It wasn’t that I found Glory threatening in the way that there were certain people I wouldn’t want to be alone with, whether or not they were a physical danger to me. It was more… social fear. Dee had stayed out of our conversation, playing the role of silent guardian until we reached the point where words would protect me instead of her presence, but she’d been there. Knowing I hadn’t been alone, that someone had been watching my back, had made a huge difference in my confidence.

I told myself that as perfectly poised as Glory seemed to be, she was obviously nervous, too… it might have been less obvious if I hadn’t seen her sister’s even more pronounced insecurity first, but I had and the markers were all there with Glory. She was probably more worried about maintaining her position than any specific fear relating to me, but still, it helped to know that I wasn’t the only one in the room who had doubts about how I handled myself.

It also helped that Glory’s whole aspect had relaxed once we were alone. Her face transformed from a blandly smiling mask to… well, she was still smiling, but there was more animation and her eyes were bright with tears, not just rabid insistence.

“Okay, okay, okay… tell me exactly what she said about me, in as much detail as you can remember,” Glory said.

There weren’t that many true incantations of great power left in the world. History was full of legendary words of power whose mere utterance could supposedly produce great magical effects, but the truth of what these words were was lost to the ages. I wasn’t yet even twenty years old, and with Glory’s help I could now report that I’d rediscovered one of these ancient spells: the phrase “tell me exactly” had the power to obliterate memories.

“Um… she didn’t say a lot about you, but what she did say was good?” I said, trying to remember what had been going through my head when I said whatever it was that I’d said that had got Glory so worked up that she needed privacy to express herself in the first place. It had been something about Grace being impressed with Glory? No, that wasn’t quite it. It was something about Grace wanting to impress Glory… which sounded less significant now that I was thinking about it. “Like… the main thing I was thinking about was that at one point, Nicki said ‘thank you, my lady’ or something like that, and Grace sort of wished that you could hear it? It was something like that.”

“Okay, but did she… was she talking about everyone or me in particular?” Glory said. “Because I could totally see her thinking that might improve her standing with the group… honestly, it would be kind of a mixed bag since some of us would see it as her getting above her station, but she can be naïve about that.”

“It was definitely you in particular,” I said, with a bit more confidence. “It wasn’t what she said so much as how she said it, but it sounded like she was talking about her big sister, not her queen.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“…reasonably sure.”

“How sure is reasonably sure?” Glory asked. “I mean, like, what would you bet me that you were right, in terms of your body?”

“…you mean, would I have sex with you if I was wrong?”

“No, I mean, what would you let me take,” she said. “You know, with a knife? Not that I would! I’m just… it’s a handy metric for confidence, you know? Like, would you bet your tongue? Your clitoris? Your… head?”

She said the last part with such a hopeful note in her voice that it gave me an aggressive enough case of the willies to overpower the reaction I’d been having to the thought of someone taking a knife to my clit. I was pretty sure that what she meant by that was something similar to what a human might mean in asking someone “would you bet your life on it”, but the added degree of specificity and the knowledge that in middling culture the words weren’t as far divorced from reality was still chilling.

“…I don’t think I’d bet any part of my body on this,” I said. “But that’s not a measure of my confidence. I bet my ass on what I was pretty sure was a sure thing before, and that’s not something I’d repeat for anything.”

“Okay, but you’re… pretty sure?” she said, with a bit of reluctance, like the words weren’t really adequate but would have to do.

“I am pretty sure,” I said. “Like, I just met your sister, but… and I hope this isn’t somehow insulting to you… she didn’t seem to be that hard to read?”

“No, she really isn’t,” Glory said. “Part of that is her age… stillness is something that takes time to learn… and part of that is just Grace being Grace. Treehome might… fix a lot of that.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Well, I think it’s not good for her to be so open, and that stillness is a useful set of skills to learn, but then I think, that’s mostly because of what Treehome is like,” she said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure that it will also be helpful for her in her adult life, but if that’s the case she has basically unlimited time to learn it then, and I’m not sure that letting Treehome beat the Graceness out of Grace just to help her survive Treehome is worth it. If that makes any sense?”

“…it makes more sense than most things I’ve heard about Treehome,” I said.

“I just don’t see what the alternative is,” Glory said. “I can’t protect her forever.”

“But don’t you only need to protect her while she’s in Treehome?” I asked.

“Yes, but I’m less than two decades away from adulthood, and less than that before I’ll be out of excuses to stick around,” she said. “And adults don’t meddle in middling affairs… it would make both of us look ridiculous.”

“Okay, but, does she need to stay in Treehome longer than you?” I said.

“She’d have to take a huge course load to qualify for other university housing,” Glory said.

“The dorms are full of people who manage them,” I said.

“People who don’t have any other choice but to try to cram a lifetime of education and education into a few paltry years,” Glory said.

I thought about pressing the point that humans could manage something she apparently thought was impossible for elves to match, but I had a feeling that we weren’t quite there in terms of actual friendship, and might never be. People were rarely grateful to have the conflicts between their beliefs pointed out.

“Okay, well, it’s not like her only choice is Treehome or moving into a dorm,” I said. “I don’t know your family’s finances or if staying in Treehome costs anything, but I get the feeling she might be able to get enough money to arrange for her own housing.”

“Her own housing, you say?”

“Yeah, like an apartment in town or something,” I said. “Commuting to campus might be annoying, but if she only has a couple of classes a semester it could be less so.”

“You’ve raised an interesting idea,” Glory said. “But… we are on a timer here, and I didn’t bring you here to talk about my sister’s future but her present. Before I… before we went off on a tangent, you were talking about working together to encourage the relationship?”

“Yeah… well, like I’ve said, I don’t actually know Nicki much better than you do at this point, but the thing is, I am getting to know her,” I said. “And I’m probably also going to see your sister interacting with her more, since they’re probably not going to be going back to Treehome together and I can’t really imagine you spend a lot of time hanging out with your sister socially.”

“I hope we’ll be really good friends when we’re both grown, but no, that just wouldn’t be done,” Glory said. “So you’re saying you’ll keep tabs on them for me?”

“…I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said. “But I can let you know if something important happens, like something worrying is going on or if Grace mentions a problem, or even if something happens that’s good.”

“How is that not keeping tabs on them?”

“I don’t like the thought of that,” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to be following them around, or hanging out with them to get info for you. But since I probably will be hanging out with them… or at least hanging out with Nicki when she’s with Grace… I will notice things, and I can tell you if something important happens.”

“Do you really need plausible deniability for this?”

“It’s not plausible deniability,” I said.

“Oh, you’re doing that thing again!”

“What thing?”

“Sincerity,” she said. “I’m a little miffed that you’re basically saying that you wouldn’t hang out with them on my behalf when it’s something you’ll do anyway, which just seems petty. I kind of wish I had someone I could punish for that who wasn’t my sister. Can I kick you in the cunt before we go?”

“…that might be hard to explain to Dee,” I said. I instantly wished I’d protested in stronger terms, on my own behalf… coming up with excuses for things I didn’t want to do instead of saying no was an old habit that I’d mostly broken. In my defense, though, the bizarreness and suddenness of it had taken me by surprise.

“You don’t think she’d understand?”

“I’m pretty sure the idea of casually kicking someone there would piss her off on a religious and cultural level,” I said.

“Really? They’re really all about the pussy down there? I always assumed it was, you know, something we made up to make them sound more evil,” Glory said.

I wanted to ask her what would be evil about that, but I was probably the wrong person to be challenging that particular cultural more.

“In any case… I don’t actually think you should have authority to punish me,” I said. “But what I said wasn’t petty to me. There’s no need for me to do something on your behalf if I’m doing it anyway.”

“Yes, but you couldn’t, like… do it in my name?”

“What would that entail?”

“I don’t know, just saying that you’re doing it in my name,” she said. “It sounds cool? I think I would like for people to do things in my name.”

“So, when I’m hanging out with your sister and her girlfriend, you want me to announce that I’m doing it in your name?”

“…okay, when you say it like that, it sounds… yeah, it’s not a perfect plan,” she said. “But you will tell me things?”

“Anything that seems important, as long as Nicki doesn’t ask me to keep it to myself,” I said. “And, um, they are going to know that I talk to you. I don’t keep secrets from friends.”

“Oh… well, that sounds non-negotiable?”

“Completely,” I said.

“Would talking to your owner change that?”

“Nope,” I said. “In fact, she would insist that I don’t.”

“Okay, then I guess I can live with it,” she said. “Okay, before we go, is there anything else you can tell me about what happened?”

“I don’t know what you already know,” I said.

“Well, assume I know nothing, because I mostly quizzed Grace on the sex… I didn’t know enough about what else might have happened to know what to ask about, and it sounds like you were there after the sex happened.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I went over to Nicki’s room to talk to her… I didn’t know that they’d met. They were both mostly naked when I got there, but I thought they could use some air and food so they got cleaned up and dressed and we went over to the food court. Your sister was pretty worked up that Nicki did things like holding doors for her, and at some point she agreed that Grace could call her ‘hers’… though the parameters of that aren’t settled, like exclusivity and stuff. They both seemed to want to take thing slow there.”

“You don’t think Nicki’s having doubts, do you?”

“I think that she doesn’t really know Grace yet,” I said. “But I think it’s like Dee leaving me alone with you… it’s not that she distrusts you in particular, and in fact I think she trusts you personally more than she would a lot of surface elves she just met, possibly more than many people in general, but she still doesn’t know you and so she can’t trust you fully. I think that’s how Grace and Nicki feel about each other, and about their relationship. They like it, but they’re not going to leave it alone in a room yet. Metaphorically, I mean.”

“Hmm,” Glory said. “It seems like the best thing I could do right now would be to release Grace to spend time with Nicki, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s really the best,” I said. “Like, don’t get me wrong… I do think it’s good that you can sort of pull them apart, make sure they come up for air and get some time and space apart to think.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think it would be good for either of them… or their relationship… if they end up spending all of their time together like they did the past few days.”

“Hmm, you have a point,” she said. “And that’s really good, because I had been about to say ‘too bad I can’t do that’ on the whole releasing Grace thing, because technically she’s being punished. But I could spread the punishment out over a longer period of time? Then she’d get more slack from the others while she’s off punishment, and I’d have an excuse to rein her in.”

“Because you couldn’t just not punish her or end her punishment,” I said.

“Yeah,” Glory said, nodding in agreement. I decided not to push it. Grace had also expressed the idea that Glory’s punishments protected her from worse treatment at the hands of the rest of the court. “So… I guess that’s our plan then? I’ll cut Grace loose and you’ll tell me how it goes?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “How will I reach you?”

“Oh… I hadn’t thought of that,” Glory said. “As much as I’d like to say that I will be reaching you, that wouldn’t make a lot of sense, since I won’t know if you have anything to tell me until you tell me.”

“Um… I’m guessing you have a magic mirror?” I said.

“Yeah. Wait… do you?”

“I have access to one,” I said.

“Okay, then we have a plan!” she said. “This… didn’t at all go like I expected it to, but I can’t really complain about how it turned out!”

And there… right there… I understand what it was about Glory that I liked, in spite of her superior manner and her other flaws. Just being not as bad as other middlings in Treehome wasn’t enough to make her likeable, but she’d believed me when I said I didn’t know things she expected me to know. She didn’t throw a tantrum or break down or ignore reality when the facts didn’t coincide with her expectations or I didn’t fit her mental image of me.

It was… nice. If Grace took after her big sister as much as I thought she did, this boded well for Nicki’s relationship.

Or for her relationship with Nicki.

“I wasn’t expecting it at all,” I said. “But I’m glad it happened.”

“So sweet! Just for that, I’ll let you be the bearer of good news,” Glory said. “If you see Nicki, tell her to expect Grace tomorrow!”

“I will be extremely happy to do that,” I said, and I meant it.

Attention, MU readers!

On occasion when I want some extra money for con expenses, I give readers the opportunity to name a building on campus via the traditional method for doing so: giving money. There’s going to be a new building coming up in connection with Glory and Grace, which means there’s an opportunity to make your mark on the story. The price is $300, and it’s first come, only serve. I will contact the purchaser to discuss their name choice. I reserve the right to reject a name that is unsuitable, but will work with the buyer to come up with a name that meets their needs and works. Typically people pick names to get their own or a friend’s name into a story, or as a memorial to someone they care about. If you want to use the opportunity to honor someone in particular, I can work in some details of the real person’s life into the fictional background of the person in-world the building was named for.

Gilcrease and Paradox Towers, the Archimedes Center, and the Emily Dactyl Center are all examples of buildings named by or for readers, as is the Ian H. Smith Hall.

We have a buyer! Thank you, lucky and generous reader… I’m in transit today, but will shoot you an email tonight that you may respond to at your leisure.

When she was sure she had everything under control, she very carefully and very precisely knocked, inserting a suitably long pause in between each rap.

“Come on in, it’s open!” he said.

“Professor Harmon?” she said, opening the door no more than was necessary for her to slip her frame through, which wasn’t much.

“Miss Mariel! I’m so glad you had time to come see me,” he said. “Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” she said. The chair was pushed in close to his desk. It would have been awkward for her to try to pull it out, so instead she vaulted the armrest and settled into it. Sylphs didn’t exactly fly, but they were known to flit.

“Last year, you were enrolled as a traditional full-time student,” he said. “And as far as I remember from our last meeting, you weren’t looking to change that. But this year, you’ve scaled back to half the credit hours and you’re living off campus. I know you struggled in your first semester last year, but your grades were excellent by the end of the year and the last time we met I had the impression you were thriving.”

“Yes, mmm hmm,” Mariel said, nodding enthusiastically. “That’s right. I had a 4.0 for the semester and I was pretty proud of that. It’s like you said I just needed to cut out distractions and apply myself.”

“So…” the adviser said.

“So?” Mariel repeated.

“I guess I’m just wondering what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know. Is something wrong?” Mariel said, her voice rising in pitch and speed as her nervousness overtook her. “From my point of view everything’s been going great. I was so super worried when you asked me to come see you but if you don’t know what’s wrong and I don’t know what’s wrong then why are we thinking that something’s gone wrong?”

“Because a promising student doesn’t usually revert to part-time status unless something has happened,” he said, wincing as Mariel smirked and possibly… just possibly… let out a very quick laugh at something. “If you’re struggling with tuition, we do have financial aid packages that you could qualify for… I’m sorry, is this funny to you?”

“Parts of it are?” she said. “It’s just ‘part time’. That’s funny to me because it’s kind of extra-accurate. I don’t know if you know anything about sylphs…”

“I don’t think of you as a sylph, I think of you as a student,” he said.

“Yeah well this student is a sylph,” Mariel said. “And sylphs live faster than you do. We think faster we see faster we hear faster we talk faster. And most important for this topic we learn faster. A week to me is like a month if I understand it right. A season is a year. None of my friends understood why I wanted to come here and learn things ‘the long way’ but I was sure that there were things I could learn from a university I couldn’t learn in an apprenticeship from another sylph.”

“I remember you told me that, and I agree,” he said. “I absolutely agree… and I hope you haven’t changed your mind about that.”

“Oh I haven’t!” Mariel said. “I mean I’m here aren’t I? But after spending so many months to get just a fraction of my education and having to deal with everything at one-quarter speed I started to see everyone else’s point too. Life here is just so slow. And four years for an education? And I realized that it wasn’t home I needed to get away from but people I mean specific people who weren’t good for me and those kinds of people can turn up anywhere. So I don’t want to spend the next three years of my life like I did the last one.”

“But, Miss Mariel, going about it this way, it will only take longer,” he said. “If you want to graduate in less than three years, I think you’ve got a good chance of it. Especially given your… abilities… that you’ve described, which sounds like they would allow for a larger course load.”

“Except they don’t?” she said. “I mean just because I can cram an hour into fifteen minutes doesn’t mean I can be at four places at once during that hour. It means I’m sitting there in one class getting the same amount of information as everyone else but I’m sitting there for four times as long. You see me taking half the normal load of classes but from where I’m sitting I’m still spending twice as much time in class as everyone else. I came back because there are still things that I want to learn that I can’t get anywhere else but I also spent my summer break getting a traditional education instead.”

“…a university education is a traditional education.”

“I mean traditional for me,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to get most of it transferred or recognized by the university? I mean I might be able to test out of some courses for prerequisites but there isn’t a lot of that in the style track of glamour and design so I was kind of hoping later on to talk to someone about getting my other training recognized somehow?”

“We might be able to have that discussion, but if apprenticeship were a substitute for a university education we wouldn’t have universities,” he said.

“I always thought it was because of efficiency?” she said. “I mean it’s easier to find one teacher for dozens of students then it is to find dozens of masters but aren’t smaller class sizes and hands-on experience preferred even in the university? And aren’t professors expected to keep their information and skills current? That’s what an apprenticeship is I mean it’s a class with no more than half a dozen people at the very most and it’s all hands-on experience by someone who’s been doing continuing education every day of their lives.”

“We can debate this some other time,” he said. “The fact is that a couple of months of apprenticeship couldn’t count for more than a couple of credit hours, and even with that this approach is going to make it take that much longer to get your degree.”

“Oh!” Mariel said. “Oh okay I understand now. I see where you’re coming from.”

“I thought you would,” he said. “You are a bright young woman.”

“You think I’m still going for a degree,” she said. “Oh man sorry I don’t mean to laugh again but suddenly this conversation makes a lot more sense. Sorry maybe I should have told you that my plans have changed? I don’t know it probably seems all very sudden and impulsive to you but I had a lot of time to think about it.”

“That may be so, but I am your academic adviser, and it would make sense to discuss these things with me so I can give you my advice before making any decisions that will have as big an impact on your future,” he said. “The good news is that one semester won’t have much impact, especially if we can get your apprenticeship recognized… there are some programs we can…”

“Sorry I hate to interrupt I mean that was the one thing that was drilled into me about interacting with other races but I have to ask… impact on what?”

“Impact on your ability to graduate on time,” he said.

“But I just told you that I don’t want my degree?” she said. “I did a what-do-you-call-it a cost/benefit analysis on spending four whole years of my life working at a human’s pace towards it and decided it’s not worth it. So I’m coming back to learn what I can’t learn any other way and I’m getting a traditional education at the same time well not at the same time but in between and when I’ve learned everything I need to know I’ll be done though I might come back and take new classes that catch my eye or to keep my skills up.”

“But a degree can open doors!”

“So can a good portfolio and work experience and I’m building those things and if it comes down to having a piece of paper I can go to one of those schools that gives a certificate in a lot less time,” she said. “And no I’m not saying that’s the same as a university education or I’d just go to them in the first place but if I need something to get me through a door so I can show off what I learned here then I’ll have it.”

“You’ve clearly given this a lot of thought, but it’s just as clear that thought is no substitute for wisdom,” he said. “A certificate from some twelve-week course in a strip mall beauty school can’t possibly be compared to a degree from a university of Magisterius University’s stature.”

“I wasn’t comparing them?” she said. “Except in the sense that one takes twelve weeks and the other takes four years. I’m not saying the degree isn’t better but it’s not worth the cost to me in time and energy. I don’t understand what the point of this conversation is. When we first met which was a long time ago for me I asked you what an academic advisor did and you said it was your job to help me understand how to reach my educational goals. Well I’m telling you what my goals are and it seems like you’re trying to talk me out of them.”

“The reason academic advisors exist is because a traditional university student has at most three and a half years of experience with the university system whenever he or she makes choices relating to the educational career,” he said. “Which makes it very easy for one to fall prey to errors of thinking or make mistakes that could be costly in the long run. It’s my job to prevent you from making that mistake.”

“I am telling you if I try to do six more semesters like the last two I will not just drop out I will burn out,” she said. “Imagine your college experience lasted four times as long and you didn’t get anything more out of it. Imagine every class was four times longer and the teacher spoke four times slower.”

“But there must be trade-offs!” he said. “You must be able to complete reading four times as fast.”

“Yes but from my point of view I’m not getting it done any faster I just have more empty hours between the agony of sitting through classes,” Mariel said. “That and I’ve always learned better from watching and doing than reading.”

“So we just need to come up with an approach that’s tailored to that,” he said.

“But I did that?” Mariel said. “If you want to help you can maybe help me figure out which classes are going to give me the most practical knowledge and which ones are just like there to pad things out?”

“Hang on a second,” he said.

“I hang on every second when I’m talking to you,” she said. “No offense.”

“What I mean is, I don’t think I could in good conscience help you try to plan your way around the kind of robust liberal arts education that a university offers,” he said. “If all you want is practical knowledge you might as well just go to beauty school or a community college.”

“So that’s your advice? Go to community college?”

“No!” he said. “Absolutely not!”

“Professor Harmon… I need to ask you a question,” she said, slowing herself down even more to make sure she didn’t say something she regretted.

“Please!”

“Are you on my side?” she asked. “I mean… when you’re advising me, are you for me, or are you for the school? Because I feel like I’m talking to a salesman who has a product he’s sure is wonderful for a thousand and one household uses and I’m not sure he understands that my household is just… different.”

“Miss Mariel… of course I’m on your side,” he said. “I’m your advocate and your counselor. I represent the university, yes, but when we’re in here as advisor and student, my only goal is to help you.”

“Do you ever advise anyone that they should go to community college?”

“Sometimes… sometimes it happens that students are just not right for the university, or the university isn’t right for them,” he said. “Sometimes a student’s academic record is in shambles and multiple corrective courses of action have failed to yield significant improvement. Sometimes it really is for the best.”

“So I should wait until my grades fall and my record’s in shambles before I do this?”

“You shouldn’t be so pessimistic,” he said. “It’s not just because you pulled your grade up so much that I think you belong here. You have such a rare combination of gifts: an eye for style, a unique flair, a strong magical talent! Why waste your potential? The first year is always the roughest, but you can’t decide on the basis of…”

“Four years,” she said. “It was four years for me professor and even though I was doing better by the end it was harder by the end so much harder.”

“Well, if we’re going to split hairs, it would be eight semesters,” he said. “Which isn’t the same as four calendar years, and that’s even assuming the exchange rate is exact… anyway, this is all a tangent, isn’t it? You asked me what my advice would be, and it’s to not assume that all the classes on our curriculum are pointless.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m asking you to help me figure out which ones would have the most point for me. And I get the whole varied education thing. Honestly some of my non-major classes last year were some of my favorite and I want to audit a few more. I mean I don’t think I need to go for a grade in them since they’re not going to be leading anywhere. I mean they won’t lead nowhere but not to a degree.”

“You’re asking me to rate our classes for relevance?”

“Isn’t that what you do?” she said. “If you knew my goal was to graduate with a Bachelor of Skill in Glamour and Design you would tell me if you thought my classes would help me reach that goal. Well if I tell you I have a different goal why can’t you do the same? Like you said you know better than I do. All I have is a course catalogue and word of mouth.”

“Miss Mariel… one of the functions, the most important function, of an academic advisor, is to help a student chart a course to graduation,” he said. “But you’re telling me that you have no interest in graduation, so I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Then maybe you should take some time to think about it?” she said.

“Maybe I will… if you promise to think about what I’ve said,” he said.

“I don’t think you understand how much I’ve already thought about this,” she said. “Anyway if I get out into the world and change my mind I can always start my career and take night classes to finish my degree since I’ll have a lot of the important stuff done?”

“Yes, but who knows where you’ll be at that point?” he said. “It might not be convenient for you to come back here to finish up.”

“So that’s it,” she said. “You are selling a product.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not trying to get me to graduate on schedule. You’re trying to make sure I buy another three years’ worth of classes.”

“You’re assigning me a motive that doesn’t exist,” he said. “I think Magisterius University will benefit you more than another institution would. I only have your interests at heart.”

“Well you promise to think about what my interests are and contact me if you think of anything that will help them,” Mariel said. “But if we just keep flitting around in circles you’re more likely to lose me as a customer so… I should leave?”

“I hope you’ll consider what I’ve said.”

“If I say I promise I will, do you promise to not do the thing where you check it off in your head like it’s a done deal and the next time we meet you act like I agreed with you because I hate it hate it hateithateithateit when people do that,” Mariel said.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that?”

“Excuse me, I sneezed,” Mariel said. “My mind is pretty well made up.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. He got to his feet an extended a hand across the desk. “But my door is always open to you if you want more advice.”

“Why bother when I know what it’ll be?” Mariel said. “I’d thank you for your time but mine is literally more valuable than yours.”

“Gesundheit!”

At first I thought Glory was just pausing as she searched for the right word to use to describe Nicki’s relationship to Grace, which made sense. They’d just met, and a whirlwind weekend together wasn’t necessarily the makings of anything else. Or maybe she was struggling to define things in terms that would be acceptable to her sensibilities but not overly insulting to Nicki, or humans in general.

But as the pause stretched into a silence and I began to feel that there was something expectant in her intense stare, I had to wonder if I’d misinterpreted her. I mean, I’d been expecting her to ask about Nicki, so maybe I’d heard a possessive where there had been a plural. Had she meant “sisters”? Grace had only mentioned one, but if Glory was the one with status then maybe she’d been the only one who was relevant to the conversation.

Or maybe I’d misheard her completely… maybe my brain had inserted the S because it had been expecting something about Nicki? Maybe she just wanted to know what her sister had been up to during her time away from Treehome. But then, why not ask Nicki? Unless for some reason she thought her sister had spent that time with me… or maybe she was coming to me because I was there and Nicki wasn’t

“…just to be clear, you should be talking here,” Glory said. “My fault, I’m sorry, I probably confused you by praising your silence just before. That was probably a bigger deal for you than I realized? I mean, I knew it would be nice for you, but now you’re probably staying silent because you’re worried that nothing you say will please me as much as silence did.”

“…I was actually waiting for you to finish the sentence,” I said. Explaining myself seemed safe enough, but the sentence felt a little blunt and bare. “Your majesty.”

“But I did finish the sentence!” Glory said. “Oh, wait, that’s not a complete thought in Pax, is it? It would have been, in Elvish… sorry, I’ve had decades to master this language but try to guess how much of that time I spent talking to humans about their relationships. This is embarrassing… I promise, though, everybody else in the room knew exactly what I meant. You know, I’ve heard it said that the Imperium is an ‘ownership society’ but people are weirdly and inconsistently squeamish about these things.”

“I actually was pretty sure you were talking about Nicki, but it would have been rude for me to answer before I was sure you’d finished talking,” I said. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Well, aren’t you sweet?” Glory said. “Yes, Nicki is the one I wanted to talk to you about. I want to know everything about Nicki.”

“I… well, I appreciate your hospitality,” I said, deciding to throw that in so I wouldn’t just be contradicting her, “but you’d be better off asking her yourself, really.”

“Yes, but that would be meddling in my sister’s relationship in a way that I have not yet chosen to do so,” she said. That sounded less ominous since the whole last clause was said kind of hurriedly, like she was throwing it in there as an afterthought. I figured she was probably covering her ass… suggesting that her sister had any kind of expectation of privacy or autonomy in her relationships would probably be perilous for both of them. “But I figure you know her as well as anyone.”

“I… might have to disappoint you,” I said. “I mean, I like Nicki, but we just met this year, and we’ve barely hung out together outside of class.”

“Really? From what I can tell, you’re the best friend she has. I mean, you walk in together sometimes. There are a lot of interrelationships among the people in your circle,” Glory said. “But Nicki’s only tie is to you. When she joins the group, she’s there as your friend. And when she’s not eating with you, she’s eating alone, or not going to the dining hall at all. At least, this has been the case since we started paying attention to her, and admittedly that was only when she started eating with you.”

“Why did that make her interesting?”

“Because you’re interesting,” Glory said. “Your life. Your existence. The fact that you drive my dear auntie into an exquisitely rage is interesting.”

I felt the cold clutch of terror when she said this, knowing that her aunt Ariadne had an office in the building, and had the same supernatural sense of hearing as any other elf… but then I realized that we were in a side room off a big open floor where the lunch crowd was currently being served, and I couldn’t hear anything from outside the room. The conference room was silenced.

Suddenly, the whole audience before the queen thing made a lot more sense. She didn’t want her aunt to overhear our conversation. Whether she’d noticed the invitation or understood it would depend on how much attention she actually paid to me, but if she did ask her niece about it later Glory would have the option of lying.

“You’re not talking again,” Glory said. “I’m not sure if I should be worried or flattered.”

“I’m sorry, the topic of your aunt makes me a little nervous. I wouldn’t try to enrage her on purpose,” I said. “She has a serious issue, and it’s caused real problems in the past.”

“Oh, well, she’s basically harmless,” Glory said.

“I don’t want to suggest that I know your aunt better than you do, but how sure are you of that?”

“I’m totally sure, but I just realized you probably thought I meant harmless in general or to you in particular,” Glory said. “I actually meant she’s not an actual threat to me, which in retrospect is probably less reassuring to you than it is to me. But this is all beside the point… I don’t like, go around antagonizing her to try to stir her up against you and see what she’ll do. The only time that I actually interfered was to head off trouble, even.”

“Yeah… thanks for that,” I said. “I really appreciated it.”

“Don’t mention it!” she said. “Seriously, you undermine your position in the negotiation by admitting that I did you a favor.”

“…I didn’t realize we were negotiating,” I said.

“Really? What would you say is happening here?”

“We’re having a conversation,” I said.

“It’s interesting that you think of those as separate things,” she said. “Oh! So, you’re not playing coy about Nicki to try to get a better deal?”

“No,” I said. “The only reason I wouldn’t tell you about Nicki is if I thought you’d use the information against her, or it would hurt her relationship with your sister… or if we were talking about her behind her back. I mean, in a negative way. Obviously if we’re talking about her and she’s not here…”

“Oh, believe me, you don’t need to explain the concept of talking behind someone’s back to me,” Glory said. “And I have every interest in encouraging my sister’s relationship with her… and I’d really prefer if you’d phrase things that way.”

“What way?”

“With Grace in the possessive position,” Glory said. “It’s creepy the other way around.”

“So, in Elvish, only one person in a relationship ‘has’ the relationship?”

“No, but our language in its purest form has hierarchical cases for nouns that Pax lacks,” she said. “If you said, for instance, the master’s apprentice or the apprentice’s master, or the parent’s child or the child’s parent, the nouns take a case that reflect the standing of the one over the other. Pax puts everyone on a level playing field, which is fine for things like ‘apprentice’ and ‘master’ because it’s part of the connotation of the words themselves, but if you start talking about two people who are in a relationship… if they’re both each other’s girlfriend, then it almost sounds like they’re the same thing to each other, which is… creepy. But I didn’t invite you here to tell you about linguistics. What can you tell me about Nicki?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s nice?”

“Yeah, humans tend to be. What about her in particular?”

“She’s a glamourist? She likes to do things with her hair,” I said.

“Anyone who sees her twice could tell me that,” she said.

“She’s very friendly and very shy,” I said. “Which seems… kind of painful to me. I mean, I’ve always been shy, too, but I’ve also been closed off.”

“Okay, let me get to the meat of it: Okay, I imagine you’ve had sex with her. What was it like?”

“I haven’t,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

“It’s weird that your culture treats those things like they’re elemental opposites even though humans your age seem to have sex with their friends pretty often,” Glory said. “I was going to ask you how she was. Grace was raving about it, but she doesn’t have a lot of experience except in servitude. For that matter, I wouldn’t mind finding out how Grace was. I like to think she would have accounted for herself with style.” She gestured around her, towards the elves seated near her on the floor. “Like, these guys all say she gives terrible head, but you kind of have to say that, in that kind of position.”

“Because otherwise it sounds like she’s doing them a favor?”

“Well, no, because it’s a service she’s expected to provide,” Glory said. “It’s more because it would sound like I’m doing them a favor by providing them with her in the first place. So they can’t be too grateful. Anyway, You really haven’t had sex with her?”

“Glory, I promise I’m not going to lie to you about anything during this meeting,” I said. “Seriously. I’ve never had sex with Nicki. Weren’t you paying attention when she was complaining about her lack of sex?”

“Yes, but I thought she was being hyperbolic,” Glory said. “Or would it be hypobolic? I just assumed she meant she wasn’t having nearly enough of it. I couldn’t imagine she meant none at all…”

“Before she hooked up with Nicki, how often did Grace have sex in the sense that you mean it, instead of just… this sounds rude to me but I hope it won’t to you… being used for others to have sex?” I asked.

“None at all,” Glory said. “But that’s her position. I can’t imagine going without any sex in the absence of a social structure that prevents it. Okay, so, were you there when Grace had sex with her?”

“No,” I said. “I’m… not really comfortable with the idea being in the room when people I’m not in a relationship with are having sex.”

“Damn, I guess the only way to find out if Nicki’s good enough would be to try her myself,” Glory said. Her lips stopped moving, but the rest of her words reached my ears in a very quiet whisper. “Though I won’t, because that would probably destroy Grace.” She resumed speaking normally. “This was fun to begin with but it’s not at all going the way I envisioned it. I thought you would be able to give me the real inside scoop on things.”

“Well, just so it’s not a total loss… what are you trying to accomplish?” I said. “You said you want to encourage your sister’s relationship with Nicki. As long as Nicki’s happy and it’s good for her… which, so far, I think is true… I want to do the same.”

“Are you proposing an alliance?” Glory asked. I thought I sensed a shift in Dee’s posture and maybe an intake in breath, and I figured she was tensing to stop me from agreeing to something without knowing the details of what I was agreeing to. Even without the labyrinthine intrigues of elven culture to trip me up, I did have a bit of a history of that kind of thing.

“…I don’t know what all that would entail to you, so I’m going to say I’m not and instead say that I’m proposing that we help each other towards a common goal,” I said.

“That sounds like less fun, but surprisingly more efficient if it really works,” Glory said. “But what would it entail?”

“I hadn’t thought much about it,” I said. “But, well… we can just sort of… generally encourage them? I mean, she didn’t really explain, but I kind of got the impression you gave Grace a bit of a push already? I think constantly doing that might not be a good idea… I mean, given that you said you don’t want to interfere. But I think just knowing you approve of her relationship means a lot to her. I got the impression she really admires you.”

“Well, naturally she has to,” Glory said. “Wait… you mean… really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like, from the heart, not just because of your relative positions. Again, I know your sister even less well than I know Nicki, but she really seemed to care what you think. At one point she was excited at the thought that you might be impressed with her.”

“Excuse me, Dee?” Glory said. “I know you’re here for Mackenzie’s protection on behalf of her owner. Do you feel she’d understand if I asked to speak to Mackenzie without you in the room?”

“I feel I would not be derelicting my duty if I were to step outside, if your followers and servants do the same first,” Dee said.

“Oh, well, I suppose I can be that gracious,” Glory said. She waved her hand and without a word, the other surface elves got up and glided out. “Thanks!” she said when the door was closed. “I’m so glad you suggested it, I was hoping you would. I didn’t want to have to offer it myself as a show of good faith, because that sounds like I’m planning bad faith.”

“Your intentions were transparent to me,” Dee said. “There is something you wish to say to Mackenzie that would make you seem weak or make your sister seem coddled, but to ask your friends to depart yourself would have been rude.”

“Thank you for understanding!”

“You’re quite welcome,” Dee said. “I’m afraid you might not understand me as easily as I understand you, though, so I will take the opportunity to make myself clear. I have heard only good things about you and your court, but it is my understanding that some of the… attrition… of human students each year comes from being ensnared in the affairs of Treehome.”

“That’s true,” Glory said. “It’s never been my doing, but you’d be foolish to take my word for it, and you should never be foolish with someone else’s property. What do you propose?”

Dee stood up and crossed to the back corner of the room, where there was what I had assumed was a storage closet but now I noticed had a pop lock on it just like the main door did. She opened the door and looked out, then closed it.

“This room currently has two exits. With your permission, I’m going to seal this door for the space of… thirty-two minutes should be more than sufficient.” Dee said, gesturing towards the door she’d just closed. She then gestured towards the one we had entered through. “I will know when the divine seal elapses, and will knock on this door for re-admission before that happens. Otherwise, when you have finished your conversation, I expect Mackenzie to walk out that door ahead of you. If you walk out first, your majesty, then I will take necessary steps to ensure that you do not leave before I have ascertained her well-being. Because you are an elf and because I know nothing of your personal capabilities, I will prioritize speed and effectiveness over gentleness. I would very much prefer to not do these.”

“I am flattered that Mackenzie’s owner thinks so highly of me to send such a capable guardian for her property,” Glory said.

“Yes,” Dee said. “You are. Mackenzie, you should avert your eyes now.”

I did. I still felt Dee’s invocation of divine power as she prayed for the door to be sealed. When I looked back, I saw she had actually conjured a physical-seeming web of pulsating darkness that covered it.

“Mackenzie, there was no transfer of authority to give orders to me, and I wouldn’t be comfortable doing so, so instead I will ask you to accept my advice,” Dee said.

“I value your advice more than most people’s,” I said.

“If I thought our hostess meant you harm, I would not leave… I would insist we both withdraw,” she said. “I am almost certain she does not. I have not read her mind, actively, but either she does not have the training necessary to shield her intentions or else she is capable of multilayered misdirection that normally requires centuries to master. But we know you have an enemy who is an elf who is incredibly resourceful and dedicated.”

I nodded. I figured she probably was talking about Mercy rather than Ariadne, but she’d phrased her sentence in a way that wouldn’t give that away. It was possible that Glory already knew about the gray elf slaver who wanted to possess me more than almost anything… but if she didn’t, Dee wouldn’t have just given it away.

“So, in the unlikely event that Glory does attack you or try to take advantage of you,” Dee said, “my advice to you would be: do not fight back.”

“What?”

“Do not,” she said. “You’re unlikely to win, and likely to come to harm in the attempt. So do not fight. Instead, set the room on fire. The entire room”

“I can’t do that!” I said.

“You can,” Dee said. “It’s not a large room. You will not endanger yourself because you cannot be harmed by the collateral of your flame any more than you can by your own flame. You will not endanger anyone outside the room because modern human construction standards require the walls to be flameproofed and the standard anti-fire wards would extinguish the fire if you yourself did not do that the moment the crisis passed. The only one in danger would be your attacker… your hypothetical attacker… who would have no safe place to stand. In the event that she has the power to protect herself from even powerful magical fire, the sudden blaze would be evident to my senses even through the door and would also bring a swift response from authorities.” She turned to Glory. “Now I believe you understand me as well as I understood you, your majesty.”

“You have the best friends,” Glory said.

“Yes,” Dee said. “She does.”

I woke up with no memory of my dreams… not so much as an inspirational training montage… though the feeling that my brain had been running a marathon all night assured me that the owl-turtle thing had been putting me through my paces. I didn’t want to complain because I’d been all in favor of using sleep learning, but it was disconcerting to know that my mind was literally being changed while I slept. Still, if what I knew about the owl-turtle thing and its methods held true, then on some level I had to actually be participating in the exercise, even if no conscious memory of it survived all the way through into the morning.

And even with that little bit of background worry, it was still kind of nice to have an uneventful night’s sleep. With so many things going on in my life, it was good to have eight or so hours of the day that just sort of passed without me noticing. That only left the other sixteen for things to go wrong in.

My Tuesday morning wasn’t very eventful, though. We still ate breakfast in the old dining hall, so there wasn’t even the chance of stealing a glimpse of Grace or her sister, trying to take the measure of their clique. Nicki didn’t join us, but I suspected she’d be sleeping in a bit. I did take the opportunity to ask Steff if she knew anything about Grace or Glory since there were no Treehome students around to listen in. She knew who I was talking about but didn’t know much about them.

“I know they’re pretty low on the tree, though,” Steff said. “I’m not saying Nicki could do better… or should want to… but in terms of social cachet, hooking up with the bottom girl in a fringe group isn’t a whole lot better than getting with one of the unaligned, unprotected outcasts.”

“Like you?” Ian said.

“Honey, I’m not even an outcast,” Steff said. “In terms of my position in elven society, I’m… basically you.”

“It’s always faintly disturbing to observe parallels between your society and mine,” Dee said.

“I just said, it’s not my society,” Steff said. “And it’s not even real society to begin with. Like, grown-up elves still do a lot of posturing and stuff, but these little houses and courts that they make up when playing feudalism in the woods, it doesn’t count for anything once they hit a hundred. Like, less than what sorority you join in college matters when you get out into the real world.”

“I would think it would be about the same,” Amaranth said. “I mean, the value of joining a heraldic order is networking with current and former members. Can’t people who were part of the same ‘court’ do the same?”

“Not really,” Steff said. “I mean, maybe they could, but the impression I get is that a lot of former middlings are embarrassed about their past associations. Like, they hit the big ten-oh and suddenly it’s like the last eight decades never happened. Anyway, Glory’s court is only going to exist while Glory’s there. When she leaves, there might be a new court that has a lot of the same members, but there’s no sense of shared identity except within the new version. And as Glory’s former followers follow her out of Treehome, they aren’t going to be looking to her for help, because her head start over them isn’t going to count for much against the centuries other elves have over all of them. She’s going to be right there kissing ass with the rest of them. The fact that they used to have to kiss her ass isn’t going to win her any loyalty or them any favors.”

“The whole middling thing seems like a huge waste,” Ian said. “They’re legally adults, under the Imperium… why don’t they just go out and get a human lifetime’s experience doing whatever the hell they want to do with their lives and then move into elven adulthood if they want to?”

“Some of them do,” Steff said. “But don’t you think that if you thought you had a chance of being one of the ones sitting on a throne made out of other people’s faces, you’d go and join the wild hunt, too?”

“Even if I did think that way… and I’m not saying that I do… how many people end up being in charge of anything compared to the number of people who are underneath?” Ian said. “And how much is it worth having a handful of underlings if you’re still getting shit on by everyone who’s more popular or more powerful than you are?”

“Right, but how many eighteen to twenty year olds are going to admit they’d not likely to end up anywhere near the top?” Steff said. “I mean, that’s the real secret of Treehome: the whole place would be a lot more livable for almost everyone who’s there if they’d stop competing for power, but nobody’s going to do that because first they’d have to admit they’re personally losing the competition. There are poor fuckers there who are going to spend the next quarter-century being some dude’s spittoon or footrest and thinking to themselves that they’re working their way to the top or just biding their time until the moment is right. They’d be the first ones to turn on someone who suggests upending the whole system.”

“Elven society is insane,” Ian said.

“Again, it’s not really actual elven society that works that way,” Steff said. “And second, that’s not some weird elf thing. It’s actually the way of the world. It just gets concentrated in middlings, because they’re living out elven ambitions over a human lifetime.”

I got a little worried that Nicki might have slept in too long when she didn’t show up for lunch, either, so instead I tried to see if I could spot Grace or her sister. I didn’t see Grace. I knew her sister had an identical face, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pick her out by that. I knew they wore their hair differently, but she hadn’t specified how her sister’s was, so I was looking at hair colors. Most surface elves were descended primarily from the groups that were called gold or silver elves, so they had shining yellow or very pale hair. I saw the dark honey color that Grace had on a masculine-presenting elf, but I expected Glory to be very femme and wearing a mouth veil.

“I don’t see any of them,” Steff said, noticing my survey of the room. “Oh, wait… I think she might be with them.”

I followed her gaze to an elf in a long, flowing canary yellow dress who was gliding into the dining area, seemingly towards us. As she got closer, I could see that it seemed to be made out of layers of some kind of gauzy fabric that were arranged in overlapping layers so that they were suitably opaque in the places that were convenient for decency. She didn’t wear a veil, but she definitely fit into the feminine camp… I supposed that might mean she was open to sex with more than women.

“Looks like maybe she’s coming to introduce herself,” Amaranth said. “That would be a nice change… not that the love-betokening business wasn’t exciting.”

“I told you, Amy-doll, nobody calls it that,” Steff said.

“Amaranth does,” Two said.

“…thank you, Two,” Amaranth said.

The elf in yellow stopped a few feet from our table. Now that she was close, it was obvious that she wasn’t just looking our way but was looking at me in particular.

“Mackenzie Jo Blaise,” she said. She stood up straighter as she said this, giving the impression of the opposite of a bow. “You are invited by Her Pretty Awesome Majesty, Queen Glory, to join her in the Harmony Conference Room.”

“Just Mack?” Amaranth said, frowning, and I didn’t think it was because she felt slighted at not having been invited. She still tried to love everyone, but she’d learned better than to trust everyone.

“The invitation is for her alone,” the elf said.

“Uh, how about Queen Glory comes and joins us?” Ian said.

“Yeah, I’m not going to go off alone with a bunch of people I don’t know,” I said, which made me think that maybe I did know somebody there. “Is Grace with her?”

“I was not told to discuss this with you,” the elf said. “And I was not instructed to entertain your objections. You have been invited by a great elf queen. Do you accept or not?”

By everything both Steff and Grace had said, it didn’t seem like Glory was that “great”, but her herald believing that she was probably had as much to do with the herald’s ego ad Glory’s.

“Amy, she’ll probably recognize your objection,” Steff said. “No offense, Ian, but she’s got more of a pedigree.”

“Hey, yeah… yes,” Amaranth said. “Um… who is Queen Glory to borrow my property without consulting me?”

“Shall I tell her you refused?” the elf asked.

“No… tell her you refused to allow me to take reasonable precautions regarding my property’s safety, thus preventing me from agreeing with her request,” Amaranth said.

“If it will allay your concerns, you may send a representative with her to ensure her safety,” the elf said.

“Should I go, or should you?” Amaranth said to Ian. “Or maybe we should send Steff…”

“Hey, Dee,” Ian said.

“Yes?”

“Would you mind doing me a huge favor?” he asked.

“I believe that in this instance, I would not,” she said.

“Hold on, Ian,” I said. “That might be pushing it a little too far.”

“So?” he said. “We’re being pushed. Let’s push back. Either we get to choose our ‘representative’ or we don’t, and if we don’t, I want to have that established in no uncertain terms.”

“But Nicki…”

“I know you don’t want to ruin Nicki’s new relationship, but if that means kowtowing to Big Sis every time she wants to throw a tea party, we should find out now,” Ian said. “You’ve got your own life to live and you can’t give up your freedom for someone else’s happiness. Anyway, if her sister’s going to be an unreasonable bitch about it, how happy do you think Nicki’s going to be in the long run?”

“You have a point,” I said. Even if I’d completely disagreed, I really didn’t want to continue a conversation that would involve Ian saying disparaging things about Glory in front of her servant. He did have a point about the cost of kowtowing to her, but there was a lot of middle ground between calling someone a bitch and kowtowing.

“Delia Daella d’Wyr, daughter of Daella Degra d’Wyr, is our representative, then,” Amaranth said to the herald. “Will that be acceptable to your queen?”

“…yes,” the elf said through unmoving lips.

Dee got to her feet, smoothed out her cloak and robes and pulled the cowl of her cloak up and then down over her eyes. She made a show of checking her mace and sword.

“Lead on, servant,” she said.

I knew there were conference rooms in the Archimedes Center and I had been vaguely aware that they were available for student use, though I’d never investigated the procedure for reserving one. They all had names like “Harmony” and “Cooperation”, invoking the spirit in which the center had been built. Instead of a simple plaque with the name on Pax, the Harmony room had a multilingual banner that had the word in Pax, Elvish, Dwarvish, and a few other languages.

The door was actually being guarded by two elven women standing at attention, or at least very still. Grace hadn’t given me the impression that her sister’s contingent was very large. I wondered if Treehome politics required them to maintain a guard, or if this was something special being done to make their leader look more important. I would have to try to make a point to bear in mind that however Glory spoke to or treated me, the whole formality of the thing suggested she thought I was somehow worth impressing.

The elf in the yellow dress knocked sharply on the door without so much as a glance at the two guards, then stepped aside as the door was opened from the inside by yet another elf.

“Enter and do not speak until bidden,” she said.

We did.

The inside of the conference room looked about as I would have expected, with an oblong table of some heavy, dark-stained wood. There were two large model crystal balls set into it, one near each end. Most of the chairs had been pushed against the back wall of the room, all except the one that was occupied by Glory. Seeing her, the resemblance to her sister was clear. Her hair was in pigtails, which I wouldn’t have expected, but she had a very regal way of sitting.

The elf who’d opened the door closed it behind us, then quietly slipped away to stand in a corner. There were three other elves seated on the floor, on the same side of the table as Glory but at varying distances from her. Grace wasn’t among them. The table in front of her had a big elaborate silver tea set and a bunch of plates of cookies and finger foods.

I hated thinking in hierarchies, but it was pretty clear what the ranking was. The one on the door was the lowest one in the room. The positions of the other three relative to their “queen” probably indicated their relative levels of favor.

“Welcome! Enter! Hello!” Glory said. “Howdy! Have a seat, both of you.”

“Thank you,” Dee said.

We hadn’t been bidden to speak, but I don’t think that mattered to her. She came from a society where rank was just as important but far more enduring than it was in middling society. She waved her hand… a gesture that I knew to be purely for effect … and a pair of wheeled chairs zoomed across the room and stopped at our end of the table. I followed her example and sat in one… it might not have been the best move diplomatically, but I had a feeling that sitting on the floor as expected would undercut Dee in a critical way, which I thought might be more dangerous.

I reminded myself that Glory liked humans, which I more or less was.

“You’re funny,” Glory said. She looked down at the elf sitting nearest to her. “Isn’t she funny, petal?”

“Yes, your majesty.”

“You’ll have to excuse my followers,” Glory said. “They aren’t normally this… stiff. They’re just on edge because I told them whoever fucks things up the worst for me today wins a special prize. Oh, but I’ve pulled you away from your lunch. Help yourself to any of the food or drink or condiments, and make free use of any of the utensils and implements and containers and dishes and, you know, the napkins. It is freely offered and freely given. Um, so, now you can eat the stuff without any cost, and I’ve got to be all insulted if you don’t, so please do.”

I noticed that nothing on the table seemed to have been touched… the stuff on the plates all looked like it had been carefully arranged for presentation and nothing was disturbed or missing. It was kind of suspicious that we were being asked to eat something that no one else in the room had eaten from, but I couldn’t see why Glory would want to poison me or dose me with something… also, from what Grace had said, this was a hierarchy thing. I could see envy in the eyes of the elves on the floor. They’d been sitting there with this meal out of their reach, and now they were expected to sit and watch two strangers… a semi-mortal and the wrong kind of elf… eating ahead of them. Even if they were allowed to serve themselves afterwards, there was still a message there.

I looked at Dee, but she was still hiding her face. If I’d been anyone else, we could have been telepathically conferring… she could have elven whispered in my ear, but there was no guarantee that Glory wouldn’t be able to pick it up.

“Well, it isn’t poisoned,” Glory said as we silently deliberated. “Do you know how much trouble we’d get in for pulling something like that inside the campus bounds? Everybody in Treehome would be at war with us if we brought that kind of heat down. Everything here was prepared by the campus catering service. Your friend Two probably knows half the people who made it. By the way, I love the way you’re not talking.” She looked at Dee. “You, a little less so, but I guess that’s kind of expected. But you,” she said to me, “you are just… A plus on the whole silence thing. Usually you tell a mortal not to talk to you and they’re all, ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’ But you… not a word. What’s your secret? Oh, don’t tell me. I almost wish I hadn’t asked you here to talk, because that’s going to spoil it. Seriously, though… eat. I’m doing a thing here and being very gracious about it, and so far it’s not working.”

“It seems safe enough,” Dee said. She reached out and picked a small strawberry from a fruit platter and popped it into her mouth, then began to fill a small plate with fruits and vegetables. “You will forgive me if I seem overly discriminating in my tastes, but I have a condition that limits my diet.”

“Well, I might, mouthy,” Glory said. She then stiffened, but said nothing else. I had an inkling that Dee had just made it clear she wouldn’t tolerate being insulted again, but had chosen to do it in a way that didn’t obviously challenge Glory’s authority in front of her followers.

I followed Dee’s lead in accepting the food, though I didn’t avoid the little sandwiches or cookies. I wasn’t sure about the tea… I wasn’t a big fan of it to begin with and I didn’t trust myself to pour it properly… but there was a pitcher of what looked like strawberry lemonade.

When we’d both taken food and drink, Glory gave a signal to the girl who’d been on the door, and she came over and began arranging things on a plate with quick, precise moments. I expected her to set it down in front of Glory, but instead she took up a position beside her, holding the plate at what I guess was a comfortable level for the elven queen and standing elven-still.

“Now, then,” Glory said. “We’ve come to a sad part of the proceedings, because you’re going to have to speak. Mackenzie… dear, darling, Mackenzie… I want you, no, I need you to tell me everything you know about my sister’s…”

“So, how was your summer?” Teddi said. It was one of her standard openers for the beginning of the year, when someone showed up obviously wanting to talk but not in a mood to start it themselves. As the semester wore on it would become “how are your classes?” and then “how were your exams?” and then “how was your holiday break?” when the next semester began.

“It was… good,” her patient said. She hadn’t sat down, choosing instead to pace the room as she spoke. It was her habit. “I visited Marlot, like we talked about. She never got tired of telling people I was her identical cousin from the Mother Isles, but that’s okay, because I was sick enough of it for the both of us by the time I left. So was everyone else, I think. I sort of admire her for not needing anyone else’s approval, but sometimes I kind of wish that other people’s disapproval would register a little bit with her.”

“You’re still friends, though?”

“I don’t know what I am to her. Her project? But we’re roommates, and we get along okay. I thought it would be harder, not going home… and I did get a little sad around midsummer, but all in all, it was more… more like a relief, than anything. I’m not sure what exactly I was relieved about, but I really felt like I’d given up a burden. Though…”

“Though what?”

“Though when I say it like that, it sounds like I’m shirking my responsibilities and happy about it,” she said. “Which isn’t something I’m happy about. But the thing is, nobody ever asked me if I wanted them. Nobody ever asked me anything. I was just a part in their system, and I was happy to be that, but I wanted to be more. And apparently that’s not possible, I either have to be exactly what everyone else expects me to be or I get kicked out.”

“The last that you’d told me, nobody was kicking you out,” Teddi said. “Did something happen, Barley?”

“No… well, yeah, kind of,” Barley said. “No one thing actually happened, it just… it was weird. Going back. Not just living in my field. Everybody was nice enough, but there was… distance. And I don’t know if it was always there and I just never noticed it before because I wasn’t used to humans in the valley interacting with me except as a nymph, or if it’s something that only happened because I’ve… changed.”

“I’m not judging your decisions,” Teddi said. “Only pointing out that they were yours to make. We both know you have a problem with owning your choices. And you don’t have to apologize to me… you’re the one who is hurt when you do that.”

“You’re right,” Barley said. “I think that’s part of why I… for lack of a better word… like Marlot. She does have a way of keeping me honest with myself. And… there is a lot to admire about her. In a lot of ways, she’s living the life that I thought I wanted for myself when I left the valley. I mean, she’s not actually very politically involved, but she lives the politics I tried to have. I think if I could go back in time to the start of last year and give myself some advice, it would be to get the hell out of Harlowe and hang out with the kids in Burlew instead from the beginning. It would have saved a lot of heartache, and not just for me.”

“So you no longer think that what you did helped Mackenzie, anymore?”

“I’ve stopped thinking it matters,” Barley said. “You always thought I was making excuses… I wasn’t. Well, I was, but that wasn’t one of them. It was a mitigating factor I clung to in case my excuses didn’t work, as I always suspected they wouldn’t. And you know? It still might be true. It might be true that my… attempted rape… screwed up Puddy’s, which could have gone much farther or turned out even worse… but there are a hundred ways I could have stopped the whole thing on purpose. I knew it was wrong, and I didn’t think I could stop it… or I convinced myself that I couldn’t… or whatever. Like you said, I struggle with owning my choices, and I don’t think it’s possible to sort out what was going through my head without tripping over a dozen rationalizations, because that’s what I was doing. But the point is, I did make my choice. I made a lot of choices, starting with my choice of friends. If I’d done better on that score, the other, later choices wouldn’t even have been an issue. And no, I’m not saying my actions are the fault of the people I was hanging out with, I’m saying I shouldn’t have been hanging out with them.”

“You sound like you’ve been giving this a lot of thought,” Teddi said.

“Not on purpose,” Barley said. “I mean, I’m not sitting around trying to figure out where it all went wrong or what I would do differently if I could, because I can’t do it differently. But I have been thinking about… who I hang out with. Who I want to hang out with. It started with looking people up to see how they’re doing… about half because I actually miss them, and half because I feel like if I’m getting a second chance, then why shouldn’t anyone else?”

“The only person who needed to give you a second chance is…”

“…is me, I know,” Barley said. “And, basically, that’s what I mean. Other people deserve my forgiveness, too, if I do. And, like, Belinda’s apparently got a great big gushy heart under all that muscle once she stopped caring about high school level bullshit… I don’t even remember her doing anything to me and I’m kind of surprised she recognized me, but the first day of school she saw me and apologized, said she was making amends. I didn’t know what else to say, so I thanked her and said it was okay and then… we hugged. I guess she could have been apologizing in advance for that, but maybe she doesn’t have a lot of practice. But, anyway, that got me curious about the rest of the old Harlowe gang… or gangs, really. So I started looking people up.”

“Reconnecting with them, or just looking up?” Teddi asked.

“Just looking, for now,” Barley said. “Like I said, I’m still thinking about who I’d actually want back in my life. And at first I thought a lot of people dropped out, because a lot of people seemed to have some of the same thoughts I did and scattered to other dorms. You know, most years, about a third to half of the new Harlowe students wash out. Flunk out or drop out… a lot of those finish their first semester or first year and then just never come back. Did you know that?”

“It’s something I’ve learned,” Teddi said. “Though the numbers have been trending downwards, and your class seems to have been particularly exceptional in that regard.”

“Yeah, we’re an exceptional bunch,” she said.

“What do you think changed?”

“Lots of things,” she said. “Some of it got better, some of it got worse. The main thing is that more people were paying attention. In my opinion as someone who spent part of one semester there, the reason the whole place has been such a grain silo is a combination of hostility and apathy. The people who openly hate on non-human students have free rein, and everybody else just ignored whatever was happening… everything that was done to us, everything that we did. You poke around in the heads of teenagers for a living. You know what’s going to happen when a bunch of eighteen year old girls get turned loose and told… and shown… that they’re completely on their own. No group’s going to be better than their worst members, and before you say I’m ducking responsibility, I’m not saying I was one of the better ones.”

“I’m glad you’re being mindful of that, but that actually wasn’t what I was going to say,” Teddi said.

“Don’t worry, I’m staying the holy hell away from Amaranth, and Mackenzie,” Barley said. “Which is easy enough since they’re still sticking together. And they’ve led a whole enclave of Harlowe ex-pats to Gilcrease Tower, so I’ve pretty much marked that area off-limits. And I’m staying away from Puddy… not so much because I’m afraid of what she’ll do or what I’ll do, but because I just literally cannot see any good coming out of that.”

“I suppose it would be hard to avoid them if you didn’t know where they were?”

“Yeah, as excuses go, it’s a good one, but I didn’t even need it… it’s a hot topic around Harlowe. I couldn’t have avoided learning it. As far as I can tell, Sara and Tara are just gone,” Barley said. “I heard they were enrolled, and even showed up, but they’ve just vanished. Not surprising. They seemed to think college was just an endless extension of their senior year of high school. Celia’s gone kind of hardcore super serious scholar… which is more surprising, but I guess after two semesters of failing grades it was either that or drop out. I mean, she’s still got the same abrasive, who-gives-a-fuck attitude, but she’s burying her lack of nose in her books instead of potion bottles. I haven’t seen Trina, but I noticed she’s writing for the Gazetteer… which I guess is kind of on the nose for a gossipy busybody, but she’s a triclops named Trina so what do you expect? Steff and Viktor seem to be on the outs, though I wasn’t trying to find that out, and she seems to be keeping that from her friends for some reason.”

“If I can make a personal observation?” Teddi said.

“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

“You seem to be… more free with your judgments… than you were before,” Teddi said. “Weren’t you trying to be more forgiving?”

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean being blind to faults, and anyway, maybe that’s what a summer living with Marlot does,” Barley said. “Or maybe being honest with myself means being honest about everything. Amaranth is the one who thinks that loving everyone means you have to like everyone, and even she’s… never mind.”

“Barley, I’m not your parole officer,” Teddi said. “Or your mother. I agreed with you that it would be good for you to avoid her, but that was your idea and you won’t get in trouble with me or anyone else if you checked up on her, or checked in with her.”

“I haven’t,” Barley said. “It’s just… neither has she. Checked in with me. Which makes me feel like I’m the one person in the world she doesn’t like. Which bothers me more than I thought it would. I mean, she’s the one who always made such a big deal out of the whole sisterly love thing. She’s the one who always went around nipping at my heels like a damned puppy. She’s the one who followed me out here. I had lots of reasons for coming out here in the first place, but I’d been looking forward to getting away from her. I wasn’t supposed to miss her.”

“It’s hard to know what you’ll miss before it’s gone,” Teddi said. “But… just because you miss something doesn’t mean you’d be glad to have it back.”

“I know,” Barley said. “And I don’t think I’d be happy to go back to the way things were. I think what I want is something new, and I’m not sure it’s possible. I don’t know if either one of us has it in us, and I don’t know if she’d want to.”

“What do you want, Barley?”

“I want… I don’t know what I want, exactly. Just that it’s different than what I had before, and not likely to happen.”

“Well,” Teddi said. “That gives us a place to start…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I wasn’t really expecting you to come back right away, unless you didn’t find Nicki in her room. It’s okay for you to spend time with friends aside from hanging out with me… mother knows I have my own interests, too. And you don’t have to tell me what you talked about, if you think it would give away too much.”

“What do you mean, give away… oh, the game,” I said. “I actually forgot to bring that up… Nicki’s found her admirer.”

Inside the shared bathroom, the toilet flushed, followed by the sound of running water. I thought this was probably just Two or Dee preparing for bed, but then the door opened and Ian walked, half hard and completely naked.

“Is everything alright?” he said.

“Yeah, I was just telling Amaranth that Nicki’s found her admirer,” I said.

“Yeah, and I was just asking if everything was alright,” he said. “I mean, just saying she turned up doesn’t exactly specify whether it’s good news or bad news.”

“It seems to be good news?” I said. I hadn’t meant it to come out as a question, but hanging out with Nicki and Grace seemed to have had some effect on my inflections. “I mean, Grace seems nice… she’s kind of on the bottom rung of the ladder in Treehome, but she’s still part of that social structure.”

“Grace is kind of an unusual name for an elf,” Amaranth said.

“She’s kind of an unusual elf,” I said. “She likes human names and in theory she likes human relationships, it’s just… kind of an adjustment?”

Damn, there was the rising inflection again. Were question marks contagious? Or was my actual underlying uncertainty about Grace coming out now?

“What’s she look like?” Ian asked.

“Kind of amber-ish hair,” I said. “Like an elf, though. Billowy clothes, when she wears them, gauzy veil over her mouth.”

“Does she have a twin sister?”

“She has a sister who looks a lot like her,” I said.

“Okay, I know who you’re talking about,” he said.

“How?”

“…we’ve been eating most of our meals at the same time as them for weeks now,” he said. “After a while, you start to notice people.”

“I don’t,” I said.

“Elves… or at least most surface elves… aren’t really Mack’s type, anyway,” Amaranth said.

“The girls I’m thinking of are almost kind of busty for elves,” Ian said. “Though I guess that could be a style thing, if most elves try to minimize their curves.”

“Yeah, I think you’ve got the right ones,” I said. “Glory’s the older sister. Grace is like her… vassal. She’s nice. Kind of… frantic?” There it was again. “And she needs to learn about tact and boundaries… or at least, she needs to learn more about them. I’m sure she understands how they work in Treehome just fine.”

“I’m guessing Nicki must like her,” Amaranth said.

“Yeah, they were three days into a love-fest when I knocked on the door,” I said.

Amaranth nodded.

“I kind of figured that, when you said that,” she said.

“I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on who it was,” Ian said.

“The heavily elven tables in the dining area are pretty much undifferentiated balls of lust and UST,” Amaranth said. “I might have noticed Grace longing for Nicki at some point, but she’s not the only one who’s had sexy thoughts about her. Honestly, with or without elven libidos, trying to untangle desires across a room that’s got a bunch of students packed together is like trying to listen to a bunch of conversations happening at once, which is basically what’s happening. If this Grace had ever interacted with Nicki directly in front of me, that would have been much easier… like tuning out the background noise to hear a conversation right in front of you.”

“So, you have no problem telling what I want right now, then?” Ian said, a smirk creeping across his face.

“I think even Mack could figure out what you want right now,” Amaranth said.

She reached down and brushed the tip of her fingernail underneath the head of his already-swelling dick, which stiffened even more with a visible lurch. They both looked at me expectantly, but while it was obvious that something sexual was about to happen, I didn’t actually know what he wanted.

“On your knees, baby,” Amaranth said helpfully.

“Wait, take off your clothes,” he said. “She should never be the only one who’s dressed in the room.”

It just went to show that even with a nymph in the room, communication was still important. Amaranth could tell what Ian wanted, but not what he was thinking. I went over to the hamper before I started to obey, in order to avoid any pre-emptive admonishment for temporarily placing my clothes on the floor before I put them away. My mind still rebelled a bit at the thought of putting a perfectly good clothes that had only been worn once into the laundry, but that wouldn’t be a good debate to have in the moment and I never thought about it except when Amaranth was having me disrobe.

“Don’t just leave your stuff sitting on the dresser like that,” Amaranth said when I’d put my belt and the contents of my jeans pockets there.

“…I don’t really have any other place for this stuff,” I said. “It never gets put away because I use it every day.”

“You can sort that out later,” Ian said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You haven’t forgotten what I wanted you to do every night before you go to sleep?”

“No,” I said, which was true. It hadn’t been on my mind, but until I fell asleep without having thought to do it, I hadn’t really forgotten it.

“I thought I’d give you a hand with it the first night,” he said. “Well, not a hand… more like a little stimulation. Tonight, you’re going to touch yourself with one hand while you blow me.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Amaranth said.

Given that this was news to Amaranth, I wasn’t so oblivious as to have missed the fact that before I came back, Ian had been about to have sex with her. But if there had been any kernel of jealousy in me for that, it would have had a hard time sprouting when they both so fluidly yielded the floor to me now that I was back. Ian had probably come over looking for me and then eventually got tired of waiting.

I liked the increasing intimacy between them, and the thought of them doing things together… not just doing things, but also doing things… even when I wasn’t there.

“You know where to start,” Ian said, and I did.

Ian had been pretty vanilla at the start, but even then he’d had a… thing… for having his balls licked and kissed. I didn’t understand the appeal or what he got out of it, but I’d never found an upper limit on how much enthusiasm I could bring to it that the whole thing became too ridiculous for him to appreciate.

The familiar scent of Ian’s masculine musk stirred up the embers that had begun to glow when I’d been breathing in the reminders of Nicki’s long, frenzied weekend. My literal hunger had a way of getting turned around and wrapped up in my other fleshy desires sometimes, if I let them… or I wasn’t expecting them. A growl erupted from somewhere deep in the back of my throat… no, I growled.

“No,” Ian said, and he kneed me in the face, hard, the way that Callahan must have taught him in the arena. I felt my nose flatten and my vision went bright and then dark with pain. I fell back and whimpered. “Bad cunt.”

The word was both whip and balm.

“Try again,” he said.

When Ian had first learned I was a half-demon, he’d been terrified that I would eat him. Now he was confident enough about my control… his control of me, if not my self-control… that he could hear me growling with hunger and then invite me to taste his most vulnerable organs.

That confidence only strengthened his control. I could feel it surrounding me, encircling my neck like an invisible leash. I crawled forward, not less a beast than I’d been in the moment my hunger rose, but an eager, grateful beast. Ian smirked down at me as I gently touched the tip of my tongue to the bottom of his balls and began to lick.

“Kiss them,” he said. “Show me how you love them.”

And I did.

“Don’t forget your hand,” Amaranth said as I was just managing to really get into it. The obedient beast was momentarily shoved aside by the cringing imitation of a person, who’d been hoping everyone would forget it.

I’d never masturbated consciously before. Even beyond any mere thoughts of sex as dirty or lesbian sex as being more so, I’d had it impressed into my head that the whole… area… was beyond filthy, absolutely irredeemable. It was pretty much only a combination of my love for Amaranth and the self-evident purity of her perfect body that allowed me to pleasure her with my hand, and even after a year of doing so it still worked best when I didn’t think about it.

But I couldn’t do the same to myself without thinking about it.

…still, no one could expect me to run before I’d learned to crawl. All I had to do for now was touch myself between the legs, right? That was something I’d done before, incidentally when I was getting dressed, or when I was washing in the shower.

Just touching, that was all.

The thought stirred the echo of a memory in the recesses of my mind. Just touching… that’s what I’d told myself and others when Puddy had been preying on me, when she’d been touching me there. She was the only one who’d ever…

No, that wasn’t true. I pushed it away. Ian never used his hands exclusively… my discomfort was hard to miss, even without a nymph in the room for guidance… but he touched me there when he fucked me. Hell, fucking me was nothing but touching me there, and he’d done that more often and more recently. Focus on that, I told myself. Hold to that.

The image of Grace’s farewell to Nicki popped into my head… kissing her fingertips, and then putting them in Nicki’s crotch. It had been so fleeting, so spontaneous, and so tender. Who’d known touching could be so… touching?

I hadn’t felt any revulsion at witnessing the gesture, which shouldn’t have been surprising since I did in fact like women… that had been hard to come to terms with, but I had and it seemed like that should have been the end of my issues with womanly bits. I didn’t have this kind of problem with Amaranth’s intimate bits. I had less than no problem with Steff’s, and they were as much a woman’s parts as mine or Amaranth’s were… and if it came down to it, I probably would have been more comfortable with Nicki’s or Grace’s. I’d been in the room with both Grace and Dee when they were naked. I couldn’t think if I’d ever seen Pala naked, but for some reason it wasn’t hard to picture. She was a bit like a muscular Amaranth, or two of them…

They were all women, and if someone had put a blessed dagger to my throat I probably could have at least quietly admitted that they were all attractive. The mess between my legs wasn’t functionally all that different from what most of them had, so why should I be so hung up on it that I couldn’t bring myself to put my fingers there?

…except that somehow I had, somehow I was, I was doing it, just like my mouth had somehow wrapped itself around Ian’s dick while I’d been corralling my thoughts… Amaranth was standing up over and behind me, locked in an embrace with Ian, my head between the two of them. I wondered what else I’d missed, but I had to admit it was a nice place to find myself.

As soon as I became conscious of what I was doing, though, I wasn’t doing it anymore, and I ended up choking a bit even as Ian blew his load. I managed to take it and then extricate myself without losing whatever dignity there was in sucking cock. Amaranth stooped down next to me and hugged me tightly.

“Okay… that was hotter than expected,” Ian said. “Are you okay, though?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

“What for?”

“I was actually thinking about… well… girls the whole time,” I said, blushing uncontrollably to admit this. Yes, I’d come to terms with liking girls, and I was far from anything like a virgin, but even right after doing something like that, it still felt odd to be talking about my desires, even obliquely.

“…you weren’t thinking about Steff while you were blowing me, were you?” he asked. As soon as he said that, I could see he might have come to that conclusion.

“Not just her, or even mainly her,” I said. “I wasn’t imagining I was blowing someone else… I guess if anything, I was imagining touching someone else. But I even wasn’t really going that far. I was just… thinking and doing.”

“That’s how masturbation usually works,” Amaranth said. “And there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“…I’m not sure, but I think… I think that maybe I could learn to enjoy it,” I said.

“Most people do,” she said. She giggled. “So, do you think you’ll be able to… handle it yourself… for the rest of the week?”

“I think so, ma’am,” I said.

“Dang,” Ian said. “I mean, I know it was my idea, but after tonight, I was kind of looking forward to helping some more.”

“Would it bother you if I suck completely and don’t walk you home?” Grace said to Nicki after we’d finished eating. “I really probably should have gone straight back to Glory when I found out what day it was… or even before that. I don’t know how much worse things can get, by I don’t want to push it any further… I’m already going to be in so much trouble.”

“Even though your sister’s going to be happy for you?” Nicki asked.

“She still has to keep discipline in the ranks,” Grace said. “The others will want to punish me if she doesn’t. So, if you don’t see me for a few days, It’s not because I don’t want to, but I might not be allowed to go off on my own for a while. Oh! And I just remembered… I’d love to meet the rest of your friends, but if you don’t think anyone would be insulted or anything I’d rather if I can just hang out with you two from the start. Nothing against them! I just… I didn’t expect to be up close with either one of you this quickly, and it’s kind of a lot.”

“Yeah, they can be intimidating,” Nicki said.

“We’re really not,” I said, though not with much confidence… I found most people intimidating at first just on principle. “But I don’t think anyone will mind.”

“That’s great,” Grace said. She looked at Nicki. “Do you think you’ll be okay walking back without me?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure Nicki gets back to her room safely,” I said, still high on the thrill of being helpful.

“You? Seriously?” Grace said. “I guess a few more minutes won’t make a difference… it’s not like anyone’s going to be expecting me back at an exact particular time, anyway.”

In the interest of keeping the peace with Nicki’s new girlfriend, I didn’t bother to protest… also, while I was getting better at defending myself, it might not have been a comment on my abilities so much as my luck.

“You should walk back with us, though,” Nicki said. “If you don’t mind going out of your way.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking that my presence might be enough to stop a goodnight kiss from turning into “goodbye, Tuesday!”… and also, I’d come originally come over to try to enlist Nicki’s services for Amaranth’s adventure game, and what with one thing and another I hadn’t even brought it up.

There wasn’t a lot of conversation on the way back, though more than once Grace observed that we walked really slowly and that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed it before. It was verging on annoying, but as slow as our crude mortal legs may have been, they still got us back to the dorm before it became unbearably so.

“Wait… should we go in?” Grace said when we got to Nicki’s room.

“Maybe it’s best if you just say goodnight out here,” I said to

“You’re not wrong,” she said. “But it seems… anticlimactic? I mean, even another climax would be anticlimactic after that, but it seems like there should be something more than words, don’t you think?”

“…a goodnight kiss is kind of traditional,” Nicki said, blushing and ducking her head. “My lady.”

“Right, but we don’t really have time to get into that kind of stuff,” Grace said.

“A kiss doesn’t have to lead anywhere,” Nicki said. “I mean… not immediately.”

“Why would it have to lead anywhere else…? Oh, wait, when you say ‘kiss’, you don’t mean… you and me, kissing each other on the mouths?” Grace said.

“…do elves not do that?” Nicki asked.

“Grown-ups do, sometimes,” she said. “But I think that’s because as you get older, your definition of an equal gets a little more… generous. I know some boys do it, but they’re more… aggressive about it then I think I could manage.”

“Oh,” Nicki said. “We’re not equals… right.”

“Don’t get me wrong!” Grace said. “As humans go, you’re… you’re just awesome. You are the best human. And I am the worst elf. If we were on the same scale, you’d be… you’d be loads better than me.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You are not better than Nicki.”

“Not, like, personally,” Grace said. “It’s just… station? And I’m not saying no, I just… I’ve never thought about it. It’s not something that would have occurred to me. It’s… outside my comfort zone?”

“I could kiss the back of your hand?” Nicki suggested.

“Why… what’s wrong with my hand?” Grace said, looking at it in alarm.

“Nothing’s wrong with your hand,” Nicki said. “It’s perfect.”

“Then how is that better than my lips?” Grace said. “I know, you could kiss the sole of my boot!”

“You know, my lips have actually made contact with your skin in multiple locations,” Nicki said. “And none of them were less perfect than your hands or lips.”

“Yes, but that was… service,” she said.

“You went down on me, too,” Nicki said.

“Because I love pussy?” she said. “And yours was in front of me and it was mine to use, so I entertained myself with it. But this is affection. It’s… more intimate, and more complicated.”

“So, I’m good enough to have sex with for three days, but not good enough to kiss the back of your hand?” Nicki asked.

“Yes! Wow, you put that so succinctly. I guess it’s not that complicated after all,” Grace said. “Wait… why did it sound like a bad thing when you said it?”

“I think you had probably better go, Grace,” I said.

“I can decide that for myself,” Nicki said. “We aren’t done with this.”

“Why am I not the one deciding when I go?” Grace asked. “I am completely lost. Did I do something wrong, and if so, what?”

“Grace… you’re talking about me like I’m less than shit,” Nicki said.

“Not shit in general,” Grace said. “Mine, maybe. But you’re… so much better than shit, I don’t know why it’s even a comparison. Like, I can’t even imagine a situation where I’d be choosing between you and shit, much less one where it would be a close competition.”

“Except when it comes to kissing one of us,” Nicki said. “Then it seems to be a tie.”

“I didn’t say that!” Grace said. “I just said it’s not something I’d have thought of doing and I don’t know how I feel about it. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“Well, while you’re figuring it out, I can’t get down and kiss the bottom of your boot in public,” Nicki said.

“Okay,” Grace said. “Compromise?”

“Compromise is good,” Nicki said. “What do you have in mind?”

“You can kiss my hand,” Grace said. “As long as you ask first each time, and say thank you, and call me your lady.”

I was biting my tongue like crazy, because however they threshed out their respective places in their growing relationship, it wasn’t my place to interrupt their negotiation. If I heard or saw somethingdangerous, I’d speak up, but mere cultural chauvinism didn’t require an intervention.

I wasn’t crazy about the way Grace had been talking about Nicki, but I knew that while she wasn’t one hundred percent in sync with the elven middling sensibilities about these things, she had still internalized a lot of it.

“…I guess that works for me,” Nicki said. “I mean, it’s not what I was expecting but… it could be fun?”

Grace held out her hand.

“May I kiss your hand, my lady?” Nicki said.

“Oh my fuck, you are good at that!” Grace said, withdrawing her hand as she threw both of them up in the air in excitement. “Okay, okay, okay, sorry, I screwed that up. You just made me twitch in fun places when you said that. I didn’t realize affection could be… fun.”

“What did you think it was, work?” Nicki asked.

“Pretty much?” Grace said. “It’s… relationship stuff. And relationships take work, right?”

“Well, yeah, but… people kiss each other for fun,” Nicki said. “Because it’s nice. I mean, because it feels nice, not just because it’s the nice thing to do.”

“See, I always thought it was like… fealty,” Grace said. “Discharging obligation.”

“Does this mean we can try on the lips?”

“…maybe we can work on that in private,” she said. “For now, let’s try the hand thing again.”

“Okay,” Nicki said.

Grace put her hand out again, and this time Nicki took it with both of hers and bent her head down over it, turning her eyes up towards Grace.

“Still ask!” Grace said.

“I was going to, you goof!” Nicki said.

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry! It’s just… it’s no good if you don’t ask, so I was worried.”

“I was… working up to it,” Nicki said. “I was worried that if I just did it again the same way, it wouldn’t be as good, so I was going to try to be, you know… sultry.”

“You were sultry,” Grace said. “Just do it again, the same as before.”

“…now I don’t know if I can,” Nicki said. “What if I do it again and it’s different?”

I was starting to get a picture of how their three days together might have went, and it seemed less enthralling than the first impression had been. The whole thing probably should have felt incredibly awkward to me, but it also seemed weirdly surreal to the point that I wasn’t feeling the second-hand discomfort. Either that, or my taking charge earlier was still buoying me up, because I felt anything but passive.

“Look,” I said, and they both jumped and looked at me like they’d forgotten I was there. “Sorry. But… you’ve found something that works for both of you. Don’t overthink it. It’s probably not going to be perfect or exactly the way you imagine it in your head, but who cares? Nothing ever is. It’s only a problem if you expect it to be.”

“Okay, let’s just do it,” Grace said. “I mean… still ask! But just go ahead and ask.”

“May I please kiss your hand, my lady?” Nicki said.

“Eee!” Grace said, almost yanking her hand out of Nicki’s. “Sorry, I need to learn to respond with more dignity. But yes, fuck yes! I mean, yes, you may.”

I looked away as Nicki bent down over Grace’s hand and presumably tenderly kissed it.

“Ooh, the next time I see you, you’re going to ask me permission for so many things, you have no idea,” Grace said. “Because that is awesome.”

“I’m looking forward to it, my lady,” Nicki said.

“Oh, you should ask permission for that!” Grace said. “Oh, no, wait, that’s silly. Is it? I’m sorry, this is just… my nipples are like arrowheads right now, and I swear my clit’s trying to jump into your mouth.”

“Your sister’s going to be wondering where you are,” I reminded her. They were both basically my age, so it really wasn’t my job to prevent them from endangering another school day, but I still wanted to head it off if I could.

“Oh, right,” Grace said. She kissed two of her own finger tips, then pressed them to the front of Nicki’s jeans, then turned and glided away at a speed faster than a run. “Goodbye!”

Nicki stayed watching the direction she’d vanished well past the point that there was anything to see.

“Would you mind coming in for a while?” she said to me. “There are things I want to talk to you about, and now that the thrill’s departing, I’m feeling a little… exposed… out in the hall.”

“Sure, Nicki,” I said. “Do you mind if we open a window?”

“No, I guess I should probably air things out a little,” she said.

She unlocked the door and we went in, where she did open the window.

“Am I crazy?” she asked.

“…in what sense?” I asked.

I didn’t think she was worried that she’d imagined Grace or anything like that, but that still left multiple possibilities. I didn’t think she meant something like, “Am I crazy for blowing off class for sex?”, but in case she did, I didn’t want to jump to the conclusion that she meant something about having a relationship with Grace. It was the more likely possibility, but it was also the more potentially insulting one if it was wrong.

Maybe I was overthinking it, but that seemed to be the only way I could stop the first thing that popped into my mind from popping out of my mouth.

“I mean, she’s fun and all,” Nicki said. “And she can be nice, but that’s… a lot of work for a kiss.”

“Well, I’m not saying there weren’t some iffy things in there,” I said. “But the two things to remember: one, she’s working, too. I kept getting the sense that she doesn’t agree with the elven perspective on relationships, but it’s the only perspective she has. I mean, she even said she likes the human approach to things better… you just can’t expect her to pick it up overnight, when she grew up among elves and has spent the past couple years around other middlings.”

“I guess you’re right,” Nicki said. “It really wouldn’t be fair to…”

“Okay, hold on,” I said. “There is no ‘fair’ here, or if there is, then it only applies to you. That’s the other thing I was going to tell you to remember: just because she’s trying to solve a problem doesn’t mean it’s not a problem.”

“So you think I should break up with her?”

“No,” I said. “I think you should make up your own mind, but it should be based on what’s right for you, not any feeling of obligation or abstract principle. It’s not just a question of whether the good outweighs the bad, it’s also a question of whether the bad is too bad. You seem… um… you seem okay with having a submissive position.”

“I’m totally okay with that!” Nicki said. “Like, I would never have said that I was submissive, but… I’ve had thoughts. And it works. At least with her.”

“Okay,” I said. “But she doesn’t just see you as submissive, but inferior. In the nicest and least personal way possible, but still.”

“Is that kind of thing a dealbreaker for you?” Nicki asked.

“That’s a question worth asking,” I said. “Steff… Steff has some shades of that, though she also has a massive inferiority complex of her own. But I think that’s probably one reason why my relationship with Steff is less serious than my other ones.”

It was something I didn’t think I’d ever said out loud, but it was true and something that everyone involved knew. My relationship with Amaranth was the primary one, that much had been spoken of, but my relationship with Ian had more in common with that one than with the one with Steff.

“I think I’m okay with it… for now… but what if I’m not sure?” she asked. “I don’t think I have a problem with her thinking elves are better than humans, I just… the look on her face when I suggested kissing her hand kind of pissed me off. I mean, obviously she liked it when we actually did it, and I think it really that she thought I’d picked her hand because there was something wrong with it, not that she was actually grossed out by the thought of my lips, but… I don’t know how often I can see someone shudder like that because of me before I start to feel gross.”

“If you were sure you were okay with it, I’d tell you to be suspicious of that,” I said. “Tell her up front that it might be a problem, and remember it’s not your job to fix her.”

“Any other tips?”

“Yeah, if she offers you jewelry… well, actually, I was going to make a joke, but in all seriousness… if she offers you a gift, don’t accept it until after you have a long discussion about what it does, and also what it means,” I said. I felt like this warning should be coming from Jamie, since he could speak from experience, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to put the two of them together directly to talk about elven suitors. As much as I wanted Nicki to have her eyes open, hearing the unexpurgated tales of Iason would probably put her off of dating elves forever.

“That sounds like… storybook stuff,” Nicki said.

“Well, you’re dealing with elves,” I said. “She’s not a typical elf, but like she said, she’d never thought about simple gestures of affection outside of the context of elven culture. Even if there isn’t any trap attached, knowing what she expects in return for accepting it might head off some confusion. She might think it’s obvious or not worth mentioning until it’s pointed out.”

“This is why I don’t know about any of this,” Nicki said.

“Are you sorry it happened?”

“That’s the strange thing,” she said. “I’m still glad it happened… even when I thought she was looking at me like I was a bug she’d stepped on, even if I’d just blown my top and told her to fuck if… which I almost did… like, I might have wished it had ended differently, but if I could have gone back in time and undo the weekend, I don’t think I would have. It’s not just that I finally got laid and it was good, it’s… I don’t know. Okay, it is just that, but it’s not just that. Like, I think I’d be more okay with not getting laid, with not having anybody for a while, because of it… I think I could be more confident and secure about it now, which might make it easier to get someone in the future, but also less important? I’m probably not making any sense.”

“…the feelings make sense, even if the words don’t,” I said.

“And I’m glad it worked out like this,” she said, not quite stifling a yawn. “Where you’re the first one who found out, I mean. That seems… right.”

“You sound sleepy,” I said.

“You have no idea,” she said. “I think we dozed off a bit at least once, but I think I’m more behind on sleep than I was on food.”

“I should probably let you sleep,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess I’ll see you in class on Tuesday… oh, that’s tomorrow now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Tomorrow is Tuesday. And you know, I mean it when I say you’re welcome to hang out with me anytime.”

“I know,” she said. “And you know what? I probably will.”

It was summer, my first summer at Magisterius University. The student union and some of the other buildings on campus had been covered with banners welcoming IPAC, the Inter-Planar Arcanists’ Conference, an organization whose conference was apparently being hosted by our world in this indeterminate cycle. The banners said it was the “2T7?th ????ual” conference, and I had a feeling that there were other characters that my brain couldn’t even discern enough to be sure it was missing them.

I didn’t know how many inter-planar arcanists a single conference could bring in, but the campus was empty enough during the summer session that any influx of people seemed like a crowd. Most of the people with IPAC badges could have passed as local, clothes and all… some were dressed in traditional wizard attire and some in modern clothes. There were some people who stood out, wearing things like form-fitting body suits or bulky armor, and there were some people who were clearly from another plane, like a group of robed mages who vaguely fit the model that my brain associated with “elf” but who didn’t look like any elf I knew. It was like someone had heard a description of an elf and tried to draw it. The ears were pointed, but they weren’t just larger than human ears, they were long and floppy. If they were elves, then wherever they came from, it was clear that their elves were different.

I could have called it a testament to my personal growth that I didn’t mind going to the student union for lunch when I knew it would be full of strange people who all knew each other, but really, it was more that I still felt like it was empty. The IPACers were a brief intrusion. They didn’t know me, I wasn’t wearing one of their badges. They would be forming into little cliques and discussion groups. I could just get my food and sit down at a table by myself on the edge of the room and read my book or sketch out enchantment ideas in my notebook, like I always did. I could block out the conversations happening around me easily enough… I’d always been able to turn off the world around me. The trick I’d been working on was not doing so, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it when I needed to.

…except when I couldn’t, because there were some topics I could never seem to ignore.

“I’m just saying, it doesn’t make any sense,” a young woman… well, probably a few years older than me, but not old enough that I didn’t want to reflexively think of her as a girl was saying. “I understand that magic forms the basis of the technology here and that somewhat lessens the need for scientific advances in physics and chemistry, but that doesn’t mean ‘science doesn’t work here’. It just means no one’s doing it, or doing it right.”

“Who cares?” another woman said. She was taller than the other… a bit taller than me, and skinny. Really skinny, like I’d been when I’d first left my grandmother’s house. Her hair was orange. The other woman’s was blonde, a kind of tawny blonde. Her build reminded me of Puddy’s, and her hair kind of did, too, though it lacked the strawberry notes that were common in Puddy’s family.

Even though the evidence suggested that she was not from around here, I couldn’t help wondering if she wasn’t another La Belle cousin… few people could annoy me in so few words. If I hadn’t just got a tray full of food and sat down, I would have walked out of the room. I couldn’t see any good coming of arguing with this person, but sitting there and listening to her seemed unbearable.

“I care,” she said. “The lack of intellectual curiosity here is criminal… and in a university. I get if the rules of magic are somewhat subjective, because you get that just about anywhere you go, but it seems like if somebody were to make an orderly investigation of the universe, they could at least figure out how to magic it better. Or how to do things without magic. Or how to use magic and science together.”

I shouldn’t have been listening… even if I couldn’t block them out, I shouldn’t have been actively listening. But I couldn’t help myself, and I also couldn’t help letting out a muffled snerk, because this woman sounded exactly like the villain in about half a dozen cheesy kids’ shows I could think of. Taking over the world by science? Talk about a tired fantasy trope.

The woman must have had ears like a cat, because they twitched and she turned around to look at me. I was kind of shocked to see how similar her face was to the other woman… I’d assumed they were friends, but now they looked like sisters.

“Something funny?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “It’s just… you sound like you think you’re the first person who’s ever thought of this stuff.”

“Maybe not the first,” she said. “But there can’t be many people who’ve thought these things, or acted on any of them, because at this point it wouldn’t take much to significantly advance the state of scientific inquiry in your world. No offense intended.”

“None taken,” and I meant that, because I thought this might actually be fun. “We do have scientists… the ones who are still around don’t tend to be serious about it, because if they were, they would either figure out they’re barking up the wrong tree or they’re dead, because in this case, the tree is carnivorous, on fire, and doesn’t like being barked at.”

“Magic and active gods complicates things, I know,” she said. “You think this is the first universe I’ve ever been in? But that doesn’t meant here aren’t real, verifiable rules underlying how it all works, and the scientific method can still be used to determine them, and knowing more of them with more certainty allows you to do more. That’s what science is. Not… electricity and internal combustion engines.”

“I’ve heard this before,” I said. “You’re not saying anything new.”

“You’ve heard of ‘internal combustion engines’?”

“Five, six hundred years ago, people were making models of them,” I said. “They didn’t very well. The ‘combustion’ part usually went okay, but the ‘internal’ and ‘engine’ parts were iffier.”

“Okay,” she said. “So, some people have obviously understood the principle, they just lacked the know-how to actually do it. You bring in someone who understands the math… or how to work it out…”

“How do you work out the math if the math changes?” I asked.

“If the math changed, then the universe wouldn’t work,” she said. “I mean, there are going to be certain tolerances, and if this universe is a bit more chaotic then you might not get as much efficiency out of an engine, but it should be possible to improve it in ways that allow for that chaos… and if not, then you could at least figure out why, and come up with something that does work.”

“We do have something that works,” I said. “Carriages with animated wheel assemblies.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “You have magic, so you give up and never look for anything else.”

“Or we’ve spent more time… and lives… investigating other things than you know or want to acknowledge, and we went with what works,” I said. “I think that, crudely, that’s what your ‘scientific method’ says we should do.”

“So you’re using science,” she said.

“No,” I said. “We’re avoiding science, which doesn’t work, in a manner that happens to coincide with what smarter scientists would conclude is the best course of action.”

“Okay, but how about this?” she said, holding up a cupcake. “You’ve got open kitchens back there so I can see your food prep area and it doesn’t look that different from what I’d expect. That means someone probably baked this. They didn’t just wave a wand and say… ‘expecto patisserie’… they baked a muffin. From a recipe. That’s a replicable process. It was probably created by trial and error.”

“…yeah,” I said.

“So, we can expect a process arrived at through trial and error to be replicable,” she said.

“No, you can expect that process to,” I said. “Usually. And many other processes, especially simple and necessary ones like cooking.”

“Okay, so you’ve laid out two hypothetical rules that replicable processes must obey,” she said. “Simple and necessary. Those can be tested and refined…”

“Your funeral,” I said. “Baking works because it works, but it doesn’t have to work.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“Okay, let’s do a little… philosophical investigation,” I said, thinking back to a book of brain puzzlers I’d found in the library. I could tweak one of them a little… well, okay, a lot… to demonstrate a point. I picked up my notebook and crossed the gap to their table.

“You mean an experiment?” she said.

“You can call it that,” I said. “It would be a thought experiment, so I guess it’s safe… but anyway, it’s more of a demonstration. Let’s play a game. Let’s say there’s a rule about the universe that I know and you don’t. It describes a relationship among sets of three numbers grouped in a particular order. ‘2, 4, 6,’ is one such set. You give me another set of numbers and I’ll tell you ‘yes’ if it fits the rule and ‘no’ if it doesn’t. You can do this as many times as you think you need to, in order to feel confident making a guess about the rule.”

“I’ve done this one before,” she said.

“I didn’t make it up, but I’m adding a twist,” I said. “So think carefully before you make your guess.”

“You’re not just going to lie, or change the rule in the middle?”

“No,” I said. “Take it as a rule that within the context of the game, including the statement of the rules, I can’t lie. And as another rule that the rules are immutable once stated.”

“Are there any other rules?”

“No,” I said. “And to keep it honest, I’ll write the rule down on a sheet of paper and give it to you, so you can verify it afterwards.”

“Okay,” she agreed.

I took out a piece of paper and thought about how to formulate the intended message in the shortest possible way. It took me a while to think of it.

“While we’re still canon, please,” the thin sister said.

“I want to make sure it’s worded right,” I said, and then it came to me, something better than what I’d been thinking of. I folded up the paper several times, and handed it to her. “Put this in your pocket or something.”

She did.

“Okay,” she said. “I know how this is supposed to go, and I know the actual solution, or the normal solution, but I don’t know what change you made, so I guess I’ll start by playing along. 10, 12, 14?”

“Yes,” I said.

“13, 15, 17.”

“Yes.”

“So odd and even sequences numbers both satisfy the rule,” she said. “-2, 0, 2?”

“Yes.”

“-2, -4, -6?”

“No.”

“-6, -4, -2?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So here’s the part where I’m supposed to guess that each one is two more than the next one. -17, 32, and a million and six.”

“Yes,” I said.

“-17, 32, and 31.”

“No.”

“2.5, 4.5, 6.5”

“Yes.”

“3, pi, 4?”

“…yes,” I said.

“i… um… 10, 20?”

I had to stop and think about that. I hadn’t taken any of the math electives in high school, but I’d heard people griping about them.

“i as in the number i?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“That’s imaginary, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Then, no,” I said.

“Well… I could keep trying numbers, but you’ve said yes to everything that satisfies the rule that I’m thinking of and no to everything I’ve suggested that doesn’t, and if your shocking twist is that you added ‘except one very specific number I arbitrarily excluded’ then we could be here for millions of years without me finding out what it is by guessing, I’m going to guess the rule describes any real numbers in ascending order,” she said. “But I’m adding a secondary guess that if it’s not that, then it’s that with some such exclusion that I’m unlikely to hit without making millions of guesses. But don’t you see? That makes the rule difficult to know, not unknowable. It’s still possible to determine what it is through an orderly process, and it’s easy to rule out false possibilities.”

She looked pretty smug, to the point that I almost felt bad for what I was doing.

“No,” I said. “And no. Your description does not describe my twist.”

“Well, then, I give up,” she said. “Let me see what you wrote, and then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.”

“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” I said.

She pulled the paper out, unfolded it, then scowled at it.

“Read it aloud for the class,” her sister said.

“’The rule describes any set of three numbers that I say it describes, when I say it describes them’,” she said. “That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not,” I said. “I thought you’d like it better than my first idea, which was to just write, ‘It literally doesn’t matter what I write here because you can’t see this information while the game is in play, so the information effectively doesn’t exist until then. The rule is whatever I say it is, it doesn’t have to be the same each time, and I don’t have to tell you the truth.’ I just thought that writing something that long would make you suspicious.”

“But you said that you weren’t lying and the rules don’t change,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “And in my original plan I would have been lying to you and changing the rules. I figured out a way that I technically didn’t need to do that, but I still could have. It was always an option.”

“No it wasn’t!” she said. “You specifically excluded those possibilities.”

“Yes, while lying,” I said. “Don’t you see?”

“Okay, but you stated those rules first,” she said. “They should take precedence over any later, unstated rules that allow you to lie about them.”

“According to who?” I asked. “And who says there’s a rule that allows me to lie? Who says I need rules to lie? You can’t apply the logic of someone who is honest and bound by rules to someone… or something… that isn’t.”

“But you were giving me consistent, predictable results.”

“I was,” I said. “Because it served my interests to… but if you’d kept playing past your first guess, I would have started giving you results that were inconsistent with the former ones, and if you thought to repeat one of your sets of numbers I would have given you the opposite result.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” she said hotly.

“I’m not trying to prove anything,” I said. “I’m demonstrating something.”

“Okay, but, the rule is that the rule describes anything you say it describes?” she said. “So it would still be possible to predict which numbers you will say the rule describes, it would just require someone to learn enough about your nature. If you’re a metaphor for the universe, then all you’ve done is describe how science works and why your world needs it more.”

“Okay, but does anyone in your world have the ability to learn that much about a human mind?” I asked. “Because in this world, people don’t even know themselves in that much detail… and if we’re talking about a mind the size of a world, then it’s that much bigger and more complicated. And if your only source of information about how a subject is to interrogate the subject…”

“This is where you tell me that the world can lie,” she said.

“No, this is where I say that your results depend entirely on the willingness of the subject to be interrogated,” I said. “And that’s going to change, moment-by-moment, because your subject is going to be reacting to your questions. Maybe at the start of a session, the subject is happy to answer your simple questions and likes the attention, but then it begins to find the whole thing tedious, then it gets suspicious of you, then it gets angry…”

“But even if it’s not answering the questions, those reactions tell us something,” she said.

“Yeah, but we’re not talking about like, an uncooperative murder suspect here,” I said. “We’re talking about a universe. Okay, let me back this up a bit. You ever played a roleplaying game before? I mean, the tabletop kind with rules and dice.”

I hadn’t… I’d done a small amount of tapestry roleplay back during my fanfic days, but I hadn’t had any kind of real-life social circle when I’d first been of an age to appreciate such things, and my grandmother would have approved of them even less than she did of most things in general, but I’d lived on the periphery of all things geeky for as long as I could remember, so I’d haunted some weave sites that were devoted to talking about them.

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay, so you know the District Manager has a screen to hide their dice behind…”

“District Manager?”

“Okay, General Manager, if you want to go generic,” I said. “So all the players are in theory bound by the rules of the game and have to roll their dice out in the open, but all the rules are actually interpreted and applied by the GM, who rolls dice behind the screen. You have to take the GM’s word for it that whatever result they call out has any relationship at all to the numbers on the dice, which you also don’t know.”

“But you can’t run a universe like that!”

“Says who?” I asked. “Obviously, people get through gaming sessions that way every week. Some GMs are more consistent about the rules and dice than others, some are open about their fudging and some lie, but they all get through it. I mean, you’ve played these games… do they become unplayable when the GM fudges things?”

“Yes,” she said. “Completely.”

“She’s not kidding,” her sister said. “Dude, you have no idea how lucky you are that she stopped playing your shitty number game before you started openly fucking with her, no idea. She will upend the whole card table if she thinks a GM isn’t playing fair. The only sessions she’s ever made it through were ones she ran herself.”

“And I suppose you followed the rules exactly as they were written when you ran things?” I asked.

“I made sensible departures where it didn’t undermine the fairness of the game, or the dramatic needs of the scene,” she said. “But if everything is up in the air all the time, then… well, if the rules say that a fighter with a great sword can hit a ghoul on a roll of 14 or higher, how’s the fighter’s player supposed to make an informed decision about what to do when the rule might not apply?”

“Because they can guess that it probably will, and that if it doesn’t, the made up rule that briefly takes its place will make some kind of sense in context, and hopefully that context will be ‘the GM thought this would be awesome’ rather than ‘the GM is a dick’,” I said. “The game doesn’t have to be perfectly consistent to be played all the way through, just consistent enough. And an inconsistent universe is capable of being consistent enough, in spots. According to our understanding of the universe, our world is a spot like that.”

I gestured up at the ceiling, but meaning the one above.

“The dome of the sky is a globe… which I guess sounds weird if you’re not from a round world… that keeps out the formless chaos outside, preserving what might otherwise have been a very brief random island of consistency,” I said. “That’s the closest thing we have to a consensus, anyway, drawn from the different myths we have available.”

“You’re drawing conclusions from myths?”

“What are we going to do, go up and tap on the sky?” I asked. “Try to bore a hole in it to see what’s on the other side? Apart from all the reasons that introducing a hole into our protection from the chaos would be a bad idea, it’s not possible, and if it were, it’s impossible to reach the sky.”

“You have magical technology,” she said. “I’ve seen airships. Is there an altitude limit?”

“No, there’s no limit on altitude,” I said. “Literally no limit, because no matter how high you go, the sky is farther than that.”

“So how do you know it’s a solid dome and not, say, an optical effect?”

“Because we’ve… not me, personally, it hasn’t happened in my lifetime… but we’ve seen things walking on it. Well, crawling. Well, swarming,” I said. “There have been breaks before.”

“How can you see them if they’re infinitely far away?”

“They aren’t infinitely far away,” I said. “They’re just farther away than you are, for any earthly definition of ‘you’.”

“But how can that possibly work?” she asked. “Perspective…”

“…is a matter of perspective,” I said. “Look, the people of this world have engaged invaders from outside the shell in aerial and ground combat before, so we know how big they were on the ground, how big they looked when they were up on the dome, and how big they looked when they were on the dome and we were in the air. And the results were mostly consistent: when they were on the dome, they looked the same size no matter how high up the observer was. Most of the time.”

“If the distance from the ground to the dome isn’t fixed, how can someone from the dome reach the ground?”

“By falling,” I said. “The distance from the ground to the dome isn’t fixed, but the distance from the dome to the ground might be. Or it might be variable, but not intraversable.”

“How could we even move and see and stuff in a universe where that’s possible? And what do you mean by ‘most of the time’?”

“Some people reported that the things on the dome got ‘bigger’ the ‘closer’ they got. It’s possible the people who reported that could have actually approached the dome, which has happened a few times in history.”

“You said it was impossible.”

“It is, except when it’s not,” I said. “That’s like, hero stuff. I don’t know if it’s this world, or the universe, or the gods who made this world what it is using their influence, but a couple of times when there was great need, mortals have ascended to the celestial dome.”

“So, this universe is subjective. It works on story logic.”

“It’s been described as subjective,” I said. “But the key point that gets drilled into the heads of people of an inquiring mind is that knowing that it appears to be subjective doesn’t tell you who or what it’s subject to, or how. Investigations of the idea that the universe works the way we think or expect or believe it should work tend to end… badly.”

“But still, you said ’when there’s great need…’ that implies that someone is making that determination. And you’re not the least bit curious about what constitutes great need?” she asked. “No one’s ever investigated what the cases where someone reached the dome had in common?”

“What’s the GM do when you try to look behind the screen?” I asked.

“You don’t, that would be cheating,” she said. “And you’d be justifiably kicked out of the group, or just be punished in game.”

“Right. And what happens when you start memorizing the rules and trying to use them to argue that the world must work a certain way, that you must be allowed to do something because of this, that, and the other thing? Or when the GM lets you do something once because they think it’s awesome or necessary for the story, but you turn around and try to turn that into the precedent for a general rule about how the game always works?”

“I don’t play that way.”

“No, but unless gaming culture is very different in our worlds, you’ve probably seen or read about it people who do,” I said. “Let’s stick with the last one. Imagine a gamer who is allowed to break the rules once because it’s cool and because the story will suck and the game will end if they don’t. They propose an exception and the GM grants it. But then the player acts like they’ve discovered a new superpower, instead of pulling off a once-in-a-lifetime miraculous feat. What’s the GM going to do?”

“Well, to use your logic, we can’t know what the GM will do and they’ll get pissed off if we try to guess,” she said.

“Now you’re getting into the spirit of it,” I said. “But at a bare minimum, doesn’t it seem likely that the GM is likely to think twice before granting that kind of exception again? Be more grudging about it, impose more restrictions, or even just flat out stop doing it?

“Okay, but by not investigating the ‘dome of the sky’, you’re making a prediction about what the ‘GM’ is likely to do, and acting on it,” she said.

“Okay, yes,” I said. “But there’s only so far you can take that before the GM notices that you’re playing them instead of playing the game, and no one likes to think they’re being studied or manipulated, especially when they’re supposed to be in control. It’s like the thing with recipes: baking a cupcake is fine. It’s… non-threatening.”

“The universe can be threatened?”

“Non-invasive, then,” I said. “And the universe… which is big, vast, complicated, and inscrutable, is the only arbiter of what is and isn’t invasive, and that determination can change depending on circumstances which are also big, vast, complicated, and inscrutable. And it can also fuck with you just because it’s noticed that you’re trying to figure something out.”

“Then no one would be able to figure out the recipes for cupcakes!”

“You’re demanding consistency of an inconsistent system,” I said. “And saying that it can’t be inconsistent unless it’s consistently so. I don’t know about where you’re from, but here order vs. chaos is kind of a big deal, and one of the constants is that order cannot be chaotic, but chaos can be orderly. That is, if I can find one inconsistency in universe, that proves it’s inconsistent, but finding instances of seeming consistency in an inconsistent universe don’t prove it’s consistent.”

“And pointing it out might make the universe angry,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I take back what I said before when I said this universe must run on story logic,” she said. “Because there is no logic and this would all make a horrible story. If you ask me…”

“Um… better not,” her sister said in a warning tone.

“…if you ask me,” she repeated, “this whole world seems like it’s just a bunch of sloppy writing by an overly touching author.”

“Wasn’t me this time!” her sister bellowed up at the ceiling. “Dandy, not me!”

“Come on, Will,” the woman said, addressing another woman I hadn’t noticed who was slumped over another table, asleep under masses of curly dark hair. “I think I’ve had just about as much of this world as I can stand. Let’s just go to our next session.”

The dark-haired woman propped herself up, giving her sister… she had the same facial features as the others… a withering look, but then got to her feet and stretched. She moved slowly, but despite her really large size, with a surprising amount of grace. She reached into the pocket of her baggy jeans as she walked past the table and dropped something in front of me. It seemed so random that I had a hard time immediately processing what it was, but it was a worn, cheap black bra, exactly like the type I tended to wear. I felt like I’d just witnessed a bit of conjuring and had to reassure myself that I was still wearing the one I’d put on that morning, but if anything, the one in front of me would have been a bit small on me now. I’d gone up half a cup size since graduating high school.

Wherever she’d got the bra from and whatever it was supposed to mean to me, she slinked away on the heels of her already-departing bossy sister. The redhead was trailing after them, but she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

“For the record, I have no idea what she sees in you,” she said, and then she was gone.

What the hell was that about? I thought. Science universes must be weird.

Author’s Note: I was going to write a story very much like this one anyway, but it’s final form was drastically influenced by me reading half of “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” this morning, after finding out that the author had put in a plug for TOMU. The allusions to that story (in particular, chapter 8 of it) should not be taken as a critique or parody, but homage.

I’m sure if I didn’t say otherwise, some people would see this as an attempt to refute the way that other story works, but they’re different animals. My setting is supposed to be what happens when a D&D-style fantasy world reaches the modern age, his is what it means when a fantasy story happens in “the real world”.

I think I’d have to learn a lot more about a lot of things before I could set out to refute Less Wrong’s work if I wanted to, and it’s possible that his protagonist would have fared better in Dandy’s place.

The Hex Kittens grudgingly appear courtesy of me.

Monster attacks on campus were common enough to be a problem but not so common that you couldn’t walk across campus without getting attacked. They were like horse riding accidents: they happened, so there was safety equipment and rules and things, but the fact that riding a horse could result in a fatal accident didn’t make riding a horse fatal, or stop people from doing it.

In any case, I thought it was more important to get Nicki and Grace out and fed. If it would be darker on the way back, but I was pretty sure we’d be okay. Nicki was only human, but Grace and I would see her back to her dorm… I didn’t know how well Grace could handle herself compared to the typical elf, but I was pretty sure she’d be able to get back to Treehome without a problem. If she didn’t feel comfortable doing that, she did have a place to stay… though I made a plan to go wake them up in the morning if Grace slept over again.

“Are the food places even still open now?” Nicki asked as we headed towards the union.

“I’m not one hundred percent sure about the dining halls, but the food court definitely is,” I said.

“They take the meal plan, right?” Nicki asked.

“Yep,” I said.

“Oh, shit, shit, shit!” Grace said.

“What?” Nicki asked, alarmed.

“I’m not on the meal plan, and I didn’t think to grab my coin purse before I left.”

“I think we can probably cover you,” I said. I’d give Nicki the opportunity to pay for her girlfriend, but I was betting she didn’t have money, either, since she’d mentioned the plan. I liked the thought that I could splurge to pay for both of their meals if I had to… I’d had people hold such favors out to me with strings attached before, and being able to do it just out of genuine niceness felt as good as receiving such an actual friendly gesture did.

I’d been way more free with my money lately, but this would be a one-time thing. It wouldn’t be taking food out of my mouth, because I had a pre-paid meal plan and I didn’t technically need to eat.

“No, no… Nicol… Nicki paid for the pizzas,” Grace said. She reached down and took off one of her boots, then upended it over her hand. Three shiny gold coins fell out. “Is this enough for a burger?”

“May I see those?” I asked, trying to keep my voice and face neutral. They seemed a little too… shimmery. If they were real, they’d be enough to buy everything on the menu and then some… but I thought it would be more tactful to quietly determine their authenticity that than it would be to voice the qualifier.

They were of elven stamp, but the minting of a coin didn’t matter… banks and businesses pressed their own coins all the time. They had to, since government only issued gold and platinum ones. The value was in the metal, so it was just the material and the size that mattered.

“Dude… you carry three gold pieces in your shoe?” Nicki said.

“Six… well, three in each, and only because they’re impossible to steal that way. It’s my emergency money,” Grace said. “This isn’t exactly an emergency, but I could replace them as soon as I get back. Also, please don’t call me ‘dude’… a lot of women go for the androgynous look to try to catch the boys’ eyes, but I like looking feminine.”

“Sorry, it’s more of an exclamation than anything at this point,” Nicki said. “There’s nothing unfeminine about you.”

The coins had a glamour on the gold more lustrous and adding an unnatural amount of detail to the picture of the elven face in profile on the obverse, but it was real gold underneath that, and a little measuring spell was enough to confirm that they were standard weight, though the glamour had them looking thinner, too.

“Well, you might want to cancel the shininess,” I said. “If it doesn’t look weird to the cashier, it will probably set off a ward when they drop it in the register. There’s no crime against passing a gold coin off as a prettier gold coin, but it’s safer all around.”

“Oh, I don’t know how to do that,” Grace said.

Dispelling a glamour was so easy it barely counted as doing anything, but I passed one of the coins to Nicki to do it so she could show off in her area of expertise and handed the other two back to Grace.

“What if I need the other two?” she asked.

“You won’t,” I said. “And be ready to get a lot of change.”

The spate of bad weather had kept the usual early evening festival-like atmosphere from forming on the pent and the plaza, but there were enough people still out that we’d gathered a few curious glances as they passed on their way to or from the student union, as curious people stopped to see why there was an elf standing on one foot holding her boot. The glances turned to bug-eyed stares at the sight of the three glittering gold coins. The only time the average college student dealt with gold was when it was time to pay tuition, and that was usually done by bank draft.

While Nicki scowled over the coin and unwound the enchantment, Grace slipped her boot back on with so much ease that I wondered how it stayed on in the first place. It unaccountably reminded me of sex with Steff, who liked it raw and rough… but somehow could slip in places more easily than Ian, who took a more moderate stance on things like lubrication and foreplay. Elves really were better at many things.

It was a weird thing to think about when watching your friend’s girlfriend putting on footwear, so of course I couldn’t stop.

“There you go, m’lady,” Nicki said, handing the de-glammed coin back to Grace.

“Oh,” Grace said, sounding a little disappointed. “Is that what gold normally looks like? Oh, but I liked that you called me your lady! You should definitely do that some more. Especially if you meet my sister. She’d be so impressed with me… I think. Though, I probably shouldn’t take you back to my place, because I don’t really have a place of my own, and everybody I live with would kind of be entitled to have sex with you and I don’t know how you’d feel about that.”

“I… also don’t know how I’d feel about that,” Nicki said. “I’m not entirely against… um… you know, stuff, in general, but I don’t like the sound of the word ‘entitled’.”

“It’s just a different culture,” Grace said. “Oh, and they’ll still be having sex with me. I should mention that. I should have mentioned that earlier. It’s probably weird to you, but it’s more of a service thing than a recreation thing, at least for me. Like, it’s my position. I do like it, but I like sex with you better!”

“I kind of had a general idea of that, from things you’ve said?” Nicki said. “But thanks for telling me.”

“I’d also like to talk about an arrangement where I can have sex with whoever I want but you only have sex with me or people I want you to, but I think we should get to know each other more first,” Grace said. “Though I don’t know who else I’d be having sex with, other than the people I have to? But it’s still… it’s kind of an important part of a relationship, to me? But that’s long-term stuff!”

“I… uh… we could talk about that,” Nicki said. “Some time.”

I couldn’t tell if Nicki’s embarrassment was because she was into the idea or because she wasn’t, but I found myself in the awkward position of having second-hand embarrassment and second-hand turn-on. It was time for a subject change, though maybe not a total one. Grace was simultaneously reminding me that she was mostly harmless and that the middling elves in general could be a thorny bunch to get tangled up with.

“What’s life in the elven dorm like, really?” I asked. I still wanted to quiz Jamie, but Grace was here and she was a primary source. If she wasn’t exactly an unbiased one, neither was Jamie. “I almost got dragged there, once upon a time.”

“Well, it’s not really a dorm, per se?” Grace said. “I know it’s classed as an external residence hall, but it’s more of a… compound? The buildings are all grown, mostly from heartwood trees. Some of them are communal, but some are staked out by… well, I guess they’d be something like fraternities or sororities. We call them circles or courts. My sister has her own. I’m sort of the new pledge.”

“Does it have a name?” Nicki asked.

“Glory’s court, I guess?” she said. “She’s in charge, but she’s kind of a… benevolent dictator, is the phrase she uses.”

“I think most dictators say that about themselves,” I said, though I said it a little quietly, seeing as the phrase had actually originated as one of the emperor’s titles.

“Well, I feel like I’m still getting to know her, but I think she’s pretty benevolent,” Grace said.

“How can you… oh, elf,” Nicki said. “I know she’s like almost one whole human older than you are, but I can’t wrap my head around what that means.”

“We’re lucky. A lot of elves don’t meet their siblings except like socially, when they’re both all grown up,” Grace said. “Or one is just another older relative to the other. I like the mortal model better. I think my sister does, too. But then, we’re both kind of… thanatophiles?”

“Death-lovers?” I said.

“It means we love people who die,” Grace said. “Oh, now I sound like Semele. Or Steff. Oh, sorry! She’s your friend.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You mean, you have an affinity for ‘mortal’ cultures.”

“Yeah, that!” she said. “We class people as dying or undying… obviously, a lot of undying races can still be killed, us included, but… not dying of natural causes is a big deal in elven culture. But I think the whole thing is kind of overblown anyway? When we’re not constantly at war with each other, it just leads to a lot of dysfunction, and most of us end up opting out in the end, anyway, so what’s the big deal?”

We’d come to the union by that point.

“Oh, let me get the door!” Nicki said, running ahead and pulling it open with so much enthusiasm that she almost tripped on the way and would have fallen over from yanking the door handle if the door itself hadn’t held her up. “After you, my lady.”

“Oh, I really like you,” Grace said. “You almost hurt yourself helping me! I mean, it would be bad if you did, but I like that enthusiasm!”

We’d barely got upstairs when Grace said, “…are those prices right?” She was looking in the direction of the food court. I could see the menu boards in the sense that I could have pointed to them and said, “Those are the menus up there,” but I couldn’t begin to read them.

“I assume so,” I said.

“…they’re in copper,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I told you to expect a lot of change.”

“…so I could get two burgers,” she said. “I mean, I know that I could get more than two. I mean, I know that now, but what I mean is that I don’t have to stop at one, which is good because I’m starving, and it’s been years since I got a chance to eat as much food as I wanted. That’s why the pizza was so great… I only had to share with one person.”

“What do you normally have to eat?” Nicki asked.

“My sister’s friends’ assholes, mostly,” she said. “Oh, they don’t starve me or anything… but when there’s a formal sit-down meal, I serve the others and then eat when they’re done. Even when we go to the Arch, they just pass me their plates when they’re finished. The food’s all good… before the Arch, I cooked a lot of it… but there’s a certain amount of ‘oh, we’d better eat this so Grace doesn’t get any’ and ‘oh, this is too good for Grace’.”

“Sounds like your sister isn’t very nice to you,” Nicki said.

“It’s… middling stuff,” Grace said. “If she treated me better, the others would treat me worse. They’re not particularly mean, it’s just that I’m the… newbie? Anyway, it suits me better to be on the bottom than it would to try to get to the top. I’m not sure I have it in me to be anywhere but the bottom. Glory’s court is one of the nicer ones, but they can still be…”

“Elf-nice?” Nicki supplied.

“Yeah,” she said. “See why I like humans?”

Hope your move to the DC area goes as smoothly as possible! I’ll be here reading.

“I don’t actually know,” Nicki said. “There wasn’t a lot of conversation, you know?”

“Falling into bed with someone without talking about it first is not a good habit to pick up,” I said.

Given my history, maybe the advice would seem hypocritical coming from me… but I wasn’t trying to lecture at Nicki from a position of superiority but rather one of experience.

Even with my current long-term partners, I’d done things that we hadn’t threshed out in advance, and the results hadn’t always been horrible but the danger was always there, and things were certainly better when we took the time to clear up expectations and boundaries. There was still plenty of room for spontaneity, as Amaranth’s trick with the sawhorse had demonstrated, but breaking that out on someone who’d never discussed being bound or immobilized before was a whole other lack of proposition.

We’d done bondage before. The hapless voyeur who can’t quite voy aspect had been new, but not really out of bounds… more like a novel mix of other elements that had been agreed to and used before, and it had worked. I wasn’t looking forward to a repeat performance any time soon, but it had definitely worked.

But… I was getting sidetracked. Nicki was already responding to me.

“Oh, we talked about that,” she said. “Briefly, but… enthusiastically. But, I mean, there wasn’t anything deeper or more long-term that we talked about… though I guess this ended up being longer-term than I expected it to. My jaw is so sore, I swear to kosh, I don’t know how you do it.”

“Uh, I think you left the realm of ‘it that I do’ at least a day and a half ago,” I said.

“Shattered your record, huh?”

“I guess. But, you know… and I’m totally not judging you at all for how you spent your weekend, or overspent it… but you really should be judging it on its merits, not by how you think it stacks up against me or anyone else,” I said. “A lot of my life behind closed doors would probably bore you to tears, and even the parts that are ‘interesting’… they’re not necessarily something that would be fun for most people. Like, the last ‘sex’ I had, I was tied up and facing away while Ian and Amaranth… were on the bed together.”

“How is that you having sex?”

“It’s… complicated,” I said. “But it wouldn’t be a sexual experience, for most people, is my point. On the subject of records, though, I’m surprised you kept your bra on for three days.”

She blushed, and the tiger stripes vanished as she lost whatever bit of concentration had been keeping them in place.

“It was kind of a… dress-up thing,” she said. “For variety? Also, Grace has a thing about… unrestrained boobies. She likes them, but eventually they sort of started to… distract her.”

“She seems nice enough,” I said. “I mean, from what I’ve seen of her… well, not seen, I mean, I wasn’t looking… well, I wasn’t not looking…”

“She’s real pretty,” Nicki said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, gratefully. “She is. But I mean, she seems… harmless.”

“You mean she’s more regular nice than elf-nice,” Nicki said.

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said.

“Steff would, though,” Nicki said.

I thought that Grace was too genuinely scattered… well, too genuine in general… to be pulling off much of an ulterior motive, at least one that went beyond the scope of just getting laid, but I didn’t want to say as much. It seemed rude to say so in front of Nicki, much less in earshot of Grace.

“I think the girlfriend talk should wait until she’s in the room,” Nicki said, her mind evidently on a similar planar layer as mine.

“And I’m out of it?” I said.

“No, you’re my friend,” she said. “As long as Grace is comfortable with it, I think I’d rather have you around.”

Even after a year of being liked and loved by my little circle, I still wasn’t tired of hearing people say that: you’re my friend. It was… nice. And reassuring. And powerful… the words carried a real charge when they hit my ear.

“Okay, sure,” I said. “But seriously, let’s take the conversation somewhere else. You need to get out in the fresh air.”

I did, too, but it seemed rude to mention that… and also potentially alarming. I could coexist with other people of human blood just fine most of the time, but every once in a while I would get a whiff at just the wrong time and in just the wrong way and there it would be, waiting for me like an old friend: the hunger. The very human smells that were hanging like a fog in Nicki’s dorm room weren’t setting it off, but they were enough to make me think about it, which was almost enough to do so.

“That’s fine with me,” Nicki said. “I’m suddenly very, very hungry. I guess that’s not surprising, though… I didn’t even know today was today until five minutes ago. I wouldn’t swear that the last pizza got here today… I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate.”

“That’s funny, I remember it perfectly,” Grace said, slipping into the room and closing the door with a sound it hadn’t made opening. The towel clung to her like a fitted gown. “Your turn, glam-girl.”

“Wow, that was fast,” Nicki said. “I take forever in my showers.”

“Well, I was only elf-dirty,” she said. There was no barb there, just matter-of-fact… she had been listening to Steff’s primer on elves from her point of view. It was probably one of the less awkward ways to confirm it, and certainly better than letting it go unsaid. She whipped off the towel and threw it to Nicki. “Go wash my pussy.”

The look on her face when the words had left her mouth probably matched mine when I heard them… she was much more expressive than Dee or Acantha. I wondered how old she was and at what age elves learned to freeze their faces, or if this was just a personal quirk.

“Sorry,” she said. “Is it okay if I say that? It’s… ‘mine’ is kind of a term in endearment, in Elvish. I guess it sounds… blunter… in Pax than I expected.”

“…it can be yours,” Nicki said, her face turning a vivid and unnatural orange. I realized she was losing control of a tanning or complexion glamour… I supposed that was the downside of managing your own appearance directly.

“Why don’t you go shower?” I suggested.

Her arcanely-assisted blush only got more pronounced when she swung her legs out from under the blanket to reveal that she was completely bare from the waist down, and I mean completely… evidently she’d prepared for her elven admirer by giving herself an elven wax.

As soon as I’d registered I was looking at Nicki basically naked, I realized that Grace was completely naked. That helped me find a nice, fully-carpeted patch of floor to stare at while Nicki got a robe, got her shower stuff together, and got out the door.

“You want me to leave while you get dressed?” I asked Grace, thinking it might give me a nice excuse to not be standing in someone else’s room alone with someone else I’d just met… it felt awkward and intrusive without the nudity and the scents putting me on edge.

“Why? You’ve already seen me naked,” she said, making no move to retrieve her clothes from wherever she’d stowed them. “Oh, but I should get decent.”

She went and rummaged around in the blankets until she found the panties and the veil that she’d slipped to Nicki the week before, which had started all this. She let the panties fall carelessly to the floor… in my head, I could hear Amaranth sucking in a sharp breath… and carefully tied the scarf-like mask around the lower half of her face.

“Oh, so much better,” she said. “It wasn’t so bad when my Nicollete was in the room , but walking around the hall without my cover, I kept expecting dicks to fall into my mouth.”

“…does that actually happen?” I asked. “To elf girls who don’t cover?”

“No, the ones who chase after cocks have to chase pretty hard to catch one,” she said. “The cover is more of a fuck-you to them… the boyss, I mean, not the girls who want them. They pretty much take it for granted that they’d be welcome anywhere, even places they don’t want to be, so we… tell them otherwise.”

“It’s not just boys who have cocks, you know,” I said, feeling I had to stick up for the existence of Steff.

“Oh, I know that,” she said. “It’s… clumsier… talking about this in Pax. We have more words in our language for talking about these things, but you look them up in a translation dictionary and it’s all just ‘boy’, ‘girl’. Is it really Monday?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Damn it,” she said. “My sister is going to be so pissed… and maybe thrilled, but also pissed. Maybe more thrilled? I don’t know. I don’t care, I got laid… hey, have you ever had sex with Nicki?”

“…we just met,” I said.

“So did we,” she said. “That’s a no?”

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Oh my shit, you should it’s awesome,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air like a toddler who’d just discovered her mother’s very important papers could serve as a confetti substitute. She threw her jubilation into reverse with surprising speed. “Only don’t now, because she’s mine.” Then the happy came flooding back. “Holy fuck, she’s mine. That’s awesome. But don’t fuck her.”

She punctuated the last bit by giving me a playful prod/shove in the chest.

“I wasn’t going to,” I said.

“Ooh, hey, are you pierced?” she said, cupping my breast through my shirt and bra hard enough to feel the locket piercing over my heart. She kept her hand there… again, there seemed to be no guile or wiles there, just… well, ‘innocent’ was the only word, but innocence could only go so far.

“Grace,” I said. I think Amaranth would have been impressed with how I managed to be forceful without being loud, if she’d been there. Grace stopped actively exploring my chest, but she didn’t withdraw her hand. “I’ve had very bad experiences with people who didn’t respect my boundaries.”

“Eep!” she said… literally, that’s not an attempted transcription of a sound, it’s exactly what she said… and she took a big step back. “Sorry, I’m… okay, I’m not a kid anymore, and you’re not elves, but elven children are a lot more hands-on with each other, and I… I haven’t fully adjusted to not-childhood yet.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“What year is this now?”

“It’s 223.”

“Oh, then I guess I’m 25,” she said. “No… I will be, this summer. No, 223… I’ll be 24 this summer.”

“How long have you been in school?”

“Three or four years,” she said. “But… not in a serious way? I’m only taking a couple of classes this semester. Both of them on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, of course.”

“Well, it’s early in the semester and you won’t be the only one in either of those classes who creates their own three-day weekend,” I said, trying not to feel too much resentment for someone with the leisure time to take such a trivial course load and then blow it off.

I supposed that technically, I could spend a decade or more to get my degree without cutting into my allotment of years too badly, but in the meantime I’d need a place to stay and a more steady way to make money. And the longer I spent learning my trade, the less valuable the knowledge would be when I joined the workforce. When you got right down to it, I really didn’t see the advantage to putting off starting my life for an easier time at college.

“…you don’t think much of me, do you?” Grace said. “I’m not making a very good impression.”

“No, honestly, you’re kind of… well, I mean, this whole thing was unexpected, but I kind of like how it’s turning out for Nicki,” I said. “It is just unexpected.”

“Oh. For me, too!”

“But… you set it up,” I said.

“I had kind of a little push,” she said. “Multiple pushes. Several big pushes. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be here!”

“You don’t have to explain that to me,” I said. A lot of things about Grace made me wonder if things in middling society were less cutthroat nasty than Jamie and Steff had implied… I hoped they were, or someone like Grace would be a sitting duck.

Suddenly, I actually couldn’t wait to see Jamie Bowman again. Under any other circumstance, he would have been the last person I’d go to for relationship advice, but he could speak from experience as well as I could, and if people I cared about were going to be enmeshed with the elves of Treehome then I wanted to hear the inside scoop.