“My god, this tastes like grass,” said Mizuki. “What’s it made from?”
“Would you believe me if I said grass?” asked Rosalind.
“I would not,” said Mizuki.
“It’s made from candyleaf,” said Rosalind. “And it’s quite the delicacy.”
“That’s hooey,” said Mizuki.
“What she meant,” said Willow, “Is that it can be a delicacy, something for the refined palette, made by artisans. This is swill.”
“I don’t mind it,” said Rosalind. “There are worse spirits to drink, if you’re drinking in volume.”
There were six of them around the table, and as many bottles, with more people at the edges of the room engaged in their own conversations. One of the boys was tall and muscular, and Mizuki had the good fortune to be sitting next to him. He was a star athlete, good enough that he could make a career of it, sponsored by the province for competition at the national level. His name was Harrison, and Mizuki had forgotten the names of the others, in part because she’d never met an athlete before.
“Alright,” she said. “So tell me, how do they prevent cheating?”
“Cheating?” asked Harrison.
“Like, I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “You get an entad to run faster. What stops that?”
“Oh,” said Harrison. “Well, wizards, I guess.” He frowned. “A cleric of Qymmos might work too, but I’ve never seen one at a match.”
“You’d have to cheat subtle, if you wanted to cheat,” said Rosalind. “Teleporting across the field, obviously that’s right out. Jumping without gravity? Nah. But if you just drink the right kind of potion, something that enhanced the body but didn’t have a waft of magic, I think you could do it? Until you got caught, I mean.”
“I don’t think that’s really how things are,” said Harrison. He was barely drinking, and very polite, which Mizuki appreciated. He had short blonde hair and excellent posture, and his sleeves were rolled up to show his forearms. “Sports are about testing yourself, your abilities, they’re about achieving the best you can, proving yourself. You can run faster with magical boots, but everyone knows a level playing field is important.”
“It would be awesome to have entad sports,” said Mizuki. “Just … anything goes.”
“You mean Mana League?” asked Harrison.
“Uh,” said Mizuki. “Here’s where I confess to you that I haven’t actually been to any proper sports game, and don’t know anything at all about them.” She placed a hand on his forearm, almost without thinking about it. “Teach me?”
“Alright,” he said, brightening up. “You’re from some dinky little town out east?”
“The dinkiest,” said Mizuki as she took a drink. She felt like she should be defending Pucklechurch, a perfectly reasonable place to live, a place she really did like, but she’d found it much easier to simply downplay it with the city folk. They seemed to like that, and she was a people-pleaser when she was a bit tipsy.
“But you have some sports, right, games you play, a pitch?” he asked.
“Oh, sure, there are games we play, usually friendly, not the whole team thing and people cheering in the stands or whatever, just … standing around.” She looked down in her glass, which Rosalind was filling up. She thought she could eventually get used to the sweetleaf liquor.
“Here, let me set something up,” Harrison said.
He began taking the glasses and bottles and moving them around, and what followed was a very thorough explanation which Mizuki was somewhat disinterested in. There were teams of six, and specialized roles on the team, and some of what he was talking about was strategy stuff that made no sense because she wasn’t even clear on the rules. She could almost literally feel her attraction toward him starting to wane. Normally she liked when people talked about things that they were excited about, and he was excited about this, but he was explaining it poorly, and any sympathetic excitement she could have gleaned from it just wasn’t happening.
“So then we do the push, and my job is to come around and do interference,” said Harrison.
“Which is mostly just crashing into other people,” Rosalind explained.
“Neat,” said Mizuki, though she really didn’t find it all that neat. “So it’s sort of like huddle, that’s what we play, you get the ball into the goal.”
“Erm, no,” said Harrison. “The ball we use is too expensive, too hard to retrieve, there’s a version you can play that’s grounded, and we sometimes do it for training, but you really need the ectad materials.”
“What?” asked Mizuki. She wasn’t sure whether she’d zoned out and missed something or whether he’d just assumed that she would know something she didn’t know.
“The ball they’re pushing is like four hundred pounds,” said Rosalind. “It’s padded, and then there are floatstones to make it neutral buoyancy, basically weightless, so you also need someone to go retrieve it if it goes up, or encase the arena in either nets or barriers.”
“Nets for training,” said Harrison. “Barriers for public games, so people can see what’s happening.”
“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “It’s like … a floating ball? That weighs four hundred pounds?”
“Erm, four hundred and eighteen pounds,” said Harrison. “But yes.” He looked a little nonplussed, but quickly returned to his explanation. “So we take turns doing the push, and usually we meet it with a hook, because they’ve had time to get the ball moving, and we’re trying to divert rather than stop or gain control. When we’re on the push, I run ahead and try to stop their interference.”
“Alright,” said Mizuki. “So tell me about Mana League, how’s that different? It’s not just people using their brawn? Also wait, aren’t there like entads that just change your body? Or clerics that make you taller, a Xuphin thing? How do you stop that?”
“That’s two questions,” said Harrison.
“In any order, please,” said Mizuki. She’d stopped touching his forearm, and was now using her hand to prop up her chin.
“Well, the cheating … it’s not really something that happens, I don’t think,” said Harrison. “There are limits, sure, we wouldn’t let someone nine feet tall walk onto the field, and if it were obvious then sure, someone might say something. But when it comes to sports, I guess the clerical stuff is just … permitted, and kind of assumed? I mean, why should someone be effectively barred from the sport just because they were born short? So yeah, probably some guys go to a cleric of Xuphin and do that, at least a little. And as for entads that change a person but don’t leave any marks behind, nothing that a wizard could see, again people don’t really do that, don’t cheat, and I guess there are entads that can see what changes have happened to the body.”
“Oh!” said Mizuki. “I had one like that, a pair of goggles. We got it from a dungeon, seemed kind of useless. I think we sold them though.” She blinked.
“Wait, really?” asked Harrison. “Those could be worth a lot.”
“Well, money,” said Mizuki with a wave of her hand. “Money money money, always money, but they were just some boring goggles, except I guess maybe they help people for sports or something.”
“To answer the other question, about Mana League, for a few games a year, after the season is over, we do special games where virtually any non-lethal magic is allowed. It sounds fun, but in practice it ends up being very hard to follow and the pushes are either over right away or one team completely shuts the other out.”
Mizuki frowned at that. “But isn’t the point of rules to make for a fun game?”
“I guess,” said Harrison. “It’s actually pretty complicated, now that I think about it, but that’s one of the goals, yeah.”
“But, okay, hear me out,” said Mizuki. “Shouldn’t they just, I don’t know, not have everyone go into the match like they’re going into a dungeon, dripping in magic items, all the armor, the weapons, the backup weapons, the lutes — so many lutes.”
“Er, there are rules on how many things are allowed to be brought in,” said Harrison. “It helps to level the field. But there are still consistent blowouts. So, if you have six guys on each team and two entads each, that’s two dozen entads, which is just way too much. And of course it’s all magic, not just entad league, which means that you can get guys on the team that normally wouldn’t be there, specialists that come in for a game or two.”
“Warlocks!” said Mizuki. “To lock the ball in place.”
“Right,” said Harrison. He’d had a few drinks since he’d first sat down, and his nods were getting a little sluggish. “But you know what I’m saying, the last match we did, one guy was a twelve hundred pound bear that could move like liquid, another guy was twenty feet tall with fists of steel, just teleportation and time dilation and future sight and all kinds of other things.”
“Chrononauts,” said Mizuki.
“Ugh, chrononauts,” said Harrison.
“You don’t like the chronos?” asked Mizuki.
“Getting the results of a game reported before the game has actually happened is the worst,” said Harrison. “It makes it feel like it’s a foregone conclusion. They’re not supposed to, there’s an agreement among their cabal, but yeah, sure does seem like the cabal drops the ball a lot.”
“But if you drop the ball, it floats,” said Mizuki with a giggle. One of the things she liked about drinking was that you were free to be silly, to say things that were just little jokes that didn’t make sense, and no one would take you seriously, even if what you said was stupid.
“And there’s no betting on sports,” said Harrison. “Because of the chronos.”
“Bah,” said Rosalind, who’d been leaning in to listen to the conversation. “There’s enough ways to catch a glimpse of the future that you’d be an idiot to bet anyway.”
“Not that many,” said Mizuki.
“Entads can do anything,” said Rosalind.
“No,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “Future sight is bad and rare.”
“Ethically bad or … ?” asked Rosalind.
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I mean yeah, that too, but every single one I’ve heard of is just terrible, not worth the paper it’s printed on. They’re bad guesses about the future, or they’re just telling you about the present, it’s not, um, not really the kind of thing you’d want if you really needed to know what was going to happen tomorrow.”
Mizuki turned to Harrison, and found that he was gone.
“Missed your chance,” said Rosalind.
“Bah,” said Mizuki. They had been saying ‘bah’ a lot, and it was almost a running joke. “You know, it’s been forever since I’ve had a boyfriend. Since I’ve kissed anyone. Months.”
“Two years, for me,” said Rosalind. She had leaned in and was speaking up, which ruined the somewhat intimate feeling of the conversation. “I think I’m past the point where I care, like it’s just my life now. It used to be about not having the time, but now it’s kind of like, I don’t know, I just don’t remember what courting is like, and there’s not much attention from anyone, and …” She was shaking her head.
“You’re so pretty though,” said Mizuki. “I’d date you, if you were a guy.”
“Oof,” said Rosalind. She clutched her chest in mock pain. She down her drink. “Oof,” she said again. “I think I’m off, I need to get home.”
“So soon?” asked Mizuki.
“Yup,” said Rosalind. “That last drink put me over my limit. Besides, I like the parties when they’re noisy, when it’s just a thrum of people, the warmth of all these bodies, it’s going to quiet down. And hey, I’ll see you around.”
“Okay,” said Mizuki. She felt like she’d said something wrong. Maybe it was that ‘I’d date you’ had been interpreted as pity, but she was a bit too tipsy for introspection.
When Rosalind had left, the twins from before took the empty spots next to Mizuki.
“You haven’t come to see the player,” said the boy. “It’s a hit. We wanted to thank you.”
“I’ve been hearing it in the distance,” said Mizuki. “There’s competing music coming from both ends of the house, it’s kind of nice.”
“The talent show is on break, but you’ve got something, right?” asked the girl. Their names slowly surfaced, Beryl and Mira, and Mizuki was quite pleased with herself for remembering.
“I do,” said Mizuki. “A special kind of magic.”
“Ooo,” said Mira. “That sounds lovely.”
“It’s secret,” said Mizuki. “So I’ll have to swear everyone at the party to keep quiet.”
“My guess would be she’s a pyro,” Mira said to her brother.
“No no,” her brother said. “That is, a pyro would be interesting, we haven’t had one of those in a while, but she doesn’t look like a pyro, save for the long hair.”
“I’m not a pyro,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “They’re all sweethearts though.”
“Are they?” asked Mira, arching an eyebrow. She was less inebriated than Mizuki, but her cheeks were flushed, and she had a huge glass of red wine swirling around one hand.
“I only know one,” Mizuki confessed, keeping her voice low, as though it was a secret. “But he’s a sweetheart.”
“Well, we’re very informal about the whole thing,” said Beryl. “So come by and show us what you’ve got, and we’ll keep mum on it.” He had a bit of a smirk, which Mizuki found attractive. Alfric didn’t smirk enough. She’d only seen him do it once or twice, and it had pleased her to no end.
The ‘talent show’ regrouped sooner than she’d thought it would, and Willow, who’d been chatting up a boy, got up from the table in order to see what Mizuki had in store.
Mizuki watched before going up. She wasn’t like Verity, who performed without thinking about it too much, and she wasn’t like Hannah, who’d been trained to be a people person in that way. Mizuki liked people, chose to spend her time around people as much as she could, and had no problem being the center of attention, but that was entirely different from putting on a performance.
The actual structure of the ‘show’ was extremely unserious, with nothing like sign-ups, and people seemed to just go up whenever they felt like, sometimes waving each other to go when two stood at the same time. It was good, disorganized fun that made Mizuki feel far less self-conscious about going up, especially after a boy read out some dreadful, if heartfelt, poetry.
Mizuki took her turn after a girl who juggled some fruit that was laying around the house, which had gotten a smattering of applause. Mizuki had had a bit more to drink while waiting for her turn, and for the courage to actually get up there.
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“I am here to present some magic,” said Mizuki. She had taken her staff from the chest, which was parked upstairs. One of the fringe benefits of the staff was that even if you were a bit drunk, you would be able to keep your balance. She wasn’t relying on it entirely, wasn’t nearly drunk enough for that, but it was nice to not sway at all. She had a glass of wine in the other hand, though it was empty. “Now then, I know there are many wizards, in the crowd. We all go to a wizard school. But the magic I’m here to show you today is that of your mortal enemy — the sorcerer.”
Mizuki looked out at the crowd, where people were murmuring. “It’s a secret,” said Mizuki. “I’ve been keeping a low profile. There are research efforts.” She would have liked to clap her hands, but both were occupied, so she set her glass down by her feet. “Now, I would love to demonstrate for you. There’s enough magic in the air from all those things you’ve got with you, the necklaces and bangles and bracers and staves and — there’s a lot in this room.”
“Are you in a state to be doing magic?” asked a boy near the front. He seemed mildly worried.
“What could possibly go wrong?” asked Mizuki.
“Death, destruction, maiming?” the boy asked.
“Well, I’ll keep my demonstration small,” said Mizuki. “You really shouldn’t take the bit about mortal enemies so seriously, I don’t think I’ve unraveled anyone’s magic that wasn’t giving it to me willingly, and I have never hurt a wizard on purpose.” She went to take a drink, so she could punctuate what she’d said, only to realize that not only was her wine glass on the ground, it was empty. “To start with, a fireball.”
She had been brewing it in her hand even as she spoke, and it exploded half a second after she was done speaking. It was a little fart of a thing, loud enough to make people jump but not so strong that it could actually hurt anyone, not unless they were basically touching it. There were some yelps from the crowd.
“Just a tiny thing,” said Mizuki. “And you know, the funny thing is, that actually makes the room safer, removes some of what you people call atmospherics, means that all your nice things you’ve made drain out less. Now, if you thought that was too loud, you can put your hands down, there’s no more of that, but I am going to show you something cool, something that a wizard’s magic is bad at.”
She had been weaving that spell while she talked as well, cobbling it together from pieces, but took a moment to make sure that it was solid. Back home, they had a rule that Mizuki wasn’t allowed to do any magic while tipsy, and certainly not while drunk, but here there was no one to stop her, which was both nice and scary.
Mizuki rose up into the air and flew through her own power, just for a bit until it gave out, then landed with a prim little pose that she wouldn’t have been able to manage without her staff. She’d been up higher than intended, and the landing was hard, but she managed a “Ta da!” at the end.
The applause was scattered and weak, and Mizuki found her seat.
“You didn’t ever tell us you were a sorc,” said Willow.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “I was living a double life. It’s good to get that off my chest, I guess.”
“You can just … see magic?” asked Willow.
“Yup,” said Mizuki.
“And unravel it?” asked Willow.
“Yeah, I should have explained it all better, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Really for a lot of wizard’s stuff, it’s kind of hard to undo it without blowing it all up. But I don’t do that, to wizards, you don’t have to worry.”
“It blows up?” asked Willow. She was frowning.
“Oh, sure,” said Mizuki. “I mean, we get taught that in class, that a well with a defect in it could explode. I mean, I’ve never blown up a wizard’s stuff, but it’s always obvious how it would blow up.”
“I had a professor who said that any halfway decent sorc could kill us with a thought,” said Willow. “I guess I never really thought it was true.”
“I mean, only if you have your stuff on you, and honestly, I know I act tough, but I’ve never killed anyone.” Mizuki frowned. “Unless you count stuff in dungeons, I guess. Besides, you know how really has to be afraid of sorcs? Alienists. I can blow up a wizard’s stuff, but an alienist is carrying around so much power that,” she made an explosion noise with her voice and demonstrated with her hands.
“Man you’re drunk,” said Willow. She let out a laugh.
“Tipsy,” Mizuki declared. “A bit buzzed, mayhaps.” She narrowed her eyes at Willow. “Are we still friends?”
Willow’s eyes went wide. “Why wouldn’t we be?”
“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “The mortal enemies thing.”
“So long as you don’t destroy my stuff, we’re fine,” said Willow. Her eyes had gone to the current performer, a girl who was mouthing all the words to ‘The Brave Knight Gave’ while the machine played the song. “I just think it’s weird you didn’t tell us about it.”
“Is it?” asked Mizuki. “Hey, what did you think I did in the dungeons?”
“I don’t know,” said Willow. She wrinkled her nose. “You seemed to want us to think you were a fighter, with plate armor and a huge sword.”
“Oh, I’ve got those,” said Mizuki. “But mostly I throw fireballs.”
It was, undeniably, a bit awkward between them, but Mizuki was feeling good about herself. It had been something she’d mostly let people remain ignorant about, but she’d practiced disclosure, and she thought that Alfric would be proud.
Mizuki got more wine, then sat in the games room for a bit, watching and having the rules explained to her, which wafted over her like a nice cool breeze. They were betting chits with each other at a table where they were playing cards, and Mizuki wondered how they were keeping people from cheating there too, but it was mostly a friendly game, and there were so many wizards around that someone had to be looking at the aether. Mizuki herself couldn’t see anything suspicious going on, though she was only half paying attention. Harrison was there, stoic as he played his cards, but he gave her a smile when he saw her.
Mizuki had no idea how late it was, but the party had started to wind down, the packed rooms and the din of chatter turning into something a bit more intimate. A few people were passed out on couches or in chairs, and more had gone up into the upstairs rooms, but Mizuki stayed on the main floor, wandering from time to time. The sun had long since gone down, and the night was a bit of a blur. The house was in serious disarray, with glasses, some of them half-full, scattered all over the place, and more than a few spills. The buffet was a wreck, almost all the food eaten, save for a weird dip that no one had been adventurous enough to try and some hard crackers that broke into shards when you tried to put them in your mouth.
Mizuki eventually found herself in a group of people who had made a circle of couches in one of the rooms. A few bottles had been brought in from one of the other rooms, and there was a nice, gentle conversation going on, less raucous than anything that had come before.
“They say she threw a fireball during the talent show,” said one of the men. He had a full beard, but was probably still in his early twenties, like most of the people at the party.
“Wow, that’s messed up, I hope they catch her,” said Mizuki.
“It does seem kind of irresponsible,” said a different man. It took Mizuki a moment, but then she recognized him. It was Garth, the other research assistant.
“Garth!” she said. “You came.”
“I’ve been here, next to you, for fifteen minutes,” said Garth.
“Still,” said Mizuki. “But ‘irresponsible’ like, okay, wizards do that kind of thing all the time, it’s called a what-do-you-call-it, a clapper.”
“Yeah,” said the bearded guy opposite Mizuki, who had a glass filled with some amber drink. “But if we were doing that in a room with thirty people, we wouldn’t just be eyeballing it, we’d do actual math, we’d figure out the amount of pressure, we’d test in controlled environments, it would be safe because we weren’t winging it. Winging it is what a sorc does.”
Mizuki didn’t like the way that he said ‘sorc’.
“I don’t think it’s a fair comparison,” said Garth. He glanced sidelong at Mizuki. “A wizard’s discipline is about planning, engineering, figuring things out, you couldn’t make a fireball ‘on the fly’ if you wanted to, and if you could do it on the fly, you wouldn’t have any naive control of it. It’s different, for a sorc.”
“You’re working with one, right?” asked a woman beside Garth, possibly a girlfriend based on the way her hand sometimes went to his thigh, or maybe a very forward form of flirtation.
“I am,” said Garth. He glanced at Mizuki again. “The very same one who did the fireball, I think. No one hurt?”
“No,” said the bearded man. “That doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
“I hope they string her up,” said Mizuki. “Expel her from school, all that kind of thing. A fireball that didn’t hurt anyone? How dare she.”
“This is Mizuki,” said Garth. “She’s the sorc.”
“How dare you make such an accusation,” said Mizuki.
“Well,” said the man with a beard. “I do think it was irresponsible.”
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve been a sorc for a long time, it was as gentle as a thunderclap.”
“A thunderclap?” asked Garth.
“Or a regular clap, whatever,” said Mizuki. She set her drink down, then immediately regretted it because it was lost in the forest of other glasses. “Check this out.”
She cast the spell, sucking in the disturbances in the aether. This one was even weaker than the one before, like a loud snap, and it had used so little of what was in the air that she was able to make a second one, almost exactly the size of the first, and then a third. She sat back with a smug look on her face.
“Was that it?” asked a girl. “That was the ‘fireball’?”
“I’d thought there would be some kind of fire,” said Garth.
“I need to do some demos, if you people are so worried,” said Mizuki. “I mean I wouldn’t say that it’s a hundred percent, there’s no math, but even drunk my feel of things is pretty good.”
“It actually wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to do a demonstration,” said Garth. He was sober as a stone, and drinking water. “We have more formal talks from visiting wizards from time to time, scheduled events. I think Arturo would rather you hold off until he’s closer to some findings, but —”
“Can we agree that people shouldn’t be making fireballs in the house?” asked the bearded man.
“What if I need to kill a rat?” asked Mizuki. “Or fight off a burglar? What then, huh?”
“You’d fireball a rat?” he shot back.
“I’d fireball five rats,” said Mizuki, which didn’t really make that much sense, but felt good to say.
“I just don’t think they should be called fireballs,” said the girl who’d asked ‘that was it?’. “Fireball sounds impressive.”
“I could show you impressive,” said Mizuki. “But we would need to go outside, and I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
Someone behind her cleared his throat, possibly for the second time, and Mizuki turned to look.
It was Alfric.
“Alfric!” said Mizuki. She stared at him for a moment. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to take you home,” said Alfric.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. She furrowed her brow. “I was … saying something in party chat?”
“No,” said Alfric. “I’ll explain later.”
“I’ve got the chest,” said Mizuki. “I was just going to sleep in there. Or, in the lute in the chest.”
“Let’s get going, get you some air,” said Alfric.
“You know this guy?” asked Garth. His eyebrow was raised.
“He’s part of my party, I said,” said Mizuki, though she wasn’t sure that she had said. “I trust him with my life. With your life too, actually.” She stood up, but had misplaced the staff and immediately felt unsteady on her feet. Alfric was there almost at once, supporting her, and they went off together while the conversation resumed. She hoped that Garth would defend her from charges of recklessness.
“You can still sleep in the lute, if you’d like,” said Alfric.
“Why are you here?” asked Mizuki. She was leaning on him for support, maybe more than she needed to. She was hoping that he might offer to carry her, which sounded nice. “You said this wasn’t an undone day, you said you’d tell me if it was an undone day for you.”
“We’re past the witching hour,” said Alfric. “It’s a new day. Where’s the chest?”
“Upstairs,” said Mizuki.
They moved together and retrieved the chest, which had been told to stay in one place. The lute was inside, and Alfric whisked them into it, then helped Mizuki into one of the beds there.
“Oh man,” said Mizuki as her head rested against the pillow. “It’s after the witching hour? I should get to bed.” She laughed at her little joke, but Alfric didn’t so much as smile. “Hey, so what happened?”
“You came home and requested a reset,” said Alfric. “You weren’t sure about the timeline.”
“Oh shoot,” said Mizuki. “Was it a fireball gone wrong? That would be very embarrassing.”
“From what I understand, you kissed a guy you wished that you hadn’t kissed,” said Alfric. His words were delivered with a very curt and impersonal tone.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “That’s it? I kissed someone and didn’t want to have done that? I get friendly when I’m tipsy.” But then she saw Alfric’s face, his discomfort, and felt a bit rotten about it.
“We can talk when you’re sober,” said Alfric.
“Do you have a way to do that?” asked Mizuki.
“Time, sleep, water,” said Alfric. He took something out of his pocket. “Also this ring, which will remove the effects of alcohol but has to be paid down at a later date. Taken from the family warehouse.”
“Yes please,” said Mizuki, holding out her hand.
Alfric held her hand and slipped the ring on.
It wasn’t until the ring took effect that Mizuki realized just how much she’d had to drink throughout the night, and when the delightful fog began to lift, she realized that her stomach was hurting and her mouth was slightly numb, or at least had been filled with enough sweet drinks to feel wooly. Her breath was bad, and she felt self-conscious about it.
“Okay,” said Mizuki, blinking.
“We don’t need to talk now, if you don’t want to,” said Alfric.
Mizuki rubbed her face. She was tired, it was very late at night if it was past the witching hour. She also vaguely recollected that she’d had a short nap on a couch or something.
“Who’d I kiss?” asked Mizuki.
“Some guy,” said Alfric. “You didn’t give me a name. You didn’t want to give me a name, because you didn’t want to know.”
“Ah,” said Mizuki. He was sitting a bit further from her than he normally did. “And you’re sure it was … I mean you’re saying that I kissed him? Not the other way around?”
Alfric shrugged. “I got the sense that you weren’t telling me the whole truth.”
“I lied to you?” asked Mizuki. “That doesn’t sound like me.”
“I think you wanted to undo it,” said Alfric. “And I think that in order to undo it, you wanted yourself to know as little as possible, which is why you told me as little as possible.”
“Well I don’t like that,” said Mizuki. “I think this is the first time undone Mizuki has wronged me. Why would I …” She trailed off.
Now sober, there were two thoughts that came to her. The first was that perhaps it had been some boy being pushy with her, that she’d given in without really wanting to, which was the kind of thing that might make her feel a heaping dose of regret. She had run into that problem in the past, had gone so far as to go on a handful of dates with a guy just because it had felt like it would be rude not to.
The second thought was that maybe she had instigated and it had gone further than a kiss. That didn’t sound like her, but if she was drunk, and if the mood was right, and impulsivity had won out, it wasn’t entirely out of character. It was a difficult thing to know about yourself, what you would do in certain situations.
“I wish you weren’t involved,” said Mizuki with a groan.
“You asked me,” said Alfric.
“Yeah, so now I’ve been double wronged by my undone self,” said Mizuki. “Ugh. Couldn’t I have asked your mom or something?”
“She wouldn’t reset the day for you,” said Alfric. “Not for something like this.”
A question burning deep within Mizuki was what Alfric thought. Had those two possibilities occurred to him too? Had he made up his mind on what had really happened, just based on what she had said and how she had said it? Maybe it was the booze, but she was feeling sick to her gut. She’d had way too much wine, and needed to brush her teeth and maybe take a warm bath.
“How are you?” asked Mizuki.
“Fine,” said Alfric.
“You don’t look fine,” said Mizuki. “You look very annoyed and … stiff. All business.”
“You weren’t very straightforward about why I was supposed to get you,” said Alfric. “I think you might have lied to me about the real reason. I missed you at our meal last night, and worried about you, and then when you came home, which wasn’t until after another full day of school, you were out of sorts.”
“Oh gods,” said Mizuki. “And I have school tomorrow, why did we do this on a school night?”
“The upperclassmen don’t have morning classes today,” said Alfric. “You’re due at your first class in about four hours, so it would probably be good for you to get some sleep. We can do full disclosure later.”
“Alfric, what do you think really happened?” asked Mizuki.
“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I think it might have been as simple as you said, that you kissed someone and felt bad about it afterward.”
“But you think the worst?” asked Mizuki. She leaned forward.
“What kind of friend would I be if I thought the worst?” asked Alfric. He gave her a weak smile. “You know, I could have forced the issue, could have said that I wouldn’t reset unless you explained everything. I trust you. I like you. I’m going to choose to believe that it was pretty much what you had said it was, though …”
“Though?” asked Mizuki.
“I guess I don’t understand why kissing someone would be such a bad thing,” said Alfric.
There was something in his tone that made that sound like a lie, and his entire demeanor since picking her up from the party had been cold and brusque. This wasn’t the way that Alfric acted when he was doing a favor for a friend, even a favor that he didn’t particularly feel like doing. He was a kind man, compassionate and forthright, and if he was acting this way, it was because he was feeling hurt.
And it was Mizuki who had hurt him, that was clear enough. She’d been thinking about him off and on, comparing other men to him, and she’d talked about him a few times, she was pretty sure, maybe many times.
“Thank you,” said Mizuki. “I guess I’ll trust my other self that this was the right thing to do.”
Alfric gave a solemn nod. “We’ll talk more in the morning, or I guess after you’re done with school. I was going to spend the day in Plenarch, maybe see my aunt. We could have lunch together.”
“Did you leave the lute outside the chest or inside?” asked Mizuki.
“Outside,” said Alfric. “Otherwise we would be racing across the province to return to the others. They’ll send it on a return trip, or we can use the staff to get back.”
“Can I make it up to you?” asked Mizuki. “The hassle, the other stuff?”
“It’s not a big deal,” said Alfric. He didn’t ask what ‘the other stuff’ was. Maybe it was obvious to him. “Slip the ring off, get some sleep, you’re going to have a hard enough time getting through class as it is. You’ll get a one hour nap courtesy of Verity, but I doubt that will be enough.”
Mizuki wanted to confess her feelings to him, to tell him that there was no one she’d rather have shared a drunken kiss with than him. If he was feeling a bit hurt that she’d go off and kiss some other boy, if her non-drunk mind was interpreting that correctly, then maybe there was more between them than she’d been thinking there was. There were reasons why it would be messy and complicated for them to date each other, reasons like them living in the same house and the chrononaut pact thing that kept threatening to rear its head, but messy and complicated had never stopped her before, and if he was going to have these emotions about something happening with another guy, it seemed better for them to just get together.
Mizuki almost went for it right there and then, but it had been an impulsive night, and she didn’t want that to be the precedent, especially not when she was feeling a bit sick and needed to get some sleep.
“Slip the ring off before you fall asleep,” said Alfric. “It needs to be paid down, otherwise no one can use it, and it’s actually a somewhat serious part of our defensive package. You’ll sober up as you rest.”
“Alright,” said Mizuki. She slipped the ring off, and immediately the drunkness returned, feeling stronger than it had been before. She placed the ring in Alfric’s outstretched hand. “You’re my favorite person.” The words just came out.
“Thanks,” said Alfric. “That means a lot. Get some sleep, and we’ll make it through tomorrow together.”