Lunch was odds-and-ends soup, a phenomenon I was intimately familiar with from my own cooking. It could really have used some cream, or failing that some yogurt, but… well, there were obvious reasons why that might not have panned out.

I had my suspicions about the mousse slathered on top of the thick slices of bread, too. But they were fluffy and the incredible saltiness of the mousse somehow managed to not overpower the rest of the flavors, and, well, it all worked. The potatoes and lime cut the salt, the bread gave everything a foundation, the smoked paprika gave it that signature taste—or an analogue that the System decided would stand in for it gave it a taste close enough to have been substituted, but I was gradually coming to accept that train of thought.

Very gradually. It was a horrifying thought.

While I ate, Mera caught up with Kelly on various bits of local gossip. She didn’t have the bubble up, whatever it was, or maybe it just didn’t exist for the table she’d chosen for us. Not at the very back, but still somewhat isolated, it was obviously seating for four adults willing to share a little bit of space—or two adults and a kid, as I saw one table away from us.

I was aware enough to know that it was a deliberate reestablishment of the familiar before she poked us off-balance again, but that didn’t mean it didn’t work. Slowly, bit by bit, I relaxed into the burbling chatter of the two women catching up, and worked my way steadily through lunch. Spark even joined in, through comments that Kelly relayed, as it asked for clarification or just gave dry commentary.

All three of us, to my surprise, got seconds.

I’d mostly stopped being weirded out by the way that they just knew without having to ask, so that wasn’t the surprising bit. No, the surprise was from something that was obvious in hindsight—Spark had given me all the information I needed to expect it.

Mera was ravenous.

“Yesterday was about peak for me,” she explained casually when she saw me noticing. “Peak output on all my Skills, for what’s a pretty long time. I’m still catching up. This stuff is convenient, really, since I need about twice as much salt as most peoples’ metabolism calls for.”

“You can have mine.” Kelly shuddered as she pushed the slabs of bread over, muttering something I didn’t catch.

“Thank you.”

We ate mostly in silence, the two of them having finished catching up on local news. It hadn’t been nearly as extensive as when Kelly had done the same with Singer Tayama—Mera wasn’t a local and didn’t identify with the area. She wasn’t interested in the people and community for their own sake, and that was the difference.

She was a professional keeping a weather eye open, someone trying to stay on top of the future work that would be landing in her lap and on her plate.

By the time I finished my second bowl of soup, mopping up the last bits in the bowl with the remnants of the bread, Kelly had finished hers. Mera had gone through seconds and onto thirds, chasing it down with a handful of the heels from the loaves, and she only with visible regret and hesitation pushed the plate away before more food appeared on it.

“So.” Mera nodded towards me, smiling that predatory smile of hers. “It’d be pretty bullshit of us to take up this table, and it doesn’t have a bubble-up anyway. You got a place you wanna take me?”

“When you put it like that—”

“Our place.” Kelly cut me off abruptly, standing up.

“Goodness,” Mera said, getting out of her chair with a smirk. “How forward of you. And I didn’t even have to flutter my eyelashes once!”

The words are you sure almost crossed my lips, but I stifled them. “Good place for talking to Gods, if you decide on taking my offer,” I said instead, and had the pleasure of watching Mera’s face go still and frozen. “I’ve talked with fourteen of ‘em in that workshop. Getting to be a dab hand at drawing circles.”

Mera paused for a long moment, eyes staring somewhere a bit past my head. “Sophie,” she eventually murmured, “if that’s a joke, it’s not even a little bit fucking funny.”

“I can name them, if you want.” I rose smoothly, following Kelly out the door and into the outside. “Some of them are Yelemi, so you’d probably know them better than I would.”

“I can’t believe I’m even considering asking this.” Her feet didn’t make any noise on the ground, but I could hear the rustle of her clothes as she walked behind us, eerie and oddly distant.

I gave her time. Spark, I composed in the meantime, what do you think? Were you able to get any understanding of her injuries? Is this something worth trying?

Counselor Taphtala’s penumbra burns with the aggregate of a thousand lights. Muffled, directed elsewhere, yet still do they blaze. Can there be aught but alarm in the consideration of such an invocation? Dwelleth the God of Craft not within the Pantheon which warred upon Yelem, and Yelem upon it?

Huh, I thought to myself wryly, that’s a good point. It was a shame I’d already made the offer, in a sense. Sure, apparently Hephaestus wasn’t actually one of the Yelemi Olympians, or if he had been he’d been muscled out at some point—I’d asked, specifically, given my ongoing connection with him.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t be tarred with the same brush, though. Especially since there was still the Remnant Five, who were still—

“If this is a prank,” Mera said suddenly, “this is your last chance to come clean about it. I’m not fucking kidding, I will kill you if you’re just yanking on my lead-line. They’ll execute me for it, but you’ll still be dead.”

I shrugged. “The funny thing about that is that some of these Gods would actually play any sort of prank on you that they thought was funny. Or that would teach you a lesson they thought you needed, or if they could just… get away with it, no other reason needed. But the one I was going to have a word with isn’t one of those.”

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There was a long moment of silence as we finished walking towards the house. It was Kelly who broke it, pausing in front of the door.

“They really would,” she said in a voice that mixed wonder and aggravation. “Sophie, um! Not that I don’t think this is a bad idea or anything. Just.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, smiling a little. “Spit it out.”

“Be… really, really sure you’re talking to the right God, okay? Because I bet some of those ones you talked with would find it, you know. Fun.”

“Think it hilarious to impersonate him?” She nodded, and I shrugged. “I’ll do my best, but… something in me says that it’s not a big concern? Which I actually don’t trust. Spark?”

The question of settled art presents itself—and ends itself. Are there not stories of precisely this? In them, how many mortals are fooled, and how many other Gods?

“Well,” I said slowly. “You’re not wrong.”

“Great!” Kelly practically threw the door open, striding in, heading for the ramp downwards into the workshop. “Come on, let’s go, afternoon’s passing us by!”

“You’re not—”

“I know you, Sophie.” She turned to shoot me a brilliant grin, one so wide it brought her ears back and made for happy squinching effects at the corners of her eyes. “Safety protocols, right? Your lab assistant is here to help you figure out what can go wrong.”

I froze for a moment at that, blinking away perfectly explicable tears. “Right.” My voice was a little bit rough, which, whatever. “Right, okay, let’s do this. Kelly!”

“Ma’am!”

I started striding in her wake, flexing my hands as if to crack my knuckles, not that that was a thing that my joints did anymore. “You know the God we’re invoking. Pop quiz, what’s the invocation, and what measures do we take as safeguards and for regulatory compliance?”

“Delineation,” she responded. “There’s a thermal sump/pump enchantment on the workshop, but we shouldn’t need it. And before you say anything! We’re gonna have it active anyway!”

“You two are always like this, aren’t you. Thousands fucking preserve me, I can’t believe Kelly found such an enabler.”

“Mera!” I looked backwards towards her, shaking my head sadly. “How rude. I find her chirpiness to be quite charming, you know. Don’t need any windows open to hear birdsong all day long.”

The look on her face was a work of art, and possibly in more senses than one. Where do her honest reactions end, I thought to myself, and the artifice start? Give someone the right set of Skills, the question’s not even valid—Kelly’s a good chunk of the way there already.

It didn’t matter, though, not this time, and I walked down the ramp without needling her further, and without being needled further in turn.

By the time I reached the bottom, Kelly had already gotten the circle drawn. It sat in its appointed position: over where we’d previously drawn it, in a corner of the workshop with nothing else around. It was done in chalk, smooth and guided by the circle in relief that it circumscribed, and within that circle there was another, engraved one.

Two permanent circles, done by Kan, and one temporary one. Overkill, sure—but I recognized no other form of kill, modulo the opportunity cost of needing to reload.

“We want some form of fire inside there,” I said, walking over to her. “A working fire, something that we’ve used to craft with.”

“Wait, we’re going with him? I thought we were going to go with the other one.”

“The other—huh.” I frowned, looking absently down at the circle. “That’s… an interesting question that I didn’t even think about. Thanks, Kelly. I… what even would—”

“This, obviously!”

“Yes! Good call, good call.” I slapped a fist against my shoulder, and Kelly practically sparkled at the praise.

“Yeah, obviously the right thing, absolutely—or alternatively, slow the fuck down and explain?”

“Kelly, go grab us something for the other guy. Mera.” I turned, discarding a couple of things I could say. “Do you actually want the explanation, or just the choices and instructions?”

I could see a bunch of emotions and reactions shoot across her face and body language before she locked it down. Smirking, she tilted her head to the side at me, body language communicating something like mischief. “If I ask for the explanation, how much will I learn about you from listening to it?”

“That I workshopped with Cleric Veil,” I said. That got me a dour look, and I shrugged, smiling. “I wanted to see if it was okay to make these kinds of offers. I needed to run some stuff past them that wasn’t immediately obvious, anyway.”

“Cleric Veil,” Mera said derisively, “isn’t my client, thank the ever-loving grace of the Thousand.”

I snickered at that, mostly because of how she’d made it sound like an imprecation. “Just the choices and instructions, then. Alright. You’ve got… two big choices, I guess.” And they’re genuinely important, I thought to myself, but that can go unsaid, and then thought better of it. “And they’re genuinely important. The first choice is nothing to mess around with; these Gods have their domains, and they act within them and through them.”

There was a clink as Kelly put a burner down on the floor outside the circles. “Forge-flame,” she said, and put the mana storage crystal down next to it. “The products of alchemical art and science.”

“Hephaestus Klytotékhnēs.” I nodded to the burner. “Renowned Artificer. God of craftspeople who strive to make masterworks, who look for the sublime in their craft. Sacred to him is the forge-flame, the fires that aren’t of nature or of the hearth—and specifically the fires of this workshop, because they’re dedicated to him.”

There was a crunch as Mera’s fingers dug into the stone of the wall, cracking it just a little. “A craftsman God does not sound like very much help.”

“He reforged my body,” I said quietly. Her eyes went wide and her fingers spasmed, pulverizing a handful of rock, which she didn’t seem to notice. “I won’t say he did a perfect job, but I’m guessing your problems aren’t in your gut flora. Bones are structure, muscles are what you swing a hammer with, blood’s your fuel, and nerves are basically just fire, doctrinally.”

“Nerves are… why would—”

“Anyway!” I spoke over her, trying to squelch a grimace, because it was a pretty dumb rule, it had always been a dumb rule, and it wasn’t actually what the rule had been. “Hermes is the God of a whole lot of things. He’s a Trickster, a messenger, a herald, and a psychopomp.

“None of those things,” I said, preempting her as she opened her mouth, “helps you. But! Hermes has an aspect, a shard, Hermes Trismegistus, whose domain includes alchemy. The stuff I make isn’t so much dedicated to him as it is… a prayer to him, I guess, an act of grace.”

“Alchemy’s still a stretch,” Kelly interjected. “Do we have anyone more connected?”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Asclepius Paean, for one—nephew of the other two I mentioned—and his daughter Panacea, but… look, they, um.”

“They what?”

“They’re too close to Asclepius’s father,” I muttered. “Too much history.”

Understanding flashed across Mera’s face, and I suddenly realized that I might have made a catastrophic mistake.