Later in the evening, Drenar is still trying to process this all. Except he really can’t. He’s busy being an arcanist and trying to make use of one of a few crafts he’s gotten pretty good at:
Arcanist tinkering. With some trial and error efforts, he's been able to channel his mana into a strange fluid that he could ‘sweat’ out so to speak, from his hands. Joey had explained that due to the crystalline lattice inside their bodies, dragons and most Kin could channel energy to become externalized in a form of fluidified mana. But usually, only a trickle at a time. Today’s experiment: he’s going to make a concussion grenade. An empty canister that matched the ones in Joey’s alchemical hopper system is sitting disassembled, but he's deep in focus, trying to will the mana to his hand. It’s working…slowly. He feels a trickle of sweat across his brow. He’s a freaking dragon, this shouldn’t be this hard to get more than a few drops of the stuff!
He lets out a heavy breath and flexes his hand when the strain of the process becomes too much. It’s one thing to take his mind off of that final message from Mom that he’s still trying to figure out what it meant. Whether she’d meant some kind of coded ulterior message that only he could figure out. He’s drawing a blank on this one. Mom had never been that subtle with things, coded messages weren’t her style.
A gentle knock on the bedroom door gets his attention, and a whiff of cinnamon betrays who’s outside. “Joey, come on in.” She walks in calmly while holding her hands tightly around a datapad. “I’m not being antisocial. I just needed a little while to focus on something.”
“Making non-lethal munitions, practicing arcanistry, trying to ignore that your mom dumped a ‘save the world’ scenario in your lap? Yeah, I totally get that one.” She sits down at the extended bench seat, shoulder more than subtly bumping into him. She's at least looking a little less grim as she places the arcanist datapad on the table of strewn equipment, tools, spare parts, and the accumulated sweat–figurative and literal–of the harnessed mana. He’ll have to dilute it into that gel she uses for some of her alchemical reagents, it should be useful for a non-lethal blast that should knock people off their feet.
She is also, surprisingly, in her kitsune form, with bright red fur, carefully trimmed claws, and that poofy tail of hers. She nudges him again with her shoulder while he’s bent over the bench, trying to put a canister together.
“Hey, engineer at work,” he protests lightheartedly. She responds by pouting with her fox-like muzzle and narrowing her eyes at him. “Oh, no. Don’t give me the look. The look doesn’t work on me.”
“The look always works on you! Julia’s been doing the same thing for years, and you never noticed!” He hates how fast she is picking up on people, even without the psionic link. She nudges a component he’s been looking for, and he hastily reassembles the alchemical cartridge blank. “You know, it’s strange, seeing your mom like that. So close, yet so far away.”
“She must be after really big sharks if she can’t even name names or dare a trip home,” he adds while examining the triggering mechanism of the cartridge. It’s just poorly designed, it opens too slowly. He needs a faster trigger to make effective use of a concussive round, where the distribution matters. A higher spring rate, or a faster piston setup should work. “I’ll bet it’s some high-up official. Maybe the head of the Conclave. Because that’s usually how it works. Person at the top is this corrupted official who got a taste for power, and then didn’t want to let go.”
Joey laughs at that, even as she hands him a screwdriver for assembling the munition back together. “Drenar, seriously, you’re so young! The problem isn’t one of them, it’s kind of all of them, to be fair!”
“You’re part of a marginalized species. I was hoping the problem was only one person. One person I could just punch in the face repeatedly, until they saw the error of their ways.” She rolls her eyes at this.
“You’ll run out of fists to throw before you run out of people to knock some common sense into, young dragon-wan.”
“Ew. I hate that nickname. It’s so dirty sounding,” he retorts back. “Oh, I need that set screw.” She passes the fastener to him before he finishes buttoning up the reusable munition, and he examines it intently. He’s been able to mostly dissect her alchemical cartridges, a feat that she and Kyle had worked on for a while. “I can’t believe this contraption only took four months for you guys to put together.”
She shrugs. “Kyle’s the genius on this one. It was kind of a half-and-half effort. I wanted to have a way to carry an alchemical bench without needing a full lab. So, we reached a compromise: a bunch of pre-mixed canisters I can activate with mana flow.” She taps at the hopper design, a boxy contraption that sits on her hip that looks like a gearbox casing–almost. It’s brass and silver plated, with a few small opening ports that open automatically when she passes her hand over a small iris-like opening.
A light trace of blue mana emerges over her palm and briefly lights up the fur on her arm, and a small metallic canister casing with a plexiglass outer shell pops out. It’s filled with a dull blue liquid that glows when it lands in her hand. “All I have to do is think of the compound I want, and the rune matrix inside feeds that to the mechanism. It’s built like a rotary hopper inside, and it’s very compact.”
“Kyle showed me a prototype earlier. It looked complicated,” he comments. He looks down at the casing in his hand, and she hands him the cartridge, where he quickly compares the two. “I made a tweak here. I can program in a delay timer with a small trigger rune. Kyle showed me how you can imbue simple magical commands on mage steel to act as triggers. I’m surprised it’s not that difficult.”
“Magical programming? It’s just cause and effect, in essence,” she comments. “So, what’s the plan?”
“Area traps. I figure, with the way we’re going, we’ll be constantly at a numerical disadvantage, so we’ll have to play this smart. Which means we play like we’re rogues in a Pathfinder session.”
“Four rogues in a party? It’ll never work,” she sighed, before examining the new prototype. “Still, you picked up on this quickly. I’m mildly impressed.”
“Well,” he said as he continued to assemble more of the small devices, “between all the other drama of life, finding out more of what it is to be a half-dragon, and training…you need your hobbies in life.”
“Still thinking about earlier?” she asks. He sets down the completed canister, folding his arms while gazing out at the darkened window–the snow has drifted and accumulated on the sill, and small flakes continue to flutter down.
He glances at her and nods after a moment. “Yeah. Mom left a message in a bottle. And that message couldn’t possibly have been made beforehand. Someone updated it, or she sent remote updates to the magical crystalline USB stick. Which is weird, right?”
“She could not have been happy to find out what Kiera had to do afterward,” Joey said quietly while leaning back in the chair, and errantly rubbing at her ear. He raises an eyebrow.
“Is that therapeutic?”
“Huh?”
“Your ears.”
“Oh! Um, I guess, sorta?” she shies away her hand and looks embarrassed. “I mean, uh, it’s sort of like rubbing your temples, in a way? I just remember that my mom would do that for me, in the evenings, if I couldn’t sleep when I was a kid. There was a lot of that.”
“Lack of sleep?” he asks. He’s gotten to know her a little bit more at a time over the past two months, and it still feels like he’s got plenty left to learn. “I was reading from a book that Nick lent me that a kitsune doesn't need as much sleep. And that you’re night owls.”
“Well, partially true,” she says while looking at him with a warm smile. “I think it has more to do with ADHD. I just am naturally allergic to sleep or something! I mean, I do need some sleep. But 5 or 6 hours later, I feel fully rested.”
“And springing onto my bed to wake me up at four in the morning,” he accuses playfully. “You’re like the world's evilest cat. Or fox, as might be the case.”
“Oh, no. Cats are still more evil than me,” she grins. “Anyway, mom would do that and it would get me to calm down, and after a while, it just became this thing I did, like a stimming mechanism. What else did you read in Nicks’s book, anyway?”
“Uh…”
Do not think or say anything! Alex whispers in a panicked voice. You cannot be held responsible for the thoughts not…thunken?
“Yeah, hi Alex, we’re adults now. We can talk about stuff like this.” He rubs the bridge of his nose when Joey laughs at this interjection. “I was uh, just reading about kitsune biology. I had questions.”
“Okay, shoot!”
“So, you guys transform like dragons do. That’s sort of how all the Kin work with shapeshifting powers.” He thoughtfully glances at her. “So, why is it that kitsune in particular still have some subtle traits in their human form?”
“Like the scent? I dunno. I have to shower once a day. Still annoying,” she says with a huff. “A few dragons do have some strange quirks. They have scales in their human form, even though they think they’ve transformed all the way. Or abnormally long fingernails that look like claws. It’s not rare enough to be unheard of.”
“Well, yes, stuff like that.” Does he dare to ask this question? They have gotten a bit closer over the past couple of months. He takes a sharp breath. “So, why is it that um…”
“You’re gonna ask how the birds and the bees work, aren’t you.” She swishes her tail playfully while smirking. “Well, I can tell you how that works: it’s the same way.”
Well this was a bad idea, Alex.
Told ya.
Joey leans in, looking concerned. “You can just ask.”
“Alright. Say that a dragon and a kitsune–or any Kin, really–have a kid. What usually governs which species their kid would be?” he asks in a daring voice, while feeling like his heart should not be going at this speed, ever. “Not to imply that–”
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
She laughs and claps his shoulder gently as if to steady himself. “You are so adorkable, you know that? You’re getting all worked up over this, because you think it’s embarrassing! It’s not, it’s just arcanist science. Or is it because it’s just me?”
“It’s you,” he says while trying his best to hide his embarrassment. “Look, I am curious. From a purely academic standpoint. I’ve uh…got a lot of stuff to catch up on in the mage world. Hell, I’m still trying to figure out what I am, in essence.”
Her smile softens a little. “Yeah. Might have picked up on that a little.”
They talk at length about it once he is no longer in fear of being judged, and after a while, the questions come naturally and without resistance. He is fascinated to learn that most Kin are compatible in that way, though which species any children will become is a bit of a random thing. He’s surprised by this, and it does assuage his fears. Somewhat.
What’s more surprising, he finds, is that sometimes, they do inherit traits from both parents–there had been a few documented cases of dragons having psionic powers, but they had been so far and few between, that it was still considered exceptionally rare. Or a kitsune with the regenerative ability of the wargen. Or with the baked-in geomancy that dwarven had. Which, led to another series of questions.
“So, the fey are kinda bird people.”
“I wouldn’t describe it in that way, but okay. They have wings and feathers.”
“But they can’t fly.”
“I know, right? They can glide, though. It’s nice to have baked in feather fall. Literally, in this case,” she adds with a laugh while he’s sitting at the alchemy bench, and adding his concentrated liquified mana. Which is weird that it’s sort of a liquid, but not? It appears to follow some of the laws of physics, but when he drops it into a beaker for adding to primer gel, it almost forms a gaseous substance that glows with a silver sheen. She points to the beaker. “Looks like it took. Good extraction.”
“That sounds like a euphemism for something.” She stammers for a few seconds, before setting her teeth on edge on her short muzzle when he smiles slyly. “Two can play at this time, Miss Pyromist.”
“Just don’t call me a magical fox girl like Julia does. Following this practice decreases your risk of accidental alchemical disincorporation,” she adds in an empty threat. Especially considering the previous week. She raises an eyebrow. “Reliving a moment?”
He nods thoughtfully at this. “Yeah, a little bit. Alright, before I lose focus, let’s finish mixing this.”
A few steps later, he’s got the prepared alchemical agent that he gently pours into the opening port of the canister, and the liquid glows silvery and white. He closes the small opening port, secures it, and examines the completed munition. “You know what the weird part of this magic is? It feels very…personal. Intimate, even, to be crafting something that was created from something my body generates naturally.”
“Mana is mana. Doesn’t matter where it’s generated. But, with your ability of telekinetics infused into it by that extraction technique I taught you? It does feel like a personal creation, doesn’t it?” she adds thoughtfully, before taking the canister in her hand. Her fingers more than linger on his hand before taking the canister and giving it a small swirl. The liquid sloshes and tiny blue motes emerge in the fluid, and her expression morphs into curiosity. “Interesting. You extracted plasma elemental energy–a tiny, tiny bit.”
“I haven’t been able to use them too much. Why is that?” she shrugs.
“Dominant trait. You come from two dragon lineages. Hell, Evan has traces of three. Sometimes it feels like a big bag of dice rolls in life.”
“You’re a hardcore nerd, aren’t you?” he accuses with a smug smile.
“Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. We should go test this!” He glances at the clock, and grimaces. It’s past midnight, and they’ve been at this for a while. And yet, he doesn’t feel too fatigued–it must be a dragon thing, because lack of sleep never seems to hurt him too much.
He relents and gets up from the bench, his back feeling a little stiff. “Alright. One test, then bedtime.” They work their way out of the decently furnished bedroom, and he looks at the small photo of the team clipped to a posting board, everyone gathered smiling and looking cheery, even in the face of adversity.
One big, weird, family of misfits, he thinks with a grin. A short trek later, they’re at the testing range, and Joey places a training dummy into position, and she springs back into position with a flash of red fur, and puts a on a pair of safety goggles. Except these aren’t meant for kitsune, when she tries to place them over her ears and misses. He giggles at that, and she frowns at him.
“Hey, it’s a thing. Body dimorphism. Sometimes you forget little things like that if you spend enough time in one form or the other. You keep trying to step like a human when you’re in your dragon form.”
“I haven’t had that much time with it.” She does have a point though, and he puts on safety glasses at the range, which is matte concrete and steel reinforcement, and faint score marks are visible in some areas. They’d had to do cleanup lately with their tests of magical abilities, weapons, and other mad magical science, courtesy of Kyle, and Nick had insisted they keep the range looking immaculate. “I mean, it only happens for a minute before my brain remembers. Plus, you wag your hips a bit like you have a tail sometimes.”
“I do not. Kyle’s lying.” He swears her fur gets slightly rosy on her cheeks, where a patch of white fur stretches from her face, down her neck, and along her arms. He glances at her skeptically before she growls. “Let it go, Rashalda. I’ll bite you.”
“You act like I wouldn’t enjoy that.” She stammers for a couple of seconds in angry retort while he primes the munition with an activation of mana, the canister now glowing. “Besides, I think you’d just nibble. Gently.”
“Ooh, you are so–ooh! You are being so bold, you young drake!” she says angrily, her footpads tensed on the floor and looking at him with narrowed eyes. “I think you’re letting Alex influence your psyche!”
“That’s not a thing.”
“It’s totally a thing! Drakensouls sometimes have a personality shift, from the few academic journals I’ve been able to find reputable data on! He might be bleeding into your consciousness, which explains this boldness that you think I’m into you in that way!” He laughs softly at that and winds back his arm with the canister readied. He’s hoping this isn’t going to make too much of a noise.
“It’s not bold. You do like me in that way.”
“It’s a bond of traumatic events!” she protests, grabs a pair of earplugs out of her pocket, and puts them into her fox-like ears. “Also, safety first.”
“Or, you’re just making excuses for last week, there was no ‘safety’ there.” She growls at him, her tail tensed–she’s just a little pissed at that one, and he might be pushing the envelope a tad too far, even as he flings the projectile. An easy toss, and this projectile should be a pretty tame–
Being flung a few feet backward and skidding to the ground, along with Joey, was not a fun experience for him. Nor was that incessant ringing sound in his ears, and he rose unsteadily to his feet, and he glanced at the dummy. The target which is now in pieces on the far end of the room. His jaw drops for a split second, and he rubs at where he landed on his arm.
That had been super effective. Joey springs up, fur frazzled and eyes lit up in delight when she surveils the destruction.
“Hell yes! That was awesome! Ow, my ears are still ringing, we need better hearing protection!” she exclaims as she rubs at her ear gingerly before drawing close to him. “I’ll make an arcanist out of you yet!”
He smiles faintly at this, even though he can still hear a monotone ringing sound, fading into the background. “Among other things.” He dips his head in, and their lips meet, and she looks surprised–but leans into it, claw points pressing into his back.
“Oh, you have gotten bold, haven’t you,” she says in a silky voice before dipping back in–and then they spring apart when there’s a shout from Nick coming down the stairs.
“Guys! No more weapons tests past midnight!” he says angrily, looking distinctly frazzled and like he’d been half asleep, then peers at them. “Were you two…testing explosives, and making out in my firing range?!”
“I–”
“Admit to nothing!” Joey says with a panicked expression. “A munition grossly exceeded predicted yield, yes! Totally not our fault!”
“Which ‘munitions’ are we talking about?” Nick asks, and Drenar struggles to respond while Nick wears that annoyed look he’s always come to associate with him, usually when things are going sideways in training. “Clean up the mess, and please, take the canoodling to the bedroom.”
“Nope, no canoodling going in here, just mad science!” It’s funnier that Joey’s fur is bristling on end like she’s just been caught doing something she shouldn’t. She is a bit shy, in that regard.
“Yes, keep the mad science confined to the lab, and not on my firing range,” Nick says with a groan. He spins on his heels and storms back upstairs, and Drenar lets out a breath he’s been holding in for far too long.
“We should clean up,” he says at a quiet and rapid pace. She nods sharply.
“Yeah, we should. And then we’ll make out, after.”
“Yep. Totally. And don’t forget to lock the door this time.”
“You’re the one with telekinetics, you could have latched it from afar,” she counters with fire in her eyes.
“I was otherwise occupied elsewhere.” She points a sharp claw at his nose, brow furrowed in simmering anger.
“I hate not being able to hate you. Also, bold of you to assume I was enjoying it.”
“But you were, though," he counters without batting an eye.
Her facade breaks, and she lets out a wicked grin. “Decent start, but I think there’s plenty for you left to learn. About women, not just kitsune.” She glances at the displaced items and the broken dummy. “C’mon, let’s get this cleaned up, first.”