If someone had walked into the inn’s restaurant at that moment and tried to figure out the dynamic at the table, they would have gotten it wrong.

Completely wrong.

They might have guessed it was a job interview, which would have been partially correct. Or maybe an interrogation, which would have also been partially correct. What they wouldn’t have guessed was that the person firing questions with the calm, methodical efficiency of a researcher working through a checklist was someone’s older sister who had traveled here on the basis of a casual goodbye.

Ariana was enjoying herself. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

That much was obvious. She moved through her questions with the easy confidence of someone who already knew roughly where they were going and was simply filling in the details. One question landed, Aaron answered, she nodded, moved on. No dramatic reactions. No gasps. Just steady, focused information gathering dressed up in the clothes of a family reunion.

Aaron answered everything.

The university. The labyrinth. The class change. The life that had quietly reassembled itself into something unrecognizable from whatever it had been before. He laid it out piece by piece while his sister sat across from him with her coffee and her perfect posture and that expression of someone who was cataloguing everything and would retrieve it later at a moment of their choosing.

The biggest reaction she produced the entire time was when he mentioned the class change.

"Ohh."

That was it. One syllable. Then she nodded and moved on to the next thing.

For everything else — powers, abilities, the elemental bracelet she had watched swirling around his hand not an hour ago — almost nothing. She was far more interested in the mundane details. The university. His hobbies. How he was spending his time. The kind of questions that sounded like small talk but felt, coming from Ariana, like she was building a complete picture one brushstroke at a time.

The topic of Nancy surfaced eventually, the way it always does when someone is asking enough questions about a person’s life. Aaron mentioned her, Ariana registered that she was also his girlfriend, nodded once, and dropped the subject entirely. Never touched it again. Filed and closed.

"You seem to be living quite an eventful life all of a sudden, brother," Ariana said, lifting her coffee cup with the grace of someone who had never once done anything without it looking intentional. "Last time I saw you, you were crying to me about how difficult your studies are."

Aaron felt the secondhand embarrassment hit him from somewhere deep in his chest.

The previous owner of this body had really not made things easy for the current occupant. Crying about studies. To his sister. Who was now sitting across from him watching him flex elemental mana. The gap between those two data points was genuinely impressive and he chose not to think about it too hard.

"Well," he said, keeping his smile in place, "I realized that studies were too difficult so I went into the labyrinth. Neat, right?"

"Pretty neat," Ariana agreed pleasantly, "considering you managed to find yourself three girlfriends already. I am eagerly waiting for the day you introduce them to our parents."

She smiled as she said it. Beautiful and completely serene, the kind of smile that noble families spent generations engineering into their children. Every movement she made had that quality — precise, graceful, like even the way she set down her coffee cup had been thought through in advance.

Aaron noticed it. He also noticed, about half a second later, that he was noticing it, which immediately became its own problem, and he redirected his attention before his brain could finish forming whatever thought it was building.

She was his blood sister. Full stop. End of road. Moving on.

Some ancient kings had pursued that particular path and history had not been kind to the results.

"Yeah, there’s quite a while before that happens," he said, keeping his voice easy. "Did you have a talk with mother?"

"Yes. She doesn’t know I’m with you. Don’t worry." Ariana waved her hand like the topic was a fly. Then her expression shifted into something slightly more focused. "So, enough chit-chat. What are your plans with the guilds? I heard there are a few planning to recruit you."

She paused to take a sip.

"Though it seems some are reluctant after seeing you use the infamous boy toy skills. Of course, there are a couple of classes that could use those skills — but those are rare classes. Doubts are already flying."

"Is that so? But I do not have the boy toy class."

"I know, sweetie." Ariana giggled. It was the giggle of a woman who absolutely believed him and was also absolutely humoring him, the way a parent nods along when a child explains why the cookie is not missing even though there are crumbs on their face. "But they don’t know."

She set her cup down.

"Reverse senses, dignity of the weak — these two were skills that were analyzed and confirmed as yours. Sad, I know, right? Those people are good at their jobs." She shook her head like she was genuinely sympathetic and not clearly entertained by the whole situation. "How many classes possess those two exact same skills?"

Aaron went quiet.

Not the comfortable kind of quiet. The kind where your brain is running fast and your face is doing its best not to show it.

He had expected the reverse senses to be the thing that blew his cover. That one he’d already made peace with. But the aura skill — dignity of the weak — he hadn’t anticipated that making it into the analysis. He hadn’t considered that they’d be able to identify that one and cross-reference it to narrow down the class pool.

Buzznet.

The name arrived in his head with all the warmth of a cold shower. The more he thought about that guild, the more he wanted to throw something.

Ariana watched the poker face and smiled to herself.

"And you don’t need to lie to your big sis about your past," she added, gentler this time. "It’s alright though, right? You have a new class now. You can still salvage your reputation."

He nodded slowly. "I guess you’re right." Then, because the question had been living in the back of his throat since she showed up at the door, he finally let it out properly. "But why are you here, really?"

Ariana blinked at him with the open innocence of someone who had never once done anything with ulterior motives.

"Would you believe me if I said I just came here to see you?"

"Of course I do," he smiled back, the sarcasm so dry it could have started a fire.

"Yay! I knew you were my best little brother!"

She clapped her hands with genuine delight, the sarcasm bouncing off her like rain off a window. She either hadn’t caught it or had caught it and chosen to simply absorb it into her own narrative, which was somehow worse.

At the side of the table, Claire had quietly entered her fifth cup of coffee.

Fifth.

She was sitting with the posture of a woman maintaining dignity through sheer force of will, listening to the two of them go back and forth with the patience of someone who had been waiting for a business conversation to start and kept watching it not start. The urge to facepalm was visible only in the very slight tension around her eyes. She resisted it.

Eva had stopped pretending to be comfortable some time ago and had moved into espresso shot territory. She wasn’t looking up. She was simply drinking with the quiet dedication of someone competing in an event no one had invited her to.

Aaron clocked both of them. He did not have a solution.

"So really," he sighed, "what are you doing here?"

Ariana squinted. Her emerald eyes focused on the dark lenses of his sunglasses with the precision of someone looking for something specific.

"I was wondering," she said, pivoting cleanly, "why are you wearing those sunglasses indoors?"

"Weren’t you wearing them too just a while ago?" he shot back.

"But I removed them now."

"Why so?"

"I wanted to look at you without the black tint." She smiled, perfectly innocent. "You look prettier this way."

"Ah, same for me," Aaron replied with the exact same smile, pivoting immediately back before she could dig any further into the sunglasses situation. "You look prettier with my sunglasses on."

He was not taking them off.

That was simply not going to happen. Whatever was going on with his eyes was not ready for a public debut, and certainly not in front of his older sister who was already cataloguing everything about him like he was a research paper she was preparing to submit.

"So. I believe we are getting sidetracked," he said.

Ariana groaned. Actually groaned, running one hand through her hair with the expression of someone being asked to do paperwork on a holiday.

"Sigh, can’t even take a little break, huh? Going on about the reason like a broken tape, geez." She picked up her sunglasses and slid them back onto the bridge of her nose. "Fine."

She set her cup down.

"I came here because you seemed like an interesting subject to study. Happy?"

Silence.

Aaron stared at her.

She had said it with complete, unbroken composure. Like it was a normal sentence. Like calling her younger brother an interesting subject to study was a perfectly standard reason to travel to another city and show up unannounced at his hotel door.

A subject. Like a course. Like some obscure elective that she’d signed up for out of curiosity.

Even Claire and Eva surfaced from their respective caffeine spirals at that one. Both of them looked up from their cups with the synchronized blankness of people who had heard something that required a moment to fully land.

Ariana sat in the middle of the staring with her usual grace, unhurried, and reached into her inventory. She produced a pitcher, poured it into her cup, and stirred slowly, building herself something that smelled strongly of whiskey mixed with coffee.

Good old Irish coffee for the woman who had just called her brother a subject.

She looked up at him over the rim.

"So?" Her voice was light, almost sweet. "Will you help your dear elder sis here, brother? I promise I’ll be gentle."