Chapter 3: Seeing is believing...

[Amos]

It took almost an hour to get her back into a coherent state, I had to carry her back into the apartment and lay her on the couch, whereupon she grabbed one of the pillows acting as a cushion and hugged it tight to her chest, burying her face in it and shaking with sobs. When she came to I thought she was trying to sell me some cock and bull story about multiple realities and how she was some sort of mage from one and some other nonsense. At least I thought that up to the point she had teleported a mug from the counter into her hand across a five foot distance. I watched it, watched it with my own eyes, there one moment, then in her hands.

After that little demonstration I asked her to do something else, first, she had lit a fire seemingly out of nowhere, then she had filled the cup she teleported with water, simply by waving her hand over the top of it. I wasn't completely convinced, I mean I had seen David Blaine and the like, but that was on tv, where there could be camera angles and whatnot, this was right in front of me, in my own house, and on objects I told her to try it on.

She made Blaine look like a chump.

"So are those real?" I asked, glancing at her ears.

"What? "she asked, she sounded drained, emotionally.

"Your ears," I said, and before I could stop myself I asked "can I touch them?" She looked at me like I was some sort of special needs kid.

"I guess," she said, tucking her hair behind her ear, and tentatively I reached over and ran my finger along the top of it, running from where it touched her head to where the tip came to an end. It was warm and smooth, and I could faintly feel the pulsing of her blood through it. I leaned in close to see if there was a seam where there would be a prosthetic, but unless she had some plastic surgery then these were her natural ears. There were even some freckles running along the top part of them that matched the ones that ran across her face just under her eyes. "I've never seen ears like yours," she said, tilting her head and looking at mine, the motion gently pulled her ear out of my fingers, which might have been the entire intent of the movement.

"Really?" I sat back and laughed a little, it was meant to sound like I didn't believe her, but that was getting less and less true by the minute, what with the way she was acting, the ears and the magic she was displaying. Either she had had access to my house for quite some time and had set up some rather impressive and elaborate props to make the magic happen, which while possible was not plausible, or she had actually been doing magic.

It was honestly a hard thing to wrap my head around, seeing as I had stopped believing in magic when I had found out Santa was just my Dad placing presents under the tree and eating all the cookies at age six or so. Which made this a rather hard pill to swallow. I sat back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling, trying to organize everything I knew to be true in my head and wondering if this new version of reality presented to me would fit in there with it.

"Hey-" she said slightly awkwardly.

"Hmm?" I asked still mulling everything over in my head, and not looking over at her.

"Is there anywhere I can go and obtain a new dress?" she asked, and I looked over at her. She had the dress she was wearing held in two fingers, the stretch of green fabric looked slightly dirty.

"You have any money?" I asked, and she bit her bottom lip and looked at me, it had to be one of the most practiced puppy dog stares I had ever seen, which consequently also made it one of the best ones I had ever seen. "Shit-" I sighed and looked away from her, glancing back up at the sky. "You know they don't give clothes away for free right?" I asked and she didn't answer, "Fine, but you're paying me back," I said with a sigh, I looked over at her. "If we are going to get you clothes then you are going to have to wear something else."

"Why?" she asked looking confused, "this dress is slightly soiled but it should suffice until I have a new garment."

"If we go out into public and you are wearing that we will be laughed at," now she looked really confused. "Look, its a real nice dress, but no one has worn something like that in the past I don't know five or six hundred years? It looks like you're going to some Disney style princess's ball or something." Her face was blank as I said it, which led me to believe her story even more, after all who on the face of the planet hadn't heard of Disney? "Wait here," I sighed and stood up from the couch. I looked her over, attempting to get a decent look at her size and shrugged, no matter what I brought her it wouldn't fit her good, she was shorter than I was by a full head, and her hips were decidedly wider, to say nothing about chest dimensions. I walked out of the room and into my bedroom. Instead of walking over to the dresser I walked over to the laundry basket with my washed but unfolded laundry and went looking through it for the shorts I was thinking of. I found them and held them up to look at them better. They were a pair of grey cargo shorts that went just past my knees and were wide enough that I needed a belt with them so they would likely fit her good, I then searched around for a tee shirt and came back up with an only slightly wrinkled dark blue shirt that had a narrow strip down the right breast that shoed part of an American flag. Nodding to myself I walked back out and handed her the clothes, she looked at them, her silver eyebrows raising into her hairline and disappearing.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Men's clothing?" she asked in a skeptical voice.

"I don't own anything but men's clothing," I said with a shrug. "Besides, anyone can were a teeshirt and cargo shorts, I would give you a pair of pants, but with how much taller I am they would look ridiculous."

"And this doesn't?" she asked her eyes narrowing. "What do you take me for? Women don't wear trousers, it's not proper." I looked at her and had to cough to cover up my laugh. It made sense, I mean after all if she was from some magic world or whatnot, then likely women would wear dresses all the time, just like in every fantasy setting that was even slightly medieval.

"You can wear shorts and-" I paused about to say pants but rather went with the word she had used. "And trousers, most women do nowadays," she looked like she didn't believe me, so I pulled out my phone and did a quick google search, turning the screen so that she could see the results. Her eyes widened, and she snatched the phone out of my hands looking it over like she had never seen one before.

[Ityira]

"What form of enchantment is this?" I asked, turning the small black slab over and over in my hand, examining it from every angle.

"Enchantment?" he asked and I took my eyes off of the artifact and looked up at him. He was a tall man, like my father, well perhaps a few inches taller even, and was built decently well across the shoulders. He had soft blue eyes and an easy smile that seemed to always be half unbelieving. "What the phone?" he asked and glanced down at the artifact in my hand, I nodded and flipped it back to the side that displayed the women. They were rather scandalously clad, with large sections of skin showing, both on their legs and thighs as well as their shoulders, in fact the artifact was displaying a rather large number of women dressed so. "It's not enchanted," he said with a shrug, "It's just a phone," the look on my face must have conveyed confusion because he went on to explain. "Its uh, technology, not magic, it allows us to speak anybody no matter how far away, so long as you have their number, it also does some other things but that is its main function."

That was a rather shocking assertion.

"You jest," I said out of reflex.

"Nope," he said, and while I didn't quite know what the word nope meant considering its context I think I understood his meaning.

"Your telling me that you can speak to any being you want in the entirety of your universe as long as you have this number you describe? By just entering it into this artifact?" I asked.

"Yep," he replied, "so long as they also have a phone." I examined his face, he looked relaxed and amused, he did not look as if he was dissembling. Even so he had to be.

"You lie," he shook his head and leaned forward, touching the surface of the artifact, pulling his finger up in a quick motion across it, and as I watched the surface of it changed. It no longer displayed the women, but rather a series of square pictures arranged in a neat row one on top of another, with small annotations beneath each. He pressed a small picture at the bottom and a white screen came up, with a listing of writing.

"That's Email," he said, "You can send mail to anyone so long as you have their email address and it gets to them in a minute or two, it's just one of the ways to contact someone with a phone, you can call them, mail them, text them." I turned my gaze away from the phone artifact and to his face.

"Text them?"

"Type them a short message," he said, "type it in, hit send, it goes over to someone else's phone and beeps or buzzes to let them know it has arrived, they can get the message in minutes, seconds even."

"That is extraordinary," I breathed out, looking back down at the artifact in wonder, if it did even half of what he said then-

It moved, like a thing alive in my hand, a buzzing sort of sound and a shaking, before I knew what I was doing I had released it from my hand, pulling myself away from the device in fright, it hit the floor with a dull thump and a flash of annoyance seemed to cross over the man's face. He reached down and picked it up, examining it from all sides before sighing in relief. I felt slightly ashamed, no doubt an artifact like that would be difficult to make, and likely expensive to purchase.

"It's fine," he said, "Just one of those texts I was telling you about," he looked at me, then at the device before a small smile formed on his lips. He held it out to me and I tentatively reached for it, but stopped just short of touching it. "Take it, it won't hurt you," he said with a laugh as he wiggled the device side to side in an enticing manner. I took it, and like he had, once again looked it over from every angle. "It's got games on it," he said, and I looked back upon his face," want me to show you?"

"Games?" this time he nodded.

"Yeah, solitaire, snake, tetris, I think I might even have fruit ninja and angry birds on there still."

"Angry birds?" I asked, and he smiled at me, but in a way that told me he was fighting to not roar with laughter, I chose to ignore that. "I do not know these games," I said, I opened my mouth to say something but he spoke before I could.

"Tell you what," he said, holding his hand out for the artifact, reluctantly I deposited it back into his hand, and watched as he slid it into a slit in his trousers. "Let's go get some breakfast, then go to the mall to get you some clothes," he looked at me sharply, "And you're going to pay me back for the clothes," he said, and I nodded, it seemed like the right response, despite the fact that I didn't have any coinage on me, that was something I would have to figure out later. "Then we can play some games," he said. I looked at his face, once again searching for malice, or an agenda, and found none.

I weighed up my options, mentally tallying everything that I knew, and seeing as there was next to no doubt I was in a foreign place with no knowledge of my surroundings or the culture it was probably best to have a guide of sorts. I nodded my assent and he nodded back.

"Alright," he said nodding back at me, "get changed, we will swing by McDonald's or something." I almost asked him who this McDonald was, but then glanced over at the clothing he had given me, and couldn't help but feel more trepidation about that than anything else...