After Zephyra sufficiently recovered from her interaction with Momo’s subconscious, she sat back down, propped her feet up on one of the guard’s shoulders, and sighed.

“I have an hour until we have to pack this mess up and get to the next town,” she said. “While my sister quite obviously tries to steal from me, why don’t we solve your little problem?”

In an unsuspecting corner of the room, Kasula froze. For as discreet as she was trying to be in finding the dagger, the room was claustrophobically small, not to mention brightly lit from all angles. But Zephyra didn’t seem to care all that much about her sister’s snooping. She clearly was just happy to have her back in some capacity, no matter how brief or ridiculous the circumstances; it was obvious in the way she kept subtly craning her neck back to look at her; the way she groaned (but still smiled when Kasula wasn’t looking.) As a fellow older sister, Momo knew the expression well: endearing annoyance.

“I, uh, I’ve heard you might know what to do with this,” Momo stuttered, producing the golden bracelet from her pocket and dangling it in front of Zephyra. The elf cocked an eyebrow and took it in her hand. “I want to be able to send messages back and forth to a long-distance friend of mine. Kasula told me you might be able to help with that.”

“You have such a big mouth, Kas,” Zephyra groaned. “Did you just spend the last six years traveling around Alois with a megaphone airing all of my business? You might want to look for a job with the tabloids. You clearly have a talent for it.”

“Oh shut up. If I wanted to kill your career, I could do it in an afternoon.”

Zephyra snorted. Kasula kicked a heap of metallic clothing away with her foot, clattering it across the room, much to the guards’ dismay. They looked to Zephyra to see if they should interfere, but the elf just waved them down. She was treating Kasula like a puppy having a meltdown. Just wait it out, she mouthed to them.

She turned her attention to the bracelet and tapped her talon-like fingernails around it.

“Grunts, bring me my tools,” she ordered.

The bodyguards immediately straightened. “Your tools, ma’am?” one squeaked, going red in the face. “Of course her tools, you idiot,” the other said, but Momo could tell from his face that he, too, also had no clue. Zephyra sighed, muttered “you have to do everything yourself,” and turned to what looked like a makeup desk. Blush and foundation littered the surface, but when she pressed a button on the side, a drawer popped out, revealing a variety of miniature, pink instruments: wrenches, tweezers, screwdrivers. It was like an engineering toolkit built for a mouse.

Using the ends of her long fingernails as if they were their own apparatus, she extracted the wrench and the tweezers. She also took out a pair of goggles and slid them over her angular cheekbones. She looked, all in all, like a truly out of touch cover model for a women’s engineering magazine. Face fully done, nails longer than king cobra snakes, with her only protective gear being a flimsy pair of swim goggles. The kind of person that the general public would scream at online for setting unrealistic standards for women in STEM.

Momo thought she looked awesome.

“So, this so-called friend,” Zephyra drawled as she began to work on the bracelet. She was picking at it with the tweezers, causing the tiny springs inside to pop in and out. “It has to be someone rather important, or else you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble. But, before you say it,” she turned to Momo, flashing a mad smile. “Entertain me this. I know from experience that it’s really only one of two options. Is it a current lover, or an ex?”

Momo’s throat went hotter than a forest fire. She nearly fainted from the embarrassment.

“Neither! Really, neither,” she all but wheezed. The thought had occurred to her to try and wire it to Sumire, but that would require the other girl to have her own bracelet. “It’s my boss. Kind of.”

Zephyra hummed. “That’s no fun. Not even a boss you’re having a covert affair with?”

Momo shook her head so hard her neck nearly snapped.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Nope. Nope. No affair,” she squeaked. “Just a perfectly normal, manager-managee relationship.”

Momo’s mind wandered to the time Valerica made her deliver a sack of dead bugs to an unknown client while riding on an undead black bear. Their relationship had never, not even in the first hour, been normal.

“Right,” Zephyra laughed. “Normal. Whatever. I’d read your mind because I’m nosy, but lucky for you, I’m not risking another migraine. Now, what’s this manager’s name? Where does she live? Postal code, address, favorite color? And I’m going to need something she’s touched recently. A hat, a piece of clothing, a whiskey bottle. Anything with her Nether remnants—they’re the only truly accurate way to lock onto a signal.”

Luckily, Momo still had those bottles of Nether Nectar that Valerica gifted her. The ones that let her, theoretically, directly visit the Necromage in the Nether. Unfortunately, unlike the bracelet, they were a limited resource, and teleporting to and from the great beyond was less of an option now that Momo had a queendom to run and a doom box to disable.

“Here,” Momo handed her the bottle. Zephyra eyed it with interest.

“This looks expensive,” she said, causing a shiver to run down Momo’s spine. A word like that did not come cheaply out of Zephyra’s mouth. “Is this really Nether Nectar?”

“Um…” Momo trailed off, not sure if honesty was the best policy around a woman with questionable morals and heaps of nepotism-sponsored blood money. “Maybe.”

“Opaque as ever, my queen,” Zephyra chided. “Don’t worry, I have no intention of stealing it. That’s my sister’s domain,” she side-eyed Kasula, who was still having no luck wading through the big-budget trash strewn around the room. “But this will do. Give me but a moment.”

Momo watched in amazement as she began the procedure. Zephyra took a cloth rag out of her toolkit and padded the bottle. Using her miniature pair of scissors, she then cut a small section of the rag, doused the rag in a chemical that smelled suspiciously like bleach, draped it around the bracelet, muttered an incantation, coughed like a chainsmoker as she accidentally inhaled some of the fumes, then set the bracelet back down.

“Her name, please?” Zephyra quipped. “And be quick, before the effect wears off.”

“Valerica.”

“Full name.”

It occurred to Momo at that moment that it had simply never come up.

“I… have no idea.”

Zephyra frowned. As the seconds clicked on, rancid smelling smoke began to emanate off of the bracelet. Nyk, who had been busy acting apathetic in the doorway, sneezed her lungs out.

“Fine, I’ll just have to make do.” Zephyra grabbed the tiny, pink screwdriver. “I’ve always relied on a trifecta of magics to rewire these things—pure Nether, gnomic currents, and old-fashioned elvish engineering. If the dwarves ever try and tell you their shit is better, it’s not. It’s practically medieval. But I like to use it as a backup transmission system in case there isn’t enough Nether around to carry the signal the whole way.”

Momo nodded enthusiastically, not having a single clue what she was on about.

“Gods, that smells rank,” Kasula said. “Are you repairing that bracelet or are you cooking it alive?”

“You smell rank,” Zephyra growled back, in a truly sisterly fashion. “Now shut up and get back to trying to steal whatever you need to steal, I’m nearly done.”

A faint white glow emanated from her palm. It was that same white glow that often shone from Kasula’s own hand when she cast magic. It concealed the bracelet briefly, neutralizing the smell. It dissipated after a few seconds, leaving the golden accessory shiny and bright, as if it had just emerged from a car wash. Zephyra picked it up and beckoned for Momo’s wrist.

“There,” she said. Momo blushed as the elf carefully slung it around her wrist. “Now, time to try it. Simply press the notch underneath here, then the one atop here…” she guided Momo’s fingers delicately around the device, placing them on infinitesimally small buttons. Momo was grateful for the tutorial, because she would have never found them herself; the bracelet was so obviously made by elves, with all the attention being paid to appearance, and none to function.

“Are you pressing down hard enough? It should be working by now,” Zephyra said, biting down on her lip in frustration. “I’ve quite literally perfected this operation. I can’t think of a single thing that would make the signal miss, unless the Nether sample was contaminated…”

A voice emerged from the air around Momo’s wrist, cutting Zephyra off. It was a disembodied, static-coated tone, deep and agitated and oddly familiar. The voice brought Momo back in time—transported her to a dark, dank cavern. Made her think of rotting teeth and kidnapping and confusion and embarrassment. She saw in her mind’s eye a skeleton, quietly obeying commands, a tea light stuck in its ribcage.

“Hello? Who is this? Is someone trying to burrow into my skull again? I told you for the last time, I am not interested in donating to Nether-displacement relief funds. The Oblivion Crisis ended minutes ago. Or hours. Or days. I can’t recall. Nevertheless, move on and stop calling this address. If you don’t, I will displace you into the abyss. Goodbye.”

The air went cold again. The caller had evidently hung up. Momo remained frozen, her finger twitching. Zephyra looked at her in surprise.

“Valerica certainly sounds a little different than I expected,” she said, matter of fact. “And quite a lot ruder, too.”

Momo stared at her, a realization slowly crystallizing inside of her.

“That’s because that’s not Valerica.”