What I Won
The moment the festival began, the first thing I went looking for was, of course, the circus. The tent pitched in the middle of the square was gaudy enough to pick out from a long way off, so I found it without wandering at all.
There was, however, a single sentence standing in my way.
Show in Preparation
Performances begin around sunset today
"...We got here way too early."
And what, exactly, was I supposed to do until sunset? I shot Evelyn a resentful glare. She only smiled, as if to ask what the fuss was, and rested a hand on my head.
"We can just look at the other stalls until then, can't we?"
She was treating me like a little kid. No question about it. Maybe that was why she'd come to collect me first thing in the morning.
Then she pointed at a tent off to one side.
"Look, Ira. Doesn't that look fun?"
What she was pointing at was, of all things, ring toss—a roadside game where you throw rings onto pegs and win a prize if they land.
She was serious? She thought that looked fun?
Evelyn sailed right past my unimpressed stare, caught my hand, and was already walking me toward the tent.
"Waaah—wait, wait a second—!"
This woman really was strong. My arm was coming off. And not as a figure of speech—it might actually come off.
Dragged along like that, I arrived at the tent. She seemed to be on familiar terms with the owner; the moment he saw her face, he stopped her cold.
"Oh dear, Evelyn. Sorry, but you're banned from playing. You know that."
"Relax. I'm not the one playing."
With that she handed over a coin and gave my back a pat. Pure coercion, wasn't it? The whole routine happened so fast that I got fleeced with my eyes wide open, and all I could do was stand there stammering.
"Ah, so this is the child you mentioned. Well, if that's the case, no problem."
Apparently the two of them had already settled it. I was starting to feel uneasy about exactly what Evelyn had been telling the village about me.
Seeing me frozen where I stood, the ring-toss man launched into the rules.
"Simple enough. Get those rings onto the pegs, and you're done. Land three in a row, and there's an incredible prize waiting."
"..."
And what, exactly, was this incredible prize? In a village this small, how incredible could a prize even be? I was curious in entirely the wrong direction. However I turned it over, I couldn't bring myself to expect a thing—but what choice did I have? Evelyn had already paid.
So I picked up three rings, fully intending to make a show of trying and then quit.
And then—
A sly little nudge.
"..."
Right out in the open, the owner's hand slid the pegs closer.
What is he doing. Is this a hidden camera?
I stared at him, dumbfounded. He only looked off to the side and gestured for me to hurry up and throw.
I looked down again at the peg I was meant to hit. This was a distance where you could simply set a ring down and it would still land. Deliberately missing would have been more embarrassing than hitting it. So just how amazing was this prize, that they were going this far?
I sighed and tossed the rings.
...
I was too ashamed to lift my head. Not a single ring, even from that distance. I really was trash.
I'd known for ages that I was a disaster at anything physical, but even I hadn't expected it to be this bad. I couldn't land one from a distance where dropping it would have been enough—and that was the grand result of spending three coins. Nine tries in all. Nine failures.
Thanks to that, I never even got a look at the incredible prize, whatever it was. I sat with my face buried in my hands. In the end, all I'd been given, pressed into my palm as a consolation prize, was a few pieces of candy. And even those were nothing but lumps of sugar that tasted sweet. Not another ingredient in them.
Eeng...
Unit 2-1 seemed to like the flavorless sugar lumps, so that was something, at least. Still—what on earth had that incredible prize actually been?
As I sat there, village children passed the bench in the square, chattering as they went.
"Jack, did you get a ring-toss prize too?"
"Obviously! I got a spinning top. What'd you get?"
"I got this marble! What should we play with them?"
"Really? Then let's hit the marble with the top!"
"Yeah!"
Off they went, giggling.
Watching them leave, I sank even deeper into self-loathing. Even those kids could do it, and I hadn't managed a single one. At least I now knew just how incredible the prize had been.
Ha...
"Ahaha... Well, maybe you're just not used to it yet."
Evelyn patted my back, trying to comfort me where I sat sunk in defeat. Honestly, though, she probably hadn't expected me to be quite that hopeless with my own body either. Every time a ring missed, her expression had slowly filled with bewilderment.
"I-I'm sorry. I won't make you do anything like this again..."
"No."
I cut off her apology and stood.
Right. I'd made up my mind.
"Let's go. I can't end it like this."
"Hm? Go? Where?"
"Another tent. One with prizes on it."
Was I going to stay a loser, or finish as someone who'd won? It was a prize even those children had taken without much trouble. There was no reason I couldn't.
"I'm taking another prize. I have to."
"Ira...!"
At the change in me, Evelyn looked on with eyes gone soft with feeling. Every coin I spent was coming out of her pocket anyway. I had no idea what she found so moving.
And so began the great draining of Evelyn's coins.
It was a festival, and the games were plentiful: knock bottles down with a ball, hit the ball sitting in a cup, snuff as many candles as you could in a single breath, and on and on.
Across all those different events, I finally came to understand my own ability.
"..."
Namely, the worst athletic talent imaginable.
Seriously—how did a person fail to score even once across that many games? Getting up from the bench all fired up had been fine. Avenging the defeat was another matter entirely. The stall keepers, unable to watch any longer, tried to give me something anyway, so I walked off with an armful of little prizes. In practice, though, that was no different from buying them with the coins Evelyn had put down. My sense of defeat had swollen in exact proportion.
I'd always been bad at handling my body, but this was too much. Was it because I'd become undead? I seemed even worse at it than before.
"Don't take it so hard. Your talents shine plenty well in other things."
"..."
That was when it happened.
"Oh? Big sis Evelyn!"
From behind us, as we trudged along the street, a girl's voice called out.
"Big sis Evelyn, when did you get here? I've been waiting!"
A girl carrying a flower basket spotted Evelyn from a ways off, came pattering over, and greeted her with bright delight. Something about her was familiar.
Hmm. Where had I seen her?
I thought it over, and only then did it click.
The kid who was being chased by the wolves!
The very child who had been chased by wolves in the middle of the night and come all the way to the mansion where I was staying. I still didn't know why she'd been wandering the forest alone, but in a sense, Evelyn and I had met because of her—even if that first meeting, built entirely on misunderstanding, had taken the worst possible shape.
Not that I could say the misunderstanding was cleared even now. She still thought I was the NPC Ira Elysia, didn't she? Well. It felt as if we'd come too far to correct it. These days even I got confused about whether I'd possessed the character I made, or the NPC named Ira Elysia.
"How's the elbow you hurt when you fell last time? All healed?"
"Yes! Thanks to the herbs you gave me, there isn't even a scar. Thank you. But this person is..."
Come to think of it, was it all right to tell this kid who I was? We were already acquainted.
I looked up at Evelyn with that thought, but she only smiled and went on.
"Mm. You know who this is, don't you?"
"Yes! The pretty big sister who saved me back then!"
"...Pretty big sister?"
Wait. Hold on. That was an extremely awkward thing to be called.
Me. A pretty big sister?
A form of address I had never once heard in my life briefly blacked out my mind. In that gap, the girl took my hand and launched into an introduction all on her own.
"I'm so glad to see you again! My name is Mari. What's the pretty big sister's name?"
"Ira..."
"Big sis Ira! You were the one who opened the mansion for me, right? Thanks to you, the wolves didn't eat me! Thank you!"
"..."
This kid was incredibly lively. She hadn't seemed like this when I saw her at the mansion. Had she just frozen because she was scared?
Drawn in by all that energy, Unit 2-1 popped up for a look, got snatched by the girl, and suffered through a whole ordeal.
Eeeeng—!
"Wow, so those eeng-eeng sounds from back then were these tiny little ones! They're so cute!"
Evelyn must have noticed how uncomfortable I looked. She eased over toward Mari.
"So, Mari, what were you doing? It didn't look like you were just out playing."
"Oh, right! I have something to give you!"
At Evelyn's words, Mari seemed to remember all at once. She let go and rummaged through the flower basket, then drew out a flower crown made far more clumsily than the rest and set it on my head.
"It's the first flower crown I ever made myself. I really wanted to put it on you if you came to the festival!"
"The first one you made yourself..."
Ah. So that was why it looked clumsier than the others. Looking again, clumsy as it was, I could see the care she'd put into it.
"Then I'll head back! You two have fun!"
With that, the girl named Mari waved and returned to where she had been. So she'd been handing flowers out to people over there.
"She's the child you saved. Sweet, isn't she?"
"...Yes."
Well. Fine.
At least I hadn't come away with nothing.