I saw Joanna at the dungeon on Saturday. I hadn't seen her all week, and I'd been deliberately giving her some space, letting her think through stuff while I had other things on my mind. But after the run, she approached me in the parking lot.

"I looked up that isolation chamber stuff," she said. "Turns out it's been tried before, and they could never get it to work."

That drew a chuckle from me. "Yeah, I found the same research. But there's one other thing I'm looking into."

She gave me a pained look. "Please don't go giving me false hope. I've tried all sorts of remedies, but there just isn't anything that will make the succubus go away, not without making other things worse."

"Hear me out. This one's new, an unknown rune I've been researching. It has the effect of redirecting mana to other planes. I don't think it could shut down your aura, not without draining you like the chamber did at least, but I bet with a bit of fine tuning it could be used to block the mental effects it induces, at least on those around you and possibly on you as well."

"A magical resistance?" she asked. "I'm not sure if that's possible."

"I don't believe it's impossible," I said. "What I have may or may not be a working solution, but the fact that we can counter it with an isolation chamber, even with nasty side effects, proves that it can be countered. I didn't want to tell you until I had something worth testing, but since it came up, I'll send you my research notes on Monday."

She gave me a surprisingly timid little smile. "Thanks. I really hope it works. You'd better not give me false hope on this. Please?"

"Hey. This idea might not work, but something will. I promise you that much."

"Thanks," she said, blowing me a little air-kiss before turning and heading off to her car.

I went to mine, and saw Felicity leaning against it, a little smirk on her lips. "You and Joanna, huh?"

"What about us?" I asked, not sure how to respond to that.

She grinned. "You're cute together. How long's that been going on?"

"Not sure what you saw there..."

"I saw a timid, shy young woman smiling brightly while talking with you, getting as close as she could while staying safely out of range. I saw her look worried, and you reassured her and she looked all comforted." She grinned at me. "And I saw her blow you a kiss at the end. Must have been quite the conversation!"

I squirmed a little. "No one should have seen that..." I groaned, getting into the car.

Felicity shrugged as she got in the passenger seat . "You were talking out in public. Just hope Kayla didn't see it, huh?"

I started driving out to the highway. "Kayla already knows, at least some; what I'd like to avoid is anyone in management finding out."

"And you don't think a gossipy bard is a threat to that?"

I shook my head. "You haven't seen how mama-bear protective she is of Joanna. I don't think she'd put her at risk like that. And honestly, I don't think she's really all that shy or timid."

"What do you mean?"

"Well... you said 'safely out of range,' so I take it you know about her?"

"Not the details, but she's got an aura that does nasty things to kith? If I had to guess, succubus bloodline?"

"Yeah. That's what she's afraid of, the effect that can have on those around her, and on her. Problem is, she carries that around with her and can't shut it off, so her nervousness comes across as a personality trait. But get her in a situation where she feels safe, and she's this totally different kith! Talkative, emotional, friendly, but with a crazy-aggressive competitive streak when it comes to video games.

"I think that's 'the real her,' the natural personality that everyone would see if she didn't have to be so protective all the time. And... I like it."

Felicity nodded. "So how come you get to see it and no one else does? You're not, like..."

"No, whatever the question was, I'm not 'like.' It's kind of three things. I have enough self-control to take the brunt of her aura without immediately trying to paw her or rip her clothes off. Apparently that's not very common. I respect her boundaries and find ways to enjoy time together without physical closeness. And I've got a surprisingly effective threat."

"A threat?" she looked at me with narrowed eyes.

"Not like you're thinking. But it turns out, if you tell her 'I have a failsafe enchantment that will knock both of us out if the clothes start coming off,' her aura becomes noticeably less aggressive in its effects. Which academically has all sorts of interesting implications, but also is just generally pretty cool when you just want a hug."

"Yeah, that's pretty awesome!" Felicity said. "I'm glad for you."

"You don't disapprove because she's not Meþasite?"

She shook her head. "Is she Good at least?"

"I never actually asked her about her Alignment," I said. "Kind of a personal question and all. I know her patron god is Neutral, but that doesn't necessarily mean she is too."

Felicity hmmmed at that. "Daheþ?"

"How could you possibly know that? Did you ask her?"

"No, but it makes sense. There are lots of kith born to difficult circumstances that weren't their fault who find comfort in the Rites of Struggle. But yeah, I'm happy for you. And for me as well, a bit."

"What do you mean?"

She laughed. "I mean next time Dad tells me I ought to get together with you, I can tell him 'he already has a girlfriend!'"

"I don't know that we're anything that formal," I said. "But we're definitely... something."

She scoffed. "Then you should definitely make it official! 'But dad, he already has a something' just doesn't have the same effect."

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"Well, that settles it then. I can find no fault in your logic."

She beamed.

"...because there's none there to find fault with."

"Hey!" she protested, laughing.

When we got to the property, there were a lot more church members gathered there this time, around fifty or so.

"Did you warn Gareth off again?" I asked before we got out of the car.

Felicity nodded. "Just don't get close enough that someone sees the tower and everything will be fine."

I saw that some of the kith who were there already were cutting trees in a wide area just off the highway. That hadn't been part of the plan. "Hey, what's going on here?" I asked Brother Thomas once I'd located him among the workers.

He gestured out towards the highway. "Too many cars out there to just park alongside the road like that. We're clearing a quick-and-dirty parking lot. Hope you don't mind?"

That really wasn't the plan, but then again I hadn't planned on any of this in the first place. How had my own property gotten so far out of my control? Although the need for one right now did make sense, and as long as they didn't pave over it the space could probably be put to other productive uses afterwards. "Yeah, go ahead," I said, hopefully without too much resignation in my tone.

There were more axes and saws to enchant, so I got to it. We got some parking space set up and the cars moved, and then it was back to work on the access road. With so many more workers, you'd expect things to progress a lot faster, but they really didn't, for a couple reasons. First, being further down the road, the workers and the cut trees had further to travel. But that wasn't such a big deal; the real problem seemed to be that there were a lot more workers but only the same few supervisors.

Kith got in each other's way. Some of them had to be yelled at to get out of the way because a freaking forty-foot tree was about to land right there so what are you doing standing there?!? Sometimes two of them would both go to cut the same tree because things weren't coordinated well, and so on.

And then there were the monsters. The patrolling paladins did a good job of repelling them, but with seemingly-defenseless prey so abundant, they just wanted to keep coming. There were only a handful of us who had any sort of experience with combat other than the paladins, so I ended up drafted to patrol with Felicity, teaming up with her to put down some of the more aggressive creatures that wandered the woods.

Felicity was right. Killing an actual living, breathing, bleeding creature wasn't pleasant. It's not like swatting bugs or stomping on a spider; you can see the pain in their reactions, hear it in how they cry out when struck with a mace or pierced with an ice spear. None of us particularly wanted to do it, but what we wanted even less was to end up with dead or maimed kith in the middle of a church project, so we fought them. Better to end up with carcasses than corpses, as Charles Ellis put it.

They were owlbears mostly; we had to put down five of them before the attacks stopped, plus one dire boar. I wasn't there for that one, but apparently it shrugged off multiple stunning spells and bowled over one of the other paladins, even with full enhancement magic active, before Charles could hit it from the side and break one of its legs.

Once the more aggressive monsters were dead, workers levitated their carcasses off to the parking area. "What in the world am I supposed to do with these?" I asked.

Charles looked over at me. "Wild game hunted on your land, under your direction? Do whatever you want with it. Bet someone around here can recommend a butcher shop that will take at least the boar off your hands and maybe the bears too."

"I didn't know anyone ate owlbear."

He nodded. "Tastes a lot like venison. Not to everyone's tastes, but there are enough kith who like it that you'll find butchers willing to buy them off of you."

That seemed like a decent idea, but then I thought back to my conversation with the Esott. "Do we have anyone in the congregation who are going through rough times and could use the meat?"

"Sure," he said. "There's a good few of them. But you'll still want a butcher to get that meat into usable form."

He had a good point; who's got room in their freezer for a carcass? "You seem to know this stuff better than I do. Can you arrange to find a butcher? They can buy as much of the owlbear meat as it takes to cover the costs of cutting up the rest of it for me, to be given into the care of Esott Daniels to help out those who need it."

He gave me an approving smile and a nod. "You're learning," he said, before walking off to talk to other church members about making some arrangements.

I was heading back to the far end of the road-clearing project when I heard raised voices, a man and a woman in what sounded like a heated argument. Wondering what was going on, I approached the sound, and found one of the paladins confronting a rather angry woman in a flamboyant adventurer's costume.

"I told you, this is private property and you need to leave. I really must insist."

"And I told you I'm looking for a friend of mine, so why don't you take your hand off the hilt of that big shiny club of yours and show me to whoever's in charge around here?"

The paladin pointed as I approached. "You want the man in charge?" he asked with the tone of one glad to hand his problem off to someone else. "Right over there."

Oh, why did he have to go and say that? "Kayla, what the abyss are you doing here?"

"Brad? What the abyss are you doing here? With freaking guards patrolling and... did he just say you're in charge?"

I shook my head. "No, you're the trespasser here. What's going on?" I waved the paladin off, and he nodded to me and went back to patrolling the woods.

She glowered at me. "I was in the parking lot. Saw you and Joanna saying goodbye. Then as soon as she was gone, I saw Felicity get into your car with you and you drove off into the middle of nowhere."

I groaned and raised a hand to rub at my forehead. "And you immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion and followed us out here to... what? Spy on me?"

"Better for Joanna to know the truth, right? But now... this. What even is the truth, Brad?"

"What is the truth? That's a very deep question that philosophers have been debating since the dawn of time."

She just rolled her eyes at me.

"It's a church project. A bunch of us are clearing some land out here. Among our number are Felicity and I, and we're carpooling. There's nothing salacious going on between the two of us. So now you've got your curiosity satisfied. You're welcome to stick around and help out, or to go home."

Her eyes widened at the way I addressed her. "Wow, on edge much? Brad, seriously, what's going on here? Why do you have armed guards? Why are they saying you're in charge?"

"Monster-infested woods," I said. "Civilian labor crew. Why wouldn't we have armed guards? And yeah, I'm a little emotionally raw right now. I just got back from killing a bunch of live, flesh-and-blood creatures that were trying to eat us. Actual violence... it's different, Kayla. It's not like fighting in the dungeon, where none of it's real."

Her anger deflated a little when I admitted that. "I bet that was rough on you," she said in a softer tone. "But seriously, why are you dodging the real question?"

"Because the answers would just raise more and more questions, and I've got work to do. You wanna help out, or not? You've got some skill with magic that could come in handy, or you could patrol with one of the paladins; I bet your sonic blasts would be real useful to stun or debuff some of these monsters. Or you could grab a saw."

I could practically see the indecision in her eyes. On one hand, a chance to gossip with all these kith and find out what was going on; on the other hand, having to earn that opportunity through physical labor. After some long hesitation, curiosity won out over comfort. "I think I can help out on monster patrols."

"All right. This way." I started walking with her, going backwards along the patrol path until I spotted a familiar set of armor. "Hey, Felicity! We had a friend show up. Can you take her out on patrol with you for a while?"

Kayla shot me a dirty look; I just shrugged and gave her a little grin as Felicity walked up and started talking with her. I headed off to get back to work, leaving them to it.

By the time nightfall came, we'd finished clearing an access road and most of the lot to build a house on. A few of the members wondered if they were going to get payment or dinner. At first I was going to turn them down, but then I thought of something. "All the money's going to the church this time," I told them, "but you guys have been working out here for hours and I didn't see any tables set up. So yeah, dinner's on me. I don't think I can take the whole group out to the same place tonight; we had enough trouble trying to get a big unplanned party in last week. But how about you organize yourselves into six or seven groups. Each group pick a restaurant, spread it out a bit so as not to overwhelm any one place. Get a representative for each group that can cover the check, and then give the receipts to me on Thursday and I'll reimburse them."

A few of them weren't quite happy with that, but it seemed to satisfy most of the kith there. I was a bit surprised to not see Kayla turn up at the same restaurant as me. It left me wondering what questions she'd have for me on Monday.