Gaius stared at the little girl who was standing right in front of the door to this house, and felt a headache well up. He had learnt to expect the extraordinary from the great gods.
The Dragon of Time descending to Cybral? Wasn’t all that impossible, given that the great god never really had a fixed dwelling place to begin with, and it was free of the more onerous responsibilities the other great gods had.
Hereward’s familiar spirit somehow hiding here from a long time? Fine, Gaius could believe that, since the great god in question was said to govern space itself. For the great god to send a familiar into Cybral wasn’t off the cards, so the little boy had no issue with that possibility.
But how did a little girl, three years younger than him, get into Cybral?
“Nakama…?”
The little girl slammed into him with the force of a little cannonball, and the two rolled back into the house. Gaius bounced off the wall, waking up his new apprentice in the process. He didn’t pay attention to the latter, however, choosing instead to firmly sit his little sister down on the edge of his neat bed.
“How did you get here?” Gaius asked, looking at the younger sister he hadn’t seen for half a year, which was around eighteen months for Nakama. She was wearing a dark violet dress, and her hair, which was also violet for some reason, was now long enough to be tied into a ponytail. The ponytail in question was folded up a few times and bound with an equally violet ribbon behind her head.
“I fell asleep and followed you,” Nakama replied, her eyes overly-bright. To his shock, Gaius felt his eyes water up too, and he turned away to hide that fact. He had missed his family far more than he thought was possible. Restraining an urge to sob, he placed Nakama on his lap, preventing her from seeing his watery eyes.
“What do you mean, follow?”
“I just follow!”
Gaius stared at his little sister, who seemed to have a cheat that defied even that of the Constellations, and then belatedly remembered that she had spoken about walking around in another world when she was unconscious two or so years ago.
Is this that world she was referring to back then? I should have seen it coming… Shaking his head, he rubbed Nakama’s head idly, playing with her hair as he tried to piece together the full picture.
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His hand stopped moving. “Nakama.”
“Mm?”
“If you’re here, doesn’t that mean that Isabelle and Xanadu are taking care of both of us?”
Nakama squirmed, and Gaius immediately knew the answer. Rolling his eyes, he squeezed her cheeks once and said, “If you stay here, you’ll be making their lives very hard. Taking care of me must be hard enough, and you know I must remain asleep for a reason.”
“Am I not supposed to be here?” Nakama asked.
Gaius rubbed his head twice. “How about this? I’ll let you stay for a day, which is three days outside, and then you return to the others and tell them about my current condition. After that…I’m not sure how your beast traits work, but you should be able to find your way here easily from now on. Maybe you can come by when you sleep at night?”
The little girl scrunched up her face as she thought through Gaius’ words, and then nodded slowly.
“Excellent.” Gaius rubbed her head, and then prodded the clearly-awake La-Ti. “Alright, before you two get to blows, I suppose I should do the introductions.”
He gestured at Nakama. “La-Ti, this is my sister, Nakama.”
Waving his hands at his curious apprentice, he followed up by saying, “Nakama, this is my apprentice, La-Ti…and in a sense, he’s your grand-apprentice, since I learnt to carve from you.”
He laughed. “I hope the two of you get along well.”
Nakama blinked twice and slid off his bed. Walking up curiously to La-Ti, who was half a head shorter, she placed her hands on his shoulders and said, “I’ll make sure to teach you well!”
Gaius laughed again.
Since Nakama was here, Gaius had to cook a few more eggs than usual, although curiously enough, his little sister’s appetite had dropped to normal levels. It was probably due to the fact that she didn’t bring her physical body here, but Gaius had expected habits to be brought along into Cybral to begin with. Since it was the same for him, it should be the same for Nakama too, but…
Well, it’s probably something to do with how she got here to begin with, so let’s not trouble my brain with that. Rolling his eyes, he flipped an omelette over as the two kids behind him began to play make-believe with the sculptures La-Ti had created. The boy had a flair for creating action figures like the ones he’d seen back on Earth, and he had been making quite a fair bit of energy salts from selling them to the other kids.
In a sense, La-Ti was the popular kid of the street now. That honour didn’t belong to Gaius purely because he was too unapproachable for the children after they watched him interact with some of the rich fellows to handle their order. It was a bit saddening, but there was really little Gaius could do about it.
But since La-Ti would be far more liked, it was worth it. And besides, Gaius was going to vanish from Cybral in half a year or so. His goal now was to make sure that his apprentice could make a dignified living, and that was it.
Ladling out the eggs onto the plates, Gaius watched as the two little kids ate his food, noting wryly that Nakama was crying for some reason. Considering that Isabelle had been cooking for them for a darn long time, it was a tad odd for her to cry now, but Gaius was going to pretend he didn’t see that.
It wouldn’t do for the elder sibling to cry too, after all.