"Okay, I have to ask..." Belladonna muttered, ignoring the whispers behind her and leaning on the counter,

"How is it that you do that?"

"Do what?" The receptionist asked with an innocent smile, as she took Belladonna’s request form and started to process it.

"You know what. The whole... being everywhere at once thing. I could kind of accept it when it was different floors of the same tower, but this is a completely different tower. So how are you doing that?"

"Is it?" She replied with another smile. "A different tower I mean. What makes you so sure of that? I mean sure it’s a different door you came in through, but even when it’s the same door it doesn’t matter. So why would a different door matter?

What makes you so sure this isn’t just the same tower as always?"

Belladonna frowned deeply as she thought it over, turning it around in her mind, before looking back at the receptionist with a confused expression that just made the woman giggle mischievously.

"Oh... You’re messing with me, aren’t you?" Belladonna sighed, to which the receptionist simply shrugged and gave her a playful smile.

"Maybe I am, Maybe I’m not. But whether I am or not, maybe the goal is to get you thinking about what is possible, or rather, to stop restraining yourself by thinking about it.

After all, I thought you were supposed to be one of the mad ones. The ones who don’t care about what should be possible, and what isn’t, and just make what they want possible regardless of the rules.

The sooner you stop caring about what ’should’ be possible, the better. Otherwise you’ll really go mad when faced with the impossible." The receptionist said, as if she was explaining something incredibly wise and deep, instead of just dodging the question and messing with Belladonna further.

"So what I’m getting is... you’re not going to tell me, are you?" Belladonna replied shortly, with an unamused expression on her face. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

The receptionist rolled her eyes with a sigh, before smirking again,

"Well of course not. It’s no fun if I just give you all of the answers. If I tell you everything, then what is there left for you to learn?"

She gave Belladonna a smug smile, as if she had lured her into the perfect trap, before placing the processed form onto the desk again and properly looking at it for the first time.

"Grimshawls..." The Receptionist muttered to herself, "Now what could you possible need with those miserable little beasts?"

"Well if I told you that..." Belladonna said with an even more smug smile on her face, as she snatched the form from the desk, "What would there be left to teach you? It’s no fun if I just give you all of the answers, now is it?"

The receptionist pouted in annoyance. Having your own words thrown back in your face was truly the worst insult, especially when they were right. Them being right completely ruined the satisfaction of you being right, and totally spoiled the fun of what you had said. A slap in the face would honestly be more pleasant.

Belladonna let out a wicked, triumphant laugh as she turned on her heels and strolled away, her stride full of swagger and earned smugness. Naturally her conversation had struck a cord with the other players, especially those that recognised her for her, but not for the reasons she had thought.

Because of her looks, and her constant presence in the Tower of Mystica, the receptionist had gained a little bit of a following. Actually, calling it a following seemed a little innocuous and tame. Simps and stalkers were much more accurate.

Many of the attractive NPCs, both male and female, had gained their own followings, fan clubs and obsessive admirers that wrote entire novels worth of disturbing fan fictions about their romance, although most of them were just smut that called itself romance. Even a few monsters got the same treatment from the true freaks of the world.

Because of this, many of them got to know her very well, according to their own delusion. They knew she did not just smile, laugh and joke with anyone. She rarely did. A professional smile, maybe, but not a real smile. The type of smile that had captured their hearts even more this very day.

In their minds, it had to be because of some hidden affection metre, or some kind of secret quest trigger. So as Belladonna left to continue her business, many of the people waiting started to copy her interaction, hoping to replicate the results and make the affection metre go up.

However no matter what they tried, even after hours of experimentation and repetition, they just couldn’t replicate the results and it seemed that the receptionist even started to like them even less!

It just didn’t make sense! Clearly there was something they were missing, and the forums became alight once more with discussions revolving around this subject, with the name ’Baroness of Blood’ being passed around once again.

As for the woman in question, Belladonna not the Receptionist, she left the tower without a care and glanced at the instructions on her notice, before taking a last minute detour. Instead of heading out of the city, she delved deeper into the shopping district until she found an alchemist.

She had never been potion shopping before, as unlike everyone else she never needed to use healing potions, so she was a little taken aback by the price of them. A single Regil for even the most basic of healing potions, and that was the rank that was expressly not used for life threatening wounds but more common scrapes and injuries.

Anything in the life saving, otherwise known as the superior healing and upwards, started in the price range of hundreds of Regil, with some stretching into the thousands or tens of thousands. It almost made her want to get into alchemy just to take part in this racket... I mean, lucrative business.

God help them if Midas ever got his hands on his very own potion maker.

Although, it did make her wonder if she could use her skills for her own business venture. That would have to come later though.

Thankfully, all she needed this time was a lower tier one, one that cost her 10 Regil, that she immediately fed to Beans. As his bruised and swollen face started to quickly recede back to its normal state, Belladonna let out a soft sigh.

What people wouldn’t do for their pets.