Tafel wiped the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her robe and exhaled as she placed her hands on her hips, arching her back while stretching her neck in a manner that pointed her head towards the sky. By her side, there was a sword with a giant eyeball growing out of it, the tip of the blade planted in the tough ground to prevent it from falling over. On the edge of the sword’s blade, there was a sheen caused by the sun reflecting off a layer of flowing green liquid.

After closing her eyes and taking in a deep breath, Tafel lowered her hands and righted her posture before taking a glance at her sword. “That was a good training session, huh, Chi’Rururp?”

The sword’s eyeball blinked and rolled diagonally upwards to meet Tafel’s gaze. “Yes,” the sword said. “Wasn’t that better than reading? You should train more often.”

“It was pretty nice,” Tafel said and patted the bottom of Chi’Rururp’s hilt, which was currently its highest point because it was upside down. She had been spending a lot of time studying the stone tablets given to her by Minerva, but she hadn’t made much progress in mastering their contents. The spells within the Trickster’s Book, the sealed ancient evil item she had obtained from the cursed dragons’ evil-sealing tower, weren’t the easiest to grasp. Without understanding a spell’s core concept, the rest of the pieces wouldn’t fall into place. So far, she had only grasped three techniques, two of which didn’t work on Vur because of his sense of smell and sense of small changes in the wind. Tafel grasped Chi’Rururp and pulled the sword out of the ground. “But for now, I’ll call it a day.”

“Place me in the meat section, please,” Chi’Rururp said as Tafel’s horns glowed silver.

“Don’t eat everything in there,” Tafel said and glanced at her sword. A portal appeared in the air beside her, and she placed Chi’Rururp through at an angle. “Bye!”

“Use me again soon,” the sword said, its voice decreasing in volume as it went deeper into the portal. “Bye.”

The portal closed, and Tafel dusted her hands together—not that it’d remove any of the caustic green liquid coming out of Chi’Rururp—and nodded at nothing in particular. She took a glance around the courtyard, and when nothing seemed out of place, she opened a portal to the washroom where she wiped her face and changed out of her training outfit. Then, she opened another portal, this one leading to Vur’s room on Ed Edward’s island. With how accommodating the noble was with his enlarged furniture, Tafel couldn’t really blame Vur for wanting to sleep there. Most dragons never experienced sleeping on a luxurious, dragon-sized mattress, and if they had, Tafel was sure they’d give up hibernating on their cave floors in a heartbeat. With portals, the distance wasn’t all that inconvenient either: training on one continent, taking a bath on another, and napping on a third, she could do it all in the course of an hour.

Vur’s sleeping room was usually completely dark, large black curtains made of a thick fabric blocked out all light that could possibly enter from the windows. When Tafel stepped through the portal, she was a bit surprised to see a red light shining near the head of Vur’s bed. In most circumstances, a red light indicated a use of magic. “Vur?” Tafel asked and made her way around Vur’s sleeping body, which was polymorphed into the form of a dragon. She made sure to keep a liberal amount of space between herself and Vur lest he decide to roll over in his sleep. It didn’t happen often, but after one incident involving being squished and intense panic, Tafel learned it was better to be safe than sorry.

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The red light flickered when Tafel’s voice left her mouth. It was definitely a strange occurrence, but Tafel didn’t find it unusual. There were so many creatures living inside of Vur; she wouldn’t be surprised if some of them exited his body at night to hang out or do whatever it was that soul-inhabiting creatures tended to do—other than inhabiting souls, of course. Tafel rounded Vur’s neck and stopped upon seeing the source of red light. There seemed to be … a portal? It was floating in front of Vur’s sleeping face, and a nervous-looking rabbit wearing a cowboy hat and tall boots was clutching a black envelope to its furry chest. The rabbit glanced up at Tafel and froze.

“Hello?” Tafel asked and raised an eyebrow. Was this the spirit rabbit Vur had eaten back on the place called Earth? It seemed to tangible to be a spirit. “You are?”

The rabbit didn’t make a single sound. It remained in place with its body frozen, and if it weren’t for Vur’s breath causing the rabbit’s fur to sway back and forth, Tafel might’ve thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. Tafel raised an eyebrow. Rather than interrogating a rabbit, which she didn’t even know was capable of speech or not, it’d be simpler to ask someone who’d know what was going on. “Stella? Is this one of your ideas?”

“What are you talking about?” a groggy voice asked. A small head of silver hair with golden deerlike antlers popped out of Vur’s snout. The tiny fairy queen crawled out of Vur’s body and yawned as she rubbed her eyes with balled-up fists.

Tafel let the fairy queen perform her waking-up ritual without interrupting. When Stella was done, she lowered her hands and blinked before looking around. As expected, her gaze was instantly attracted to the ominously red portal floating in front of Vur’s face. “Tafel?” Stella asked. “Aren’t your portals usually calmer in color?” Then, the fairy queen’s gaze landed on the frozen rabbit. “You got Vur a stuffed animal? It’s wearing a strange outfit.”

“That is not my portal,” Tafel said. She pointed at the rabbit. “And that is not a toy.” Tafel glanced at the runes decorating Vur’s body. “One of you elementals has to know what’s going on, right?”

A sunlike run lit up on Vur’s shoulder. “I saw everything,” Sheryl said. “A portal opened, and a rabbit hopped out. It looked like it was looking for something, but I think it got scared of Vur, and it froze in place. Then, you came.”

Tafel raised an eyebrow. “I see,” she said and grabbed the black envelope the rabbit was holding. It didn’t even struggle as the paper left its grasp. “I wasn’t aware Vur had any friends who’d send him a letter through a portal other than me.”

“Maybe it’s from a secret admirer,” Stella said as she flew towards Tafel’s shoulder.

“A secret admirer?” Tafel asked and furrowed her brow. “You think Vur would have one of those?”

“Hello?” Stella asked and gestured around herself towards the dragon-sized furniture within the dragon-sized room created by a skeleton with a dragon-sized amount of admiration for Vur.

“Right,” Tafel said, her face turning dark. “I wasn’t thinking before I spoke.”