To Live Again, For the First Time!

  *Knock* *Knock*

Emilin stared at the door in silence, listening for any sounds that came from the inside.

Nothing.

She was about to knock again when she thought back to what that man with glasses, Neo, had said.

'So, I'm supposed to just wait here after knocking twice?'

'Let's see who here has more patience. You or me doc.'

Emilin was already assuming that this was some method used to annoy those who would come here and well she could always use this time to do her own thing.

She sat down cross-legged on one of the couches just in the lounge. When she had first arrived here, she hadn't taken any of her time to observe her surroundings.

The room had beige walls with a few modern paintings hung here and there so that the walls wouldn't feel bare. The short glass coffee table in front of her also had a pile of magazines, just like any other waiting room in front of a doctor's office would.

Well, more like those waiting rooms for your dentist appointment before phones came to existence.

There wasn't much else of interesting to see around here, well at least it seemed to be that way, but there would always be some things that you wouldn't be able to catch with just a glance or two.

Cameras, there were cameras all over the place.

Some were very well placed, in places that even experts may find hard to notice, placed in locations that people would already expect some sort of light reflection so that they wouldn't be accidentally found out, and others that were 'camouflaged' in plain sight.

There were cameras in the lights, the glasses, the frames, and even in the moving chandelier.

From what Emilin counted, there were at least 16 cameras, and this was just from her half-assed counting.

There was probably double that number.

She didn't want to make it obvious that she was looking at the cameras and so she just took note of them in the same passing glance which she looked at everything else with.

Emilin's right eye twitched a little when she saw the camera right on top of the shelf to her right, but she could see how one might assume that it was there just for decoration.

It didn't look like a camera used for monitoring purposes, but Emilin could tell that it was well and working.

'Well, whatever. They didn't even hide it that well. Maybe they wanted me to see it.' Emilin didn't show any changes on her face as she questioned the hypnotist's motives.

'I mean, the people who come all the way here are all suspected to be spies so the leaders here should at least have these many precautions. Otherwise, I would be questioning whether the person on the other side of the door was a Master hypnotist or a Master loafer.'

After making these preliminary judgments, Emilin didn't bother looking anymore less she'd become even more suspected for no reason at all for looking at those cameras subconsciously.

Is she looked any longer, she might just try to look for every single one of them.

How would Emilin know that not doing anything would be what would get her suspected for this time...

***

On the other side of the door.

A youthful man sat behind a layered wooden desk with a glass top. Beneath the glass was the video feed of the lobby room from multiple angles. All of the images concentrated in the center were those who had a young lady as their focal point.

"Ah, that bastard Elijah. " Moulan sighed, leaning back on his chair.

"I have to monitor this child on my day off, does he think that I have nothing better to do?" Moulan mumbled to himself as he pushed his black hair back.

"Ha. This report is such a joke! Liam actually said that this lass is likely to be a spy sent from the side family just because she speaks Malalakan? What a load of bullshit." Moulan flipped through the papers that Neo had handed him earlier that day and he was not amused.

"What's strange about speaking the language used in the trading centre of M continent?" He continued to complain, heaving sighs to no one in particular.

Though the girl could very well be a spy, some of this information sent to him was bs and he knew it well.

As for the speech meant for the ghost hiding in the corner of the room, that was just him blowing off some steam for being assigned more work on his day off.

"I bet that Elijah's planning something again. There's no way he actually thinks that his uncles sent this little girl with just this much prep." Moulan threw the papers to the side again so that they wouldn't cover his view of the video feed from the cameras installed outside.

"But why is she here? Was it really just bad timing, or a third party?" Moulan muttered as he looked at the youth who was still in the same cross-legged position that she was in 30 minutes ago.

He was leaning more towards the thoughts of this all just being bad timing, mainly because there would be more work for him if this were to involve another third party.

Well, no one was really counting, but if they were, this wouldn't exactly be a third party, but rather like a 5th or 6th party.

Even if he wanted this all to just be a coincidence, as a famous Fleming quote has it, 'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.'

This girl had already 'coincidentally' met two separately traveling teams and she was brought in before a third could happen.

He gave the stream a good stare and couldn't help but find Emilin strange. She was captured into enemy territory and here she is now. Sitting down and meditating like nothing was happening… it was just, too suspicious.

Nonetheless, Moulan was never one to jump the gun and he still didn't have enough information to form an informed hypothesis.

Moulan rested his head on his crossed arms for a bit in contemplation before standing up and opening the door of his office.

'I'm too lazy for this right now, but I also know that I'll be even lazier to do it later. Might as well get this over with.'

He set his eyes on the young girl he had been looking at for the lesser half of 30 minutes.

"Come on in then." Moulan turned right around, sitting down on the consultation couch rather than his work seat this time.

His open back made Emilin wonder just how he hadn't died yet, considering his line of work. Well, mainly who he did or did not work for.

Emilin found herself seated on a three-person couch adjacent to the one-person couch Moulan sat on.

"I'm Moulan, your doctor for today." He extended his hand giving Emilin a firm handshake.

His words were spoken as if to say that he never wanted to be Emilin's doctor after today, which wouldn't be wrong.

Moulan gave Emilin a passing glance as he sat down while Emilin just made herself comfortable in her seat as if she were in her own home.

Moulan didn't mind it.

"I just couldn't bother waiting for another 4 and a half hours so I called you in first. I see you've already made yourself comfortable so I'll be doing the same," Moulan off handedly explained

'Ah so it was a waiting game after all,' Emilin lifted one of her eyebrows as she thought.

"I'll be straight with you. Though that group brought you in and you were sent here, truth be told, no one actually thinks you are a spy." Moulan explained, seeing that Emilin wasn't going to be talking.

"You've just been brought here so that I can muddle around here and there with some of your recollections so that we won't be compromised, you understand right?" He paused for a second and waited for Emilin to process a little.

Emilin lightly nodded, even if she might not buy everything coming out of this Doctor's mouth.

"Well, I'm sure you already know that I'm a hypnotist, I heard that little Calim was in the group of people who brought you in. He already told me that he had informed you of the situation," Moulan casually spoke.

He was so fluent that Emilin would have suspected that he had practiced this speech before if it weren't for how naturaly it came out.

"By the way, in this conversation, no, monologue I'm having here. I'll be taking silence as silent agreement to everything I say. Are you ok with that?" Moulan played with the pencil in his hand as he spoke.

Seeing as Emilin didn't respond, Moulan showed a bright smile.

"Good. Then I'll be hypnotizing you to get the information I need to confirm that you had no previous allegiances and that everything else is just false allegations. Will you be ok with that?" Moulan still had that calming smile on his face, as if telling Emilin that everything would be okay.

'He's good.' Emilin couldn't help but admit that this person was rather skilled.

He first made sure that Emilin would lower her guard.

He was the exact opposite of those investigators or officers who needed to extract a confession. 

All he needed was to hypnotize his opponents for those answers.

Moulan lowered her guard while talking, always keeping the same even tone, even when it sounded like it oscillated, especially since it was nowhere near monotone.

The tapping of his feet, spinning of his pencil, and even his even breathing was used as subtle psychological cues, bringing the target into a trance.

'Too bad that doesn't work on me.'

To begin with, it's already hard to act on people who know every single detail of every ploy you're trying to use when it comes to hypnotizing and it only goes downhill from there.

How well do you think things will go when the person you're trying to take into the trance not only knows what you are doing but also knows what you are doing wrong?

All Emilin could think about was how slightly offbeat his pencil was spinning and in the end, she couldn't help but furrow her brows at how unintentionally unsettling it was to her.

Moulan saw every one of Emilin's minute reactions but seeing as she had yet to call out in objection, he could only hesitantly continue.

He reached out to the breast pocket of his coat to pull something out and continued to say.

"Then I will be using this to hypnotize you," pulling out a golden pocket watch.

Emilin almost couldn't stop herself from bursting into laughter.