Right after Hecate spoke, the water around them began to stir, drawing his attention.
A dozen small whirlpools, forming a circle with a fair distance between themselves and away from them, spun into creation. The water beneath his feet trembled faintly with each one, and he had to remind himself that he was not, technically going to sink and drown.
'Not this time at least.'
Hecate released a hand from her clasp, and raised her palm. The water obeyed, rising from each whirlpool and stilling into mirrors, and she lowered her hand as though she had done nothing more than open a door.
"The Beyond Tutorial is no handholding guide," Hecate said, "It is a trial that you must succeed in for you to live up to the lore you have chosen."
As Yanis listened, his own face stared back at him from every mirror; there were twelve versions of himself, each one dressed differently, with a different bearing and feel that he couldn't quite fully put his finger on. Couple with that, 'Trial' was not at all what he had been hoping to hear after 'Consternation'.
Yanis fell to sobriety, and his fingers faintly brushed against each other. His countenance became august.
"And if you fail this trial, you lose the right to ever again be possessed by the Backgrounds that you had chosen."
He had not - not properly at least - considered failure until she mentioned it, and it felt much too similar to the irritation of an itch at the back of his head, as his eyes glanced over his figure that was in loose robes, and landed on the figure of himself shackled and slovenly, screaming without a sound as he held a crude, broken blade in the center of an empty pit.
His eyes thereupon widened faintly. In the next reflection, he lay dead in the ditch of a swamp with his throat cut beside the first reflection.
His stomach churned and he inadvertently swallowed a little. He had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that the Backgrounds would show him things, versions of himself. Yet, the last thing he expected was to be staring at his own dead, slack and open-eyed face.
It was not real, he knew that mentally, however, he couldn't quite convince himself of it sensorially. His jaw tightened as a pulse throbbed in his throat.
Yanis stepped toward one of the reflections as she continued:
"As such, you should understand that you will never be given the same trial scenario twice."
Therein, Yanis' hand was reaching out. He didn't choose the one in silk or the chained one. Of all of them, his feet carried him to the corpse in the ditch.
His fingers touched the surface of the mirror with his dead body beyond it, and sank through. Cold water parted around his fingers and slithered up them till his wrist. It wasn't unpleasant, but certainly strange. And he felt as if it were waiting for consent to let him continue.
"Corse." He heard Hecate's voice and half turned his head. "He lies in the shallow of a ditch in the depths of a swamp. His throats red grin gapes at a canopy covered crying sky, with his eyes open and lightless, and his mouth closed as his blood ran down, staining the collar of a coat that was not worth dying in.
His knees are mudded from kneeling, and his hands are behind his back, still bound. The rain has been washing him for a while now, and beneath the veil of the sky's tears, his vestige had settled so solemnly that it could almost be mistaken for rest."
He looked back at the lifeless corpse of himself, and then at Hecate. Yanis was quiet for several long moments. He couldn't imagine himself accepting death solemnly, but looking at the rain-washed countenance of his corpse, he could not deny that the peacefulness felt familiar, as much as he knew of his anarchy.
'But, this doesn't feel good...' He took a slightly deeper breath, then he sighed out a longer one.
"Your vague description doesn't help, you know?" He said as he pulled his hand out of the slab.
"It is deliberate," She gestured to all the water slabs around them, "To dispel the illusion that any one is 'better' than the other."
Then she her gaze lingered on the reflection that he had just been in touch with.
"Backgrounds will not directly grant Abilities or Canto that you can fire off. They are instincts, muscle memory, and knowledge. They are lives you might have lived." Hecate glanced back to Yanis evenly. "Hence why, your choice is best made on instinct and your judgement on what might suit the experience you wish to live in Beyond, rather than basing it off what one might assume would be the most powerful or grandiose."
He glanced back at the corpse in the ditch, 'Grandiose certainly isn't the word for this version of me.'
He looked toward other mirrors while she spoke, and felt the blood in his hand still running as cold as death.
She needn't have warned him on their measures against mainstream selection choices, if he were being fully honest.
'Damn conventional and basic choices when gaming,' He mused as instinct, apparently, made itself clear. 'They're meant to allow you to explore new, fantastical things.' He never quite understood going with the same flow as everyone. That said, to each their own, he supposed.
Therein, she continued, "And it is why out of the thousands that are available, I have only presented to you twelve. We may go through the entire catalogue if you wish, but these are the ones I judged you might be drawn to the most."
Yanis' mind slightly drifted, remembering the extensive questionnaires that he had the option to fill in for a 'better gaming experience', and understood where her analysis of him had come from.
He wondered, briefly, what the other thousands looked like; the temptation from that brief thought shrivelled away and lost its life within moments of inception. He didn't like the idea of stomaching potentially hundreds of more scenes of his suffering. After so long, he had grown quite spiteful against misery, and found the capacity to war for oneself within it. He did not wish to potentially see more of what he had left behind himself by now.
That said, looking around the circle of mirrors, he thought that if these were the ones she judged he'd be drawn to, her judgement was uncomfortably faultless.
"The trial…" He began, as he stepped towards another slab that had him wearing rich, silken clothing. He wore a myriad of jewellery, and clothing embellished in gold threading, and there were coins of different colours floating around. "Does it fully model itself after what Backgrounds I select?"
"To an extent, yes." Her hand drifted back around to clasp behind herself, "However, it is more accurate to say that your Backgrounds dictate the most suited trials for you and one of them, from a pool of many, becomes your ordeal."
He walked over to the next one. It was a serene, yet lonesome figure seated cross-legged atop the peak of a cold mountain, dressed barely in white robes. Hecate followed as he moved.
"Do they affect my success requirements?"
"No." Yanis stopped as she spoke and glanced to the side at her, "You have only one success requirement,"
His mouth had gone dry. He noticed it only when he tried to swallow and couldn't quite do it without a struggle. And therein, he stared into the hollow of her eyes.
"To survive."
When he had selected his Backgrounds, and the light of the character creation sea dimmed into darkness, Yanis heard a regal, indifferent voice make its declaration:
[ Destitute! You have claimed your origins. Selection of remembrance trial now commences. ]