It turned out that Sara was quite willing to take a little time from her morning to press the button on the rice cooker, provided he’d loaded it with rice and water the night before. She was also quite happy to taste even simple corned beef if the way the apartment’s temperature slowly cooled as she did the ghostly equivalent of running around like a happy little kid was any indication.

At least she wasn’t making weird moans. That would have been awkward.

Despite his reluctance and all the extra work it resulted in, Loren grudgingly moved towards cooking his own food. In the long run, kilo per kilo, making his own food was ultimately cheaper than buying canned. After all, it wasn’t like he had schoolwork and a busy social life taking up his time. He was able to put a USB of movies and shows from the high seas he hadn’t watched yet into his TV and played them while he prepared ingredients.

Loren fell into a routine, cooking a dinner that was some flavorful, brothy thing that he could mix cooking vene into so that Sara could taste it. He’d a have preferred something fried, but it was hard to mix cooking vene into that, so Sara wouldn’t really get anything from it. Cooking fried pasta would have worked—he’d need to use a neutral oil, or find a cheap olive oil—but it was a pain to clean now that he had to do all his washing himself.

Sara had tried to help, but trying to manifest in the running water sapped too much of the imbuement she was able to gather from the sunlight and when the two of them held hands. Her help was limited to turning on the rice cooker, helping stir to keep things from sticking while Loren went to get something, and keeping an eye on things. It was quite helpful, though he sometimes needed to send more magic to the Flames he was using to cook, since Sara tended to stand close to the flame and start soaking up heat.

All the work was making Loren rethink not buying a refrigerator and stove. At the moment, he was cooking food on fire generated by his magic, on top of a stovetop burner grate he’d bough online. For food storage, he had a Styrofoam cooler he kept freezing cold by using a Flamecraft that converted heat into light. It was one of the more complicated Flamecrafts he knew, but with sufficient imbuement—and a little oil as a backup fuel source, just in case—it was enough to last more than two days between needing to be imbued with more magic, and the Styrofoam box was well-insulated enough for what little food to be well cooled for hours more after the Flamecraft ran out. As to his lack of stove… well, he had Flame, so why did he need a stove?

While he could hardly claim to not enjoy the change in his diet—as much as he liked canned food, two weeks was already enough to make the flavors available lose their shine—Sara was appreciating it immensely. Well, Loren supposed he could understand. She’d gone from not ‘eating’ to having a meal of flavor every day. Compared to the complete isolation and near-total sensory deprivation from before, it must have been like night and day.

It was also seemed to be prompting the ghost to be more active, or at least try to contribute more. Every day, the broom and rag he used to clean surfaces were slightly off from where they’d been that morning, with him having to wash the latter progressively more often, until he had to buy a couple more.

All in all, while he found himself more busy when he was home, it was to a marked improvement to his quality of life. It was an improvement that he did in fact need, as subsequent days at the work site found himself doing more and more manual labor. They only needed so much cement every day, after all, and not all of the cement needed to be quick-curing. He spent his days helping haul, bringing things up and down scaffolding, and assisting Mang Ambong with welding the new steel support rafters, purlins and trusses. Once Ambong was satisfied that he could at least knew how to weld properly—“You’re slow though, but that’s something you’ll lose once you get used to working,” the oni said—Loren found himself assisting with welding the new roof trusses on the ground. Most of it wasn’t even welding, it was cutting the steel bars into the right lengths before Mang Ambong laid them out on the ground in the right shape and told him to weld them together so they kept that shape.

Naturally, he made a couple of mistakes—he was still learning after all—but being a Flame, it was easy to reshape the incorrect welds and realign the bars together the way they were supposed to. That let him get off a bit easier, since he could so easily fix his mistakes and redo his work without having to use up welding rods. By the end of the week, they managed to get several trusses on top of the houses, welded to the rebar of the support pillars of the house’s columns as well as other pieces of rebar that had been inserted into holes drilled into the cinderblock walls. Loren didn’t know how secure all that was, but Mang Ambong probably knew what he was doing.

By the end of the week, the trusses were in place, and they were painting primer on the metal to protect it from rust, while others worked on fitting in new doorframes. The old ones were either all rotted, termite-chewed, or otherwise damaged in some way, and had gone into the scrap pile. Loren had seen burn marks and very smooth cuts that he thought was the work of veneblades, or at least they looked the way the damage caused by veneblades in movies and shows did. Of course, those VFX artists on ScryVids always said a lot of shows rendered those wrong…

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Loni was the one leading that part of the rebuilding. While Malory’s twin might have had some form of social anxiety, she was much more comfortable where she was doing carpentry, which in this instance included getting the new, solid wood doorframes set in place and secured. Jerry and Ricky were helping her, while Sam and Louis helped with the roof trusses.

While it was hardly easier work, Loren found it all surprisingly relaxing, in a ‘don’t really have to think to hard’ sort of way. Oh, he had to pay attention and not let his attention wander, and every day his arms, legs and fingers hurt, but it was all straightforward. Even the welding he did was simple magic, even though Ambong winced when Loren let molten metal pool on his finger to connect two steel bars together.

By Friday, the house they were working on seemed vaguely house-shaped again, if only because the roof trusses gave it a shape.

“How much longer will it be to finish the house?” Loren asked Harmony as they packed up to go. Steve was offering to give them a ride again, and they were taking him up on it.

“Oh, at least a month more,” Harmony said. “We still need to order the roofing sheets, then the boards of the eaves, the gutters, the pipes for the gutters… then after that we need to do the inside. The bathroom’s plumbing is in good shape, thank goddesses, or else we’d need to dig that up, but the toilet is cracked, it needs a new sink, the shower was ripped off…” She shook her head. “House flipping takes a while, you know.”

“I know that. Just wondering. I don’t really know how long something like this takes, after all.”

Harmony waved a hand in a careless gesture. “Eh, you get used to it. Why, you in some kind of hurry?”

He shook his head. “No, no, just wondering what a regular timetable looks like for us. Hey, you wanna come over tonight? I was thinking of getting pizza. And we can get Sara a mooncake to go with it.”

“Ooh, let’s get stuffed crust!”

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The next day, Loren had to go back home to do his laundry. While it wasn’t the first time he’d done this, today he felt mildly guilty about leaving Sara alone in the house. It really shouldn’t be any different from leaving her alone during a weekday, but… well, it felt like it.

While his clothes were in the washing machine, he started going through his old stuff, looking for something he could bring back that Sara would be able to manipulate that would hopefully help alleviate her boredom. It was a nostalgic walk down memory lane as he looked over all the toys hidden in various shoe boxes tucked away somewhere in his room. He found a whole bunch, but… well, nothing seemed like something she’d be interested in. Why would she want to play with a Rubik’s cube? Or marbles? He’d never actually played with marbles, though he’d heard how it was done. His dad had stories about how they’d basically played little kid gambling games with them, but he was pretty sure those needed at least two people, and dirt so they could draw lines on and to keep the marbles from rolling on forever…

Ooh, he’d forgotten he had this! It was a toy pinball machine, the kind that had lights and actually kept score and admittedly had all sort of annoying sound effects. He’d enjoyed playing it for about… six months, before it had been relegated to the bottom of the toy pile. It didn’t have any batteries, but the big ball bearing could be launched manually, and the flippers were mechanical…

It went into his bag, along with some things he printed out on photopaper. He could have it printed out on the way back to his apartment.

“Loren?”

He looked up. “Yeah, Mom?”

“I went through my perfume bottles and found some old ones that I don’t like. Will these work?”

“Yeah, thanks Mom.” He wasn’t sure if Sara would enjoy those scents, but they were usually oil-based so he could use it as a base to mix something.

It turned out that Sara actually liked the pinball machine toy, or at least liked having something to play with. Even without any batteries, she liked to keep the ball in play for as long as possible, regardless of score… which, Loren had to admit, was how he used to play it too. He spent the weekend resting in his apartment and working on getting better sound out of his ghostlight Flame. He had a ghost candle lit nearby that he was maintaining, both for if Sara wanted to talk, and to study so he could copy its Flamecraft. It was coming together better now. The sound coming out that rendered Sara’s speech audible was at least consistent, the problem was it was simply too weak. He had to practically put the flame to his ear to hear it. Usable, but hardly practical.

Sitting back on his bed, watching Sara’s form playing with the pinball machine on the floor—her body was stretched out so she could absorb the heat coming through the windows—Loren enjoyed his first weekend as a working adult. He’d have to cook dinner in a couple of hours, and he wasn’t looking forward to the work that would be, but for now…

Well, he felt he deserved a nap…

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The next Monday, he found himself back at the Happy Homes office instead of the work site, and wishing he had a week of lifting heavy things, getting dirty, and maybe painting to look forward to.

“We’ll be inspecting a property that I’m contemplating buying,” Steve exposited. “The owners are claiming they’re being haunted, and the price is just at the border of what I’m willing to pay. Normally, I’d wait until the price went down some more, but the house is in relatively good shape and we might be able to get the furnishings, so I’m considering it if the haunting is one we can easily deal with.”

Yep, no heaving lifting and painting for him today. Just potential ghosts.

…

It was just maybe possible he was still mildly traumatized by his early encounters with Sara, even if he was comfortable with the ghostly woman himself. He might need to talk to someone about that…

…

But not right now, because he was a manly man and could power through it. After all, it was the middle of the day, the four of them would be going together. Trauma? What trauma? He had a job to keep!

…

He should probably tell Harmony later, she’ll know what to do.