Omet decided that the distinctively non-sleeping noises coming from the roof were worth looking into. They were becoming genuinely concerned with Quet’s current sleeping habits, or general lack thereof.

Xiao was curled up on what was once Quet’s bed, snoring quietly with an empty plate dangling from one hand. Omet made little effort to leave the room quietly, but Xiao did not so much as move while they left.

Up on the roof, Quet’s counter had been removed in favor of what looked like a spotlight-cannon hybrid bristling with glyphs. Quet was straddled atop the upwards-facing barrel, clinging on like a tick while inspecting the pattern of glyphs lining the top. Meanwhile, Mark lay between the struts of the structure and looked up at the glyphs on the underside while frequently looking through the manual next to him, which would have been quite difficult if the two hadn’t hung their goggles from the side of the structure. The sleeping bag lay piled up in a far corner.

Omet stared at the sight for a few seconds before announcing their presence. “So, what did I miss out on?”

Mark looked through one of the triangular struts at Omet. “We’re making a death ray.”

Quet shimmied forward on the barrel, making it tip under her weight and lower to directly face Omet. “Specifically, a focused cannon designed to draw in ambient magical energy and direct it in a concentrated beam towards the castle. However, it is as of present non-functional. Completely non-magical confetti.” She leaned her head over the side so that she was staring directly into the barrel. After a moment, she pulled her head back up. “Nope. Not dead.” She blew a stray hair back into her bangs.

Omet further inspected the structure. “I-is that one of the confetti cannons from last year’s birthday party?”

“Correct! Just modified heavily to better suit its current function.”

“You kept it for a solid year?”

Quet snorted. “I keep everything, Omet.”

Mark rolled out from under the cannon, now that the part he was working on was so far up in the air. “Yeah, we’re just trying to do something to help manage all…” He waved in the direction of the castle. “...that. Did you hear what happened outside a while ago?”

“You mean someone getting electrocuted right outside my window? Yeah, it wasn’t exactly quiet.”

“Reasonable.” Quet placed her elbows on the end of the cannon. “Man, the whole gang’s been coming up here to visit me in my pad. Crazy, huh? It’s just normally one at a time.” She glanced back at Mark.

“Yeah, actually…” Omet took a step away from the cannon. That confetti was dangerous up close, as they had learned the hard way the year before. “You’ve just been up all night talking to everyone one by one. I was kinda okay with you sleeping up here because I figured that since you were so out of the way of everyone else, you would actually sleep.”

“That was never gonna happen,” said Quet, sliding off of the cannon.

Mark nodded. “Hey, Omet? Are you sure Quet is actually capable of sleeping? It’s been, like, three days. This is getting ridiculous, even for me.”

Quet kicked a glyph on one of the cannon’s struts and the whole contraption folded up into the tiny rock. “Let me tell you, I wish that prophet joke you made earlier was true, like some kind of self-instigating reverse ouroboros. If I didn’t need to sleep, the past two-almost-three days would be so much easier if I didn’t need sleep.” She blinked and went back over what she had just said. “...Yeah, case in point.”

All this was starting to genuinely concern Omet. “So, remember how we had that big talk a few hours ago about how you’re putting your own health at risk in favor of small benefits to other things? And how you yourself just admitted that it’s having serious effects on you?”

“...Yeah.”

Omet pointed at the sleeping bag in the corner. “There’s a solution to both of those issues right there.”

Quet groaned. “C’mon, we’re so close to getting this right! Besides, things keep getting worse, like with the lightning floors just now. We need to keep up with all the bad-ness or else we’ll be completely out of our depth by tomorrow morning. That’s how being prepared for things works.”

Omet looked over Quet’s shoulder at Mark. “So, did you encourage her, or..?”

Mark held his hands up. “Hey, we didn’t talk about anything like this. I’m already getting some serious déjà vu from all this, I am tapped out of emotional support.”

The two Primoi both stared at him for a while. He got the message after an uncomfortably long pause. “Yeah, okay, I’m just gonna…” He sat down in the corner opposite the sleeping bag. “Not participating. Unless I do.”

“Cool, thanks.” Omet looked back over at Quet. “My main question is that, since we already agreed that you don’t need to prove anything to us, you can just work with us and let us go through this together as a team. That was established a few hours ago, why are you still going back on that?”

Mark raised his hand. “For zero dollars, I’m guessing ‘deep-seated enforced desire to impress others’. Knowing my luck, that’s probably some kind of default for Primoi.”

Quet and Omet exchanged glances, then shook their heads at each other. Mark slowly lowered his hand. “Okay, horse of a different color, got it.”

Quet sat down on the ground. “To be honest, it’s… I dunno. I try to sleep, but when I even try to think about it, my brain turns itself to something else. I don’t know if it’s on purpose, because of everything I’ve got on my mind, or if I’m just not built for crises like this? I always start doing something else and think ‘Oh, I can do this quick, no big’, but then boom, it’s been thirty minutes. That normally just happens on slow, quiet days back home, it shouldn’t happen so often in a place like this!”

Omet got down next to her. “So you just let it happen? You gave up your bed with me for Xiao, did you want it to happen?”

“I… I dunno. I’ve got a lot of questions like that going through my head, actually.” Quet leaned back and folded her arms across her chest, looking straight up at the houses floating overhead. “Hey, you ever think about why exactly we do any of this?”

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“...What?”

Quet raised her thumbs out of her armpits, a loose approximation of a shrug. “Like, have you at some point wondered why we’re so worried about…” She covered her face with her hands. “I sound like a psychopath just thinking about saying it, actually.”

Omet nudged her. “No, keep going. I’m not gonna judge.”

“You say that now. Nobody starts off judging.”

Omet’s eyes scanned Quet, probing her hands for any chink in the armor that would reveal her face. “...What, is this about our family or something?”

Quet’s hands slipped down a little. “...Yeah. You ever think about why we’re so worried about them? Like, I’ve been talking to Horan and Waia, and… I dunno, don’t you think we can do better? I’m not even saying we leave them to die, just…” She turned around and planted her face on the floor. “Ugh, it is insane. Forget I said anything, let’s just keep doing everything we were doing before.”

“No, no, it’s…” Omet sighed and leaned back, propping themself up on their elbows. “I get it.”

Quet turned her head to face Omet. “No you don’t.”

“I’m serious.” Omet gave Quet a moment for her to turn back around. “I’ve got my fair share of issues with everyone too. Mostly Hurat. I mean, you’re well aware that none of you guys ever let me die on game night, the next person just takes the controller and gets me out of there.”

“Yeah, because you suck and never remember to save.”

“Still, it would be nice to get the chance to not suck every once in a while.” Omet grinned. “You know how I got this cardigan?”

Quet shrugged. “I don’t even remember when you got it honestly, I kinda figured you just manifested with it and I’d forgotten. It’s like your thing.”

“I might need some extra context for what you mean by thing. And I got it seven years ago, it’s by no means old.”

Quet flipped one of the cardigan’s loose corners onto Omet’s lap. “Y’know, a thing. Everyone in this little friend group has their own weird little thing. I’ve got my belt o’ spells, you’ve got the dumb cardigan, Waia’s got her Mesothelioma On The Go-”

“What?” Both Omet and Mark perked up at the mention of Waia’s backpack.

“-Mang’s got his weird rolling pin transformer gun, Horan’s got… I dunno, his eyepatch? That box of stickers he hasn’t used in forever? Also, do we count Xiao as part of our group?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Omet. “Also, my cardigan isn’t stupid.”

“Yeah it is, it’s all dangly, it’s more of a trenchcoat than any sort of believable jacket.”

Omet pulled the cardigan close to their chest. “Fine then. Also, we were trying to talk about something important.”

“But then you started talking about your cardigan for some reason.”

“I was going somewhere with that!” Omet smoothed themself over. “Okay. Remember that time I got to, like, the very end of the final boss of- wait, what was it? The-the big meat angel fight?”

Quet shrugged. “I think I remember something about that, yeah. I think you were about to die, but Hurat took over and beat it instead? And wasn’t there a whole extra level or whatever after that?”

“For the record, I was not going to die. I had everything under control, and the boss was maybe three hits away from dying. But yeah, Hurat took over and beat them instead.”

“This does not sound like an endorsement of our family.”

Omet held up a hand. “But here’s the thing. I was really mad. I went up to my room and lay in bed until I heard everyone else get up and leave. I’d cooled off by then, so I went back down and caught Hurat alone in a hall. I told him I didn’t like being coddled and all that, and he said sorry. He promised he’d stop, and that he’d make it up to me. He hasn’t interrupted me during a game since, and a few weeks later, he dropped this off in my room.” They lifted up a sleeve of the cardigan.

Quet inspected the corner close to her. Good for what it was, but slightly shaky and non-uniform. The style of someone practiced, but far from professional. “...No.”

“Yeah.” Omet smiled. “Like I said, it took him weeks. He’s apparently pretty experienced at this knitting business, I think he said he made that rug in the foyer.”

“I thought he just bought that or something, he made those?!”

“Yup. He just doesn’t bring it up much.” Omet leaned back fully, rendering them parallel with Quet. “That’s kind of the thing about family, at least in my experience. You live together for as long as we have, we start getting on each other’s nerves. We forget and take for granted all of the good stuff, until all we’re left to see is what we don’t like. I know you’re mad at yourself for thinking about why you hang around Hurat all the time, but I don’t blame you for anything. I think it’s good to ask yourself questions like that every now and again. It forces you to give answers you don’t want when you need to.

But the thing about Hurat is, he means well. He’s an idiot, but it’s usually just a case of Hanlon’s Razor with him. Whenever you’ve got an issue with him, you can just talk to him and he’ll do whatever it takes to fix it. And that’s something that people like us can forget really easily, so it’s good to take the time and think about what it really is that we love about the people close to us.”

“Yeah…” Quet glanced over at Omet. “Probably pretty tough to do that for me, of course.”

Mark groaned audibly from his corner. Once he was done, Omet took the chance to do it themself. “Really? This again? C’mon, Quet, We’ve been over this. You don’t need to compare yourself to Hurat all the time, it’s unhealthy.”

“Yeah, but that’s kind of the thing! I do suck at this! Hurat wouldn’t have all these hangups, he wouldn’t question saving his family, he…” Quet got up and cradled her head in her arms, tapping her opposing elbows. “He’d just go ahead and do it, no questions asked. I don’t care if I can ‘do whatever I want as long as I believe in myself’, because ‘myself’ is useless! All I’m good at is cooking and saying magical jargon! I need to use nothing but dumb magic gimmicks to actually do anything!”

Neither Mark nor Omet reacted while Quet took a moment to breathe. “I’m fine with who I am. I figured all that out a while ago, as you are well aware. But that version of ‘me’ is meant for hanging out with her family in our big house for all eternity, not…” She waved aimlessly at her surroundings. “...this!”

Omet paused again for a moment. “You done?”

“...I’m done.”

Omet nodded. “Yeah. It’s like I keep telling you, I’m scared too. And not just because we’re on so many time limits. I do have more to work with than you, but ‘splitting things in two’ isn’t exactly world-changing. But worrying about everything going wrong hasn’t gotten me anywhere. Ever. I’m well aware that I’m not the model of Aztec grit, but I keep going with what I have rather than fretting over everything going on.”

They leaned back. “Sorry for making this all about me, by the way. It’s just… Nobody’s perfect, y’know? Everybody on earth has messed up at some point, there’s something they don’t like about themself. It’s just that some people are better at hiding the parts they don’t like than others. And when you’re talking to someone, you can end up seeing the cracks in the armor they’ve set up, however thick that might be. And it’s easy to think less of them when you see that kind of thing while sweeping your own issues under the rug. Or even the exact opposite, in your case.

But when you start getting to know that person and you get a good look at all those skeletons in their closet, it pays to really put yourself in their shoes and look at their issues the same way they do. It’s the only way to really understand and connect with them, and sometimes the only way to understand yourself. If you want to really mean something to someone, and you want them to mean something to you, you need to get a good look at them and accept them for who they are. Warts and all.”

They looked away from Quet, who was passing by and headed for the trap door in a hurry. Quet, meanwhile, went in for a hug. “Here’s hoping we don’t mess this up.”

Omet reciprocated the embrace. “Yeah. Here’s hoping.”