Night had come, Aranea was making camp after another long day of travel.
She was attempting to stoke a campfire but found herself struggling to make slightly damp wood come alight.
Like a great many people, she highly valued success, and right now, she felt like a failure.
When she departed from the capital with an all-important task, she'd been faced with a choice, go to a frontier village in the east to find a powerful demon, or go into the southern woods.
Frontier villages were under semi-constant attack by demons operating as guerilla forces, so her odds of finding one were quite high if she had chosen to tour the frontier towns.
The southern woods by contrast were scarcely populated and were rarely used as a base for Ruen's guerilla forces, instead, it was more independent demons, who sought to live separate from Ruen's influence who made their home here, at least according to local rumors.
Aranea had chosen to go to the woods instead of a frontier village due to a desire to avoid populated areas. She'd lied to herself with other reasons for picking the forest, convincing herself she'd have an advantage over her foe in the more densely forested areas, but the truth was her decision had been made entirely due to her strong desire to avoid people, to avoid their judgement, their stares.
She'd been told long ago she shouldn't hide herself away, that she take pride in who she was, that her deeds should more than prove herself in the eyes of her doubters. she was making progress, she was considerably less ashamed of her heritage than before she'd recieved that advice, but she still found herself avoiding the more judgemental frontier folk.
In the woods, she'd found nothing, and doubted she'd ever find anything at this point, the woods were huge, and spanned for miles in every direction, and she'd found nothing that hinted at demonic activity, so she'd decided to abandon the woods in favor of a roughly five-day journey to the frontier villages.
She'd wasted potentially precious time and couldn't help but judge herself for that.
"What's done is done, I can't change the past." Aranea wistfully muttered as she crawled into her makeshift tent, night had come, and a long journey awaited her tommorow, and for several days after that.
"How long has it been?" I awoke to find myself peering into a dark sky.
"Everything went dark... how long has it been? It was practically morning when I entered her mind." Once more, my mind raced trying to think of what had happened.
"Okay... so the last thing I did was try to alter Aranea's memory, so she was completely naked, and then I passed out while I was talking, is that what happened?"
I felt that my saying it back to myself, it was somewhat obvious what had happened in hindsight.
Minor changes like the door color used next to no energy.
Dubious but plausible changes such as the screaming guy use a moderate amount of energy to enact.
Outright lies that Aranea doesn't feel the need to resist too strongly, like me being attractive, seem to use up basically all my energy, but can be implemented.
Finally, outright lies that Aranea would never believe and actively resists, like her being completely naked for no reason, just knock me out cold if I try to utter them.
Actually... the more I thought about it, that last one could be somewhat useful, I was complaining yesterday that I couldn't sleep, maybe this would be a good alternative? After I'm done with my changes for the day, I could just knock myself out cold, it was like sleep on demand.
Of course, it was disappointing to have such a limit on my powers, but at least there was a bright side.
Doing the best I could to see in near pitch-black conditions, I was almost certain Aranea was asleep, so I decided there was nothing else to do besides resuming my attempted corruption.
Re-entering her memories, and once again surrounded by the hundreds of camp tents that seem to represent her memories, I decided it was time to start pondering how exactly I was going to go about corrupting her.
I knew my limits now, and I knew my goal.
I could make a few plausible sounding changes to her memory a day, or one dubious change.
My ultimate goal is to make her see me as her master.
My short-term goal is to see her naked.
"Easier said than done" I mumble internally.
How do you make someone loyal to you? I had to ponder that question for a while before I realized how difficult this was likely to be with my current toolset, there was almost no chance her mind was going to accept me saying "In this memory, you pledged absolute loyalty to the spirit in this piece of jewelry."
I didn't even need to test that; I knew it wasn't going to work, even a toned down version like "You greatly respect the spirit you believe is in this jewelery" is obvious bullshit she won't go for.
However, I could reshape what was plausible within the confines of her mind, when you think about it, a person is made up of all their memories, all their experiences, and if they have new experiences, and forget old ones, it reshapes their opinion of themselves, of what they think is plausible.
It saddened me that this revelation was derived from the existential crisis I was having, I could remember almost nothing about myself.
I didn't remember my own sense of ethics, I had had no idea what I believed in, all I had to go on were directions, and a thin hope of one day not being made of copper and string.
Thinking about all I had lost made me feel bitter, and that bitterness informed today's itinerary, if I don't get to remember my life, why should she?
I wanted to see if I could destroy a memory.
I looked around, reading the titles of the memory tents before I found something perfect for what I had in mind.
The tent was simply titled "Why we fight" Honestly, when I started looking for a memory to remove, I was going to target something more along the lines of "Happiest day".
But this sounded perfect.
I pull apart the flaps of the tent and head inside.
I suddenly found myself in what looked to me like a clothing store, capes, shirts and various other mundane items you'd expect to find at a clothing store were piled around, although most of the items were blurry and out of focus, evidently, Aranea hadn't been looking for any of these items, because the sole items whose details were identifiable in her memory were a rack of cloaks.
I could see Aranea in front of me, wearing her normal outfit with her hood pulled up, sorting through each of them, I remember her wearing a short dark green cloak with her outfit, maybe this is her memory of buying it?
It strikes me as odd for her to be wearing her hood indoors, and looking at her from the front, it seems to obvious to me she's trying to cover the top half of her face, looking at her from the front, her eyes aren't visible.
Interesting, is that what she's hiding?
Eventually, after no small amount of waiting, I see her picking up and inspecting a dark blue cloak that looks nothing like the one I see her wearing in the present day. None of the cloaks on the rack look like her present one. So much for my theory.
