Mei Ruan May 21th,20XX

“Ah Ah! Let go! I won't run anymore!”

I tried to keep my eyes as far away from the sight in front of me as possible. It was a scene I wasn’t sure I was even allowed to be seeing.

The queen had the man tied up like a present and paraded him behind her like a kite through the streets. The man had stopped struggling by now and simply called down to Heloise to let him down but she pretended not to hear him and maintained her usual gentle smile.

The fairies we passed looked at us oddly like one would look at a circus attraction but none of them approached us with questions.

“Fine! Can you at least take me home? I see your companion picked up my equipment and I'm on a bit of a deadline.”

Heloise didn’t respond but quickly changed directions and increased her pace by a small amount. We flew until we reached the other edge of the city before Heloise finally let the man down and loosened the bindings on him.

He shook off the feelings of being bound like a loose beast with an obnoxious shudder and began to walk past the gates of the humble abode in front of us.

At first, I was preoccupied with lining up where I knew we were on the map with the actual place in front of me, so I didn’t notice but soon it became too obvious to miss.

The closer we got to the house the more his spine straightened, his hair became a bright red and his stride lengthened. By the time we reached the doorway, he looked even younger than I.

“I see you still insist on not letting anyone release this trifling curse.”

“You know exactly why as well Heloise. Don’t be catty.”

“Hm? Catty? I? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Hmm?

Was it just me or did she sound a tiny bit offended?

“Well, I see you eventually perfected that infernal fake attitude of yours.”

“Well, it's much better than running around like a scamp with you as I used too.”

I tried to wrap my head around the image of the dignified queen running around this backwards village like a rascal with this guy but my mind refused to bend so far.

“As much as I've missed bantering with you I can't believe it's happening. What made you break the rest you had been looking forward to so much? Missed me too much?”

She let out an elegant laugh, covering her mouth with her hand and her eyes gently crinkled at the sides. IT was a perfect laugh by any definition but the man seemed to get visibly upset by it.

“As fun as it would be to entertain such a notion, I'm afraid not. It's my grandson.”

And so the upset expression on his face deepened but then halfway it morphed into one of worry.

“The half-breed? Is something wrong with him?”

Before Heloise could respond I had already dropped all the things in my hands and had a sword to his throat. The tip hovered seconds away from his throat and a single sweat drop caressed his forehead and dripped down to his neck.

“I’ll have to ask you to mind your words, sir.”

I didn’t know his relationship to Heloise or what he was to the royal family in general but I wasn’t going to let him get away with badmouthing Cai, even if Heloise seemed okay with it.

“Woah, Heloise would you mind calling your little escort off me so I can explain?”

“Now don’t be rude Milo, that’s my granddaughter in law you’re speaking too. And mind you, if you weren’t a half-breed yourself I wouldn’t have let that slide.”

There were three things in that evenly spoken sentence that shocked the sword out of my hands and onto the ground.

The first was that the queen called me her grand-daughter in law. While I tried not to get too emotional about these things, it took a large pressure off my chest. The second was the name.

We fairies were known for our superiority in magic and our large population but we were lacking in magical technology and engineering. Milo was the name that had helped somewhat even the playing field with the goblins and witches. He was best known for his weapons though and was said to have made almost all the weapons for the past three generations of royalty.

The third and most significant to the immediate conversation was that Milo, this legendary figure, was a half-breed.

But half what?

The man edged two steps away from me and performed an extravagant bow,

“Milo, half-goblin half-fairy engineer, at your service.”

Once again, that shouldn’t have been possible. But even if I used Cai as a rule and not an exception I didn’t see any racial markers on him. If not for him walking around the city like he had lived there his whole life, I would have suspected that he was human.

“You can look as much as you want but you won't find either a horn or a pair of wings on me.”

He jokingly made a sheepish expression and put two hands to his forehead. I was forced to look away, aware of how rude I was being.

“My apologies. I was just surprised.”

He waved me off and gathered his equipment that I had dropped off the floor.

“No problem. At least you didn’t fly up to me and feel me up. Now that would have been uncomfortable.”

He sent a pointed look to Heloise but aside from flashing him another gentle smile, she didn’t react.

“The truth is that I am a half-goblin and half fairy. Only my Father was a fairy and my mother was a goblin. Yeah, I know.”

I quickly wiped off the pitying expression from my face and tried to school my expression into something more earnest. While male fairies were somewhat weaker than the female counterparts Female goblins tended to vary between either strong or dead. There were a few cases of weak female goblins but it was even rarer than cases like Cai’s and now Milo’s.

“The imbalance between the two manifested in me the opposite way it manifested in the little prince. He got both the markers of each race, and I got none. While I was younger I had both a horn and wings, but once I reached maturity they were both weak enough that they cancelled each other out. I couldn’t inherit the goblin genes from my mother, but they were strong enough to cancel out the fairy genes from my father. All in all a mess.”

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear all that.”

He hauled the large bag of equipment onto his work table, where we had somehow arrived at after all that walking and shrugged off my sympathies.

“Don’t think about it too much. It's not like I got nothing out of it. My mother taught me a lot about engineering and my father taught me enough about magic that I can use myself as a research subject. And turn spells into machines.”

He quickly and efficiently unloaded each thing into seemingly random places and soon the workspace was clear, save for two of the materials he had left out.

“I'll be so bold as to assume Heloise here wants me to come with her and help her deal with her precious baby boy.”

And so he was back to poking fun at Heloise. I kept expecting her to blow up at him but somehow that smile, that infernal smile never once cracked.

“Well, since you already know we’re heading out in a few hours. That should be enough to make me a new bow right?”

He scoffed at her tone and retorted in a taunting voice.

“Now what makes you think I would do something like that? I mean, I don’t even know the kid. And I already told you last time that was the last weapon I would ever make for you!”

As he talked he tried a headband around his hair to keep it from going into his eyes and began measuring out pieces of the metal and wool on his desk.

Heloise didn’t grace him with a response and floated out of the room, beckoning me along.

“Come now, we still have some more shopping to do. I can't have my grandson going hungry once we find him.”

Although I didn't have any sort of future sight I could almost feel the sensations of my arms getting heavy with bags and my purse getting much, much lighter.

Cai, you better be okay to receive all of this.