The only sound in the small stone building was the clink of tile pieces coming together. Across the floor lay a dozen tiles in a neat row, each painstakingly reassembled and balanced against each other. Zaria wiped her brow with the back of her forearm and slowly lowered a piece the size of her thumbnail onto the top of the curve in front of her. For a second, it seemed like the whole thing would fall apart, but when it didn't, she backed away carefully before letting out a sigh.
"Why are you doing that?" A peeved voice sounded out from across the room.
Zaria settled back onto her heels and looked unabashedly at the young man who sat with his eyes closed in the same position he had been in for the last week. Except for trips outside to get rid of waste, he did not speak or move. It took a few days for her to figure out that he was meditating or something like it. As for why, she had to guess. After explaining about parallel universes, he did not speak again. When she woke up that next morning, the boy was sitting upright with his hands resting in his lap. Around what she guessed was lunch, her stomach began to growl, and she walked to the trunk to get a snack bar. His eyes snapped open, and he scowled at her, kicking the trunk as far as his little legs could move it. She took the hint and threw a few of the bars near him and took out a handful to move to her side of the room. His eyes closed again, and she was, essentially, alone.
A few days passed, and it became obvious that something strange was happening to his body. He seemed to be taking up more space each day. By day three, he looked like he was at least ten years old. Zaria scrunched her nose up and squinted her eyes as she watched him while eating her little food bar for dinner. That first day, he told her that when his energy was sucked out, he had been forced to take a smaller form to conserve energy. He made her think of Xianxia manga, people cultivating their inner power and flying through the air and such. If she could see energy and magic, would she see him absorbing it into his body? She took another bite and stared at him for a while longer, but he did not stir.
More time passed. The amusement she gained from sitting and watching him and trying to remember details of her favorite novels and playing them out in her head started to wear thin. Looking around the room, her eyes would land on the tiles occasionally, and she started to assemble the broken bits like it was a big puzzle. Without glue, and with some of the pieces being very small, it was slow going. It did give her something to do besides stare at the teenager doing a statue impression. It made the time pass quicker.
Looking up from her newly assembled tile, she met the silvery eyes of the young man across the room and considered his question. "I'm putting the tiles together."
"Why?" He seemed curious and not just condescending like he usually did.
"I was trying not to bother you," she said as she reached for the next big piece to start putting together another. "It gives me something to do. Big smashed up puzzle."
"But some of the pieces are too small, and you have no way to make them stay."
Zaria patiently picked up a handful of smaller pieces that shared the same outline and started pressing them into her original part to see what fit. "I like puzzles, I don't mind."
It took the rest of the day to find two more pieces that would fit together with her first. Now that the last tiles to fall had all been assembled she could see clearly that the earlier tiles had been smashed by not only hitting the ground. They had also suffered the indignity of having their friends fall on top of them, breaking them more. She glanced over to see if the boy/teenager was still taking a break from whatever he was doing. His eyes were closed once more. Shrugging, she headed outside to stretch her legs.
The cloud cover didn't seem as thick. In some areas, it almost seemed as if the sun could peek through. A gentle breeze dried the sweat on her forehead and swirled some of the ash and dirt on the ground at her feet. She scratched at her scalp for a moment before realizing what she was doing. The magical drying session had done nothing more than dry the water, leaving all the salt and other stuff on her hair. Her scalp was itching every day, but her hair felt so brittle that she was scared to touch it. She didn't even want to imagine how she looked. Or smelled. Several weeks of sitting in a building with no plumbing meant no shower. Every morning when she woke up there was a pitcher of water nearby,but she needed it to drink, and didn't know if the boy would respond if she asked for enough to rinse her body off with. The water was used for drinking and rinsing... THAT area just a little since she had no toilet paper.
Kneeling down, she picked up a handful of the loose soil and made an ick face. Plenty of countries used dirty and ash to clean themselves when they didn't have enough water.
"Lucky me, I have both..." she muttered to herself before closing her eyes and quickly rubbing her sweatier areas with the handful of powdery material. Her face and exposed skin were already coated with a layer of ash from crawling around the tiles and opened area of the building, so she concentrated on the areas of her body without openings under her clothes. The horrible injustices were stacking up in her mind, and the blame all rested on the rarely responsive kid inside.
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"Getting angry will do nothing, you are calm, you are serene, you don't want to piss off the magic dude and be abandoned here in volcano land," she whispered to herself as she walked three hundred steps away from the building and then back again. She repeated that route for an hour, ducking her head back inside to make sure he hadn't left each time she came back to the building. Not that there was anything she could do if he did leave, but maybe knowing she was eyeballing him would keep him from taking off when he was done doing... whatever it was that he was doing.
This continued on for a while, every day the same routine. Wake up, use the bathroom, eat breakfast bar, work on puzzling out the tiles, and so on. Occasionally, she would pull her phone out of the pocket of her black work pants and carefully touch the screen. It had not survived the dunk in salt water. Maybe if she had been able to get some clean water to rinse off the salt before it could crust, then bury it in a bag of rice to soak up the water, there might have been hope. She wished that she could turn on the screen so she could see a picture of her dad, even for just a moment. But, maybe that would hurt worse.
On the day that the man looked pretty close back to when she first met him, he opened his eyes and looked around. Seeing Zaria watching him, he made a 'hmmph' noise and walked outside to take care of his business. She listened to his steps, but he just walked around to the same spot he always did and then came back outside. His hands glowed as he readjusted the size of his robes, as he had to do every few days as he grew.
"Why are you still here?" He asked, straightening his collar and belt to his liking.
"Where do you expect me to go? I am waiting for you to send me back to my world." She fought against the urge to bite him. The lure of his maple syrup voice was moldy and done, and she found the sound to be irritating at best. So pretentious.
"Did I say I would do that? They probably think you are dead by now, anyway. It has been ... at least 30 days. "
Her eyes opened wide, and she sputtered until words finally came out. "You are going to do it, or I am going to hug you and suck all your energy and haunt you forever!"
He stared at her, waiting for the rest of his words to catch up. There was a stillness to her body when it did, her brain registering at last. "Thirty days? I have been here for 30 days already?"
"Hmm." He turned away and picked up a food bar from his pile by the wall. "I have been wondering, why are you not more shocked by everything that is happening to you? Most creatures that I have had to deal with don't grasp the concept very well. They certainly would have spent a lot more time screaming or moaning before reassembling ceiling tiles in an old house."
"I don't... know?" She took a bite from her own dinner and chewed it slowly. "I am pretty sure this is all a hallucination. Maybe I tripped and hit my head taking out the garbage. But even if it isn't, I can't control anything but myself. So freaking out wouldn't actually change anything that is happening. I mean, except I might hit you a lot more. Like, a LOT more."
He pulled back a step as he watched her fingers clench around her food bar. When she did not stand up and attack him, he sat down and began to eat as well. " I can't take you directly back to your universe, I don't exactly have a map of everywhere I have been. But I can maybe make you something that might work, eventually."
With no other options, she had no choice but to continue her routine for a few more days, watching him carefully every time that he was within eye sight. The day after their conversation, he sat in his usual position. Starting the day after that one, he began to become animated. His silver irises spread out to touch the edges of his eyes, and his lips moved with the shapes of words that she could not make out. Eventually, his hands began to move, hesitantly at first but confidently as the day moved on into night. Zaria tried to watch as long as she could, genuinely interested in the odd motions he was making. As a girl who read lots of light novels and manga, the idea of seeing magic being done up close was fascinating. The attack out behind the restaurant had happened too fast. She didn't have time to really pay attention.
When she woke the next morning, she rubbed her face with one hand and balanced herself on the floor to stand up and take a morning potty trip. As she walked past him, he spoke, "You need to walk at least one hundred paces away from this building." Sensing she was about to ask the requisite 'Why' he added impatiently, "I am ready to materialize this and if you are too close you will likely just eat up all the energy and I will be back to the start."
She nodded and walked outside. She drank from her pitcher of water as she walked away, wrinkling her nose at the ash that was already floating on the top. Behind her, there was a loud 'whump' sound, like she remembered hearing when her sled would fall on top of the snow when she was a child. Turning back, she could see a red glow from inside the building, spilling out from the front door and onto the grey and brown ground. When the glow faded, she waited a while more, counting to six hundred to see if any more sounds or lights came out. Then she walked back, setting her pitcher down upon reentering the building. She straightened up and instinctively reached out to grab something that was flying through the air toward her.
"It is like a homing transporter. It reads your energy and takes you to any universe that has some of the energy from yours in it. Once it recharges, if you are not in yours yet, you try again. Put it on," the man, now teenager again, said to her. She looked at him and then down toward the item in her hand. It was a pendant made out of some smooth white material and attached to a cord of some sort. The design was hard to concentrate on, a series of loops and knots, like snakes that were slithering across and around each other. Uncertain if the loops were really moving, she averted her eyes and slid the necklace down over her head.
"It will help you speak and understand whatever languages you hear, as well. Make sure it touches your skin," he ordered impatiently. She didn't fight the eye roll this time and pulled her shirt collar out to let it drop down against her chest. Immediately, it grew warm and began to glow a red similar to his magic. "Now press it against you like you are trying to flatten it."
She did so, and an odd whirring sound entered her ears. As stars exploded in front of her eyes, she heard his voice as though from far away, "And good riddance."