I Start with a Bad Hand!

As he continued to count the years on his fingers, he eventually gave up and looked at me with a smile.

“It seems Baron Degoph had a more round impression. You don’t resemble him at all? You must take after the Baroness.”

“Ha, no, that’s not it. I was adopted into the family after the Baron received his title…”

It seemed he was mistaken about Baron Degoph’s children. I didn’t want to give him any misunderstanding. The guard, who had been laughing heartily, suddenly stopped and closed his mouth. I felt Klaus’s arm, which was escorting me, tense up.

“They are good people. They took me in when I had nowhere else to go.”

“…I apologize. I didn’t mean to be rude…”

The guard stiffened his expression and offered an apology.

“There’s no need to apologize to me. Being adopted by them was the greatest fortune of my life.”

I hoped Dietrich would think the same, and so I spoke to the still tense guard. He finally relaxed his face and truly accompanied us until the academy’s main gate.

Klaus didn’t say anything until the guard excused himself and disappeared.

“Dietrich, I…”

Klaus opened his mouth, looking unsure of what to say. It seemed he was contemplating the awkward situation he had just learned about. I lightly tapped his shoulder to reassure him.

“It’s okay. It was something I could have mentioned at any time.”

There had been no real opportunity to discuss it before, so I hadn’t brought it up. Despite my reassurance, Klaus still looked downtrodden.

“But I still feel…”

“Really, it’s fine. We saw a great play because of you, and it feels like we can make an even better one ourselves.”

“Let’s give it our best shot.” With that, I extended my hand to Klaus. His gloomy face soon gave way to a gentle smile as he took my hand. His warm touch was tender and soft, fitting perfectly.

“Okay.”

Klaus was now smiling at me.

***

Rehearsal for the play was reaching its final stages. Only a week remained until the final script, with its confirmed ending, had to be submitted to the professor.

“So, we’re really going with this ending.”

A sigh followed. The fresh wave of complaints about my script exploded due to the ending.

“Change the ending, please!”

“No.”

The debates over the script’s conclusion continued, encapsulating the dramatic tension not just within the play but also among us as we prepared to finalize our work.

“Isn’t it too cliché to have a tragic ending just because the families were at odds?”

“I have no intention of changing it.”

“Dietrich, a love that ends like this… it seems too sad.”

“Endure.”

I really had no intention of changing the ending. No, I didn’t have the ability to. I had never thought about a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that wasn’t a tragedy. So, every time they grumbled about the ending, I had only one thing to say.

“Juliano already faked his death by taking a false poison and then actually died. How can he come back to life again after that?”

Then it was back to the beginning, back to them pleading to be saved. Thus, our inconclusive argument about the ending continued until Irene quietly called my name.

“Dietrich.”

“Yes?”

“Is this the complete story? There’s no more to it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Irene closed the script she had finished reading and stroked the cover. Then, resting her chin in her hand, she looked out the window. The sky was overcast, with little to see, but she kept looking out. It was a habit she often had when choosing her words.

“To think he wanted so desperately to escape the family. In the end, he couldn’t escape even in death.”

Even in death. After saying that, Irene turned her gaze back to the script and then looked at me.

“Good work. Now all that’s left is to submit it.”

And those words impacted me more profoundly than the hundred others they had muttered to me.

“He couldn’t escape even in death.”

“When I was young, I even escaped riding a horse to avoid my escort.”

“…he couldn’t escape in the end.”

“I chased after you crying. Hehe.”

“Even in death….”

Irene’s last words and the situation Klaus had told me about haunted me. That slightly lonely look, resigned expression, and somewhat regretful tone kept floating around. Whether I was eating, practicing in the drama room, attending classes, or lying in bed before sleep.

“Argh, really!”

I sat up abruptly in bed. I checked the final submission date for the script. Two days.

“Ha…”

In truth, my script lacked philosophy or anything substantial. It was just a script I wrote targeting just to pass in the drama class I entered due to my poor decision. So, it wouldn’t be a big deal if a script that was already bad took a slightly weirder turn. After all, what does a bunch of letters matter?

‘Might as well make a mess stained with hope if it’s going to be a mess anyway.’

I finally got out of bed and picked up a pen.

***

“What is this…?”

“You asked to change the ending. I changed it.”

“No, that’s good, but my lines right now….”

The second prince read through the script with a dissatisfied expression.

“But really, this young lady wasn’t half-tricky. She wanted, upon her death, the spade she used to dig potatoes with the Capulet’s steward to be given exactly as it was and buried with her….”

There’s really a bottom to hell. Agnes muttered quietly. Having acted before, her criticism seemed dramatically delivered. The second prince nodded annoyingly and continued reading the script.

“Everyone exits. The stage darkens. From the center of the stage, a bulging grave, a hand like a zombie’s emerges. In that hand is a spade.”

Silence lingered in the rehearsal room for a while.

“Why… ask to put a spade in the grave?”

“How else is she supposed to break out of the grave without any tools?”

“But still….”

Agnes interrupted the confused second prince.

“More importantly, digging up potatoes with a spade…?”

Agnes looked at me with an expression that screamed what are you talking about. I nodded. Seeing me, Agnes looked at the script again and then yelled in frustration.

“Don’t talk nonsense!”

Right. It was nonsense. But none of them, whether two nobles, a royal, or a merchant’s daughter who had always lived in the capital, seemed to have ever witnessed the birth of a potato.

Dismissing the city dwellers’ doubts was as easy as eating cold potatoes.

“Have you ever seen anyone dig up potatoes?”

At my question, Agnes showed clear signs of being flustered. Convincing Agnes was really the only issue. She was the only one who had objected to the fact that potatoes are dug up with a spade. The rest of the nobility and royalty might even believe that potatoes grow on trees. Bourgeois fools….

Anyway, I had to keep pushing.

“What? I haven’t seen it myself, but logically….”

“In our domain, we dig with a spade. In regions where potatoes are plentiful, that’s how it’s done.”

Are you suggesting that the agricultural methods of our domain aren’t logical? As I spoke in a mean tone, Agnes backed down with a sour face.

‘Sorry to the potato farmers of Heylem….’

As the point about digging potatoes with a spade no longer held, Agnes shifted to complaining about the potatoes themselves.

“And I’ve always wondered, why are there so many potato references regardless of the story? What kind of play can’t progress without potatoes?”

Because of potatoes, families fight. They fall in love throwing potatoes, and even during confessions, potatoes are mentioned.

“Why are you so obsessed with potatoes?”

“I had no choice but to include the story about the shovel in the grave. It was all foreshadowing, actually.”

“But you could have written it more plausibly!”

“If I could, would I have written this script?”

At that, Agnes shut her mouth. And she was silently cursing with her eyes. I kept her curses close to my heart while the second prince spoke up.

“What’s a zombie?”

“What?”

“Here, ‘In the center of the stage, from a bulging grave, a hand emerges like a zombie’s.’ What exactly is a zombie here?”

Caught off guard by the critique, I felt a chill. It seemed I had lost my mental strength while writing through the night.

“Ah, zombie… It’s a kind of bug. Zombie bug.”

“Zombie bug?”

“In our domain, we sometimes call it that. It was a mistake in translating colloquial language to written language.”

I must have made that mistake while editing the script late last night. I’m sorry. At my apology, the second prince squinted his eyes, trying to discern if I was telling the truth or lying.

“…I’ve never heard of that before.”

“It’s a term only used by the people of our domain, so outsiders might not be familiar with it.”

Take that, outsider. I flipped through the script, avoiding eye contact. I wondered how many lies I had told just today. My conscience was prickling.

However, in a remote domain that required a week’s journey by carriage without any teleportation, there was no way they could go to Heylem to check the veracity of my words.

Whenever there was a vague part in the content that was hard to explain, I just brushed it off as part of Heylem’s culture. By that point, they would cringe just hearing ‘He’ from Heylem and acknowledged whatever I said. Agnes clenched her teeth and muttered that she’d like to visit there sometime.

Amidst Agnes and the second prince’s relentless critiques, the atmosphere shifted due to Klaus.

“But I like it.”

“Huh?”

“There’s hope. It makes me curious about what happens after the ending.”

“I’m just glad they didn’t die.” Klaus said this with a smile like a freshly sprouted potato shoot, clearly grasping the author’s intention. His supportive presence allowed me to smirk wickedly again as I looked at Agnes. She was now cursing with her lips.

The curses of the capital were colorful.