You can't tell me the founders of this place built it so small... she thought, pressing on an off colour wall stone and frowning when it failed to prove to be a button. Appear so small, I can fathom, but be so small... I guess practicality outranks enormity. Or... awareness is as important as foresight, she sighed and continued on. She had more training in the skill then most, but where skills were involved there's always room for improvement.

Some time into her exploration, she happened into a room so familiar yet one she hadn't paid as much attention to as one should of course. Peering about the place as she maneuvered about in silence, she stopped as she came upon a practice dummy, all vital areas marked as well as footnoted along the seam of each area. Several marks weren't meant to kill at all she discovered as she scanned the dummy down, but instead were meant to maim and indefinitely injure the target. Pulling the hand pins from the dummies head, Karli amused herself with the fake target, practicing her strikes as she darted in and out of the shadows.

"You toy with it half heartedly," a voice spoke from the shadows. Accustom to not being alone in being alone within the halls, Karli paused in her play only a moment before leaping up and stabbing the hand pins through the targets marked eyes.

"Ya, well I can't help reading the crowing thing as I go," she replied, straightening her shirt and catching what little breath she had lost.

"Heavens forefend you should meet a scholar who ran out of parchment in battle," they voiced, shifting positions but not emerging from secrecy.

"Is everyone in this place a smartass?" she inquired, disregarding the dummy and turning her attention once more to unearthing the halls secrets.

"Yes," they replied, as she expected they would, causing her to smirk. "Judging by your reaction to the dummy, I take it you've studied one before."

"I saw my first one ages ago. Merlordd has one in his basement. Not quite as detailed as this one, but good competition. Most of the times I've been in his home I didn't have direct permission to be so, so I didn't stick around for study time or to discover what other deadly treats he has in that room."

"Regardless of how relaxed you may undertake a task, if you were called to do your duty would you?"

"Relieve someone of their mortal life you mean?" she inquired seriously, not turning away from the cask of some unknown liquid she had half stumbled across. When the other occupant of the room failed to reply she nodded and answered anyway.

"Of course. I don't believe I could have when I first joined, I will confess, but I have few loyalties and none that outrank my duties as what I have become anymore, and I plan never to again."

"What changed your views and disposition on the subject? Why not to the why so."

Halting in her exploration, Karli hopped up onto the cask, taking a seat. "Because," she began slowly, crossing her legs. "When I first joined I was younger, more eager and less intelligent. I had only so many lessons learnt under my belt and have since learnt more, not as numerous as the years leading up, but the severity could have tripled the quantity easily.

"I've learnt that many things in these lives of ours makes little to no sense, possess next to no justice, morals in the masses are few and far between, death, war, and hate will never leave these lands, but the spirit can. The gods have made it impossible to truly kill another, though some I wish they would restrict their generosity concerning... If I take another life and they fail to return, it's not my fault for being the porter at the door of release," she grinned cynically.

"You passed through that door before," they reminded her. "Why then did you return if so many wrongs exist and always will?"

"I returned because the place I ended up was far worse then the life I had destroyed before it," she informed them. "I had also left many duties untended too… I didn't die a natural death and therefore didn't suffer a natural afterlife. I'm sure it's a far fairer place then this and far better place then the one I ended up in. I didn't die a pleasant death either," she added, shuddering slightly. "What I offer when I kill another creature as I've been trained to do is a far more humane passing then what I endured. Painless, sudden, precise. I offer the art of death.

“So you feel no remorse for your actions, their outcomes and the potential to steal a soul away from the living?”

“As I mentioned, it’s the gods who decide whether they walk back through the door of mortality. I am simply speeding them towards judgment; their rejection is their own design or choice. I can’t be held accountable for the decisions of the gods; to believe so would be to place myself among their ranks and there I don’t belong… By a long shot,” she added, raising both eyebrows and tilting her head a touch with a slight smirk.

To be Continued... Eventually