A Monodrama for Carolyn August - Chapter 97

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Episode 97.
When she opened her eyes, everything felt impossibly good.
Caroline rose unsteadily, marveling at the warm sunlight, the strange silence, and the way her exhaustion had vanished.
Strangely comfortable, yet oddly unfamiliar.
“……What is this?”
She blinked at the clock on the wall, her vision still hazy.
“?”
Caroline doubted her own eyes.
“……Seriously?”
It wasn’t the nine o’clock in the morning she usually saw. The clock ticked past one in the afternoon, its mechanism clicking steadily forward.
‘This can’t be right.’
Caroline scrambled out of bed. She’d thought she’d slept well, but how had time gotten away from her like this?
She was changing into her slippers and preparing to leave the room.
Knock, knock.
“Miss Caroline, are you still sleeping, perhaps? Tea time is now ready.”
“I’m up!”
“Then I shall show you down.”
Caroline hastily combed through her unbrushed hair and made herself as presentable as she could before heading down the stairs.
For the first time in ages, today’s tea time was held in the middle of the Garden. She remembered the very first tea time held here after arriving at the Mansion, shared with the other Players.
And there, already seated, was Aiden in a white shirt and navy trousers. He had poured iced tea into both of their cups.
“I apologize for being late. I lost track of time and overslept…….”
“It rained heavily this morning, though the sun is bright now. So you simply had a good rest. Either way, I’m glad you were able to relax.”
[□□□]
Caroline regarded the three squares that had now appeared next to his name. It seemed he had grown considerably close to her.
The tea spread, prepared a little more generously than before for her sake after she’d skipped breakfast, was evidence enough. She picked up a canapé and placed it in her mouth, watching as Aiden prepared to speak.
He sat comfortably in his chair, his fingers interlaced.
“Today I’d like to discuss ‘What Silvia Left Behind.’ After conducting tea time several times and talking with you, Caroline, I’ve found that there’s less and less to say about the play itself. It seems to be because you know so much already, and you have such an instinctive grasp of what I’m trying to convey.”
Aiden rested his chin on his hand, his expression thoughtful. He seemed uncertain what to discuss.
‘We’ve certainly covered a lot of ground at tea time. There’s not much I don’t already know.’
So Caroline decided to ask first about what she wanted to understand.
“Um, Aiden.”
“Yes, Caroline.”
“Last time you mentioned specific details you’d set for your character role. I wanted to know if you have those for Ipros as well.”
“Ah, Details. Yes, I remember we touched on that during a meal.”
Now Aiden had no difficulty recalling their shared memories. Thinking back to those earlier days when he hadn’t even known how many people there were, Caroline suddenly felt how much he had changed.
‘Is it because his Affinity increased?’
“Ipros is actually a simple character. He’s a machine, sleeping until Isaha finds him again, and he depends on her greatly. He has almost everything a person has, but he can never truly become human—he carries that incompleteness. And so he’s always anxious. It’s a character anyone can easily understand.”
Caroline nodded.
“But I found him difficult to understand.”
“?”
She paused mid-bite of her second canapé, her eyes widening as she looked at Aiden. He’d just said Ipros was easy to understand, and earlier tea times he’d even said he enjoyed Acting the role.
“When you perform the character, understanding him becomes even more difficult. To him, only Isaha matters, but I can never become a ‘human’ capable of fully satisfying her. He’s always anxious that she might abandon him. But I realized I couldn’t exist that way, holding such thoughts while always waiting.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Caroline didn’t quite follow. She asked for clarification.
“I thought Ipros seemed far too passive given the depth of his obsession with Isaha. That gap between his obsession and his actions made him difficult for me to understand. So I added my own Detail to the character. That Ipros’s dependence on Isaha, his fixation on her, runs so deep that he’s always harboring a plan to keep her bound to his side.”
Keep her bound?
“What kind of plan?”
“……Hah.”
Aiden gazed at Caroline, then laughed as if embarrassed by his own thoughts.
“Extreme as it may be, if Ipros ever sensed that Isaha might leave him, he would lock her away somewhere immediately. So she would see only him.”
“Ah.”
Now Caroline understood what he meant.
“So you’re saying he has those tendencies we see in romantic obsession stories—confinement, abduction, that kind of fixation?”
“Exactly.”
Caroline let out a surprised laugh.
It was a angle she’d never considered. To her, Ipros had only ever been a child, a tender boy, an incomplete being—someone to care for and accommodate.
He followed wherever Isaha went, grew anxious when separated from her, preferred to comply rather than voice his own opinion for fear of displeasing her. And yet all along he carried such a plan?
“That’s impossible. I never imagined Ipros would have the nerve to do something like that.”
“In truth, it’s not official canon, nor does it surface in the play’s actions—it’s merely a Detail I added to better understand the character. But consider this, Caroline: if someone feared you might leave, wouldn’t they try to ensure you couldn’t? Especially if you possessed a clever mind for designing objects and spaces.”
Caroline pressed her lips together and fell into thought.
She couldn’t imagine doing such a thing herself. Kidnapping someone? Confining them? Such thoughts didn’t come easily to her.
“No, I couldn’t… I don’t think I’d ever come up with a method like that. But in Aiden’s case, I suspect he studied the character through various works, and tried to fill in the gaps in plausibility he felt with those details, didn’t he?”
“That’s certainly possible.”
“Though it didn’t come across clearly in the play, Aiden’s version of Ipros is someone who frets over Isaha’s every move, always prepared to confine her if he catches even the slightest hint that she might leave him, isn’t he?”
“That’s correct.”
Aiden nodded, his ears flushing with embarrassment at his own characterization.
Still, she could understand the greater framework Aiden had imposed on Ipros while playing him—the darker desires he’d woven in for the sake of vitality and depth. But then….
‘If that’s the case, does the Ipros I’ve been meeting all this time harbor those same thoughts?’
If those were details Aiden had assigned to the role, shouldn’t his character’s personality inherently carry that same resolve?
‘But he never seemed like that at all.’
He did rely on physical contact, and when they hadn’t shared a bed, she’d sensed a faint uncertainty in him. But had he been concealing it so completely that she never noticed?
“Then, could that be why Aiden said before that Ipros was the most dangerous of his characters?”
In truth, it had been something the 3 a.m. version of Aiden who’d said it, not the daytime one. But Caroline seized on his forgetfulness to ask the question carefully.
“Ah, did I say that? Dangerous, you say….”
Aiden folded his arms, sinking into thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Among the four characters, Ipros is the one you truly can’t predict what he might do. By the details I’ve set for him, there’s no telling how far he’d go. In that sense, yes—it seems like an accurate assessment.”
Caroline found herself growing afraid of the Ipros she would meet tonight.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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