The entree was eaten in relative silence. Everyone was too busy cutting up the meat served to them and stuffing their faces to bother talking. I was strategically cutting my food into little bits and moving them around the plate to give the illusion of having eaten. The many appetizers had sated what little appetite I had and I couldn't bear the thought of eating more. Nikolai had caught onto this and was sneaking bites off my plate whenever he could without bringing attention to it. I appreciated this gesture as I was unsure what would happen if my mother caught wind of this, I shuddered to think of being forced to gorge myself on this tasteless slop.
I wondered for a moment why I thought she would force me to eat my food and suddenly a memory of Kitty's childhood bubbled to the surface of my mind. She had been only five or six and was eating dinner with some important figure or another. Kitty had eaten too many snacks prior to the dinner and thus spent the dinner sitting at her place, politely listening to the adults. Unfortunately one of the guests remarked upon Kitty's lack of eating and "Mama" as Kitty was fond of calling her at the time, simply laughed it off at the time. After the meal however, the Queen forced Kitty to eat several servings of the meal, feeling like Kitty had embarrassed the crown by not eating in front of, unbeknownst to Kitty, foreign dignitaries.
I had distinct memories of being shoved plate after plate of food, tears running down my face as I cried and pleaded for her to stop but as she said, if I didn't eat then I would simply be caned for impudence. I chose to stuff myself over the beating but this incident left a terrible scar in Kitty's mind and irreparably fractured the relationship between Kitty and her mother. It taught her the difficult lesson that her needs came second to appearances. Ever since she tended to not eat anything the day before a big dinner. A habit I continued, the entire day I had been too anxious to eat and blamed it on nerves from preparing for the party but now that I seemed to have regained this memory the hesitation to eat made more sense to me. It was another strange hold over from switching bodies. Unfortunately for me I was so repulsed by food in this world that even fasting couldn't get me to eat very much.
I was snapped out of this memory by Nikolai placing his hand over my left hand that was sitting on the table.
I looked at him and he mouthed to me,"are you okay?"
I was confused by this sudden show of concern before I realized I had been silently crying. I discreetly wiped my eyes before continuing to play with my food. I wondered what caused this memory to resurface, was it the proximity to my mother and a hesitation to eat, the large table of people eating while I silently listened, or was I slowly integrating myself with Kitty's consciousness? I dreaded the last possibility I had come up with. The memory I had just experienced was so real and traumatic, if Kitty had enough of these memories it was likely that the person I was would quickly be consumed by Kitty's memories simply because she had suffered some truly terrible things.
I wondered why the creator of this predetermined world bothered to give these characters such traumatic moments in their lives. To the player it appeared irrelevant as to whether Kitty had suffered to make her the way she was or if it was simply in her nature. From what I had read online, the game never bothered to explore her past too, she was just a bully for no reason from Natasha's perspective. As the next course was served I spent a bit of time pondering this while watching Anna begin her splendid show of entertainment again.
It wasn't as if this was simply a whole other world, this was a set piece made to tell a story. It differed from a normal play, where instead of having actors read from a script; the director knew exactly how each actor would react to a given stimulus and used this reaction to further the story. But why bother giving a character a backstory? I could understand needing one for the main characters but as far as the player was concerned Kitty had none. It would have been much simpler to just make all the minor characters robots with a list of predetermined reactions to situations instead of manipulating their personality until they reacted to each situation as desired. The amount of time needed to create a single perfect performer was unfathomable, and that was in a vacuum. Every performer you had had to interact as desired with each other which added another layer of complexity.
For the first time it dawned on me that Anna's task might be entirely impossible. Not because I lacked the strength to carry out her orders but because whatever it was she wanted to destroy was on the level of a creator deity. Could a person made by such a thing destroy the world around it? Each and every performer in this room had an equally complex history, would not taking out one just cause another performer to step up into the now open space in the story?
I sat thinking about this for a long while. So long that the rest of the dinner passed without my noticing.