“I have to admit that I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” the mirror’s reflection shimmered in what I understood was nervousness. They knew me but they didn’t know me. Turns out that while the engine remembered the reboots, the other constructs only knew about them from the pages they managed to read before the reboots happened. That left pretty big gaps in their memories that the typewriter tried to fill in, but to be clear, the typewriter was better at typing than talking.

“That is an awful lot of boxes,” the bucket clunked around the edges of the room. Now that it had been freed of its closet, it wasn’t interested in returning to it even with the floor being taken up with our load.

“What is that?” the pillow pointed a tassel toward the pile of boxes we were carting in from the car, but that only egged Damon into taking a casual swipe at the tassel. Those two would either become friends or enemies.

“This is a whiteboard,” I explained, collapsing onto that comfortable chair, my body unable to meet the demands of lugging in a bunch of heavy things.

“Sit. I’ve got this,” Cliff assured me, and I grit my teeth in frustration. If we were in the game, I would have been able to carry boxes all day without breaking a sweat.

“Thanks,” I ground out, but Cliff didn’t take offense. He’d always been able to deal with my grouch. It was simple. I got mad, and that dropped adrenaline into my system so that I could do the next thing that most people took for granted. “At least I can put this together. Did you see the box with the dry erase markers in it?”

“Yeah,” Cliff frowned. “It’s around here.”

“Nevermind,” I waved him back to his unloading. “They have one in the board box. I can start with that one. Screwdriver?”

“Yeah,” Cliff snapped his fingers. “I knew you’d need that right away.” He rummaged in one bag and quickly tossed me a poly-whatever package that there was no way I’d get open on my own.

“Scissors?” I prodded him with a wry look.

“Oh,” Cliff gave the room a frantic look.

“I can take care of that,” the pillow cast a spell and the packaging disappeared neatly.

“Fizzbarren hated that packaging,” the mirror explained as I grabbed a screwdriver to put together the stand for the whiteboard. “Our Clean spell is specifically enhanced to dissolve it neatly.”

“We all have the Clean spell nowadays,” the pillow fluffed herself.

“Except the Quill,” Sammi lamented for the fluttering object, the only one of them that Fizzbarren had neglected to reprogram with spells or even speech. It could fly, scribble if it had ink handy, and edit when it plugged itself into the engine.

“We’ll fix it, Quill, I promise,” I itched to be able to figure out how to cast spells in this world. I wanted that Clean spell and a few others that could be found in those potion bottles lined up neatly on racks. I’d tried it before, but I didn’t have the knack here. The only mana I could use to do anything was author mana and for that I needed people to read my writing. “Just as soon as I get enough mana. Speaking of which, if we have enough out of the car, Cliff, can you set up my laptop?”

“One more load.” Cliff lumbered out the front door.

We’d bought a few computers, maxing out credit cards that Cliff said I didn’t want to know about. We had two laptops for us to use, one old junker that Cliff had cobbled together out of old parts and kept in the back of the truck, just in case, and one top-of-the-line desktop computer, or at least as top-of-the-line as Costco could provide. The moment we’d left Costco, Cliff had shredded both credit cards we’d used into a nearby trashcan. I didn’t ask. Potaaato, potahto and all that. The fact that he wouldn’t talk about it in the truck said something. He’d only smirked at the idea that Kat had gotten herself out of jail that night.

“You can set up in the bedroom on that desk in there,” I called out to him as he headed out the door.

“Are you sure he won’t come back?” the bucket whispered to the mirror.

“I don’t care if he does,” the pillow puffed angrily around Damon’s rotund and pretending-to-be-asleep form. “This is the most fun any of us has had since he brought us to life, and I, for one, am looking forward to being something more than that wizard’s mud-catching slave.”

“She hasn’t asked me to clean anything,” the bucket whispered. “What does that even mean?”

“That we can be more than maids,” the pillow primped.

“Like what?” the mirror’s tone wasn’t as sure. I was trying to give them their privacy and freedom to say what they were feeling, so I focused on my whiteboard. “Do you think we’ll go to school, get degrees and become doctors or something?”

“Sometimes a lot of freedom all at once is a little scary,” I told them, watching Cliff set down another box and start rummaging through stuff. “Give yourself some space to figure it out. You have time.” I realized that I’d told Kat nearly the same thing when she’d be moaning about too many choices when we’d started college and she’d been so young. It was like having another set of kids. I took a contented breath and let that idea settle on me, finding that I enjoyed the thought.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

“I’m going to put away the groceries.” Cliff craned his neck to figure out which doorway led to which room in the house. It wouldn’t be my cooking, but at least I’d recognize the ingredients. We had a couple of pizzas and there was always takeout. “Then I’ll set up the computer system.”

“I feel like you’re talking about setting up the Batcave,” I teased him.

“Not with this Wi-Fi,” Cliff replied more seriously than I’d expected. “I hate to impose on you folks,” he addressed the constructs who almost didn’t realize that he was talking to them. “But do you think you could boost that Wi-Fi signal?”

“Fizzbarren never let us have internet access,” Sammi groused with a thump of a leg that reminded me that I had another use for that screwdriver before I did anything else. “I doubt that we could pull any more from the neighbors with the way all this is interfering.”

“Fizzbarren must have a service provider,” Cliff muttered almost to himself.

“Oh, yes,” the mirror jumped in to answer, an image of a crumpled paper appearing in its reflection. “I have that information. Fizzbarren often threw fliers for service providers into the trash, but I remember what they looked like.”

Cliff eagerly punched in the number on the flyer. I watched with my mouth hanging open as Cliff pretended to be Fizzbarren and ordered service to be hooked up the next day. “Five hundred meg is the best you can give me? I don’t suppose you have fiber optic lines? Not until when? How much?”

There was a pause as I listened to him babbling stuff that didn’t make any sense to me anymore. Cliff noticed my baffled look and took his conversation to the bedroom, his phone in his pocket on speaker and a set of computer boxes in his arms. The last thing I heard him mutter was something about having better connection when he was homeless in Sweden. I shook my head and headed over toward Sammi with a few screws and a power screwdriver.

“What are you doing with that?” Sammi, as the bench, asked me, scooting themselves under the table and away from me.

“One screw and you’re good as new,” I pointed my screwdriver at his wobbly leg.

“Is that thing metal?” Sammi shuddered.

“Yeah, why?”

“You can’t use metal on us,” the mirror rushed to explain. “We’re fae-made.”

“I’m sorry,” I dropped the screws back in their box. Still, I knew a bit about woodworking from my stepfather. “No metal. I promise. Just let me look at it and let’s see what we can do with some wood glue. Fizzbarren has to have a bit of wood glue around, right?”

The Quill waved in front of my face in the negative.

“Hardly,” the mirror scoffed. “What need would he have of that when he has a Mend spell. He just didn’t bother to use it.”

I sat back and realized we needed even more stuff. In the game, I’d have waved my hand and Sammi and everything else in this place would be clean, and mended to a point that it all would have shined like new, maybe even better than new. I owed the constructs so much. The least I could do was repair them.

“Cliff, we need more stuff,” I asked hesitantly.

“Make a list and I’ll get it tomorrow,” Cliff called out of the bedroom, and I could tell that he was distracted by computer stuff. “I’m not even sure the house wiring will run these computers, so I need more stuff too.”

“Wiring?” I asked more to myself than anything else. I had done this on a whim and a prayer last time with a single old computer and the hacked Wi-Fi. Did we really need the Batcave? “Why do I feel like the more efficient we try to make all this, the more complicated it gets?”

“We don’t get our power from the electric company,” the mirror admitted. Again, I was shocked. I hadn’t questioned it last time. There had been a plug. I’d plugged stuff in. It had worked. “It’s all from the ley lines.”

“Are you telling me that the plug there on the wall where the engine is plugged in… that there is no wiring back there?” I asked as if the world had just turned upside down, which it had for me and for Cliff.

“No,” the mirror answered as if it was perfectly normal to get their electricity from ley lines. At least I knew that ley lines were fae power sources that traced the positions of various sites of power. “There is plenty of power in the plugs for whatever you wish to run, though I do tend to get better reception than a television might.”

“And what if Cliff opens up that plug back there?” I asked.

“That would be bad,” Sammi admitted.

“Cliff!” I called out and tried to dash to the other room, forgetting that this body wasn’t going to do that. I fell on my face near the bench form of Sammi, who had politely scooted out of my way.

“Are you alright?” Cliff thumped into the room and leaned down to help me up. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry about the wiring,” I warned him. “In fact, it would be very good if you didn’t touch the wiring.”

“Ookaaay,” Cliff took my arm and patted it like I’d lost my mind.

“It’s all run by magic,” I waved my hand around a room that I only then realized had no metal in except for what we’d brought in.

“So, I should cancel the internet service we just signed up for?” Cliff asked the room.

“Probably,” the mirror admitted.

“You could have told me before I made the phone call,” Cliff complained mildly, shaking a meaty finger at the mirror.

“We aren’t used to questioning our masters,” the mirror admitted.

“We are not your masters!” Cliff threw up his hands. “I don’t swing that way, buddy. I’m much more of a sub than a master.”

“Uh,” the mirror didn’t understand but I did, and I had a really hard time keeping a straight face.

“And if you’re looking to her as a master, you brought out the wrong one in that marriage,” Cliff quipped, running that thought right off the cliff.

“And that’s enough of that,” I inserted sternly. “My sex life is private and will remain that way, Cliff.” Cliff raised his eyebrows in reply, but kept his mouth shut. Okay he didn’t and the constructs know more of that than I wish them to know, but they promised not to include it in the book. Except for this, obviously, which was more than I wanted.

Cliff and I spent another hour sorting out necessary metal from unnecessary metal with the help of the constructs, who were relieved to tell us what needed to leave the house for the magic to keep working strong. The aluminum was okay, so we kept the whiteboard and our cans of soda. The computers were surprisingly made of mostly formed plastic parts, and while we had to remove a bunch of the screws, the constructs showed us how to use hot glue to replace them all. I felt like a good little crafter. Wi-Fi reception got better once we’d removed most of the metal that had any steel in the mix. That, and we moved the truck to the edge of the driveway.

I used the hot glue on Sammi’s leg and winced at the mess I made of it, but it made Sammi happy. I longed for some wood glue and sandpaper, but we had bigger fish to fry. We popped microwave popcorn in a non-microwave microwave and used the whiteboard to sketch out a plot for our new book. This included many writing lessons and a few hacked videos from BBC’s masterclass service. Even when Cliff and I crashed, the constructs watched those videos all through the night. The typewriter hummed throughout the day, though I didn’t realize it was writing half the time. The mirror would give me magic lessons and I tinkered with some of the potions on the wall. My eyes changed from blue to green for a few days, but there was nothing else I could use without the talent for magic myself.