There was something unbelievable about how well I’d slept ever since washing up on Kibosh’s verdant shores.

I’d never had a bed as luxuriously comfortable as the thin mattress in my room, nor bedding as wonderfully heavy while still perfectly breathable. Mundane materials couldn’t do that, couldn’t stay at the perfect temperature for each body part so that your core was toasty warm without being too hot and your toes were too.

I’d thanked Kan at least once a day for the gifts he’d given me on my moving into the shophouse. Maybe it would start to wear thin at some point, but for the time being I could tell that he was some mix of amused and gratified by how genuinely happy it made me.

Folks here have never slept in a hotel bed, I groused to myself and a little bit to Spark. Nobody here has allergies, as far as I can tell. I hadn’t been allergic to down, like some of my friends, but I had been allergic to a weirdly unpredictable range of carpets, and it had been… more than a little bit inconvenient.

There exist such means as to reduce the symptoms of those things in Shem, as there existed in your world.

“Yeah,” I said to Spark out loud, “and I bet the receptor-blockers—the ones for what causes a lot of the allergy-response mechanism, and oh wow, I need to talk to Rafa about why I don’t know a word for that.”

“A word for what?”

I startled, already wincing in anticipation of the accidental elbow strike to the stone of the wall I knew I was performing. Something soft got in the way, though, with a mild oof.

Make that someone, not something, I thought to myself distantly as Kelly followed up her interception with a hug. I leaned into it, leaned into her, and we stood there for a long moment, breathing in unison with her head tucked under my chin and my arm squished between us.

“Kelly,” I eventually murmured, “that’s actually kind of awkward. And probably inappropriate.”

“You’re welcome anyway.” She smiled at me impishly, stepping back and letting my arm go. “Morning’s joy, Sophie—and may this Ease teach you the wonders of a little bit of time spent in idleness.”

“Morning’s joy, Kelly. Thank you for sparing me that pain and indignity.” I grinned at her, mind whirling a little. “Is that Ease thing a ritual? Like, am I supposed to give you a blessing or whatever in response, and is it personalized or standard? If it’s personalized, is there a bunch of norms around what I say? Do I give Spark—”

“Sophie, Sophie, slow down!” Kelly hugged me again, giggling, and I shut my mouth with a snap. “Feeling pressured about it is against the spirit of Ease. So don’t, okay? You don’t have to give me one, or anyone else. It’s about… do you have a genuine thing you want for them that’s specifically about Ease?”

My mind flashed back more than fifteen years, and I smiled a little more sadly. “Oh, that’s easy,” I said, trying to infuse my voice with cheer. “Spark, may this, your first Ease, leave you looking forward to the next one. Kelly, may this Ease bring you all the joys of any past, and new ones besides.”

Kelly’s initial response to that was a somewhat strangled cough, as a blush started to work its way up her face. “Not all the joys,” she managed after a beat. “I don’t really have anyone I’d choose to dance with.”

Existence is intriguing. It necessarily follows from a desire to see another fortnight that one looks forward to the next equivalent day. How strange, though not without its own logic, that even a day looked forward to can at the same time be, or not be, a day to be suffered in transit.

I grinned at both of them, and started to disengage in order to walk downstairs. Kelly’s two-fingered grip on my wrist prevented me, or signaled that I shouldn’t, and I turned to raise an eyebrow at her.

“Here.” My eyebrow went higher as she handed me a package, brown fabric rolled around some bulky stuff and tied off with clever-seeming knots. “Go get dressed! You are wearing something nice, it’s not Festival but it is Ease, and you’re not supposed to wear work clothes.”

I hefted the package in my hands, estimating it at around six pounds. If this is clothes, it’s a whole-ass outfit. And not a light one. Isn’t it still the warm season? “What’s wrong with my work clothes?”

“Well, for one, it’s important to wear something that isn’t designed for working in. Socially mandatory, honestly.” Her hand gestured to the subtle padding around my pants, and then she smirked. “Also, your other clothes match my new ones! Or, well, that’s what Tomas said. I haven’t looked at yours. Or mine!”

“Oh, if we’re going to be matching, how can I object!” Tossing the package from hand to hand, I made a show of striding back into my room purposefully, and then sat down to study it.

The knots were indeed clever. There were three loops and three strings, and I had absolutely no idea how the construction of it worked, but the strings were of different sizes and I was willing to take a hint. Starting at one of the corners, I pulled the longest one first and smiled happily as it slid cleanly out and took one of the loops—the smallest one—with it.

There were three of the ties, and the rough-ish brown fabric fell open once I’d gotten all three of them and unwound them a bit. I whistled softly once the contents were revealed—it really was an entire outfit, head to toe.

An entire outfit. A matching one, apparently, based on those measurements that Tomas had so carefully taken, and I grinned at the pile of cloth as I enjoyed the slight heat.

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

It was, admittedly, a little weird that Tomas of all people was going to this length. But… maybe not that weird? He and Kelly had started to unfreeze a bit with each other, which mostly involved Kelly unclenching and pulling the stick out.

She hadn’t called it a gift, which meant that this was probably going to be either an exchange of favors or something that I paid for as, in effect, a piece of equipment. Unless the village was paying for it, because it was socially mandatory?

Well, no point in trying to figure out all of the details on my own. I shrugged, still grinning. I double checked the door—it would have been rude to leave it open, given that Kelly and I were definitely not screwing—and started shedding layers. I racked the clothes I had thought I’d be wearing that day next to the other everyday set Tomas had made me, and I glanced mournfully at the literally-divine bra I’d grown so attached to.

I was loathe to set aside the crimson and blue and purple skirts, the red and rich brown leggings and pants. I liked sturdy boots lined with steel, long-sleeved cotton shirts in rich colors, and leather-like coats. Hephaestus’s gifts, and Tomas’s work that had mimicked them, were familiar, deeply practical while still looking good and making me feel like I was the same person with the same styles.

To say that the new outfit was a departure from that would be an understatement. In a lot of ways—a lot of ways that had to be deliberate—it was the exact opposite of what I’d been wearing. Everything was still supremely comfortable, but the general effect couldn’t have been more different… and for all that I was initially dubious about the change, the look worked.

Clever elastic and unobtrusive stays narrowed or supported, respectively, just enough to make a visible difference, and between the cinch at the waist and the just-clinging-enough shirt, you could actually tell. Boots hugged my leg just above the ankle, with fabric somehow both soft and stiff enough to be supportive despite their low heels. Those, at least, were familiar, though I’d never worn anything with fit and quality this good before in my life—aside from what I arrived in Yelem with, but that was a literal divine gift.

Outside of those, though, everything was loose and flowing. Thin pants that flared and billowed, with a high-waisted skirt that would have spun indecently—despite going down almost to my knees—if I weren’t wearing the pants under them. The shirt mostly tucked into the skirt, but it had panels that came down to the hips on the outside, presumably giving a little bit of resistance and control there, and the sleeves were… intricate.

I waved my arm around, watching the fabric drift with it and then placing my palms against the stone of one of my walls and twisting just so to turn the stone into a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The outer layer was so thin it was almost translucent, a subtle just-off-white that I was very much hoping had self-cleaning enchantments. It reminded me of a bell sleeve, though it didn’t go all the way to the wrist; instead, it ended at mid-forearm. Checking again, it also wasn’t free-flowing as far up as I’d initially thought, with just enough looseness to look as though it were—but it stayed close to the layer under it until about two thirds of the way down my upper arm.

The innermost layer was sinfully comfortable, feeling so good on my skin that I was constantly wanting to wriggle a little just to feel it caress me. It hugged me from my shoulders down to my wrists, snug but not binding, and there was at least one middle layer flaring out along the arm—and gathering in a cuff at my wrist, like a bishop sleeve—in between those layers.

Everything… billowed, flared, and danced in the air. Everything was layers of translucent near-whites over rich reds, purples, and oranges, teasing the eye with ever-shifting levels of saturation. Everything was perfectly fitted, wonderfully comfortable, and stunningly beautiful.

I didn’t deserve the outfit, hadn’t done anything remotely deserving of the outfit. And Tomas had sent it to me anyway, for a price that either I wasn’t paying or that would, I was sure, be perfectly reasonable and within my means.

An outfit that I could never have afforded back on Earth. An outfit that could never have existed back on Earth, not without a huge amount of time and custom tailoring.

I blinked the tears out of my eyes and steadied my breathing. I would be grateful, I decided, and the way the mood spread within me made me sure it was the truest of my many emotions.

Mostly dressed, I tended to the accessories. The earrings hung on a clever little holder shaped like an ear and, when I pressed them to my skin, painlessly melded in rather than needing a piercing. The thin not-exactly-anklets went just above my ankles, where the boots ended, and when I touched their ends together they fused into seamless bands, glinting just a little and hugging the boots to my legs.

The hairpins, and the hair clip, were… a challenge.

I tackled my hair itself first. I’d gotten into the habit of just running a hairbrush through my hair in the mornings. A magical, enchanted hairbrush that stripped all the dirt out along with perfectly fixing the tangles, of course, this being Shem, but the hairpins had come with some vague, stylized iconography of a hairstyle.

It took me a bit to get it right. Not that long, but it was a more involved style than I usually went for. It reminded me somewhat vaguely of a crown braid, if you did a single-strand twist instead of a braid—it still kept the hair out of my face, at least, and the first pin went in where the two twists met. The clip went where my usually-rowdy lock was, taming it and giving an asymmetry that pleased the eye, and the other pins went into the tail to keep it off my shoulders and give it some lift.

I didn’t actually understand the mechanics of it, but I could see the results. It turned what was usually hair that didn’t go past nice into something stunning, dark against the colors of the pins and clip and flowing nicely when I moved instead of just flopping around.

I frowned, turning my head again, staring at the mirrored wall. The colors changed as I did so, shifting from—ah. Seen without the almost diaphanous outer, floating layers of my clothes, the colors of the rest of my outfit were rich and bold. Seen through that translucency, they were gentled, mostly into pastel blues and pinks past the white of the outer layers.

The clip and pins, then, were just mirroring that. Seen from one angle, they were deep reds, pinks, blues, and purples—seen from another, they were those same pastels.

The last piece was a pair of gloves, which I was surprised to feel join seamlessly with the bottom layer of my shirt once I pulled them on. They were… not exactly fingerless, I supposed. They were made out of absurdly fine whorls and meandering loops of cloth, weaving and ducking in and out from around each other to create intricate patterns from my wrists to the backs and palms of my hand. The patterns didn’t stop there, continuing somehow—without seeming as if there had been any transition—in a completely different fabric up through my first knuckles. It was barely visible even inches from my face while still giving a just-barely-noticeable opalescent shimmer at a full reach, and the sheer artistry of it threatened to make me start weeping.

I opened the door instead, feeling chills run up and down my body at every motion—from how good it felt or how absurd I felt, I didn’t know. Kelly was waiting for me when I stepped out of the room, and looking at her, I froze in mid-stride as all of my breath left me in a soft, unconscious sigh.

Gratifyingly, in a reaction that warmed me from my toes upwards even as my eyes went wide and my jaw went slack, she did exactly the same.