Leander walked up the path to Arwyn’s front door, looking around curiously. The house was located in an old-fashioned suburb, the driveway empty and the lawn indifferently kept. From what he knew, Arwyn was a creature of the indoors, and he could not see the stamp of her presence on the exterior of her home.

Looking at his wrist phone, he saw that he was fifteen minutes early. Briefly wrestling between the options of loitering around suspiciously and potentially catching her unprepared for his arrival, he rang the doorbell.

“Coming!” came her voice from through the door. A rapid patter of footsteps, and then she was there, slightly breathless and smiling. He felt his lips curving upward in automatic response.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Come in, come in!” She beckoned him inside, automatically reaching for the bag of takeout he was holding, its outside printed with the name and logo of a local Japanese restaurant. Slipping off his shoes, he let her lead the way down the hall, following at a slower pace so he could look around.

Arwyn’s home was a slightly cluttered mix of basic self-assembled furniture interspersed with couches and chairs that prioritized comfort over aesthetics. Small potted plants lined the window sills, hardy succulents and cacti that could withstand weeks of neglect. Where there were shelves, they were stuffed top to bottom with books that showed signs of being read multiple times. The walls were mostly bare, with no art or pictures to give any hints as to her preferences in that regard.

The kitchen was more of the same, the appliances plain and functional, a table with four chairs in the attached breakfast nook. Arwyn left the takeout on the table to retrieve cutlery and Leander busied himself by opening the bag and laying out the individual containers, utterly content with the simple domesticity of the moment.

Arwyn turned and saw the unwrapped food for the first time, and he was rewarded with the look of pleased delight that told him he had ordered correctly.

“You got all my favourites,” she said, her wide eyes landing on and mentally cataloguing each dish.[i]

“It was in the manual,” he said, feeling compelled to give credit where it was due, though it in no way dimmed his smug satisfaction at making Arwyn so happy.

“Didn’t you order anything for yourself?” she asked, eyebrows creasing in concern.

He pointed at the small container of sashimi in the corner, which he had added because none of Arwyn’s Japanese restaurant favourites actually contained any raw fish. “I have it on good authority that you are unable to actually finish all of this,” he said with a grin. “We can share the rest.”

“Is this…?”

“Taro[ii] tempura,” he confirmed. Only a minority of restaurants in the area offered it, and he was glad he had searched around until he located one.

Suddenly, he had an armful of warmth and softness as she wrapped him in a hug. “You’re the best,” she murmured against his chest.

He squeezed her close. “You are easy to please,” he murmured back.

They separated enough to take their seats and start eating but stayed in physical contact, her knee pressed companionably against his. The food was good, but he thought that even the most bland and tasteless of dishes would be enjoyable in the moment.

When they finished and tidied up, Arwyn asked, “Would you like a tour?”

“Please.”

She led the way around the main floor and then upstairs, no deviation from her sparse decorating except that she had quite a few stuffed animals that reminded him of her pets in Fantasia.

That and a lot of pillows. “Do you really need five pillows?” he asked teasingly, counting five full-sized versions piled at the head of her bed.

“The fifth one is a bit much,” Arwyn conceded, her delivery so perfectly deadpan that he had to chuckle.

Tour completed, they returned downstairs and settled on the living room couch. “Um, do you want to watch something?” Arwyn asked, reaching for the television remote.

He pulled her close. “If you want. We could just talk.”

“Sure. About what?”

“Anything. Tell me about your family.”

The topic was not one he had planned to bring up, but he realized as he said it that it had been in the back of his mind. Leah’s handbook had included a detailed family tree up to three generations back on Arwyn’s maternal side, but nothing about the paternal line, not even her father’s name.

“Well, there’s me and my older sister Kaylin. My mother has an older sister as well, but she never had any kids, so I don’t have any first cousins. My grandparents have a bunch of siblings each, so I have like twenty second cousins, but I don’t really know any of them.”

“And your father’s side?” he prompted gently.

“Oh.” Arwyn’s tone suggested she had completely forgotten that there might be another half of her lineage. “My mother had me and my sister through artificial insemination with a sperm bank, so I have no idea about my biological father except that he was of Caucasian descent and did not have any history of heritable diseases within three generations.”

Her tone was so completely unbothered that he could not feel any awkwardness in the moment. “You must have had to explain this frequently as a child,” he ventured.

“Sometimes. A lot of people just assumed my mom was divorced and never asked.”

“Did you ever find it difficult?”

“Explaining artificial insemination to other children?” she asked with a grin. “When they were younger, yes.” More seriously, she added, “I never felt I was missing anything, if that’s what you’re asking. My grandparents helped raise me, so I think I got more attention as a child than from a two-parent household where both are working. And I’m extremely similar to my mom; you’ll get it when you meet her. I didn’t need a father figure to learn how to beat up my enemies. I think it bothers my sister more; she cares more about being ‘normal’.”

Leander barely heard the last two sentences. “Am I going to meet her?” he asked. He was surprised his voice still worked.

“Who?”

“Your mother.”

He could see Arwyn mentally replaying her own words and realizing what she had said. Her eyes widened and she blushed, but she did not try to backpedal. “If you’re okay with it. She would want to meet you.”

“I am okay with it.” He was nervous beyond belief at the prospect, but he wanted to know everything about Arwyn, including the people who had shaped her life.

“Right. Um, I’ll have to call her and arrange something.”

“Would you like to meet my parents as well?”

“Yes? That wasn’t supposed to sound like a question. Yes,” she repeated in a much firmer tone.

Whereas she had been completely relaxed discussing her unusual childhood, she was now visibly flustered. “They are both out of the country, so it is not an immediate issue,” he assured her. “Perhaps that is enough talking for today,” he added, reaching for the remote and powering on the television.

Unexpectedly, the simple action earned him a kiss on the cheek, Arwyn’s expression relaxed and warm even before they had chosen anything to watch.

When he looked at her questioningly, she smiled. “You make me feel… safe.”

He kissed her cheek in return. “Good.”

***

◊◊◊

“The both of you are infuriating,” Sirena said, covering her eyes in exasperation. “Who says, ‘that’s enough talking’ as a prelude to watching TV? And you, calling a guy ‘safe’ is like the least sexy adjective ever.”

Fey did not have much to defend herself with against the mermaid’s beration. “He didn’t seem to take it badly?” she said with a sheepish shrug.

“Right, right, right, you’re both completely abnormal.” Sirena shook her head to clear it, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “Okay yeah, it’s fine in Upside Down Land where you both live.” (Insert Australia joke here.)

The party was inside a practice combat instance to let their pets train for the tournament without sustaining real injuries. Amethyst was still confiscated in Caleb’s workshop, so they were having Firefly duel one on one with different Feypets in turn. Currently, the fyrfalcon was engaged in a dangerous game of reflexes with Boris. On the one hand, the land-bound boar had no choice but to wait for a high-speed diving attack before Firefly was in range. On the other hand, Boris was nimble enough despite his bulk to dodge the attack, and follow up with a countering kick that could cripple the light-bodied bird in a single hit if it made contact.

Blade was vocally encouraging his pet and advising her on possible adjustments to strategy and technique, but Fey was letting Boris do his own thing. For one thing, she could tell that the boar was annoyed at being deprived of his usual battle buddy, and that he was not seriously trying to develop an effective counter for flying opponents because he knew that any such attack while Amethyst was on his back would result in a very dead bird as Whip used all that downward momentum against it. For another, she was being evaluated on her love life and earning a solid C by Sirena’s standards, which stressed her out on both an academic and romantic level.

Sirena was alternating between working herself up with the facts of the encounter and trying to calm herself down by reminding herself that both parties in the relationship could not be evaluated by simple human standards. “Like you seriously spent the entire duration of a movie draped all over him but didn’t even kiss?” she asked incredulously, exasperation on the rise again.

“Well, like, we did… on the cheek.” Leander was extremely physically affectionate once he realized that the contact was welcome, but equally careful to avoid pushing her to the point that she got nervous and tense.

Sirena tried another deep breath. “It’s fine. It’s fine. You’re both young. It could take another five years before you two move beyond middle school dating, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s. Fine.”

“It won’t take five years,” Fey protested. “Come on, that was only the second time we’ve hung out in real life.”

“Yes, but you’ve spent the last six months talking every day in virtual reality and he’s already proven that he’s not a creep, he’s really into you despite all the,” she waved vaguely in Fey’s direction, “he’s hot, he’s smart, he’s probably paid pretty well given the company he works for, and he’s somehow not an arrogant asshole despite all of the above. What exactly are you waiting for?”

“I’m not waiting for anything, it’s just an adjustment, okay? I was not prepared for this.”

“Like I said, it’s fine. It’s. Fine.”

“Stop saying it’s fine!”

“Fine, it’s not fine! It’s not fine!”

The glooms squeaked confusedly amongst themselves at the nonsensical exchange and ultimately concluded that they were better off not understanding the category of “romantic relations”, as it appeared to inflict some sort of madness debuff on anyone who started discussing it.

High in the air, Firefly went into a stoop, flames igniting along the edges of her wings as she picked up speed.

Boris trotted a few steps back and forth, forcing the fyrfalcon to adjust the trajectory of her dive multiple times, but ultimately held still until just before impact, diving neatly out of the way as he had multiple times before. This time, however, Firefly flared her flame attack, scorching Boris’ flank despite not scoring a direct hit.

Squealing in pain but in no way hurt enough to lower his fighting abilities, Boris’s eyes flared red as he activated Glare. Caught by its intimidating effect, Firefly’s wings faltered. She slowed, nearly certain to get caught by a counterattack until Blade shouted, “Shake it off!”

The shout clearly had some kind of skill activation associated with it (but clearly the author has fallen victim to sloth and given up on tracking such things), as Firefly stabilized and was able to pull back into the air and avoid being kicked to death. Boris sat and glared up at the escaping bird, clearly putting more effort into seeking her demise than before.

Fey chuckled evilly, seeing the vengeful determination in the boar’s eyes. Boris was the calmest of her pets, but calm and gentle were not the same.

It took Firefly a while to work up the nerve to attack again, but eventually she went into another dive, flaring her fire magic even higher than before. Boris calmly waited, judging the distance as it closed. This time, however, he did not dodge to the side; he leapt into the air and took the collision straight on his chest as flames bloomed and licked at his hide.

Boris grunted with the impact and lost approximately 10% of his health from the flames but landed on his feet alert and ready to fight on. The naturally thick skin of a male boar’s chest and shoulders were developed into actual iron plates in the evolved iron boar, and the fyrfalcon’s claws had not even broken skin, though there were visible gouges in his chest plate.

On the other hand, Firefly had just viscerally experienced the law of conservation of momentum, where her mass, about a tenth of a Fey, went up against Boris’s six-Fey bulk. The boar’s jump meant that their impact had been a fraction of a second earlier than Firefly was expecting, and she was braced wrong for a straight on collision. She wasn’t dead, but she staggered through the air for a few wingbeats before half landing and half crashing on the ground.

Boris did not bother finishing the virtual fight, trotting smugly to where the glooms were cheering excitedly, if mostly silently, their ears undulating like streamers in a breeze. Blade ran for his pet while Fey came to examine Boris’ burns.

“The best offense is a good defence,” Sirena quipped, casting a water-based healing spell over the boar. Firefly, with an incompatible fire affinity, was out of luck and would have to either exit the practice instance or wait to regenerate her health naturally.

Blade walked up, cradling a dazed Firefly in his arms. “[Censored phrase] Fey, your pets are overpowered,” he complained. He had been quite aware of how ridiculously strong Amethyst was, but hopeful that his pet would be able to stand up to Boris, who was a lot more mundane in his skill list compared to the slime.

“I mean, all you had to do was stay out of range,” Fey pointed out, fairly sure that Boris would not have been able to come up with a way to rip the fyrfalcon out of the sky if she had stayed over 15 metres in the air at all times. (Only mostly sure, though. Never underestimate the power of vengeance.)

“Firefly can’t do real ranged attacks.”

“That sounds like a problem you should work on.”

Blade made a face but did not argue. “Okay, let’s fight a gloom next,” he said, wanting some kind of victory under his belt.

“Sure.” Fey turned to her glooms while Blade popped out of the instance to restore Firefly’s health. “Which one of you wants to go up?”

Five of the six glooms raised an ear, the only one not volunteering being Obsidian, who had inherited more of Fey’s lazy tendencies than her wild enthusiasm for random things.

“Okay,” she said to the volunteers. “How do you plan on winning?”

After the question, most of the glooms paused to think, but Shadow promptly shifted into a miniature silhouette of a fyrfalcon, about half of its real size.

“…Have you developed the ability to fly while I wasn’t looking?”

Shadow-the-fyrfalcon nodded.

“No way,” she said, her tone more excited than disbelieving. “I wanna see.”

She threw Shadow in the air and the gloom indeed was able to unfurl its inky wings and take off into the air. (So this is the part where the author massively upgrades the glooms in order to make it seem like they’ve been linearly progressing in strength this whole time despite not playing any major role in a fight for dozens of chapters. Subtle. *smacked by the author-goddess for sarcasm*)

As creatures of elemental darkness, glooms were able to freely manipulate their shape from level 1, but started out insubstantial, lacking the ability to maintain a rigid form. Now at level 56, they had gradually gained the ability to manipulate their density and hardness to approximately that of an living animal, though they were still far from being able to mimick metal weapons the way that Mimi’s Shifty could.

The glooms were able to quickly pick up on any advancement that a fellow shadow-rabbit had invented, so the others soon joined Shadow in the air, flapping their wings clumsily. From there, the experimentation with form and density began, the glooms squeaking their observations to each other as they rapid prototyped[iii] their way towards optimizing for various properties, such as flight speed, maneuverability, and attack power.

Without biological limitations to their body plans, some of the experimental shapes were distinctly odd, occasionally outright terrifying.

Blade re-entered the instance approximately fifteen minutes later, having stopped to grab some food while he was out.

“Okay, we’re re—”

His eyes caught on the shadowy nightmares occupying the air above him.

“Let’s go find some normal people to practice with,” he said to Firefly, turning around and leaving the same way he had arrived.

With Amethyst still with Caleb, there were now no pets who needed to practice for the tournament. Fey looked at Sirena and shrugged. “I guess we can go hunt for items with Mimi?”

“Sure.”

The glooms landed on Boris and resumed their cute and cuddly bunny shapes as they exited the instance.

“I wonder if you could win a match just by making your opponent forfeit immediately,” Sirena mused.

Fey chuckled evilly.

[i] Not that it’s relevant to the story, but the lineup of food ordered includes assorted vegetable tempura, sweet potato rolls, dynamite rolls, dragon rolls, salmon teriyaki, and seafood udon. Yes, the author is aware she is an uncultured heathen.

[ii] Colocasia esculenta, or taro, is a starchy purple-fleshed root vegetable used in a variety of both sweet and savory dishes in cuisines across the world, and is, in the author’s opinion, the most superior root vegetable. She will fight you if you disagree.

[iii] Rapid prototyping is a product development strategy where full-sized, three-dimensional prototypes are created, usually through 3D printing, in order to test its physical properties and usability. The feedback from prototype testing is used to create another iteration of the product, and this is repeated until the design is finalized.