True God In Another World (Tensura x Tbate)

Chapter 109 - Pawn

Rimuru POV

Visiting Gideon's lab was never something I looked forward to. Even under the best circumstances, the place had a way of making me feel like I was one wrong step away from losing an eyebrow. The last time I'd been here, under circumstances I'd rather not revisit, I'd come about three inches from losing significantly more than that.

So stepping through the door again required a certain conscious mental preparation. I took a breath, stepped inside, and then stopped.

I looked around slowly.

The lab was... clean.

Not clean in the relative sense, not "clean for Gideon's lab," which previously had meant you could identify at least forty percent of the items on any given surface. Actually clean. Fully organized. There were labeled shelves. The components on the central workbenches were sorted by type and arranged in neat rows. The floor was visible. The entire floor. Continuously, without interruption.

Gideon was at the far end of the room, hunched over a workbench and making the particular sounds of someone engaged in a losing argument with an inanimate object. Emily was nearby, sitting on a tall stool with a notebook open across her knees, her thick glasses catching the light as she looked up when I came in.

"You've finally grown up, Gideon," I said, still surveying the room. "You're organizing your things now."

Gideon looked up long enough to snort. "It's all because of your girls."

"My girls?"

"He means Ciel and Sylvia," Emily said, with the particular smile of someone who had witnessed something and was still quietly enjoying the memory. "Ever since Ciel started coming here regularly, she's been systematically refusing to assist with any experiments until the lab met what she called 'basic safety standards.' She started categorizing everything. She made a list." Emily paused for effect. "It was seven pages."

I tried to picture Ciel walking into this lab for the first time and experiencing what I could only imagine was a brief, controlled internal horror before pivoting immediately into problem-solving mode. Yeah. That tracked completely.

"It was perfectly organized before," Gideon said, not looking up from his work. "I knew where everything was."

"You nearly blew us up three times last month because you mixed up components that looked similar," Emily said cheerfully. "Three times. In one month."

"Those were calculated risks."

"You calculated wrong three times."

"The calculations were correct. The materials were inconsistent."

I walked further into the lab, examining the labeled shelves as I passed them. Ciel's handwriting was on some of the labels, small and precise. I recognized it immediately. "And Sylvia?" I asked.

Emily's smile widened. "Sylvia came in on the third day, heard Professor Gideon complaining about the new organizational system, and told him that if he kept resisting it, she'd have a conversation with Lady Alice about some of the more experimental projects he'd been running."

There was a short, heavy silence from Gideon's direction.

"He reorganized the remaining shelves himself that afternoon," Emily finished.

I genuinely laughed at that. The image of Sylvia standing in the middle of this lab with that particular calm expression she wore when she was being quietly lethal, and Gideon caving within a day because the prospect of my mother's attention was worse than the inconvenience of tidying up - that was genuinely one of the better things I'd heard this week. "They work well together," I said.