had retreated to a safe distance began to gather around her, one by one. They could not contain their wonder at the griffon's majestic bearing, its splendid feathers and wings.
"Here. I'm returning this."
Reina abruptly held out a single dagger toward Clara.
It was the one Clara had thrown moments earlier.
The strength drained from Clara's body in a wash of hollow defeat.
A knife she had thrown with everything she had — and Reina had plucked it out of the air with insulting ease.
"Thank... you."
She tucked the dagger Reina offered back inside her jacket.
The successive shocks had driven from her mind the fact that she was supposed to be guiding the students.
After they had enjoyed the griffon's company to their hearts' content, the auditing students filed into the tower.
"Whoa."
"What is all this?"
The children took in the room's interior and let out a mix of awed exclamations and startled yelps.
True to its nature as the taming professor's office, the space was packed with animals. The owners of the tracks they had spotted out in the garden were all here. Several were predators every bit as formidable as the griffon.
Yet the children felt no fear at the sight of them.
No — what welled up in them instead was pity.
Every one of them was caged.
Inside glass bottles, arrayed across a whole wall of shelves on one side of the room.
"That must be the rumored ability."
"Seeing them collected like this is... a little chilling."
At that moment, a door at the far corner of the office swung open, and someone appeared. A woman in her mid-thirties, her face set in a genial smile.
"Welcome. I am Professor Phairen, in charge of Taming."
She beamed as she surveyed the children, their gazes fixed on the glass bottles with a mixture of fascination and unease.
"You're already taking in the view, I see. Aren't they charming little ones?"
Heads nodded at her words, but the faces behind them were clouded with unspoken questions. Ella voiced what the others were thinking.
"Are the animals all right? It looks cramped and stifling in there."
"That's what had you worried, student."
Phairen lifted one of the bottles from the shelf.
Inside it sat an elephant.
"Don't worry. This may look like an ordinary glass bottle, but the moment any living creature enters it, the interior becomes a world entirely separate from our own."
She abruptly turned the bottle upside down.
The children shrieked in alarm — yet the disaster they anticipated never came.
The elephant within seemed utterly oblivious to anything happening outside; it remained huddled at the bottom of the bottle, dozing as before.
"In truth, these animals are not inside the bottle at all."
Phairen proceeded to explain the nature of her Inspira.
She could place any animal she had formed a contract with into a glass bottle. As she had noted, she said "in the bottle" for convenience, but the bottle itself served only as a medium linking the animals' world to reality.
"They reside in an entirely different space."
"Where is that?"
"A place described as the most comfortable, the most peaceful of all. While there, they feel no fatigue — physical or mental — or so they tell me. No need to eat, no need to relieve themselves. My personal theory is that it's a special space Kirkeus has established somewhere within his own domain."
She led the auditing students from one bottle to the next, telling them where she had met each animal, what kind of personality it possessed, and what tricks it had learned.
Not a single one lacked its own history, its own tale.
The children roared with laughter at some stories, teared up at others, and bristled with anger at others still.
Originally, the auditing students were meant to be dismissed by early afternoon, but the final stop consumed so much of their time that the day's field-study schedule did not conclude until the late afternoon.
***
I nodded along as I listened to Ella recount the day.
When the scheduled hour had passed with no word from them, I'd contacted both her and Maya through the Sound Room.
Fortunately, nothing had gone wrong.
The children had simply responded so enthusiastically to the last place they visited that the visit had run a little long.
"Is that so?"
I nodded again, taking in her warmly favorable assessment of Professor Phairen.
Had all my worry been for nothing?
The woman who had exhibited such madness in TT2 might, at this point in time, be nothing more than a harmless animal fanatic.
Even in the game, she had been wholly absorbed in capturing animals.
She had wandered through those hellish scenes with a beaming smile on her face, glass bottle cradled in her arms.
Do a handful of sub-quests for her and she'd even invite you into her hideaway and proudly show off her collection.
"Is that...?"
"Urgh."
The knight's expression had gone rigid. The thief looked ready to retch on the spot.
Only Maya examined Phairen's collection with an entirely impassive face.
What lay inside those bottles were no ordinary creatures.
"Ghhhh. P-Please, kill me. Kkiiieek...."
"My legs just tore apart on their own, all twisted like this. Kkyaaahk!"
Victims whose bodies had been partially warped by Wonderstein's power — people whose transformation had been arrested just before they could mutate fully into monsters.
"Aren't those human beings?"
At the knight's question, she had laughed brightly and shaken her head.
"Human? No. That can't be right. My ability cannot contain anything I recognize as a person."
She had said that and then fetched a bottle from a corner of her office — a vessel with a round body and an elongated spout.
"Master. The guests have come."
She had held it out toward the heroes with pride.
"Say hello. This is my master."
Had another person twisted into a monster been trapped inside it?
The thief had peered into the bottle and frowned.
Not only was there no human inside — there wasn't even anything visibly alive. One side of the glass was even shattered.
All it held was something like a broken, dried-out crustacean shell, with a smear of desiccated blood crusted onto it.
"Master! Master! The guests have arrived!"
She had carried that broken, silent bottle around, calling out to a master who, by all accounts, had died decades ago.
"This woman's lost her mind, too, hasn't she."
"In a city so thoroughly governed by Wonderstein's madness, I'd say this much is practically a mercy."
She was a disquieting figure, but compared to the helpers in other cities, she was relatively tame. At the very least, she didn't harm people.
Still, her claim that she did "not recognize as people" those who were merely victims afflicted by the Curse Plague — that left a deeply uneasy weight in my chest.
***
Phairen remained alone inside the tower now that the students had departed.
She drew the curtains, locked the door, and approached the bookshelf behind her desk.
Her fingers touched a few items arranged there, and with a low mechanical sound, the bookshelf slid backward. A hidden passage lay exposed behind it, leading to a concealed chamber.
She passed through the corridor, found the switch on the wall, and turned on the light inside the room. With no windows whatsoever, no gleam could escape to betray the space.
Electric light flooded the darkness.
A room several times larger than her office revealed itself.
Massive shelves ringed the walls.
Each shelf was crowded with hundreds of glass bottles.
Each bottle, as before, held one living creature.
But their forms were unlike anything that had been visible outside.
They looked as if someone had taken some corner of an ordinary living thing and twisted it, stretched it, deformed it beyond recognition — shapes that could be found nowhere in this world, nor even in the Abyss.
Phairen's face remained placid in the presence of such horrors.
She had no reason to fear them in the first place.
Every one of them had been captured by her own Inspira.
Her gaze fixed on the center of the room.
A pool of absolute blackness gathered there where the electric light could scarcely reach.
A resonant, thrumming voice welled up from within it.
"You have come."
No human silhouette was visible in the darkness. Only a single round-bodied, long-spouted glass flask, bound fast by sturdy metal clamps atop a desk. The voice issued from within.
Inside the round-bottomed flask squirmed a creature that did not look to belong to this world.
It resembled something you might find in a seafood restaurant's refuse bin — layer upon layer of shell and conch, piled atop one another, cradling a dark, wriggling mass of flesh.
Phairen regarded it with eyes full of reverence and love.
Then she prostrated herself before it.
"Yes. Master."