“I dunno why I ever stopped taking naps,” Nathan said as they arrived at the rest area, having traveled through two more rooms of largely unremarkable nature. “Like, there’s this joke that it’s the people who don’t want to nap who have the time to do so, and the ones who do want to nap don’t get to? But I think that’s mostly just a reflection of the fact that wanting to nap is a consequence of not getting enough sleep, and you didn’t get enough sleep because you didn’t have time, and not having time means you didn’t get a nap.”
“You’re not wrong,” Tanya agreed, looking down at her partner. “Not all of us look this good doing it, though.”
Given that the partner in question was snoring softly while pressing as much of her body up against Tanya’s own body, a bubble of drool hanging from the lower corner of her mouth, this represented a mixture of bias on the one part and supernatural attractiveness on the other.
“How is she doing that, anyway?”
“She… likes the body heat?”
“No, I meant the—hey, rude,” Nathan muttered. “You know what I mean.”
“She’s a Liminal Priestess, she’s practically a living divine domain, however she wants to embody herself. She doesn’t want the clothes to be in the way, so she… does this.” Tanya looked down again and snickered. “Which is cute. Bizarre as shit, sure, but also cute.”
“She’s clipping through your clothes,” he objected. “That’s more than just bizarre. It makes no sense! I get a headache even looking at it.”
“Divine. Domain.”
And that was all there was to it, and Nathan did not have it in himself to object further. It made a certain amount of sense to him, after all; if divinity was a lens of action or perception which violated the rules of reality, even those which were magical in nature, why shouldn’t Honeydew be able to be skin-to-skin with someone through armor and clothing alike? And that meant…
“She never has an itch she can’t scratch,” he muttered enviously. “No wonder everyone wants to be around her. Get that one spot no matter how buried under layers it is.”
Tanya paused just before entering the tent she was standing in front of, turning to look at him as though she weren’t certain whether he was joking, oblivious, or deliberately things up. “Yes,” she said slowly, after a moment. “That is exactly how I would describe it, and no doubt how she would describe it. Have a good rest!”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Nathan paused at that, looking around the room. “I’m going to assume that was some sort of sex thing,” he said to himself with impeccable accuracy. “It’s always some sort of sex thing. Why are people so obsessed with sex? Then again, until just recently I read an average of more than two hundred thousand words of fiction every day. But that’s a hobby, not an obsession,” he qualified for the sake of any observers, whom he had no real reason to suspect the existence of with the exception of his as-yet-unnamed interlife partner, the one who had so recently reincarnated him into the center of a star.
No answer proved forthcoming; not to the not-at-all-rhetorical question he’d asked nor to any of the ones he’d implied. There was, however, plenty to look around at, which he undertook to do rather than dwell on the explicable silence and the manifold mysteries of human nature.
The two rooms they’d passed through between the classroom laboratory and the rest area had been simple to the point of boredom—one was a ballroom or gymnasium with a polished wooden floor, simple panel walls, and a mirrored wall; the other had been a commercial kitchen sans appliances, all polished steel counters and empty cupboards. The rest area was, by comparison, boon and benison in its every detail, and he studied it intently to try to divine its nature and hidden details.
There were such details, of course, but he was unable to find them amidst the bustle and vibrancy of even as little nature as he was surrounded by. The very rooms themselves operated by magical principles which he could, if he knew precisely where and how to look, discover for himself; he knew some of this, because he had seen the glyphs and runes which had indicated the combat chamber’s nature and to some degree controlled its triggering. But instead he stared into a fountain, fed by eight slender wooden tubes of perfect and precise balance. The tubes filled with water by a variety of means ranging from water spouts in the shapes of animals to a simulated drip from leaves placed above them, and they tapped down in an elegant and shifting pattern of doik sounds which somehow managed to present a soothing music.
There was a tent, one which hadn’t existed before he stepped into the combat room with the adventuring party of the other two delvers. He was, having done so, a member of their party now, and all magics which were specific to the party would include him; and so would the level they were delving, growing in challenge and rewards alike. But he ignored the tent, settling down on a bench in front of the fountain and staring at it, trying to figure out where the water flowing into it was going.
The bottom of the fountain was imperfectly smooth, almost like a glyph worked into stone. His eyes traced it around and around as he tried to make sense of it, and he frowned for a time.
Around and around, his eyes traced it, and his frown eased.
He woke up two hours later to Tanya’s demands for a spare, perfectly rested and knowing precisely how the glyph worked—it was three dimensional, defined not just by the stonework but also by the whorls of water above that the imperfections caused.