Sara was soon playing with the little squad of plastic robot tsukumogami. While she still needed to concentrate to lift them up, their spiritform meant she could touch them, or at least derive tactile sensation from doing so. And while it wasn't much, the contact between her spiritform and theirs was able to convey just enough force that she could get their attention and maybe tip them over if they were unbalanced and inattentive.
Loren heard her playing with the plamo as he cooked caldereta for dinner, gently stewing the meat so it would soften. The plamo, for their parts, seemed to love the attention. They clustered around her and seemed to like it when she touched them, making him wonder if perhaps being touched by a pure spiritform was a novel experience for them.
He was occasionally called upon to assist when one of the plamo fell off the table, until it happened enough times that he simply set them on the floor so it wouldn't happened again. None of them seemed to mind the change of elevation, with Sara hovering parallel to the floor. When Loren had announced that dinner was ready, Sara had actually been reluctant to stop playing with the plamo… though not for long.
That did mean that Loren had a line of seven robot figurines standing on the table across with him as he ate dinner, but it wasn't like he was using that end at the moment. Sara joined him to eat, reaching into the caldereta to draw out the imbuement that it contained. Since it was the first time he'd cooked caldereta, her foodgasm was a powerful one as new flavors sank into her mouth and left her writhing in the air. At this point, Loren had gotten used to the way her clothes would flicker in and out of existence as she enjoyed herself, and just concentrated on his food until she regained herself-control.
"Don't worry," he reassured the plamo. "Sara's fine. She's just… enjoying herself. Give her a minute or so."
Indeed, after a while Sara settled down to at the other side of the table… and also remembered to put her shirt back on. She, for her part, had gotten used to playing it cool whenever she realized she had inadvertently stripped herself in the middle of eating again.
Sara reached into the caldereta once more, drawing out another blob of imbuement. However, rather than slowly consuming it, she broke off a small piece—just a little speck between her fingers—and offered it to the nearest of the plamo. It was slender and in shades of gray, although that seemed to be how it was actually supposed to be instead of being a sign it needed to be painted, and had four articulated arms on its back in imitation of the payatin form. Curious, the figure took the little speck of imbuement, and it shone in the palm of its molded hand.
"You need to eat it," Sara explained, miming putting something into her mouth and chewing. At the demonstration, the plamo just looked down at the speck, the tapped the molded plastic of its face and the clear lack of a similar orifice. "Ah… right…" She gave Loren a pleading look.
He finished chewing his food and swallowed. The potatoes were just the slightest bit not soft enough. He should have let them stew a little longer. "Just try to absorb it," Loren said. "It's imbuement, so you should have a way to make it part of you."
The plamo seemed to think about it for a second, then… the little speck in its hand vanished. Sara and Loren both found themselves peering at the Plamo expectantly, but nothing else happened. The plamo just looked at its hand curiously.
"I don't think it works for them the same way it does for you, Sara," Loren eventually said. "They don't have a sense of taste and never have, not like you did. At best, they just got a little more imbuement from that, but didn't taste anything."
"Oh…" Sara said, looking slightly deflated.
"You can still give them some," he said. "I'm almost sure getting a little imbuement is good for them." He paused. "Though I should probably ask Steve, he'd probably know better than me."
Each of the plamo got a little bit of imbuement and though they didn't react the way Sara did, they seemed thankful for the gesture. Though they were still seemed nervous when Sara consumed the rest and started thrashing in the air, despite Loren assuring them that was all completely normal.
Sara played with the plamo some more as he did the dishes, and he was even able to take a bath—a water bath unfortunately, as distasteful as it was—reasonably certain she wasn't in the bathroom. That was never a guarantee, normally.
Since it was still early, he set up the TV, which now stood in front of a wall covered by various pictures of Sara that he'd managed to find in various places. Sometimes he caught Sara staring at the pictures of herself, touching her face as the shirt she wore momentarily turned into a dress, a school uniform, a skirt and shirt, a graduation gown…
It was unfortunately the closest thing he could offer her to letting her see her own face on a regular basis. Unless ghostlight shone on her, she made no reflections on mirrors and other surfaces, and that reflection… well, Sara seemed to find it as disturbing as he initially had. Her manifesting with her own imbuement as even worse, as she was more suggestions in the air, shades made by dust in the air, and a feeling of lines cast by tricks of the light. Supposedly she could manifest as something almost indistinguishable from human, but that required far more imbuement than she had at the moment, even with what she was getting from the venecite in the food and from the Flame she was drawing from him when they held hands.
Visual stimulation wasn't really something she needed as sight was one of the senses she had. It was just… well, Loren thought she might appreciate the reminder of what she looked like.
Getting settled on his bed, he pulled out his phone to send a video to the TV… and sighed. "Sara, do you mind if I move everyone off the table and onto the counter?"
In the end, he moved them onto the bed, setting them on a pillow so they could sit and watch the TV, which was playing an old movie that he liked and Sara had never seen. As the evil cowboys made fools of themselves while they sang an old folk song that made them seem foolish, Loren called Flame to his hand, holding it out to his side. He felt Sara take it before feeling a chill in a line along his forearm and bicep. Without missing a beat, he spread his Flame through his arm, and the feeling of cold became pressure.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
They sat like that, watching the movie, and then the one after that, until it was time to go to sleep.
Loren slipped into the darkness to the sounds of a ghost and several robot figures trying to figure out what to listen to on the radio.
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Over the next few days, Sara quickly became fond of the little squad of plastic robot tsukumogami. And while he found a flat stretch of shelf to set up their stands, the plamo were almost never on it. From when he woke up to when he left for work, they were usually playing with Sara to one degree or another, and much the same when he got home from work until he fell asleep.
It wasn't like they ignored him. When he sat down long enough for them to notice, at least one or two of them would walk over to him and get his attention by trying to climb his foot. That would be his cue to pick them up and play with them. The wasn't really the 'make two dolls fight' kind of guy, so his idea of fun was trying to put both in a cool pose that wouldn't fall over if he put it down on a flat surface. At first the plamo had tried to help by making adjustments themselves, but eventually they stopped, letting him pose them by himself.
There weren't really a lot of poses he could put a single plamo in, but if he had a pair… well, it was always fun to pose them like they were ballroom dancing. Other times, he'd just pick them up so they could see whatever he was watching on his phone or reading on his tablet. They seemed to find that equally enjoyable, somehow.
Of course, most of the time he was cooking or sorting through the cooler box that acted as his fridge and freezer, and they'd learned not to bother him when he was doing that. Hence why they spent much of their time with Sara, who was coming to adore them. And why wouldn't she? She could touch them, and they were self-aware enough to respond to her. He'd caught them playing hide and seek as he'd come home one time, and had needed to make clear than there would be no hiding in the toilet bowl and especially not underwater in the S-bend. Thankfully he'd been able to watch that one while it was in the middle of trying to climb the porcelain.
Outside of finally having… not pets. Playmates. Outside of finally having playmates that could keep Sara company when he was gone and keep him from worrying she was going nuts from isolation, the plamo also started acting as her hands. Now it was them pulling off the earphone jack and adjusting the control knobs of the radio, which they could just barely do with their molded hands. In return, Sara took care of replacing their hands for them. Apparently they had preferences on what they held. He supposed even dolls liked to be fashionable according to their own standards. Or perhaps it was just how Mr. Halili had once posed them.
At work, they finished installing the new tiles on the floors of the house as Malory's sister went to work overhauling the wiring. That meant pulling out the old wires and putting in new ones. Malory helped with that, using her vene to pull wires up the tubes already there when possible, although some of the walls had needed to be broken open to put in in tubes for the wires when the sisters had spotted the PVC pipes had been damaged in the walls by whatever fire had destroyed the roof.
Once the rewiring was done and the thankfully few holes chiseled into the walls for access and installing new electrical utility boxes—PVC ones as opposed to the metal ones that had originally been installed in the walls when the house had first been built—had been mortared up and smoothed, they installed the new ceiling panels. They were fiberboard instead of plywood, which meant they needed to be screwed on rather than nailed, so Loren's role was basically helping hold the boards up while someone else used a drill to secure them in place.
He was able to get out of that by providing the electricity to use their wired drill so they could secure double the number of screws, but that meant he was the one screwing on panels now, which… well, at least when he was holding up the board he didn't need to bend his neck to look up. Then came drilling holes in the panels for light fixtures and pulling through more wiring…
Two weeks seemed to pass by in a haze of work as they completed the house. The last day wasn't all that special. They finished the last of the painting inside and out. The rook was a dark green, the walls were a pale shade that looked white but up close was a shade of blue—or possibly gray—and the insides were all white. There were new plumbing fixtures in shiny faux chrome, the kitchen sink was now deep and metal instead of shallow and made of marble tiles, and with the transparent windows everything was bright and hot. The yard… well, it was cleaned now, they'd put down squares of grass to make up the lawn, and Steve had planted limbs of bougainvillea that had been cut from hedges around his house in a bid to try and make it grow. The fence had been repaired and repainted, the metal scrubbed of rust to keep it from deteriorating further, with a few metal bars welded into place by Mang Ambong to repair spots where it had rusted away.
The last day was mainly spent cleaning, recovering nails and welding rods and cleaning up their debris, putting it all into now-empty cement sacks to sort through later or just to make it easier to dispose of. The tool shed was dismantled into panels, and put in the back of the pickup along with everything else. It didn't even take the whole day, and when they were done the house… well, it was visibly more recently painted than the other houses around, but it no longer looked like a ruin. It was just a house now.
Granted, it was a very nice house
Everything felt strangely anticlimactic as Loren go in the car with Steve, Harmony, Malory and Loni as they drove back to Happy Homes.
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"Good work everyone!" Steve said as he raised a beer in congratulations, and everyone else did the same with their own drinks. "Another house finished!" There was a wave of good-natured cheers, of which Harmony and Sam were the loudest and Loni letting out a yelp before hiding behind her sister. "It looks much better than when we found it, although that's not hard." There were chuckles at that. "So good job, everyone!"
Loren was surprised when Steve turned towards him. "And I know he's been with us for a while, but we haven't had a chance to welcome him before now. Loren could you come up here?"
Awkwardly, Loren moved away from the wall where he'd been standing next to Harmony as every turned to him. He raised a hand to give an awkward wave as he moved next to Steve. "Hey."
"Everyone, say hello to Loren… two months late, but better than nothing." There as a laugh, but everyone let out a loud hello. "He's been doing good work, and we're glad to have him. So, welcome to the company, Loren."
"Thanks, Steve," Loren said, and he found he actually meant it. He still planned to only stay the year until he could apply for more internships, but… well, this place wasn't bad. Sure, he'd have preferred light indoor work with no heavy lifting, but the lifting he'd needed to do so far had been completely reasonable.
Steve patted him on the shoulder and waved at the bounty of food on the table. Fast food fried chicken, two pizzas, three bottles of soda—Loren had magnanimously allowed Harmony one cup, and was willing to let her have up to four before he cut her off—two pans of fast food spaghetti, sticks of barbeque, and some lechon liempo from a rotisserie chain… it was a nice feast, and vaguely reminded him of the pot-luck Christmas parties they'd had in high school, although with the food cut down to a reasonable amount. "Well, enough of that. Let's eat!"
As Loren grabbed a paper plate and went over to an end of the table, grabbing some barbeque for himself and Harmony, he found the feeling of anti-climax fading away. This was much more like it.