Well, first it was time to take a shower, which also sounded very nice. And before that, she had to chuck herself up against the table some more, to get it back to where it had been before. Or close enough, anyway. Then it was back on with the sandals and trotting upstairs.

The bathroom she came to was occupied this time, but on knocking a familiar voice called out, “I’ll be out in one moment!” That sounded reasonable enough, so Mila waited, a small smile at her lips when Rora opened up the door and stepped out, still looking tired in spite of her own night’s sleep and recent shower, and far too comfortable in the overly fluffy blue bath robe she sported. “Oh, good morning Mila!”

Mila eased back and away against the wall as the other kobold moved in a bit closer, and Rora did not follow further. While they did not quite get as… ‘wet dog’ smelling as humans, kobolds still sweated just fine, and Mila was acutely aware that she stank of nickel from her workout. The last thing she needed was to ruin the relaxation and cleaning Rora just underwent.

“I’m gonna head out to some stores after this, if you want to join me?” She offered as Rora tightened up the shoulders of her robe. They went shopping pretty often, having many shared stores of interest, and had even made each other’s acquaintances at their favorite, a book store a few streets over.

Rora thought about it for hardly a moment. “That sounds delightful. I’ll get dressed. Is it raining today?”

“It is indeedy, yup. And I will be a bit, so no rush.”

“See you shortly then!”

Mila sidled on past, Rora stepping away further even though she had not been blocking the way into the bathroom. She did not turn around to see the golden kobold’s look of concern, nor was the mirror low enough for her to see behind her without stepping up on the stool in front of the sink. Instead, she hooked the door shut and popped the latch into place, not too concerned with the security but appreciating the feeling of privacy a vestigial lock gave.

She cranked the shower and felt the water with a hand before she then began the shucking off of her clothes, chucking the garments right into the shower before stepping in herself, her sandals the only things that were left outside.

Being so short was pretty great for the shower, she had to admit. It gave her plenty of room to stretch and shift about in the bath, no worries at all about hitting her noggin against the shower head up above. Given that this particular one was hefty metal, that meant easily avoiding a concussion, always a plus. Mila was unsure if healing magics took care of brain injuries fully, and she had no interest of risking a CTE to try and find out.

After a few handfuls of seconds just enjoying the feeling of water droplets hitting her scales and running down along the grooves between them, she started to move again. She picked up her vest from the floor of the tub with her tail, passing it into her hands so that she could hold it up to the fresh water. She made sure to soak the garment through, turning it around to get both sides, and then folded it onto itself and pressed water out, letting it soak back up as she released it. She did not wring out her clothes, though - that is how you damage the fabric.

She draped the newly cleaned garment over the side of the pewter bath and repeated the performance with her pants, then her one piece of underwear. No brassiere needed, thank goodness. They were about to go tromping around in the rain anyway, is part of why she was fine with reusing her clothes even when they’d still be a bit damp, but washing her clothes while she washed herself was a habit she had fallen into a long time ago - made it all much less of a chore when she took care of them together. And then she would just typically hang her damp clothes up on a clothesline set up in her room, for clothes as fresh as can be the next day!

Once her clothes were set to the side, she just stood for a bit, face tipped up into the spray of water. It did not matter what world you were in, a good shower was good stuff, maybe second only to a good bath with lots of bubbles and the water just a smidge too warm at the start. Maybe with some music in the background.

Unfortunately, Fantasyland’s musical options were less robust for personal listening, and that thought sent her mind down a path that soured her shower. The lack of Beyoncé hurt, a deep twinge in her soul that could not be mended. It also made Mila start to think about everything else that she knew was out there, just a world a way.

“Just a world away” being too damn far away, unfortunately. Magic to throw yourself to other worlds was relegated to the realm of fantasy books here in Fantasyland, so the prospect of rustling up some fantasy squared magic to solve her problems was outlandish at best, especially when it would not actually solve anything. She had friends in Scienceland, but she had friends here too, and it gnawed at her a tiny bit that she was closer to the folks here than over there. She had a job and a comfortable life over there, but her doing odd jobs here was its own kind of comfortable, and she actually made a difference here. Family was… equally a wash in both worlds, for similar enough reasons that she cared not to dwell on much.

And that was all before she factored in being a (admittedly adorable) lizard woman under three feet tall here. Scienceland solely had such in works of fiction, so turning up as she was felt like it would result in mass panic or being whisked off to be vivisected by the United States government. That felt very in-character of them. All that was also ignoring how maybe there was a Mila over there already, the one her Scienceland self had come from. It was not a possibility she could rule out, and if that Mila was merged too, well. That would be something a therapist would have to untangle, as fun as all that would have to be.

Here, she was the sole two-in-one Mila, she… well, ok, she stood out, but in a way that did not have the looming threat of being experimented on by a shadowy agency or two, and she could do more good work. Actually help people, instead of whiling away hours in front of a screen to make some nebulous corporate entity’s line go up. That her romantic relationship back in Scienceland had cratered months ago, a result of poor communication on both partIes’ sides, long enough to no longer sting kept her from jumping to a need to ‘get back’. But the idea of never playing with her tabletop role playing games group or never rolling down to her local game store did ache.

Morbidly, a chunk of her Scienceland self was intrigued by Fantasyland, acknowledging the much greater physical dangers of the wider world but excited to see more of it. Getting packed off to a strange world was prevalent in a lot of literature she consumed, so the overall concept as not alien. Those stories often had helpful status screens and rarely had their dashing hero(ine) riding copilot with a version of herself that was suspiciously similar, much less all stitched together to that copilot, all horror-movie-like.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Mind-melding and yotel physiology aside, though, at least it was not as bad as so many of those grimdark fantasy settings that Mila hated accidentally starting. Her drive to finish a story once she started it was a problem she had to work to overcome, but those types of series made it so very worth that challenge, feeling better to put down than actually consume.

That Mila did not have access to some hard statistics, no status or character sheet at all, actually felt a bit weird. Not because she expected that in a vacuum - neither world had such convenient quantifications of data! Anything that tried would have to be hilariously complex, more than would ever be useful. No, it was weird that some, but only some, of the things here in Fantasyland mapped over to Scienceland’s fantasy zeitgeist. She was a kobold, for Pete’s sake! The little reptile kind from Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder and their ilk. Pretty much all of the humanoidish people she could think of seemed to have a counterpart in one fantasy series or another.

Yet, plenty of other stuff was completely divorced from any fantasy series she could churn up in her mind. The damn yotels were just regular coyotes, creepy and cunning as they were, dosed up with magic and given some upgrades. They were terrifying in practice, with their mind magics and ability to do basic manual manipulations to open doors and shit, but that was no schlocky creature of fantasy novels.

Gods, she hated coyotes.

And outside of the fantasy stuff, there were similarities that felt suspicious as well. Things that lined up too well, and things that almost lined up but only if you squinted a little bit. The weather here was awful, a dank, swampy mess that felt exactly like how she remembered late spring and early summer, back in the American Southeast. Before Scienceland Mila had managed to escape and head out west. Even certain geography lined up, the Appalachian mountains replaced by The Spine, albeit with enough differences that she could say they were not exactly the same.

Now, obviously, the answer to all of it was just ‘a wizard did it’. Handwavey, perhaps, but she was also just some gal who was busy getting all her shower thoughts worked out over the madness that had settled upon her this past week. *Actually* figuring out all the metaphysical bullshit in a grand epiphany, while very convenient, was unlikely and would have frankly put her even more on guard. She had plenty of experience with grand, insightful reveals, and every one that had hit her had done so fiercely, with the crushing knowledge that she should have figured that shit out ages earlier but had been too busy getting in her own way.

One venomous green eye peeked open, translucent inner eyelid still closed to keep the water out, as she paused her self-monologuing. She wanted to give the universe at large a suitable beat to interject, if it felt it was dramatically appropriate to do so. Mila did not want the universe to withhold answers just because it would be rude to interrupt her, after all.

Unfortunately, nothing took that moment to conveniently clear everything up. She gave a shrug within the shower, having given it her best show. Maybe next time, she assured herself. One day something like that was going to work out in her favor, and probably nobody else would know it, but the stars would align and she would be all the better for it.

Her train of thought having switched tracks a bit, she turned her attention once more to the warmth that had long since seeped through her scales and now tickled at her bones. For much of the rest of her shower, she focused on more important things, like snappy one-liners and pithy parting words to field in order to win arguments long since already over. She had grown accustomed to the tides of despair, albeit for issues that she had since come to terms with and addressed within herself, so the grand situation she was in, feeling a bit adrift while mentally avoiding the loss of her acquaintances, was not completely novel to her. This would just… take a bit longer, is all. A few more showers, at least.

That did not mean she was not allowed to enjoy things either, and her imminent shopping trip had her tail swishing excitedly. They had divvied up their job’s pay late in the night, subtracting the overhead and doling out shares with one share going to their “oh fuck” fund. That money was dipped into for anything unexpected and bad, as the name conveyed pretty clearly in Mila’s opinion, and half the crews that came and went seemed to fall apart because they did not have something similar. Or because they did not have two math people, probably. Her and Aluca would get tipsy, do their dividing separately, and then hash out their results in front of the group. As long as it devolved into name-calling between the two, that meant things were adding up and checking out for everyone involved.

All told, she had a tidy sum to her name and, if some mental budgeting worked out like it should, meant she had more than enough wiggle room to indulge a bit. Not too much though, because that would prevent her indulging again before the next job. And given how the previous one went, it might be a while.

Her clothes dried well enough and she slipped them on, checking her face in the mirror. She had scrubbed at her face with her hands while bathing, but she could tell that it would be time to deep clean soon - scales that did not quite lay flat were starting to grow in, with some along her body that she had noticed too. Taking care of those before they got annoying was key for good scale health.

But that was later. So much to do later, and no time to dwell on it at all. First it was stopping by her room to pick up her last minute items, then downstairs she went, ready to meet up with Rora and get the show on the road, already trying to map out in what order they would go.

She had to suppress a snort of laughter once she saw her shopping buddy, though. Rora was decked out in a bright yellow, slightly-too-big rain coat and had orange boots to keep her feet dry, which really tied together the duckling aesthetic. Mila did not know if it was on purpose, but it was delightful, in a way that only Rora seemed to be able to pull off. It took a special kind of lady to pull off the potentially accidental cutesy outfit, but given how Mila had also seen her take a four foot long slab of metal and bisect things, Rora managed just fine. Dangerous competence paired very well with adorableness.

By comparison, Mila’s outfit for today was ‘business casual’, but only if you already knew her line of work. And not the white collar kind either, that had you wearing one of those throat-stranglingly insufferable ties. Her shorts and vest had pockets galore that held all sorts of knickknacks one might need at a moment’s notice, plus she had her pair of knives tucked away against her hips. Even her rain gear was not what most would be toting in town - she had shrugged on a poncho over the pack she sported, the canvas’s mottled greens and browns being more for hunting than shopping.

A twinge of jealousy scratched somewhere in her mind at the disparity on show, but Mila did not let it take root. “Looking good today! I’ve got a few places I gotta hit up. Anything specific for you?” She asked, an eye ridge raised. At least she herself did not blend in with her camouflage rain gear. Fuchsia stood out.

Rora smiled and moved closer, not quite waddling with her outfit. “The bakery, is all. Mrs. Morris said she was going to be trying out new pies as different ingredients were brought in.” Which did sound delicious to Mila nodding along. “And the book store, of course. Something new would be nice.”

“Oh, absolutely the book store. Only so many times I can read Sir Connor swooping in and saving Damsel Heather, or whatever her name is, setting her heart a flutter, before I want to puke.”

“By your own testimony, you had that reaction the first time you read the first book. That did not prevent you from borrowing the sequels.”

“I just wish that Heather would, I dunno, stab her captors next time or something. Be more proactive! And then the protracted, longing gazes in high stakes situations? Have professional standards!”.