I walked alongside the Kalief and Tzera, my head down to avoid reading their minds. I didn’t normally bother doing it, but I guess I felt guilty about keeping my abilities secret.

“Why do you seem so down?” Kalief asked. I looked up, her thoughts boiling up like I’d taken off earmuffs. [She’s probably really scared.]

“Scared...?” I whispered, fiddling with my fingers nervously.

“What did you say?” she asked, leaning in.

“N-nothing. It isn’t like I’m just sad or anything. I just tend to look down.”

“Oh, you’re that kind of person,” she said as if she’d learned something interesting. [The type to keep their head down in unfamiliar places] “Well, we’re going to do the best we can to make you happy, ok? There’s no need to be scared.” [At least for now.]

I kept being surprised by the Marionettes’ hospitality, despite how obvious it was that they were all good people. Though they seemed to be a small, militant group, they acted more like a community than a platoon.

“Right, Tz- hun?” she asked with a studder, turning to face Tzera.

“Yeah, of course,” he heartily agreed.

We walked mostly in silence, me keeping my head up, this time, but looking away from the two. Although I heard thoughts mostly when I focused on people, I would hear them as vague static if they were in my peripherals, barely louder than tinnitus.

“So, something’s been bothering me,” Tzera said, catching my attention as we turned a corner. “We summoned the ‘strongest person’ from her world, right?” That was news to me.

“Yeah. What about it?” Kalief asked.

He looked back at me. “Well, I’m just curious. How come you’re so...” [meek] “reserved if you’re the strongest person in your world? Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t like power is everything, even in our world, but...W-what I mean to ask is what was your world like?”

“My world is...well, it’s nothing like yours,” I flipped out my cellphone and turned the screen on. “This sort of thing is normal in my world.”

“Huh. What was your life like, though?”

I averted my eyes. “Nothing interesting. I only sat around and entertained myself at my house. I lived with my brother, so I did a bunch of stuff with him.”

“Like what?”

“Well, sometimes we’d go to famous landmarks and fool around, doing dangerous fun stuff for the heck of it.”

“What about monsters?” Kalief asked, “Didn’t you fight those?”

“Monsters? No, we’ve got nothing like that.” I had seen a strange squirrel the other day, but I didn’t realize it was a real monster (if it really was one).

“So, did you not need to fight?”

“Well, the Monster King was originally from my world, so naturally, there were dangerous people like him. As far as wars between nations are concerned, they became rarer later on.”

“Wait, so humans fought humans a lot?” Tzera asked, surprised.

“Yeah, usually,” I said.

“Whack.”

We turned into a wooden door to our left, revealing a kitchen of sorts, which was connected to the mess hall by another door. There was a mix of new and old cabinets and counters, a few sections of which were long broken beyond repair.

Kalief and Tzera began to show me how they cooked, taking me to the freezer in the back of the room, where runes perpetually chilled the air.

Once I saw the plants inside, I began to quiz Kalief on the weird stuff she pulled out.

She opened a wooden case and pulled out a char-colored leaf that glowed a dim white.

“Ohhh, What’s that leaf?” I asked enthusiastically.

She looked at it, then at me with a blank, somewhat confused expression. “A Zhana leaf? It’s from the plants that glow in the moonlights. We use it for teas and seasonings.”

When she opened another case with an onion with long leaves in it, I asked again. “And that’s that?”

“A yunzun. It grows around the mountain. We use it for seasoning, but sometimes we fry it.”

She pulled out another case of large, fuzzy, rigid leaves, and before I could ask about it, she explained. “This is a taakbou. Its found in rocky areas, naturally, but they’re grown frequently in farmland. I chop it up and boil it, usually, but only because I’m too lazy to steam it.” She took a whole bunch of the leaves and threw them into her basket.

“Does it have thorns you need to pluck off it?” I asked, recognizing their rigid shape.

“Yeah, usually. Katchal does all that before they’re stored, though.”

“Thistle it is,” I said with a smile, recording it into my brain’s compendium.

At my unofficial behest, Kalief explained the name, location, and uses of all the ingredients in the refrigerator. It was a lot of fun, and Kalief seemed to find my easy excitement over plants amusing.

Some plants were very similar to my world’s equivalent, like the greenish potatoes she collected(which didn’t really need to be refrigerated, but I kept my mouth shut about it), while others, like the taakbou, had no obvious equivalent. Some were really foreign and seemed to defy what I understood about plants, but most were familiar to some degree.

Eventually, Kalief got to cooking. I watched from the sidelines as Kalief explained her cooking process to me, working off the momentum. Cooking didn’t normally interest me, but learning about how the plants were prepared and listening to Kalief as she gestured to explain her process while her scarf safely(and amusingly) did all the work was engaging enough to keep my attention.

Tzera worked on cutting the meat, looking a little sad I wasn’t interested in his side of the work, and when Kalief was finished preparing one part of the breakfast, he would use ‘Heat Wave’ to cook the ingredients in an oven and ‘Perpetual Flame’ to create a ‘perpetual flame’ cook the stew and tea over a stove, in one big pot.

Their equipment was rudimentary, though strangely advanced at the same time. The stove was made of brick, with a covered tube on the top that could be opened so Heat Wave(a spell) could heat the inside. The tea press, if it could be called that, was a circular pot, where the herbs could be placed in, stirred above the flame, then pressed to the ground with a wooden circle just barely big enough to fit in the pot while still keeping the leaves flattened beneath it. Apparently, they hadn’t invented small-holed strainers yet, which was just plain weird(or maybe the Marionettes didn’t have access to them).

The cooking utensils were fairly typical, though, with the strangest difference being that their forks were two-pronged and intended to be used in combination with what was essentially a chopstick.

It was fairly clear that, if the world was really 108 years old, humans were given quite a few specific headstarts in technology, presumably from the gods. Either that or I was missing something. I would have asked Green about it, but I didn’t have any way to contact the god. What did that guy even do with all his time?

As we neared completion of the breakfast, with the only job left, waiting for the casserole to bake, at a minute from completion, Kalief asked, “Tzera, would you mind telling everyone breakfast is finished?”

“Of course, honey,” he said before leaving.

I quickly asked, “So is it normal to drink tea during breakfast for you all?”

She nodded. “They say that when the Woman in Red was the god who passed the knowledge of tea onto humanity. She insisted that tea, in particular, was for breakfast and breakfast only.” [Don’t ask me why.]

‘insisted’ was a surprisingly flavorful word to use to describe a god’s actions. “What’s your relation to the gods?” I asked.

She looked at me with curiosity. “Well, if you’re talking about humanity as a whole, they’re the people who gave us a lot of the knowledge and power we have today. Everyone is bound to speak to a god at least once since we at least need to speak to the Woman in Red to know what our signature magic is. She’s well known for being difficult, upfront, and mocking, but also cunning, perceptive, and imaginative, since she’s the one who designs the signature magics.” She fiddled with her scarf lovingly. [I still remember when she said I’d look good in blue and white scarfs.]

“Huh...I’m more used to talk of gods being more...vague, or detached,” I said.

“Some of the gods are enigmas, to be fair. The Blue Thing is as mysterious as it is terrifying in nature. It’s known as the origin of magic, but nobody I know has spoken about it in detail before. The only story I’ve heard about them is one where they tricked a priestess into traveling to our world to stop a disease created by the monsters.”

I leaned against the wall, thinking about the implications of it all. If the story was true, then I wasn’t the first person to be sent to the world for the explicit purpose of helping its denizens. “I don’t even know what gods rule my own world...I guess they’re just the laissiez-faire type of gods...” Then, I brought up what had been on my mind since I’d met the girl. “Is Tzera your husband or something?”

She visibly looked annoyed. [Urg, this again...]

“S-sorry,” I quickly said. “Its just, you two don’t exactly...feel like a couple, even though you two are, obviously, in a relationship. I was just curious, sorry...” I trailed off as I realized she was about to respond.

“He...” [I think she’d feel better if I didn’t keep secrets...] “He lost his wife a few months ago. I’m only an old friend of his.”

That was the first time any of them had mentioned someone that had died recently. It was easy to hear the bitterness in her voice. “S-sorry, I really didn’t mean to ask something so per-”

“After she died,” she continued, intentionally interrupting me with an annoyed inflection, “I was the only person he knew who wasn’t a corpse. The Monster King attacked us with a fleet of gargolzytes and rust dwellers, and as the village’s strongest fighter, I was issued with protecting Tzera, our most effective healer, if things got rough. In the end, I was forced to leave the village with him wrapped in my scarf, begging...” She paused, looking down. “Begging to see his wife.”

“T-that’s...” I began before being interrupted by her again.

“He had a breakdown in front of me when we got to safety, and-”

“Breakfast is ready, everyone!” I heard Tzera’s voice boom about the kitchen as if through a loudspeaker. “Line up in the kitchen so our new stew pourer can hand you your share!”

Kalief sighed, then cleared her throat. “After that, I began making him food, keeping him alive. He...called me Kalief, his wife, and so I...I guess I decided that would be my name from then on. If I tried to tell him I wasn’t...I don’t know. He’d just have another breakdown. I’m afraid he might just...” [kick the bucket then and there.]

I looked at her with an expression that was, in retrospect, a little too passionate, like I thought she was crazy. “That...he’s never going to get out of that mentality...if you keep pretending to be his wife...”

“Yeah, I get it,” she said, a little aggravated. “Tzera needs to face reality.” She waved me off, stern. “I understand what you’re trying to say. Chances are, I’m going to end up coddling him until this war ends, and it will really hurt him once this inevitably blows up. The thing is, I’m not ready to do that. Not right now. I don’t know if this is best for him; to keep up this facade. Still, I’m happy with my choice. It hurts a lot more to be uncertain and possibly wrong than it does to be confident and possibly wrong.”

I remained silent, stunned at everything she had said. I lowered my head. “I’m...sorry you need to go through all of this.”

“You’ve got jack shit to do with my problems, lady. No need to apologize,” Kalief snapped back.

I felt a little offended by the last comment, but when my astray thought process came upon a distressing thought, I blurted out, “Wait, d-does he make you...d-do things with him?!”

She reeled back in surprise. “No, what the heck!? There’s no way in hell I want to do that with a guy. Besides, he might be mentally unsound, be he’s self-aware enough to not fuck his childhood friend! If he tried that shit with me, I’d freaking cut him with Elysia!” She slashed her scarf in front of me quicker than my eyes could track it in a show of force, causing me to freeze in sudden fear. It was presumably this ‘Elysia’ in question.

A loud ‘thwack’ impacted a stone counter, leaving a small crater in it and sending shrapnel flying about. I nervously watched as Kalief looked between it and her scarf in confusion. She thought about how it made no sense that her scarf had made the crater while my mind raced to think of ways I might reason out the random event, which was most certainly not caused by my runaway psychic powers, if anyone asked.

I hadn’t noticed until then, but the man with the knives at his belt had walked in a few seconds ago. He watched with me as, for whatever reason, Kalief began wildly spinning about the kitchen with her scarf, the apparel swinging about so fast that it could easily decapitate my head if I walked a little too close.

The knife dude looked at Kalief with a mystified expression. “Kalief? What are you doing? That’s dangerous.”

“Just making sure there’re no invisible monsters lurking in my kitchen,” she said, coming to a halt. “Psychi, I’m not the only one who saw that crater appear out of nowhere, right?”

I shook my head, feeling guilty about gaslighting the girl. “Nope, definitely was just your scarf. I saw it hit the counter, for sure.”

“Really...?” she said as if disappointed. [I swear Elysia was a full meter from it!]

“Well, anyway,” the knife guy said, “can I have my breakfast or not?” [How obviously can one lie?]

“Oh, right. Psychi, I’m leaving that job to you. Pull the trays, bowls, cups, and plates out of that cabinet, then get him breakfast, ok? I’m going to talk to Vrazel about something Daakyn asked me. Just ask Katchal over there to cast Message on me if you need to talk.” Kalief walked out of the kitchen rather quickly, leaving me alone with Katchal.

He patiently waited as I prepared his food, and I occasionally glanced at him, reading his thoughts as I did so. Eventually, I walked over to him with his tray and handed it to him.

[It wouldn’t be too far-fetched if she did have her powers back...I’ll just talk to Chara about it, for now.]

He walked out like he didn’t suspect a thing.

Had he really not caused a stink over it?! I shrugged and tried to turn my brain off, relaxing as people filed in and waited on me for their breakfast.

It was boring work, but it gave me time to relax my brain and feel useful, and I liked that.

It felt easy.