I looked towards the footsteps I heard and to my delight, it was Tanya. I raised my hand up and was about to call out to her when I noticed she was holding a knife in her hand. I quickly held Becca's hand so I could teleport right away if Tanya decided to attack us for some reason.
Tanya noticed I was on high alert and called out to me, "quickly reveal yourselves like you promised. Once I know you are not a threat to me, I'll put the knife away."
"Ok, no need to worry."
Becca and I both lowered our hoods and revealed our faces.
"Hello Tanya, I am Duke Harrison and this is my wife Rebecca."
Tanya was shocked. She quickly put away her knife and kneeled down. "I'm so sorry, Duke Harrison! Please forgive me."
"It's okay, Tanya. I would have done the same thing if I was meeting hooded strangers in a back alley. I just want to talk to you about your journalism informant. Also, for now, please call me Nicolas. I don't want anyone walking by to overhear that the Duke is here."
Tanya relaxed a little bit because of my words, but she remained kneeling. "Is this because of the book I wrote, which was similar to your life a couple of years ago? I beg for your forgiveness. It was a completely made up story. I didn't try to make it resemble your life!"
I turned to Becca with a confused expression. Becca laughed at me. "She wrote a book with the same main character as the one you read a few years back that depicted how much of a womanizer you were. Of course it didn't use any real life names, but anyone familiar to you would realize the story was an almost one to one of your escapades."
Becca faked crying, "Even the part where you ignored your kind and well mannered fiancé."
With the context of Tanya's plea for forgiveness, I turned back around. Tanya heard Becca speaking, so she was trembling badly as she feared for her life. Seeing this scene, I thought of a good lie to explain my new character.
"I did learn about this book recently because I read it myself. It has an uncanny similarity to my own life. From an outside perspective, I realized how horrible my actions so far have been. Since I read this book, I decided to change myself and be a better person. Then, once I married Rebecca, I decided to become a faithful husband. It might seem far too late for me to ask for forgiveness when you read about my exploits shown in the book, but Rebecca found it in her heart to forgive me and I fell in love with her after we started living as a married couple. The reason we came to find you, Tanya, is because we decided to make drastic changes to society, so a happy married couple will be the average couple in our Duchy. To help facilitate this change, we want to start our own newspaper and have a skilled journalist like the main character of your story. I want you to tell us how you know so much about journalism, so we can talk to your informant."
Tanya tilted her head, "if you want to create a newspaper, weren't you talking to my husband earlier?"
"Huh?"
"My husband runs a local newspaper in the Duchy. You didn't know that when talking to him?"
"I had no idea…is that how you learned about the details of being a journalist?"
Tanya shook her head and raised her index finger. "Let me explain it from the start. I have always like writing and journalism. My husband and I met because we both worked at the same newspaper. My husband was an editor at the time and I was only there to bring food and drinks to the staff whenever they needed it. It didn't get to do any writing at the time, but I would practice writing in my free time because I wanted to someday be a journalist myself. My husband noticed that I was practicing writing and one day he came over and offered to edit my writing, so I could learn where I was lacking. He started to stop by and check my work everyday. Eventually, we fell in love and got married.
After we got married, my husband decided to start his own newspaper and I was excited because I thought I would finally be able to start working as a journalist since it would be my own husband's newspaper. However, ever since we started dating, my husband has become overprotective of me. He was so paranoid I would get hurt from sneaking around looking for scoops to write about that he did not allow me to be a journalist. We fought a lot about it because he knew all along it was my dream and it is against the law for me to work as a journalist without his permission now that we are married. Eventually, we made a compromise where I could start working as a fiction writer since it didn't need me to be out in sketchy situations.
I really love my husband and I know his fear is because he loves me too, so I have forgiven him long ago. The one thing my husband doesn't know is that when he is busying working at his newspaper, I go and do my own journalism style research to find material for my books. The reason my stories are so realistic and complex is because they are based on true stories I find while going out and hunting for a scoop."
Listening to Tanya's story, I think we had a good opportunity here. "Wow! So your story is like a really long journalist article you wrote by finding really life scandals?"
"Yes, it makes me feel fulfilled even though no one else know the stories in my novels are real life situations I uncovered."
"Would you like to be the investigative journalist of the new newspaper I am going to create?"
Tanya's eyes lit up, "I would love to! But there are a couple of issues. First off, what is your newspaper going to be about? Second, I won't be able to be a journalist since my husband will object."