The next day, Ash and I headed down to Earth, to meet up with Mike, Liz, the merchant, Duke, and X. When we arrived at one of the living areas, we found Mike, Duke, and X already sitting there, possibly waiting for us. I gave a quick nod and asked, “Do any of y’all want anything specific or just trying to hang/make plans?”
Mike shook his head and answered, “I’m waiting for Liz, she and Aozia left to check on business stuff before the Bazaar, the two of us are going out on a date once she gets back.” Ash immediately walked over and pulled him aside to, as the kids say, ‘get all them juicy deets’. I turned to the two left and asked, “And y’all?”
X replied, “You guys are new in town, figured you could use a tour guide from a local. I plan on showing you some good enchanters and crafters and whatnot, so Duke is tagging along to pay them a visit and see if he’s improved more than they have.”
Duke added in, “I also want you to teach me your language. You seem to have knowledge of some rather interesting concepts, so I figure if you teach me how to speak ‘English’, I’ll be able to use them in my enchantments. Also, we’ll need to work out designs for the moon trip.” I nodded in acceptance. We hadn’t actually made any sort of definitive plans that involved him coming with me to the moon, but I guess I could consider this to be his answer. Cool, that should definitely make my job easier if I can get some assistance in figuring out how to get us there alive.
As Ash and Mike were still conversing enthusiastically in hushed tones, X decided to change the subject, so that we weren’t just standing around in silence waiting for the two of them to finish. “I see you got your top back. Also, I like the new look, I can actually see what expressions you make now.”
I spread my arms and gave a quick twirl, showing off my hoodie that I’d finally gotten back. Last night, after Sophia had finally taken it off, I had grabbed it and kept it inside of my soul, an oft-forgotten aspect of the material that still most certainly had its uses. Fortunately she’d taken it off in the normal way last night, forgetting that she could have just done the same thing, absorbing it into her soul, and I would have never had the chance to steal it back from her. Or maybe she was okay with me having it back, it’s not like I had specifically pointed out that I had it before I’d left.
“You sneaky little thief!!!” Okay, probably not the second option. I can’t really steal something that I made specifically for me Soph. Don’t worry, I’ve been making sure that the spinning wheel has been running the past few days, so there should be enough thread to put into the loom in about a week. Just a few more days after that and I’ll have a sheet I can use to make you your own. It’s not like I have the full designs for the space suit yet anyway, I can spare enough cloth for you to be comfortable.
Sophia still seemed to be rather irritated that I had taken advantage of her momentary lapse in judgment to reclaim the hoodie, but replied, “Fine, you can have your stupid hoodie back. Can’t have all those Capital bitches seeing you shirtless anyway. You are Mine.”
An unfortunate side effect of wearing sweatpants is that sentences like that one are rather dangerous for me now. I tried to walk away inconspicuously, in order to….ahem…adjust myself, but there’s a decent chance that X noticed what happened. I decided to skate over it, and said, “Yeah, managed to steal back the hoodie, and Soph and Ash both helped style up the hair and shave the beard last night.”
X looked confused, “Soph is your wife?”
I nodded, “Sophia, yeah.”
“She’s here in the Capital?” Instantly I understood the confusion.
“Oh, nah, she’s in a completely different place, but there’s a sorta special spell so that we can always talk to each other, and we can both use space magic to teleport to the same kinda middle ground. It’s a sort of subspace where we have a house set up, and we can both go there any time.”
X’s eyebrows raised, then he squinted, eyebrows knitting together, and tilted his head softly to one side. Surprise, followed by appraisal. Whether it was at the revelation that I was even more adept at space magic than he thought, or the knowledge that my wife was apparently at least as skilled with it as I was. He had no idea just how powerful Sophia actually was after all, and I intended to keep it that way. Call it paranoia, but in this Kingdom, I wanted to keep some of my cards close to the chest.
Soon, Ash finished speaking with Mike, and returned to us, looking….odd. Her eyebrows were knit together, and she had a small sort of smile, but it looked….wrong. Different from any smile I’d ever seen before. Are you okay? I sent through the telepathic link. Ash looked at me and shook her head. Human town stuff or Mike stuff? It could really be either. When we’d arrived at the Capital, we hadn’t exactly stuck around long enough for it to really sink in that she was in the most heavily human populated area she’d ever seen, perhaps that even existed in the world. On the other hand, this look had appeared after her conversation with Mike, so it would also be reasonable to conclude that he was the cause.
Mike and Liz….They’re back together. They worked everything out. And apparently….Liz decided that Mike had a point about their physical relationship….so….uh….they’re um…. But I understood. I walked up, and started stroking her hair. Silent tears fell down her face as she wrapped her arms around me in a hug, and I responded in kind.
I knew this would probably be how it turns out, but it still hurts, you know? I stayed silent. I mean what could I even say? I am perfectly unsuited to relate to her in this moment. I just stood there, listening to her, letting my arms around her shoulders tell her that I’m here.
He’s a really great guy, you know, and I’m happy that he got the girl, I just….I wish it could’ve been me. That I could have been the one he chose. For a few minutes, she vented her emotions. Things I couldn’t understand. That I would probably never really understand. So I stayed there silently, letting her say what she needed to say. And after a while…
Tell me, what would you do? What should I do?
Well shit. Now I HAD to say something. To be perfectly honest with you, I’m probably the last person you should ask for advice about anything emotional, you already know that. But I will say this. Before I met Sophia, years and years ago, I used to be married to another woman. Her eyes widened as she looked up at me, surprise stopping her tears. I don’t think I’d ever actually told her about my ex before.
Because of the way I am, I’ll never know if I genuinely loved her, but I was willing to stay with her regardless. I chose to make her a central part of my life, regardless of what unknowable emotions I actually had. And when she left me….it probably wasn’t the same kind of grieving that a man goes through when love dies. Probably not the same kind of grief you’re feeling now. Because I had chosen to base my life on the assumption that we would be together forever, it was like my entire existence had died. The kids we were planning on having, the house we’d bought, my entire identity that I’d constructed around the concept of ‘being a husband’, just gone overnight.
In a weird way, what I grieved wasn’t the loss of love, but the loss of myself. Of the me I’d been, of the me I could have been. And God did that suck. It hurt. All of a sudden, the friends I thought I had, the family I thought I had gained by getting married, they all left the moment she’d said, ‘I want a divorce’. I ended up completely alone. I couldn’t go back into the past, I couldn’t move forward with the present, I couldn’t look ahead to any sort of positive future. I had died, you see. The me that I had spent so much time building, the me who would be a husband, a father, he just….died. And until I chose what kind of me I wanted to build next, I was frozen. Unable to do anything.
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So if you ask me, that’s what you need to do. You need to build the next version of you. A version of you that doesn’t have Mike, but can still be happy. And the biggest difference between my situation and yours? You won’t have to do it alone. No matter what, you know Sophia and I are here. So go try new things. Meet new people. Find the next boy you’ll go crazy for. Worst comes to worst, you’ll fail, and come back home to get your ass kicked in some games.
Ash finally let out a broken sort of chuckle, and let go of me. She stood up on her tiptoes, and placed a kiss on my cheek. There were no sort of romantic or sexual undertones to our relationship, so to be perfectly honest, it kind of threw me for a loop. It was a gesture of pure appreciation, and wasn’t the kind of kiss a woman would give a man she had any sort of interest in. It was…friendly…familial. A kind of physical affection I’d never really experienced before.
An hour later, X, Duke, Ash, and I were walking the streets of the Capital. Duke and I were trailing behind, as I was teaching him the basics of English grammar while keeping an eye on X and Ash up front. She seemed to be okay, though I know 80% of it was probably just putting up a tough front. She was talking to X almost too enthusiastically, and the usual playful sort of bounce she had in her walk was practically nonexistent. According to Sophia, the only thing I could do for her was give her time, but man, this shit sucks. I kinda felt like hitting Michael a few times, but at the end of the day, this wasn’t even his fault. Ash had been pining over him for years, and never said anything. He never even really chose Liz over her, because in his eyes, Ash was never really even an option. Still wanna punch him though.
“Okay, so nouns are people, places, or things, verbs are actions, adjectives describe nouns, adverbs describe verbs.” Duke repeated.
“Adverbs also describe adjectives, and other adverbs. For example, the word ‘very’ is an adverb that could be used to describe an adjective, such as very fast, or to describe another adverb, such as very smoothly.”
“And those are all the kinds of words?”
“Oh god no, there are also prepositions, questions, expletives, conjunctions, pronouns, and determiners. You’re definitely going to want to write all of this down. Where I’m from, studying English is mandatory for over a decade, even if you already speak it fluently, and even then, very few people actually know the grammar rules. You lucked out that I even remember half of what I learned, given that unless you have some sort of career where perfect grammar is absolutely necessary, it will never actually be relevant in your life.”
“Hold on, so where you’re from, you’re all forced to study your own language for over a decade, for no reason whatsoever, and no one even remembers it?”
I nodded along with his summation. “Yep, that about covers it. You also have to consider that the sheer number of people who can speak English is absolutely fucking MASSIVE, I’m talking in the hundreds of millions who speak it fluently, and billions if you include people who know enough to survive, but not enough to actually be considered fluent.”
Duke turned his helmed head to face me. “How are there potentially billions of people speaking a language I’ve never heard of?”
Shit. I kinda forgot he doesn’t actually know where I’m from. “It has to do with some of Sophia’s magic, not really secret, but difficult to explain, I’ll tell you some other time.” He nodded in acceptance, and I carried on with the English lesson. To tell the truth, I was kind of worried about this. Learning English as a second language is already difficult enough, but the English vocabulary is filled with completely foreign concepts to this world. I’m fully aware that those are the concepts that he’s trying to understand, but still, I have very little confidence in my ability to teach them. Math, physics, chemistry, history, philosophy, theology, and of course, astrophysics. These are the things I know, these are the fields in which I excel. English, and the language arts? I mean I’m not terrible, as my speech and writing are entirely legible, and not filled with horrifyingly noticeable errors, but I’m far from an expert.
As we toured the Capital, we stopped by some blacksmiths and enchanters, so that Duke could show off. Apparently, the suit of armor he wore is a relatively new creation, something that had been in the works for years that he finally completed, leading to several surprised reactions from the shop owners when the chestplate opened up and out burst a gnome.
The seventh shopkeeper was a dwarven blacksmith, who was apparently from the same town that Duke’s adoptive family lived in, and knew Drake and Corina, Duke’s surrogate parental figures. We spent a decent amount of time there, as apart from simply showing off, Duke seemed to want to actually catch up with this guy, and see if there was any news from his parents. From what I could tell, this particular blacksmith somewhat regularly traveled back and forth between Duke’s hometown and the Capital. Partway into their conversation, the blacksmith turned to the other three of us, and said,
“Pardon my rudeness, Lord Xavier, Mister, Miss. You two friends of little Dookie here?”
I made a mental note to endlessly mock ‘little dookie’, before answering, “More like recent acquaintances.”
Ash turned to me, tilting her head in confusion, her ears flopping to the side and twitching in a rather adorable manner. “They’re friends by now aren’t they? Why would you call them just acquaintances?”
I shook my head softly. “The word ‘friend’ is overused. A friendship should be a commitment no less significant than that between lovers. If someone is your friend then the two of you are partners in life, even if it’s just you two against the world. No matter what happens, no matter what fights you guys have, if you need someone, you know that they’ll be there, and if they need someone, they know that you’ll be there. Calling someone a ‘friend’ when you don’t yet have that level of trust, when you don’t have that level of commitment for each other, only serves to cheapen one of the most precious words that exists.”
A moment of silence fell after my words, before the blacksmith broke it. “You’re a serious sort huh?”
Ash let out a giggle. It sounded a little…better than it had all day. A little less forced maybe? She flounced over behind me and pulled my hood down over my head. “He’s super serious, but mostly about stupid stuff. When he made this outfit he was ranting about ‘the glory of comfortability’ and ‘divine attire’ for a loooong time. And if he even sees a giraffe, phew, don’t get me started.” I decided for the moment not to remind her that being composed of my Aspect Manifestation, this outfit literally WAS at least semi-divine attire. I could not, however, allow her unjust oversimplification of a perfectly reasonable caution slide.
“Hey, giraffes are pure evil incarnate, we’ve already gone over this, and those were herbivorous giraffes. I’m not about to take my chances with magically enhanced carnivorous giraffe-based monsters. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice? Shame on me.”
This prompted a rather intense argument, where the words ‘paranoid’, ‘dumbass’, ‘dork’, and ‘damn cat’ were thrown around wantonly. To my right, or her left, the other three people in the shop seemed to be rather entertained by our spectacle, laughing along. At some point during the stupid fight, I received an extremely interesting message from Sophia, and a certain test she’d conducted on my Aspect Manifestation.
Sophia’s POV
Before we started three player chess last night, when Leo was still making the board and Ash and I were chatting, I had gotten Leo’s go ahead to take some of the leftover scraps of his cloth to run some durability tests. When I made my way into Hell, I saw Veronica practicing stretching her mana outwards as far as she could reach, and Sean practicing supplying her with his own mana. Their progress was….slightly disappointing. Sure, Veronica could cover a rather impressive 10 thousand mile radius, about 16 times the size of the Earth that Leo came from, but according to Leo, the moon where he comes from is a quarter the size of Earth. The gravitational pull of the moon on the Earth is also apparently what makes their days last for 24 hours, and without it, their days would last less than half that. Which means, that as our days are the same length, then there’s a somewhat real chance that our moon is also a quarter the size of Hell. However, he says that we also have to consider the fact that we have 4 moons. Is this potential mass of 1/4th Hell split between the four moons? If so, is it split unevenly? There’s no way to know until he builds equipment to measure the distance from here to the moon, and from there gain a rough estimation of their sizes.
In a worst case scenario, we need to be ready for the possibility that the four moons combined equal a quarter the mass of Hell, which at the lowest end would put their radius at over 25 thousand miles. Not only that, but it’s not like we’d be able to arrive in the core of the moon, so Veronica’s binding would need to be able to stretch potentially 50 thousand miles, to cover the full moon from where we land on it.
Taking a deep breath, I reminded myself that there’s no point in stressing about it right now. We need more information, and once we get it, we can make a plan from there. I decided to focus on something that I actually could gain some potentially useful information from, the two small pieces of cloth that I’d taken from Leo’s shed. I started out with a basic strength test, trying to rip one in half. I pulled as hard as I possibly could, and….nothing. No tears, no fibers snapping, nothing. It did stretch a little bit, but that was more due to the way it was woven together, and not because the fibers themselves possessed elasticity. For my second test, I needed Sean’s help. When he and Veronica took a break, so that she could restore her mana, I asked him to hit the piece of cloth as hard as he could. For his first shot, he tested it physically, using a trident to stab it as forcefully as he could, but the cloth still did not tear.
Now, this is not to imply that Leo wearing his outfit made of it was now indestructible. After all, it did nothing to diffuse the force behind the strikes, so if Sean had stabbed his trident at Leo, Leo may have avoided getting stabbed, but he’d still have exploded from the sheer force behind the strike.
For the second test, Sean used his Aspect, the gorgeous blue waves flowing smoothly out of his deep green, almost black body. The full might of the Ocean, the pressure, the power, the unknowable danger of the deep raged at Leo’s cloth, and….It held. For a little while at least. For a few moments, it seemed as though this unstoppable spear of Obscured Tide had found an impenetrable shield, however, the cloth disintegrated within 10 seconds, glittering white sparks diffusing into the deep, clear blue. It looked like the surface of the ocean at noon, twinkling in the glorious light of day. Until the glittering white was snuffed out, beneath the cold, unyielding waves, flowing back into the depths of Sean’s phthalo body.
If Leo were a Titled, with adequate dominion over his Aspect, then perhaps his cloth would have been more evenly matched with Sean’s, however, he was not. He may have succeeded in Manifesting his Aspect as a Marked, but it was empty. Hollow. It lacked the inherent power to go head to head with a Titled’s Aspect Manifestation. However, I had one more test I wanted to run, and one more piece of cloth to run it on. Leo’s Aspect Manifestation couldn’t go head to head with the Aspect Manifestation of a Titled, but it was durable enough to come into contact with it. Hell, it had stood its ground against a full on attack for almost 10 seconds. So what if it came into contact with an Aspect that was not directly trying to harm it?
I allowed some of my flame, some of Me, to leave my body, and enter Leo’s cloth. This time, it did not dissolve. Instead, I found myself capable of channeling my flame through the cloth in much the same way I channeled mana. This….This would change everything. Immediately, I communicated the discovery I had made to Leo through the open channel.