This was it. This was the day. Darron’s twentieth birthday, to be exact, and while he was the subject of the festivities, Shara was getting the best present of all. Today, they were finally leaving Bornsson’s. Eleven years she had spent in this place- longer than she had known her birth parents. More than half her life she had spent here, using her mother’s strength to pull and push and lift and plow. The Bornssons were truly wonderful people, but this wasn’t what she was made for. It was way past time to leave, but at least this way she got to bring along the best part of her life here: Darron.
Shara and Darron had become an impressive team in their eleven years of living together. Although he hated it, Shara managed to instil some monster-hunting spirit into her adoptive brother. So long as Darron stayed safe– a strategy he was naturally fond of anyway– Shara had free rein to play rough. The pair of them made the area around the Bornsson’s house among the safest places in the southern plains, giving birth to a small thriving community as the combination of excellent protection and bi-annual visits from the Titan of Life failed to remain a secret for very long.
Shara had developed into an impressive young woman over the years, although she did little to flaunt this. She kept her modest chest bound up behind layers of protective gear, and her hair was cut as short as she could manage while still being considered feminine. She had tried shaving her head once– hair did nothing but get in the way during a fight– but the constant distracted stares people gave her from breaking that cultural norm polluted her headspace too much to be worth it. They’d probably get used to it over time, but that would do her no good if she was traveling to new places. The mind reader had gone to great lengths ensuring her outfit was oppressively practical– light, tight, but armored enough to both protect her vital organs and give no hints as to what she might look like without it on. As-is, Shara’s face was the part of her most wandering eyes ended up resting, thanks in part to the striking color of her irises. Her round face and perpetual carefree grin gave most people the impression of innocent, childlike cuteness, a reputation that slightly irritated the nineteen-year-old girl who could bench a cow. It was ultimately fine, she supposed. In the perpetual battle of social interactions, cuteness was a powerful weapon, and a vastly preferable method of using her feminine charms compared to the alternative.
Darron had grown up to be… less cute, unless you were very attracted to an everlasting bedhead. Brown hair, brown eyes, and a permanently bored expression made Darron Bornsson look like an incredibly boring person. Though he had finally gotten rid of his excruciating stutter, his words came out so incredibly monotone they somehow looped around and gave people the impression he was being sarcastic. He also kept his face magically shaven, leaving his cheeks baby-smooth and giving off the impression that he was much younger than twenty years old. The mop of hair on top of his head roamed free, just long enough for errant strands to droop down and flirt with his eyelids. If pulled straight, his hair would probably block his vision, but it was so unkempt that it paradoxically managed to avoid being a problem.
As for why the two of them were leaving on his birthday, Darron had been officially accepted into a spellcasting academy in Hydronia. As the acceptance letter had half-joked, “if you manage to cross the Oinos Mountains and reach the academy grounds before classes start in two months, without the use of teleportation, we can count that as passing the entrance exam.”
It was said that less than ten percent of people who tried to reach Hydronia from the southern plains survived the journey, and doing so in in under two months didn’t make the task any easier. Even if they made it to the relative safety of Hydronian borders, Grantidal Academy was located in Grantidal City, which was nearly smack-dab in the middle of the enormous country. The distance from the border to the city was almost as long as the trip to Hydronia in the first place, except instead of a monster-filled plain standing between them and their goal, it would be a monster-filled swampy marshland. Most of Hydronia was, as the name might imply, very wet. Grantidal City itself was even floating atop the Aarkurth Sea, and Shara was pretty sure Darron didn’t know how to swim.
If Darron and Shara did use teleportation, they could probably make it to Grantidal Academy in time for Darron to actually take the entrance exam, which he would no doubt handedly demolish. Unfortunately, teleportation magic was one of the most difficult and dangerous kinds of magic there was, which naturally made it one of the rarest and most expensive. The pair had absolutely no chance of affording it, even if they pooled their family’s combined worth. Hence, Grantidal Academy had kindly offered to waive the test in lieu of a more difficult one: making it to them in one piece.
Overall, the whole journey sounded beyond awesome. Shara barely paid any attention to the festivities around her brother’s actual birthday; she was simply too excited. She had her best set of leather armor on underneath her nicest-looking combat-ready outfit, which mostly just meant the one with the fewest tears and holes. Her travel backpack was full to the brim with rations, water canteens, spare sets of clothing, and other necessities. She refused to take it off for the entire party. Strapped firmly to the left side of her waist was her beautiful, beautiful sword, in scabbard and ready to remove any beast that dared to halt their journey. It was a fairly basic double-edged longsword, although it was built thicker and wider than most to help it stand up to the incredible force Shara put behind her swings. On the right side of her waist she hung the ornate dagger Aelius had pulled from her head eleven years ago. A few years back, he had given it to her as a gift.
“He and I have had a lot of fun times with each other,” Aelius had said, indicating the knife, “but I figured it was only right to return it to you. After all, his original owner did intend for you two to be together forever.”
Aelius had then laughed at his own tasteless joke for a solid thirty seconds.
Anyway, Shara could not possibly be any more ready than this. The birthday party passed in a flash and she barely even noticed it. The whole community came to give them their sendoff. Even Gloria, leaning on her daughter-in-law for support, made the trip to say goodbye.
“Hold your head up high, boy,” the old woman told Darron. “You’ve done all you can for this place. You and Shara have already turned it from somewhere your family could barely survive into somewhere all these people could actually live. You two made made it all possible.” She cracked a sly grin. “Now that it’s here, though, we don’t need you anymore. So get!”
And that was it. With the party over, the pair made their way out of town. The first stop was Terranburg, then over the Oinos mountain range, then straight up through the northern lands until they hit the southern tip of Hydronia. This was finally it. It was exciting, it was was everything Shara had wanted for years, it was…
“Boring!” Shara lamented about five hours into the trip. “This is so boring! Why is nothing happening?”
“It’s a day and a half’s journey to Terranburg,” Darron sighed. “We’re walking there. I really don’t know what you expected.”
“We’re walking through the middle of the southern plains! I expected us to have been attacked by monsters like twenty times by now!” she pouted. “I was looking forward to rescuing you like a helpless damsel in distress.”
“Oh, so I’m helpless, am I?” Darron asked. “I seem to recall being the one with a collegiate scholarship for magic. I can literally force your body to eat itself.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that spell!” Shara grinned. “Granny called it a ‘disgustingly wasteful use of magical energy,’ but boy did it hurt. I’d probably rank it worse than the dire ant farm I sat in, but not as bad as that direct nerve-stimulatey spell. Neither were as bad as the diarrhea spell, though.”
“I told you, it’s not a diarrhea spell,” Darron said defensively. “It just converts the symbiotic bacteria in the intestinal tract into harmful pathogens that–”
“That gave me two weeks of diarrhea! Thank you again, by the way, for testing that one before making a reversal spell. Real brotherly of you.”
“Well, ‘that which doesn’t kill you,’ you know? Think of it as training.”
“Yeah,” Shara said, rolling her eyes, “if there’s one part of my body that desperately needed training, it was my butt.”
They kept walking, bantering along the way. There were two main options for making the sixteen-hour trip to Terranburg: breaking it into two days or doing one long haul. The latter was generally safer: if you were going to get attacked by monsters anyway, you should do it while awake. Darron’s birthday party, however, had lasted until midday, so given the late start they had little choice but to find somewhere to sleep through the night. Shara’s extra sense worked while she was sleeping, which should make the overnight stay fairly safe, but the two of them would sleep in shifts just in case.
Shara took the first watch, using sword drills to keep herself awake. After about four she was getting to a point where it wouldn’t be safe to force herself to keep going, and regretfully moved to wake Darron up.
“Alright bro, my turn to be unconscious.” She said, bracing for mental impact. The moment when a soundly sleeping person gets woken up is always a crushing onslaught of negative emotions.
Darron’s waking mind bowled into her like a grumpy avalanche, but quickly evaporated as he found his bearings. Waking up sucked. Shara usually tried to get up after everyone else so she only had to experience it once per day. At least the experience rarely lasted very long.
“You’re breathing heavily,” Darron commented as he began to sit up. “Was there a fight?”
“No, I was was just training.”
“Well, you look exhausted. Save some energy for the monsters next time, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I went a little overboard. I’ll sleep it off.” Shara said with a grin, pulling off her overshirt so she could undo her armor for bed. Getting a good night’s rest in hardened leather just wasn’t going to happen, especially when she only had half the night to do it. Even as tired as she was, it was going to be hard falling asleep. After all, tomorrow they’d reach Terranburg, the biggest city anywhere in the southern plains. Well over a million people lived in Terranburg, all packed together in one city. What would that feel like, so many emotions packed together in one spot? It was a little worrying, as chances were it wouldn’t feel great. It might even be completely overwhelming, though that was unlikely.
Despite these possibilities, Shara was beyond excited to know. Back when she lived there, Aletheia had somewhere in the area of a hundred people in the clan. The Bornsson’s town had just recently hit two hundred, minus two. Those were the only places Shara had ever really been long enough to remember them clearly, and both of them were mostly self-sufficient communities. Until just a few years ago, Shara had never bought anything before, let alone seen a shopping plaza or food stall. She’d never lived in a place where the people who pass you on the street don’t know your name. She’d never been somewhere that people were all trying to get ahead, rush forward, and clamor to the top of the social ladder. She’d never been somewhere people lie, cheat, steal and manipulate to get ahead.
It sounded like a lot of fun. As someone with a foolproof lie detector, Shara easily outwitted people who thought they could trick her and enjoyed every second of it. The cutthroat horror stories she’d heard about Terranburg and its people sounded like an absolute playground. She imagined herself making a fortune out-conning con men, catching petty criminals, and turning in bounties, until the Terranburg underworld finally got fed up with her and hired assassins to face her in the streets, mano-a-mano. With these sweet dreams, she finally lulled herself to sleep. Looking back, had she arrived in Terranburg on any other day, that might have even happened.
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The sun was high in the sky when Darron spotted the huge stone walls of Terranburg. Nearly thirty feet tall, protected by balista and patrolled by guards, no monster was getting past the Terranburg gate. The dry dirt of the southern wastes was unsuitable for mining, stonework, or really anything useful, but Terranburg had the advantage of being right at the foot of Mt. Phlegethos, the second-tallest peak of the Oinos mountain range and one of four active volcanoes that bordered the salufidi nation of Dynamo. The Oinos were rich with natural minerals and strong stone, and the founders of Terranburg had taken advantage of those resources to construct the impressive Terranburg walls nearly two hundred years ago. With monsters roaming in great numbers throughout the southern plains, Terranburg was the obvious go-to choice for a safe place to live.
Terranburg had since expanded greatly, building new wall systems outward from the original construction before filling them with new residential and business districts. It was now an industrial hedge maze of buildings and walls, filled to bursting with all walks of people.
Two guards stood in front of the southwest gate, heartily conversing with one another. These men were clearly well-fed, well-funded, and Darron could also tell they were well-trained. Each of them stood comfortably in the blazing sun with heavy chainmail vests, thick leather gloves, and sturdy metal greaves. Each held a heavy crossbow in one hand, resting uncocked but loaded, while they made lively gesticulations with the other arm. These men were warriors enjoying a bit of easy door duty, confident that their comrades on the wall would eliminate any monsters long before they got close enough to shoot from the ground.
Once they got fairly close, the guard on the left turned away from his conversation to give Darron and Shara a friendly wave. He looked much younger than the guard on the right, his face covered in stubble and arrogance.
“Hail, travelers!” he said with a hearty grin. “May I see your trade documentation, immigration papers, or passports?”
Darron had never heard of needing any such things to enter Terranburg, and the smirk on the guard to the right’s face seemed to indicate that was probably the case. Seriously? They hadn’t even gotten into the city yet, and someone was already trying to hustle them. Darron was way too tired to deal with this right now.
“We don’t have any of those things!” Shara responded cheerfully. “What do you need them for?”
“Oh, you know,” The first guard explained, “Legal stuff. We just need a record of why you’re visiting our fair city. I’m surprised you weren’t informed. No big deal though, we can set up a passport for you here at a nominal fee.”
“Oh, why thank you!” Shara said, clapping her hands and grinning innocently, “That’s awfully kind!” The guard’s smile exploded to greater heights, until she added “...Is what I would say if I was a complete idiot.”
The man visibly deflated. His older partner, who had kept silent until now, busted out laughing.
“Gah ha ha! I told you they weren’t from Elpis, Fraser!” he said. “Looks like my next drink’s on you!”
“Aw, come on, boss!” the guard who was apparently named Fraser complained, “How can you even tell? They’re just two kids. There’s no way two kids walked here by themselves. They must have bought a teleport.” The two guards were barely paying attention to Shara and Darron anymore. Darron was fairly tempted to just walk past them and enter the city.
“Well, firstly,” the older guard smugly began, “they’re two armed kids. If you can’t tell that girl’s got armor on under those clothes, we should reconsider your position on watch duty. But more importantly, it’s their skin. Look at that tan, son! These kids know an honest day’s work.”
“Oh, that’s bull!” Fraser argued, “People in Elpis get that stupid fashion tan or whatever. They lay out in the sun for fun, the freaks. You can’t say someone’s a local just because they’re not pale.”
“Um, excuse me,” Shara butted in, just before Darron decided he was going to try walking right past them, “Can we get in now, or…?”
“Huh?” Fraser said, turning as if he had forgotten about them, “Oh, yeah. You guys are good to go. Gate’s open. Where are you from, out of curiosity?”
“Bornsson’s place, day and a half southwest.” Shara cheerfully replied.
“Ha! Told ya,” the older guard mocked. He turned to Shara. “You two walk all the way here to see that Elpis festival?”
Darron didn’t know anything about a festival, and didn’t much care. He was only here to find a bed and prepare for crossing the Oinos Mountains, which was a dangerous and lengthy task. The mountain range wasn’t terribly wide around the Terranburg area, but it was extremely tall. Distance-wise, crossing the Oinos would be a tiny fraction of the total journey, but it would likely take around quarter of the trip’s total time. He wasn’t interested in holding a conversation with two men who tried to scam him out of money and take bets on where he was born. So naturally, Shara responded:
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Festival? What festival? What’s going on?”
“Oh, well Terranburg and Elpis have had that trade agreement for a while now, right? Apparently they’ve decided to give us a five-year ‘thanks for selling us your stuff’ anniversary gift: a teleportation gate. Those rat bastards want to open up trade hardcore by bypassing the plains entirely. They say it’s going to be great for the economy, but I bet they’re just prepping to take us over. I mean, their bigshot military commander is here setting up some magic room that could drop a whole bunch of people right on our doorstep whenever they want? Please.”
A teleportation… gate? Darron was hardly an expert on teleportation magic, but the edifice this man was describing– a reusable teleportation spell that permanently linked two points in space–sounded unfathomably complicated and costly. Hypothetically possible, sure, but the sheer amount of materials and upkeep needed to store and maintain that much magical energy in the necessary form… it seemed beyond the resources of even a nation.
Well, no, perhaps that was a knee-jerk reaction. Darron realized he might just lack the perspective to understand how large a million people really was compared to the five he had lived with most of his life. Never even mind the hundreds of millions each said to live in Elpis, Hydronia, and Sentonis. That level of scale, that many orders of magnitude above what Darron had ever witnessed, was something he could only try to imagine. What did it mean to be a part of a community so large, you would never meet every member of it as long as you lived?
Unrelated, but it also occurred to Darron that this would likely destroy the influx of trade through his home. Unfortunate.
“Woah, that sounds super cool!” said Shara, genuinely excited, “What kind of festival?”
Darron barely managed to hold back a groan. Goodbye, any possibility for an efficient preparation session! There was basically no chance Shara wasn’t going to drag him out to whatever dumb festivities were plaguing the city with noise and stink until they were both too tired to safely travel tomorrow. He could try to prepare for the journey without her, but he was relying on her abilities to get the best bartering deals.
Darron had long since figured out Shara could read minds. Frankly, she wasn’t particularly good at hiding it. It only took so many instances of her clearly knowing more than what she’d been told to figure out there was some kind of natural magic at work, and Darron managed to narrow down the possibilities to just a few before confronting her about it. Mind reading had admittedly come as a surprise, however– it was a long-sought magical ability that, to the best of his knowledge, had never been successfully performed. Leave it to nature to generate an inherent ability that surpasses hundreds of years of sapient research and effort. Honestly, natural magic was just cheating.
“Eh, it’s really just a parade, mostly,” Fraser said. “They want to prance around looking pretty. A lot of people from Elpis have been coming in to celebrate, so we’ve been making a killing. They say Elpis is the smartest country in the world, but they all just seem too nice for their own good to me. A buddy of mine felt bad watching an Elpis dude get scammed the other day, so he went up to him, and he was like, ‘Hey man, you know you’re getting scammed, right?’ and you know what the Elpis guy said?” Fraser swapped to a mocking tone for his Elpisian impression, “‘If this man is so desperate, he must need the money more than I.’ Is that just crazy or what? A scammer’s not going to stop being a scammer if he becomes a rich scammer, idiot.”
Darron presumed Fraser might know about that first-hand. Regardless, this was more than enough social activity with rude strangers for one day. He made a point to try and feel as irritated as possible so Shara would pick up the hint. For someone who didn’t like talking, having a mind reader for a sister could be handy.
“Yeah, that’s pretty crazy,” Shara agreed, “but hey, you guys have a good day. We’re gonna have to work double time if we want to finish our errands before that festival!”
“Hey, yeah, you have fun, kid. Enjoy the big city.” With a wave, Fraser let Shara and Darron pass, returning to his conversation with the other guard.
Finally, Darron and Shara made it past the gate. Inside there was an open, circular clearing, as if designed to try and trick people into thinking the entire rest of the city wouldn’t be a sardine can of buildings and bodies. Streets splintered outward from the open space like spokes on a wheel, and people flocked from area to area, but each gave a wide berth to the ornamental fountain that served as a centerpiece to the city’s welcoming area.
An actual fountain. It was some abstract art piece that kind of looked like a dead tree, pouring water calmly down into a center pool from the branches. Darron had never seen a fountain before, but it looked like a frivolous and insulting waste of water. How could Terranburg obtain enough water to slake the thirst of its million-plus citizens and still have enough left over to lavish on an ugly attraction like this? There must be some massive reservoir of water underneath the ground Terranburg was built on, because Darron was sure that there wasn’t a river running down from the Oinos for a hundred miles.
Perhaps more immediately striking than the fountain itself, however, was the likely reason the locals were avoiding it. A woman sat inside the fountain pool, looking mostly human if not for the iridescent teal scales that covered her body. She was facing away from Darron, lounging with her arms propped on the walls of the basin like she was relaxing on the beach. On first inspection, her long navy-blue hair seemed to be styled in dreadlocks, but in fact they were tendrils of thin flesh, caressing so beautifully down her back that one could hardly tell the difference. Non-human sapient species were rather common around the world at large, but this was the first time Darron had ever seen one.
Darron couldn’t be sure, but it probably wasn’t legal to bathe inside the public fountain. He noticed a few families lugging kids quickly through the clearing, covering the children’s eyes as they noticed the woman. Was she naked, or something? That was definitely illegal. Either way, all signs clearly pointed towards this lady being someone to ignore, avoid, and move on from.
“Woah, Darron!” Shara exclaimed, pointing directly at the woman everyone else was trying to ignore, “Check out that blue lady over there! She’s so pretty!”
Okay, nope. No. No thank you. Shara was an extremely extroverted person, and Darron had come to accept she’d drag him into a few conversations that he wouldn’t want to participate in from time to time. However, his sister was now clearly intending to walk over and talk to a freaky fish-person criminal. He could see about a hundred people from where he was standing, and she had picked the actual worst possible one. Darron was not having this. He immediately made a ninety-degree turn away from the scaly fish woman, and started walking.
Shara, however, was apparently having even less of this. Pretending not to notice his obvious objections, she grabbed his hand with both arms and started heading towards the woman. Against her strength, the choices were clear: he could be dragged on his feet, or dragged on his face. Titan’s sake, why was she doing this?
“Hello, miss!” Shara cheerfully exclaimed as she got close to the fountain. “I just wanted to let you know that you are super pretty!”
The woman slowly turned towards them. Darron braced for the inevitable creepy fish head that he expected her to have, but other than being blue and scaley, her face looked relatively normal. Darron did his best to continue looking at it, as she was, in fact, completely naked, and quite impressively proportioned at that. Even though she was sitting, Darron could tell she was quite a bit taller than either him or Shara, probably a solid three inches over six feet. Slitted gills opened up on the sides of her ribcage, but she otherwise appeared to be a statuesque picture of beauty. The woman gave the two of them a confused-looking smile.
“Um, thank you, I guess,” she said. “I’m, uh... not really sure how to respond to that. You two look pretty okay yourselves?”
Her voice was… less elegant than her body. It sounded like she had tried to give a genuine compliment, realized how pathetic it sounded halfway through, and then swapped to playing it off as sarcastic joke instead. She mostly just looked confused. Her eyes darted back and forth between Darron and Shara, trying to figure out why they were here. Darron wondered the same thing himself.
“Well, what the hell. Where are my manners?” she eventually said with a shrug, and started getting out of the pool. A large number of passerby began to watch out of confusion, interest, or disdain as the amazonian fish woman emerged dripping from the water and stood stark naked in front of two strangers. Darron’s comfort level with this situation hit zero and kept falling. She extended a webbed hand in his direction to shake.
“My name’s Adgito,” the fish lady said. “Nice to meet ya!”
Darron did not want to shake this woman’s hand. He turned to glare at his sister, who was politely looking above Adgito’s eye-level assets to meet her smile.
“My name is Shara!” she said in cheerful defiance of Darron’s discomfort, “And this is my brother, Darron! We are very happy to meet you, and Darron will shake your hand to prove it!” She looked towards him mockingly. “You do know how to shake hands, right Darron?”
Was she really just doing this to annoy him? Whatever. The sooner he got this over with, the better. Regretfully, he reached out and shook the woman’s hand.
The moment their skin touched, Darron felt a magical pulse prod his barrier. Then, at incredible speed, the fish woman changed. Her shining teal scales melded together and dulled, forming into completely normal-looking skin. The slits on her ribcage fused and disappeared as if she never had gills in the first place. Darron felt the webbed skin on the hand he was holding recede, leaving the fingers completely free. The woman’s fleshy hair-tendrils shrunk, vanished, and reformed as actual human hair. But most strikingly, the woman ceased to be a woman. Her ample chest shrunk and receded into defined pectorals, her shoulders widened, her hips thinned, and her groin became very visibly and very anatomically male.
Darron considered himself a medical professional, or at least an aspiring medical professional. It was far from the first time he had seen someone naked, and it wasn’t even the first time he had seen a man grow back his own genitals. (There was a snake-like monster in the wastes that was actually named the “crotchbiter.”) It took around a second for Adgito’s body to make the full transition from fish lady to human male, but Darron stoically continued shaking the man’s hand as if it never happened, refusing to give his sister any sort of satisfying reaction.
“Woah!” Shara yelped, “What the heck was that?” Was that... genuine surprise from her? Perhaps she knew something crazy was going to happen if Darron shook hands with this... guy, but didn’t dig deep enough into Adgito’s head to find out what it was. Well, joke’s on her now, Darron supposed. Being around a naked man had to be even more awkward for her than being around a naked woman was for him.
“Whew, thanks man!” Adgito said to Darron. His voice was deeper now, and it sounded less out-of-place. “That aquatic form can be a real pain sometimes. The skin just gets so dry it hurts to walk around, you know?”
“No,” Darron said flatly. “I don’t.”
“Oh, uh… yeah.” Adgito scratched the side of his face sheepishly. “Guess you, um, wouldn’t know that. Uh… sorry. To use you like that, I mean. It’s just sort of my thing. My body changes shape all the time based on stuff that’s happening around me or people I touch, and I can’t really control it very well.”
“Okay,” Darron said, “but why are you naked?”
“Oh, heh, so funny story about that actually.” Adgito started. His expression brightened; he had apparently been looking forward to telling it. “These jerk kids come by with a bucket of water and splash it on me to try and make my body auto-swap to aquatic form, right? Well, it works, and I’m forced into fish mode and my stuff is all wet. Like I said earlier, being in fish mode on land is not a comfortable experience, and once I change I can’t really swap forms for a while, except sometimes when I can like if my life is in danger or something. So I hightail it to the fountain here. At this point, it’s nighttime and nobody’s really around, so I take off my clothes and stuff so it’ll all dry while I’m waiting out my little transformation cooldown period, you know? But, water’s really comfy when you’re a fish, and I fall asleep, and next thing I know it’s daytime again, everyone’s out and about, and someone stole all my stuff. I’ve been sitting here ever since!”
Adgito grinned, clearly expecting some kind of reaction, but Darron didn’t really know how to react to any of that. They stared at each other in silence for a while.
“Okay, well!” Shara finally said, taking off her backpack and rummaging through it, “As interesting as that is, hanging your dangly bits out like that seems to be making a lot of people uncomfortable, so” –she produced a set of Darron’s pants from her backpack– “I am going to give you these!”
Darron was too far beyond done with this situation to care that Shara had volunteered his belongings instead of her own. He was a little taller than her anyway; his pants would fit Adgito better. Not that either of them should be giving free stuff to this freakish stranger.
“Wow, thanks!” Adgito exclaimed, overjoyed to have some trousers. He donned them immediately. They were still far too small, but Adgito didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. Darron sighed.
“So was this your whole plan?” he asked, “To just wait around for some stranger to give you pants?”
“Honestly?” Adgito responded, “I was expecting to get arrested. Fer like, loitering, disorderly conduct, and indecent exposure.” He counted off the charges on his fingers as he said them. “I figured the guards would come by with a blanket or something to cover me up as they escorted me to jail, I’d un-fish on one of them, plead guilty, and get a few weeks of free meals. Elpis made this place create a buncha ‘Natural Necessity’ law exceptions or whatever when they signed the treaty, so it’s kind of legal for me to do some of this stuff if I can prove I biologically have to, which I sort of do. I’d get off light. Some of the guards can be real bastards, but they probably wouldn’t do anything to me. I’m too poor to extort and too tough to beat up for fun.”
Adgito’s plan sounded suspiciously well-thought out.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve ended up naked, is it?” Darron asked.
“Uh, no, it’s not,” Adgito admitted, slumping a bit. “My powers burn through clothes like... uh, an actual fire burning clothes. Sometimes that happens. Like, the fire thing, specifically.”
He scratched the side of his face again. It seemed to be some kind of embarrassment tic. Darron had to admit, this guy really seemed like a man with nothing to hide, and not just regarding his lack of decency. When Adgito was happy about something his face was a huge grin, his chest was puffed out, and he stood up tall. Likewise, he deflated and drooped whenever Darron brought him back down to earth. After years of learning to deal with Shara’s nigh-impenetrable poker face, Darron had to admit it was refreshingly jarring to see someone give straight answers to simple questions. Not that it in any way made up for the utter ridiculousness of this situation at all.
“Well, uh, thanks again,” Adgito stammered, “Really owe ya. For the pants, I mean. I wanna pay you back somehow, but, uh, these are now literally the only thing I own. But, if there’s something I can help you with or something, just let me know!”
Oh no. Here it was. This is why Shara was doing this. This was her real goal, from the very beginning. Darron knew exactly what was about to go down. She was going to say–
“As a matter of fact, there is!” Shara said, rubbing her hands together.
Yeah, that.
“Darron and I just got into town, and we’re looking for the best places to buy a few things,” Shara continued. “It would save us a lot of time if someone who knew the area were to help us find the best stuff...”
“Okay, no.” Darron intoned, finally putting his foot down. “I’m done getting pulled around for your amusement today. Why are you trying to get us to spend the day with this… weird stranger?”
“What do you mean?” Shara asked, pouting in mock offence, “I just said why! This place is freaking huge, and we have no idea where we’re going! There are probably dozens of shops that have the kind of equipment we’re looking for, and half of them are probably shoddy scams that will break halfway to Mt. Phegethos! Unless you want to search the entire city blind, we need a guide!”
“Yes, but why him?” Darron clarified. “He– or she, we can’t even tell– is some random mutant criminal we found naked in the street! He was actually in the process of waiting to be arrested when we got here!”
“Wow,” Adgito commented, “I should probably be really offended by that, but I gotta admit that is pretty much exactly what happened.”
“So what?” Shara responded indignantly, “I can tell he’s a good person and he knows the city well. He was just doing the best he could given his situation. Why do you care what laws he was breaking if it all turned out okay?”
“Because unlike you,” Darron growled, “I can’t just magically know how good someone’s intentions were. I, and the rest of the world, can only judge people by their actions. So when a person ends up flashing everyone in the middle of town square, I consider them responsible for that mistake regardless of whether they meant to or not, and so will everyone else! Sure, yes, as best I can tell, this guy seems pretty nice–”
“Hey, thanks!” Adgito butted in. Darron didn’t stop talking.
“–But he also seems unreliable, absentminded, and potentially dangerous. Did you miss the part where he mentioned he sometimes catches fire? Or how he was so calm about being naked in public because it happens on a somewhat regular basis? A nice person that means well can still be a serious problem if they don’t have their act together, and this guy is not a guy with his act together.”
Shara crossed her arms and looked away. She seemed irritated, but it also looked like she was giving real thought to what Darron was saying. Adgito was just kind of standing there, hands on his hips, looking back and forth between the two siblings as if they were a stage act and he was waiting for the punchline. For someone who likely spent so much time outside and shirtless, his skin was pretty pale. Perhaps tans didn’t carry over when your skin turned into fish scales and back. Also striking was the fact that Adgito seemed to have no chest hair, no facial hair, and not even any armpit hair, but he still had a mop of black hair on top of his head. Did some kinds of hair have to regrow naturally after a transformation, while other kinds didn’t? Adgito’s musculature was toned but lean, as if he was naturally healthy but didn’t really work out. His appearance was so idyllically sculpted it reminded Darron of an example diagram from an anatomy textbook, but with the head of a grinning idiot grafted on top. His external organs seemed capable of changing quite a bit in a very short amount of time. How would his internal organs be affected by form changes? The creation or removal of an entire gill structure would– wait, no, this was no time for science. Darron was supposed to be mad at his sister.
“I guess I see where you’re coming from now,” Shara said, “though I still feel confident in vouching for Adgito in this case. I think you should know I’m not going to purposefully lead us into dangerous people. But if you’re still not convinced, consider this: we really do need a guide, and this guy” –she poked Adgito playfully in the sternum, causing him to stumble back a bit– “is probably the only one in the city who doesn’t have anything better to do than give random people he just met an express tour, even when one of them clearly doesn’t like him.”
“Once again,” Adgito said, nodding sagely, “I feel I should be offended, but that is pretty much spot on. I would be happy to show you around, and if you’re ever dissatisfied with my incredibly professional services, you’re welcome to ditch me whenever.” He turned to start walking, but immediately turned back around as if he remembered something and pointed at Darron.
“Also... feel like I should clarify,” Adgito said, “I’ll only catch fire if someone, like, actually sets me on fire. I don’t have full control over my transformations, but they’re based on environmental triggers and stuff, or if I’m in physical danger. Not gonna just randomly explode on ya.”
Fine. It had seemed at first that Shara chose Adgito as their guide just to annoy Darron, but perhaps she had actually been considering their needs as her first priority for once. Ultimately, Darron did trust her, which he supposed meant he was obligated to trust Adgito by proxy.
He didn’t, but the right thing to do was to try.