The Chained Watcher

A Little Birdie Told Me...

This chapter's been a long time coming...

:)

(Starting on Xisuma's POV)

~~~

"Listeners? Yeah, they can be annoying at times. They never believe I'm just minding my own business, so whenever I would run into them, they would try to kill me."

Grian absently folds a square of paper, glancing up at the instructional video he's got playing in front of him. Origami, it's called. Xisuma carefully pays attention to everything he says about his opinion on Listeners. "Sounds like they would annoy you pretty often."

"Yeah, it got pretty annoying for a while. Sometimes I'd be doing work somewhere, and they would raid the place, forcing me to disappear and lose the payment I would have gotten. I got a bit of revenge by knocking them out though. Pretty funny to watch them wake up braced for the worst, only to find they've been dumped upside down in an empty barrel or a horse trough."

"So you don't hate the Listeners for trying to kill you?" This answer is one he wants, one he needs, before he potentially makes a mistake that costs a certain pair of Listeners their lives. Listeners don't like Watchers. If something happens to Grian because he stayed silent, that would be his fault.

A little confused, Grian nonetheless dismissively denies, "Nah, it's not their fault the other Watchers are nasty pieces of work. I had plenty of ways to avoid their detection, so I just left them be."

"But what if they attacked you?" he presses.

"Depends. Early on I ended up killing them, but as I got stronger it became easier to incapacitate them without resorting to that. Nowadays I'll just knock them out, as long as they're not too close to my level of strength. They're not bad people, they just have one heck of a grudge against Watchers."

"Huh..."

...He should tell him. Just... Maybe after getting a promise out of him that he won't do anything.

"...Can you promise that you won't go after the next Listeners you run into?"

Grian's confusion grows. "Yeeeees? I wasn't planning to to begin with?"

Here goes nothing.

"I... hadn't mentioned it earlier, and that's my bad, but..."

"Hmm?"

"You remember, back on the weird server, when we found that room of records? The one with the logs."

Grian looks down, confused smile fading. "...Yeah. Finding a place with records of my past like that was definitely surreal."

"And you remember how Jimmy and Martyn didn't quite react like they should have after discovering the records?"

"I mean, they definitely acted weird, and I've got a lot of questions about them, but I have a feeling you're leading up to something a bit bigger."

Sigh. "When I went back into the room, I saw them sending messages to someone, with the pictures of the logs being sent en masse."

"Kinda annoying, but it makes sense that they'd want to share."

"No, that's not it. I kinda confronted them about how weird they had been acting, and they said..." He takes a deep breath, hoping he's not making a terrible mistake. "They said they're Listeners."

Lavender eyes stare directly into his eyes. Grian's mouth is hanging ever so slightly open, and his eyebrows raise nearly to his hairline when he doesn't reveal it to be some kind of poorly thought out prank idea.