The night had been pleasantly cool, the first phase of fall finally wrestling summer to the ground. It would start building heat soon as the sun came up to wash over the sea of tents and other festival infrastructure. This whole loud, overwhelming event had begun as a constellation of Correlan-wide seasonal celebrations many centuries ago, and now the Stone Moon Grand Tourney had become this…thing. This giant, bloated festival of sports and markets and after-dark side-eye debauchery that brought people in from all over the connected worlds.
Thankfully, it was in Illuria this year, the best location in the four-year cycle.
Unfortunately, that meant it attracted the highest numbers, the boundaries of the thing burgeoning out more and more each year until it spread farther out into the countryside. There was only so much open space left in this part of the world, so the physical limits would cinch around it soon enough.
Lidea cracked eir eyes open and met the one-way mesh of a window and the gloamy pre-dawn beyond. Ey sat up on eir elbows groggily, shifting into a cross-legged position. Looking east, shying north, far away in the distance beyond the peaks of tents and the structures of the fairgrounds, a thin, spindly tower poked the pink part of the sky. You wouldn’t know the Apolais Beacon was there if you weren’t looking for it, and unless you had grown up in the Apolais Independent Incorporation, you probably wouldn’t know what it was.
At the base was an artificer’s tower, a less than literal description of a place a master artificer had made their center of operations. The spindle — the thing that could be seen from such a massive distance — was a remnant of centuries-old magical machinery. Something in the way they used to hold open the space tunnels for the transport circles. Even if ey wasn’t so hungover, ey couldn’t remember all the details.
Ey was as close to “home” as ey had been since the last Tourney, and it was near enough.
Arms came around eir waist, and ey looked down into Sunny’s face pressed into the outside of eir thigh, body contorted into a weird shape. He grunted at em, rubbing his forehead against eir leg. Ey dropped eir fingers into his hair and ran them through. He needed a trim and a shave, by his own typical grooming standard, but ey liked it when he grew a little wild. Maybe ey’d tell him one day.
“Coffee?” A goblin dropped down on eir other side with a camping-appropriate steel mug, chipper to the point of irritation. Phyll’s clematis complexion was ragged with sunburn, high points blotched with raspberry. Ze was bald, like all goblins, with four small horns in a square around the crown of hir head. One was chipped a little, but that could be buffed out as the horn grew. Otherwise, hir head was round with gigantic eyes, wide mouth, shallow chin, and a broad nose.
Hir akimbo limbs were knobby, little protrusions of cartilage on the elbows sticking out when ze bent and hyperflexed hir arms. The fingers around the proffered coffee cup had four segments, knuckles popping and wriggling as they curved.
Ze was short and squat otherwise, the soft body of the troella sub-type proportionate to the four and a half foot frame.
“You look like shit,” Phyll said.
“Never smoking with you again,” Lidea croaked.
Ey closed eir eyes and pieced together the day before. Sunny and ey had arrived the day before, about midmorning, and checked into their pre-made single-family tent. In their youth, they would have loaded in all their own supplies and taken to the outskirts of civilian camping. Nope. Not now. Not when Lidea was technically here as an exhibitionist, so ey could rent the space on the Thýlalykófoton’s credit.
Their tent had been, by sheer coincidence, near a three-family rental tent full of goblins. Not just goblins, but members of one of the Miraalan technical guilds who all threw in together to rent a tent so they could trawl the magical engineering marketplace. And among those members of a Miraalan technical guild, was Phyll, someone Sunny had been in school with.
Sunny didn’t volunteer stories from university without some kind of trigger, but when he did, something interesting always unfolded. Usually involving a harrowing encounter with a lapidary saw. The instant he saw Phyll was across from him, his whole body had lit up.
This was fine. Lidea was happy to let him reminiscence with an old friend while ey wandered the first round of vendors. Ey had had to meet with eir exhibition partner, Ajax, to make sure the equipment had made it across the inter-world bridge from Latolan in one piece.
Their demonstration was on multi-frequency magic, fastest and easiest with multiple magicians. None of this was new technique, just perpetually complicated. A stone elf artificer who used to contract with the Thýlalykófoton, Constantine, had cracked a way to get a machine to mimic magic frequency conversion in the same way magicians did it.
Barely.
Artificery was never going to completely replace what a magician could do, but they inched closer and closer every few years.
“Are you sure they didn’t hook up?” Ajax had asked during a brief lull while they waited for the machine to charge up. He was also a greenwitch, but of the full wood elf variety. His response to the extra-heavy cultural isolation that came with this disposition was to shave his head down to a peach fuzz.
Lidea had blinked at him a few times.
“What?” ey had replied, still unsure how to respond.
“Sunny and this goblin friend. Did they hook up in college?” Ajax’s face had been passive, no particular feeling revealing itself either way.
“I don’t…think so.” Lidea had run through eir memory, looking for spaces in the conversation where clues might have been left behind. “Does it matter?”
Ajax gave the gentlest shift of his shoulders.
“Not to me, but I’m not the one currently dating him.”
“We’re not…dating…” Lidea had said, unsure if she even believed emself. Here Ajax had stared at em, eyebrows lifting into the stratosphere.
“Alright. Sure.” Then he had turned back to the machine, waiting for damage to present itself.
Now, Lidea looked down at the arm around eir waste and the low bed ey had shared with him the night before. Ey didn’t actually know what they were doing, which was stupid for a person eir age.
“Fill me in a little, Phyll,” Lidea said. “Someone changed out the hookah to something stronger. Sunny said I should stop. I ignored him. Took a puff. Nothing. I got nothing after that.”
“Oh, yeah, your delicate elven constitution was absolutely torched.” Phyll ran hir hand up and down eir back. “You passed out, and Sunny hauled you back to your tent. He didn’t want to leave you, so I came over here to hang out with him while we watched you.”
“Oh…thank you. That’s…I didn’t mean to take you away from your friends.”
“I see them all the time. It’s been two years since I’ve seen Sunny, and taking care of a passed-out person was a good excuse to find quality time.”
There was just…something…something about the phrase “quality time” that just…sat on em. That squished eir lungs down into eir chest until they refused to expand.
Sunny finally stirred around eir.
“Anything specific you need to do today?” Sunny murmured, nuzzling into eir thigh.
“I’ll check in with Ajax again tonight to make sure we’re ready for tomorrow morning, but no. nothing specific. We can just hang out and relax.”
“We’re all going to see the joust,” Phyll offered.
“Maybe,” Sunny yawned. “Coffee, then we’ll see.”
Lidea ruffled his hair and set down eir own drink.
“I’m going to use the latrine, then we can talk.”
Sunny reluctantly let eir get up, and ey ducked out of the tent, slipping on eir shoes. Across the way, the goblins were already in full-swing, and they waved at eir. Their tunics and breeches and skirts were cut along plainer lines than goblins usually wore. To compensate, each piece was intricately embroidered with brightly colored animals and flowers. They all had coordinating wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces and their horns covered.
Ey stumbled past them, bringing a hand to eir braid absently. There were flower petals in eir hair, tucked under the textured strands. Where had…? Right. Flower crowns. One goblin had made eir a flower crown as a blessing on eir upcoming “performance.” Ey didn’t know where it was, at the moment, but Sunny would have kept it safe. It was bad luck to damage a goblin blessing.
The latrines pulled up on eir right, and ey stepped into line behind an ariesian with tan horns. They nodded at eir, and ey offered something half-hearted back.
“Kýriolykós Lidea!”
It was a young half-elf, bits and pieces of a sylvan heritage populating the other part of their anatomy. Ey recognized them as one of the younger members of the Thýlalykófoton who wasn’t planning on being a mage. There were other benefits to finding camaraderie in magical affliction.
“There’s a problem,” they said.
“Shit.”
*****
“Well, I’m super screwed, maybe.” Lidea burst back into the tent, annoyed. Ey flopped on the floor next to Sunny, legs sprawling. He sat cross-legged in front of a small mirror hung from a tent upright, running a comb through his hair, slicking it back into something that looked like it was intentional. His beard wasn’t quite long enough to do anything but scratch into a fluff with his fingertips, but he was planning on shaving clean again before his upcoming fall lectures.
Lidea absently scratched his chin through his beard, and his opinion started changing.
“What’s happening?” A fresh pot of coffee was brewing in the percolator, and Sunny flipped it off at the base as it reached temp.
“Ajax let himself be convinced to drink dyerga beer, got too drunk too fast, tripped, fell, and cracked his head open.” Lidea drug eir thermos out of eir bag and half-emptied the kettle into it.
“Holy fuck. Is he okay?” Sunny dropped his comb gently on his leg.
“They took him to the provincial hospital, so he’ll be fine. Obviously he can’t do the presentation, though, so I went to the radio room to call in. See what they want to do. And, apparently, I need to go solo.”
“Isn’t the whole point that it’s a two-person process?”
“Eh.” Lidea threw eir head against Sunny’s shoulder. “Constantine isn’t a greenwitch, so it was supposed to be her and two magicians doing the demo. Ajax volunteered because he actually likes this kind of thing then bullied Babylon into doing it with him. She ran into some shit with her kid’s dad that got her stuck on Areylan, of all places. No problem. I draw the short end of the stick for the job. Then Constantine has a fucking stroke, and she’s not medically cleared to come across a gate in time. Okay fine. Ajax and I can handle it just the two of us. I’ve studied the manual and the theory. Then this shit. The whole project is cursed.”
Sunny drifted a hand around eir back, curling his fingers around eir waist and pressing into eir skin. Lidea focused on the sensation of them, warm and rough.
“Ding dong.” Phyll peaked around the frame of the still-open tent flap. “Saw Lidea come back. Everything okay?”
Sunny gave another squeeze around eir waist before dropping his hand to fall behind em.
“Eir presentation partner ended up in the hospital,” Sunny said.
“Oh, shit. I heard the medical sirens last night. But…” Phyll shrugged. Sunny considered the goblin for a minute, a plan forming up.
“Liddy, would one of the other greenwitches help you if you asked?” Sunny asked.
“If I begged and pleaded, maybe.”
“You gonna be in trouble if you let someone else look at the written material?”
Lidea immediately understood what Sunny was asking, and the realization cracked over Phyll a few seconds later.
“I can figure anything out from a well-written manual,” Phyll said. “Unless it’s written in High Elven…”
“It’s not,” Lidea said, getting up and moving toward one of eir bags. Ey pulled out a blue and red ring notebook, two inches thick. “Some side notes in Traditional Elven.” Ey handed it over.
“Oh, I can read that. That’s fine.” Phyll opened the notebook, and eir eyes squinted through the text. “Need my reading glasses, but I have this.”
“Okay. Okay.” Lidea clapped eir hands a few times. “You two combine your powers to make sure the damn thing doesn’t blow up. I’m going to go bribe someone into doing this with me.”
*****
Lidea found emself hesitating more and more as ey moved further through the open camping area toward where a group of other greenwitches had set up camp. Maybe a third of the members of the Thýlalykófoton’s members actually gave a shit about the organization at a structural level. The largest outer rings of membership were populated by the automatic entry of any elven magician that showed interest. Lidea settled comfortably into the middle rings. The Thýlalykófoton sourced jobs for em. Ey went to meetings. Ey was here doing this presentation in exchange for a ticket on their dime.
But then there was the super-intense inner core that kept the whole thing running. They formed a clique that fell together into a dense ball. For things like the Tourney, they camped together and changed the whole mood of everything around them.
Their campsite was just off the main path, and all the other nearby campers had created a ring of space around them. Tents formed a rectangle, with all doors facing the center. Standalone awnings covered most of the open space to create a sort of interior courtyard with a hole in the middle for a central campfire. The front of the rectangle was lined with hip-high tables, creating the sense of an entryway. One side was dishwashing; the other, a larger group food prep space.
The elves emerging from their tents for breakfast and coffee were mostly wood elves with the occasional bits of other things running over their features. Two stone elves came out of smaller tents along the back wall. If ey was recognizing them properly, they had been saved from childhood body trafficking by the Thýlalykófoton. Lidea was aware of those specific efforts but had never pressed anyone on the details. In the corner was Evire, the only sun elf Lidea knew by name, her dark beaded braids clacking as she looked up from whatever ineffable book she was reading alongside her coffee. Lidea had always gotten the impression she was less of a volunteer member and more an installation. An ambassador-spy sent in by sun elf elders to make sure the rest of them weren’t tearing the worlds apart.
A dozen sets of eyes in total, turned to em as ey moved into the camp circle, then flicked away again, guilty hearts knowing they weren’t going to step in and volunteer their help.
“No one wants to do it, Lidea.”
Lidea closed eir eyes hard in frustration, then rolled eir head around to the wood elf sitting under the nearest awning. Paul balanced his prosthetic arm across his knee and fiddled with something inside. His long blond hair, drawn into a high ponytail, was dyed with threads of lavender and pink this quarter.
“That’s bullshit, Paul,” Lidea insisted. “We’re supposed to be working together.”
Paul rolled his eyes and pulled his arm up over his elbow, fastening the harness up around the outside of his upper arm to lock into place. He flexed his prosthetic hand with a small magi-mechanical sound. Something about the movement wasn’t to his satisfaction, and he took the arm off again.
“If I could help you, I would. But I can’t risk damage to my focus.” He patted his arm. Yes, there was a slight chance the feedback from the demonstration machine could ricochet through eir own focus and damage it. But that risk was marginal at best, or else the contraption wouldn’t be demo ready.
At the same time, any risk was too much risk when your focus was also a functional part of your body.
But he could also just admit he didn’t want to do the damn presentation either, instead of hiding behind his arm. Again. That excuse was going to run out, one day.
“Lidea. You here to grovel?” From the tent behind Paul, a giant of a man ducked through the doorway. Archmage Ivan Magnusson was half human and half elf like eir, but of different varieties of both. The bull elf side of his parentage gave him his lean muscle, flaxen hair, and sharp blue eyes. While bull elves were the biggest of them, for Ivan it was the human side that drew him up, the genetics of the Cofash ethno-subspecies stacking him seven feet tall.
He was also a vampire, which pissed Lidea off when ey thought about it. Trans-hemaphagic transformation had been the only way to treat a hyper-rare genetic condition that manifested in his teens. Elven and phagic genes didn’t play well together without some kind of biological buffer or outside intervention, so his medical case was genuinely cool.
In all the connected worlds, they estimated a double-digit number of phagic magicians, and a very small subset of those were actively registered on professional or academic rosters. Lidea had heard fewer than twenty at one point. Four of these people also had elven lineage of some sort. Four people with this specific combination of biological traits out of something like twenty billion people of a dozen different species and twice more magical inclinations. It should have been a treat to be on a first-name basis with one of them.
It was too bad he was such a fucking asshole.
“Ivan,” Lidea grumbled. “You have the most power to help me here. You’ve read the manual.”
“And?” He pulled his large gray hat on, looking down at her in the halo of the wide brim, buttoning his long sleeve white shirt at his wrists. The frog-shaped cufflinks shimmered silver with emerald inlays.
“And you’re an incredible magician who could do this demonstration in his sleep.” The words were ashy in eir mouth, made worse by the fact they weren’t wrong. It was an open secret that several of the phagic magicians were Arches for purely political reasons. Ivan had earned it multiple times over.
“Ivan,” Paul murmured, “you can not be a dick here. For once.”
Ivan shifted his gaze to the back of Paul’s head and drilled into him. He clucked his tongue.
“Jean-Marie Auclair is very close to not paying on a bet. She’s here for the Tourney. You get her to make good on it by tonight, I’ll be in a good enough mood to help you tomorrow morning.”
Lidea considered him for a moment, debating whether this was actually worth it.
Lady Jean-Marie Auclair, Duchess of Chandlay had been nice the one time Lidea had occasion to speak with her. It was the suspicious brand of nice, though. The kind that was perfectly fine if your interactions were cursory. Lidea wasn’t inclined to go beyond that first layer to find what was underneath, but ey was comfortable enough to gently plead eir case.
Except Jean-Marie Auclair was also the head of community management for the Interworld Office of Phagic Affairs. She was the talking head for everything involving the phagic community.
Getting to her was going to require going deep into vampire territory.
Which was really really annoying, and Ivan knew it.
Lidea tilted at him, the pros and cons populating a side by side list in eir head.
“Done. Be ready for tomorrow.” Lidea turned on eir heel, grabbing an apple from the food prep area, and biting down on it viciously as ey walked off.
*****
“I’m annoyed at how much I understand this,” Phyll said aimlessly. Ze had taken the manual apart and reordered the pages to match the flow of hir thought process better.
“What do you mean?” Sunny was flipping back and forth between two pages, memorizing the switches that needed to fly in what order to get certain effects.
“Because if it was this straightforward the whole time, I feel like one of us should have cracked it first.”
“A goblin?”
“Yeah. Getting beat to something by a kunyukena artificer…”
“Oooh, we’re using slurs now?” Sunny cast a spurious glance hir direction, but he didn’t actually care. Ariesians were the only ones who took offense at the inference they “evolved from monkeys” as the word implied in its original language. For the rest of them, it was just sort of half-accurate in the grand scheme of things.
“Only for you,” Phyll replied. Ze looked up from the spread out papers. “Okay…I need to see this thing. You think they’ll let me?”
“They won’t care enough to turn us away, I’m sure.” Sunny flipped to the back of the manual and glanced over a handwritten note about beats for the presentation. “I think I need to be the other magician.”
“You’re a long-wave. You work in completely different frequency ranges.”
“It gives me a headache, but I just need to practice.” Sunny looked down at his bracers. He brought magic in and let it spin around inside of them, circling his wrists. He pushed it faster and faster, the tension pulling at his muscles until all the small tendons in his hands started to burn and shear.
In his palm, he formed a small fire, the type of energy change this demonstration was looking for. It hurt, and he shook it off.
“Maybe,” he muttered to himself, then looked up. Phyll was watching him.
“Alright. What’s the deal with the elf? You’ve told me all about em, but told em nothing about me. And after all these years, we’ve never met. What’s the deal?”
“We’ve barely seen each other since university. It’s just a coincidence I’ve never introduced you two.”
“Okay, so why does Lidea know nothing about me? Or, apparently, anything from university at all?”
Sunny closed his hands, even short, his nails cutting into his palms.
“Why do you think?” Sunny snapped. “What could have possibly happened during university that I maybe don’t want Lidea to know about?”
Phyll stared at him, and the tension grew thick and undulating.
“You asked this person to marry you. You want to spend your life with em. And ey don’t know about Echo?”
Sunny looked away, trying to avoid answering.
“You know you have to tell em,” Phyll said darkly.
“I know.” Sunny kept staring at the ground, waiting for Phyll to press the matter. He wanted hir to. Wanted someone to care enough to make a bigger deal out of it than it needed to be.
“Come on,” Phyll said instead. “Go with me to convince some greenwitches to let me see their magic machine.” Ze got up silently and made for the exit of the tent.
*****
There was a host of cascading legal structures that forced outside events of a certain size to create areas that served people with biological photosensitivity. In theory, this included hemaphages and dyerga and chimoniads and whatever was left of the night elves. In reality, ey was about to walk into a space wall-to-wall with vampires.
And they were just…so weird. As people.
The photosensitive section of the campground was obvious from a distance, huge umbrella-like structures erected above the tops of the tents. Ropy strands dropped from some of the horizontal bars, and a very light current of magic strung between them. Through the energy curtains, the interior of the area beyond looked dimmer.
Lidea passed through a pair of wooden uprights, denoting the shift between inside and outside. It wasn’t twilight so much as the perpetual edge of a total eclipse, the UV tangibly falling off eir skin as ey passed under the tents.
“Good morning!” a woman greeted em from the front of her tent, bouncing a toddler on her knee. When you knew what you were looking for, vampires of different sorts had a variety of small biological tells. Things that made them stand out from the rest of the human and sylvan populations from which they originated. Nothing obvious enough to tell just passing in the street.
Supposedly there were also tiny differences between organically genetic hemaphages and those that transitioned later in life, but Lidea wouldn’t be able to tell even if that was something that mattered to em. Vampires were vampires. Or…phages? Lidea knew there was a semantic difference between “vampire” and “phage.” No one had ever corrected em, though, so ey’d never dug into it.
Having so many in one space created a wave of ambient magic that rippled through eir body. It wasn’t unpleasant by any means, little crumbs of feel-good glamour magic riding the same railings. Ey needed to get in and get out before ey got distracted. Lidea turned vaguely to the woman who had greeted her to find she had been joined by a few more, watching Lidea closely as ey moved farther into the camp. Elves (even half) didn’t taste very good, so ey wasn’t of interest in that regard.
“Sorry. Magic swell got me.” Lidea shook eir head a little, and the confused faces softened into understanding. “I’m trying to find The Duchess of Chandlay. Do any of you know her?”
Of course, they all would. She was a celebrity. Ey was eagerly pointed further into the area and told to look for a bright green tent with sunflower bunting strung between some temporary outdoor lights. It was easy to find, the huge tent paired with a little porch area and a cluster of attendants. Being visibily elven would save eir from some of the formalities of human nobility, but really being native to two different worlds stripped a lot of that weight away. The only human title Lidea really cared about was the Queen of Illuria, and even then barely. Still, politeness would get em farther than not.
“Excuse me!” Ey called from a distance. The little group of people turned sharply. “Is the duchess available?” The day was starting to open up, people in the campgrounds moving to the market and sports fields. Hemaphages ran on different schedules, though.
“What’s this concerning?” A woman approached from a tent off to the side. An engot, another subspecies of human from Azelan that were inherently vampiric. Her hair was a natural bright blonde-red, braided down over her shoulder, all of it low-contrast with her pale skin, bluish in tone from the traces of visible blood vessels. Her mouth moved oddly around two sets of canine teeth, the outer set just a little longer than the rest of her teeth.
“Kýriolykós Eliadea kat Panapole.” Lidea introduced eirself with the full throatfull of words, holding out a hand for a shake that the engot returned. “Lidea.”
“Allegra Xochit. Vampire Affairs Board Chairperson.”
With titles passed between them, some of the tension eased out of the encounter. Lidea forgot, sometimes, that ey was part of an echelon of people that carried some semblance of weight at a titular level. Ey was…important…in a limited way.
“Nice to meet you,” Lidea said. “So I’m acquaintances with Archmage Magnusson — “
“Oh, merde, did they say Magnusson?” The bright, feminine voice came from inside the tent.
“Yes,” Allegra called back.
“Can you entertain them for a moment?”
Allegra made a sardonic face but didn’t answer back.
“You don’t have to entertain me,” Lidea assured.
“I live in her duchy, so I think I might.” Allegra reached for a tin camping carafe on a nearby table. “Unless you like coin tricks, the best I can offer is topping off your coffee.” She tapped it against the edge of Lidea’s thermos. Lidea nodded and opened it to allow a quick infusion.
“Certainly need it,” Lidea said. “Made the mistake of smoking with goblins last night.”
“That’s a terrible idea,” Allegra muttered.
“Yeah, not doing that again.”
“Alright. I’m here. What does that asshole want?”
Jean-Marie was a short, plump woman with rich, dark skin and a deceptively cute face with bronze eyes and a perfect cupid’s bow. In professional appearances, she wore deep purple lipstick and intricate scalp braids with rings tucked into the plaits. Now, her face was clear-skinned, and she’d picked out her curls into a voluminous halo. She tapped her white lacquered nails against her khaki slacks.
Lidea gave a little half bow and spread eir hands in uncertainty.
“Your grace, I’m not going to waste your time with details. I need something from Ivan Magnusson. He says he’ll help me if I can convince you to pay up on some bet by tonight.”
Jean-Marie snorted.
“Alright. And you believe him?”
“He’s a dick, but he’s not a liar.”
“That’s certainly a point.” Jean-Marie looked eir up and down. She turned to call into her tent. “Lucas, come here a moment.” An ariesian emerged from the tent, tight spiraling horns deep black. His shirt was open, fresh bite marks startlingly obvious on his golden skin. He pulled up next to her, four-fingered hand touching the outside of her fingers much the same way Lidea found emself touching Sunny’s.
“Ivan’s rushing a bit for me to make good on that bet from last week, but it’s still really up to you.”
Lucas clucked.
“So I’m the one cashing the checks that you write.”
“You knew what this was,” Jean-Marie replied, the edge of a snap in her voice. Lidea turned eir gaze away subtly. Ey didn’t know much about how vampires conducted themselves on a personal romantic basis, but ey knew when to stay out of an awkward dynamic.
“Okay,” Lucas decided aloud after a string of silent communication. He turned on Lidea. “What I’m hearing is you need a favor from Ivan. And he’ll help you out,if I let him put his teeth (and other various parts) in me. So really, I’m the one doing you a favor. And I don’t know you.”
“That’s fair,” Lidea said. “I just got put into a real shit situation that I’m trying to figure my way out of. Obviously, I’m not here to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do. Just covering basis. Thank you for even talking to me.” Lidea turned to leave.
“Wait,” Lucas reached out a hand vaguely. “I can be convinced for caramel liqueur candies.”
“I…what?”
“There’s a sylvan confectioner called SugarCream that brings a storefront to every Stone Moon Tourney. I hate waiting in line for them, though.”
“I can do that,” Lidea nodded. “Okay.” Ey hovered there for a moment longer, unsure how such a weird interaction was supposed to end. With a half-hearted shrug, ey turned and moved back out the way ey had come.
*****
“If you’re looking for Lidea, ey’s already been here and gone.” Paul was in front of his tent, near the entrance of the area the greenwitches had set up. He was noodling with his prosthetic with a tiny screwdriver.
“Can we look at the magical pressure machine?” Sunny anticipated the elf would need the star-shaped driver next, saw that it was on a table a foot away, and retrieved it for him. He was right, and Paul exchanged the drivers.
“Do you need a hand?” Paul’s arm was a particularly clever design from a dyerga artificer who famously hadn’t pursued an official Mastery despite his talent. Magically enhanced and enabled prosthetics were common, but double-dipping as a focus was such a bold choice. Most magicians needed a regular break from having their focus on their person. Paul couldn’t do that without losing basic functionality.
Except again, the design was particularly clever.
Paul could turn the magical elements of his arm off, leaving just mechanics behind. It was super fucking cool, and Sunny would love the ability to sit down with it and see exactly how it worked.
“I always need a hand,” Paul muttered. “But no. I’m good.” He snapped down whatever it was he was adjusting, set the arm to the side, and stood. “It’s in Ajax’s tent. Come on.”
“You’re just going to show us?” Phyll asked. “Takes ten layers of non-disclosure agreements to see a prototype device where I’m from.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Paul said. “Not my ass on the line.” He led them across the group of tents to a small one in the corner. Unzipping revealed a tent that had barely been used. The air mattress, sleeping sack, and pillow were still made up neatly. If there had been a bag of clothes, it was gone, but a small box of supplies was left behind. A section of the tent door had ripped, and a rock pressed sharply up through the tarpaulin floor. A dark spot across the top had been missed on the cleanup. Sunny could follow the narrative of drunkenly tripping over the lip of the tent, falling, and busting a head.
The machine was in two parts against the tent wall, manual next to it, everything neatly arranged.
Phyll squatted down next to the bottom part of the machine and ran hir fingers over the buttons. “Can we take this outside and put it together?”
“Do whatever,” Paul shrugged and moved away from the door of the tent.
“They really don’t want to actually help with this,” Phyll said, leveraging hir hands under the top part of the machine to drag it out in the open space in front of the tent.
“Because this project is mostly Constantine’s baby, from what I understand,” Sunny replied, following out with the bottom half of the machine.
“Yeah, but it’s extremely cool,” Phyll argued. “A machine that can auto-adjust frequency would be huge on Miraalan.”
“That’s where she’s from.” Sunny let out a series of grunts as he set down his part of the machine. “It’s neat, but it also could fill in lower complexity tasks. Makes people nervous.”
“So mages who were doing the bare minimum might lose their jobs, possibly several iterations from now.” Phyll rolled hir eyes.
“Yeah, basically.”
“That’s stupid,” Phyll said, lifting the top of the machine onto the bottom, making sure the contacts snapped into place.
“Because you’re thinking like a goblin.” Sunny locked down the connections on his side. This was one of the things that stood between them, that always kept him at arm’s length from the goblin. The same thing that made it weird to return to his mother in the sylvan enclave. The same thing that made those two disparate groups get along so well.
“You lose your current job, what happens?” Sunny asked. “What do you do?”
“N-nothing?” Phyll replied. “I’d just be assigned a temporary position until I found a new one. I don’t understand the question.”
“Yeah, exactly.” The functional socialist utopia of goblindom would cover hir in any and all times of need. The Universal Basic Income he collected as a resident of Tomar covered a lot of gaps, but it wasn’t the same.
Phyll huffed at him, then focused on studying the machine some more.
The thing wasn’t pretty, lacking the sleek casing that would typically accompany a machine like this in regular use. It was intricate though, tendrils of metal and ceramic filigree reaching up from a solid base. When Phyll flicked a switch, millions of threads of gemdust inlays pulsed through the uprights before the light settled down into the base.
It hurt to be this close to it. It desperately needed additional shielding. Another reason, maybe, no one else wanted to do this outside the creator. Phyll was dripping with excitement, though, hopping between hir feet and rubbing hir hands together.
“Let’s get it away from everyone,” ze said. “I want to see what this thing can actually do.”
Sunny sighed.
“Alright. Shut it down and let’s find a place where we won’t accidentally hurt anyone.”
It was easy to find SugarCream in the section of the marketplace where all the specialty food stalls had been installed. It had the longest line, zig-zagging between some stone benches. Lidea considered eir options.
There was no point standing in line if ey couldn’t get the specific thing ey was there for.
Ey moved a little closer to where the candies were displayed, looking for evidence of their stock. Several varieties were already sold out. Cherry, hot cinnamon, and, low and behold, an “out of stock” sign across where the caramel had once been.
“Shit,” ey muttered to emself and paused to think.
“Those go quickly,” said the sylvan behind the counter, chestnut hair plastered to their peach skin with sweat.
“Will you have any more?” Lidea hedged, already feeling the answer.
“Oh, dear no. We sold a large preorder to a group of trenglates. They might sell some back to you.”
“At twice the price.”
“I can still point you in the right direction,” the sylvan said before needing to hop away to attend to the business.
Lidea stared at the glass case of candy. At the line of people. At the sylvan who had offered the next clue in the thread. Looked at the possibility of having to track down a group of cranky people covered in scales with sharp claws and teeth.
“This is too fucking stupid. I’m not doing this.”
*****
Lidea spent the entire walk back to the camping area deciding whether ey was going to confront Ivan a second time. He made the decision for em, approaching from the path that led toward the gaming arenas. He stopped in front of em, letting em share the shade of his lavender parasol.
“Lidea.”
“Look.” Lidea poked him in the ribs. “I was willing to play your mind games, but it’s gone too far.”
“Oh, hell, you actually went to talk to her.”
“Are you going to help me or not? Just tell me so I can figure out what I’m doing with the rest of my day.” Lidea huffed, shoulders falling and rising in irritation. Ivan shifted his massive weight onto one foot and looked em over.
“This righteous indignation thing isn’t cute. I’m the one who made sure your little boyfriend got a free ticket, yet I’m suddenly the bad guy for not asking ‘how high’ when you say ‘jump?’”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“The Thýla is stingy with plus-ones when they arrange free tickets or have events. Internally, the board draws the line at being officially partnered in some capacity, legally or spiritually. We just don’t tell anyone that’s what we’re doing.”
“I never noticed…”
“Yeah, that’s the point. I argued that if they wanted you to do this presentation without a fuss, they needed to give you an extra ticket for Childress, too. So, get him to help you with this. I’m sure he’s capable of it.”
Ivan shifted around em to move on down the road.
“Why would you argue so hard to treat Sunny like my husband?” Lidea asked to the back of his shoulder.
“Because I have eyes,” he replied as he kept walking.
“Run it again.”
“I think we need to stop, Sunny.”
“I can do it. Just crank it up.”
Phyll sighed and flicked the switches in the base. Sunny let the magic wash over him, looking for a frequency to hold on to. Constantine had built this thing to work with greenwitch and more standard variegated magicians. This wasn’t built for someone like Sunny. The frequencies were outside his range.
But he told Lidea he’d help em, and that was what he was going to do.
Sunny sunk his shoeless feet into the ground, grabbing the parched grass with his toes. There were two pieces of fruit on the ground between him and the machine. The goal was to freeze one and steam the other, plying two strands of magic at the same time. In a real-life scenario, a single magician would just do one after the other as quickly as possible. Two magicians would take an apple each. It wasn’t actually that impressive. With the machine, he could theoretically do both simultaneously. From a technical perspective, it had a lot of really interesting use cases beyond cooking fruit.
Heavy on “theoretically,” though.
He had to match the output of the machine first, force feedback with it to get control from the outside, and then branch two strands of magic. It started fine at first, even working at a higher frequency than he was accustomed to. Then his bones popped against each other, muscles trying to pull away to make space for the energy that was moving through his body. He bared down, trying to compress. His vision went spotty, breath hitching.
This was stupid.
Why was he doing this?
“Okay. We’re done. You’re done.”
Phyll shut down the machine. Hir hands came around Sunny’s jaw and lifted his head for a better look.
“Pupils are huge, and your nose is bleeding. You’re not doing this.” Sunny felt Phyll wipe under his nose, and blood came away on hir sleeve. Sunny fell back to sit in the grass, letting his bloody nose drip free.
“Why are you pushing this hard?” Phyll asked.
“Because I asked em to marry me, and ey haven’t said yes, yet. Not really. And I’m going to have to tell em about Echo one day. I’m going to have to tell em about a lot of things. Things no one knows about.”
Phyll’s hands were a little less gentle as ze touched fingers to his shoulder and chin.
“And when that all comes to light, I want to be the person who made eir life easier, not harder. To make up for the rest of it.”
Phyll chuffed.
“Yeah, hate to break it to you, but you’re not exactly making anyone’s life better if you have an aneurysm. Your priorities are fucked up.”
“Sunny, holy shit.”
Lidea saw his back first, his body hunching over, then his face, streaks of blood across his upper lip. Ey dropped next to him in the grass, hands wrapping around his face. Ey brushed blood from his nose.
“You need to go to the hospital,” ey said.
“I’m fine,” Sunny barked back.
Ey knew better than to fight him on it. Ey got up and ran eir fingers over the filigree. Ey turned it on at the base then flicked it off immediately.
“Shit…” ey sighed. “Yeah, no one’s turning this on. It’s not supposed to do this. Something broke. Maybe when Ajax…I don’t know. I’m not an artificer. But it’s putting off an antagonist wave.”
“Wait…how…shit…if it’s high frequency, I wouldn’t have felt it. Shit.”
“And you were trying to feedback on it…” Lidea dropped to squat in front of him, exploring the angles of the machine. “Never do something this reckless again. Ever.”
“Yeah…yeah okay.” Sunny pinched the bridge of his nose. “You smell like vampire.”
“Yeah, I’ve gotta run you through my day so far.” Ey found an apple sitting in the grass. It was squishy, steamed inside the barrier of its skin.
*****
There was something deeply satisfying about spending the latter part of the day watching handsome people in armor smash at each other with various weapons. An axe met a shield, and the stadium erupted in cheers.
“Who are we rooting for, again?” Sunny asked, leaning his head against Lidea’s shoulder, reaching into their shared box of caramelized popcorn. Phyll had broken off to return to hir other friends, threatening Sunny with a good time later. A threat neither of them would be following up on.
“Gal in blue is from my hometown, so that one.”
Sunny squinted down at the fighters.
“You’re from Apolais?” he asked.
“Have I really never brought it up?” Ey took eir own handful of popcorn and munched. “We don’t talk about things from when we were growing up, do we? Just kind of left it all behind.”
“We don’t have to,” Sunny said sharply.
“I feel like it should get hashed out eventually. Secrets make bad bedfellows.”
“Hm…” Sunny felt his hands clench, and he forcibly released them. Lidea saw it out of the corner of eir eye, but didn’t turn eir head. That had made him nervous. Whatever ey had said had agitated him. Ey threw eir arm around him to change the mood of conversation.
“We’ve got time. Don’t have to rush it.”
They both settled into silence, watching the fight and pretending that something dark hadn’t dropped between them.
Pixels and Pins Studio 