Chapter XXXVIII (38)- Wine and Girls

At the last second, Kizu tried to pull out of the party altogether. It felt wrong to go without Harvey, and without him, Kizu would barely know anyone there. The closer they drew to the promised hour, the more his eagerness faded, giving way to mounting dread.

But of course, now that Basil knew he was invited, the shapeshifter wouldn’t hear any excuses.

Despite Basil’s best efforts, Mort refused to wear the matching outfit sewn for him. The most he managed to coax the monkey into was a little green bandana, and even that had been a challenge. In the end, Mort only relented once Basil made it clear he would hound him for eternity, night and day, if he didn’t compromise. Mort valued his sleep. To be honest, before today, Kizu hadn’t known Mort was even capable of compromise. He felt a bit miffed that Basil had succeeded so quickly where he so often had failed.

When they arrived at the villa, Kizu almost turned and walked away. But the moment to flee disappeared even quicker than he’d anticipated. Instead of knocking, Basil just swung the door open and waltzed in like it was his own home.

Emilia hadn’t been lying when she said the party was lowkey. It was nothing like the one she’d thrown a few weeks back. Kizu counted just ten other students inside. The atmosphere was almost subdued compared to the chaos he remembered.

A few guests glanced up at them as they stepped inside, but they went back to their idle conversations after only a cursory greeting. Everyone was dressed in formal clothing. A few of the boys even had lace around their collars and wrists. In that moment, Kizu was incredibly grateful to Basil for crafting him a classy outfit for the occasion - and simultaneously grateful that he hadn’t let Basil attach any laces to it.

When Emilia spotted him, she smiled and ushered him over.

“Kizu, I’m glad you could make it. Here, have a glass of wine. It’s imported from Edgeland.”

Kizu took a sip and blinked in surprise. It tasted nothing like the other alcohol he’d had in the past. It didn’t bite like the bitter swill he’d snuck from the crone’s stash as a child. It wasn’t thick and cloying like the ale he’d had with Harvey a few weeks back, either. The wine was sweet. It actually tasted good, almost like a normal drink. He eyed the glass in disbelief. The liquid was cherry red. He took another sip.

“I really like this,” he said lamely.

Emilia glowed at the comment. “My family owns the orchard! It’s one of their trade investments.”

“You’re from a merchant family?”

“It’s more common than you’d think. Most of the student body is either minor nobility or connected to some kind of international trade. Have you not noticed?”

The thought had crossed Kizu’s mind, but he had never really cared to look into it. He glanced over to Basil, intending to ask about his family, but the boy was already enraptured in a conversation with one of Emilia’s friends. Kizu recognized her as one of the girls that followed Emilia around everywhere.

Emilia led him to a couch while she went on about the myriad ventures of her family’s business. Kizu listened attentively and pieced together enough to know that her family must be extraordinarily wealthy over in Edgeland. He wondered why, then, her family couldn’t help Harvey out with his tuition. Her parents were his aunt and uncle, weren’t they? He opened his mouth to ask, but then Mort fidgeted on his shoulder. His monkey had spotted a pile of fruit off in the distance. Kizu had to grab ahold of his tail to keep him from bounding across the room and ransacking it.

“Mind if I sit?” Not waiting for a response, a Hon boy roughly Kizu’s age wedged himself between Kizu and Emilia.

In his irritation, Kizu released Mort’s tail, letting the monkey go trawling for food. No doubt he’d harass the other guests while he was at it. Maybe, if they were lucky, he’d go for Basil first.

The Hon boy looked almost as statuesque as Basil did tonight. He didn’t even spare Kizu a glance as he began droning on to Emilia about a group assignment they had due soon. At the very least, Kizu noticed Emilia looked as irritated by the interruption as he felt.

Kizu found himself in an awkward position. More than once, he tried to jump back into the conversation, but the other boy would just roll right over any comments he tried to make. It made him feel like an absolute idiot. The older boy never once acknowledged his existence.

Kizu decided to try another strategy. He stood up and cut straight through the conversation, asking Emilia if she wanted another glass of wine. She nodded; an obviously fake smile plastered to her face as she continued to politely listen to the boy’s rambling.

Unsurprisingly, he found Basil over by the wine. The boy’s face had softened a bit from the chiseled he’d arrived with, shaving years off his appearance. As he gulped down another glass, he noticed Kizu.

“Kizu!”

“How many drinks have you had so far?”

“Lost count. No need to keep track when it’s free, you know what I mean?” He wobbled slightly as he poured Kizu a glass and handed it over.

“Do you even need to eat and drink?” Kizu asked as he took a sip of the wine.

Basil laughed. “Of course! Everything alive needs to eat and drink. It’s just a matter of what. Even a tree gobbles up sunlight.”

“But not all magical creatures need to eat to stay alive,” Kizu said, thinking of the bloodspawn. They felt discomfort without substance, but starving them of blood wasn’t an effective way to kill them.

“Maybe not.” Basil shrugged. “But I definitely do.” He glanced over his shoulder at the others. “Want to see a trick?”

Before Kizu could say ‘no’ Basil had taken a buttered biscuit from the countertop and held it out in his hand. Then, slowly, it sank into his palm, absorbing the food whole.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“You can eat with your hands?” Kizu asked, staring at the place where the biscuit had been a moment earlier. Not even a crumb remained.

“I can eat with anything. If I wanted to, I could create mouths on my knees. I don’t have an actual digestive tract, so it's all the same to me.”

“Are there a lot of students like you?”

“Are there a lot of students like you?” Basil repeated back at him.

“I mean, not really. But there are a lot of people from Hon.”

“Oh, well there are loads of people from Tross. I think there are at least four more in this room, even.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Though Kizu hadn’t known that Basil was from Tross. “Is there anyone else of your species here?”

“No. I think the faculty have decided one of me is more than enough for them. Even if there were more like me.”

“So, you’re one of a kind?”

“Aren’t we all?”

“What about your family?”

“No idea. Never met my mother. Anyway, how’s Emilia?”

“Talking to another guy.” Kizu wanted to ask about his other family, but let the subject drop. “What about your date? Where’d that girl go?”

Basil shrugged. “Passed out. She wanted to match me drink for drink. Cute, really, but senseless. I set her down on a bed and left a bucket by her head.” After a moment of thought, he grinned. “You know, I have an idea that might solve your problem.”

Kizu did not like the sound of that. He told Basil as much.

“Relax, don’t be so high-strung. You want that dude gone, right?”

“Yes,” Kizu said hesitantly.

“I’ll be back in just a minute. Wait here.”

Basil stumbled around a corner, his flesh sagging and seeming to melt off his skeleton. Kizu didn’t know whether to stay put, warn Emilia, or flee the villa altogether. He sipped his wine and pretended to be calm.

When Basil stumbled back into the room, he wore a completely different skin. He looked like a beautiful Hon woman, with luxuriant black hair that spilled down past his shoulders and long eyelashes that accentuated wide black eyes. The only reason Kizu knew it was Basil was because of his boots. Well, that, and his drunken staggering.

“Where did you get those clothes?” Kizu asked.

“I always keep at least one spare set on me at all times.” He looked at himself in the window’s reflection and fixed the position of his hair clip. “Okay, follow my lead.”

Kizu grabbed the wine bottle to refill Emilia’s cup, but realized Basil had finished it off. He opened the cupboard, snatched the first bottle in sight and poured it into both his and Emilia’s glasses. Then he hastily followed after Basil.

When Kizu poked his head out from around the corner, he saw the boy next to Emilia was still deeply enthralled in his one-way conversation with her. But as Basil walked by, the Hon boy paused mid-sentence. Basil met his eyes and nodded slightly over to the side. The boy quickly made an excuse and rushed away from Emilia.

Finally, Kizu returned to the room and passed Emilia her wine glass. She smiled politely and thanked him.

“Who was he?” Kizu asked.

“Oh, just the son of some rural Hon duke. He’s a small fry, to be honest. But my parents told me never to overlook potential assets.”

“Assets?”

“The entire reason they sent me to the academy was to build connections for future trade negotiations. You don’t make any friends by staying tucked away in obscurity. My parents always tell me it’s about who you know, not what you know.”

Kizu thought about who he knew at the academy. As far as he could tell, none of his friends held much worldly influence. In fact, Emilia was probably his most valuable friend, from that point of view.

He wondered if that’s why his parents had sent him here. To build reliable connections for their trade empire. If that was the case, he wasn’t doing the best job so far - though, at the very least he was doing better than his brother. He had yet to see Finn with a friend.

“And you’re okay with that?” Kizu asked her. “It sounds like your parents are controlling your entire future.”

Emilia laughed quietly. “What’s wrong with that? I’ve never really understood why people resent their parents so much. They just want you to walk the most successful path in your life. And they know better than I do how to do it.”

Kizu mulled that over. For some reason, he wasn’t sold on the idea of living up to his parents’ expectations. He took another sip of wine. This blend tasted more bitter than the first, but it left behind a pleasant tang on his tongue. The alcohol was doing its work, smoothing over his unpleasant thoughts of family. He took another gulp.

“Besides, it’s not like they don’t trust me,” Emilia continued. “I get to make plenty of decisions for myself.”

She took a sip of her own wine. Then she frowned and looked down at it.

“Kizu, this isn’t the wine I had out.”

“It was in the cupboard. Basil finished off the other one.”

“Oh. Not from the winerack?” She looked down at her glass. “Well. In that case, maybe we should go somewhere else more private.”

“Why?”

She looked at him like he was dense. But even as he met her eyes, he felt the world mushing together. It was as if his senses had decided there was too much space between the objects in view and mashed them all together.

“Actually,” Kizu amended, “Scratch that, let’s go.” He distantly felt her hand on his arm, guiding him into a different room. He heard a door latch shut behind him.

“What we just drank was experimental,” Emilia quickly started explaining. “It’s wine fermented from a berry found deep in the World Dungeon. My parents sent it to me to give to Professor Grove for analysis. It’s supposed to-”

Whatever it was supposed to do, it seemed at that moment Emilia was hit by it just as hard as Kizu had been. The world continued to compress. He felt his breath quicken. He forced himself to calm down. Relax. No need to panic. He was safe. He was sitting in a villa with a beautiful girl, even if he couldn’t see her at the moment.

Then something else pulled at his attention. Like a splash of cold water, he found himself connected to Mort’s senses. In that moment, the link was stronger than it had ever been before. It felt as if he and Mort shared one body. They jointly moved around the room, examining the students. There was a cherry floating in one girl’s drink. He maneuvered himself into the rafters directly above the girl, then pounced. She spilled the drink and screamed, but that didn’t matter. In fact, it was convenient. The cherry sloshed out with some of the liquid. He snatched it up, midair, and darted across the room to nibble on it.

Kizu pried his awareness away from Mort’s. It felt like separating two layers of cake from one another. He could do it, but it was messy.

His awareness floated for a minute, trying to relocate his body, before something else slammed into it.

“Please,” it begged.

He blinked and found himself sitting in a large box. The walls glowed a pale scarlet. It was warm. It vaguely reminded Kizu of his little cupboard by the furnace in the crone’s hut, but something kept the box from feeling that homey. Instead of relaxing him, it set him on edge.

A man peeled the top off the box. He felt himself relax at the sight of him. Comfort. Familiarity. Love. Everything that was missing in his life.

“Good, you’re awake.” The man bent down over the box to help him up. As he did, Kizu’s consciousness floated out. He wasn’t needed anymore. As he slipped away, he met the mismatched eyes of the body he had temporarily coexisted in. One eye was black, the other red.

After a moment of drifting, he snapped back into focus. He was in a room in Emilia’s villa. He took a breath of the seaside air and relaxed.

“-assist with divination,” Emilia finished.