Waia was just polishing off the food that had floated through her room’s window when a second object appeared from above. The main difference this time was that the window was closed.
Waia’s head jerked up when she heard something crack against the glass, followed by an “Ack!” Quet appeared to be dangling from the roof, her face hanging upside-down and looking into the room. “Hi! It’s me!”
It took Waia a few seconds to formulate a proper response. “A-are you hurt or something? Do you need me to get you down, or...?”
“Nah, just felt like saying hi. This is faster than going down the stairs, so… Also, I wanted to know if you wanted me to make you an enchanted artifact.”
“You have no idea how much I want that to happen right now.”
“Righteous. Bring a thing up here and I’ll make both figurative and literal magic happen.” Quet pulled herself out of sight. “Ow, headrush!”
Admittedly, that was weird. Also admittedly, Waia had seen very little regarding Quet that wasn’t weird. At this point, Waia just had to know. She scooped the last few scraps of food into her mouth, grabbed her backpack (and sketchbook for good measure) and headed up.
Up on the roof, Quet had replaced her cooking setup with what looked a lot like a carpentry station. A wooden counter had been set up in the middle of the roof, complete with an array of magnifying glasses and an unusually large pen attached with a wire to a car battery, against which a green, leather-bound book laid. Quet, meanwhile, was sitting on the edge of the roof, up against the spikes ringing the space. When Waia’s head poked through the trap door, Quet’s lit up. “You actually came.”
She helped Waia through the door. “Sorry, I was kinda just expecting you to never show up and for us to just drop that this ever happened. What’d you bring?”
Waia hesitantly held up her backpack. “...So, did you legitimately call me up here just to make my stuff magic?”
“Yup.” Quet grabbed the backpack and placed it on the counter. After turning on the desk lamp to provide proper illumination, she opened a drawer built into one of the counter’s legs, revealing it to be filled with dozens of smooth pebbles of varying sizes. “Couldn’t really manage to sleep, so I thought, ‘Hey, we’re gonna get into a big fight tomorrow, presumably, so some thaumaturgical augmentation of the others’ equipment is pretty productive’! More so than making patatas bravas, anyway. Plus, you’re the only one here who’s halfway useful in a fight, so I figured you could do the most with my particular tools. By the way, what are you actually looking for in my augmentations? You can never go wrong with a standard internal volumetric magnification matrix, I’m pretty good at those, but there’s also-”
Waia held up a hand to dam Quet’s flood of words. “So you’re actually trying to make me something?”
“Yup. Like I said.”
Waia nodded slowly. “Okay, right, it was just kinda weird to come from out of nowhere. Didn’t you say you had to sleep?”
“Eh. Like I said, I couldn’t. Besides, it’s only been 61 hours, why would I want to sleep when I could be doing cool wizard things?! You don’t know my life! I play by my own rules! For instance…” She unzipped the empty backpack and looked inside. “Pretty spacious already, not as many metal band patches inside, made of…” She squinted, then checked the outside. “...canvas, with some form of white padding on the interior.”
“Oh, right, that.” Waia leaned over Quet’s shoulder. “Polu gave me the bag as a wedding gift. Said it wouldn’t catch fire as easily when I melted rocks inside, which did actually happen a lot to my older backpacks. Given that Polu’s the one who gave it to me, I’m pretty sure that stuff’s asbestos.”
“...Neat.” Quet grabbed the three-inch-thick, sticker-laden book from the counter and set it down in the middle of the workspace. “You don’t seem the type to be particularly well-versed in the methods behind the design of thaumic enchantments, so we’ll probably be going off of the book rather than pure process of elimination. Do you want to go through this yourself, or should I just list off stuff in here you might like?”
Waia flipped the book open to a random page and, after seeing that the nigh-incomprehensible handwriting consisted primarily of extremely dense shorthand, opted to slide the book over to Quet. “Let’s go for the second one. I was actually kinda hoping to do some quiet drawing while you worked, so that all works out.” She pointed up at the faint pinpricks of light far above, all that was visible of the Wizardly Suburbs. “I can’t not keep this.”
“Can’t you just take a photo?”
Waia shrugged. “Doesn’t have the same personality to it.”
“If you say so.” Quet pulled a wheeled office chair away from the counter and hopped into it, sending it spinning and careening across the roof while she flipped through the book. A much more difficult task than maintaining momentum on the chair, given the hardback cover.
Meanwhile, Waia sat in the same place Quet had been in when she had arrived, slid her pencil out of the spiral binding and started drawing the skyline. The labyrinthine silhouette of the castle in front of the glow of the Pillar was definitely a sight to see.
“She uses it to store things, so no infinite soup…” Quet looked over at Waia. “Hey, we’ve never really talked, just me and you, right?”
Waia thought back for a moment. “...Not to my knowledge, no. To be honest, you didn’t seem the type.”
“I agree with that assessment.” Quet decided to stop rolling across the roof when her chair bumped up against the spikes. “This is just for the sake of curiosity. You’re married, right?”
Waia looked down at her wedding ring for a moment, then back up at Quet. “Pretty sure.”
“Awesome. I was kinda curious about how that ended up actually happening. My Domain isn’t super well-versed in the overall concept, and, if I’m allowed to throw the line back at you, you don’t seem the type.”
Waia nodded in assent, looking down at the early stages of her sketch. “I get that a lot, actually. But mostly from my own Domain, most humans just kinda assumed me and Ivy hit it off. Pretty fun story, really.”
Quet pushed off of the wall so that she was a more comfortable distance from Waia. “I’m game. The upcoming time period that my out-of-whack circadian rhythm is informing me is night is long.”
Waia didn’t even bother to parse that last sentence. “So picture Hawaii right after the Nabbing, with all the nukes and stuff just having been fired. Not fun. My Domain looked at all the rioting and murder, Honolulu was just gone, and we figured we had to do something about it. Deus tried and failed for whatever reason, but didn’t have that personal touch. Treated the management of human civilization like a job. So we decided to make things a little more intimate.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“I imagine that that image might be a little difficult to maintain while pacifying four-something islands with nothing but a few dozen Primoi,” said Quet, while leaning against the back of her chair.
“We did figure that, yes. So what we did is, we delegated. You’ve gotten a pretty good idea of me. I’m the muscle, and everyone in my Domain knows it. Whenever there was a town or village that wasn’t playing nice to our covert little efforts, they sent me in. When there’s a pile of lava shaped like a person setting fire to your house, you’re gonna be a lot more open to talking to the weird strangers who say they can fix it.”
Quet leaned forward. “Heavens to betsy, this backstory has certainly been proven to be more bountiful than I was initially anticipating.” The back of her chair was leaning far enough back that some may have begun to call it an abnormally wide armrest.
Waia harrumphed. “Yeah, well, we haven’t even gotten to the good part. See, back then, I was just a little demon. Personality of a Chihuahua, I’m telling you. I was getting into fights with humans, running off to join garage bands, tons of stuff. I think a few of my siblings found me in the woods hunting boars after a few weeks of searching. They never said it to my face, but I think the main reason I was never short of a job back then was because giving me something to actually work on was actually a great way to keep me in check, focusing on something calming just really helps me focus, y’know?”
Quet nodded. “I’ll buy that, yeah.”
“But after a few months or so, our big plan to keep Hawaii calm was really starting to pay off. We got that big ritual thing on Moloka’i going, so people could start farming and stuff again. But apparently, my Domain was pretty comfortable with getting me to bother someone else. They set me up with a quiet little village by the coast, that being Honoka’a, and told me to make sure things stayed calm there. Also, for good measure, they said I’d be fired if they ever saw me without first seeking me out.” Waia shrugged. “Not sure what I’d be fired from, but it hasn’t really come up anyway.”
Quet decided to scoot over and watch Waia draw while she listened to her story. “Seems like they really weren’t fond of having you around.”
“Yeah well…” Waia shrugged again. She didn’t have any other gestures that fit her thoughts on the matter. “They visited occasionally. Like I said, my backpack was a wedding gift. But speaking of, I met Ivy about a week after I first settled down, once my little watering hole was up and running. Plenty of people came throughout the day to just hang out. I was going for calm, relaxing vibes in there, so I’m glad it worked.”
“I thought this was the story of how you met your wife, not an ad for your bar.”
“I’m getting to it now!” Waia looked up at Quet. “Besides, I thought you were looking through your catalog of stuff to give me.”
“As it turns out, most of the enchantments I’ve written down in there pertain to soup. Once again, I am my own worst enemy.”
Waia slowly turned back to her drawing. “...Alright. But the thing is, I was still just a little pent-up ball of violence, which doesn’t lead to good things when you’re a major public figure-slash-secret ruler of a town. Whenever someone got up to no good or the odd band of nomadic raiders showed up looking for trouble, they never left without losing at least one of their own to me. Metal as anything, but it wasn’t the best look. Not many traders came our way, which was a problem for a mostly fishing community, we weren’t very self-sufficient.”
Quet nodded. “Your place looks pretty alright nowadays, so I assume there’s more?”
“Yup. I’d kind of abandoned all my Primus lava powers at this point, so I was just policing the town as an awesome inhumanly strong martial artist bartender. Sounds kinda dumb, now that I sum it up out loud, but I’d say I made it work. But then Ivy and I started ‘hanging out’-” Waia made exaggerated air quotes with her hands. “-more often after we realized that there was some overlap with my taste in music and her vinyl collection, which she kept for some reason past the Nabbing. But that was mostly just an excuse to talk with each other, at that point. So she started tagging along whenever I went out to do some street justice. But as it turns out, my excessive violence was a little concerning for her.”
Quet feigned a gasp. “Who would’ve thought?”
“Har har.” Waia folded her arms over her now complete drawing. “Still, she tried to get me to calm down a little, figure out some kind of actual system of punishment beyond just trying to murder them. And you know what? It turns out that that was a pretty good idea. Plus, once news started to get out that the insane murder barkeep of Honoka’a had chilled out, traders started to actually show up. I saw that no violence had better results than yes violence, so I started living a calmer lifestyle.”
Waia turned her sketchbook around to show the result to Quet, who nodded with approval. She smiled and turned it back around to face her. “The sky-houses and Pillar don’t work quite as well without the color, but I still like the castle. But yeah, I started getting into drawing, I tried properly figuring out a home life, I proposed to Ivy because she obviously knows what she’s doing and I need that kind of presence in my life long-term. Also I was, like, in love. Or something. That part was probably a bigger factor. All in all, I’d say settling down made both me and the rest of my Domain a lot happier with all this. At least for the next forty or so years, but…” Waia shrugged.
Quet continued to nod. “Cute. So, what’s the whole marriage deal like? My family isn’t really interested in that whole deal with each other for a number of reasons, and I think you might be the first Primus I’ve heard of that settled down with a human. Also, everyone in my family hates rom-coms with a passion, so that’s further alienation from the experience.”
Waia began flipping through the earlier pages of her sketchbook, or at least the ones that hadn’t been pulled out and hung up elsewhere. “Well, like you said, I’m kind of an outlier. If you asked any other married person what their favorite part of it was, I don’t think they would say that it’s telling someone ‘That’s my wife you’re talking about!’ And then just…” She punched the air in front of her. “...Knocking them out in one hit. Because nothing feels better than that, lemme tell you.”
Quet held her chin and began nodding in a much more exaggeratedly thoughtful manner. “Kinda gotta shift that idea away from its general you-ness, but I can get behind that.”
Waia had come across her earliest, most unrefined drawings. Mostly of her fellow Domain members, several of which were crammed onto a single page. “I think the main thing that I love about all of this is…” She turned forward again and found a sketch of the front of her house, drawn the day after she had finished renovating the once-abandoned home. “It’s a fresh start. Like I said, I didn’t get along with the rest of my Domain. But aside from all those trips I took to get away from it all every now and then, I just stuck around with them for a good few centuries. Because, y’know, Primoi always have it in their heads that they can’t be a part of humanity. That we’ll never really be able to be on the same level as them, or the other way round.”
Quet nodded again, this time in a far more sincere manner. “We have to stay with our Domain because any humans we grow attached to will only be there for maybe half a century, tops?”
Waia looked up at Quet and raised a finger. “Yeah, yeah, you get it. I mostly got passive-aggressive warnings about that at the reception instead of gifts. A ton of my ‘siblings’ showed up just to talk to me about Ivy like she’s some kind of pet goldfish, then left. But, like, I don’t need this to last forever. I wish it did, but as long I get as much mileage as I can out of this nice, quiet life, I’m okay with just living in the moment. And maybe, when it’s all run its course, I’ll go back to my Domain, rejoin the others in the Primus life. Maybe in the grand scheme of my life, all this is gonna just be an extended getaway. But as of right now, I don’t really care.”
Quet smiled as she looked up at the flickering lights of the houses above. “Guess you can always just jump ship to found family, huh?”
“Guess so.”
Both people spent a few minutes in silence, watching the Wizardly Suburbs float through the sky and pass in and out of the haze outside the city. Every now and then, a house would drift in front of the Pillar, drowning out the rainbow light keeping it afloat and turning it into a strikingly clear shadow against the harsh blue behind it.
After a while, Waia got up. “Okay, I’m beat. Guess the whole enchantment thing didn’t really work out.”
Quet pulled her chair back up to the counter while Waia grabbed her backpack. “Yeah, this kind of thing usually takes an hour or two anyway. Still, uh, good talk.”
Waia paused on the edge of the trap door. “Yeah. Good talk. Night.” She slid down and closed the door behind her.