to be fair, so did rags most likely.

Huh, Ryoka was pretty close there. She can make some pretty good guesses sometimes.

Erin’s a wonderful character to me. But her treatment Toren, one of Erin’s biggest opisie-daisy, well, I guess Erin kinda deserved to be lost someplace. Maybe. I sound like an asshole with that one.

I honestly think Erin annoyed Toren into gaining sentience.

How could she, he has no words, no expressions, no noises, unless her pantomimes something to her she can’t understand him and she never learnt enough about the spell to realize him acting up was deliberate rather than a design flaw

Yeah. This is almost more a failing of Pisces than anything. He really dropped the ball on explaining to Erin that Toren was meant to become sapient. He only sort of said that Toren could level, nevermind being truly intelligent.

Well, that’s depraved.

Go reread the story up til now, but remove all of the Toren PoVs. Skip over/ignore any parts of the story where we, as readers, get insight into how Toren is thinking. Remove all those “and Toren wanted to sigh… but he’s a skeleton, so he couldn’t!” moments.

Reread it without all that, and then see if you feel the same way. Cause from Erin’s point of view?

Geez, Toren is sure uncoordinated. Hope that gets better soon!
Wow, Toren sure does take orders literally. I’ll have to be more careful in the future!
Yeesh, Toren is so weak. But at least he puts himself back together!
Hey, Toren is actually pretty helpful around the inn. Glad he’s gotten more coordinated!
Oh man, Toren really takes those orders literally. Guess I shouldn’t tell him to go away!
Hmm, Toren is acting a bit weird. But at least he can serve guests properly!
Man, if Toren weren’t around, I’d have to get all these bees myself. No thanks! Go Toren! If only he weren’t so weak… oh well, he still puts himself back together!

There’s literally nothing that he does so much different now compared to when she first got him, except him being more coordinated. She has zero reason to suspect he has anything other than a basic amount of intelligence to move around and do stuff she tells him to do. As far as she or anyone else knows, undead don’t get any more intelligent as time passes.

Why would she ever suspect he’s even close to sentient? Why would she treat him any different than she always has? To her, Toren is just a golem made out of bone. He follows orders and he has some quirks… but Pisces was the one that created him, and he definitely has quirks, so why wouldn’t his skeleton be the same?