There were a few interesting things about Tomar that set it apart from anywhere else in all the connected worlds. It was the only large permanent city on the entirety of Latolan; a city-state of something like twelve thousand square miles. Smaller settlements and individual homesteads and farms spread out in a wonky halo a hundred miles out at its farthest reach, but the semi-sentient jungle had a habit of pushing in, encroaching back into the places they had burned it out from.
It was also the only place where a relatively high number of inter-world gates had opened into such a small area. If any of them went through a cataclysmic overload, it would cascade to all the others, and the only thing left would be a crater, disintegrating everything in a three hundred-mile radius in an explosion of magical fusion.
Yet both Sunny and Lidea kept home bases in Tomar along with eight and a half million some-odd other people.
It was impossible to get used to coming through an inter-world gate, and everyone adjusted for it differently. For Lidea, it was like eir brain shut down then restarted, firing back up over the course of a few minutes. Ey was vaguely aware of time passing, but eir perception never matched the time elapsed. Ey could feel the journey in eir legs, though, as ey walked eir body over a bridge of concentrated magical energy.
Sunny described it as simply ceasing to exist as a discrete sapient being for a short while. When he re-materialized, though, he could read in his bones, to the second, how long it had taken him to move between two points. He had tested it with a mechanical stopwatch before.
“You good, Liddy?” Sunny touched the outside of eir hand as ey wobbled in the hallway outside the gate room. The attendant that had helped em down the steps and out into the passage was already on the way back to help the next uneasy traveler.
Lidea snapped to, shaking eir head into shape. Ey grabbed Sunny’s hand tighter and nodded.
“Yeah, just need to walk it off.”
Lidea let him guide em up the hallway, past one of the waiting rooms, and into the main foyer. Gate stations were universally low and flat, built around the spontaneous openings through space and time.
No magic-fueled machinery. No electricity.
Light came in through skylights and windows, transported through the building with mirrors. In the too dark early mornings and evening, oil lamps did the job. The ticketing system lived just off-site and was updated manually over the course of the day with a team of runners.
Lidea glanced at the black ticker board above the curved travel information desk. One of the help-desk employees changed it out by hand every hour on the hour. They had come across the Erykeanós gate, piping them through from Correlan. After the Tourney in midwestern Illuria, they had traveled slowly toward the east coast. There were a few days to kill in the capital city, Lyric. Then they headed to the gate station just outside of town with a whole crowd of other travelers switching from summer to fall locations.
Down another L-shaped part of the building was another gate, this one going to Azelan. It didn’t welcome nearly the same level of traffic, just a simple trickle of pale people in velvet waistcoats and lace parasols.
A batch of runners with their blue bags of afternoon tickets was disappearing around the side of the building as they exited out onto the promenade in front of the gate station. Tomar was small enough it didn’t need transport circles, choosing to usher people through the streets with a robust public transport system.
The color-coded trains of Tomar were a menace of form and function, a half dozen systems on top of each other to move everyone around in a system of complex patterns. Practically no one drove their own vehicles, so the streets were alight with primarily bikes, cars for hire, and the slow-moving pedal trams. These were set into grids with street-level railed trains that moved a little quicker.
These were all below them as they took the high-speed elevated express monorail. It had only a few stops, one or two per borough, latticed in an oddly shaped but spatially efficient polygon.
The ancient, narrow buildings of Düzlem had fallen away quickly from the lift platform as it traveled up to the monorail, and now they slid off in a rolling tide of clay and thatch roof tiles. The border into the next borough to the north, Westlake, was harsh, once flashy glass buildings, now neatly blacked out against the sun. From above, brightly colored marquees and wall-high murals became neon constellations in a cool gray galaxy of angular semi-expressionist architecture. The rail picked up a small group of people in long sleeves and dark glasses, probably hemaphagic vampires.
The monorail cut the corner of Starlight Vale on this edge, far south of the luxury mansions in the foothills, then rattled on vaguely east over Eifanei. The simple, boxy architecture of the mini-elven enclave was all clean ivory, ochre, and green. On other worlds, the roofs would be covered in native grass and flowers. Here, that was maybe too dangerous, so they’d settled with toothless moss and lichen. If it picked up any elves, they didn’t come through their car.
Continuing northeast, the buildings went old and brown again, but with a soothing red cast over the wider avenues and taller buildings. The monorail slowed with a sudden drop as it neared their stop. Tower Watch rose to meet them as they took another lift down, aiming for transfer to a tram.
The yellow route tram stopped in front of Tower Watch Plaza, an orderly mish-mash of social, civil, and commercial space. Guild Row was typically the thing a person came here for, though, so the feeder buildings faded into the background. The large, ornate buildings crouched around a central cobblestone courtyard, each one home to a headquarters of a major inter-world network of various professionals or magical inclinations. The Council of Vampires, The Mercenary Guild (capital M implied over the smaller mercenary guilds), a few of the Mage Guilds with their specific specialties. And sitting low and solid among them, slightly out of place with it’s more brutalist architecture, was the main office of the Thýlalykófoton, the place where greenwitches gathered.
It was quiet. It was always quiet. And it felt like a hospital, eggshell walls with blue and green accents as a floral patterned striped down the center. The first area was a small foyer with a round secretary’s desk in the middle. The guild beyond was partitioned off by a wall with a few doors leading into the rest of the building. The secretary was a young person, elf-shaped in all the normal anatomical ways, but with dark brown hair. They didn’t have the sense of magical inclination around them, though. Numerically, there were only so many magician elves. During staff shortages, other elves with slight defects (by wood elf standards) sometimes slipped in to fill the gaps.
Wood elves were too weird for their own good sometimes.
Lidea gave the receptionist a little wave and moved toward the door farthest to the right. A sensor box nearby recognized eir specific magical signature, and the door unlocked for em. While every elf with an active magical inclination belonged to the organization automatically, only members of the central college like Lidea were received with special treatment. Ey couldn’t say, to this day, what rubric they used to induct certain members into an elevated position. A letter had simply shown up at eir family home explaining what they had on offer for em. Ey had never pressed it further.
The Thýlalykófoton had a small dormitory, maybe a dozen rooms on two floors. Only three had inhabitants on a more permanent basis, but they stood empty for large periods of time. Through the door, they moved into a small hallway that had a little sitting room off to the left side. A double door on the opposite side of the sitting room led into the rest of the building. Across the hall from the sitting room was the first set of stairs, but there was a sign on them claiming they were out of commission.
“What the hell is this?” Lidea muttered, flicking the sign with eir fingertips. Eir room was on the top floor, but there was another U-shaped staircase at the end of this hallway. As they moved down it, however, the wood floors, normally pristine, felt squishy underfoot.
“Lidea!” Ey turned to an elderly stone elf woman, thick silver hair in youth, now white and brittle, leaning on a cane to support her she moved from the sitting room and into the hallways.
Mattie had been head of the college in her youth, and now she spent retirement handling the onerous task of paperwork. Lidea hugged her gently, squeezing a body made of stringy muscle with firm pressure.
“I wanted to catch you before you made it this far,” Mattie croaked. “You can’t stay in your room right now. There was a pipe leak, and now the mold is just…it’s just everywhere. We hoped to have it fixed by the time you birdies came home to roost, but-“
“No, I understand. That’s…that’s annoying; I’m not going to lie.” Lidea’s shoulders dropped.
“Your stuff is okay. We moved it into storage. And we’ve got a voucher for a hotel for you. So! It’s all squared away. Just come by my office.” Mattie turned immediately, heading back to the main part of the building. Lidea moved eir bag up on eir shoulder and turned to Sunny. Ey ran eir hand through his.
“Head on to your place. I’ll catch up with you later. See what terrible hotel they put me up at.”
Sunny didn’t move, though, stalling as he worked up the courage for the next ask.
“Why don’t you just stay with me?”
“What?”
“You’re only in for a little while, right? Until you catch your next contract? I’ve got the room.”
“Um.” Ey studied him. Noticed the way he glanced off holding eye contact. Ey wanted to stay with him, ey realized. Ey didn’t really want to part, unsure when ey’d see him next with his lectures coming up. Why had ey never really realized that feeling before?
“Okay,” ey said, and felt both their hands tighten around each other.
Instead of the elevated train, they took the street-level rail one borough over into Oslo. The slower ride let them cool down from all the hurried travel so far and enjoy the gentle slide from packed buildings into something resembling the suburbia of more industrialized areas. Sunny’s terrace home was up in a slightly hilly area about three low-speed tram stops from Giddington Academy, the all-through school he lectured at in short stints a few times a year. Lidea stood at the hip-high iron gate that sat at the end of the paving stone path. Ey had only ever seen the outside, and that had only been a few times, standing in this exact spot.
It was a cute house. All the terrace houses were. Quaint little boxy things purpose-built as a cohesive neighborhood. There was a walking park, playground, skating arena, and swimming pool with slides and fountains all within a few blocks. These were the neighborhoods that contrasted the more ephemeral quality of the rest of the city, the place where people hunkered down and actually stayed for generations on end. The all-inclusiveness of the neighborhood made it happen. This area had a strong proliferation of magician families, drawn to the magical education juggernaut that was Giddington. Even young magicians who stayed in more general schooling took night and weekend extracurriculars at magical schools, and Giddington was happy to offer them to all locals who qualified.
So Sunny’s neighbors, peeking out their windows to see his return, knew him pretty well in an academic sense, even if he was only “home” half the year at most.
The “trees” on Latolan were a fibrous flowering plant that grew fast and strong, twenty feet tall and five in diameter. They imported steel for the twenty-story buildings of Old Town and Westlake and the roller coaster park in the Lochburg river loop, but the local plants were perfectly sufficient for houses and even larger, low-stress buildings.
Sunny’s townhouse unit was part of a cluster of four that shared the front courtyard, all painted coordinating pastel colors with white trim. Sunny’s was peachy-pink. Leafy, thorny bushes underneath his front windows had been threshed back, but only barely. His neighbors on either side had made the smarter choice of having totally potted plants, but even these overspilled their containers.
“Liddy?” Sunny looked back down the path. He had spent the whole day so far looking back for em, it felt, constantly searching the path behind him.
“Will your door plants bite me?” ey asked. Sunny dropped his hand to the tangle of vines by the door, and one of them lifted to him. It wrapped around his finger, testing his aura and looking for bio-magical familiarity. It gave a little squeeze, then retreated, satisfied.
“George is fine,” Sunny replied. His plants liked him specifically because he didn’t cut them back unless they really, desperately needed it. And even then, they usually asked first. Deadheads and poorly developed leaves were an energy drain.
In the front window, a roll of vines pressed against the glass, seeking Sunny’s aura through the barrier. Lidea moved up behind him, giving a little space to the plant that was now creeping up to sense em out. “George” brushed against eir leg, decided it approved, then circled back into the mass of thickety bush.
“See?” Sunny let them inside, opening straight into the dining area of the first floor. To the left, bleeding in from the dining space, the far wall of the kitchen created a division between the spaces, a little window peeking into a sitting room beyond. The stairs along the right wall disappeared into a dim upstairs.
The walls were a mellow olive green from front to back with complementary neutral clay tiles all the way through. Sunny set his bag down on a small, round, wooden dining table, just big enough for four chairs. Based on the extra shine along the back of the chair and the marks in the floor, he only ever used one spot. Lidea followed suit, laying eir bag on the table next to his.
Ey had planned to pick out only the things ey actually needed from storage. Then ey saw all of it in a single three by four space and didn’t know how to process that eir whole life fit in a closet. Sunny encouraged em just to have it sent over to his house to sort through, and it was still on the way.
Lidea followed as Sunny drifted through the house, frozen in a state of disuse. The kitchen cabinets were blue white, the more ecru of the refrigerator standing out awkwardly in contrast. Sunny opened it to reveal only a handful of things in the door, mostly bottles of sauce and jars of jam.
“Need to go to the market,” Sunny said, closing it again. Lidea moved along the right wall, peeking into the living space. A matching overstuffed couch and chair floated in the middle of the room, a dark vegetal purple, tied together with a simple, low-pile rug in dual-toned stripes of mustard yellow. Around the corner of the outer wall of the stairwell, built-in bookshelves were packed full of military histories, chronicles of technological invention, and engineering manuals. Even so close to overfull, the books lined up like soldiers, small gaps created with bookends to separate out different sub-subjects.
The left wall, facing the couch, had a low wooden cabinet with a boxy television on it. On the first shelf of the cabinet, the face of a gray videotape player peeked out from the blackness. Lidea toed open one door of the cabinet to find rows and rows of neatly shelved video and audio tapes.
Even after all these years of traveling, it still felt weird for video tapes to just…exist in someone’s home like this.
Things like film and recorded tapes didn’t cross gates well, making it functionally impossible for the average person coming across on foot. It took the level of shielding that only governments and large corporations could construct. The demand for Purvailan-recorded media was high enough, however, that going through such a complex trade process still proved lucrative. It brought with it a trade — often underground — in Areylan-recorded media as well. The higher the magical density, though, the more that ambient pressure degraded various kinds of film and tape. Not everything could be transferred to a magic-friendly format, so you either invested in more shielding or expected to lose the recording eventually.
So on Correlan, where Lidea grew up, the expense of importing videotapes and television sets made them a communal purchase. Gathering at eir grandmother’s home with eir cousins and a few of the neighbor kids for weekly movie nights was a fond childhood memory.
Latolan was a lot closer in magical density to Purvailan, so a lot of those problems disappeared. Thus, a personal collection of media became more accessible.
A cord hung out of the back of the television, hooking into the wall. Latolan also had live broadcast television of shows created on-world, and ey had no idea how that worked. Ey could work eir head around videotapes because it was just photographic film and phonographs spliced together somehow. Ey perfectly understood the propagation of sound waves through the atmosphere to create radio. How both light and sound could travel through a cable in the wall right into your television was too weird, though. Too foreign.
Eir brain would probably pop if ey ever actually went to Purvailan.
“Liddy,” Sunny grumbled from the bottom of the stairs. He started moving up them, expecting Lidea to follow. Ey stalked up after him, running the edge of eir pinky up the railing. The wall at the top of the stairs was full of photos in simple wooden frames. Lidea glanced over them, recognizing faces of people they both knew in some of the group shots. Lidea emself was in a lot of these photos. More than ey was prepared to actually face in real life.
Sunny went for the closed door to the left first and opened it into a small workshop room with a thick artificer’s workbench and a pegboard wall full of perfectly aligned tools. Lidea knew, without looking, that around the corner of the door would be stacks of drawers with tiny bits and baubles in them. Every artificer workshop was the same. Sunny’s were probably actually labeled, though.
Everything as it should be, Sunny moved down the hallway, past one door into the bathroom, toward his bedroom, feet loud as they moved off the rug runner to the tiled floor. He was waiting for em to notice, to voice the thing he had been purposefully avoiding drawing attention to because it raised too many additional cascading questions. His bedroom was as he left it, large bed against the long wall to his right. Directly across from the door, the sheer curtains on the window let in the softer light that the flowering plant there preferred. He walked over to the low console table to greet Josephine, and it flicked a thorny vine at him.
“Hello, darling.” He checked the self-watering valve with a turn, letting it drip a little into the soil. It squeaked, so he followed the flexible tube with his eyes across the floor. It went through the attached door into the bathroom, then up under the sink. Lidea moved into his field of vision as he checked the connector points, and ey could see the thoughts churning as ey looked over his neatly made bed.
“Is your couch a convertible bed?” ey asked.
“Uh…no.”
“Your workroom-“
“This is the only bed in the house,” Sunny said.
“So…what are we doing? Are we temporarily converting your workshop?”
Sunny turned to look at em head-on.
“We share a bed all the time.” Sunny flopped his hands against his thighs.
“It’s different when we’re on the road. We don’t usually have a choice.”
“Okay, come on.” Sunny sat on the bench at the end of the bed. “We almost always have a choice, and we always choose to share. I don’t know why you’re denying that.”
“And I don’t know why you’re pressuring me like this,” Lidea snapped. Sunny pressed his jaw tighter, thinking, making sure he didn’t say the wrong thing.
“I’m sorry if that’s what it’s feeling like.” Sunny stopped before he talked himself into a corner. He ran through a few options before settling into uncertainty. “I don’t know what you want me to do or say from here.”
Lidea sighed.
“Let’s just go get some groceries,” ey said.
Despite eir irritation with him, ey found emself grabbing his hand as they took the tram down to the grocers. They were part of a small group of people who disembarked in front of the large, low building. The doors auto-opened for them, inviting them into the foyer with the cart corral. Sunny picked up a rechargeable icebox from the station and attached it to the cart, pushing forward into the store.
Lidea didn’t really buy batches of groceries when ey was on world and had grown up in more of an open-air market with independent food sellers kind of environment. With so much importation, Tomar relied on a more corporate supermarket system. One that was at least aware that most people used public transport. Sunny eschewed grocery delivery, preferring to actually feel the items he planned to eat.
“What do you want to eat this week?” he asked as they moved through the fruits and vegetables first.
“You going to cook for me?” Lidea asked, putting some apples into a biodegradable mesh bag then settling them into the open area of the shopping cart.
“I cook for you all the time, already,” Sunny pointed out, referring to the road rations he frequently made for both of them.
“Yeah fair. Okay.”
They moved through breads and chips and other snacks, picking up things here and there, until they wheeled around to the meat and cheese and dairy and fish counters. These all went into the ice box to be kept cold and delivered separately.
“Professor Childress! I thought I saw your lecture on the schedule, but I wasn’t sure if you confirmed.” The ariesian woman caught them as they were debating on which ice cream they wanted to add to their cart. She ran on the petite side, pearline horns peeking out of a puff of black coily hair in its natural spun-sugar state. She honed in on Lidea sharply.
“Is this Lidea?” she asked with a sharp smile. She reached for Lidea’s hand, and ey took it numbly. “I’m Dana Sinclair. My wife is head of the department he lectures under.”
“Oh! Fun!” Lidea managed, gagging on the words and unsure how to react.
“How long are you in town for?” Dana asked, leaning on her grocery cart with a sharp elbow, almond eyes flicking under sharp eyeliner.
“Uhm. I don’t know yet. Usually just a couple of weeks. I haven’t picked up my next contract, yet, though.” Lidea found eirself twiddling with the end of eir braid over eir shoulder. Dana clapped her hands sharply once.
“How do you feel about bookbinding and printing?”
“Neutral?” Lidea replied, but Dana was already digging in her purse for something.
“I work at a local shop, and we have some magic inlaid filigrees and blah blah blah. And regulation says we have to have at least one registered mage on staff to monitor etc etc.” She found what she was looking for in her bag and came away with a business card. “Our current one is retiring this week, and the new one was supposed to start next Monday. But! They’ve been delayed by another job. We have a makeshift solution, but if you can fill in for eight weeks-“
“Eight weeks?”
“Yeah, if you’re available! Come by tomorrow, and we can talk about it in more depth. Mid-morning.” Dana tapped the address on the card, then vanished around the end of the aisle, some of the mystery spoiled by the squak and squeal of the cart. Lidea looked down at the card then shoved it in eir pocket.
“We should get chocolate,” ey said, reaching for the small cardboard carton and dropping it in the icebox.
“Are you going to go check it out?” Sunny asked when ey kept silent.
“Eight weeks. I haven’t stayed in one place that long in a really really long time.”
“Maybe it’s a chance for something new.”
“I’ll get restless. I can’t…I don’t think I can settle down that long.”
“Have you ever tried?” Sunny asked, trying not to snap. Lidea stopped, leaning on the handle of the basket, knuckles paling as ey gripped tightly around it.
“No. No, I’ve never tried.” Ey ground eir jaw. “I can maybe do that, at least.”
Lidea laid on the couch with eir head on the armrest, still wet hair wrapped in a towel to keep it off the upholstery. Ey had found a broadcast of a crime thriller from Purvailan that ey was mostly following. Ey didn’t know much about cars, but ey was pretty certain they didn’t explode all the time. Still, it was entertaining.
By the time they had made it back from the grocers, eir stuff had arrived from the storage locker. The afternoon had been spent picking apart haphazard boxes someone else had packed quickly to save eir stuff from the burst pipe. Spread out in the company of Sunny’s material existence, the transience of eir life flashed in stark contrast.
The discomfort in this new environment hadn’t started fading yet, but ey was accustomed to that specific feeling at this point. Ey was always in a state of readjustment, of constant adaptation. Lidea had become good at it, being in that state of flux and movement. Were eight weeks enough to lose that ability?
Ey traced the sound of Sunny’s footsteps above and behind em. He’d dry his hair, go to bed, and probably fall asleep quickly. Ey counted the moments in the tension of eir jaw, trying to math how long all this would take him. Ideally, ey would just wait for him to be asleep and ey could slip into bed without conversation. Ey just wanted to sleep, right now, not face new and terrible patterns of existence. The show eventually ended (the husband was ultimately the murderer, of course), and that felt like enough time.
Sunny heard Lidea trying to walk as softly as possible down the hallway and laid still as ey opened the door, letting em have the space without the weight of his attention. He opened his eyes a slit and felt guilty immediately. But then Lidea’s bare back was pale in the moonlight coming in through the window, and he couldn’t pull away, memorizing the lines of eir spine and shoulders. Then ey slipped another, more billowy shirt on and moved toward the bathroom to brush eir teeth.
Sunny gripped the blanket tighter as ey came back toward the bed. Ey sat on the edge, hands resting on eir bare thighs.
“I can feel you still awake, Sunny,” Lidea said quietly, low enough that he probably wouldn’t have heard em if he wasn’t wide awake still. He poked em in the hip. Ey smacked him a away a little and laid down, bringing the other blanket up to cover emself from the waist down, arms falling to eir side to lock eir body into place. Sunny reached over and touched eir hand. Ey let him but hesitated before reciprocating, turning eir hand over to let his fingers interlace.
“I know what you’re trying to do.” Ey had figured it out in eir nervous system before the ideas drifted up into eir brain to ruminate and form coherence. Sunny waited for em to elaborate, but he was fairly certain he knew what path eir brain was heading down. “You’re boiling me alive.” Sunny waited again, but Lidea had stopped. Maybe he didn’t understand after all.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You asked me to marry you, and I didn’t give you a hard yes. And now you’re freaking out because you don’t handle that kind of thing well. So you’re boiling me alive. You’re going to press little changes on me without me noticing until, suddenly, I’m waking up to make us breakfast before heading off to my office job while you get our two and a half kids ready for school.”
“Neither of us planned to have kids.”
“That’s not the point.” Lidea pinched the bridge of eir nose. “The point is you’re doing it, and you’re not subtle.”
“I’m not trying to do anything,” Sunny countered, knowing immediately, as he said it, that he has probably been nudging them both without thinking about it.
Both of them were stubborn and struggled with change, but he had one big, specific alteration he wanted to make to his life: having Lidea be a part of it permanently. He kept thinking ey just needed to be shown what that life could look like, to bring the image that lived in his head into a space where Lidea could see it, too. So if he could just…push em…a little…
And now he saw exactly what ey was saying. What ey’d been saying this whole time and he was continuing to struggle to accept. They had always flowed together so easily, he didn’t know how to handle real friction between them.
Lidea rolled over, away from him.
“I’m tired. And I’ve got that meeting at the bookbindery tomorrow.”
“Are you thinking about taking the jo-”
“I’m tired,” Lidea said more firmly. Sunny rolled over away from em, as well. He touched his shoulder-blades to eirs, and ey didn’t pull away, at least.
“So…what do you think?” Dana made a dramatic sweeping gesture through the windows that looked down over the bindery floor. The tour had been cursory, Dana running em through the basic process of receiving material to copying and printing it. This printer focused on informational and educational texts. They printed almost every medical pamphlet in the entire city.
The only set of machines they lingered on was the responsive magic ink process. It was an old and refined enough process, it could be used to create everything from tattoos to commercial food labeling. Here, they pressed ink into paper that could respond to various stimuli as needed by the brochure or pamphlet. Maybe a scroll of medicine side-effects or highlighting different parts of a diagram with just a tap. Once it was set up, the printer only needed an artificer for repair and maintenance, but workplace regulations demanded a magician be in the building while they ran. Whatever anyone’s personal opinion on the matter, the laws were stringent enough to have Dana recruiting in a grocery store.
Lidea wouldn’t actually have to do anything, though. Not really. Dana said she’d find em something to do to fill the time if ey wanted, but honestly they just needed a warm body, for now.
“You know,” Dana said when Lidea didn’t respond, moving up next to em to look out the window. “Sunny mentioned you were big on social systems.”
Lidea attempted a professional shrug. Ey wasn’t like Sunny with his hyperfocus on geology and engineering. Ey just sort of picked things up as ey went, collected information about the world bit by bit as ey moved through it, let it wash over and through emand leave whatever flotsam behind.
“It’s an interest, yeah,” Lidea finally affirmed. This was the real world where people abided by social norms, not out in the wilds. Ey needed to resettle into the patterns of civilized conversation. “Does Sunny actually talk about me?”
“Oh, all the time. Only good stuff, I promise.” Dana gave a vague pat on Lidea’s arm. “So we’ve been taking some customer feedback for one of our off-world clients.” Dana moved around to a small crate next to her desk and brought it up on top. It was full of loosely parceled papers with scrawly hand writing on them. “We haven’t really had a chance to go through and process them, though. Could be a great little side project while you’re here warming a chair.”
“This feels like you’re trying to hard sell me on the job,” Lidea said. Dana rolled forward on her toes a little.
“Look, you’d be doing me a huge favor. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We can’t afford to shut down our magic printer, so I made a deal with guild Thannaly that they could throw whoever was available at me to make sure we have someone in the building. However, I don’t need a bunch of random street mages I don’t know coming through and having to do the paperwork over and over again. Sunny knows and trusts you. I trust Sunny. Transitive property.” Dana gave em a pat on the back.
“Hey, it’s basically a paid vacation. Give it a day to think on it.”
Lidea shifted on eir feet, mirroring Dana’s uncertainty. Maybe that was the way to think about this. Not a cage. But a break.
A rest. One ey needed.
Sunny didn’t normally need to do things like staff meetings, but he always liked to come back to campus a few days ahead of time to check paths to his lecture rooms and get a sense of any changes. This meant a small foray into one of the faculty lounges for coffee and sweet snacks. He ran into a few other faculty, some permanent, some in a more temporary position like his.
Giddington, right from its lowest levels, was about teaching kids how not just to live as magicians, but use those abilities professionally if they so choose. The upper-level education required at least a few classes that explored the pragmatic side of this. Those kinds of classes needed teachers who had that practical experience. Those people were often still working in the field, and there was no way to nail them down for a full semester of teaching. Six weeks was usually feasible, though, and they could work it into the schedule.
A lot of universities and through-level schools all over the connected worlds had similar sub-semester class slots, so he could probably pick up lectures anywhere. He enjoyed coming back home to Latolan, though. It was like a break. A reset. One day he was pretty certain he would just come home and stay home.
His hand got a little tighter around a mug.
He just had to fit Lidea into that, somehow.
“Sunny!”
“Yasira, hey.” Sunny greeted a stone elf who had wobbled in through the door, tight white braids bouncing along his back. He had been a mercenary at one point then a broken back took him out permanently. He had hard shifted to teaching a few different history subjects at the secondary school level.
Yasira moved up to get his own mug of coffee, gray skin darker against the white of the ceramic.
“I wasn’t sure if you were coming by early this time or not. Come out this weekend and catch up.”
“Um, yeah, maybe. Let me double-check with Lidea.” He pressed his lips together, trying to figure out how that selection of words sounded together.
“Oh, not gonna keep you from em, of all people.” Yasira stirred his coffee with intent.
“Ey’s actually in town longer this time, maybe. And ey’s staying with me so…it’s…I just want to make sure ey didn’t have something planned.”
Yasira looked him over.
“Lidea’s staying with you. Does that…mean anything?”
“I don’t know yet,” Sunny admitted.
“Well,” Yasira tapped his spoon on the edge of the mug. “My office number’s the same. Let me know.” But he made a clicking sound as he moved back out the door. Sunny pressed his palms to the countertop that held the coffee machine.
Yasira would make one casual remark to one of their shared circles of acquaintances, and the entire guild row would know by the end of the week. Probably needed to decide what it meant by then.
The bed was empty when Sunny woke up. It had been every day so far. He was the first to go bed, as well. Lidea was purposefully giving up little margins of eir own sleep to not be in bed with him while they were both awake.
The days ending out the weekd had been…odd…He had taken em around, got some clothes that were more “work appropriate” for the bindery job ey had decided to take, went swimming in the spring-fed pool before it got too cold to bear. But Lidea refused to hold the ends of the conversation up, and that had dunked them into a weird, tense silence.
It was something Lidea had noticed a long time ago but had born it out because it seemed like such a minor quirk of their relationship. When ey thought about having to drag conversation out of Sunny for the next eight weeks solid, the weight started dropping heavier. Whey ey extrapolated that out to the rest of eir life, the thought turned eir bones brittle and eir muscles drawn. Maybe ey would grow used to it. Maybe it would become a pattern ey one day grew to miss when Sunny invariably preceded em into the planes beyond life. Ey wouldn’t go down that road without fighting it, though.
And Sunny had picked up the change. Of course he had. Lidea suddenly fading into silence beside him meant he was barely talking. So much so he’d noticed his voice croaking and complaining in even just a short time. There was probably a full panoply of wrong things, but he was too stupid to figure them out from one another and address it. He needed Lidea to walk him through it, but that also didn’t seem entirely fair.
He found em in his workshop down the hall, sitting in his rolling high-backed chair, staring blankly at the wall of tools.
“I knocked some of your books off the shelf by accident,” Lidea said. “One of them was a photo album. Didn’t look.” Ey glanced toward where it had fallen on the floor, open to a page in the middle. Ey didn’t know any of the faces in the photos except for a young, beardless, short-haired Sunny. The baby-face clean-cut affectation of a twenty year old artificer-in-training still trying to prove himself. Lidea was telling the truth, but only barely. Ey had squatted down, fingers to the edge of the page planning to turn the page. Ey didn’t. Couldn’t. It was peeking into Sunny’s past without his permission. Ey didn’t want that.
When Sunny looked, he saw a flash of one of the worst weeks of his life. Of Echo’s face next to his in a class photo just before everything so bad for everyone involved. He toed the book shut. It still wasn’t the right time to bring all that up. He picked up the others — reference manuals and notebooks with calculations — and stacked them back on the nearby shelf sloppily. He immediately hated that and set them up straight and tucked them in properly. That still wasn’t good enough, so he shuffled them into the right order, moving some other things on the shelf so that it made sense again.
Lidea watched him the whole time.
“Okay, this shit. This is the thing I’ve been thinking about most.” Lidea swiveled the chair toward him dramatically. Sunny shifted back and forth on his feet in front of Lidea.
“What are we talking about?” he asked, glad for the seed of conversation.
“If I’m going to be here for the next eight weeks, it has to feel like my home, too. It’s only been a few days, so I haven’t had a chance to really fuck up your environment yet, but it’ll happen. Can you be cool when I do?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” He wasn’t going to ask em if he’d been particularly particular. He knew who he was, and Lidea was a saint for putting up with it so far without making a big deal out of it. Lidea swiveled in the chair, rocking on eir heels.
“I don’t…hm…I’ve never had a place that’s just mine. Long term, you want me to share this place with you, I need to figure out what that means.”
“Understood.”
Lidea glanced over him some more, giving him a chance to elaborate on his own terms.
“Something else.” Ey tapped eir fingers along the crest of eir knee. Sunny felt his own hands tense to prepare for whatever this was. “I’m realizing that as much as I know you, I also don’t. I don’t know the version of you that lives here, just the one out there. I’d like to get to know this version.”
“Okay.”
“And I’m bad about this, too, but I want to know more about you before we met.”
“Um.” And they both felt that hesitation like a lake of sludge. “Alright,” Sunny agreed.
“Alright.”
“Okay.”
The phone on the wall behind him rang, and Lidea jumped. Ey technically had a phone in eir room at the Thýlalykófoton, but it never rang. It hadn’t gone off at Sunny’s either, so ey sort of forgot they existed.
Sunny picked it up on the second ring.
“Sunny, you busy?” Yasira said through the phone.
“Yes and no.”
“Come over and check the energy transfer unit on my bike.”
“Is this an excuse to hang out because I never gave you an answer about going for drinks?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
Sunny hung up the phone with no additional conversation. Yasira would know.
“Want to go over to a friend’s house?” Sunny asked. Lidea wanted to know this “version” of him better. This was the best he could do, for now. Yasira would certainly spill some semi-convenient truths of Sunny’s existence.
Lidea nodded.
“I’ll break out one of my new pairs of pants.”
It was hard to pin down any part of Tomar as “new.” The city, as an urban unit, had become as big as the wilderness was willing to let it, right now, and they had reached that footprint a generation ago. Eifanei, however, was among the first three provinces defined, wood elves desperate to make sure they had carved out their chunk of land. The center of the province was wood elf construction, blocky and austere and sensible.
From there, though, a ring of stone elf neighborhoods had formed with a cluster of bull elf blocks. In theory, there was a small sun elf neighborhood somewhere toward the middle, too, but in all the times Sunny had been through Eifanei, he had never found it. And he’d actively looked, boredom giving way to curiosity sometimes during his lengths of teaching. That mystery was probably by design.
Yasira’s condominium was closer to the highway intersection, a tram stop up from the sprawling shopping plaza that covered all corners of it. Lidea stopped briefly at the sign at the entrance to the apartment homes. Ey looked for an ownership tag in the text below the neighborhood name.
One of the strong connecting threads of all elves was that they rarely had any kind of personal possession over their own home. Everything was technically owned by a clan leader, and you sort of “paid in” to live on your property. Not quite renting. Something that existed in the in-between spaces that humans had designed around property rights.
Eifanei wasn’t clan-lands, though. It was direct District governance through Tomar. Ey tapped eir finger to the sign when ey found it. Ey’d figure out what exactly the “Eifanei Council” looked like from a logistical perspective, later. Despite technically living here, in this city on this word, ey kept a lot of distance from it.
“Liddy?”
“Coming.” Lidea took a few long steps to catch up to him.
He brought them down a small garden path, through a lovely shared courtyard where some stone elf kids were playing disk throw, and up a flight of stairs. Yasira must have heard them coming, because he threw open the door for them as they approached.
“Get in here, you two.” Yasira grappled Sunny around the shoulders and pulled him into a hug, pressing Sunny’s face into his chest.
“Can’t breathe.”
Yasira released him, arms staying in a u-shape. He reached for Lidea with a handshake, but ey let him go in for the side hug.
“It’s great to actually meet you,” Yasira said. “I hear about you all the time.”
“Yeah, I’ve been getting that, lately.”
Yasira hooked them both under the elbow and brought them inside. The apartment was neat and boxy. The left was hallways into the bedrooms. The right side was a combined living room with a frosted glass door leading into the kitchen. It was open, and the smell of baking bread drifted out. A stone elf woman stood in the doorway, hair tucked under a blue scarf, floral dress hiding a profoundly pregnant belly.
Sunny spread his hands in surprise, gesturing to her midsection.
“Indy! What the hell, when did this happen?!” Sunny met her across the living space and shared another hug.
“We had only just found out the last time you were home. I’ll pop before you head back out again.” Indy patted Sunny on the back, then looked up at Lidea. “You’re Lidea.”
“Yeah, everyone seems to know me, but I don’t know anyone.” Lidea shifted nervously, letting Indy give em a side hug as well.
“Um…I…” Sunny floundered. He was cut off by a loud stomping from the floor above them.
“This is terrible timing, Sascha.” Yasira grabbed a broom leaning against the wall and gave five raps to the ceiling, two evenly spaced then three quicker and closer together. The stomps returned the same pattern. It was one form of the distress signal shared between wanderers-by-trade when they met out in the wild.
“Damn it,” Yasira muttered, dropping the broom against the wall. “Her asshole ex-boyfriend is back. Y’all come with. Maybe it’s actually good timing.”
Yasira breezed back through the front door, Sunny and Lidea hot on his heels. He brought them up the stairs and back down the space between apartments to the one just above his. The door was cracked open and voices were pouring out, raised and angry.
“Stay a few steps behind for a second.” Yasira yanked the door open and barreled in.
This apartment was built like the one below, but inside were two people caught in the middle of a screaming match. The woman, Sascha presumably, was a stone elf mixed with a little something else, probably a sylvan grandparent. It wasn’t super apparent in her appearance, but it ticked over in her aura. The man screaming at her, backing her into a corner, was fully human and several shades of angry.
Sunny felt a knot form in the base of his stomach. He had been here before, watching this kind of thing unfold with other friends who had called him in for backup. It never went smoothly for him.
Lidea touched eir fingers to the outside edge of eir shortstaff, unlatching it from the leather strapping that holstered it to eir thigh. It was an instinctual sort of movement birthed from the tension in the room. Not that ey was much of a fighter.
Yasira had hopped in between the couple as Lidea and Sunny moved around.
“Hey, man,” Yasira said. “Let’s all calm down, come on.” He hooked his hand around the human’s arm and started giving him a gentle push.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” the ex-boyfriend snapped, yanking his arm out from under Yasira’s grip. “This isn’t any of your fucking business.”
“You’re stressing out my pregnant wife with all the yelling, friend; let’s bring this all down a little.”
It was standard mercenary technique to attempt de-escalation before ever wielding a weapon in earnest. If he were still an active member of the mercenary guild, he would have a lot of legal leeway to inflict grievous defensive injury without getting in trouble with the law. Even retired he could get away with a fair amount of violence. It was good he was disinclined toward it, and the mercenary screening process had done its job.
“I told you to back off. ” The ex-boyfriend actively pushed Yasira this time, forcing the stone elf to yield a few steps. Sunny moved closer to Lidea, brushing the back of his fingers against Lidea’s free hand. Yasira moved in a little closer, hands out in a placating fashion. The ex pulled back to swing.
Things shifted into slow motion for Lidea, then. It was actually one of the simpler approaches to magic and part of the irst set of systems young magicians learned. It wasn’t hard, and ey didn’t need to be careful.
Ey whipped eir staff out into an arc, drew magic up, then slammed the energy down against the human with a sweep. The solidified energy crashed down on his body in a flush of force, and he collapsed underneath it mid-punch. If he’d been expecting it, he probably would have dodged or withstood the magic, but he simply hadn’t been prepared. He laid on the floor, flat, facing upward, breath knocked out of him.
Yasira squatted down next to him.
“How about you go downstairs, Sascha? Indy was making lunch. Let my friends and I have a conversation with him.”
Sascha glanced between them all of them wide-eyed and sweating.
“Okay.” Her voice was soft, doe-like, and she scampered out of her own apartment, grabbing her keys in a weird tumult of clumsiness.
Yasira turned back to the ex-boyfriend. The human moved again, breaking out of Lidea’s pressure plates. He tried to swing again, but this time it was Sunny who dropped a boot lightly on his chest. Lidea always forgot about his cursory mercenary training until he did something on the edge of vicious like this. It felt…weird…like another version of him forming in front of em. But then, again, ey had been slowly increasing the pressure of eir own magic the whole time, securing the human aggressor more firmly to the floor.
Yasira pressed his hand to the ex-boyfriend’s chest.
“Now, look. I like Sascha. She’s sweet. Been helping us set up the nursery. And she moved here…to get away from you. Now I’ve been dealing with your shit for four months, and I’m starting to get tired of it. I’ve got a baby on the way that I need to focus on.”
The human tried to sit up, and Yasira pushed him back down.
“My good friends here are in town for a bit, and they’re a lot meaner than me.”
“I’m not sure why this guy isn’t black and blue already, honestly,” Lidea said. Ey had no idea where the words came from, but they felt right. Felt tough in this weird little playacting they were doing. Sunny ground his boot a little, enough to force a grunt out of the man on the floor. The truth was they were all old and tired and didn’t really have the energy to beat up some random twenty-something.
“So how are we handling this?” Yasira hissed. The question hung heavy for a moment. The human shifted and whined.
“I’ll go. I won’t…I won’t come back.”
Sunny lifted his foot, and Lidea let the magic slide off him. The human rolled to his knees and scrambled out the door, hands brushing and dragging on the floor as he went. Yasira stood back up with a creak in his spine.
“I expected the tough guy act from Sunny, but you’re not bad either, Lidea.” Yasira arched backward, hands on his hips. “Okay. Let’s head back.”
Yasira led them through the door, locking behind them with a latch from the inside.
“Be there in just a second,” Sunny said, sending Yasira back toward the stairs with a shrug. He turned to Lidea. “I feel like I need to apologize for that.”
“Why? You’re mercenary auxiliary, so you’re going to know mercenaries. And mercenaries do shit like this. You think I’ve been walking around blind to that this whole time?”
“I…I don’t know.” Sunny leaned over the railing, looking out over the courtyard below and the glimpses of city beyond. “You were fast in there,” he said as Lidea joined him. “I’ve never seen you do magic quite like that.”
“I mean, that’s just what my magic looks like when I don’t bother refining it, force and energy.”
“Never really thought about it, I guess.” Sunny hung his hands on the railing. There were a lot of things he hadn’t really thought about. Just moved forward without assessing. “That won’t be us,” he said, gesturing to the door of the apartment behind him.
“What?” Lidea asked.
“That. Sascha’s boyfriend. Whatever happened there. We’re not like them.”
“Well, I mean, yeah. If you ever thought you could come into my home and yell at me, you’re leaving in a body bag.”
“I…okay, yeah, that’s fair, you’d beat my ass.”
“And you’d deserve it.” But Lidea weaved eir fingers into his hair, flicking at his ear with eir thumb. “Is that something you were worried about?”
“I thought I had ruined it by pressuring you to live with me.”
“Nah,” Lidea breathed. “We just needed some air.” Ey kissed him on the side of the head. “I just watched you step on a man’s chest, and it didn’t scare me off. Might take even more than I realized,” Lidea mused. “Let’s go eat whatever Indy was making.”
Lidea dropped eir hand into Sunny’s and pulled him toward the stairs. He’d have been satisfied if the “even more” wasn’t so terrifying to face.
Pixels and Pins Studio 