WE’RE NOT HERE

Ela Bambust

Prologue

It’s easy, even tempting, to think of the universe as obeying the laws of mathematics. This is, in part, because it appears to follow the laws of physics, and there’s no way mathematicians were going to let physicists get away with being right all the time without having a say of their own. Everything can be, eventually, calculated. Although there appear to be more letters involved than numbers, mathematicians will swear high and low that this is normal, and that the universe runs as it should.

In such a universe, if parallel realities existed, it would not be inconceivable that these exist due to minute divergences in probability, quantum fluctuations of particles so small they barely ever get chosen for soccer practice, and choices made by human beings, leading to an infinite string of realities, all slightly different from each other, stretching in every conceivable temporal and existential direction.

This would, of course, be wrong. In actuality, reality is a mess. If, at some point, the archeologists of reality went through it with brushes and fine-tooth combs, they would find that the whole thing chooses to obey some laws sometimes and others at other times. That, while alternate realities most definitely appear to exist, they do not line up in a neat and orderly line like mathematicians would like you to believe. In reality, they tend to hang around, meandering this way and that, popping in and out of existence for no real reason other than that they seem to enjoy doing so. And sometimes, two universes will sort of… click. These are often not related, have very few interactions, and just hang out near each other until one or the other goes *pop*. The universe, it seems, is cold, empty, and likes to keep a close circle of friends.

But every once in a while, two universes hanging out will have things in them. If these things can walk, talk and invent multi-level marketing, things get very messy, very fast. Especially if one of universes is significantly stranger than the other.

Imagine such a pairing. Two universes, gently vibing across the vast garbage heap of possibilities that is all of reality. These two worlds have been hanging out for some time, and, much like a married couple or a single alone-but-not-lonely person and their pitbull, they’ve begun to look alike. Certainly, both of them have two-legged creatures that have taught themselves to pee standing up and sitting down, but more significantly, both worlds tick by the same clock. There’s a little overlap, and like anyone who has tried to sit down on a chair already occupied by a cat, you know that overlap can cause problems and possibly minor-to-severe lacerations. Sometimes, things bleed over. Sometimes, a tick in one world will be followed up by a tock in the other.

They’re not in sync, but like two people trying to sing “Happy Birthday,”  they occasionally -- and entirely accidentally -- harmonize. It’s little things, of course. They are, on the surface, very different. One of these two worlds has dragons, knights, heroes and villains, magic and actual proof of the existence of souls. The other one has stand-up comedians, and is undoubtedly the stranger one of the two.  

But you know that one already . For now, we’ll focus on the other one. The one that has impractically large swords , improbably spacious backpacks and unrealistically advanced sensibilities surrounding hygiene and footwear. The one with dragons in it .

Tick

Chapter 1

The mountain was perilous. That wasn’t particularly noteworthy; mountains have a tendency to be perilous, depending on how you approach them, even though this one was particularly  perilous. It had a perilousness that was very deliberately manufactured. That didn’t mean the people currently trying to go up it were going to stop , of course. They weren’t those kinds of people. Only that they were going slowly, finding footing on snowy paths and climbing icy walls. Occasionally, one of them, a little shorter, would curse, or lose their footing. The other would chide them or rescue them, respectively, easily catching them with a single hand, before they resumed their climb.

They had been climbing for two days, and the storm hadn’t let up at all, and if this had been a more leisurely, extreme-sports kind of life-risking scenario, even the most extreme of sports enthusiasts would have parachuted home already. Sadly for the two climbers, this wasn’t that kind of climb, nor did they have access to parachutes. This one was important, more important than mild frostbite or the risk of death-by-lack-of-parachute.

Neither of them spoke as they continued to climb, until, upon reaching a sort-of-horizontal ledge, the shorter one made a grunting noise that could possibly be interpreted as ‘ I am getting tired ’ or maybe ‘Hey, I can’t really tell through this blizzard, but I think it’s starting to get late and we should consider finding shelter .’ But for the most part, it sounded like they said ‘ghnk’ . The taller figure looked up the mountain and the hood of their cloak -- because it’s simply bad form to climb a dangerous mountain without  a hooded cloak -- was thrown back by the gale. He had a cloth wrapped around the lower part of his face, and his bright blue eyes tried to pierce the blizzard to no effect. He ran a hand through his hair and then pulled the hood back up, before it (or his hair) snapped off in the cold, and grunted.

It didn’t take them very long to find some kind of outcropping. Just like the cloaks and the snow, the small cave, hiding them from the cold and the wind, was almost traditional. There was always one, when you needed it. You just had to know where to look. And he knew where to look. He’d done this before. Well, not this exactly, but he’d found that, in life-or-death situations, things had a tendency of working out if you really believed in yourself, paid close attention. He had also figured out that it was still a lot easier if you had a sharp sword and a lot of coin, but those were details.  He was, after all, a Hero. His companion blew on some sticks that had blown into the little outcropping some time ago, and it didn’t take them very long to catch fire.

“You’ll have to teach me that trick some time,” he said with a smirk as he unwrapped the scarf dramatically. The woman threw her own hood back and warmed her hands by the slowly expanding fire. It wasn’t much, but it was some warmth. He sat a little closer to the fire, hoping to get some feeling back in his fingers. She smiled back.

“Then what would you need me for?” They shared a look that had Meaning in it. Many times, travelling companions will, of course, share moments of quiet contemplation. This contemplation can range from ‘ I wonder what this person tastes like’ to ‘I wonder what this person tastes like’ , on two opposite sides of the spectrum. But even then, there is a special category reserved for Meaningful Looks. Meaningful Looks exist on their own, and are universal across all dimensions. Meaningful Looks span a wide range of emotions and whether that is ‘ Don’t pick a fight with your uncle during Thanksgiving  dinner again’  or ‘ If you don’t cover your mouth the next time you cough, there -will- be violence’  or even ‘I know we used to date, but what you just said kind of crossed a line and I just want you to be aware that I’m aware that you just did that.’ It was that kind of Meaningful Look. “I didn’t mean --” the woman said, lowering her head.

“I know,” the man replied, and blew on his fingers. The cave was silent except for the obtrusive sound of snowy winds outside and the soft crackling of the fire. “We should get some rest. We’ll want our strength tomorrow.” The girl nodded and pulled her cloak a little tighter. He hoped they’d both at least be thawed out before morning. The fire wouldn’t go out, he knew, but mountain caves have a habit of being badly insulated. At least there wouldn’t be any lions, tigers and/or bears to contend with.

“Do you think we’ll… you know…” the girl mumbled, her sentence petering out as she stared into the fire. He could see doubts dancing in her eyes, alongside the bright flames. He also wasn’t going to make any assumptions about what she was going to say. Assumptions had carried him far, but had also carried him right back, with only some emotional bruises to show for it. She looked at him and saw he wasn’t going to be finishing her sentence for him. “...make it,” she added.

“Of course. We should reach the top of the mountain tomorrow,” he said, turning his eyes away from her.

“I meant --”

“I know what you meant,” he sighed ominously . “Sorry. I just... “ He leaned back against the wall of the cave and immediately pretended like he hadn’t just bumped his head against a particularly pointy piece of rock. He was going to have to act like his hissed breath had to do with his own growing trepidation. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t really scared of the next day. Sure, the climb would be arduous and hard, and the castle would be foreboding and scary, and She  would be tough, but he’d be alright. He always was. “I’ll… It’ll be fine,” he said. He didn’t like the idea of lying to her, but he also didn’t want to tell her that his companions had a tendency to die, often in very unpleasant ways, at the end of a journey like this. In his defense, he had tried to leave her behind the first day, but she’d been remarkably persistent. That had been months ago. He ran a hand over his face. He was tired . Very tired. There was the whole two-day-mountain-climb thing, but it was more than just that. If -- When  he reached the top and saved the world, that would make four.

Four times he’d saved the world. Like, all of it. Even the ugly bits. There were a lot of ugly bits, because as soon as you get taxes and some basic capitalism in a universe, you’ll quickly have ugly bits. Throw some monarchies in there and you’ll find yourself in a universe that has issues looking in the mirror in the morning. A universe only a creator could love. And, despite seven separate religions claiming otherwise, this one didn’t have any, and the Hero could feel  it. He wasn’t destined to save the world. The world was just kind of really bad at staying in one piece, often in dire need of saving and he was the best man for the job. Not that he was happy  about it. Sure, there were perks and a lot of coin, but his shoulder told him when it was about to rain and he couldn’t turn his head all the way left anymore.

“Get some rest,” he said. He looked at the woman again and sighed. They had a history, because of course they did. He was the kind of person who had Histories with people, and most, if not all, of those ended up in narratively satisfying but ultimately physically unpleasant places. There had been a lot of dying and a lot of crying and parting of ways. He remembered some old friends when he looked at her, and wished he didn’t. They had all had a similar look on their faces the night before, and it had always ended the same way. Narratively satisfying. There was probably going to be a heroic sacrifice of some kind. He kept his emotions off of his face. She’d be remembered. He could promise her that much, at least, if not out loud.

The wind was howling outside, and under normal circumstances, it would have been too loud to allow either of them to fall asleep. These weren’t  normal circumstances. He was too tired to be bothered by cold or noise, and before long, he was asleep, wrapped in his cloak in front of the fire. If he had stayed awake, he would have seen the apologetic look on the woman’s face before she, too, fell asleep. The fire didn’t go out, as the Hero had predicted, but the next day wasn’t going to go nearly  as well as he thought it was going to go. For one thing, while he most definitely was going to save the world, he was also going to end up very, very  dead.

Further up the mountain, Evil went to sleep. Well, an  Evil. So the Hero had been told, anyway. Things got tricky when it came to Evil. ‘Capital E’ Evil, the Hero knew, was different from evil, in the sense that it was more focused, more powerful, but also required a lot more effort. Little evils happen all over the universe, insidious little acts -- or a lack thereof -- that make the lives of others marginally worse. Things like unscrewing salt shakers, not putting your hand in front of your mouth, or taking the last of a product you don’t really need. There’s also medium evils, where you participate in a system that is actively making the world a worse place to live in. It’s snitching on a victimless crime or shoving someone out of your way, yelling at someone who has done nothing wrong and is in no position to respond, like retail workers.

But Evil, with a capital E, is different. It gets up in the morning and decides to do something that is objectively immoral, and can not be justified, no matter how hard someone might try. That kind of Evil commits atrocities and goes for ice cream after. It burns down your house and has a bag of marshmallows already at hand. It smiles in your face, offers you a glass of water and compliments your haircut while it repossesses your house. Capital E Evil  was currently flossing, because she was about to go to bed. She’d been doing some work terrorizing, there had been some wailing and gnashing of teeth, and, all things considered, it had been a productively Evil day.

She looked forward to tomorrow. She was going to take a day off, have a lie down, maybe a nice meal, a walk around the castle, maybe play a bit of dress-up, count her money, all of that. Well, she wanted to do that. She wasn’t actually going to do any of that. She was actually going to die, quite suddenly and violently.

The next day was going to be very eventful for everyone involved, and that wasn’t even going to be the worst of it. Because, across the gulf of reality, a lot of things were about to very coincidentally and very awkwardly come together to make everyone’s lives a lot more complicated. Because even the uncaring void likes to have a little giggle every now and again, and random chance sometimes really likes to go for that one-in-a-million chance (as a joke), this world, on which both the Hero and Evil were about to die, was about

to                                 

 go

Tick

Chapter 2

The next morning came and the blizzard, it seemed, had died down a bit. The sun seemed to be having an off day, and was doing only the bare minimum, illuminating the landscape not unlike mildly ineffective fluorescent light bulbs in a convenience store whose best days were some twenty years ago. It was, all things said and done, dim. The fresh snow was stark by contrast to the grey skies, and there was a part of him that felt bad for trudging through it the way he did. The last leg of their journey had been fairly easy, partly because of the improved weather. The wind no longer tried to freeze the air in their lungs; the cold no longer inconveniently whipped their scarves in their faces at inopportune moments. Instead, it was simply freezing, and the silence, the crunching of snow under their feet, the icy cold, had created an atmosphere of stillness. A world figuratively and literally frozen in place. It was only a few hours of walking, and the Hero tried not to take too many breaks. For one, it would give the sweat in their clothes the time to cool off and freeze them all the way through. The other was that he wanted to get this over with.

The Black Castle came into view. It was, indeed, ominous.  Not only was it ominous, it was the kind of castle that other castles looked up to and wanted to be like when they grew up.  It had parapets and machicolations and buttresses, often in places where they weren’t strictly speaking necessary. All over were gargoyles and statues, banners and etchings and reliefs. It was a castle that looked like it had been designed by an architect with a severe caffeine  addiction and unlimited supply of pencils, told not to stop until they ran out of graphite, paper, or, ideally, both. To call the castle ornate was an understatement. It was like calling the surface of the sun ‘a bit warm’ or invading Russia in winter ‘a slight goof’. It was a big castle, the Hero decided, though he’d seen bigger. As he approached, he heard a gasp behind him. His companion had clearly only now looked up and must have seen the fractal disaster that was the castle. He absent-mindedly wondered if the castle had a lot of pigeons. Depending on the eating habits of the gargoyles, the castle could be either literally or figuratively pigeon-heaven.

Slowly, the large gatehouse came into view, its front gate wide open like a gaping, inviting maw, the large, toothy portcullis hanging heavily overhead only adding to the illusion. The Hero walked in without pause. To his companion, it looked as if he fearlessly trod into danger. In reality, he simply really wanted to stamp his feet on ground that wasn’t powdered water, and being out of the snow was as much of a relief as he figured it would be. Besides, he wasn’t worried. If he had things figured out correctly -- and he definitely sometimes did -- the place was likely deserted. There would be no armed guards, no gnomes or kobolds or trolls or even mild variations thereof. Besides, getting food and supplies up here would be impractical bordering on the impossible. The only one here would be Her.  

He looked behind him to see his companion take down her hood and shake off her cloak. He watched for a few seconds, waiting until she was ready, then nodded. “Your fingers not too stiff?” She shook her head.

“Not for this.” If the situation had been different, that might have called for a mildly vulgar joke, perhaps even a lewd joke or a dirty limerick, but neither of them were particularly in the mood about short comedic poetry about a girl from Malinger, even if   she was a singer. He put his hand on his sword -- the sharp, metal, stabby one -- and moved into the castle. The woman was right behind him. The walls of Black Castle were tall, imposing, and just as much of a graphic designer’s nightmare from the inside.

The two of them walked across a large courtyard which was sheltered, if not from the snow, then at least from the wind. Some crows watched them ominously. One of them squawked in a way that sounded suspiciously like a gleeful little snigger, and the Hero shot them a look. They shot one back, eyes big and beady. He glared. They glared more. He gritted his teeth and stared at them full force, which the birds seemed to accept as being the match-winning point, and flew off. Consciously, he was aware that ominous corvids were part of a decor like this, but he wasn’t looking forward to the rest of his day, and he didn’t need any sass. Not even from crows.

Him and his companion reached the large front gate, which was unlocked. Not surprising. There is no real reason to lock your door when you live on the edge of the world, on top of the tallest mountain, surrounded by a magical blizzard. As he entered, he did briefly wonder if it ever blew open because of the wind, and how bad it was to heat up a place like this. Although, for someone like Her , that probably didn’t really matter. He closed the door behind them and looked around. Long, bland hallway. He’d seen the kind before. Some tapestries showing the history of the Great Demon King, his ascent to power, etcetera. He didn’t even really give them a look, though he slowed down his pace to allow his companion a moment to stare. He wasn’t interested in the story being depicted. For one, he did not  care. For another, he had seen this story before, when he’d killed the Demon King ten years ago. That was -- he had to pause for a moment -- the second time he’d saved the world. Huh. Time flies when you’re having fun and/or keeping the free world free.

The Demon King had been an unpleasant figure all-around. He was rude, largely unfamiliar with the concept of personal hygiene and, for that matter, decency, personal space or volume control, and, perhaps more importantly, had been known to engage in killing, attempting genocide, and general large scale mayhem. The Demon King had been, the Hero had quickly understood, a real bastard. He had also, apparently, liked neither dogs or  cats, which was a ridiculous character trait to have. It was something he had brought up on more than one occasion, too. So the Hero had unceremoniously turned him into paste by dropping a castle tower on him. Some things just had to be done, and he had done them. He noted, as he walked down the hall, that the tapestries left out the part where the Demon King, who seemed to be portrayed as heroic in this story, had been turned into a sort of purple-brown smear on the ground. They also seemed to try to imply that he had given a heroic final speech after having been slain by the (obviously treacherous) human, leaving out the part where his actual last words had been ‘Hahahuhhhrhgh?’. In the defense of the artists who had woven the tapestry, that was a lot of h’s to put into a single word. Wouldn’t want the story to be as ridiculous as the reality had been.

They came to a large set of doors that had light coming from behind it. There was also some warmth seeping in through the crack. He looked at his companion. They both knew this was it, the woman’s hands raised and glowing a gentle purple, but the Hero didn’t draw his sword yet. For one, pushing open a large set of doors dramatically was a lot easier to do with both of your hands free. Second, with his sword out, he wouldn’t be the first adventurer to rush into danger only to find himself rapidly inhaling the wrong end of his sword. If he was going to stumble on entering the Evil Throne Room -- which was undoubtedly what was behind that door -- it wasn’t going to kill him. Even with decades of experience, he was well aware that one of the leading causes of death among the heroically-inclined was overzealousness. After you killed a dragon, it was hard to imagine being killed by a toy car on the stairs, which made it all the more important to take precautions.

Dramatically, he pushed open the doors with both hands, letting them swing widely. They had been better oiled than he’d imagined, and their dramatic swing was slightly marred by the fact that they hit the walls on either side and then immediately bounced back, and both of them had to do a little hop forward to avoid getting smacked in the face by the giant wooden doors. This led to his entrance being a lot less imposing than he’d hoped, and he really hadn’t expected it. Giant wooden doors had to be loud and groaning, hard to open, ideally maybe even creak. It was traditional . At least a lot of the Evil Throne Room was up to snuff, even though there was a noticeable lack of cobwebs or skulls lying in corners.

The room itself reminded him a lot of the old Demon King’s throne room. It had been in a castle not unlike this one, a few hundred miles south. That one had been his, well, summer home, by the lake, and from there he had launched his assaults on the free world. Getting there had been a mess and a half, with unkempt roads and even more unkempt soldiers, but eventually, the Hero had managed to push the Demon King and his army back to his castle, where he slew, smote and inconvenienced the King and his most loyal -- and dangerous -- commanders. The throne room had been a real battlefield, and in the end, not much had been left standing. At one point, the king had been trying to hit him over the head with the throne. Not his most glorious moment, that. Right now, however, this particular throne was currently occupied by someone a lot different from the old Demon King. Well, in some ways. In others, she was very similar. Same set of horns. Same dark reddish skin, like a particularly vivid grape. Same stature, which was over nine feet tall (without the horns). Same eyes -- big, red, glowing, malicious.  

What also drew his eye was the way in which she wasn’t like the Demon King. There was a lot more leg, for one. Not that she had any more than the standard two, but they did seem to occupy a lot more space than those of her predecessor. There was also the little crown, which was a lot smaller than that of the Demon King. Finally, there was her battle-armor, which left a lot less to the imagination. He couldn’t help but wonder if that was deliberate. She appeared to have been expecting him.

“I have been expecting you,” she said with a breathy voice. Some traditions were just not made to be ignored, after all, and it seemed like the Demon Queen (or, colloquially, the Demon Dragon  Queen, although that was a bit of a mouthful that not everyone was keen on) was in the mood to uphold at least the most important ones. She was lying, of course, but he didn’t know that. He had missed the part where she had noticed him at the last minute and had  rushed to her armory, gotten dressed as quickly as she could, and had only barely managed to sit down just in time to look like she had been waiting for him with a bored expression on her face.

“I’m here to stop you,” he said, because he knew the steps to his side of the dance just as well. He’d played this part a couple of times -- one time with a giant snake and a lot of garlic bread, which the bards always failed to mention -- and he knew his lines.

“Okay,” she said, and the Hero felt the tension in the room dissipate a little bit.

“Okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, it would be silly of you to come all this way and not try , right?”

“Do you know who I am?” he asked. The situation wasn’t going exactly as he had planned, and it was confusing him a bit.

“Well, yes. You killed my father.”

“Exactly!” he said, glad that things were getting back on track. “And now, Evil Demon Dragon Queen, I have come t--”

“Thank you for that, by the way,” she said, interrupting him with a little smirk.

“What?”

“Thank you. If you hadn’t killed him, my mother, his brother, one of my sisters, my brother, my grandmother , or I would have, but you know… it saved us the hassle.”

“It saved… you…”

“The trouble of having to kill him, yes.”

“ Why?! ” The Hero took a step forward in annoyance. He had completely lost control of this situation and it wasn’t sitting well with him. Sure, she was playing the haughty bits perfectly, but the threatening part was absolutely missing, and it was causing him to break his stride. “Why kill him?”

“Because he was an embarrassment,” she said. “Loud, obvious. Begging to be slain, really.” The Demon Queen stood up. “Though I suppose you’re here to kill me, too.”

“Yes,” he said, and drew his sword.

“If we have to,” the Demon Queen responded, and drew a long, thin sword of her own. Behind the Hero, the young woman raised her hands, which crackled with arcane energies. “Is it too late to tell you that we don’t have to do this, join me, etcetera?”

“Yes,” he said, and raised his weapon.

“I’m just… not in the mood?” she tried.

“No, that’s not going to work today,” he said. “Your evil will end. Here. This night.”

“It’s two in the afternoon.”

“This afternoon.”

“My evil hasn’t even started yet,” she said, and he could swear she was pouting. He frowned. She was Evil Incarnate, after all, so her objection felt dishonest. Right? “But if it’s a fight you want,” she said, and the air between them exploded.

Chapter 3

Something they don’t tell you about swords is that they’re heavy. It’s easy to imagine yourself swashling and buckling, wisecracking while you match wits and swords with your opponent. Most children have, at some point, picked up a stick and swished it around like a saber, sometimes making swoosh-noises with their mouth, imagining themselves some noble knight or princess (or both) that will save the day by clashing swords with the villain. In reality, swinging a sword for five minutes will leave your arms sore for the rest of the day, and any kind of fight -- sword or otherwise -- will often see you way too out of breath to crack wise. It’s a fun fantasy to have, and with training, you can probably throw out a pun or two while waving around a slab of iron that weighs as much as a baby taped to a stick, but even then you’ll have to really concentrate, because you’re often also trying to avoid getting hit over the head with an equally oversized shaving implement by someone who is most likely much more focused on your footwork than your verbal sparring.

All that said, the Hero was tired. His back hurt. His ears were ringing. It was hard to see out of his left eye and he was pretty sure one of his ears had just up and left at some point. Not that he could really feel much on that side of his head anymore; not that it mattered . His arms were heavy. His sword was heavier, the tip almost-but-not-quite dragging across the snowy ground. He stood outside the castle, and approached the Demon Queen, standing at the edge of the mountaintop. She looked as bad as he felt, although she still managed a smile.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he responded. There was more to say, of course, but quipping gets harder and harder when you have a concussion and your head has been treated like a particularly popular percussive instrument. He looked behind him. There were chunks missing from the castle. Somewhere in there was the young woman, unconscious but alive. He was pretty sure, at least. He couldn’t exactly go and check, so with a sigh he resigned himself to probably never finding out, and turned back to the Demon Queen.

“You really don’t want to try the whole ‘joining me’ thing?” she asked weakly. “Maybe surrendering. I promise I’ll be gentle.” He grimaced, and then found his expression softening into a smile.

“No,” he said, “I don’t think I do. What about you? Do you want to renounce your demonic heritage and stand trial before the House of Lords?” He took the time to stretch his back and realized what a bad idea that was. For one, the calm was giving him time to realize just how much pain he was actually in. There was also the possibility that she was charging up for another attack, although she didn’t look like it. But she could always be deceiving him.

“Hah!” she said. “No, I don’t think that would change things very much. I would prefer to end things here one way or another than to be publicly executed.” She raised a hand, but no magic flame, no dark surge of power came out. Somewhere in the fight, she had been disarmed, but that had made her no less dangerous. She’d flung spell after spell at him, and he’d barely been able to dodge most of them.

Most people think fighting a wizard is like fighting someone with a bow and arrow, that it’s a matter of deflecting or avoiding fireballs, zaps of purple energy or easily-reflected beams of deadly light. In reality, most people would not survive a fight with a magician, wizard, enchantress or similar. After all, an arrow can only put a hole in you. Sure, a painful and possibly lethal one, but that is the whole of it. A demon witch can turn your blood into soup, or your brain into a clump of cutlery (presumably spoons, for the soup), and contrary to popular belief, magic doesn’t have to go in a straight line, or in a line at all. It was only because the Hero had been wearing several layers of clothing with various magical protections that he hadn’t been turned into several confused ferrets or, less charmingly, inside out. Sure, he’d lost both his gloves -- they’d scurried off, dooking furiously at him -- but that had been an acceptable loss in a fight like this.

“You don’t seem to be doing too well, Fiend,” he said. He didn’t know why he’d called her a fiend. It seemed to be the thing to do. She was an Evil Demon Dragon Queen, ostensibly The  Evil Demon Dragon Queen, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be a little courteous, at least. He wasn’t wrong, though. The reason she hadn’t raised both her hands was because one arm hung limply by her side, and she was bleeding a deep purple from a multitude of small and not-so-small cuts. She was also breathing heavily.

“Well… first of all, that’s not a very nice thing to say to a lady,” she replied.

“You did try to kill me several times,” he said.

“You started it,” she pointed out.

“A fair point,” he conceded.

“Second,” she said, and took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt. She winced, and he mirrored the expression out of sheer sympathy. “Neither do you.” He couldn’t help but feel like she was probably right. He’d taken a serious beating and one of her more explosive attacks had missed him by that  much. If he survived this, his armor would be worth less than scrap, and he himself wouldn’t be doing much hero-ing anymore. He briefly wondered how he was going to get down the mountain. Maybe there was some kind of magic inside that would make things easier? He shook his head. The time for things like that was on the other side of the foggy bank of the unknown future.

“Do you think you still have enough in you to kill me?” he asked. It was a taunt, sure, but it was, he would have to admit, an honest question, too. He was on his last legs, at the end of his rope and possibly knocking at A Door -- if not Death’s, then at least Fate’s. The Demon Queen again sidestepped the script a little by shrugging.

“I don’t know,” she said, and then that little smile appeared on her face again. “I think I might have enough juice left for one more deathly curse. What about you? That sword isn’t too heavy for you yet?”

He shook his head. “I think I can manage another charge,” he said. “You can still give up.”

“Thanks,” she said. “You too.” They stood opposite each other for a moment, and it started to snow. It was a perfectly dramatic moment, not ruined by noise, by sound of any kind. Even the wind had died down enough for them to have this quiet conversation on a snowy mountain at the edge of the world. The Hero, having been a hero for some time now, of course knew what this meant. While he wasn’t the most learned or the most well-spoken, he knew his narrative contrivances, the rules of the story. This was the end. The end of the world, the end of the Demon Queen (he hoped), and most definitely the end of the story. His story, maybe. But definitely the end of a  story. It was all too too perfect  for it not to be. The universe might not have a sense of humour, but it’s definitely a drama queen when it wants to be. He raised his sword, for possibly the last time.

“Any last words?” he asked. Maybe she’d say something profound, and he’d pass it on. He’d asked the question before and nine times out of ten, the other person ended up shouting expletives at him. But it was always worth a shot. People at the end of their rope -- or their life -- definitely often had something worthwhile to say. It’s just that they usually didn’t. She seemed to mull the question over for a bit.

The Demon Queen looked behind her for a moment and was probably more than a little uncomfortable with how close to the edge she’d gotten. Well, that was on her. She turned back to him. “I’ll let her go,” she finally said, nodding a little. He shot her a questioning look. “You know,” she continued. “If I win. I’ll let her go. Your companion.”

That was unexpected. He’d expected another thinly veiled threat, maybe an innuendo or an old-school ‘ You can’t beat me!’ -kind of boast. He wasn’t sure if he could trust her, of course, but she had no real reason to lie about that. Whether they were her last words or just the last ones of hers he’d hear, they were still pretty good words. “Thanks,” he said with hesitation. “That’s… very nice of you.” Immediately, the Demon Queen recoiled.

“What? Ew. What?” Her expression was one of disgust, like she’d just been offered to kiss a latrine.

“You’re right, I apologize,” he said, “I don’t know why I said that. It’s kind of you.”

“Better,” she said. He couldn’t blame her revulsion. Neither of them were nice . Nice was something for other people, for teachers with glacial patience and old ladies with hard candy. But him and the Demon Queen, occasionally they could be kind. Kind, he felt, was not nice. “Still not correct, though,” she added. “It’s… courtesy. Respect, maybe.”  The Demon Queen looked at the castle.

The Hero smiled, one of those cheeky smiles. “Nice,” he said. The Demon Queen grinned at him.

“You bastard,” she said and raised her hand a little bit. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Something about that movement had broken the spell between them, the unspoken truce that had been hanging in the air between the snowflakes and the winter wind. He gripped the handle of his sword tight, and charged.

The Demon Queen’s height had, surprisingly, not really been a problem so far. Sure, she was almost eleven feet tall (with horns), and she was strong, but so was he, and he was a lot more agile than her because of his shorter stature. As he’d fought her, he’d been reminded of a saying of an old teacher of his, that prodigious size alone has no intrinsic merit -- unless you’re looking for more surface area  to bleed out of -- and he’d always taken that to heart. But now, now that he was performing what might be his final attack, he really hoped he’d be able to reach up that high. She was some ten paces away, and he was rapidly closing the distance. He saw her try to follow his slightly ziggy-zag movements with her hand. Whatever spell she had saved up, it clearly required some precision. Good.

Three more paces and he put everything -- and more specifically, his knees -- to the test. A jump, unreasonably high, launched him upwards and he felt her curse hit. It was a wave of something different. There was no fire or lightning, no thunderclap and no turning into frogs or sweaters. Only the certainty that he would die. But that was okay, he thought as he slammed sword -first into the Demon Queen and they both went over the edge. He had expected this as a possible outcome, of course. What he hadn’t really considered was what happens when you fall off the tallest cliff-face in the world. The two of them were falling, wind whipping past them so loud it would be impossible to understand what they were saying. If you had been able to understand what they were saying, this is what you would have heard.

“So,” she said.

“So,” he said.

“That was dramatic,” she said. “Happy with that outcome?”

He shrugged. “Could have been worse. Saved the world again.”

“Bully for you. I didn’t even do anything yet.”

“You set a house on fire.”

“He was very  rude. Discriminatory to people with horns.”

“You flew over a town as a dragon. There was panic for days.”

“Not my fault people are dracophobic. Besides, I was just sightseeing.”

“You were going to take over the world.”

“But I didn’t .”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment as they tumbled down the mountain. While it wasn’t impossible for the wind to slam them into the mountainside, and for them to sort of slinky-bounce their way down, it seemed like both the wind and the mountainside appreciated the drama of the moment and just let them be.

“So what was that you hit me with?” he asked.

“Really bad curse,” she said. “I can’t use it much, but you looked so determined, I figured it was all or nothing, and I really didn’t want you to find a way to fly away from this fight alive after killing me.”

“Speaking of,” he said, “why don’t you fly away? You have wings, right? Can turn into a dragon?”

“Ah,” she said, “that. I don’t have the energy for turning into a big lizard, I’m afraid.”

“And the wings?”

“Yeah,” she said, “the wings.”

“The wings.”

“All I have to do is concentrate, you know.  Poof!”

“Poof,” he repeated.  

“Yeah,” she said. “Big pair of wings out of nowhere. It’s really quite something.”

“So why don’t you?”

“You see, there seems to be a sword stuck in my spine.”

“Ah,” he said, feeling strangely guilty.

“Yeah.”

“That’ll do it.”

“Yup.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. It was a good fight.” She looked around for a moment, the wind whipping her hair around. Her little crown was a distant memory. “Hey, we’ve been falling for a while n--”

Tick

Chapter 4

There are many kinds of void. The most popular kind is really high up, usually filled with stars and planets, and isn’t really  a void, but it’s the closest to an actual void that people come into contact with within their lifetimes. Outside  of their lifetimes, however, there are many other kinds of void. There is the void before someone is born, which is hard to observe because people are usually not born enough to really appreciate it. It is filled with nothing, with the exception of the potential for a person, which is enough to fill the void while not being there at all. To perceive it is said to drive someone mad with happiness, despair, or a mix of both.

This was not the kind of void the Hero was in. There was definitely something in this void, there just wasn’t enough of it for it to be disqualified as a void. For one, there was definitely a floor, even if it was as deep black as everything else around him. He could feel it. He jumped up and down a few times to make sure there was one. There was also, of course, the Hero himself, which was almost as important as the floor he was on. The last thing he remembered was accelerating towards the foot of a mountain in the most efficient  way possible, if not necessarily the most conducive to his health.

The Queen had been there too. He wasn’t sure who had been the first to hit the ground and, he figured, it didn’t matter much. When you drop two cakes from high enough up, they begin to look like one very wide cake when they hit the ground. He also remembered being in quite a bit of pain. That was gone, at least. The logical conclusion presented itself, and he nodded vaguely, admitting to himself that it was finally over; The Hero’s Journey had been concluded with a satisfying arc. For some people, the resolution would probably be a little frustrating, but, all things considered, he was pretty happy with it.

There was a bench. He hadn’t noticed that before. Did the realm of the dead, or a purgatory , or wherever he was, have benches? He wasn’t going to complain about it, of course. He walked over to it. It was a perfectly ordinary stone bench. No real frills or decorations. Simply a functional piece of furniture for sitting. He sat, and leaned on his knees, looking out into nothing. There wasn’t much else to do. He wondered if he was supposed to wait here. Was there more to it than this? Was he supposed to do anything? He spent some time ruminating on his life, wondering if maybe there were things he was supposed to let go, or some judgement he was to cast on himself.

After a while, that proved to be mostly fruitless. He tried to work backwards through his adventures and realized that his memories got a little vague once he went a while back. He didn’t blame himself for that; he had been hit over the head a lot  in the past few years. Being a Hero came with occupational hazards, and mild-to-severe concussions were some of the lighter ones.

“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind him. It was a woman’s voice, though he didn’t recognize it. He turned around. For a moment, he considered the possibility that it was his traveling companion, who had traveled to the afterlife to come pull him back, but that seemed increasingly unlikely. For one, she seemed a little younger, in her early twenties, and she was wearing very strange clothing, out of fabrics he couldn’t identify. The girl herself was pretty, short, with shoulder-length brown hair and big glasses that framed her face. She was also holding what the Hero had no way of knowing was a plastic to-go cup of coffee. She looked at him. He looked at her. They looked. She seemed a little hesitant, now that she had his attention.

“You’re not what I was expecting,” he said.

“So you’re gonna let me go?” she asked. He frowned. Then she frowned. She walked around the bench and sort of awkwardly stood next to him, looking at him like a puppy hoping for a treat.

“What do you mean? I’m not… what?” He tried to find a good way to respond but his brain was coming up empty.

“You’re not Death?” she asked, and sat down.

“No? I don’t… think so.”

“So I’m not dead! That’s so rad!” the girl said, with hopeful relief in her eyes.

“Wait, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dead,” he said. She cocked her head.

“But I’m  not Death?”

“Who are  you?” he asked. She blinked. She clearly hadn’t been expecting the question. Her plastic cup rested on her lap. It was clearly empty, but it was probably giving her sense of, well, something  to hold on to.

“My name is Sally,” she said. “I was on my way to a job interview, there was traffic, a loud horn. I remember getting shoved to the ground and then I was here.” She picked at the wrapper around the cup. “I really thought I was dead.”

“Nice to meet you, Sally. I fell off a mountain after slaying the Demon Queen,” he said, matter-of-factly. “I’m also fairly certain I’m dead.” He nodded at her. “My name is Daniel.” Sally waved a little awkwardly. In a situation like this, waving awkwardly was probably the reasonable thing to do. He certainly couldn’t think of anything more useful. What was someone supposed to do in a situation like this? Grin wildly? Hug? He was fairly certain he was still a ways away from losing his sanity. Or maybe he had lost it a while ago. Maybe this wasn’t death, and it was the infinite void of what was left behind when he had finally lost his mind from years of stress and fighting.

“You’re for real, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I’m real, yes,” he said.

“So you’re, like…” Sally hesitated. She had never encountered someone from another world before, and she struggled to find the right words that weren’t likely to offend what appeared, to her, as a magical medieval swordsman. She brightened up a bit when she seemed to have found the right word. “European,” she said.

“What.”

“Like, medieval. Ye-olde-bookshoppe.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” he said, hoping that the complex patterns he was weaving with his eyebrows adequately expressed his confusion.

“You’re from another world,” she tried. Daniel nodded thoughtfully. It was certainly possible. That still didn’t explain what this place was, of course.

“It seems so. Or at least one very far away, because I can hear and understand the words that you’re saying, but the order in which you’re saying them makes no sense to me.” She looked a little offended. That wasn’t his problem.

“So what is this place?” Sally asked. Daniel shrugged.

“Not sure. There are many legends in my world that talk of the afterlife, but none of them are… this.” He waved at the nothing surrounding them. Sally sighed and put her cup down, then looked at him.

“We might be here for a while, you know? Want to tell me about them? Because the ones where I’m from suck major ass, and you look like you have legends about great warriors and stuff like that.” She looked lost. He couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and he definitely appreciated the desire for stories in a time like this.

“Well,” Daniel said as he scratched his chin, “the Lizardmen of the Red Plains believe that, after death, a great caravan of tortoises that will take you across sunbaked sands to hunt the moon until the end of time.”

“The Lizardm--” Sally said with disbelief, and then smiled, closed her eyes and shook her head. “Okay. That doesn’t sound half bad. It sounds weird , like some kind of, like, trip, but not too bad. What else?”

“There’s certain tribes of warriors in the north who believe they will swim forever in giant lakes of beer.”

“Ew.”

It’s not my favourite either.”

“It sounds so sticky .”

“It does,” he said, and they both chuckled a little bit. It was good to have a moment of connection over the inherent absurdity of… well, everything. But in this case it was specifically the absurdity of a lake of beer.

“And what about you?” Sally asked. “You don’t sound like you believe in those.”

Daniel shook his head. He hadn’t really thought about religion and belief for some time. This wasn’t because he was particularly disillusioned with the existence of gods. He had seen too much proof to really be an atheist. Rather, he had seen too much proof of all  different gods, from different and very incompatible religions. He didn’t see the point in praying exclusively to one god or another, to throw in your lot with a deity, when all of them seemed to both exist and contradict each other. But he did have a favourite.

“There was this… witch,” he said. “She lived not far from my home where I grew up. She told me that her mother, and her mother’s mother, all went to a special place after they died, and that I could go there too if I wanted to.” He sighed at his recollections of the past. That was decades ago now, and sometimes a memory coming out of nowhere can hit hard. Sally looked at him, smiling encouragingly. “She said that, after you die, you go home.”

“Like, as a ghost?” Sally asked.

“Hah!” Daniel scoffed. “No, thank the gods. No, it’s less… literal than that.” He took a breath as he tried to find the exact words the young witch had used so many years ago. “You go home as you… felt it. When it was its most… home . You go to your happiest memory of home, and you live out your best day, every day. For some that is summers when you were a child. For others, that could be winter by a warm fire. It could be both. But it’s always, well, home.”

“That does sound nice,” Sally said, then looked around. “Doesn’t seem to be this, though.”

Daniel nodded. “Indeed, it doesn’t.”

“Better than Beer Lake, though.” Sally said, and they both laughed again. After they sat in silence for a while, she sighed. “Why do you think we’re here?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea,” Daniel said. “I worry this might be a mistake. Or maybe this is the afterlife.”

“Hey!”

“I mean the emptiness,” he said with an apologetic smile. “Not you specifically.”

“Oh.”

Daniel turned to her. “In any case, I am grateful I’m not entirely alone here. Thank you.” He stuck out his hand.

Sally smiled and nodded. “The feeling is mutual, Daniel. It’s good to meet you.” She shook his hand, and then everything went sort of ‘ vworp’ .

When Daniel had considered where he might be, he had quickly realized that he was in a void. But there are many kinds of voids. There’s the void Above. The void Before.  But this was clearly neither of those. But what Daniel -- and most people -- did and do not know, is that there is also the void Between . This is not the void between life and death, which is the void After . The void After  is like a cosmic bus-stop, which takes you from who and where you were to what you’re about to be for the rest of eternity, until your universe goes Pop .

The void between places, however is what happens when one universe really likes another universe and it likes to share things, like ideas, words, languages, symbols and stories. All of these things pass through the void. And sometimes, things go a little weird and some things that should have ended up in other places end up in that void. And sometimes, when one universe goes Tick , that tick doesn’t stay within one world, and two things touching each other makes everything go ‘ vworp ’.

Daniel had fought the Demon Dragon Queen, and his world had gone Tick.  Then there was Sally, and he had shaken her hand. Now he was turning inside out, the universe didn’t know where to put him -- it couldn’t put him back, that would be embarrassing  -- and there was the cosmic equivalent of trying to pass someone on the sidewalk and stepping sideways in the same direction in a universal dance of mild surrealism. Daniel screamed, he thought. Or someone did, at least. He was pretty sure there was screaming, definitely.

Everything turned inside out.

Tock.

Chapter 5

Once upon a time there was a Demon King. A lot can be extrapolated from a title like that. There’s a vague sense of fire, maybe some horns, an army of easily-disposable vaguely-stereotypical minions with faceless helmets that no self-respecting hero would feel bad mowing down. Some things just come with the territory. But this Demon King was, on top of the horns, hooves, angry scowl and general fire-and-brimstoney-ness, also an absolute and utter bastard. He was Evil. That wasn’t something that was attributed to him by outside parties, or would ever be hotly debated. There was a vague sense that, if he was ever cut in half, the words ‘Evil Bastard’ would be written on the most legible part. Maybe alongside things like ‘Puppy-kicker’ or ‘Probably Racist’.

This Demon King had inherited the throne from his father, who inherited it from his father’s father, and so on, usually through the tried-and-true method of patricide. After seven generations of this, it had become a family tradition. A Demon King who was stabbed to death by his first-born son was considered to have Died of Natural Causes. It was just how things worked. Demon King after Demon King would rule over the lands to the north of what people would refer to as the ‘civilized world’, in that vaguely ethnocentric, condescending way people usually did when they didn’t want to be overtly discriminatory but did want to project an air of superiority. There, Demon Kings would amass small armies, harass some settlements with them, get pushed back, only to be inevitably murdered by their children.

Up and until this  Demon King. This particular Demon King was loud, ambitious and powerful (although mostly loud), and he had amassed an army larger than any Demon King had before him. This was largely due to the groundwork that had been laid by his  father who had been, as Demon Kings go, fairly benevolent, focusing on agriculture, infrastructure, and only the minimum necessary amount of pillaging. But his son’s plans had been bigger .

This new loud Demon King thus amassed an army large enough to actually be noticed and started to march it south, towards the ‘civilized world’, conquering everything in his path. He also had to, because a total mismanagement of forces and supplies meant that the army had to keep pushing in order to keep from starving on its feet. But he was a loud Demon King and it’s very hard to stand up to a ten foot tall demon lord and go ‘Um, excuse me sir, but the men are getting quite upset and we ran out of toilet paper some days ago and would you maybe be willing to take a break so we can all sit down and have a good meal and we’d really  like that toilet paper’ because anyone brave enough would usually find themselves becoming a sticky reddish-brown smear on the floor, walls and ceiling.

At some point, the Demon King conquered a castle and found himself sitting comfortably for a few days, only to be confronted by a Human Male Hero -- the most default of heroes -- and his entourage. He was challenged to a fight he did not take seriously, and very quickly realized he should have taken the Hero seriously. He realized this at the same time as he realized what it was like for an ant to be stepped on when an improbable amount of castle fell on him.

This was the end of the Demon King, the most ambitious (and loud) of his kind in generations. However, Demon Kings usually spawn Demon Princes and Princesses, who usually grow up to be tall and Kingy themselves, although they were going to have to do without the patricide this time. This Demon King had tried to avert death-by-heir by not having any sons, which he’d achieved mostly through magic, and although the intent had been there, avoiding a tradition like that usually ends up biting you in the ass anyway.

It hadn’t, but it definitely could have. For one, he’d had an eldest daughter who had been more  than willing to end his line early -- he had been as good of a father as he had been a person -- and she would have if the Hero hadn’t ended the Demon King’s reign rather prematurely. Now, the teenage Demon Queen had been plopped down on the throne and had taken it upon herself to do things differently. For one, she wasn’t powerful or loud enough to lead any armies just yet, but she had a knack for math and a weird tendency to see her subjects as people rather than disposable action figures. She got rid of the faceless visors, for one. That had gone a long way in humanizing her guards. Not that she had many of those, having sent most of them home to assemble something of a society in her lands while not engaging in any procreation whatsoever. She had plenty of older relatives who could take over, if she ended up tripping and falling onto some Hero or another.

As the years went on, she grew stronger, and became the Dragon Demon Queen. There are many kinds of Demons, and there are many kinds of Queens, and every once in a while there are those that end up being something a little extra. Over the years, there have been Lizard Demons, Snake Demons and even Unicorn Demons, although that last one usually led to people awkwardly giving the father an uncomfortable side-eye. Being a Dragon was quite rare and, even part-time, it was a pretty nice bonus to have for an aspiring Demon Queen. Her mother had been part-Dragon, and without getting into the strange genetics of being part-firebreathing-lizard, it was quite rare for a descendant to be able to turn big and scaly. It wasn’t something she could hold on to for extended periods of time. This had less to do with magical reserves and more to do with the fact that becoming the size of a large barn also gave her the caloric requirements of a large-barn-sized lizard, and it was simply not something she was up to most of the time.

Stories of this new Demon Queen had made their way down south, because of course they had, so she put her castle on a high mountain and went on with her day, occasionally flying down in her purest Dragon form to have a look at things. Nobody would be stupid enough to climb all the way up the mountain just to pick a fight with the most powerful of one of the most powerful species on the planet. Not even her younger sisters.

And then someone had, right as she was having an off day, and she made a few mistakes in a row. The first was that she underestimated the Hero and his companion. While it wasn’t unwarranted -- the Demon Queen could bench-press a medium-sized elephant -- she still didn’t anticipate sheer skill, training and a little magic to go as far as it had. So she’d assumed that using her normal form would do just fine. The second mistake she made was that she also held on to the belief that there was no need for a back-up plan, or rather that her back-up plan would be to the detriment of her image. After all, it wouldn’t do for her to face the Hero while eating a bag of chips or having a large bowl of soup. She didn’t want to feel bloated or look silly.

This, as we know by now, meant that there had been no Dragon in the Demon Queen when the fight didn’t go the way she’d thought it would, and she would be rather unceremoniously turned into a Demon Shish Kebab by the Hero. As she plummeted to her death, casually chatting with the Hero, she regretted a few things. She’d tried to be a competent ruler who would have, one day, been able to outshine her father, but it had been for nothing and the only remarkable thing about her now would have been her gender. She also regretted not eating more so she wouldn’t have died in the first place. But most importantly, she regretted not having enjoyed things more.

In her last moments, she allowed herself to feel a little sad, because when you’ve been impaled and are actively falling to your death, you’re allowed a little self-pity. As a treat. She wished she’d tried more things, maybe met more people. Had a friend or two. In the end, she’d been alone a lot, and loneliness hadn’t  hit her before. But it did now, for just a second. And then the ground did, and everything went black.

After everything was black for a good long while, it abruptly stayed black and she found herself in a weird space that felt both extremely impossible while simultaneously being very lacking in magic. It reeked of physics . Wonky physics at that. The kind of physics that professors love talking about because they think it makes the universe sound cool, like particles being in two places at once or talking to each other while bonded, which say a lot more about the relationships physics professors have with the people they are bonded to than it says about quantum particles.

After she ran around for a little bit and tried to blow a hole in the fabric of this reality -- only a small one -- she found herself frustrated and sitting on a large stone bench. After a while, she was joined by a human, who had some difficulty climbing the bench, which was sized to her. The creature was very short, compared to her, and seemed… not at all afraid of her. The few times she’d interacted with people there had been a lot of running and screaming. Occasionally some attempted stabbing, which had never ended well for the stabbing implement. It had been amusing the first few times, but after a while she’d just stopped trying to talk to people.

But this one didn’t seem to mind her height, her horns, her eyes, all of that. It just sat there, cross-legged.

“Hello,” she tried. A part of her wanted to shake the figure and try to get an answer out of it, but she also knew that anyone or anything that looked so lost and despondent would probably not know a lot more than she did.

“Let’s just get this over with,” the Human said, and laid back. “Not how I thought it would go, but I’m ready.”

“Ready for what?” she asked. She was a little curious about the Human.

“To die, of course. I didn’t think I’d warrant being picked up by the Devil -- and I hadn’t expected her to be a her -- but I figure it makes sense.” The creature rambled on and after a moment she wasn’t really listening anymore as it talked about Sunday School and other things that made very little sense to her. She looked at it with a mixture of pity and contempt. Try as she might, she wasn’t really in the mood to console this thing, and she kind of wanted to know where she was and how to get out of here. It was more than a little dull, and other than the softly-mumbling person, there wasn’t much here to discover.

The Human was about to go into another tirade about something or another, and she’d had enough. She put a hand over its mouth which practically covered its entire face. She was about to shush it, when she suddenly found herself experiencing exactly-but-not-quite what it was like to be a freshly squeezed lemon being sucked through a garden hose. Somebody screamed. It might as well have been her.

She was absolutely certain she was dead this time. Well, she would have been. Almost was, even. But there was a niggling doubt at the back of her mind. For one, she expected death to smell less alchemical. She was also pretty sure that death didn’t go ‘ beep ’ every second. There was also a distant chattering of voices. The biggest argument against this being real, proper death, however, was the fact that she was experiencing the grandmother of all headaches, who had brought her entire extended family and was barraging her with several mother-headaches, granddaughter-headaches and several niece- and nephew-headaches, all enjoying a family headache potluck somewhere between her neck and her forehead.

“Fhgllrrrr,” she said. Her tongue felt heavy in her head. Her head  felt heavy in her head. Her entire body felt like it was being weighed down by, well, itself. It was an unpleasant experience, which she was about to exacerbate. She opened her eyes, and looked around the hospital room.

Chapter 6

There’s a universal law that states that every single hospital room has to have several defining characteristics. The first is that it has to smell faintly like someone has tried to safeguard the place against vampires and food critics, or has tried to cover up a crime by committing an olfactory one. Hospitals smell awful, but nobody ever says anything because everyone assumes the smell has some medicinal purpose. Whether or not it does is a mystery lost to time.

The second is that the lights are slightly too bright, the walls too off-white and there’s a stain on one of the floors that’s too faded to make out perfectly but too visible to ignore. Hospitals are, despite often being crowded and full of people, liminal spaces. Stepping into one, there is the distinct feeling of stepping into another world, one you don’t want to stay in for too long, for fear of finding out what’s on the other side.

The third is the sound. There is a distant intercom that is ever so slightly unintelligible, crackling things that sound like words. There’s the sound of wheelchairs, trolleys and stretchers, every single one with a slightly squeaky wheel. But most importantly, every single hospital room throughout the vastness of the multiverse has a machine that goes ‘beep’ . Electricity is not always a prerequisite for the beep. It simply is.  

So, on the third floor of a fairly ordinary hospital room, were two beds. In those two beds were two people. Both of them had recently died, in both strict and figurative senses. Strictly speaking, both of them had recently suffered severe physical trauma, followed by cardiac arrest, with a little bit of brain death sprinkled in to taste. They had been, in every sense, clinically dead for a bit. That was undeniable, and it was written on the little sheets that hung off the foot of their bed , with a little question mark written next to it. In the past few days, there had been several scans done to confirm that these people were as dead as dead got.

Both of them were currently also sitting upright, hearts beating, if not happily, then at least with mild contentment, in their chests, and their brains slowly processing their environment. The machines went ‘ beep’ . That was because both of them had also been dead in a more ethereal sense.

Daniel chewed on a sandwich, the only piece of food he’d recognized, and considered his situation. He was a seasoned warrior who had dealt with shenaniganry many times. He’d been to underworlds and dreamworlds, and while this one wasn’t like those at all, he was adaptable. It was the biggest reason he hadn’t freaked out when he’d seen his reflection in the knife they’d given him to cut his food. The girl’s body in the reflection was not unattractive, in that recently-hit-by-a-car kind of way, but it definitely wasn’t his. There was no hard jawline, no short (but secretly quite well-maintained) brown hair, and, strangest of all, even his eyes  weren’t his. Instead of cold blue, they were a sort of amber-ish brown. There were… other parts to his anatomy he hadn’t had a clear look at, and he wasn’t eager to do so. Other than the severe discomfort, there was another element that kept him so calm, and that was in the bed ten feet to his left.

Despite the exterior, he could tell by the body language, the stolen glances and glares, and even the facial expressions, that this was her . Sure, the body was masculine, the face unfamiliar, and large parts of the skin had taken on the colouration of a particularly spectacular nebula, but he knew .  A part of him, the part that did the swashling and the buckling, that had punched dragons in the face and didn’t know when to stop, told him that he should go over to the other bed and end the fight, for real this time.

A few things were stopping him. The first was that, well, the fight had ended. They’d both died. Wherever they were now, it clearly wasn’t back home, and he desperately hoped this wasn’t some third-tier afterlife from some small religion up in the mountains . That meant that she probably wasn’t entirely herself either, and in no position to do any slaying, conquering and/or pillaging any time soon. The other reason -- he still wasn’t sure if it was a more or less pressing one -- was that he got the distinct feeling that, if he stood up, the discomfort he felt now would quickly become a lot worse. He also wasn’t sure his legs could hold him very well. The pain in his body throbbed gently, to remind him that, even if it hadn’t fallen off a mountain, it had sure as hell been put through the wringer recently.

The reason for all of this, of course, was complicated, in ways Daniel had no concept of. What happens when two universes hang out close together is that they  begin to share things. Ideas. Stories. Sometimes names, letters and languages. And every once in a while, when a life is about to go out in both places at once, two worlds will share people. Daniel and Sally had, at the moment of both their deaths, been exchanged, like unwanted gifts after a birthday party. So had the Demon Queen and the unlucky soul she’d been swapped with. The problem with an exchange like this is that the body doesn’t travel along, so this was bound to be an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.

On the other side of the room, the Demon Queen was also calmly contemplating murder. The knife and fork she’d been provided with would be terrible for an extended fight, but she had figured that she’d be able to get the upper hand regardless. She had, of course, also immediately recognized the man who had slain her -- heroically, maybe, but dead is dead -- even if he wasn’t wearing the same body. And this one was a lot smaller. She would easily be able to overpower it. She looked at her hands. Big ones, a lot meatier than she was used to. The hairs on their back seemed to have been shaven short recently, but it was still coming in thick and bristly. She grimaced, clenched and unclenched them.

Being the Demon Queen came with certain perks and drawbacks, but a seething disgust for her own body had never been one of them. It was like wearing a shirt after someone else had run a marathon in it. A particularly sweaty someone. She shuddered and took a breath. Maybe killing the man who had traveled across half a continent just to kill her would give her some sense of resolution, or at least give her something to focus on that wasn’t the meat-suit she had suddenly been trapped inside of. On the other hand… this place was more than a little alien to her. It was a lot smoother, with more metal and a material that felt like a mixture between hard wax and glass. The tray next to her bed was made of it. The headboard was made of it. It was everywhere, and the fact that she had no idea what it was frustrated her. Going by the way the Hero in the next bed over was touching everything around him, he didn’t know it either, whereas the healers who had come to check up on them seemed fully comfortable in their environment and their strangely baggy clothing.

One of them entered the room, a man who looked like he measured sleep in minutes and ate when it was convenient, which clearly wasn’t enough.  He had once upon a time been tired, had come out the other side, and now seemed to be in a sort of permanent state where rest was something that happened to other people.

Daniel watched him approach with apprehension as the radio in the hall chattered incomprehensibly, words that may have made sense if it wasn’t for the static and the mumbling. “ Piggling bokter Mittens to harbiology,” it announced, only furthering Daniel’s suspicion.

“How are we feeling today, miss?” he asked, and it took Daniel a hot moment to realize that the physician was talking to him. Daniel was many things, but a ‘miss’ was not one of them, and he tried to resist the impulse to correct the man with a ‘hit’.

“The same,” Daniel said, glaring. “Not dead.” He wiggled his toes to emphasise his point, because clearly sitting up and talking wasn’t doing the trick.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hrmm.” The man grunted like he was mildly offended, and took up the clipboard from the foot of the bed. He looked at it for a moment, then at Daniel, then at the paper again. “Says here you told a nurse that you’re under the impression that you’re…”

“My name is Daniel,” Daniel said, daring the man to try and confront him about it. Instead, he got a look of… compassion? That was a weird one. He’d expected confusion, maybe anger or the desire to start an argument.

“The very best of luck with that,” the man said in the kind of voice people use when they feel sorry for someone they know is about to have a really bad time. He clearly had experience with it. “I’m afraid I can’t just change markers and pronouns on this thing, but I’ll make a note of it anyway.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Do your parents know?”

“My parents are dead,” Daniel said flatly. They’d passed away some time ago, and he’d processed it easily. Peaceful deaths both, and he had never been particularly  weepy person to begin with.

“But it says here they’re…” The man looked at him again and clenched his jaw. “I understand.” Daniel had the feeling a lot was going unsaid here, but he’d realized fairly quickly that people in the hospital had quickly mistaken him for the girl whose body he was in, and he wasn’t about to risk his medical care by pointing out that he had no  idea where he was, or the meaning of a lot of the words that he was being bombarded with.

Of course Daniel had no idea what words like ‘insurance’ meant in this context, or what a ‘pick-up truck’ was, and he had only an inkling of what a ‘traffic violation’ was, but the staff didn’t need to know that. He had an incomplete picture in his head, and the other half of it was, sadly for Daniel, currently in the head of a girl stuck in his body, a world away.

“Now, about your saviour,” the man said, and walked over to the other bed, where the Demon Queen glowered at him. “We still haven’t found any ID for you, I’m afraid. You…” he checked the document attached to her bed, “still don’t remember anything?”

She shook her head, and then paused. “I do know my name,” she said. Even whispered, her voice was a loud, rasping one, and knowing to look for it, Daniel saw her briefly wince at the sound of it. He knew why. He was better at hiding it, but his own voice was wrong  now in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The doctor raised an eyebrow and held a pen to the clipboard.

“Go ahead?”

“My name,” the Demon Queen said, “is Eliza.”

The doctor looked at her for a stunned second, then looked at Daniel, and then back at her, back and forth like he was watching a particularly slow-paced tennis match. “You’re both…” His other eyebrow went up too. “O-kay. Do either of you remember... Well, anything about the other yet? Who the other is, that kind of thing?  Girlfriend, partner, etcetera? I don’t know what we can do insurance-wise, but it might, you know, help.”

Daniel and Eliza looked at each other for a moment. There was a brief, unseen powerplay for a moment. A fly crossing their gaze would have been microwaved in seconds. Sure, neither of them was likely to murder the other right away, but Daniel would be damned if he was going to let the Demon Queen out of his sight any time soon, and he knew she probably felt similar to him. Both of them smiled wolfishly in agreement. Their conflict, clearly, was going to continue in this world too.

“Yes,” they said in unison. The game was on.

Chapter 7

Daniel had been injured before, of course. Plenty of times. Severe physical trauma was  an occupational hazard for the kind of people who saved the world. That didn’t make the fact that he was practically unable to stand any more palatable, or his frustration at how slowly  he was recovering any less present. Back when he’d first been almost turned into paste during his first foray into hero-ing, he’d been patched up by magical healers and he’d been back on his feet in a day. Sure, everything had tasted like copper for a bit and his left eye had been colourblind ever since, but the ability to go back out into the world in almost no time at all had been more than welcome.

Over the years, he’d picked up some more grievous injuries and magic hadn’t always been available. Healing then had taken forever . This, the hospital, the healing that was done here, was somehow better and worse. They had marvels of what he soon learned was technology, not magic, and their understanding of the human body far surpassed that of any medical professional he’d ever met back home. That wasn’t saying much, of course, when the average prescription for an injury was rubbing some leeches on it, but even by the standards of the most well-regarded healer, what this hospital had access to was almost inconceivable. What it didn’t have access to, however, was magic.

And both their injuries had been extensive. Whatever high-speed collision he and the Demon Queen -- Eliza, apparently -- had been a part of had left them both with a skeleton that made soft crunching noises when they moved too much. Being able to move around using wheeled chairs was very welcome, and he was grateful to have that kind of mobility to move around once he’d started feeling a bit better, even if he did need help getting in and out of it.

Apparently the insurance thing was important, though. They were going to have to leave the hospital soon, and he wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to move around when he was pretty sure that going down the stairs would be a matter of trying to bounce softly. He’d been going through the girl’s effects, all contained in a barely-useful little satchel, and had been doing his best to learn things, but it had been very slow going. Everything was obscure, with numbers on every piece of paper or… whatever the hard little rectangles were. He had asked one nurse about them and the look she had given him had reassured him that they were so ubiquitous, not knowing about them would be met with suspicion.

And suspicion was something he’d slowly become accustomed to. He and Eliza never left the other out of their sight, which amused the hospital staff to no end and made keeping up the charade of their relationship a lot easier, if a bit more involved. Pretending to be her partner required a lot of lying through his teeth and giving nurses that smile people give their more politically contrary relatives around the holidays. For her part, Eliza was doing a better job, falling into her role as a doting ‘boyfriend’ with ease, grinning at him when no-one was watching.

At least they could drop the pretense when nobody else was around. It was necessary. Both of them were having more difficulty dealing with the changes than either had anticipated. Daniel had on more than one occasion been on the receiving end of transforming magic, having spent a week and a half as a particularly grizzled dog, complete with a scar over his eye, as a result of a cursed sword he’d picked up. It had barely slowed him down, and when he turned back, he’d hit the ground running and continued with his quest. When he thought back on it, he mostly remembered the fleas.

This was different. Instead of being turned into a strange creature, forced to try to walk on four legs without crashing face-first into the ground every other step, this was so close to right and yet completely wrong. It was worse than being cursed for a variety of reasons. For one, there was no expected way out. This world, after all, had no magic. He also didn’t want to bank on the little trick that had caused him to literally survive death to work a second time. The other thing was that the similarity to the shape he used to have (no tail, two legs, hands) made him occasionally forget that this wasn’t his old body, and that made the discrepancies all the more upsetting.

The breasts were a major one. They got in the way, and when he sat down in the chair, they bounced ever so slightly, pointing out their own presence like an uninvited guest coughing politely to remind him they weren’t leaving any time soon . He tried not to look down too much, but that led to him accidentally punching himself in the chest every once in a while, and that led to point number two.

This body was so damn sensitive. Over the years he’d built up a tremendous tolerance for pain. He had enjoyed soft touches and fabrics, of course, but you can only get thrown through walls so many times before you get a little desensitized, and he hated the fact that everything was felt so much more keenly  now. A bump to the chest was somehow enough to interrupt his train of thought dramatically. His skin was so absurdly sensitive, the sheets  were bothering him. He’d slept in full plate armour in freezing temperatures only days ago, but the fact that the sheets of the bed were not soft enough kept him awake at night. It bothered him more than his healing bones and aching joints, in fact.

The girl, Sally, had also had much worse vision than him, which was frustrating. He had to squint to read things from a distance, and it made him feel even more like he was just cut off from things, a constant reminder that this body was a barrier between him and the world. When he gripped the sheets in frustration, he could even feel that she had been weaker than him. He simply wasn’t able to hold on to things as easily, and he’d relied more than once on his ability to hold on to the edge of a precipice, hanging over certain death and/or doom with one hand, only to pull himself up at the last second.

Eliza wasn’t doing much better, although it wouldn’t give Daniel a lot of satisfaction to know that. He didn’t delight in the suffering of others, and the Demon Queen was suffering. She had, initially, been gratified to learn that she was healing faster than him, but that had brought with it the honour of being the first to go to the bathroom on her own. The Demon Queen, who had been raised by a cruel father in a cruel family, raised to take over a family of conquerors, who had fought for her life more than once growing up in the name of ‘training’, cried quietly as she sat in the bathroom. It was torture to her.

Not helping was the fact that the facilities had seemingly been designed by an inhuman monster, placing the washbasin -- mirror and all -- directly opposite the toilet. In the midst of her discovering the wrongness of her new body, she had been forced to enjoy her reflection looking back at her. She had tried, through her inexplicable tears, to understand why it bothered her so much, to see an unfamiliar face in the mirror, a week-long beard on the square jaw, heavy eyebrows over eyes that always seemed to be glowering even when she didn’t mean to. It was the opposite of the person she’d once tried to be. There was none of the regal attitude in this person’s appearance, big square shoulders slumped that didn’t so much increase her stature as add to what already felt like a big, lumpy mass.

Not that she showed Daniel any of this, of course. She had been killed by him once before, she wasn’t going to show him weakness now . That felt downright silly. So instead she groaned into her hands, too big and hairy but perfect for hiding her face in, took a deep breath and wiped her tears, before heading back to her bed, where a set of clothes -- provided graciously by the hospital staff -- was waiting for her. This was their last day here, the room needed clearing, all that jazz.

Daniel could tell she’d been crying, because Daniel was not an idiot and someone who spent thirty minutes in the bathroom and comes out with red eyes and a congestion doesn’t leave much to the imagination for an observant second party . He didn’t say anything, and neither of them acknowledged what had happened, both of them instead trying to get dressed under the blankets  with limbs that were still black and blue and, in several cases, wrapped in plaster. Like two people trying to play Twister while doing their best impression of a haunted bedsheet , it took a comically long time. Either of them might have laughed if it wasn’t for the physical agony or the existential dread. Finally, both of them sat in their wheelchairs for the last time, as they’d be taken back by the hospital staff upon leaving, although they’d be supplied crutches. Daniel knew how to use those, at least. Eliza didn’t, but she was a quick learner.

“So,” Eliza said, finally, her voice a low whisper. She hated the sound of it, and this was the easiest way to try and avoid how much it grated her. Daniel glared and wheeled around a little bit, feeling idle and hating every second of it.

“So,” he responded. He knew they would probably have to talk at some point, although there was a part of him that just wanted to continue their battle and see who could gently nudge the other down the stairs first. In their current state, that was probably all it would take, after all. On the other hand, he did want to hear what she had to say. How they were going to proceed from here.

“I’d like to…” Eliza said and then paused for a moment, chewing on her thoughts like a piece of food that had been stuck behind her teeth. “I’d like to discuss the rules of engagement,” she finally said. Daniel looked at her.

“Elaborate,” he finally demanded, turning his chair to look at her. He was happy that, now that there was no hospital staff around, they could at least speak frankly. He was tired of calling her ‘sweetheart’.

“I think that, if we keep this up, we might end up doing this forever,” the Demon Queen mused. “There’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to kill me, and vice versa.” Daniel wasn’t so sure about that -- he was  the hero, after all -- but even without her magic, Eliza had been a formidable foe. And she once again had the physical upper hand. He just nodded. “If we kill each other at the same time, we might end up waking up in another world again,” Eliza assumed incorrectly. “Instead, I would like to… propose a truce, of sorts.” Daniel frowned. Over the years of his world-saving career, he had heard many speeches from villains, liches and monsters about how they should work together. His knee-jerk response was to slap it down, but he figured he had no reason not to hear her out this time.

“I’m listening,” he said. Worst case scenario, it would give him the time to heal, regain his strength, train this body enough to defeat her once and for all, and then get to finding a way home now that there was no chance of her trying to reclaim her old throne.

“You’re lost here,” Eliza said, and despite the fact that she sat hunched over, he could hear the haughty tone in her voice, like she was pretending that she wasn’t in the exact same situation he was in. He was about to scoff, when she continued. “And so am I.” Well, that took him by surprise. “I propose that, since we’re from the same world, we stick together. We have the same understanding of things, and people here think we’re mad as soon as we say anything that contradicts what they know to be true.”

She wasn’t wrong. Every time they’d gone off-script, the doctors and nurses had looked at them like they’d grown an extra head. “And then what? Find a way back, go back to killing each other? Why not do that here?” Daniel asked.

Eliza shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I have my reasons, but let’s just say I currently have no intention to head back.”

“So you aim to subjugate this world, instead?” he asked, accusing her with a glare. Eliza made a face like she’d been told to clean a bathroom with a toothbrush.

“What? No, this place is awful.” Daniel shrugged. She wasn’t wrong. “Right now, I want to get out of…” She looked down for a second, and a surge of sympathy shot through Daniel, one he quickly repressed. The Demon Queen looked so downcast and vulnerable, he’d almost forgotten who and what she was. It got even worse when she looked up at him. “I don’t want to die here, hero.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had the chance to figure it out.”

“Hrm,” Daniel said. He needed to think about things. He didn’t have a lot to go back to, all things considered. He’d been given a small estate as a reward for a favour he’d done for a princess, and after spending a summer there trying to retire, the threat of a new Demon Lord (or Lady) had come as a relief more than anything. Sure, he had some people, but those would already be mourning him. Even if he believed Eliza’s little sob story, he wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was here. He didn’t know enough about this world, where he was and what had happened, and his unusually small frame did nothing but constantly distract him. “Very well,” he said. “We find a solution, or at least some answers, to where we are right now.” He glared at her again. “You make one wrong move and I’ll come for you. You know that.”

“I know, hero,” Eliza growled. “And that goes both ways. The moment I see you try anything, to invoke one of your gods, I will come down on you like hellfire.”

“You and I both know there’s not an ounce of magic in this world. We would’ve seen evidence of it by now.”

Eliza shot him a glance he wasn’t sure how to decipher, but there was a smile in her eyes he absolutely distrusted. “Of course,” she said as the nurses came in to escort them to the exit. “So you agree?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” he said, his voice sugary sweet in front of the nurses. “I agree.”

“I look forward to it, darling,” Eliza said, clearly delighting in how uncomfortable Daniel seemed to be.

He was about to say something in response when he blacked out in his chair, and he found himself standing in a sea of blackness.  

Chapter 8

“Oh, it’s you again,” was one of those phrases Daniel wasn’t particularly fond of. It was up there with “Well well well, wot’s all dis den?” and “You’ll never catch me alive, hero!”  While it wasn’t as likely to result in a fight, there was the promise of verbal, if not necessarily physical violence. It was one of those phrases that was used by slighted lovers, shopkeepers who you owed money in reparations to, and, occasionally, monarchs. Sometimes a combination of the above.

Sally had her arms crossed, tapping her foot in the void, and Daniel got the distinct feeling she was getting even more annoyed at the fact that it wasn’t making any sound. He tried to move and found that the pain in his everything was gone. Wherever, whatever this place was, the damage to his body hadn’t been carried over. Speaking of which, it was his body again, which was a relief.

“Looks that way,” he said. The bench was there too, because the space between worlds doesn’t have to necessarily be uncomfortable. He sat down.

“Are we dead again?” Sally asked. In another context this could’ve  sounded remorseful, scared. But clearly Sally wasn’t going in for the ‘lost and scared in another world’ thing, and was taking it in -- annoyed -- stride.

Daniel shook his head. “I don’t think so. The physicians where I ended up seem to believe I was healing -- if not as well as I’d like.” He stretched and bent his legs, in ways he hadn’t been able to for a while now. Whatever this place was, wherever, it was a little refreshing to be able to be himself for a bit, and to feel things the way he should. Sally looked at him for a bit, then plopped down on the bench and leaned her head in her hands with an annoyed huff. Luckily for Daniel, the body language of an annoyed twenty-something is almost universal across all dimensions, reality and universes, and Sally was most definitely an annoyed twenty-something.

“You know,” she said, “comfortable as it is to be back here and all, this whole thing blows.” Daniel raised an eyebrow. He had been to many different nations, learned a few languages, and found that words didn’t always mean in one dialect what they did in another. Still, Sally’s way of talking was new to him, so he was more than happy to let her ramble while he tried to figure it out. “Like, I’ve seen this in shows and movies, and there’s always this moment where the two bodyswapped characters have to pretend to be each other or whatever and the guy in the girl’s body squeezes his boobs and that always felt so gross  to me but whatever, like, it was shown as this cool kinda-funny kinda-sexy joke exploration.”

Daniel blinked a few times. Sally had a way of stacking a sentence together much like a mother piling seventeen kids into a minivan and then taking it for a drive around a paragraph until even the run-on sentences grew tired . “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“What I mean is that this fucking sucks. ” She groaned into her hands. “There’s no freaky-Friday weirdness going on where I have to warn you not to do anything weird with that body because, if your experience is even a little  bit like mine, you’ve been feeling like ass .”

“I have,” Daniel nodded, “indeed been feeling like ass.”

“Good,” Sally said. Daniel raised an eyebrow. “Well, not good -good, but you know, shared pain and all that.”

“I think I understand,” Daniel said. “There’s an expression where I’m from. ‘Shared grief is half grief.’ Knowing we’re both going through this makes this…”

“Easier.”

“Yes.”

They both sat there in silence for a bit. Then Sally looked at him again. “ Just for the record,” she asked, “you haven’t , like, done anything weird, right? Like, I can imagine wanting to look down--”

Daniel winced. “No, I haven’t. Things get in the way. That’s it.”

“Ugh. Yes they do.” Sally stuck out her tongue in disgust and Daniel couldn’t help but laugh. There were elements of his anatomy he’d never really regarded from an outside perspective, but he could imagine that, if he was as uncomfortable walking around ‘as Sally’, she probably wasn’t any happier with what he’d been carrying. Even the thought of walking around as someone not Daniel made him shiver.

“I apologize,” he said softly, nodding. Sally shot him a grateful smile.

“Thanks for not making a dick joke. That would not have been welcome right now.”

“I know.”

Another silence. Some people will tell you there are up to nine kinds of silence; these are based on the feelings of the person currently actively engaging in silence and are wrong. Empirically, throughout the universe, there are forty-eight kinds of silence, ranging from the silence right before the thing you just knocked off the kitchen counter at four in the morning hits the ground, to the silent scream made by the Muffler bird, a fantastic creature from some far-off and mostly-unremarkable little universe. It has evolved in a biome filled with all kinds of birds, all of whom have various songs to attract mates and attention. The Muffler bird’s call is so quiet it deafens all sound around it, and, usually around the mid-morning, its call interrupts the noise of the forest with a few minutes of blessed calm. It is the only bird throughout the history of the universe that has evolved a call not to attract a mate, but to get a few more minutes of sleep in.

The kind of silence Daniel and Sally were experiencing was a little like that. It was deafening, because there were a thousand questions running through his head and all of them made it so much louder inside his head than outside of it. Sally, thankfully, broke the silence.

“Your friends are worried,” she said, and then just let that linger for a while as if a phrase like that didn’t usually involve a conversation about drinking habits or similar. Daniel looked at her.

“My friends?”

“You know, the dozen or so people that haven’t left me alone since I woke up in that body of yours,” Sally said, and Daniel couldn’t help but feel like he was being berated. He’d always kept his distance from people, he thought for a moment, but that wasn’t entirely true. Once upon a time he’d had plenty of friends. Him and the friends from his youth had gone on adventures together, and had faced hardships and adversity together and through this, their friendship had been forged in fire.

Until the fire had gotten too hot, and one by one, his friends, his family, had sacrificed themselves, often heroically. He’d told a lot of widows, mothers, fathers and husbands how brave and noble their loved ones had been before they’d succumbed to one evil or another. After a while, Daniel had stopped celebrating, and stopped getting close to people. It turned out, Heroics was a lonely business. But there were  some people, he figured, who cared, despite his best efforts.

“Hrm,” he said, not knowing what to actually  say.

“Yeah, they seem to think that this evil queen lady did something to your head and scrambled your brain, and they’re trying to bring me  back and, to be totally  honest, this whole us being here is a little  reassuring because it means I’m not crazy, despite all your fr-- despite everyone trying to gaslight me into thinking I’m actually you.”

“People here seem to think I know myself well enough, but it’s only been physicians, so far,” Daniel nodded, and then frowned. “You mentioned the Demon Queen. She’s there?”

Sally grimaced. “Sort of. She doesn’t seem like the person they think she is either,” she said. Daniel chewed his tongue for a moment.

“Yes, the real one is with me, here,” he said, and then looked around. “Well, back there, anyway. In the hospital.”

“Gotcha,” Sally said. “Then who’s with me?”

“Don’t know,” Daniel said. “The physician says they haven’t found his name so far, but he appears to be a man in his mid-to-late twenties.”

Sally looked at him with an incredulous stare. “ Really?  Huh. I wouldn’t have called that one,” she said. After Daniel shot her a questioning glance, she waved her hand noncommittally. “Not to, like, lean into gender roles or anything, but whoever is in there doesn’t seem like your typical guy, if you know what I mean. “He” has been asking people what the evil queen’s name is -- which, apparently, the magic lady knew -- and asked to be called that, and keeps trying to make friends with people. There’s a lot of crying whenever someone yells at him.” Sally jutted her jaw forward. “I feel weird calling him ‘him’. I might need to ask about that,” she said, and then shook her head. “Anyway, most people here -- because someone thought to drag her body -- the queen’s body, I mean -- with us, and now they woke up, everyone keeps trying to kill them, but they keep reflexively conjuring up a shield nobody can get through. I feel bad for them, to be honest.”

“He saved your life,” Daniel said. “According to the people here. Well, tried to. I don’t know if he did. I still don’t know if we’re dead.”

“Oh,” Sally said. “Didn’t do a very good job but… I’ll have to say thanks. If I get around to it. Nobody’s giving me a lot of space to think much around here.”

“That’s… less than ideal,” Daniel said, nodding. “I might… I think I might have something.” Sally looked at him expectantly. “About what you can tell the others, I mean. You could pass on a message from me, saying I was… moved to the underworld or something, that you’re a spirit from another place who got lost, but until I  get back, you don’t have a place to stay. I can give you some notes and phrases that should  reassure most of them that the message is  from me and it’ll keep them from trying to… exorcise you.”

“Yikes. That’s probably a good idea then. Being exorcised sounds unpleasant.”

“It is,” Daniel said grimly. “Trust me.” In fact, Daniel had been exorcised on three separate occasions, although always by amateurs, and it had only taken root once. As it turned out, when someone is supposed to save the world a bunch of times, it’s really hard to keep them incorporeal before some very unlikely confluence of events just brings them back. In fact, that he hadn’t already been flung back into the world he’d come from was something of a surprise. He was supposed  to be the Hero, after all. He was going to be saving the world until the end of his days.

“On that delightful note,” Sally continued, interrupting his train of thought, “anything I can help you with? Maybe don’t try to like, talk to my family yet.” She grimaced. Daniel knew that face. Rejection of the older generation was a universal constant, too. “I know I haven’t. Anyway , I can imagine there’s a lot about my world you have questions about, and if you’re in the hospital you’re soon not  about to be and it’s gonna suck to be you when you have to pay off those hospital bills which I just  realized are going to be my hospital bills when I get back and euuuugh--”

“It’ll be fine,” Daniel said. “Start at the beginning. There is a small satchel with my belongings. There’s a square in there made of something like… warm, slightly bendy glass. It has a picture of you on it. I take  that to be your identification. Everything else is a mystery to me.”

“Oh god,” Sally said, “I’m going to have to teach you about addresses and  PIN codes and… okay.” She took a deep breath. “There’s one -- it’s called plastic. It’s not glass -- one card in there that’s going to be the most important. It’s going to save your life. It’s called a credit card…”

Chapter 9

All things considered, healthcare on Earth isn’t bad. Sure, there’s planets that have full-body scanning-and-healing booths and those definitely line the top of the leaderboards, but there’re  also  still places where anxiety is treated with leeches and cocaine. While those are definitely interesting and lively places to exist, life there tends to be a little bit more all-or-nothing, with an interesting  life-expectancy. By comparison, Earth is a place where, if you’re born in the right place, usually with the right skin-tone and within a fairly broad range of socio-economic classes, you can reasonably expect to not die due to negligence. It might happen, but it’ll be unexpected.

However, these standards of care still vary a lot from place to place, and the socio-and-especially-economic demographic Daniel and Eliza appeared to be a part of were not included in the highest  standards of profit-based care. As such, they were unceremoniously asked to leave, with a little ‘We’ll send you an invoice later’ smile from a nurse. She actually did have the bill on hand, but after a long morning that involved a stabbing and a lot of blood even  before  her shift, she was not in the mood for a possible tantrum. That worked out nicely for Daniel and Eliza, who had no table of conversion for interdimensional currencies.

“Now what?” Eliza asked. Daniel was still walking on crutches (he’d been reassured they would also be on the bill), healing a little less fast than Eliza, who was getting along reasonably well with a cane (equally ‘to be monetized later’). The two of them looked around. They’d seen some of this world out of the windows of the hospital, but this was the first time they were actually out here and it smelled…

Not great. To most humans who live in most cities, there is an inherent awareness  of the smell of gasoline, diesel  and general smog, but to someone from another world, these cities reek. It didn’t quite take their breath away, but both of them did wince for a moment. There were a few sad trees planted alongside the hospital, but all they really did was emphasize the lack of green grass or blue sky. Almost everything was a brown or grey, except for the cars, which were mostly silver or some muted, dark version of red or green. Sally had warned him about them, and he had, a little reluctantly, passed it on to Eliza. Cars. Chemically (he thought, anyway) powered vehicles had replaced almost all modes of transportation, and they were heavy and went fast.

If they needed a reminder of what happened when they got hit by one, all they had to do was turn around and remember what it had felt like to wake up in there, every bone in their body some degree of jigsaw puzzle, ages fourteen and up at the very least.

At least most streets were lined with elevated pathways for pedestrians, and crossroads had clearly marked crossings and lights, Daniel noted. In fact, there were a lot of lights. Sally had done what she could to give him as much of a primer on this world as she could, but it was still hard not to get overwhelmed. Everywhere had flashing lights, from cars beeping, to shop signs selling Beer-brand beer. Well, this world had beer. That was one thing. He also quickly picked up that green seemed to mean ‘go’ and red meant ‘stop’, when it came to traffic.

“I say we try to find my… this body, Sally’s, residence,” Daniel said. “We need to find a place to recover while we strategize. She’s given me instructions on how to find it, and how to pay for food and lodgings.”

“What do you mean ‘how to pay for food’?” Eliza asked. “It’s payment. It can’t be that  complicated. Surely you just give the shopkeep--”

“It’s complicated,” Daniel interrupted her darkly. “It seems most transactions involve direct communication with banks somehow.”

“Oh dear,” Eliza said. “I thought I ran an Evil Kingdom.” Daniel glared at her and she shot him a sweet smile. “Sorry, was that in bad taste?”

“Not at all,” Daniel said, looking around. “Just worried you’ll try to do the same thing here. It pays to be prepared when around the likes of you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Eliza said coldly. “Let’s go and find something to eat then.” She clearly wasn’t very comfortable with her cane yet, and Daniel, trying to keep up with his crutches, couldn’t exactly blame her. Sure, he was more used to this, having been in his fair share of fights, but he could imagine the kind of sheltered upbringing Eliza might’ve had, and how she’d never needed a mobility aid before. Despite that, she was easily a foot, maybe a foot and a half taller than him, and he was struggling. She either didn’t notice or didn’t care, only slowing down when she rounded the corner.

When he caught up with her, he saw why. The hospital had been built just around the corner from a commercial street, which in this case meant a lot of shops, a lot of cafés and restaurants, and a lot of advertising. While places like this are common in a lot of cities in a lot of universes, as commercial ventures sort of clump together like clams on the underside of trans-oceanic boats, licking the salt off each other, the sight of post-electricity shopping streets was still a fair sight to people for who this kind of thing was often associated with more shouting, carts stuck in the mud, and people tossing buckets of latrine-water onto the street. The street was, compared to what Daniel was used to, practically spotless. He couldn’t even see any latrine-water. There wasn’t a single brown little boat happily floating down the gutter.

He wondered what Eliza saw. Unless there was a secret city of demons up in the mountains -- and he highly doubted there was -- she had never really been in a city before. While crowds are universally sort of the same, and people chatting outside of shops have a kind of ingrained instinct to stand slightly too close to or too far from the building to easily walk around them, the streetscape was still almost too much for Daniel to handle. Eliza was probably on the verge of a meltdown. He knew he would’ve been.

It wasn’t just the sights, of course. The sounds were everywhere too. Cars were noisy, and the hum of the hundreds -- maybe even thousands! -- of them, driving through the city was ever-present. But even with that constant white noise, there was still stimulation coming from all over. Many of what Daniel easily identified as boutiques, statues dressed in fine clothes behind the glass, had music coming from inside, and he wondered if this was electricity.

Sally had mentioned electricity, but clearly she didn’t understand it very well. Apparently it drove a lot of things in this world, and was probably her world’s version  of magic. That was understandable, at least. But it seemed to be everywhere, and he didn’t know yet what its limits were. Even the little plastic credit card had something to do with electricity, even though, Sally  had reassured him, there was no electricity in the card itself.

And electricity conjured up images on what he’d imagined were just large posters, playing music while they gleefully advertised food, or clothing, or what appeared to be perfumes, although fragrance advertisements are obscure across the multiverse and what they’re actually selling is anyone’s guess. Electricity also seemed to be in the little black rectangles everyone was looking at, and he wondered briefly if this society had completely cut people off from each other, until he saw at least one person talking with one of them pressed to her ear, and then briefly waving at a friend, and he quickly realized that it was mostly likely a device made for communication. If that was the case, the majority of younger people he could see actually did more  communicating than he’d ever seen in the old world, which was… well, it wasn’t a bad sight.

But he was quickly distracted -- and clearly, Eliza was too -- by the smells. The sights were everywhere and disorienting, and the sounds were loud and sometimes more than a little annoying, but the smells were everything. After the initial chemical smell of the cars had begun to drift into the background, he was able to pick up more and more. Many people wore exotic perfumes that he hadn’t smelled when he’d been invited to royal balls, but even those paled in comparison to the food. Smells of food from street-vendors, bodegas and restaurants wafted towards them, overwhelming them with smells Daniel had never even considered. He didn’t know there were that many smells, but clearly his nose knew something he didn’t, and immediately identified it as both food  and delicious

After a while of careful and aimless walking and, they stopped by a food cart that sold food Daniel recognized: Sausages. In a bun. Daniel looked over at Eliza, but if she had opinions about them, she didn’t share them, giving a blank look as they waited in line to get one. Daniel made sure to listen to the transaction, to figure out what to say, how to say it so as not to sound too out of place. The sausage in a bun was referred to as a hot dog, and came with a variety of toppings, and, more problematically, no two customers picked the same ones, although there were some recurring elements.

A few minutes later, after having paid and Daniel having to unclench his jaw at being called ‘miss’, the two of them found a little bench -- which reminded Daniel with slight annoyance of the bench in the in-between-world he kept bouncing back to. They had, between them, two sausages-in-a-bun. One with mustard, one with ketchup. What that actually meant , however, Daniel had no idea. The idea was that they’d both pick one, and if they both hated it, they could swap. If they both liked theirs, there would be no  problem. And if one of them didn’t like their pick… well, tough luck.

Eliza bit down on the one with mustard and couldn’t even swallow it before spitting it out. Daniel looked at her, making a mental note not  to show the brief worry on his face. She told him that, no, it was neither poison nor terrible. It was simply too intense. If he hadn’t just experienced the streetscape they’d walked through earlier, he would’ve considered what she’d just said nonsense, but he believed her. When he tried a bite of his own, he understood what she meant. The bread was somehow sweet. The sausage was stuffed with who-knows-what, and the ketchup was an assault on the taste buds. They both had to take a moment to recover, mentally. Emotionally. When Daniel offered to swap, Eliza snapped at him with a sneer and he put his own sausage off to the side and looked at her.

Eliza had her mouth full, but caught his glance and rolled her eyes, putting her own food away. “What?” she asked after she’d cleared and wiped her mouth. “Why are you looking at me like that, hero?  Am I doing something uncouth, maybe? Delicate sensibilities get the better of y--”

“When we fought,” Daniel interrupted her, “we both fell.”

“I’m aware, hero. I was there.” She glared daggers at him.

“You were ready to die.”

“So were you,” Eliza said, accusatory.

“And now you’re not? Or you’re… what? Angry with me? You seemed fine then. What ch--”

“I’ll point out,” Eliza said, her turn to cut him off, “that we are not  dead.” Daniel stayed quiet. She wasn’t wrong. “Not only are we not  dead, Daniel, Great Hero , but I’m stuck in a body that’s more broken than the castle you trampled through, one that has a stubble  in the morning, and worse the rest  of the day. I’m stuck in a body that looks like it’s made to shovel dirt every day, with a voice like a cow gargling gravel and a face like a dying primate, a brow big enough to convert into a sun-roof, a jaw fit to crush rocks and a chest and shoulders so wide I practically have to walk through doors sideways, Daniel.  This is revolting . If I’d known you’d do this to me, I don’t think I’d have lost.” Eliza’s breathing had become laboured and if he didn’t know any better, he’d think she was on the verge of tears. All things considered, what she said about her body wasn’t exactly warranted. The face was a perfectly normal, masculine face. The shoulders were no wider than that of any man he’d ever met, and he probably would’ve dwarfed the original owner if he himself had been in his old body, if on muscle-mass alone.

But that, of course, wasn’t it. He knew exactly how she felt. He knew what it was like to look in the mirror and see not only a stranger, but a reminder that everyone else  saw that stranger too, that the man who’d sold him the hot-dog had seen some twenty-something girl buy her boyfriend a hot dog and that he was most definitely not  the boyfriend in that scenario. That the face that was so not him  was supposed to be his face now and that this body, too thin, too small, too fragile, with hips and breasts sticking out like lumps of fat , big doe-eyes that looked almost child-like...

“I didn’t do this,” he said. “I’m stuck here too. This is… not my afterlife, either. I don’t want  this, either. This is… this is…” He smirked. “I’m not as good at expressing my dissatisfaction as you are, but take my word for it that I can relate, if not quite in the same way.” He sighed, wishing he could express the feeling of waking up and feeling okay for a second until a single movement, something as simple as cloth against his skin feeling wrong on a fundamental level, on how going to the bathroom was alien and strange and that looking down was something he only did when he absolutely had to... Despite everything, the corners of Eliza’s smile went up too.

“You didn’t do this.”

“I wouldn’t do this to my worst enemy,” Daniel said. “Let alone some Evil Demon Queen.” Eliza laughed, throwing her head back,  and some people walking past looked at her. She didn’t seem to care, and it was strange to hear her express what seemed like genuine joy for the first time. When she calmed down, she leaned back and took another bite of her hot dog.

“So I have a plan,” she said.

“If it involves world domination, I will  have to stop you.”

“Later, maybe,” Eliza said. “First, I want to make sure this world doesn’t have any  magic in it. Because if it does, even a little bit might be enough to fix these bodies, even if it can’t send us back.”

Daniel nodded. That would make it a lot more bearable to be in this place. “And in the meantime?”

“Well,” she said, and a bit of her confidence, the woman he’d met in the throne room, was seeping back into her voice, “I don’t know about you, but if all the food here is this good, I wouldn’t mind going a little native. I promise,” she said with a voice like ketchup, thick and sweet and overwhelming, “I won’t try to kill you too much.”

“That works,” Daniel replied with a smile. “I’ll try not to get away too easily.”

Chapter 10

“So this is the place, I think,” Daniel said, looking up at the apartment block, not knowing what to think. It wasn’t a building in any style he’d ever encountered, although that was because he hadn’t been paying full attention as they’d walked through the city. In fact, there had been a few buildings along the way, but there had been too much to see and smell and hear for him to have really absorbed the different architectural styles that made up the city proper. Not that anyone could blame him for this of course.

Brutalism, after all, is one of those styles of building designed to be both eye-catching, an eye-sore and easily shuffled into the background. Brutalist architecture is, at its blandest, the untextured geometry of the three-dimensional cityscape. In a streetview of highly detailed buildings with storefronts, flags hanging out of the windows and balconies where the laundry hangs out to dry, the brutalist building sticks out like a block of wood with not much more to show for its inclusion than a monolithic present-ness. “I am here,” Brutalism says.

“Okay, yes, and?” an onlooker might ask.

“That was it,” Brutalism responds, and goes back to sleep, dotting the landscape as schools and government facilities. Brutalism is oppressive in the blandest way a building can be, eschewing buttresses and gargoyles for flat concrete. And now that Daniel was standing in front of the apartment building, which seemed to have a bit cut diagonally off the top for no reason and about two thirds fewer windows than he’d expect for a building this size, he wasn’t sure he especially liked it.

“I like it,” Eliza said. “It’s ugly.” Daniel craned his neck to look at her, and then back at the building. He craned his neck a lot these days, another one of the annoyances of his new situation, and another way for people to not take him seriously. He had to sidestep people on the sidewalk a lot.  Eliza mistook his pained expression for misunderstanding. “It’s deliberate, see? It’s supposed to make you feel uneasy, but like, without being manipulative. It’s so honest  about what it is. This isn’t… how do I put this…” She put her hands on her hips. “Some buildings are like a veiled threat. Some buildings tell you that, if you misbehave, there will be a hand in the night or even an official looking man at your door the next day, and you’ll lose something important. But the façade  is regal. This isn’t… that. This is a man with a sledgehammer at the front door telling you he’s going to hit you with his sledgehammer unless you do as you’re told.”

“I suppose,” Daniel said, “that’s probably why I hate it.”

“You prefer the more subtle threats?” Eliza asked, one eyebrow and the corners of her mouth slowly going up.

“I prefer no threats at all,” he grumbled, and he approached the building with a degree of apprehension. Maybe the building wouldn’t be as aggressively raw  on the inside as much as the outside. Behind him, he heard Eliza chuckle softly. There was a man standing by the front door. He was holding a briefcase, an item Daniel had never seen before, and nonetheless immediately knew the meaning of. A man with a briefcase conjures up a feeling that transcends dimensions. ‘I have,’ a briefcase seems to say, ‘papers.’

“Hello,” the man said. “You must be Miss Sa--” he began.

“Yes,” Daniel cut him off, not in the mood to hear the name several nurses in the hospital had repeatedly used to refer to him even after his repeated asking them not to. “That’s me. Who are you?”

“My name is Robert Lawton. I’m here on behalf of the Edison Corporation. I was told you would both be coming here. Could we speak inside, please?” Robert’s voice was hoarse and low, and yet somehow grating. If the feeling of someone grinding their teeth was a voice, Robert had it. The squirrely little man, Daniel decided, was not a threat. Even if he meant harm -- and Daniel was fairly convinced this man couldn’t mean harm if he tried -- Daniel was sure that, even in this body, he could overpower him and probably snap him like a twig. He was about to say something when Eliza stepped up next to him.

“You’re sure this is the place?”

“Not sure of anything,” Daniel said, and the man winced.

“Oh dear,” Richard mumbled. “This is… oh dear.”

“Yes, Mister Lawton, we can talk inside,” Daniel said as he rummaged around in the satchel -- the hand-bag, as it had been referred to by the nurse who handed it to him -- and fished out the keys.

“This is an awfully big residence for a g--” Eliza started and then caught Daniel’s gaze. She’d clearly almost referred to Sally in the third person, and Daniel didn’t want to give away their identity, or lack thereof, just yet. “For someone as young as you,” she finished with a curt smile.

“Don’t be silly,” Daniel said as he opened the door and held it for her and Robert.  “I only have some rooms within the building. There are many tenants.” Sally had explained to him something about the prevalence of apartment life when she’d given him the address. Robert looked at them both like they were speaking another language, and Daniel shot him an apologetic smile as he led the way to the stairs. He’d been told about the elevator and he didn’t care that it was eight floors up, he was not getting in a small metal box to be pulled up by rope. “I apologize, Mister Lawton. Private joke.”

“Ah,” Robert said. “Haha.”

The climb was fairly quiet until, with the three of them all out of breath -- Daniel and Eliza both pretending not to be -- Daniel opened the apartment door. He didn’t know what he’d expected. Sally was young, so he hadn’t expected it to be tidy. The building was ugly and flat, so he hadn’t expected it to be ornate. But what was there was… nice.

Sally’s apartment was small. It had a central living room with a large and a small couch, and a small coffee table. Against the back of the biggest couch was a small dinner table with three chairs. There was a station in the corner that Daniel would’ve assumed was a desk of some kind, but it was full of electric things which he recognized by the cables.

Something about the way the room was decorated screamed to Daniel that Sally wasn’t all that well off, but that she’d done her best to make it work for her regardless, with no two pieces of furniture matching and everything having a second-hand feel to it. He could relate. He’d grown up in places not unlike it. Some better-off tenant  had, at some point, installed wooden flooring, which went a long way in making the place a lot cozier. There were a lot of plants all over, where there was room. A few bookcases here and there. One of the walls had been left bare, with no decoration other than a sheet of white cloth nailed to a wooden board, opposite an installation of electric things. If he saw Sally again, he’d have to ask about that, too.

“Come in,” Daniel said, realizing he was staring. Robert also looked around, and did his best not to touch anything. Daniel couldn’t tell if that was out of courtesy or because he didn’t want to get common citizenry on his fancy suit.

“This is cute,” Eliza said, and Daniel was about to shoot her another look when it became clear to him that her expression had been genuine.

“It’s clear to me,” Robert said, “that the situation for the two of you is… less than ideal.” Daniel had no idea what the man was referring to -- or rather, which part  he was referring to -- and decided to let him do the talking. Robert put the briefcase on the table and opened it, retrieving a stack of papers.

“Unofficially, the Edison Corporation deeply regrets what happened to both of you,” he said rapidly, “and wishes to assure you that accidents like this are exceedingly rare when our self-driving vehicles are involved. The Event…” Robert cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “It was all incredibly regrettable. That is, between us, our stance on what happened.”

“And officially?” Eliza asked, crossing her arms and leaning on one leg. She could clearly still be imposing if she wanted to be, Daniel noted, and it was easy to mentally replace the masculine appearance with who she really was underneath.

“Officially, this never happened,” Robert said drily. “Or we would like for it to be that way.” He pulled a pen out of his pocket and put it on top of the papers that were on the table. “If you sign here, your medical costs will be taken care of, with something extra to ensure your… cooperation. In return, you do not press charges, don’t talk to the press, and any mentions of brain-trauma or head-injury are due to an unrelated accident caused by your own selves.”

Daniel and Eliza both looked at him. If the medical costs really were as high as Sally feared, this was a generous offer. The papers, stark and white, glared at him from the table. He hated this kind of thing. It felt like lying.  He walked over and picked up the pen. There was a dotted line, because there is always a dotted line. He almost put pen to paper when--

“Hold on,” Eliza said. Daniel and Robert both looked at her, the latter seeming especially annoyed at the interruption. “How much extra?” she asked.

“Well, we wished to ensure your full cooperation, so we feel a donation of fifty thousand dollars will be more than satisfactory,” Robert said, licking his lips nervously.

“If you’re offering us that amount… going by the fact that you’re even here…” Eliza was clearly doing math in her head. Daniel could see the gears turning as she analyzed the little man and everything he’d said. “You could afford to give us twice that…” she said, and Daniel looked at Robert’s expression, who seemed to put up a mask of solemn resignation. Eliza had clearly picked up on it too. ”And you’re okay with us asking for that much more. So you can afford a lot  more.” Robert’s face shifted from that of a man who thought he was about to get away with something to a deer in headlights that most definitely wasn’t.

“No, I--”

“You can afford to give us ten times that and nobody in your company would ever feel it,” she said, staring daggers at Robert. “Hells, twenty  times. Am I right?”

“We-- Well-- I-- I--” Robert stammered, and Eliza took a step towards him. Daniel wanted to interrupt what was clearly veering into intimidation, but he also couldn’t help but be impressed at the way she was playing the situation like an instrument. “Look, we can’t just give you a million--”

“You’re offering us a large amount of money,” she continued, “because an experiment -- done by you -- caused harm. That means you want this to go away fast , because this experiment is going to make you a lot more. You can’t afford to leave us as a loose end.”

Robert took a step forward, clearly trying to push back. “That doesn’t mean you can just demand  more. Besides, we could always look into other aven--”

“ But,” Eliza interrupted,   “you’re also worried that doing something more insidious or backhanded would get more  eyes on your experiment, and you don’t want that either, because you need this to be a success. You need our cooperation. So you give us… twenty times the amount you had in your head, on that line you hadn’t filled out yet,” she pointed at a line on the paper Daniel hadn’t even noticed, “or we talk to the… uh…” she snapped her fingers a few times.

“The press,” Daniel offered. He was sure this bluff wouldn’t work. Eliza had no idea how business here worked, or even what self-driving cars were, because he  had no idea. But Robert seemed to deflate.

“I can’t... “

“Yes,” Eliza said, “you can. You almost got two people killed and that matters, doesn’t it, Robert? That doesn’t just go away unless the two of us do.”

“That is,” he said, with a voice like someone slowly trying to deflate a novelty badger, “the upper limit of what I have been informed I am allowed to offer you.” He took the pen and wrote down a number with a lot of zeroes on the page, after which Daniel and Eliza both signed names that were alien to them. With a curt nod and a mumbled farewell that bordered heavily on the impolite, he left.

“Damn,” Eliza said, “could’ve gotten more.”

“Wh-- what? ” Daniel blurted out incredulously. “No matter how much this currency is worth -- and you don't even know how much that is -- this is clearly an insane amount of money. You have to see that!”

“Oh, I assume so, blight upon my existence,” she said, looking at her copy of the contract, “but if he said it was the upper limit, that means there was more.”

“If you say so, evil demon queen .” He looked around the place, and saw two doors. Through one was what he assumed was a kitchen. It was tiled, which would make spillage easier, for one. There was also a sink, another universal feature of household design. Through the other door was a modest little bedroom. One  modest little bedroom. With one bed. Daniel and Eliza looked at each other. It was  getting late. “I’ll take the couch,” Daniel said, refusing to play the game the universe had clearly set up as a hilarious little prank.

“No, you won’t,” Eliza said. “Don’t patronize  me, Daniel.” She huffed and sat down on the largest couch. “I won’t have you try and play the gentleman with me.  I’m not some waif to be pampered, and you’d do best not to treat me like it. I know what I look like, but don’t you dare oversteer in the other direction.”

“Very well,” Daniel said, shrugging, “I’ll take the bed then.”

“ No! ” Eliza coughed and cleared her throat daintily. “No, that would also be unfair.” She smirked. “You can take the other couch, until we find a way to determine who gets the bed.” Daniel blinked at her a few times.

“This is ridiculous.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Eliza said. “Now help me find some blankets, I have the feeling this place gets cold at night.”

With a sigh, Daniel gave up. “Very well,” he said, and went looking. But not because she’d told him so.

Chapter 11

Eliza, Daniel had come to conclude, was not the best, but not the worst roommate he had ever had. There were idiosyncrasies to contend with, certainly, but he had expected things to be different. She was royalty, technically speaking, and he’d expected her to demand fineries, luxury, comfort, but she seemed oddly at ease in a place this small, although he caught her staring out the window with an expression he would only be able to describe as wistful more than once. Or maybe he was misreading her. She must’ve missed her old life as queen, minions at her beck and call, ordering servants around, surely. And yet… She wasn’t stuck up. Not as such.

That wasn’t to say she was easy  to live with. Despite the opulence of the bathroom, adjacent to the bedroom, she’d still made certain demands with regards to hygiene, which they’d eventually been able to satisfy after several trips to a nearby store -- which had been an adventure all on its own. She also had a tendency to brood, steepling her hands as she sat at the little dinner table and seemed to try and burn a hole through the table with sheer intense staring, and while he was worried about what she might be planning, he was also convinced he wouldn’t get a straight answer out of her if he asked.

Which, of course, played into her vicious streak. While they most definitely both adhered to their ceasefire, and Eliza wasn’t planning any grand conquests as best as he could tell, she made a point of keeping him on edge a lot. He caught her holding up and examining knives in the kitchen more than once, only to turn around and hide it behind her back when he came in. It was only after the third time this happened that he realized he hadn’t caught her doing anything, but rather that she’d set up the situation specifically  to provoke him. After reaffirming that she wasn’t planning to stab and kill him, all he could do was lament her unfortunate sense of humour.

But she’d also put the effort in. After their first day, they’d both realized that making the other miserable was very much akin to cutting off their nose to spite their face, and wouldn’t lead to anything but mutual misery, and they’d fallen into a rhythm of sorts. A few rules, spoken or unspoken, cemented themselves, and both of them adhered to them.

Bathroom time was sacred, for one. While Daniel had enjoyed baths, back in the day, and he was sure Eliza’s old castle had contained a bath the size of a lake, one of the wonders of this world’s plumbing included showers . Eliza and him had shared a moment of unadulterated awe and even joy when the slowly-heating water had come out of the shower head. Ever since, they had both taken to enjoying long showers that were not to be interrupted under any circumstances. Sure, a part of it was to relish in the hot running water. But if her experience was anything like his, Eliza probably spent some time every day in the bathroom trying to make peace with her new appearance.

He knew he himself did. In fact, for the first time in his life, he’d had a panic attack in that bathroom, shivering and hyperventilating, and trying to scratch at his skin until the person he used to be showed himself underneath. The body he was in felt borderline repulsive to him, and spending time -- fruitlessly, so far -- coming to terms with it was becoming a daily ritual. Weight hanging off his chest when he moved too quickly felt like something had been done  to him. Bumping into things with hips that flared out ridiculously. It was a bit too much sometimes and he had to keep himself from clawing at his own body.

He’d heard Eliza sobbing through the door at least once before, and the eye contact they’d made after she came out of the bathroom had cemented the importance of that alone time. Neither of them said, a word about it, of course.

 There was also the sharing of duties and rights. Shopping and cooking were things they were both equally adept at, having no idea how to navigate the city or how to operate the various kitchen appliances. They’d agreed, after doing the dishes, that the person who cooked was exempt from some cleaning chores that day. Whether she enjoyed cooking or hated cleaning, Eliza had quickly taken to learning how the kitchen worked, and spent more time cooking than Daniel, even if she wasn’t particularly good at it. He’d even heard her humming while cooking, once. He’d made sure not to say anything. It was a spell he wasn’t keen on breaking any time soon.

They took turns sleeping in the bed, which was quite big for a girl as small as Sally, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about a partner, so it might’ve been a luxury expenditure. The girl hadn’t exactly thrown away money on much else, Eliza had noted. The bed was definitely soft, if a bit empty for Daniel’s tastes. It’s why he used to prefer single beds. Or, well, not sleeping alone. But these days the only person he knew was… He shook his head.

Daniel sat at the little living room table, tourism guides and how-to manuals strewn about, and tried to focus on something other than Eliza. She was all around him these days, and they were learning how to coexist with remarkable ease, but he couldn’t allow himself to forget who she was, and what he was supposed to do when that side of her made a comeback. She was the Demon Dragon Queen, and that didn’t just go away because she shaved so often it made him wince. He was the Hero. He had to keep an eye on her.

The various pamphlets in front of him had been to give him a better lay of the land, to get a better idea of the world they were in now, but it was overwhelming. The black plastic card, the Credit Card, with the funds from the company that had put them in hospital, had come in after only a day, and it had paid for food, rent (a practice Daniel had serious questions about) and these. A pile of how-to books as tall as him and he had no idea where to get started. Sure, he was interested in this world’s technology, but all of it used jargon he had no idea how to decipher, and he hadn’t heard from Sally since the hospital, so she hadn’t been available to ask questions of. At least the map of the city was incredibly detailed, on a level had never seen outside magical scrying done by mages back home.

There were other things eating away at his hindbrain, of course. It’s a universal constant that any person who is in a situation with guaranteed food and shelter but no way to express or keep themselves busy will get incredibly restless. There’s a reason it is considered by many societies as a fitting punishment to lock someone in a box with enough food for sustenance until they slowly go crazy. Daniel needed to do something. Eliza too, from the looks of it. They were both getting restless.

A job would help. He still didn’t have any idea of how much money they now had access to, despite a book as thick as his arm on economics just a few feet away from him, but no matter how much it was, money had a tendency to run out. A source of income would take away some anxieties, at least, and give him something to do other than try to cram a world’s worth of knowledge into his skull.

Searching for magic had been fruitless so far. Sure, they’d found traces and signs of magic in a lot of books, but all in a hypothetical, mythical sense. Magic, it seemed, existed in this world as fiction only, which was disheartening. Eliza had flung at least one book at the wall that mentioned ‘finding your inner spirit goddess’, only for it to turn out to be less true wish-fulfillment and more wishful thinking.

They’d done some more shopping, of course, and Sally had  given him a primer on laundry and how to operate the small washing machine and drier in the corner of her kitchen. Sally’s wardrobe wasn’t huge, but it was expansive and neutral enough to cover Daniel. It wasn’t clothing he was used to -- the old large undershirts he’d been used to simply didn’t seem to exist here -- but it did the job and none of it was too aggressively feminine.

 But Eliza had still  needed clothing. Daniel had offered to go with her, but she’d adamantly refused. She only took one of the smaller maps with her to avoid getting lost, and had come back after a few hours with a bag that contained mostly underwear, baggy jeans and baggy hoodies. She’d clearly cried, he could see it in her eyes, but the glare she’d shot him had told him not to ask about it. He hadn’t needed to.

And then there was the last thing. The elephant in the proverbial room. Their identities. Daniel was walking around as a girl named Sally, and even though he tried to tell strangers, like retail workers, his name was Daniel, they just seemed to assume they misheard him and called him Danielle, which was no better. But at least he knew who Sally was, with Sally’s own help. She was a twenty-something who’d moved to the city after a falling out with her family, and had apparently made enough to get by working the front desk at a local ‘multi-media’ store, although she’d assured Daniel that she probably wouldn’t be missed if she didn’t show up. She’d mentioned something about franchises and big corporations that Daniel hadn’t been able to follow.

But Eliza still didn’t know who her body had been supposed to be. A random nobody? Daniel hoped that Sally would be able to find out more by the time they ended up in that in-between space again.

But there was, of course, more to it than that. He knew who Sally was now. But what if they weren’t able to make it back to their respective worlds? Sure, it was a worst-case scenario, but it was one that had to be considered. Sally hadn’t said it outright, but her argument with her family hadn’t seemed like the never-talk-again variety.

The more he tried to make himself useful and distract himself, the more he was getting overwhelmed. Leafing through a book on geography to get an idea of the size of this planet, this world,  the almost-two-hundred-countries and upwards of six thousand languages jumped out at him to remind him that his experiences were completely insignificant by comparison, and it kept forcing him to sit back and think about Sally’s family.

“What’s going on?” Eliza asked as she walked past. She held a cup of steaming tea, something that had thankfully been present in both worlds. “You seem more sour and dour than usual.”

“It’s nothing you’d concern yourself with,” Daniel said, crossing his arms and jutting his jaw forward as he thought. “It’s little people stuff.”

“I’ve lost several feet in height,” she said, sitting down on the other sofa, “try me.”

“Sally -- this body’s -- family is out there somewhere,” Daniel said, reluctant to share his worries with someone who might well try to subjugate this world or his old one if given the chance. “I’m trying to figure out what to do if we meet. If I should reach out or not. What to say.” He leaned on his knees. “I don’t know what they’d think.”

Eliza looked at him for several long seconds, and Daniel was starting to wonder if telling her had been a mistake, if she’d mock him or berate him. She took a sip of her tea then put it on the table in a tiny spot not covered by a book ‘For Dumbasses’. “You don’t know if you should convince them Sally is dead,” she said. The edge that was usually in her voice wasn’t there, and Daniel looked at her with confusion.

“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Difficult.”

“If you’re going to mock me…” he began, but she shook her head.

“There’s many reasons someone might take distance from their family,” Eliza said. “But if I can’t find any magic, we’ll have to give them a way to grieve while confirming to them you’re not their child.”

“I… well, that’s true…”

“I can think of a few things,” Eliza said. “Maybe we can… But that requires magic…” She frowned and crossed her legs, before bouncing up with determination. “I need to know what’s possible in this world.” She frowned and looked over at his stack of books, running a hand over the spines until she stopped at one and pulled it out, only slightly wobbling the pile. Daniel looked at the cover as Eliza simply sat down and started reading what appeared to be a book called Modern Psychology , then frowned again. What was she looking for? She seemed utterly engrossed by the book immediately, and Daniel didn’t know what to think. Was she just… helping? Coming up with solutions just like that? Why? Surely not out of the kindness of her heart. After a few minutes, she looked up at him. “What?”

“I… nothing. Thank you,” he said, and went back to one of his books on world history. He could’ve sworn he saw the corner of her mouth twitch.

“Hrm,” Eliza said. “Don’t mention it.”

“More tea?” he asked as he got up.

“Please.” Eliza held up her cup without looking. Daniel took it and, with a lot to think about, went to put the kettle on for both of them.

Chapter 12

Of all the things he hadn’t expected to happen, ‘Eliza getting a job almost immediately’  was at the top of his list. They’d been trying to figure out some of the f ine points over the past week, with Daniel picking up a book or two on telecommunications, which was an incredibly complicated system of communication he was sure involved magnets somehow, although he had no idea how they were used, and how they were electric. But it had helped him to sort-of explain why there was a small device in their apartment that occasionally loudly screamed at them.

Sally was, after all, a practical girl. Like anyone distancing herself from her family, she had made sure not to give them her new phone number. But, like a practical girl who did want to have the ability to give her well-meaning grandmother a phone number to call once a week, she had invested in a landline. After life had pulled one of its curveballs, that landline didn’t get used much more anymore.

After the initial panic, the screaming plastic box had been identified by Daniel, although neither him nor Eliza stopped regarding it with suspicion since that first time. Knowing how to pick it up was its own little challenge, but eventually, he’d given it a go. It felt, to him, not unlike the first time a priest of one of the lesser religions had given him a blessing and he had felt, through the man’s touch, a lesser god trying desperately to be relevant. Something tangible but divine. Important, sacred, real. That moment had lasted for all of seven seconds when he realized that the woman on the other side of the line was trying to sell him something, and he immediately defaulted to universal behaviour.

“I’m sorry,” he said, faking a smile the woman wouldn’t be able to see, “but I’m quite happy with my plan already.” He put the phone down before she could argue and stood there sweating for a moment and wondering why that had made him so nervous. Whether it was the lying or the completely unexpected social interaction, he suddenly started to realize the horror of having one of these in his home. And he didn’t even know about cell phones yet.

“So… what was it?” Eliza asked, trying desperately to pretend like the loud ringing hadn’t made her teeth itch, stirring an experimental cup of coffee. It was terrible, but as she had no frame of reference, she was quite proud of it anyway.

“Of all the… someone was trying to sell m--” Daniel began, ready to launch into a rant about how he could travel across the vast oceans of the spaces between space itself and door-to-door salesmen would always find them. He was ready to really let loose about predatory marketing schemes and how they always targeted the vulnerable, possibly followed up by an out-loud musing if that involved them now, and was then entirely prepared to do the full wrap-around back into frustration with not just unwanted and uninvited salespeople, but the fact that they could effectively step inside  with the use of these telephones, and how that was a truly terrible thing. He had been ready, but he didn’t. Because he was interrupted. By the phone again. Eliza and him both jumped in response to the noise, and then looked at each other, laughing sheepishly. “I’ll…” Daniel began hesitantly, but Eliza held up a hand.

“Let me try,” she said, and walked over to the phone, picking it up the way she’d seen him do it. “Hell… lo?” she said, not sure how these things were supposed to work yet. Daniel was happy to observe. With all the conviction of someone with exactly one (1) more experience under his belt than her, he figured he could make an accurate estimation of the rest of that interaction. He could, of course, not.

“Yes,” Eliza said to the voice on the other end. Daniel noted that, now that he was further away from what he had no idea was called a receiver, the voice on the other side of the line sounded suspiciously like being mumbled at by a goblin with a dislike for language, vowels and consonants, and an outright hatred for syllables. It was all high-pitched garbled nonsense from where he was sitting.

“Hffl? Wuddo libel noddaboo arroo mobiban?”

“Yes, I would, actually,” Eliza said, and the way the corners of her mouth curled up gave Daniel shivers. He was already starting to feel sorry for the poor soul on the other side of the line, and then stopped himself when he realized that they’d come into what was, at the moment, his  living room, to sell him something he had expressed no need for. Whatever they were about to get, they most likely deserved. Probably.

“Wubbafell! Cabboopelus waccurepan yuyuseng?”

“Well, before we get into that, I have to say that I’ve received your previous message and I have to say we were sorely  disappointed by your offer,” Eliza said with a voice like poisoned cake. There was a pause on the other side of the line. “Would it be possible for me to speak with your commanding officer?”

“ Yubeena mamajer?”

“Yes, manager. My mistake. Yes, of course I’ll hold.” She leaned against the table and began to twirl the phone’s cable around her finger idly, and Daniel couldn’t help but smile. She was enjoying  this, and it was hard not to get some enjoyment out of it in return.

“ Wello owkannawelpu?”

“Yes, hello, I was just speaking to your… worker,” she said, and Daniel went into the kitchen to make himself something. If he was going to watch the spectacle, he was going to get something to drink while he was at it. They’d discovered they had a coffee machine and one of the drawers in the small kitchen held not just its manual but the manual to every electrical appliance in the house. He and Eliza had a little wager going about who was going to be the first to make what the machine called a “cappuccino” that didn’t taste like angry gravel. When he walked back into the living room, he saw that Eliza was still in an animated conversation.

“ Juzzamoma, wemmie gemma mamagermam.”

“Of course,” she said sweetly, “take the time you need. Your offer was already quite generous but I can’t help but be offended.” A small pause.

“ Swuzmie?”

“You may go,” Eliza said and she sat on the back of the couch, crossing her legs. Daniel handed her a cup of failed coffee, which she took with a grateful little smile.

“Is it going well?” Daniel whispered.

“I haven’t had this much fun in weeks ,” she said gleefully. “Yes, hello?”

“Wezzelpip, aziwunderspan yuvassom compin…”

“Yes. Not to say that your subordinates haven’t done their best to be helpful, but I think you and I both know that the packages offered are for common clientele…” Eliza said, clearly already having picked up a bunch of jargon from the previous resellers. Daniel couldn’t help but be impressed by how easily she was talking circles around the person on the other line. And then, after another ten minutes of back and forth, the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“ Avoowever comsiberapareep immarpeping?”

“Well, I hadn’t considered it, although I do have several years of experience in… management.” Daniel’s frown deepened as Eliza was clearly being asked questions that were outside the scope of being sold something. He asked an unspoken question, and she shrugged with a smile, which wasn’t reassuring in the least. “Uh huh. Of course. Yes, I’m interested. Oh? Wh-- I’d have to look, but I want to say yes. Okay. Thank you. Yes. No, thank you. I will of course be expecting… Of course, I knew you’d be reasonable. Thank you. I’ll see you then.”

She put the phone down and looked at him with a smugness that transcended the face she was currently wearing. He could see  the perfect face of the Demon Dragon Queen underneath it as she flashed her teeth bare. “What just happened?” he asked.

“I can start tomorrow,” she said, and then practically bounced off to the bedroom. It was her turn tonight, and loathe as he was to admit it, she’d definitely earned it. He didn’t know how , but she did.

That had been a week ago, and, as far he could tell from her demeanour, it was going great. And he knew he was supposed to be happy for them. They had a source of income now, on top of what they had in their account, and that bought them more time in case they needed to make expenses here. But he had also sort of expected him  to be the first to take up responsibility and find employment. He’d handed in applications at a few places, but he didn’t exactly have a lot of easily marketable skills. None that would translate to this world, at least. He’d applied as a personal trainer at a local gym, because he had some experience whipping people into shape at least. And he’d made sure to do his exercises ever since his body had started to heal a bit. Starting with running, he’d also moved up to various ways to bulk up. If this body was going to be in his way for a while, he was going to make it more like what it should be, as best he could, as limited as that was.

“So that is where things are at,” he said, leaning on his knees, his  knees, ol’ reliable and unreliable, in armor he’d worn for years. It was good to be in that body again, even if it was temporary, like a breath of fresh air after being locked in a musty room for weeks. It was also just good to see Sally again, to ask her how things had been on the other side. She seemed to be a lot more chipper  than last time at least. “It’s been hard,” he said, sighing. “I keep fighting for this…” he looked down and for the first time in a while it didn’t cause his scalp to burn, and chuckled. “Well, for that  body to fit even a little bit.” He shot Sally a slightly accusing glance. “You could’ve exercised better. But I’m making it work.”

“I’m… well, I’m glad to hear you’re figuring things out, at least. It’s been really interesting here too. Oh! Oh. Oh! Okay, so I know it sucks on your end still but with help from… well, she says her name is ‘Liz’ so we’re calling her that for now, but she gave me my old body back… well, something like  it. But--”

“Liz?” Daniel asked.

“Oh! I didn’t tell you yet! Yeah, it turned out that the person in the body that the old queen is in wasn’t a guy at all, but a girl named Liz, which does make a lot more sense, although it clearly wasn’t her name, but she’s refused to give her old one, and y’know, I can tell it’s a sore subject so…” She shrugged. “She’s nice. We’re actually on the road back to her castle with the mage who went with you the first time. She’s going to be trying to dismantle all of her power structure and stuff. The mage… Sybill? Sabine? I haven’t talked to her much. Anyway, she’s coming with to keep an eye on her, and I’m coming with because, well, I don’t know anyone else who likes falafel here and sometimes you gotta talk about street food, y’know?”

“Uh huh,” Daniel said, trying to untangle the ball of string that was Sally’s sentence structure. “Speaking of figuring things out… there’s some things I’m still not sure on, and I don’t know how to find them easily. There’s a large book of business and phone numbers, but it is clumsy at best.”

“Oh, just google i--” Sally said, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh my god… You don’t know about the Internet yet. I totally spaced on that, damn . Okay, I have to tell you about the internet and smart-phones and computers and… Okay, so you know about phones, right? Okay, so the whole electricity thing… look, there’s a computer in the living room. I’ll walk you through how to turn it on.”

“What’s the Internet?” Daniel asked. Throughout the history of his world, there had never been someone who asked a more loaded, more dangerous question. To someone like Sally, for whom most of her life had existed in a world connected in every direction, the idea of explaining it, its intricacies, was a daunting task. But she decided to take a crack at it anyway.

“Okay, so… Imagine a series of tubes…”

Chapter 13

Daniel hadn’t had to fight this hard in some time now, and this damned body of his, even with clothing that strapped all of the uncomfortable bits down, was so hard to make cooperate. It wasn’t that it wasn’t equipped with the right muscles, but that he was constantly reminded of its wrongness. Even when he’d got himself a short haircut, it felt off. The clothing that was supposed to allow him freedom of movement felt restrictive and designed to emphasize his figure , something he didn’t even want to have.

But that didn’t stop him from forcing it where he wanted it to. He had always been good at metaphorically standing his ground and making the immovable move. In this case, that was his body. And he was moving it like his life depended on it. It didn’t, of course, but he had also learned over the years that sometimes, working like your life depends on it is the only way to get things to go your way.

Job interviews are awful. It would be hard to find someone who disagrees with that, and yet, as a society, people keep having them. To perform a degree of social literacy in front of a jury of people, something often unrelated to the actual position that is being applied for, is designed to put people on the back foot. Eventually, all this often does is filter out the people who are good at lying about their experience from the people who aren’t. This is not even going into personal biases and societal and institutional discrimination. It is an outdated system, and should be done away with.

The owners of Pat & Jenny’s Gym, Pat and, surprisingly, Jenny, agreed with that sentiment wholeheartedly. For one, they had no use for people who were good at talking their way into a position they couldn’t also hold for five minutes without sweating. They’d had people show up who had clearly been there because they figured the job would be easy, which had led to some stumbles early on in the Gym’s history. There was also the fact that neither Pat or Jenny were particularly good with words, and they knew that a particularly vocal person could probably talk them into a corner.

Which was why Daniel was currently beating the absolute snot out of Pat & Jenny’s resident and heavily padded martial artist instructor. He’d originally applied to be a personal trainer, but his resume, written out on a piece of white paper in a functional but far-from-eye-catching handwriting, had caught Pat’s eye for its mention of experience with fighting. Of course, Daniel hadn’t been able to put all  of his experience on it, nor what it exactly entailed. He looked like he was in his twenties, and he figured he could only account for about a decade of training; he’d made sure it looked like it had been his life. Because it had been. Jenny had made a small note of how un-girly the handwriting was, and how Daniel had looked when he’d handed in the resume, and the name at the top.

The first thing he’d been asked to show was his ability to perform certain acts of athleticism, which hadn’t been that hard. It had been more than two months since the accident now, and he’d been running and exercising religiously. He’d learned over time exactly what the limits of a body felt like and even if this one wasn’t his, by the gods he was going to make it do what he wanted it to. No cartwheels or handstands, and lifting weights was damned difficult with so little basis for muscle mass to work with, but given a wooden sword he could do drills for hours. After Pat and Jenny had seen that, they’d asked for Bobby, the ‘sensei’ they’d hired last month to step into Hall B with them please, if he didn’t mind. Bobby had grinned when asked to spar with the short girl for her job interview.

Bobby was exactly the kind of person Pat and Jenny had tried to avoid hiring, but he’d been very good at selling lies, and he knew just enough about Taekwon-Do and Jiu-Jitsu to make it look convincing. He’d figured he’d knock a small girl on her ass and get more affirmation about his skills and maybe even raise. He hadn’t expected the girl to insist he wear additional padding and a boxing helmet while she stood there in what looked like a teenager’s workout outfit.

He also hadn’t expected her to be so… intimidating. He was a foot and a half taller than she was, and yet he had the feeling he was being confronted by someone like his father, a stern older figure ready to show him how much of a kid he still was. It was something in her stance, in her eyes.

What Bobby didn’t know was that, for the first time in his life, he was in the same room as a warrior. And this warrior was, first off, not a girl. While he was working with a body that wasn’t even his, it is, as they say, a poor craftsman that blames his tools, and Daniel never blamed his. When Daniel started to approach, Bobby found it hard to know exactly what to do, almost paralyzed in fear.

What Bobby also didn’t know, and what his body did , was that he was in the presence of what was, essentially, a creature more dangerous than him. It had gone into fight, flight or freeze and with the eyes of Pat and Jenny on them, it had opted for the latter with no easy alternatives, though it was clearly considering them. He didn’t understand why the hair on the back of his neck stood up or why he was sweating as this short person sized him up, or why his heart jumped in fear whenever they made eye contact, but his body clearly did. It was trying to urge him to jump out the window.

The first hit, eventually, was his, as Daniel stood two feet in front of him. Bobby opted for a high chest kick, hoping to knock the girl down before the fight had even begun. It would’ve been a good strategy against an inexperienced opponent. A kick like that can hit like a mule and knock the wind out of you, and rattl e your skull when you hit the ground. That kind of disorientation is something battle-hardened fighters spend years completely overcoming. Of course, some fighters had realized they were suddenly in a much smaller body and opted not to get hit at all.

Daniel was not an inexperienced opponent. He sidestepped the kick and, considering the opponent’s padding, began a swift series of blows on Bobby’s joints, followed by several body checks to keep him off-balance, hooking his own foot behind Bobby’s to make him stumble.

This went on for several minutes. To an observer, this looked a little bit like a mouse-sized cat toying with a cat-sized mouse, but Daniel was simply conserving strength, expecting his opponent to try something stupid but dangerous, as well as trying to keep from actually causing long-term harm. He was a teacher, after all. Sure, he had no experience with fancy martial arts, but fancy martial arts are often more art and less martial. An experienced pit-fighter will kick your ass with experience, grit and a mean streak that no amount of tai-chi can easily overcome, no matter what kung fu movies will try to tell you.

Eventually, Bobby tried something stupid, foregoing the little martial arts training he’d had with a tackle. Daniel, having anticipated this, met Bobby’s chin with a rising knee. Bobby made a sound that would have been, to a desperate elk, particularly attractive, and went down like a sack of bricks.

There was a moment of silence in Hall B, which Bobby had failed to get renamed to ‘The Dojo’, until Pat, who had been sitting on a folding chair in the corner walked over to Bobby and Daniel, the former sitting up with a groan and the latter doing stretches.

“That was… uh…” Pat said, displaying his trademark eloquence. Daniel knew what he meant and nodded.

“Thank you. I hope that was an adequate display of physical ability. I can teach others to stay fit like this,” he said.

“Well,” Jenny followed up, her hands on her hips and the daggers in her eyes currently pointed at Bobby, “I think we were wondering if you’d be interested in teaching self-defense instead.” She paused. “Or both, really, if you have the time.”

Daniel considered this for a moment. If people here needed to learn how to defend themselves, he could do that. “Certainly,” he said, and then glanced at Bobby. “Would that present a problem?”

“Not at all,” Pat grumbled. “A position just opened up.” Bobby seemed to realize his trial phase had not gone his way, didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to say, but just as importantly, his jaw went - click- when he opened his mouth.

“I’d be happy to,” Daniel said and offered his hand. Pat shook it and was surprised at the lack  of vice-like grip. After the display he’d seen, a part of him had expected Daniel to crush his hand between steel fingers, but the handshake was remarkably… normal. Unbeknownst to Pat, that was because Daniel had overcome the toxic habit of trying to assert dominance through pointless displays of strength decades ago.

“So…” Jenny asked as she watched Bobby slink away, “is Danny like… a nickname?” Daniel blinked a few times.

“No,” he said. “It’s Daniel.”

“That’s an… interesting name for a girl,” Pat tried.

“It would be,” Daniel said, defying them both with a calm stare. “Not a girl.” Jenny just shrugged and walked to the door with a smile.

“Cool,” she said, “neither is my boyfriend. You’ll do fine here, Daniel.” Jenny held the door open and nudged at it with her head. “Come on, I want to go grab lunch and I have someone to fire.” Daniel blinked again. That wasn’t the reaction he’d been expecting, and not the one he’d had at  the hospital. Jenny’s casual acceptance of his name hit harder than he’d expected it to. Grabbing his bag, he followed her to the exit.

“Thank you,” he mumbled, his brow furrowed, not knowing what to think and so resorting to thinking of everything at once. He was lost in thought all the way home, his body heavy after a fight that had been his first in months. It had been a good workout, sure, but it also made his body that much harder to ignore. It was because of this that, when he walked past the multimedia-store Sally had once worked at, he didn’t look inside, and didn’t see his old face, as well as that of Eliza as she used to look, plastered on a poster taller than him.

When he got home, Eliza herself was sitting at a table, poring over a series of papers with a frown on her face as intense and deep as his. When their eyes met, there was an immediate buzz in the air. Not that Daniel had been in a bad mood, but his body ached in the way that a shower wouldn’t fix, and Eliza clearly had a bone to pick with reality in general. He ground his teeth for a moment.

“How did it go?” Eliza asked curtly.

“Good. Was offered a job after fighting a bad instructor.”

“Of course you picked a fight,” Eliza scoffed. “Typical.” Daniel’s eyes bugged out at the accusation of… what, exactly? He dropped his pack and walked closer, carefully.

“What,” he started, “is that supposed to mean exactly?” Eliza leaned back and glared at him.

“You’re The Great Hero, Daniel,” she said. “Of course you have to resort to physical violence to get what you want. It’s typical of men  like you.” The way the word ‘men’ burned on her tongue, the way she spat it out didn’t sit well with him. Navigating his own masculinity was a fight against expectations of his current body by both himself and his environment, and he didn’t appreciate it being reduced to something like this.

“Listen, Eliza, what ever  is going on with you, it isn’t my business,” he said, trying to stay calm, “but I’m not interested in trying to box up to you when I’m…”

“Shorter than me?” she asked, standing up, thunder in her eyes. “Feel intimidated because I’m tall, is that it?”

“No, that’s not--” he said, and he balled his fist, his feet automatically spreading a bit to give him a more defensible stance. He’d fought someone not half an hour ago. His body remembered what to do.

“Feeling threatened by a more aggressive male  in your space, Hero ?” Eliza snarled, and there was something in her voice, something he couldn’t put his finger on. Something was off.

“No, I didn’t--”

“Do I make you feel uncomfortable , Daniel, with how much bigger and stronger than you I am? Do you feel unsafe  around me? Is that why you went to go pick a fight? Is that it?”

“Stop,” Daniel said, steadying his breathing.

“Why? Am I getting thr--”

“No,” he said. “This isn’t about me.” Eliza froze. She was shaking, and Daniel saw what he’d missed before. That red line around her eyes that indicated she’d been crying. The marks on the back of her hands where she’d cut herself shaving her arms one too many times.

“You--” Eliza said, and her voice cracked slightly.

“What happened?” Daniel said, taking a step closer. Eliza was shivering more obviously now, her lower lip betraying the inner turmoil she was trying to keep down.

“At work…” she began and Daniel ignored the one tear that ran down her face… “I have been… learning… But what is persuasive for them… they seem to view me as… aggressively…” Daniel heard the creaking of her fingers as her knuckles grew white, “ masculine. ” Ah. Daniel put a hand on her arm. Tears were flowing more freely now.

“I can relate,” he said softly, his high-pitched voice like nails on a chalkboard to him.

“What do you see, Daniel? When you look at me?” There was a pleading tone to her voice that was heartbreaking. He took a deep breath.

“The Evil Demon Dragon Queen,” he said with a soft smile, and before he could get more out, her arms had wrapped around him and he heard her weeping softly into his shoulder. He didn’t even realize the stress was washing off him in heaving sobs until after he’d been crying himself for a minute as well. Neither of them said much more that evening. Eliza made food. It was pretty damn good, and she blushed when Daniel told her. They both slept on their respective sofa s, wordlessly agreeing not to speak about it.

Chapter 14

Working again was a blessing, Daniel realized. Being cooped up had been driving him slowly insane, especially considering the fact that Eliza had become, essentially, the breadwinner. He’d worried at first if her employer would take umbrage with the fact that she had no valid form of identification, but clearly their hiring process and background checks weren’t exactly in-depth. All they’d required was an address and an account number.

So she’d been working and he hadn’t, and he’d still been hesitant to touch the electric device in the room. The books, while giving an abundance of information that was almost impossible to wrap his head around, were physical, tangible objects he could pick up. The idea that all of human knowledge could somehow be accessed through a screen, a box with letters on, and something that could only be imagined to be a mouse with a lot of imagination. He’d quite literally wrestled a dragon, but that thing scared him. He’d booted it up once. Pressing the button with the circle and the line it had made a whirring noise at him that he hoped was normal, though he had regarded it with suspicion. Painstakingly he”d typed out the password, just like Sally had told him to.

The computer had unlocked, and immediately several squares with moving pictures and a lot of noise had popped up, blaring music at him, and he slammed down on the power button and turned it off again. He hadn’t dared turning it on since, and he was, he had to admit, just that little bit too proud to ask Eliza for help.

But now that he had work, he didn’t need to worry too much about the computer anymore because he didn’t need to constantly worry about having things to do . Sure, he needed to learn about, well, everything, and he and Eliza spent a lot of time quietly reading in the living room toge-- well, at the same time, but he was no longer cooped up. And the work was good, too. The class he taught was maybe a dozen or so people, all beginners, but all people who were motivated to, if not learn how to properly defend themselves, then at the very least get in shape while pretending to. He didn’t mind those.

Over the years, he’d taught many companions how to defend themselves. Early on, it had been a slightly misogynist attitude to the less masculine of his companions, feeling that, as a man, he knew how to teach them. There hadn’t been a big confrontational moment that had turned him around. Just a lot of small ones that had slowly made it clear to him he’d been acting like a pig. But as he’d grown older and more experienced, he’d found that he’d actually had something to teach, something to pass on to younger friends and allies. And then there had been that time with the village . So he knew how to help. How to teach.

And he really was good at it, and it was giving him satisfaction in doing something constructive, helping people, even if it was just to feel confident in themselves. There was a strange double-edged sword to his teaching. His students were, on the whole, receptive to what he had to show them, especially after he’d put Pat in an armlock for demonstration, but he also knew that the major reason for this was the simple fact that they thought of him as a woman. The majority-women class were comfortable being taught by a woman like them, and it made his skin crawl, even as he was helping them.

His most recent class had just ended when Jenny walked up to him as he was toweling down. He nodded at her as she approached. Pat and Jenny had made him feel welcome there, and they both called him Daniel without a second thought, and they’d accepted his half-hearted attempt at a lie about partial amnesia, explaining things that he felt he should know but didn’t. They’d been more helpful than he would have expected, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“Looks like that went well again,” Jenny said, tossing Daniel one of the bottles she was carrying and screwed the top off the other. “You doing alright?” Daniel nodded gratefully as he took a swig and sat down against the wall. Drinking more was something he still needed to get used to. He was a lot smaller than he used to be. Dehydration just hit harder. Jenny and Pat were professionals though, and they could tell, sometimes better than him, apparently, when he was pushing himself too hard. It was strange to know people again, after having only Eliza to talk to for so long, even though he couldn’t exactly relate to them in the same way he did to the Demon Queen.

“Yeah,” he said. “Mrs. Hendricks keeps putting too much weight on her bum knee, but I think she is finally starting to listen to her body.” He gave Jenny a weak smile. “They are… getting there.”

“I meant you, Daniel,” Jenny said and sat down next to him, giving him at least a foot of space. Sure, she was being nice and making sure she wasn’t being overly close or familiar, but when you’ve just spent several hours working out, teaching several groups of people how to defend themselves, physical contact is the last thing you want. Daniel felt like a degree of gross and sweaty that made him feel like, if thrown at a window, he’d probably just stick in place.

“Ah,” he said, and they sat in silence for a while. “I am… all right. I’m doing something productive. That is a great help, I will admit.” He grew quiet. There was a ‘but’ hanging in the air, like an obtrusive little thundercloud.

“You… don’t talk about you, much,” Jenny said. “I know the accident really rattled your brain and all that but like, if you need to talk… Pat and I are here, alright?” Jenny chewed her lip for a moment in that way that people do when they try to find words that aren’t platitudes. “Look, I know a lot of shitty companies and stuff say that they’re a family, and I wouldn’t like, go that far when it comes to the gym, but we really do try to make sure that the people we work with are in a good space, you know? So like… if there’s anything you want to get off your chest…” she paused. “Sorry, unfortunate choice of words… If you ever want to talk… we’re here, okay?”

Obviously, Jenny had picked up on the fact that Daniel’s baseline comfort was somewhere in the ‘bobbing for apples in a sewer’-range, and his stilted way of speaking had hardly escaped her. It wasn’t something he was easily able to change. “Thank you, Jenny,” Daniel said. “Truly. I just don’t know if this is something you, or Patrick, can help with.”

Jenny nudged Daniel’s shoulder with a fist, a jovial little punch . “You’d be surprised. My boyfriend didn’t know he was my boy- friend for a while, if you catch my meaning.”

“Yes,” Daniel lied. “I… Thank you. I may want to talk soon, Jennifer. But I still have things to understand, first.”

“Of course. Take your time, Daniel. Now, not to be that  chick, but we need this hall for Zumba in a couple of minutes.” Jenny got up and offered Daniel her hand. He gratefully took it, and let himself get pulled up. It was funny how quickly he was lifted up. He was so small , even if he had been bulking up lately.

After saying goodbye to Pat -- Daniel hated  the idea of showering at the gym, where he’d not only be showering in the women’s changing rooms, feeling like a voyeur but where he’d be seen  as one of them -- he headed home quickly. His head was a mess. Something Jenny had said had put its hooks in him. He’d magically been thrown into this world, but maybe there was the possibility that it wasn’t just him and Eliza. Were there others? The walk home was, as always, not an unpleasant one. After a thorough workout, the block-and-a-half journey back to their apartment was a great way to get some semi-fresh (this was still the city after all) air and stretch his legs.

This time, however, he had his head held a little higher. Not for any particular reason, sometimes people just realize their posture has been bad, and they try to look ahead instead of at their feet. It happens, and this time, it happened as he walked past a store with a bad little graphic design of an old-fashioned gaming controller on the sign outside, with the two large windows that had human-sized statues of fictional characters, and a very large poster. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye, and he froze, and slowly turned.

When one universe really likes another universe, it sometimes likes to share things, like ideas, words, languages, symbols, people and, sometimes most importantly, stories. When someone tells you that the pen is mightier than the sword, they are often not referring to the latest action movie where someone does something unspeakable with a fountain pen to another character’s head, nor do they mean that yelling insults is a better way to confront fascism than a good old-fashioned punch in the face.

What they mean is that stories are immortal. Stories will drift through the world, gaining power until they live a life on their own and tell themselves, changing unfortunate details until it becomes the best version of itself. A story is a growing, evolving organism, always changing to be the fittest for its environment. And sometimes, a story is simply a series of facts told by one universe to another. And someone, somewhere, will wake up with a really  good idea for a video game, and several artists will have the perfect  image in their head of what the hero looks like, and a writer will know exactly what to name these characters. And sometimes, the other universe then shrugs and goes ‘might as well make it happen’. Which came first is anybody’s guess.

There was a large poster on display. On it was Daniel’s face, as it once was, rendered in vivid detail, every hair on his kept (if not all that well) beard, the lines on his face of decades of fighting, the heavy brow, the short brown hair, the look of grim resolution. And opposite him was the face of the Demon Dragon Queen, smirking, a pair of ram’s horns curling and pointed straight at him, like a pair of daggers. In the middle of the page was a title. He ran inside and immediately bought a copy of whatever it was that had his face on it, then began to run home. Thoughts of the conversation with Jenny had left his mind completely. The only thing he could think to do now was to go home and show Eliza. He might even put the disk in the computer, actually braving the electrical monstrosity.

When Daniel rounded the last corner, he broke into a sprint. He didn’t care that he’d just gone through a workout, he needed to know, and he didn’t understand. He wasn’t very good at figuring out problems like this. But Eliza could probably help. She’d be getting off work around this time, anyway. Well, she got off work an hour ago, but she’d been forced to do ‘sensitivity training’, which had infuriated her to no end. She had apparently intimidated some of her female coworkers, and had to take classes on sexism in the workplace. Daniel had helped her reframe it as helping her try to fit in, make people less uncomfortable, but it had only worked a little bit. Trying to make a body that isn’t yours fit in is like adjusting an ill-fitting mask. It wasn’t going to solve the problem, but it would make it less obvious for others, and that was going to have to be enough.

He ran up the stairs three at a time and ran inside, tossing his bag to the side and then saw Eliza standing by the little living room table. To say that she looked shaken was an understatement. He remembered the night a little while ago when she’d been so upset, and he immediately slowed down. If she was going to come after him again, he didn’t want to fight her, but he was going to if he had to.

“Eliza?” he asked, clutching the bag with the little box in one hand. Maybe he could brandish it to snap her out of it if she became aggressive. Eliza took a few steps towards him with an intensity in her eyes he hadn’t seen in a while, and then, very slowly, her face split into a wide grin. He was worried for a moment that she’d lost it. That she’d finally cracked under the pressure and had been waiting here like a slowly maddening predator for him to come home. But then tears were forming in her eyes again and she grabbed him by the shoulders. She held him like that for a moment before, clearly with a great degree of difficulty, she managed to find the words.

“Daniel!” she practically yelled. “We’re transgender!”

Chapter 15

Daniel sat at the living room table. The game box was on the computer desk, having been metaphorically shelved away until they got this out of the way. Sure, they’d had a talk about this after he’d come home out of breath, but Eliza had helped him understand that this was a ‘video game’, and that it was likely just fiction. And her news had been, for obvious reasons, a lot more pressing. Not that they weren’t going to get to it in time, but the fact that they weren’t alone, that there were others like them out there, that they’d be able to get help with the desire to step out of their skin every day… it was too much, too important not to focus on. And when Eliza had quickly explained it to Daniel, the atmosphere in the house had changed drastically. The sense of teeth-gritted resignation had given way to hope, and they could both sense it.

Shortly after, Daniel had talked about it with Jenny, who had been more than understanding. In fact, she’d burst out laughing. She’d thought that Daniel had long known what was going on, but she was supportive of his coming out, and Pat, although he didn’t know what to make of it, had only nodded approvingly, then offered help, and then finally wrapped Daniel in a spine-shattering hug .

After that, Jenny had brought the two of them into contact with her boyfriend’s doctor, and it had just been a matter of making an appointment. The two of them had been welcome to both come in at the same time, and they’d been asked a few pointed questions by someone who was underpaid, overworked and exactly the right amount of open-minded. He’d given them both some forms and asked them to carefully read them and then get back to him. Throughout the whole process, Daniel had expected someone to jump out from under the desk, going ‘ah- Hah! ’ and accuse them of being from another world or something like that, but no such shenanigans transpired.

It had all kind of gone by in a blur. Daniel had gotten a few days off. Eliza had not. Eliza existed in a separate world now where people used words like “hustle” and “quotas” unironically, where water-coolers were not props for background comedy but an excuse to step away from a desk while pretending to enjoy the aforementioned hustle. But she seemed to be doing quite well in that environment, even if Daniel could tell there was no small degree of stress that came with that kind of competitive attitude.

So now he was at the dinner table, looking at what might have been the most intimidating piece of paper he’d ever been confronted with, including that time he’d been asked to sell his soul to a wayfarer demon to save the life of one of his companions (a long and mostly boring story that had him quickly travel to hell to retrieve it again later). The piece of paper in question did not ask him or Eliza for their souls, nor did it promise eternal riches for an IOU TBD at a later date. Instead, it asked a few questions that seemed so simple on the surface. The one he was currently looking at was for Eliza, which was why the door to the kitchen was wide open. She was currently trying out something new involving scallops while he pored over the document.

“Uh…” he said, then cleared his throat and tried again, a little louder. “Eliza,” he said over his shoulder. There came an acknowledging noise from the kitchen, letting him know she was listening. “First question…” he licked his lips. This document didn’t waste any time getting to the point. “I -- and then a little line for you to sign your name on -- identify as having a female-dash-feminine and-dash-or a gender non-conforming gender identity and wish to be treated with estrogen.” That was a sentence and a half, and he looked over his shoulder, wondering if he should repeat the last sentence. Eliza’s head poked out from the corner with a confused frown.

“What, just like that?” she asked.

“It sure looks like it,” Daniel said. “There are more questions, of course, and a laundry list of side effects. But yes, this is the first question.”

“Hells,” Eliza said with a soft whistle. “That’s a lot more forthcoming than I’d expected. Well, obviously the answer is yes.” Daniel nodded and entered her initials there. She’d just have to sign at the bottom herself. The next question was more or less similar, but sounded a little scarier, about how the long-term effects hadn’t been properly studied yet. Bit by bit, he relayed the information to Eliza, who occasionally popped out of the kitchen to look at something or other, leaning over his shoulder to read the page.

Despite the gravity of what they were going over, Daniel was still aware of how close her face was to his when she did, and he wondered if it was because her attention was divided between the consent form and the cooking that she wasn’t. Not that he minded, not really. After she’d come up to him the other day and she’d explained the gravity of those words, they’d hugged it out. Like a dam broken, the unspoken implication that they’d duke it out once they were in their own world had been driven so far into the background so as to not be visible anymore.

That didn’t mean he was entirely comfortable.  She was very close, after all, and whenever she got like this, focused, her eyes fixed, pursing her lips slightly, he couldn’t help but ignore the face of the person whose body she’d been wearing and see the queen underneath. He wondered if she saw that person too, whenever she looked in the mirror. He hoped she did.

There is a world, very far removed from this one -- and you should hope it stays that way -- where there is a parasitic creature that feeds on mild discomfort. It is invisible and can’t be touched and lives on your shoulder. There, it whispers uncomfortable things in your ear. It can be a flaw or imperfection on your own face you hadn’t noticed until you absent mindedly looked at your reflection in a car window, or how much your aunt actually looks like that famous actor and you can’t un -see it. These creatures are wholly unpleasant and can only be driven out by self-control, positive thinking and, ironically, throwing salt over one’s shoulder. The problem, of course, is that on Earth, no such creature exists, and that intrusive thoughts can't be simply banished by throwing a handful of salt in some parasite’s eyes. Intrusive thoughts, on Earth, intrude from within.

There is no creature that whispers, drawing attention to useless facts and problems, and all you can do with the information it provides is make peace with the idea that it is entirely your own mind dancing around itself. As such, Daniel had to come to terms with the fact that there was no little creature on his shoulder, telling him that Eliza, the Demon Queen, was actually quite beautiful. There was a smaller part of his brain that wondered if she could read minds -- which she couldn’t (anymore) -- and tried not to think about that, or her, or much of anything anymore as he focused on not blushing.

“Daniel?” Eliza asked, shaking his brain like an Etch-A-Sketch, returning it to factory-default settings. He turned to look at her and she was a lot closer than he’d anticipated and oh god their noses touched and he could feel her breath. Both of them pulled away with a start. Daniel shook his head, trying to make sense of the white noise in his brain.

“Uh… wh--... sorry… I was… elsewhere.” He looked at her with a faceful of guilt and a headful of empty. After a second Eliza’s face broke into a smile and then a full hearty belly-laugh.

“Hah! Clearly,” Eliza said, still chuckling. “Anyway, I was just wondering if your form looks anything like this?” She looked over the pages again and Daniel with her. The effects were wildly different, of course, although there were similarities.

“Yes and no,” he said, a little embarrassed. He’d never talked about bodies outside of a medical context all that often, and certainly not this frankly. “There is… uh… less mention of sex-drive, or… uh… physical reactions.”

“Uh-huh,” Eliza said. “Honestly, I could do without those, it can certainly get…” There was a pause where Daniel made sure to keep staring at the page because he was certain she’d just shot him a glance that would’ve made him a lot more self-conscious than he’d been in a long time. “...distracting,” Eliza finished. Then stood upright and put her hands on her hips with a self-satisfied look on her face that immediately conjured up images of her old form again. “Daniel,” she said, “are you blushing? ”

“Kindly go off, Evil Queen,” he mumbled, but couldn’t keep the smile from playing on his own face. Eliza grinned like a cat and turned to the kitchen.

“As you wish, oh Blight of my Life,” she said, and then her eyes grew wide. “Bollocks! The scallops!” She sprinted to the kitchen, leaving Daniel to try and catch his breath. The whole encounter had left him beyond confused, and he was trying to make sense of his heart hammering in his throat and his brain bouncing somewhere around the upper stratosphere. He hadn’t felt this way in decades, and he wondered if it had something to do with his younger body. Eliza was clearly having an effect on him, especially the two of them living in such close proximity to each other. He was supposed to stand up to her. He was the Hero, and she was, still , the Demon Queen, wasn’t she?

He looked over his own informed consent forms, trying to distract himself. The clinical text helped him calm down and focus on his own immediate future. Most of the changes were things that were incredibly welcome to him, even if they’d used to be inconvenient. He kind of looked forward to shaving again, for one. And while the softness of his skin wasn’t… unpleasant , it didn’t feel like his. He’d rather touch someone else’s skin. Before the invisible creature on his shoulder could offer some suggestions as to people he might like to touch, he quickly flipped the page.

Just then, Eliza came strutting out of the kitchen, towel still on her shoulder, having salvaged the food that had almost-but-not-quite burned, and presented an appetizing bowl of noodles, scallops and what appeared to be assorted vegetables, as well as a fork. Daniel looked at it for a second, and decided then that he needed to take a degree of control back from the situation. Eliza had been… a lot to handle, in ways he hadn’t expected, and Daniel needed to make it clear to her that she wasn’t the only one with power in their dynamic.

Carefully, he put the papers to the side and stood up, much to Eliza’s confusion, and he went to the kitchen. He’d been working on something small, and he figured that this situation, right now, was the best time to try and bring it out. After only a moment, he came back into the living room and sat down with his secret weapon at the ready. Eliza glared at him. She knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew she knew, and he knew she didn’t know why  he was doing it. That was part two of his plan. But first he needed to act like nothing was the matter, until she brought it up.

“Daniel?” Eliza asked carefully as he began to eat. It was fantastic, but he wasn’t going to acknowledge that. He ate as if he hadn’t heard her for a moment and then looked up at her with an innocent, questioning glance.

“Yes?”

“When did you learn to eat with chopsticks?” Eliza asked, clearly annoyed. He knew for a fact she hadn’t figured it out yet, and he wasn’t going to admit that he’d spent several days while she was at work trying to get his hands in just the right position. He did his best  to make it look easy.

“Oh,” he said. “I think I just… sort of picked it up.”

“How?” Eliza asked, poking at her own food while shooting daggers at him. “ Why?”

“Well, you know,” Daniel said, chewing his food carefully, making sure to swallow before making very deliberate eye contact. “If I’m going to be eating food like this,” he said, pointing at it, “I felt I had to enjoy it authentically.”

“What do you mean? ” Eliza asked. Daniel shrugged, keeping himself from showing too much satisfaction. He could tell he’d gotten under her skin.

“It’s the only way I could think of to make it better, considering the fact that it’s… well…” He looked at her with an innocent little smile. “Perfect.”

“Oh… I… well…” Eliza stammered through the compliment, and then suddenly seemed to realize what he’d done, breaking into a wide grin. “You bastard,”  she giggled, and flung the towel at him.

Chapter 16

“Wait, damn, really? Holy… wow…” Sally blew raspberries into the void, lying on her back on a mildly uncomfortable bench in the space between worlds. “I thought transgender was for like… people who were born that way,” she said. “I wish I had a ball to throw, you know?” Daniel leaned against the back of the bench, looking out into the void. He’d learned by now to let Sally go on her tangents. Like a homing pigeon, she usually found her way back to the original sentence, she just needed some time. “This place is boring,” Sally, continued. “I just need something to do with my hands. Speaking of which, good job on finding a job, my dude!”

“Thank you,” Daniel said with a little smile. “It’s helped a lot.” It had been a little while now, but these little ‘visits’ were irregular and hard to predict, but it was still welcome. She was a good source of information that wasn’t going to be judgmental.

“Awesome possum,” Sally said, causing Daniel’s brain to briefly stumble, like the feeling he’d had going up a flight of stairs and expecting there to be one more step. Keeping up with Sally’s vernacular was the verbal equivalent of trying to assemble a puzzle on a rocking ship while someone threw kittens at him . “But yeah, good on you, man. You got hormones and all that stuff?”

He nodded. “We did. For a few weeks now. The effects are minimal, of course, but we have been told to be patient. It will take some time, but I think it will be worth it.” Sally sat up and wrapped her arms around her bouncing knees.

“It’s gonna be weird, you know?” she said, bobbing her head left and right, listening to music only she could hear. “Like, I know we’re probably gonna find a way over here to put us back, and the mages here assured me they can undo whatever you’re doing over there , but it’s like… You’re doing things to my body that would make me really  uncomfortable, you know?”

Daniel nodded, and then cocked his head. “What did you do to mine? What do I… well, what do you look like now?”

“Oh!” Sally bounced up. “Pretty much like this. No cardigan though. And uh… redder skin. And wings.” Daniel briefly had to wonder in stunned silence if this was one of her weird sayings, or if she really was… “Yeah, there was a weird little mixup, but I don’t mind it. And it helps me blend in with Lizzie.”

“Lizzie.”

“Yeah, the girl in the old demon queen’s body. She really is a total sweetheart. That’s going well, by the way! We moved back into the old castle. Not cozy, of course, you two really  did a number on it, but repairs are going well, and sure, like, people are noticing the difference between her and the old one, but the ‘previous’ demon queen wasn’t big on the whole death and destruction either. She was more of a middle-manager type, you know? Anyway, there’s a snake-y -- like, top half girl, bottom half fourteen feet of scale and slithers -- advisor here, and she’s been huge  help, but you really could’ve  warned me about that mage, tho.”

“Warned you? The mage? What?” Daniel was well and truly lost in the deluge of nonsensical information.

“She’s an absolutely useless  lesbian. Her and the advisor are dating now and they’ve both clearly  got a crush on Liz, and I’m just here like ‘no thanks’ on the whole dating thing and it’s just such a saccharine mess  -- not that I mind , but I would’ve liked a heads up.”

“I’m… sorry?” Daniel tried.

“It’s cool. Just don’t have someone to talk about with some of this stuff, you know? Lizzie is too obtuse and dense to pick up on it. Anyway , how is the original doing? She still   eeeeeevil ?”

Daniel cleared his throat. “She is… doing quite well. Not all that evil, no. She works selling things and she’s good at it. I don’t think she enjoys  it, but that is a different story. She is delighted with the… changes, now that we are on these supplements. She seems to get more comfortable with herself every day.”

“Daniel~” Sally said with a singsong voice, leaning her elbows on the back of the bench, her chin on her hands. “You’re smiling,” she said with a smile that could’ve given any Demon Queen a run for her money. “Why are you smiling like that, Daniel?”

“It -- It’s simply good to see her denounce her old ways, and find happiness in little things,” Daniel said, not knowing what was being implied and not appreciating the implication. There was also a big part of him that felt he was having to defend and/or justify himself for some reason, which was preposterous, because this wasn’t about him.

“Uh-huh. Sure thing, Pinnocchio.”

“Who?”

“Never mind,” Sally said sweetly. “So what’s this about a video game? I don’t know squat  about games, so I had no idea.”

“I found it advertised in a storefront some time ago. It… took some time, but Eliza and I have finally managed to get it running on the personal computer. We are… having trouble with it, but from the looks of things… my life’s story has become a game in your world.” This was mostly  true. In fact, Daniel and Eliza’s story had existed long before either of them had. They had merely provided the details.

“That’s weird. I mean, cool, but also like, a little bit of a mind-warper, you know?” She scratched her head. “Find out anything cool? Could be fun to see how your story is supposed to end, you know? Maybe find out some things about your lady  friend.”

Daniel, oblivious to her tone of voice by choice, crossed his arms. “We would  have, but neither of us is very good with these video games. The way to control another person by use of keys and a little mouse is… counterintuitive. I don’t know how people do it.” He sighed and looked up. “At least she knows what my parents look like now, I suppose.”

“Why don’t you look it up?” Sally asked, kicking her legs. “Like, how the game goes and stuff, if playing it is too hard.”

“Look it up where? I doubt we’ve also made it into the annals of literature.” That was a thought Daniel hadn’t considered yet. The idea that his story wasn’t just some toy for electric machines but a novel, written in a world that didn’t even know it had him in it, was mind-boggling.

“No, online, silly. Didn’t you check out the Internet like I told you?” Sally looked at him in a way that made him feel well and truly old for the first time in a while, and enjoyed the strange experience of being chided by someone who had, by all accounts, a lot less experience with life than him.

“Well… yes. We have used it to find maps of the local environment. It is how I found out Pat and Jenny were hiring.” He paused, looking for more examples, like a student trying to find proof that he had most definitely done his homework. “Eliza regularly uses it to look up recipes.”

“Oh my god, you sound like my grandmother,” Sally said with a little laugh. “You can look up anything  on there. Like… music, movies, games, everything is on the internet, my dude. Just look it up. Like ‘game name full playthrough’ or something like that will do.”

“Just like that?” he asked. Sally just nodded.

“Just like th-- oh, looks like I’m fading. I’ll see you in the next one, yeah?” She waved at him. He felt the pool of consciousness against the back of his brain as well.

“See you again, Sally. Take care of yourself.”

---

Many people under a certain age know exactly what it’s like when they have to explain the Internet -- or computers in general -- to people who have no idea what they’re doing. There’s a lot of shuffling about and explaining core concepts (“What is a click?’, “How do I drag?”, “My computer is right here, what do you mean, go to ‘My Computer’?”) and much like trying to get a sleepy cat into a carrier, it’s generally an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. Such experiences are universal whenever a new technology is introduced anywhere.

However, Daniel and Eliza didn’t have anyone to show them how to use the Internet, or the computer, other than what Sally had told Daniel, and they were both trying to keep from screaming whenever the other did something they didn’t fully understand or made an easily avoidable mistake.

After a while, it became clear that Eliza was more comfortable behind the keyboard, as she also had to work with one at her job, albeit sparsely. Daniel took a backseat, letting her fingers rattle across the keyboard, trying not to be too frustrated with the fact that there was nothing he could do but watch. He would prefer to take charge himself, but the number of problems in this world that could be solved with swordplay and swashbuckling seemed to be painfully small .

After a while, huffing to himself slightly, he went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and turned the coffee-maker on too. Sure, Eliza would argue that her coffee was better, but he’d seen her face whenever he brought her a cup he made. He knew what was going on, when her eyes lit up like that. Secretly, he knew, she liked his coffee better.

He leaned against the counter as the water began to boil, crossing his arms. It was strange. Just minutes ago, he’d done the same thing, in that space-that-wasn’t-quite-space, and there it had felt normal. Natural. Here, there were things in the way that made it impossible to get quite comfortable. But, he reminded himself, he’d have to have patience. His skin would get oily and he’d even been prescribed some cream to help with acne, something he hadn’t had a problem with since he’d been a little boy. But what he was mostly looking forward to was the body fat redistribution. Feeling more like himself  was the goal. The doctor had mentioned possible surgeries, but those were too far into the future to even think too much about right now.

The coffee maker went off with a ‘ding’ and he poured out a cup for Eliza, and some tea for himself, then made his way back into the living room. Eliza wasn’t typing as furiously anymore. She seemed to be looking at walls upon walls of text, using the little mouse-thing to scroll through it all. He sat down in the chair next to her and handed her the cup. There, the expression on her face, where it became softer and her eyes filled up with gratitude, was exactly where he’d expected it. Proof that his coffee was superior . He smiled back.

“Have you found anything yet?” he asked, looking at the screen. “It certainly looks like a story of some kind.”

“Well,” Eliza said, sipping her coffee, “yes and no. I thought  I’d found it, but then I ran into a lot more information than I thought I would have. It’s been difficult to make my way through all of it, because there seems to be a lot of nonsense on here.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel asked, leaning back.

“Well, at the start of the game, the player got to choose, well, your gender, right?”

“Yeah,” Daniel said, grumpily. It had made him more than a little uncomfortable to think that the people who had created the game had made that part of his identity multiple choice, and Eliza’s insistence that they probably hadn’t been aware of the fact that he was a real, living person had helped only a little bit. The players could even choose his name, which was deeply strange to him. “I remember.”

“Well, a lot of these seem to assume  that this is the right version of the story,” Eliza continued. Daniel grimaced. “There is mention of the actress doing a better job.” She looked at him, saw the sour look on his face, and cleared her throat. “Regardless, a lot of this seems to run contrary to how you’ve described your own experiences, and I can’t help but wonder if this is something else entirely.”

Daniel nodded. “What do you think?”

“Well… it depends,” Eliza said, thoughtfully. “Everything I’ve found here… Has Sally, in your conversations…” Eliza scrolled up to the title of the webpage she’d found everything on. “Has she ever mentioned ‘Fan-fiction’?”

Chapter 17

Fictional characters are, by their very definition, not ‘real’ in the traditional sense. However, depending on your point of view, that doesn’t necessarily have to mean much in the grand scheme of things. After all, they clearly have a voice, sometimes a physical appearance, care about their loved ones and are sometimes even aware of their status as fictional. Where  these characters exist is a point of some contention, however.

There are three popular ways of interpreting the life (and death) of the fictional. The first and most common is the textual. A character exists between the pages of the work that originally envisioned it, and beyond the words printed on those pages, is merely a collection of descriptions and speech patterns, repeated by the author. However, this view brings with it some issues.

When a story ends and the author writes a new one with the same protagonist, is it the same protagonist, or a different one? The author has moved on somewhat with their life, their vocabulary has maybe increased, as has their mastery of prose. “Of course,” someone might say, “it is the same character. Created by the same person, put on the page by the same person, this is the same characters and their actions are,” (as they say), “canon.” But then, what of stories of the same character that are published by the same publisher and approved of by the same author? Or when an author writes part of a book only to have it finished by someone else, does the character stop and start, like the engine of a mishandled jalopy trying to painstakingly make its way through the slopes of the Ural mountains, stuttering in and out of existence? Are publishers the ultimate arbiters of the life of a fictional character, then? Obviously, it must be concluded, characters exist beyond the pages they were born on.

The second view is exactly this. Characters exist within established canon. The characters from your favourite film or series exist throughout the spectrum of the various officially approved works. ”Yes,” this view says, “fictional characters exist on every officially published page and in a sort of nebulous possibility-space, depending on who has the rights.” Which is where we run into the next problem. Sometimes, rights run out. The character is yanked this way and that, and their very existence becomes a muddled soup of actors and writers, all of whom are interpreting these characters differently and, depending on who you ask, all of them are wrong.

Which is, of course, why the only correct conclusion is that fictional characters simply exist. They can talk, because when you read the page some people can hear them. They can act, because their actions have real impacts on the emotions of the people reading and sometimes even writing them. They are, in a sense, real. Sure, they might not be able to pick up the book you’re reading and smack you over the head with it ( much as  many authors sometimes like to daydream otherwise) but they have a real tangible impact, and, and this is the important bit, even when they exist in someone’s head.  

A character is no more or less real when it is imagined differently from the written text, it is just as strong when imagined by an octogenarian who desperately wants to be whisked away by a man in a blue box or a teenage girl who wants her favourite superhero to drop a forklift truck on Mister Henderson from second grade Maths. Characters, it has to be clear to us, exist, and all we can do is borrow them. Sometimes they will simply hang out in our heads and act out scenes we’d like to see, and sometimes we wrestle them onto a page and have them repeat those lines for everyone to see.

All this said, the concept of fan-fiction is rubbish. All fiction is fan-fiction. There is no meaningful difference between an officially published work and one made by a fan after the fact other than chronology, and even that will become muddled by time. As such, fan-fiction occupies a strange place where everything is possible, and characters can change and be who they need to be to tell a certain story, adverse as it is to the work that spawned them. There is, quite possibly, no limit to the human imagination or, for that matter, for its ability to bring two characters together and ship them off holding hands forever after.

In that very moment, Eliza had just discovered that it was very possible for people to have some very interesting interpretations about why she was who she was and was trying to wrestle with the possibility that, while they were wrong about her , they might not be wrong in general, and whether or not their  truth was more or less important than her own.

It was, she had decided, not. Not in the case of xXDem0nslayrXx, who had written quite a piece about how easily Eliza had been defeated, not by Daniel, but by himself, after he had, ridiculously, been killed in a traffic accident and fought his way to her castle. There, he’d killed her easily and then conquered the rest of the world for laughs. It was… insulting, and she was already typing a comment below it. At first she’d resisted the call of the comment section, but after a while she’d seen so many takes about her, what she was and could do, that she just had to say something.

Her first few comments had been just as riddled with spelling- and grammar-flaws as the works she was commenting on -- typing wasn’t something she was exactly used to -- but as the hours ticked on, she found it easier and easier to have her fingers dance over the keys. First two, trying to find every letter, then four, until she looked up a guide online about how to type faster. Her fingers now rattled over the keyboard as she left an angry comment on chapter two hundred and fourteen of a story that wasn’t very good but that she couldn’t stop reading for some reason.

A part of it was that it was bad , but in an engaging way, that made her want to see what the author did wrong next. Another was that she was simply engaged. She knew something about this. She’d lived it, after all. And her work was less than stimulating, day to day. While it was true that calling people up and ramming her personality through the phone until the person on the other end of the line promised to renew their subscription was something she wasn’t good at -- and she enjoyed being good at things -- but it rubbed her the wrong way and she wasn’t actually getting anything done.

This, though… this felt like something she could maybe steer in the right direction. So she finished off another comment with a flourish of exclamation marks to prove her point,  hit send, and then clicked ‘next chapter’ and continued. Her eyes were beginning to strain a bit, but it felt silly to stop now. Besides, it was a Sunday tomorrow, she didn’t have to work, so she could afford to stay up a bit longer, even if Daniel had gone to bed already. He’d taken the bed, so he wouldn’t be bothered by the monitor’s light shining through the living room like a lighthouse beacon.

Behind her, Daniel cleared his throat, and Eliza, the Demon Dragon Queen, let out an uncharacteristic squeak and nearly fell off her chair. She turned around with an indignant huff, only to be confronted by Daniel, who was trying very hard not to laugh, holding a steaming cup of morning. Light creeped in through the windows.

“Get up,” Daniel said softly. It wasn’t quite  a command, but Eliza felt compelled to do as she was told anyway. Still, she wasn’t going to just do it cause he told her so. That would be giving in .

“This is important, Daniel. There might still be something important here. If we miss it, I wouldn’t forgive myself, and neither would y--”

“I’m not telling you to stop, Eliza. I’m telling you to get some rest.” Eliza blinked a few times. She had  been up for some twenty-four hours. Getting some rest would be good. She sighed in resignation and stood up, her entire body -- in this case, mostly her head, eyes and joints -- protested at this sudden change of position, and she groaned softly.

“Fine,” she said, took a few steps and threw herself onto the couch. “There. Are you satisfied now?” Daniel looked at her as he sat down in the office chair. She felt oddly… looked at. Not that she felt she had to hide herself or cover herself up, but still somehow vulnerable, when he looked at her with mild concern like that.

“You know, the bed is free now.” He took a sip of the mystery morning hot drink. Eliza pulled the blankets over herself and shrugged.

“This is fine. What will you be doing?”

“Well, as riveting as your current reading material is,” Daniel said, glancing at the screen, “I think I’ll continue reading through the actual game’s story. I’ve already seen some minor discrepancies between it and my actual life, and from what I’ve read, it’s the fifth  installment in the series, so I can’t help but be curious. Are they all about me? Were they based on me or do I and it just coexist? It’s… I’m afraid I don’t understand a lot of it, but I’d still like to find out more. Besides, I don’t have to work for a few days, so I figured I could get some reading in while you rest.” He turned to the screen, and Eliza noticed that he minimized the screen she’d been on, rather than closing it. Good boy.

“‘Sfine,” Eliza said. “Have fun.” Daniel nodded and, after shooting her another one of those glances that made her feel a little bit like her old self, in a good way, he turned back to the screen. She felt her eyes get heavy and she did the little shuffle on the couch, the little ritual some people do when they know they’ve been comfortable in that spot before, if they can just find the right angle, position, temperature and possibly phase of the moon. It didn’t take her too long to find it, despite her usual discomfort with how big and clunky this body was, and her mind went off to wander while her body took a well-needed rest.

Sleep was dreamless, and she occasionally drifted in and out of wakefulness. She was sure she saw Daniel glance at her at least once and cover her up with the blanket a bit more. She was going to have to make fun of his soft-heartedness for that later. Maybe. Sure, it would risk the possibility of that never happening again… and maybe that risk wasn’t worth it. Someone being concerned about her comfort was a nice feeling, she realized as sleep overtook her again.

Several hours had to have passed when she woke up again. The afternoon sun shone quietly through the little sliver between the curtains -- had those been closed before? -- and she felt her stomach rumbling. She slowly sat up. Daniel wasn’t at the computer anymore, and she did a quick-but-subtle check of the room. She didn’t want to look desperate, in case he was standing behind her or something. But no, a slight rattle from the kitchen indicated where Daniel had been hiding, and she relaxed a bit, wrapping the blankets around her until she was a cocoon of warmth, the cobwebs of sleep still clinging to her mind slightly. This was nice. If she could stay home like this more often, if she wasn’t as tired  after work like she usually was, she felt she’d be… happier, which had never really been a concern before. After a little while, Daniel came in with two plates and smiled warmly at her as he offered it to her.

“How did you--”

“You’d been rustling for a little while. I figured you’d be awake soon, and hungry at that.” Eliza gratefully took the plate and put it on the little coffee table. Eggs. The way she liked them. She might have mentioned it. Once. A few weeks ago.

“Thank you,” she said softly and tried not to smile or look at him as she had breakfast at three in the afternoon.

Chapter 18

Eliza had a hobby, now. Daniel had half-expected her interest in the stories about himself and her to wane after a day or two, but she’d fallen into a hole of fiction that apparently consisted of thousands upon thousands of authors, all writing about worlds outside of their own. At first, he’d been slightly annoyed. Days where he worked longer than she did, he’d find her when he got home, sitting behind the screen, scrolling idly downwards as she consumed the words. A part of him, he had reluctantly admitted to himself, was worried that what had felt like a growing friendship -- or something like it -- would be hampered by these invisible strangers writing stories in some other part of the world.

But over time he noticed that they improved her mood. Dramatically. Sure, she hadn’t been in a particularly bad  place, but she hadn’t exactly been the most eager employee at her sales job, and had often come home tired and relieved. Now, she had more energy, seemed eager to be home, to have something to read, and that didn’t stop when she wasn’t reading. She would talk about the stories at the dinner table, about small frustrations she had with them, inconsistencies or things that felt unrealistic to her. While he wasn’t an expert on fiction, whenever she talked about stories involving their world, or swordfighters and heroes, he could often jump in and keep the conversation going.

Daniel noticed, especially, when he asked her if there were any new stories she liked, that her face lit up with a bright smile, and she’d talk happily for what felt like forever and somehow no time at all. She’d tried apologizing, once, for dominating the conversation so much, but Daniel had made it very clear he wasn’t having any of that. Anything important enough for her to lose herself into it so much was worth listening to. She had nodded, and continued, and Daniel had sat there, half-listening, not because he wasn’t interested, but because he could really not help but notice how happy she looked when she was talking.

That wasn’t even considering the work the hormones had done. Her face, and every expression on it had softened. Her cheekbones were more pronounced, her skin seemed smoother, and even her eyes looked like they were bigger. It would’ve been hard not  to look at her when she animatedly waved her fork to paint a picture in the air, or when she giggled at what even he thought was a bad joke. Not that he minded in the very least.

That wasn’t to say the hormones hadn’t done a number on him either. It had been several weeks… months?... now, and the changes were starting to show themselves. It was a little easier for him to gain and retain muscle mass, if not much. There was a very slight shadow along his jawline, and his body hair was noticeably getting thicker. After talking about it with Jenny and Pat, he had come out to his classes. He felt it was best, as a lot of them were regulars and would be seeing the changes in him. Pat had been in the room, with Jenny just around the corner, in case people got nasty. Almost nobody did, and the angry woman who did was calmly informed that the rest of her membership would be refunded, feel free to never come back, please and thank you. Other than that, his students had been largely supportive, with the occasional “I knew it”  thrown in that made him feel just that little bit taller. It had been… good.

He didn’t look like he used to, not even remotely. He doubted he was ever going to, but it was slowly becoming more bearable. He was starting to feel  like he used to. Permanent discomfort giving way to moments of euphoria, a sense of self that had once been unshakeable, still out of reach but no longer unattainable . Those moments, when Eliza sat at the table, and they talked for hours after food had run out, did a lot to make him feel comfortable, too. He was starting to feel like home, and he was starting to have to deal with the fact that the woman who always sat opposite him at the dinner table was rapidly becoming inseparable from that home.

It had been his night to sleep in the bed again, and he’d been woken up by a dream. As dreams go, it was fairly mundane, in that surreal sense that dreams sometimes get to be, where you don’t pay attention to the cat that is also somehow the car you drive to work. But it had ended with the hero slaying the dragon, and that had been mundane, somehow, too. But it had left him waking up with a bad taste in his mouth, so he’d gotten up to go to the bathroom to get some water.

When he walked back into the room, he became aware of two things. The first was the alarm clock, which, in angry little red bars, told him it was so late it was almost early, and he groaned softly to himself. Not enough time to get another good chunk of sleep in, but too much to just get up. The other thing he noticed was that light from the living room shone under the bedroom door. More specifically, light from the computer monitor.

That was the part of Eliza’s love of fiction that worried Daniel somewhat. Sure, it clearly gave her joy, and he wasn’t going to chide her or in any way discourage her passion, but he also didn’t like the idea of her sacrificing her health to engage with it. With the glass of water still in his hand, he opened the door. Eliza was where he’d expected her, blankets wrapped around her, making her look a little bit like a grub with a human head full of hair that was getting quite long, actually. Her fingers rattled across the keys with a speed and precision he had no hopes of matching. He had been getting a bit better at the game, which he still wanted to play through, but Eliza’s typing speed was impossible for him to match.

He shuffled quietly over to her, making sure to let his feet drag and coughing once. Eliza had a tendency to get lost in what she was doing, reading, writing, and he didn’t want to give her a heart attack by not announcing his presence. He shuffled his feet so she’d know he was getting closer. He coughed so she’d know it was him. He wasn’t sure if Eliza knew it was something he did on purpose, but it had helped. She looked over at him when he sat down on the sofa, and for a moment neither of them said anything, both lit harshly by the light of the screen.

“Can’t sleep?” Daniel finally asked, breaking the silence. Eliza gave him a little, smiling nod, taking a sip from what was surely ice cold coffee by now. Her legs were folded up into the blankets with her somehow. He wasn’t sure how she’d assembled herself  within the blanket cocoon, but she looked very cozy. “What are you reading?”

“Not reading,” Eliza said, quietly, with that croak people get when they’ve been quietly working for hours without losing focus, and haven’t really cleared their throat or moved much at all. She coughed softly. Her voice had gotten a lot softer, partially through some exercises she’d found online. Daniel himself had found his own deepening of its own accord, which had been a welcome change. “I have been writing,” Eliza added.

“Oh?” Daniel raised his eyebrows. “I thought you mostly concerned yourself with the works -- and flaws therein -- of others?”

“It was becoming… frustrating,” Eliza said. “They get too much wrong, about how magic works, about how the world  works. Stories with…” she paused, and looked at the screen, “...villains. Evil. They don’t know why these things happen. It’s always either analyzed to pieces or lacking in all nuance. It’s… wrong, but maybe more importantly, it’s dull. ” She was getting a little indignant, and Daniel couldn’t help but smile a bit.

“And you know you can do better,” he offered. It wasn’t a question.

“You’re damned right,” Eliza said, grinning her trademark grin. There was no longer any question about who she was. The woman underneath had slid to the forefront, and she could be stunning if she wanted to be. Was she really still, well, evil? Daniel had been wondering about that.

“You know…” Daniel said, and then stopped. He took a breath, a sip of water, a moment, and then looked at her again. “Can I ask you a question?”

“I believe you already did, Daniel,” Eliza said with a smile, until she caught his expression. “Yes. Yes, of course you can. What’s wr-- what’s your question?”

“You say people don’t… understand. You call yourself  evil. I was told you were, practically shoved on my horse to slay you. But… why?” Daniel looked at her, leaning on his knees. “I’ve been asking myself that question for a while. I understand why the nobility would be scared of you, an intimidating dragon woman living on a mountain? They’d never be able to handle you.” Eliza chuckled softly at that, and he couldn’t help but feel a little satisfied at being able to make her laugh a bit. “But… you were  picking up the old pieces, putting them back together. Were you… going to? You said… how did you put it…”

“‘I didn’t even do anything yet’,” Eliza said softly. Daniel nodded, the question still in the air like a little monster that wasn’t going to go away until it was slain. He could tell she was struggling with it. “I don’t know, Daniel,” Eliza said, and when she looked at him, he could tell she was struggling to get the words out. “I wish I could tell you that I would’ve been a good person. That I would’ve renounced my heritage, dismantled the demon armies and what remained of my father’s kingdom. But I… I don’t know…” She bit her lip and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I don’t… you don’t know what it’s like. I was supposed  to be the Demon Queen, Daniel. I was raised, since birth , to be, well… her. I wish I could… I--” Her eyes were filling up with tears. “I’m sorry.”

Daniel looked at her. He wished he could say the right thing, but he didn’t have the words. Of course, he did know what it was like, but he didn't know how to say that without making her feel like he wasn't taking her seriously. He didn’t know what to say, which is one of the most frustrating places to be in when suddenly having to console someone. Most people have, at one point or another, been in the presence of a friend, a loved one, someone they care about, breaking down in a way they didn’t see coming. And then it feels like the right words don’t exist, because you don’t have a script. Daniel didn’t know what to say, so he just made something up. What he thought he would want to hear in her place.

“You didn’t do it,” he said.

“Wh-what?”

“When I said ‘you were going to take over the world’, you said ‘I didn’t’.”

“Yeah, but I might--”

“But you didn’t,” Daniel repeated. “You might have. You might have caused harm. But you didn’t. You took a really  long time, too, so maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough credit. Or maybe, as soon as you stopped having to be ‘her’, as you put it, she stopped too.”

“I… suppose…”

“I… I realize that I asked you if you would have, but the question itself doesn’t really matter, I don't think. And neither does the answer.” He thought for a moment. He had the feeling he was doing quite well and wanted to push on. “Maybe… maybe a more pertinent question, Eliza, is whether or not you would, now. If you went back, right now, would you still be ‘the Evil Demon Queen’?” Eliza hugged her legs a little tighter and looked at the computer screen.

“I don’t…” she started, and then seemed to change her mind, shaking her head slightly. “I think I would like to be… me for a bit.”

“What, uh, what does that mean?” Daniel asked, a little sheepishly.

Eliza turned back to him, and she smiled again, the most fragile smile he’d ever seen on her face, and it was only because he was looking for them that he saw the tears streaming down her face in the harsh light of the computer. “I don’t know,” she said. “Is that okay?”

Daniel felt his heart practically fall out of his chest. Her words had been so fragile, so scared, so… small. “Of course,” he said. “Of course that's okay. In fact, I think that is a good answer.”

“Thank you.” It was almost inaudible. They sat in silence like that for a while.

“So… you’ve been writing,” Daniel said, and he got up to look at the screen.

“Yeah,” Eliza said. “It’s not ready, though. But I've got some readers already.”

“I am… I’m glad you have a way to express yourself,” he said, and looked at the screen, and his eyes went wide. “And apparently, so do twenty thousand other people?!” Eliza smiled apologetically.

“I’ve been publishing some things to the site,” she said, sheepishly. “They seem to like it. There’s a few people mentioning patronage, I think.” Daniel stared at the screen in disbelief. He had already been baffled by the fact that so many people cared about him and his story, but that Eliza had contributed to that story -- in more ways than one, now -- and that it clearly resonated with people…

“This is… pretty big, Eliza,” he said, reaching over to scroll to the comments. “These people are offering you money to keep doing this.”

“Do you think I should?” she asked. He looked at her. Gods. Her eyes were so big. And she was so close. The way she looked at him. It made his heart try to escape out of the back of his head.

“Yes,” he said. “I think you should.” He nodded. “You’ll be a lot happier doing this than… whatever it is you actually sell.”

“Yes,” Eliza said, sticking out her tongue. “Blegh.” Daniel couldn’t help but laugh.

“It might not mean much, Eliza,” he said, standing up straight, “but I’m proud of you.” Eliza slowly stood up, her blankets falling to the floor, and wrapped her arms around him. He could hear the lump in her throat again as she spoke.

“No,” she said quietly as she hugged him. “It means a lot. Thank you.”

“I… you’re welcome,” Daniel said, and then, finally, as they pulled apart, “now, for all that is holy, Eliza, go to sleep.”

She grinned and saluted. “Yes sir,” she said, and grabbed the blankets, plopping down on the sofa, waving at him as he went back to the bedroom. Daniel crawled under the covers, heart hammering in his chest, throat, and everywhere else the heart can hammer, and didn’t get a wink of sleep, nor did he mind.

Chapter 19

“Are you absolutely certain this is a good idea, Daniel?” Eliza asked. It had been the fifth time she’d asked. Her usual confidence wasn’t exactly in pieces, but it had most definitely fallen off the dresser and rolled under the couch when nobody was looking . It was, Daniel had to admit, a strange sight, seeing her fret like this, as much as he could relate to how she was currently feeling. He’d had some reservations of his own, when Jenny and her boyfriend had invited him and Eliza over for dinner.

For one thing, being over at someone’s home had always been a cause for anxiety for Daniel, who had been invited to many a soiree and nobleperson’s  house, and almost always there had been an attempt at bribery, straight up job offers -- which he’d declined, he’d have made for a terrible  geography teacher -- and on three separate occasions, assassination. He simply had never had an invitation from someone he hadn’t known for years that had actually been the evening of fun and companionship that had been promised.

The other thing was that he wasn’t sure how to approach an evening like this with Jenny and her boyfriend, who he had yet to meet and whose name he was fairly certain started with a K. Sure, they both knew he was, well, Daniel, but he didn’t have a lot of clothes that would allow him to look even remotely decent at an evening like this. He had shirts and the rough pants made of denim that he quite enjoyed, but he never saw people wearing them in official settings. He’d told Jenny about it, who had simply reassured him to come as he was and, if necessary, he could borrow some of her boyfriend’s clothes, which barely  helped. He simply didn’t know what to expect.

That hadn’t been a problem for Eliza, who had sheepishly walked into a clothing store and had been adored  by the two girls there, who had been more than eager to help her find the perfect outfit. They had whisked her away and Daniel had been forbidden from seeing what she’d ended up with, but she had looked extremely pleased with herself when she’d left the store. The two girls had waved them out enthusiastically and Eliza hadn’t said a word more, grinning smugly all the way home.

Now she was getting ready in the bathroom and all that bluster had evaporated. Daniel, lying on the bed, simply stared at the ceiling with a slight chuckle. Not that Eliza’s confidence on its own wasn’t… something he could appreciate, but knowing she was mortal under all of that power never failed to make him smile.

“I think,” Daniel said, “that it would not be the worst idea for either of us to make more connections. Loathe as I am to let you out of my sight, lest you go conquering worlds again, I do think having some friends is a good thing.” He propped himself up on his elbows. “Besides, I’d think you, of all people I know, would be more comfortable in a situation where you can present as the great Eliza again, rather than having to conform to this world’s more… drab standards. Not to mention that I can’t help but feel like you wouldn’t like to miss a chance to finally get dressed up ag--”

That’s as far as he got. It is a common fallacy that men are easily distracted by beautiful women, and it is a fallacy that is built on a system that devalues the attraction of women, as well as that of gay men. In fact, everyone is easily distracted by someone they think is beautiful, but only men see their open attraction acknowledged without punishment. All of this to say that Daniel’s response was entirely normal, even if he was a man and Eliza was a beautiful woman, the latter of whom had just walked out of the bathroom with none of the demure timidity that could be expected of someone insecure about their appearance.

Eliza was wearing a grey knee-length sweater dress with green accents and a split that went just a bit up her thigh, leather boots with only a hint of a heel that went halfway up her calf, and black leggings. The only piece of jewellery was a sapphire -- or something that looked a lot like one -- on a simple silver chain around her neck. It wasn’t particularly big, but it complimented the muted tones of the dress well. Her now shoulder-length hair was up in a bun, with a few loose strands framing her face. One hand on her hip, she smirked at Daniel.

“You were saying?” she quipped, before striding through the room the way she probably used to all the time, patently ignoring Daniel’s inability to tear his eyes off of her. When she stood in the doorway, she stopped and turned back to him. “It’s… not the shoulders, right?” A twinge of vulnerability in her voice and her jaw set a little too tight, and Daniel wasn’t sure if that was insecurity because of herself or because of him.

“No! No… I wasn’t…”

“I just… I want  to think you were looking at me because of the way I’m dressed,” she said, “but I do look… all right, right? I know I don’t look traditionally… feminine…”

“You look…” he paused, trying to figure out how he’d want her to talk to him, too. He didn’t want to sound placating, or condescending, and it would be so easy to say the wrong thing. “You don’t see the person in the mirror that you want to, Eliza,” he said. She nodded. “I think… I think I do.”

“Bully for you,” Eliza said, rolling her eyes. “I’m glad the mirror is your ally.”

“No, that’s not what I…” He groaned and rubbed his face. “That was supposed to be…” Eliza looked at him with all the patience of a cat waiting to pounce, her eyebrows raised. As expressions go, ‘I see you have dug yourself a hole and have only a shovel to dig yourself out’ is highly specific, but it is one that has been perfected across all layers of reality. “I see what you don’t, Eliza,” Daniel said. Eliza nodded, still not understanding. He cleared his throat and tried to calm his suddenly-quite-fast heartbeat. “I see you,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Yes,” he said. “If you’d understood what I meant in the first place then we wouldn’t be in the middle of what is rapidly becoming the most awkward conversation of my life, but yes.” He was a little frustrated and a lot flustered and he didn’t know why, only adding fuel to both. “I see the version of you that you wish you could see in the mirror, because I know who you are and you… wear that dress… really… quite… well…” His voice trailed off as a blush rose up his cheeks, hopefully a little camouflaged by the still growing stubble. He had taken to trimming it a bit -- he had learned a long time ago to avoid the teenage see-through facial hair -- but he felt that a hint of stubble made him look both more masculine and a bit older.

“Thank you,” Eliza said, her smile reaching all the way up to her eyes. “I’m glad.” there was a comfortable silence for a moment, and then Eliza turned on her heels. “Come on, let’s go! We’ve only half an hour and unless you’ve secretly learned how to drive, we are either walking or taking public transportation, and I don’t want to sit on another bus.”

“We could attempt a taxi?”

“No,” she said resolutely. “I’m never doing that again. I’ve never felt more embarrassed. Are you all set?”

Daniel nodded. “Jenny let me know again that it’d be no problem for me to get changed there. Her boyfriend is to give me ‘pointers’. It’s going to be dreadful.”

“It’ll be delightful, Daniel.” She picked up her purse -- grey, with a little blue accent -- and led the way to the front door. “Come on, I don’t want to be late to meet your… boss.”

Daniel groaned. “Don’t call her that. She’s more like… a colleague.”

“Who pays you,” Eliza said drily.

“She pays herself the same amount, mind! She makes enough to keep the place running, and then only for hours doing her share of the work. Pat’s no different.” He huffed. “Far as I’m concerned, all three of us hold the same position.”

“But they get the profits, don’t they?” Eliza said as she whirled her coat onto her shoulders with a flourish Daniel neither could nor had any intention to learn. Eliza, however, looked positively royal when she did so, and as they made their way down the stairwell -- neither of them very comfortable with elevators, useful as they were for groceries -- he felt distinctly underdressed, wearing a cheap jacket over his already not-very-impressive shirt-jeans combo. Next to him, Eliza looked, well… like a queen.

“No,” Daniel said. “The profits -- and there aren’t many -- go into a separate account for the gym. If new equipment is needed and so on. For the most part, they appear to break even, wages not included.”

“Huh,” Eliza said, “interesting. Well, she is still the person who employs you soooo …” With a little wink, she stepped out into the afternoon-rapidly-becoming-evening air, and they walked mostly in silence to their destination, not far from the gym.

Daniel was the one to knock. Even though he still felt more than a little self-conscious about being a hunched-over ill-dressed figure next to Eliza, he was essentially the main invitee, and the one Jenny knew. He should, he figured, be the one to lead the proverbial charge. For a brief moment he pondered on how different his life was these days, how this  was considered leading the charge for him now. Once upon a time he would run into the open maw of a titan wielding only half a sword, and now the thought of socializing was making him nervous. Some hero.

Jenny opened the door with a big smile, and immediately, Daniel felt even more like the odd one out. Her black cocktail-dress was pretty, and its design left her muscular arms and shoulders bare. Daniel hoped Eliza took note. Jenny could probably bench-press him, and she didn’t look any less feminine for it.

“Daniel, I’m so glad you made it.” She turned to Eliza, and blinked for a moment. Daniel could swear Jenny’s gaze slowly walked all the way up to Eliza’s face in a way that bordered on the inappropriate. “Okay,” Jenny said. “Okay. Yeah! Hi! I’m Jenny. You must be Eliza.” She offered her hand, which Eliza took gingerly. “Please, come on in!”

They did as they were offered and were led into a small -- though not as small as their own -- living room, cozy and far from devoid of comforts. A large screen seemed to be set up against one wall on which a fireplace was projected, and the table had already been made. There were candles.  Soft music came from somewhere and they took it all in for a moment. It was nice. The kind of thing Daniel wouldn’t mind living in, if he ever lived with someone else.  

“It’s wonderful,” Eliza said, and Daniel couldn’t help but agree. Jenny smiled a thank you and then ran into the kitchen to do… something. Just in that moment, the man of the house entered. He wasn’t much taller than Daniel, dressed in a simple white button-up, buttoned down slightly, and a black vest. He presented handsome in a way Daniel hadn’t seen in person much before. Not in this world, at least. He’d seen a lot of business suits, but this managed to look both refined, dignified, as well as casual and comfortable.

“Daniel?” he asked, and they shook hands. “I’m Hayden . Good to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Many have,” Daniel said without an ounce of shame, boast or humour. Hayden did him the courtesy of laughing anyway. “Good to meet you too, Hayden. Jenny sings your praises often.”

“Does she?” Hayden grinned. “I’ll have to bully her about that later.” He turned to Eliza. “Of course, the eponymous Eliza. Honestly, I’ve only heard about you… third-hand, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t ready  for just how much of a vision  you are,” he said, and Daniel noticed her blushing. He’d half expected Hayden to bow or kiss her hand, but he simply shook Eliza’s hand like he had Daniel’s. “Now, all that out of the way, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check on the potatoes. I’ll ask Jenny to show you to our room, I put some clothes out on the bed that I think you’re going to dig.” He smiled again, gave Daniel a gentle pat on the shoulder, and disappeared into the other room.

“That was…” Eliza said, looking at the space Hayden had occupied just a moment ago. They had both been mesmerised.

“Definitely something,” Daniel finished.

“Never met a man like that before.”

“Dapper?” Daniel asked with a smirk.

“Jovial. He makes me feel welcome,” Eliza said. Daniel turned to look at her.

“I don’t?”

“No,” Eliza said, and Daniel’s rapidly dropping heart was caught at only the last second. “You make me feel at home.”

“Daniel?” Jenny asked as she walked back into the room, handing Eliza a glass of bubbles and putting Daniel’s on the table. “Come with me? Hayden says he got some things ready for you.”

Hayden had. Hayden had put out an outfit not unlike his own, but with a black shirt instead. However, the part that really stuck out to Daniel was a centerpiece, something that clearly was supposed to go under the whole thing. It had a little note.

“Daniel. If everything Jenny says is correct, this is your first time wearing one of these. Remember, if, at any point, you start to feel out of breath, you immediately go and take it off. It helped me a lot, early on, and I hope it helps you too. Men like us have to stick out for each other. -- Hayden

“PS: I washed it.

Daniel looked at the garment for a moment, took a deep breath, and forced himself into the outfit, deliberately ignoring the mirror in the room, and straightened everything out as best he could. The buttons on the shirt had taken a moment to get used to, but he’d hoisted himself into uncomfortable ceremonial outfits before. He was just glad there were no cufflinks. He ran a hand through his hair, rubbed his face, and took a not-as-deep-as-he-would-like breath before heading back.

Jenny and Eliza were happily talking next to a set of pictures, Eliza clearly having mastered the art of small talk, when he walked and ran a hand down his chest to flatten out the shirt, and was struck by the realization that the underthing Hayden had given him had practically taken away his bust . He looked down, and back up, catching Eliza’s eye.  Did he look like he felt? Did she see  him the way he felt?

“It looks amazing on you, Daniel!” Jenny said. “Gosh, I’m so glad this worked out. I had a feeling , because you and Hayden are the same size, but I don’t like to assume. Please, sit. Gosh, Eliza, he looks handsome as hell!”

“Yeah,” Eliza said quietly, her eyes wide as the four of them sat down and Hayden broke the ice by giving everyone their glass of champagne. It wasn’t a taste Daniel had acquired yet, but he appreciated the celebratory/festive aspect of it.

“To making new friends, yeah?” Hayden said and the other raised their glasses to salute. “Now… dig in. I spent way too long on the mash and I need someone to tell me it’s not garbage.” They did, dinner going by happily. It didn’t take long for Daniel to relax and open up a bit, although he and Eliza couldn’t go into detail about a lot of their earlier life and they did their best to stay vague, asking questions themselves.

However, as anyone who has tried to avoid a subject is well aware, every once in a while, you let your guard down and eat something. In such a situation, you are defenseless. You can either lie, which most people are much worse at than they think they are, you can dodge the question, which will cause more questions, or you can answer the question. The third option is, of course, the worst, and the only correct one. However, that doesn’t make it easy . As Daniel enjoyed a forkful of what were actually really  good mashed potatoes -- ‘No, really, I think you were being facetious, you knew they’d be this good, haha’ -- Jenny raised her glass and looked conspiratorially at the two of them.

“So,” she asked, wiggling her eyebrows. “How long have the two of you been together?”

Daniel nearly choked on his food.

Chapter 20

Eliza was trying to regain her composure, and doing a much better job of it than Daniel was, still choking on his food as Hayden tried to help him by patting him on the back. It shouldn’t have been a difficult question to answer, or not  answer, as the case might be, but clearly Daniel was having just as much trouble with it as she was. They weren’t  together, after all. They were sworn enemies, only temporarily brought together by the whims of fate, so that they might escape this world together.

As Daniel sat up again, his head red and his breathing heavy, their gazes crossed and Eliza knew  that that was a lie. Daniel was no more her enemy than the mashed potatoes were. In fact, as the potatoes had just attempted to assassinate him, a uselessly glib part of her brain pointed out, they were more  eligible for that position than he was.

But that left the question unanswered. Unanswerable. Their eyes stayed locked, and Eliza knew that speaking right now would lead to stammered nonsense. But she had to say something, didn’t she? But what if she misspoke? If she had fundamentally misunderstood the nature of them… or worse, if it didn’t matter. They would still return, after all, and she’d be Demon Queen again. He would be Hero  again, with all that entailed. They had worlds to return to, and something like this would be left as nothing but a bittersweet memory. Wouldn’t it?

“I’m not,” Eliza began, and the part of her brain that usually did the words thing failed and the backup words thing short circuited, and she bumbled through a series of noises that Jenny seemed to find humorous enough to pretend not to laugh at. “He’s not…” she tried again. “We’re not supposed  to…” Eliza finally said.

“Yes,” Daniel said, his voice clearly still hoarse. Why did that have to give it that low, gruff quality his voice’d had when they’d first met? Why had his voice decided that now was the time to be so eminently attractive? “We can’t,” he said, and Eliza felt something pierce her chest, like she’d been stabbed all over again. He was right, of course, but somehow this hurt more than the first time he’d run a sword through her chest.

“Yes,” she said, with an apologetic smile to Jenny and Hayden who, of course, didn’t understand. “It’s a very long story, but sadly, there’s no future between us. I couldn’t…” She paused, trying, struggling, failing to find the words and having to resort to a handful that was going to have to do. He was the Hero. He would never be able to be hers, not with someone like her, when they went back. “Not with someone like him,” she said, and sipped her drink, hoping to hide behind the glass for a moment.

Daniel nodded, his face about as grim as she felt, and he looked between Jenny and Hayden, who now seemed to have shifted into concern. “It’s a very long story,” he said, and Eliza tried her best, for her own sake, not to hear his voice breaking. “It’s… for another time.”

“I’m so sorry,” Jenny said. “I didn’t know this was a touchy subject. I never should have brought it up.” She looked positively guilty, and Eliza couldn’t help but feel bad. The girl really hadn’t anticipated shattering the evening’s atmosphere with a question like that, and clearly it weighed on her. Eliza tried to give her a reassuring smile.

“It’s quite all right, Jenny. It’s something Daniel and I discussed a long time ago ,” she said, looking across the table at him to make sure they were still on the same page. “Perhaps it was for the best that it was brought up again?” It was a half-question. Part rhetorical, part plea, begging the universe to tell her that, no, it wasn’t.

But no such answer came. Daniel simply nodded again. Their agreement stood. And that was, perhaps, for the best. Companionship has a tendency of making things complicated. Even someone as isolated as the Demon Queen knew that. If and when they went back, there would be worlds between them again, after all, and then it would be easier to wave this all away as a strange episode in their lives, if one she would try to remember with all the fondness she could muster. Even if it made her want to bawl right now.

Dinner continued quickly and quietly after that. Not much more was said. Not much more, Eliza felt, could be said. Something had been broken, both in the evening and, she feared, between herself and Daniel. Maybe temporary. Maybe not. A broken bone could heal, the devil on her shoulder told her. A broken pot could not, the other devil on her other shoulder reminded her. There was no telling.

It was quiet. It wasn’t… pleasant, not as pleasant as it had been, and even though the room was warm, the food tasted wonderfully and the company was good, Eliza felt cold. She wanted to hold someone, a thought she also needed to push to the background because she knew  only one person she wanted to hold. As the evening came to a close and they said their goodbyes, Jenny apologizing again for the unfortunate question, Eliza did what she could to make sure the wonderful couple didn’t feel too bad. It hadn’t been their fault, after all, and both Jenny and Hayden had been exceedingly charming. She’d been made to feel beautiful by them both, and they’d given Daniel clothes that had made him look and feel a lot more like the person he really was. The person Eliza saw so easily when she looked at him.

The walk back to their apartment was uneventful, to Eliza’s regret. She would’ve given… well, not anything, but a lot, for something to break the silence, the glass wall that seemed to have been invisibly set up between Daniel and her. She wanted to talk to him, but would that do any good? They’d already talked. They’d already agreed  on what they were and what they’d be doing. Sure, she’d still be more Eliza than ‘Evil Demon Queen’ if she ever found her way back, but he’d be Daniel, the Hero. They weren’t supposed to even be friends. Would it even be worth it to go back, in that case? If she’d just be in her castle, talking to servants and dignitaries and accountants and…

More importantly, she wondered as they walked up the flights of stairs, did she even want to go back? Here she could read, and write, and people paid her to do it! Not much, but enough. And she would have that nest egg that would last her in times of hardship. She didn’t have  to be anything but Eliza here. She could just stay.

As they walked into the apartment, which felt cold and cramped instead of warm and cozy, too dark and too oppressive today, Daniel simply walked over to the couch and sat down. Without looking at her, he started to unbutton his shirt. “You can take the bed today,” he said quietly. “I might take a walk.” Eliza nodded. It wasn’t really that late, all things considered, and she couldn’t hold the need to clear his head against him. She could use the same, if she was honest with herself. On top of that, she appreciated that he wouldn’t be waking her up if he did decide to go out. She just nodded in response and went to the bedroom, trying to figure out why.

Why, she couldn’t figure out, was she on the verge of tears as she took off her shoes? Why did it feel like she was losing something as she scurried out of her sweater dress? Why was every fiber of her being telling her something was wrong as she crawled into bed? Nothing had changed, she told herself as tears started to flow. Everything was just the same as it had been before, and that was the right thing, wasn’t it? As she slowly curled up into a ball, Eliza cried herself to sleep.

----

“No,” Eliza said, as she stood in an infinite field of nothing. “I am not  in the bloody mood for this right now.” She took a deep breath and tried to unfurrow her brow and unjut her jaw. She put her hands on her hips and was surprised to find them there again. They were her hips. Sure, the hormones had done some work, but these were… well, it was a bit like sitting in your favourite chair. There was a sense of familiarity. She looked down. She was in her own body again. Sure, the skin was more… skin-coloured, and her center of gravity was a little closer to the ground. She wasn’t the giantess she had once been, but that was fine. She’d gotten used to a more human height anyway.

“I can come back later, if you want,” a voice behind her said. On a modest bench made of the same nothing-material as everything else sat… well, her. Goodness, she had never really considered how big  she used to be. Except that this person had none of the panache, the presentation she’d once had. Knees together, wearing what seemed to be a modest summer dress instead of the risqué pieces Eliza had once worn, this felt like a timid reflection of the person she’d once been. But she was smiling happily, in a way Eliza had never done, either.

“You’re… Liz, right?”

“Yup!” Liz said with a happy bounce. “Sorry for taking your name, it just… fit.” Eliza waved her concerns away and sat down next to her.

“You’re free to do with it what you will,” Eliza said, wearily. “Daniel has mentioned having talks like this with Sally. I must be honest, I’m not in the mood to exchange pleasantries and gossip about both worlds right now, Liz.”

“Oh, that’s not why I’m here, Eliza,” Liz said, the picture of innocence. “It’s been taking me a lot of time, because, well, magic is hard , but… I’m the one who started this,” she pointed between herself and Eliza, “little interaction.”

Eliza frowned. “Wait… how did… but doesn’t that mean that…'' Liz just nodded cheerfully, encouraging her to go on. “You’re able to establish contact between us at will?”

“Yeah! Well, sort of,” she said. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to bridge the gaps between our two worlds and all that, but I’m going to be really honest, I wouldn’t know how to do that. I mean, you  would, but I keep blowing parts of your castle up.” Eliza frowned harder at that. “Oh! Don’t worry, I fixed it! But the problem is still there. You know how to use your magic and I don’t.”

“So learn,” Eliza said, a little sourly, not in the mood to play games.

“Well, I  could ,” Liz said, “but that could take a while. But I think I can do something else instead. Something that could help a lot faster.” Now that piqued Eliza’s interest.

“Go on?”

“Well, I think  I can send through a bit of magic. Nothing major but… enough for, oh, say, two people to jump across the apparently quite flimsy barrier between this world and that one?” Liz seemed a little self-satisfied and, Eliza had to admit, she probably had the right to be. It was a good plan.

“Enough magic for two people to make it through, huh?” she said. “Not four? You and Sally don’t want to go back?”

“We-ell,” Liz said with an innocent little pout, “I’m actually pretty happy here, so if it’s all the same to you I would like a guarantee that once you’re back in your own body that you give me one a lot like it because I don’t think I want to go back. Sally’s fine too, by the way.”

“That…” Eliza took a moment to chew on her thoughts, looking out into the void, hoping for it to come up with answers. “I don’t think that will be a problem,” she said. “I don’t think I want to go back anymore. But Daniel might. And I could use the magic to adjust my body a bit over here. Well, your body,” she shot Liz a glance, who had stuck out her tongue in a look of mock disgust.

“Ew, no, it’s all yours, thank you. Well, if you think you’d be able to make do with that kind of thing to help you out, feel more than free to turn it into… well…” Liz looked down at Eliza with a smile. “You look like you already have a shape figured out. You’ll get there.”

“Yeah,” Eliza said, trying not to think of what her life would look like soon. “I will.”

Tick

Chapter 21

It was only just past dark, though it felt later. Daniel shoved his hands in his pockets as he walked down the streets, his thoughts noisy and more useless than ever. Clearing his head had sounded like a fantastic idea when he’d said it, but actually being out here, not as easily done. Walking forward didn’t seem to make his head any clearer, his thoughts any less loud. If there was any benefit so far, it was that it let him expel some of his pent-up energy, and right now, he just wanted to move forward, whatever that meant.

Eliza’s reaction at the table kept running through his head. Had he read it wrong? She’d spoken the truth, after all. They weren’t supposed to. She was Eliza . Even if she wasn’t the person that had once meant, she was still, well, royalty. She was grandeur . Opulence. She was Grand , and once she got back, she’d be a queen again. Daniel was… well, he wasn’t even the Hero anymore, was he? He was frail, now. Small. Even with the bit of scruff on his face, he felt thin and ineffectual. He had to crane his neck to even look at her, and she wasn’t that tall.

Eliza was grand and powerful and he couldn’t possibly measure up to that. What was it she’d said? ‘Someone like him’. He caught his reflection in a window and quickly looked away. Yeah, he wouldn’t feel exactly comforted around someone like him either. She’d needed help a few times and he’d done his best, but clearly, he wasn’t enough. He definitely wasn’t going to be enough for her here, and trying to imagine that he might be was only going to hurt him in the long run, wasn’t it?

He’d allowed himself to live in the cute domestic life for a while, but it wasn’t going to last forever. The last time he’d spoken to Sally, she’d mentioned off-handedly that they’d been trying to find a way to get both of them back to where they were supposed to be, and he had every faith that the world, his  world couldn’t do without a hero for much longer. He’d be whisked back and saving the world in no time at all. Just like he was supposed to.

He’d miss it, sure, but it was a silly fantasy, constantly interrupted by the fact that he needed Eliza’s help to reach the top shelf, that she could probably pick him up effortlessly, that she needed to go back, and that he did, too. It was never going to have led anywhere, and he chided himself for thinking it might have.

Daniel took a deep breath. This wasn’t clearing his head at all. There were only more and more thoughts swarming around in his brain, and he was angry at all of them. He crossed the road to the little park that was adjacent to their block, a little, well-lit copse of trees, with a pond and some ducks. It was nice enough, and it smelled like pine almost all year round. He had hoped, as he had set out to come here, that it would calm him down some, that it would remind him of days he used to spend walking, going forward. Of having a purpose, a clear goal.

What was he even trying to do here, anymore? He tried to figure out what he’d been doing and the first, obvious conclusion was survival. He’d been trying to survive in this strange, alien world, while waiting for a way to get back. And Eliza had just been there? No, that didn’t even make sense to him. There was clearly more to it than that. Time hadn’t just been passing by while they waited. He’d been living , trying to build a life. And Eliza hadn’t just been around. She’d been an active participant in his life. He wouldn’t even have found a way to alleviate the feelings of wrongness without her. She’d been the most important person in his life since, well, his death. Pretending she wasn’t was unfair to both of them.

But apparently, ‘someone like  him’ wasn’t the person she wanted in this life, was it? She’d said so earlier, and she’d made that crystal clear. They had talked about it, early on. That they would be allies by convenience and necessity. But they had grown into more, hadn’t they? Or was he just lying to himself? Had years of being The Hero gone to his head? He wasn’t worth all that much these days, was he? Barely a man anymore, no matter how hard he tried. The hormones and the exercises weren’t going to make him taller any  time soon, and even with some angles on him, would he ever look… feel right?

The park would have been, once upon a time and place, dark, full of shadowy corners in which monsters could lurk and bandits might hide. But not here. Lanterns were placed strategically to cast a warm light over a large area, and little benches dotted the paths going through it. It was an aspect of this world that had taken some getting used to: it never really slept. Electricity ran through the streets and houses like a lifeblood, and even without people, there was a sense that this place was lived-in. That didn’t mean he was stupid.  He was short in stature, and he knew there was a chance he might have to rely on his ability to either hit quickly or run quicker.

But for now, he felt mostly secure, taking in the smells of the trees and the grass with a deep breath, and trying to force himself to relax, to let his sense take a hit of nature and push his thoughts out. Nature was, historically, good at that, after all. He’d done his best lack-of-thinking sitting against a tree with the wind on his face and the rustling of leaves in his brain. He sat down on a bench and closed his eyes.

There’s an expression, which says that it never rains, but it pours. Technically, this is wrong. There are parts of the universe, and even on this world, where it never pours but rains almost constantly, where the drizzle is constant and people gurgle gently when they speak. Sometimes, there is only rain, and you learn to wear your jacket and an umbrella regardless of the time of year, even if it grinds you down like an ocean against stone.

But sometimes, it does pour. Sometimes, when you’ve had a bad day, and you’re walking home with the slightly-too-cold rain lightly pattering on the shirt you wore because you didn’t expect to need a jacket, and you think “I’ll just get changed when I get home, it’ll be fine.” You feel confident that the bag with papers you’ve got with you will not be rained through, and you know it’s just a bit of discomfort, it’ll get better when you get home.

And then someone up high accidentally bumps into the giant faucet of reality and the tap is turned all the way open, and all of a sudden you’re drenched in seconds  and you realize that this day isn’t going to be better when you get home because when you get home you’ll have more work to do, drying papers, and you’ll have to do laundry, and that’s assuming you don’t slip and fall on your way home, because that might as well happen too.

Sometimes, it pours.

“Sally?” a voice behind Daniel asked. Motherly, concerned, almost scared. Daniel froze. He hoped that the voice was talking to someone else, that this was going to go away in just a second, because he wasn’t in the mood for this. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone, nor did he think he was ever going to be in the mood for this , but he would’ve liked for it to show up at an opportune time, at the very least. But it hadn’t. It was  happening now, because sometimes it pours. Two figures walked around the bench and looked at him. He regretted having changed out of the clothes Hayden had given him, because they would’ve made this a lot easier to shake off, but the undergarment had been restricting and the clothes had made him feel, well, fake , and so he’d thrown on one of Sally’s old hoodies and he was deeply regretting it now.

“Is that you?” the other figure asked. It had a distinctly fatherly quality, with a twang of an accent Daniel had no way of placing. It was a gruff voice, the kind of voice that had worked in places with bad worker’s comp for decades and looked down on anyone who hadn’t. It was a voice with a moustache and a favourite pair of workman’s boots. Daniel looked at the two of them. They looked like he’d expected them to, although the mother was a little shorter than he’d anticipated.

Daniel inhaled and tried to remember every single thing he’d learned on those videos on the computer, pushing his larynx down, trying to feel the resonance in his chest, and cleared his throat. “Can I help you?” he asked. He knew who they were, but he couldn’t let them see that. Not now. He wasn’t ready.

“It’s not her, Will,” the woman said, and then her face twisted into something he hadn’t expected. The way Daniel had envisioned it, he’d expected one of two things. The first was that he’d expected her to be angry, or upset, that she hadn’t found her child. That would have been hard, of course, and awkward, but expected. The second was recognition. That one would have definitely been a lot more unpleasant for him. But the look on her face was one of contempt, and a bit of pity.

“I see that,” the man said, and both of them just… stood there, looking at him. The man had shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at him like something unexpected pulled out of the river. The woman looked at Daniel like the thing had been wriggling, almost with morbid fascination.

Daniel had, on more than one occasion, been forced to stand on a stage to receive an award, or to give a rousing speech, in front of dozens, hundreds of people. But somehow, he had never felt more looked at than he had in that moment, like a curious specimen.

“It’s sad,” the woman said, “the way the city forces girls to do this to themselves.”

“Hrm,” the man said, and Daniel felt like this was his usual response to things.

“Excuse me?” Daniel asked. The woman just continued as if he wasn’t even there.

“Look at her,” the mother said. “A beautiful young girl in the prime of her life and she has facial hair. I mean, I have no problem with gay people, but people need to stop trying to convince children  to do this to themselves.”

“It’s not natural,” the moustache said, and added a “hrm” for emphasis.

“I know,” the woman said, and started to pull him away by the arm. “It’s all of these new cults, they just want to push their ideas on innocent young women…” Her voice trailed off as they walked away, until they were out of sight and sound.

Daniel sat on the bench, cooking alive in his own skin. His hair felt like it was on fire, and if he could have crawled out of his body like an insect crawling out of its cocoon, he would have. He wanted to get out . He was fairly certain these had been Sally’s parents, and he understood now why she hadn’t seemed all that eager to get home. But other than what they’d said, which had been borderline nonsensical, and the way they’d talked about him like he wasn’t there, which had been rude beyond comprehension, like he wasn’t even human … it was the small things that seared through his brain, like someone running a hot poker over a carpet, scorching lines and making small fires.

Did he really just look like a woman with facial hair? He knew who he was, but to them he had just looked like some… thing . An abomination. An abnormality. And he was, wasn’t he? He wasn’t even supposed to be here. He was supposed to be back home, to be the hero, to be big, to be strong, to be good enough to be himself.

He got up and started walking. He felt like he might explode if he stayed seated. His legs pumped underneath him, and it was only when he skidded to a halt that he realized he’d been running. He was barely out of breath. The months of exercise had paid off, at the very least. He practically flew up the stairs, grinding his teeth every few steps to keep from screaming in the stairwell, until he got to the door of their apartment and he took a few deep breaths before sliding his key in the lock, quietly. Despite his frustrations, he didn’t want to wake Eliza up.

It turned out not to be necessary. She was sitting at the little table by the back of the sofa, with a few papers and booklets in front of her, frowning. When he came in, her face seemed to light up for a moment, and then it fell when she saw his expression.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said, his voice catching in his throat. It was too hard, too much, to be here and not be good enough, not for himself and not for…

Eliza looked at him with concern. “Can’t do what?”

“Stay here. Be this.” He shuddered. He was practically shaking. “I have to get out.” His voice was breaking and her expression was tearing him apart. He did not want more pity. Not now. Especially not from her.

“Well,” Eliza said, and she seemed to be close to tears for reasons Daniel didn’t quite understand. “Good news, Daniel.” She smiled in pain. “There’s a way home.”

Chapter 22

A way back was a long way away, apparently. A very long way away. Daniel looked at the bags they’d purchased, fit for travel. They’d only be gone for a few days, but, Eliza had said, a little dourly, it was better to be safe than sorry. He had the feeling she was scared it wasn’t going to work out, that she had to prepare for the way back. It was possible, but not a possibility he was willing to entertain. If there was no future for them here, they had to be able to go back. They had to.

The way there was more than a little complicated. Apparently, Liz was barely in control of her powers enough to do something even remotely complicated, and so she’d come up with an interesting solution. Eliza knew how to use that power, though. So an object had been sent through with a bit of that power in it.

Infusing objects with magic is a complicated and arduous ordeal that most self-respecting mages eschew in favour of throwing raw magical energy at each other. The problem, mostly, is that using an object that has magic running through it is a little bit like opening a souped-up version of a modified Schrödinger’s box. The contents of the box exist in a quantum state, multiple possibilities in superposition until you open it. The magical object exists in a state of both being powered and unpowered until you try to activate it. In both cases, the odds have been fiddled with to massively increase the likelihood of the desired outcome. The shield reflects fire. The cloak becomes invisible.

But when playing with odds, even massively fixed ones, there is always the chance that you’ll open the box, and the cat will be neither alive nor dead, but instead be a very living, very angry badger.

It was for that reason that Daniel had never bothered with magical objects and items much. They were too unpredictable. Even a thousand-to-one chance that your boots turn you into garlic bread when you jump, he figured, was a chance too high for him to take.

But this one was, apparently, simply an object that held some power, enough for Eliza to drain, and to send them both back to their own world. As Eliza said it, it would take less energy to get someone home than it would cost her to turn someone into a frog, if that was something she was interested in doing. Between her and Liz, they had discovered a fundamental truth about their realities.

Objects, people, stories shared between realities were, as they had discovered, coiled up like a spring or a rubber band. With only a gentle magic nudge, someone like that could be catapulted back to where they were from, new body included.

What Liz hadn’t discovered was how to send the object somewhere specific. So it had slipped through the veil between worlds and it was… somewhere. Eliza knew where. She could feel it, even, but they’d had to go through dozens of maps, with only the vaguest sense to go on. Eventually, however, with a lot less excitement than he’d expected for something this important, she exclaimed that she’d found it, and pointed at a specific point on a map. A map, they figured out a second later, of Iceland, an island off the coast of an entirely different continent. The distance between here and there would have taken them forever to cross where they’d come from. Voyages like that were simply, well, not taken overseas. But people here had discovered most of the world in a way that they simply hadn’t back in their own world.

Iceland, it turned out, was a six-hour flight away. So they packed their bags. Quietly. There wasn’t much to talk about after all, right? They both wanted to go back. Eliza wanted him to go back. He didn’t doubt it. He had to assume she’d want to be out of that body too. Sure, to him she was, well, beautiful. Right up until the dinner with Jenny and Hayden, he’d seen her light up a bit more every day, and her lust for life had given her a glow, an energy. He could’ve looked at her forever. But something like that couldn’t go both ways. They both had to go back. Even if that made things painful and awkward right now. It was, simply put, for the best. He wouldn’t be able to find happiness here.

He hated this, though. The quiet. The  not talking. It was painful and constant and it tugged at his emotions like a hook in his brain, putting him on edge in a way he hadn’t been for months. Not that he had any intention of lashing out. But it made him feel like there were things he had to say and he couldn’t think of any of them. It was frustrating beyond belief. He tried not to think about it much, but every once in a while something would come along and make itself impossible to ignore.

Eliza had brought him a plate of food when he’d just got done packing. Not that he’d been bringing much. He wasn’t exactly intending on coming back. She had handed it to him and for a moment their fingers had touched. Like electricity shooting through him, he had been so acutely aware of the short moment of connection, it had tied his stomach in knots. Neither of them had said anything, only keeping their eyes locked on each other, unspoken, invisible words churning in his head. It had been physically painful.

Then she’d turned away to finish up her own bags, her face an unreadable portrait of emotions. She’d been packing for a while, but he hadn’t been wanting to pry. Her privacy was important, doubly so now. The last thing he wanted was to say or do something wrong and ruin their last few days together with an explosive fight. Not that he was worried she’d leave him behind. He just… didn’t want to remember her like that. He wanted to remember her sitting across from him with a pair of chopsticks, smiling at the terrible joke he’d just made, radiant in ways she had no way of ever seeing herself. Even if they never saw each other again in that other world, that’s an image he would probably cherish for… some time.

The airport wasn’t far, and a single bus ride, much as both of them disliked buses, took them there in less than an hour, just after sunrise. The ride was as quiet as the past few days had been, although Daniel caught Eliza looking at a mother entertaining her child with a smile he didn’t even want to think of as wistful. Whatever she did with her life once they’d arrived back in the other world, he wasn’t going to be a part of it, and he didn’t want that as a reminder. But it was nice to see her smile again, at least.

The airport itself had been a hurdle they had been expecting to overcome. Daniel, with all of his cards still present, would have no trouble getting past customs, but Eliza had been a different problem to consider. They had done their due diligence in researching everything that came with international travel, and Eliza had promptly gone to city hall. Shortly after, she’d made a trip to the bank, and then back to city hall. As it turned out, it was remarkably easy to get a temporary travel passport if the right palms were greased, and it wasn’t like they were going to need their nest-egg much longer after this trip. Eliza’s official identity just hadn’t come up before.

When she’d come home, she’d clutched the paper with her official name and identity close to her chest, a look of melancholy on her face. She hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t either.

It turned out to be no problem at all. Customs took her temporary visa without trouble, and they were waved through to the ‘gate’, which was just another building rather than the, well, gate he’d been expecting. There, they waited quietly for their flight. Daniel retrieved some pre-packaged food from his carry-on bag. -- apparently airport food was overly expensive, and they wanted to avoid any unpleasant surprises on their journey -- and offered a sandwich to Eliza. She took it with a smile that didn’t quite make it to the rest of her face, and they nodded at each other, eating quietly.

After a while, the monotone voice on the speakers started to become background noise, and it was only because everyone around them stood up when it called out the name of the city -- which Daniel wasn’t even going to try to pronounce -- they’d be landing at. Strangely, it looked like Eliza was nervous, even though they’d already made it past the part that had been most likely to give them trouble. After all, the flight would be a piece of cake, just six hours of waiting in what was, according to his research, the safest way to travel. Then, in the city itself, they would be able to rent transportation.

They shuffled through the tube and into one of the most cramped spaces Daniel had ever set foot in. It reminded him of a makeshift barracks he’d once spent a few nights in. Okay, so it wouldn’t be a pleasant  six hours, but he’d been through a lot worse. Shuffling to their seats -- Eliza had asked, quietly, for the window side -- they stowed their bags like they saw people around them do, and then sat down. There was a lady giving them instructions and almost mechanically, he listened and followed. Clicked the belt closed. Then there was more waiting. Waiting to wait. It was familiar, at least.

Finally, a man with an accent warbled tinnily through the speakers overhead, giving him information about the air that he had no idea what to do with, and suddenly, everything started to move with a jolt. He’d braced himself, of course, but hadn’t been ready . It was strangely exciting, right up until the whole cabin suddenly tilted backwards and they started to accelerate with the roar of engines louder and bigger than any he’d seen before. He tried not to panic, and decided to look out the window. The ground was going down. He was going up. It didn’t help.

What did help was seeing how utterly terrified Eliza seemed to be. Something in the panicked look in her eyes calmed him down. If she was scared, he couldn’t be. He had to be there there, after all.

“Hey,” he said, breaking the silence that had been hovering between them for hours. Her gaze fell on him, and she looked scared. Small. “It’s going to be okay.” Eliza just nodded, her lips a thin line, her jaw tense. He hoped she wasn’t going to throw up. She looked scared and uncomfortable enough, but he also knew she had the kind of willpower you could bend a horseshoe around. He nudged her. “I would have thought you’d be the one comfortable with flying,” he said with a little smirk. That got him a frown that seemed to shake her out of her reverie of fear .

“It’s… it’s very different when I’m the one doing the flying, you know,” she said with a veiled indignity, keeping her voice low. “Being locked in a tube made of who knows what and going straight up like that… it’s unnatural!”

“Considering where we come from and how we got here,” Daniel mused, “I think we’ve done a pretty good job of blurring the line between natural and unnatural.”

“You’re not wrong,” Eliza said with a soft laugh. “Regardless, I have every right to be uncomfortable. There’s barely enough room for my legs, and if this thing goes down we’ll all be crushed like--”

“Don’t think like that,” Daniel interrupted her. “Things will be fine. We both know that.” He nodded, trying not to think of what ‘things’ included. ‘Things’ meant goodbye. They meant going back to their own world. They meant not making dinner together anymore, or sneaking a glance at her when she smiled. They meant going back to being the hero. They meant going back to things as they were supposed to be.

“Yeah,” Eliza said. “They will.”

“Try to get some rest,” Daniel said, closed his eyes and failed to get any sleep at all.

Chapter 23

Daniel startled up when the plane made contact with the ground again. He hadn’t fallen asleep, not really .

Most people take being awake for granted. It is, after all, second to sleeping, the thing most of us get the most practice doing, in that spot between birth and death. What most people fail to realize is that being awake is a resource. Consciousness is spent on itself, certainly, and needs to be replenished every sixteen hours or so, but other things can bite into that pool of awake-ness as well.

Stress, anxiety, excitement, physical exercise, all of those require the same energy (or similar enough that the distinction does not, in this case, matter all that much) as staying awake does. As such, we can be awake for only half a day and already find ourselves slouching over like a wax sculpture on a hot day, drained of energy.

The mind will often tell the body to keep going, at which the body will simply sip its fifth cup of coffee and mutter “good luck” under its breath, and then an hour or so later come back around to slap the mind with all the weight of its own hubris.

When the body and mind are pushed far enough like this, the average human starts to slip into a sort of in-between state. The body and the major functions are still going on automatic . The steps are still taken. But the actual processing is pretty much gone.

To most people, this state of near-catatonia is known as exhaustion, although that word doesn’t entirely do it justice. Exhaustion implies having done physical exercise that can be entirely absent here. The limbs are heavy, despite not having done anything. Among humans, this state of existence is known best by students and young parents, who exist in a state of automation that is nearly unrivaled among all species in the known multiverse.

Daniel had been in that state for a few hours now. The trepidation he felt, the anxiety of flying itself, and of course the weight of the last few wordless days, had all come crashing down on him and he was barely conscious. He was beyond tired, although the shock of the plane landing had pushed him out of it momentarily through sheer adrenalin, which carried him forward all the way from the taxi to the gate, where he lost all energy when the plane came to a halt.

He was barely aware of his surroundings as Eliza gently nudged him left and right out of the plane, towards customs and baggage claim. He wasn’t really present and just let himself be guided forward. He wasn’t even sure he wanted  to be here anymore, but, his upper brain functions gently snoozing in the couch cushions of his mind, he didn’t really see anything for it but to just let it all happen. This was, his automaton-brain figured, simply something he had to see through to the end. There wasn’t really any alternative.

He was startled awake again when they stepped out of the airport. The air was cold. It was beyond cold, it was freezing, and it was enough to shake him awake. He looked around. This was Iceland. It was nothing like… it was nothing like where they’d been living. He realized with a shake of his head he’d almost thought of the apartment he’d shared with Eliza as home. But it wasn’t, and he shouldn’t think of it that way. He wasn’t going back there again, after all. Home was where he was going.

Iceland was different, at the very least. A bit more like how he remembered the world he’d grown up in. Sure, it was colder, but the air felt as crisp as it once had, without the pollution of big cities, and he could hear the sea nearby. The buildings, other than the large airport, were smaller, and stood further apart from each other. Eliza looked around, pulling her luggage behind her, its wheels loudly rolling along the floor.

“This way,” she said quietly as she started walking. She’d memorized a map of the area, and she knew where to rent a vehicle. They weren’t expecting a very long walk, half an hour at most, and Daniel hoped that maybe the exercise would get his blood pumping a bit. The streets sloped gently, and the white buildings lined streets that were made with pedestrians in mind. The contrast was definitely stark. He’d gotten used to a world made for motor transport, and seeing a city so friendly to foot traffic and, by comparison, quiet, was not unpleasant.

They came to a small building with a sign out front. He didn’t know what the word actually said, it looked like a jumble of letters to him, but they’d memorized it. This was where they were supposed to be. The man inside was nice, and luckily he spoke English, something the guide online had mentioned most people on the island would do. Eliza spent some time talking to the man, pointing to a point on the map. His nodding and asking a few questions was encouraging, even if Daniel wasn’t really mentally present for the actual conversation. He seemed to know where they were supposed to go, at the very least.

After some time and payment (the credit card worked, it seemed) they were led to a car by a young woman wearing a thick orange jacket and short blonde hair. She was nice, and, Daniel, realized with relief, not very talkative. Whether that was because of a language barrier or simply because that wasn’t really the norm here, he didn’t know, but she communicated mostly in nods and gestures. That worked fine for him.

He hadn’t been in a car before, but he’d seen it a lot and, after the plane, it was practically nothing. It was easy  by comparison. Eliza and him sat next to each other, quietly, both looking out the window. The car starting was quiet, almost muted, and it wasn’t all that long before the buildings gave way to landscape, and something very strange happened. Daniel recognized  it. The landscape was familiar to him in a way that was hard to put to words. He’d seen this before. The sparse vegetation. The mountains in the distance. The vague sense of timelessness. He frowned.

“I see it too,” Eliza said. He turned around. He thought for a moment she was looking at him, but her eyes were fixed past him, out the window, a look of nostalgia on her face. “I’ve flown over landscapes exactly  like this.”

“I’ve walked through them,” Daniel said, and looked outside again, getting the distinct feeling that Eliza’s eyes were on him. “Once. On my way to fight the Evil Demon Dragon Queen.” He heard Eliza scoff next to him and he chuckled softly, too. That felt like a lifetime ago, now. In a way, it was.

“You two are visiting Lagarfljót,” the woman in the front seat said. It wasn’t really a question. She looked over her shoulder with a smirk. “From the video game, j á ?” Daniel looked back at her, not really knowing how to respond. She just nodded and looked at the road again. “You two are not the only ones who want to see where the story was born,” she continued, her slightly singsong. “I will take you to the edge of the lake. From the pictures.” There was a playful quality to her voice, amused by what she probably thought were two tourists.

“Sure,” Eliza said, blinking a few times, processing the new information. What neither of them realized -- or had any way to realize -- was that this was a coincidence. What almost nobody realizes is that coincidences are a way for stories to tell themselves. In one world, a Demon King, long ago, had built a castle on a mountain, overlooking windswept plains and distant, rolling hills. In another, a man had sat by a lake, looking at windswept plains and distant, rolling hills, and imagined a mountain with a castle and a Demon King.

The story was told in whatever medium it could find. In people. In the imagination of a man who grew up with a landscape open enough for him to paint a story on top of it. All of this, of course, completely went over Daniel and Eliza’s heads. They had no idea about any of this. But they still saw their past there. And, Daniel feared, their  future.

“What was it like?” Eliza asked. He looked at her, and the expression on her face was one of kind curiosity. “Back then. What was your life like? I didn’t… It never felt like there was time, you know?”

Daniel nodded and looked back. “It was… a lot,” he said. “The first time it was a whole adventure.” He looked out the window again, difficult as it was to tear himself away from Eliza’s face. “Friends. Magic. Evil spirits. I don’t remember half of it. I was a child.” He sighed at the memories. “After the first time it became… an obligation. It was still… the right thing to do. But now I also had to. I was supposed to be the hero, after all.” Eliza made an affirmative noise. She was clearly listening, and that made it easier to keep talking, even if he wondered what the woman in the driver’s seat thought about the strange conversation they were having. “It was… what I did. What I do.” He looked back at her. “What about you?”

“It was a lot,” Eliza said, looking out over the landscape. “Never great. I was always going to be the Demon Dragon Queen. I was always going to have to take over my father’s kingdom, and it was always a big thing. Whether you,  or someone like you, was going to show up to defeat me. If not you, then a child or a relative.” She went quiet. “I’m glad that’s behind me now. That that’s not… who I am.”

Daniel nodded. He’d noticed it too. He wondered for a moment what sort of person she would want to be when she went back. Would she even want to? If she went back to her own world, she’d be almost ten feet tall, horned, the picture of, well, the Demon Queen. Would she put that behind her, too? “I know,” he said quietly. “I don’t know if I want to be the person I was then anymore, either.” They looked at each other for a moment, and he felt that hook in his very soul again, pulling him away from his own thoughts. His exhaustion was starting to catch up with himself.

“You don’t have to be, you know,” Eliza said softly. Daniel frowned, not sure he understood what she was saying. He did. He was the hero. He had to go back. If it was without her, if he wasn’t good enough for her here, he might be good enough for himself again back there  at least.

“What do you mean?” he asked. He was a little scared of the answer, in that way people get scared of what they’re asking in case they get an answer that hits them at knee-height, wipes them out and slams them face-first into a realization they aren’t ready to realize yet.

“I don’t want to be the Demon Queen,” Eliza said, resolutely. Daniel nodded. She’d said that before, but there was a tone in the air, the absence of words that absolutely promised that there would most definitely be more words in just a moment. “And I… don’t think I’m going to be.”

“I know,” Daniel said. “We talked about this. You’re not that, not anymore. You never were. You’re Eliza.”

“Yes,” Eliza said. “And I will stay that way.” She wasn’t saying what Daniel thought she was saying. She couldn’t be. There was no way for that to be what she meant. He gritted his teeth as he felt the bottom fall out of his heart when she continued. “Daniel,” she said, “I’m not going.” He wanted to respond. He wanted to ask why she wanted to stay behind if he was leaving, if the thought of even being in the same realm had become too much for her, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t, not because he couldn’t find the words, but because darkness closed around him, and he lost consciousness.

Chapter 24

“Not the greatest timing,” Daniel said as he stood in an infinite void. He was annoyed at the fact that he had gotten used to it. The feeling of walking on black glass. The different shades of black in the distance. The dull hum of silence. He was annoyed at a lot of things, but mostly the fact that he needed to talk to Eliza and couldn’t. She’d just told him that she wasn’t even coming with him. He was going to have to go back and he was going to have to do it alone. Sure, he’d wake up soon, but ‘soon’ was not nearly soon enough.

“Hey you,” Sally said, waving. She sat on the bench, idly kicking her legs. She appeared to have small horns now. Not a major change, but it did give her a very distinct definitely-not-human look. “You look glum as heck. Liz was pretty sure the send-magic-thing worked, but we’re getting a little worried since neither of you is showing up. Did something go wrong?” Daniel sat down heavily next to her.

“Yes. No. No, it didn’t. It’s complicated.” The look she gave him was one of those universal ones. He had gotten quite adept at picking them out. His world and Sally’s had a few expressions that meant  different things. One universe’s ‘are you kidding me’ was another’s ‘how dare you’. But the one she gave him was universal, and he was annoyed at how easy he could read ‘you can  leave it at that, but I’ll judge you for the rest of the day if you do.’ He sighed. “Well, for one, it showed up in a different country.”

“Oh?” Sally’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “That’s… unexpected. Liz tried to send it somewhere that is significant to the Demon Queen, to make sure it ended up close to you. Where, uh, where did it end up?”

“Iceland,” Daniel said grumpily.

“That is not very close.”

“No, it’s not.” Daniel rubbed his face in annoyance. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t ask  to be here. He didn’t even want to be in Iceland. He just wanted for all this to be over and for him to finally find some godforsaken peace.

“Weird. Do you know why?” Sally asked, leaning back on the bench.

“Apparently it served as inspiration to the original concept for the game that just happens to share every major beat of our very lives. You know, somewhere useful ,” he said, his voice sharp, and then he groaned. “I apologize. I’m… conflicted, about many things.”

“Well, wanna talk to Aunt Sally about it? I’m a great listener when you can get me to shut up. My grandma -- the good one -- she told me that she used to want to be a therapist and she thinks a lot of that runs in the family, but personally I think it’s just her and me because my parents are absolutely awful  at listening to people…” She gave him a sheepish smile. “Anyway,” she grinned. “Wanna get it off your chest?”

“Well, first things first,” Daniel said as he leaned heavily against the back of the bench too, “I met the people I think  are your parents. Father named Will.”

“Oh,” Sally said. The smile had come and gone. “Shit.” Well, that confirmed it.

“Yes,” Daniel said. “They didn’t recognize me, though. Or you. But I see now why you decided to take your distance from them. They seemed to have some… preconceived notions.” He scratched his chin, the stubble now present both in this in-between place and in reality. Hormones had really done a number on him. “Not the most… open-minded people.”

“Yeah, no. They’re really not. I’m so sorry you had to deal with them,” Sally said.

“It’s fine. They just confirmed to me that… I was never going to really be myself,” he said. He balled his fists and relaxed them again. “It’s only been in here that I look like… me. ”

“What do you mean?” Sally asked. “Like, how your body feels versus how it looks?” Daniel nodded. She gave him one of those weird looks that maybe  translated to both realities. He wasn’t sure, because it seemed to be one of those conspicuously-knowing ones. “Like how your body in here looks like it feels?” More nodding. Where was she going with this? “Well, I mean, you’ve seen me change in here, right? Look, I’ve got little horns!” She poked at them. “Same with you.”

“What? I look like me, here,” he said. His hands were the right size. He was taller. His chest was flat. He felt good  like this.

“Yeah. But you don’t look like you used  to. You look more like… like you’re an older relative of mine, I guess?” She made a face, clearly a bit disgusted. “Or a kid of ours. Ew. No offense.”

“None taken,” Daniel said with a frown. He felt his face. It felt like his face. Hard jaw. Maybe his hairline was a little less receded than it had been. But he was definitely himself. He knew that much. “What does that mean?” Sally shrugged.

“Ask someone who knows what they’re talking about,” Sally said. “Sure as heck ain’t me. Anyway, we’re getting way  off-topic. What did you want to tell me about?” Well, for one thing, he hadn’t actually volunteered to give her any information, but he felt a little compelled to tell her anyway. She was the closest thing he still had to a friend, outside of Eliza. Which, of course, brought his thoughts to her door.

“Eliza...” he said, and then stopped. Good. Great start. Sally gave him a cheeky look and he rubbed his face again. Why did he feel so damn confused  whenever he talked about her to Sally. It was supposed to be simple.  “Eliza isn’t coming with,” he said.

Sally cocked her head. “Oh? That’s… curious.”

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “I don’t know how you or Liz are going to come home, but I’m afraid it won’t be through Eliza. She doesn’t seem to have any intention of coming with m-- of coming to her old world.”

“Daniel,” Sally said with a smile, “Liz and I don’t want to go back.” Daniel looked up at her, slightly bewildered. “Whatever we left behind there, we’re leaving behind willingly. We’re happy here. Both of us. This is home. By the way, did you know that Liz has two girlfriends now?! And that’s only because she doesn’t realize that the freaking Queen  herself has a crush on her too, or it would be more. Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m not getting involved in that. Too much hassle for me, I don’t get the whole attraction thing, but they seem happy and honest, but still, can you believe it?” Finally, she stopped talking to take a breath. Daniel was surprised someone could talk that long without needing to come up for air. “Anyway… we’re fine. We don’t want to come back. ‘Coming home,’ for me, is crossing the hall from where I hang out with the people I’ve met here to go to my bedroom.”

“But… you’ve got a place here. And a family. I mean… we’re supposed  to--”

“Oh, screw that,” Sally interrupted. “I’ve got a place here too, and a family. In fact, I’ve picked  this one. This one doesn’t matter any less, so don’t even try that with me.” She seemed genuinely a little annoyed.

“I apologize,” Daniel said. “I meant no offense.”

“You’re… fine, Daniel. No offense taken.” Sally huffed. “I just don’t care for that ‘supposed to’ stuff. My parents were all about it and it’s not me. I’m happy here, and I’m staying. So is Liz. And, it seems, so is Eliza.” She gave him another Look, the Significant kind. “She has stuff to stay around for too, it seems.”

“But I have to go back,” Daniel said. “I am  the hero, Sally. I can’t not. And Eliza knows that.” He hung his head.

“And she’s not coming back with you,” Sally said. “That is a conundrum.”

“Yes,” Daniel said. “It’s already clear I’m not… I can’t stay. So if she does, that’s a clear enough message.”

“The message here,” Sally said matter-of-factly, “is of course that she doesn’t feel about you the way you clearly feel about her, despite the way you’ve described the way you two make each other feel, about how comfortable you are around each other despite being sworn enemies, and that she has no intention of staying with you.” Daniel frowned. Did she have to be so harsh about it? This felt almost cruel, but he was sure she was going somewhere with this, so he decided to humour her.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

“And that because you’re the hero, you can’t stay behind,” Sally said, “despite the fact that you would actually not mind staying behind if it meant that you might have a future with her. You have to, because you’re the hero.”

“That’s correct,” Daniel said. “I’m not supposed--”

“Daniel,” Sally said, “if you say the word ‘supposed’ one more time, I’m going to scream.” He clamped his mouth shut. “You know, for someone who is supposed to be world-weary and experienced in life, you can be incredibly  dense, you know that?”

“Oy,” he said, sitting upright. “Now listen here--”

“No,” Sally interjected, again. “I’m not going to sit here and listen to you be that way again. I’m not in the mood for it. I swear to god, boys . All of you.” She crossed her arms and looked at him in a way only his mother used to look at him. “Have you told her any  of this?” The accusatory stare pried his mouth open before his brain even had a say in it.

“Well, no, but it’s pretty clear to me th--”

“Yes or no would have been enough, and the answer is a clear ‘no’. But she talked to you about not wanting to go back, right?” Her interjections were frustrating. He felt like he was being dragged by the hand through the conversation like a nine-year-old through a busy market. If he let go he’d be lost, sure, but…

“Yes, she did. We didn’t get to talk more, because this,” he waved his hand around, “happened, but yes, she just mentioned that she was staying behind.”

“So on your way to pick up whatever to send you both back home, Eliza tells you that she wants to stay,” Sally said, “and you took that to mean that she wants you to go, so she can stay behind alone.”

“Well, yes,” he said.

“Oh my god,” Sally said and put her palm to her face. “You are so… What do you  want to do, Daniel?” He opened his mouth. “If your first verb is any conjugation of the verb ‘to suppose’ I will slap the hero right out of you,” she warned, and he closed his mouth again.

“I…” he said, picking his words carefully. “I want to… I don’t know if I’m allowed …” He felt his face redden. The temperature in this place hadn’t changed, but that didn’t stop him feeling like he was suddenly up close to a campfire.

“Screw all of that, Daniel! For the love of mercy , my dude, you are a person! You aren’t  ‘The Hero’, that’s just something people have called you! It’s not, like, something that’s been tattooed on the inside of your soul or something. You are just a guy! ” Sally was getting increasingly exasperated. “You are allowed to want things, man! Does being around her make you happy?” Sally grabbed him by the shoulder. Daniel’s stomach was in knots, his head was full of noise, his ears ringing. It was like there was a storm in his brain and it made his eyes sting.

“I… Yes!”

“Do you want to stay with her?” She was practically shaking him now. He felt tears begin to run down his face.

“Yes!”

“Then, in the name of everything that is even remotely holy, do you want to stay too?!” Sally wasn’t quite  screaming in his face. Not quite.

“Yes!”

“Then wake up, you asshole , and tell her. ”

He did.

Chapter 25

The driver had been a little concerned at first, of course, but once the shock of it had worn off, Eliza had reassured her that this was normal. “He does that,” she said, and tried to prop him up in at least a somewhat comfortable position. She leaned in close and pulled one of his eyes open. “I swear to the seventeen hells, Daniel, if you are faking this to get out of this conversation I will never make you breakfast again.” She suddenly realized that she might never get to do that again anyway, and sat back up, crossing her arms and feeling guilty. Feeling like shit.  She didn’t want to be here without him. But he clearly wanted to get back, and she wasn’t going to force him to stay against his will.

She slowly stewed in her own thoughts. She’d hoped for a reaction after making it clear she didn’t want to go back. Sure, it’s not like she had to go back to being the Demon Queen even if she went to the place she once called home, but she simply didn’t want to be… that. She didn’t even want to be that Eliza anymore. That’s what the document burning a hole in her pocket was for.

And he knew that, now. She’d finally said something. And Daniel knew, and he’d clearly had thoughts on it. And then he’d blacked out and she’d sat there with a mouth full of words and a brain full of thoughts, all of them useless. They bounced around like startled bumblebees trying to make their way out a window, bonking against the glass walls of her mind. Was Daniel going to stay ? Did he really hate it here that much? Did he really want to be away from her?

There was the big one, of course. Would he stay if she asked? Would he be happy here? Would this life be good enough? She didn’t have much to offer. Back in the old world, once he went back, he’d be hailed as, well, a hero. He’d be accepted back with open arms, and probably live a life of luxury. Whatever life he wanted, really. Compared to that, a life with her would be… small. Laughably so.

But maybe? There was something there. They’d grown close, sure. Friendship was the least of it. There was a connection there, terrified of it as she was, and a part of her deeply regretted not saying anything but… he was the hero.  She was… well, no-one. Not anymore. And would that ever be enough for someone like him? Could she ask? What if he said yes because  there was something there and he was miserable here? How long before he resented her? She couldn’t risk it.

After a little over an hour, the lake came into view. Whatever the woman had called it. It went miles in either direction, and the view was… well, it would have been gorgeous and awe-inspiring if she’d been in the mood for it. But it was just water to her, now. It was a destination, a place for something important to be in. Sure, it reminded her of a lake she’d once passed by, and the only real emotion she felt looking at it was a sort of mild guilt that it was being spectacularly wasted on her. It was the sort of location people would travel a long way to see. She shouldn’t just be passing through it.

But she was, and just sighed. She looked at Daniel again. He looked peaceful at least. Well, almost. She reached over and closed his mouth. Now he looked peaceful . She smirked a little, and then her smile faded when she realized she might not see him much more again. The car began to slow down.

“We are here,” the driver said as she parked the car as close to the lake as she could, and then looked back at Daniel. “Would you like to wait for him to wake up?” She looked at her watch, and then at a little booklet in the passenger seat. “I am available for a little bit longer.”

“No, thank you,” Eliza said as she opened the door and walked around the car. She unbuckled Daniel, before carefully starting to lift him out of the car. “If you could come back this evening to pick me up, that would be fantastic though.”

The woman nodded and unloaded their bags. “Pick you both up, yes?” she asked.

“Sure,” Eliza said, and she carefully carried Daniel to the edge of the lake with effort -- either he’d gotten heavier or she’d gotten weaker, and she realized that either way, hormones were to thank for it. With a sigh, she set him down on the grass near a small boulder , then went back to pick up their bags.

“Not a lot here for a camping trip,” the driver said, handing Eliza their luggage.

“We’re not staying long,” Eliza said. “Just something we needed to see.”

“Hmm,” the woman said, and looked at Daniel who was slowly slumping over. “He will be okay?” Eliza looked too and nodded with a sigh. The woman gently patted her on the arm. “You two are cute together,” she said with a smile, got into her car, and drove away, leaving just the two of them on the edge of the lake. There was supposed to be an ancient serpent living in the lake. Maybe it would come out and swallow her whole. She sat down next to Daniel and let the cold air tousle her hair before pulling him a little closer to her. If both of them died of hypothermia here, there would at least be a bit of dramatic irony in it, but she’d still be pretty mad. On the other hand, if he left… would she have the energy to go back? To the apartment? Alone?

She sat there for quite some time. After a while, she retrieved a small thermos and poured out some soup, which was thankfully still warm, and sipped it as she tried to let the gently lapping waves of the lake quiet her mind. The same questions kept drifting past, but the longer they went without answers, the easier they became to ignore. She’d run every scenario through her head a dozen times. She’d cried a few times just trying to think of how she’d say goodbye. There was a moment when she’d broken down completely, thinking of kissing him farewell. That would be too much. She couldn’t do that. Not to herself, and not to him. But time went by, and tears dried.

“You know,” she said into the wind, “I really wish we’d talked more about us.” Daniel couldn’t respond. Daniel was slumped up against her arm and was drooling slightly. Not that it mattered, this was the perfect time for her to say the things she was scared of saying to his face. “Sure, we talked about each other and our situation a lot. But I wish we had discussed our future more, as a possibility.” She looked at her soup. It was orange. She wasn’t in a particularly orange mood, but soup doesn’t care. “I guess… I guess we always took this… going back… took it as an inevitability. What if we hadn’t?”

She took a deep breath and drank her soup. Even if it didn’t care, it was at least hot enough to warm her up. And it did taste pretty good, even if she said so herself. Maybe a little spicy, but she didn’t mind spicy, and Daniel definitely didn’t. Whenever he’d taken his turn at cooking, he’d always gone overboard with all the spices he’d never had a chance to try. His food was incredibly flavourful, and it cleared out her sinuses faster than a high-pressure hose could.

“What if we’d considered staying? Together. You know? I would have liked that.” She nudged him. His head rolled sideways and he almost fell over. Managing to grab him just in time, Eliza pulled him upright again. “I think we live well together,” she continued once she’d propped him up again. “I think we would have… would have…” She began to cry a bit again and she rested her head on his, looking out at the lake. It was blurry through her tears. “I’m going to miss you a lot, Daniel,” she said softly, and choked back a sob.

Then she saw something. Just above the water. Something shimmering, like a mirage. She focused on it, and felt the pull. It was a sensation she hadn’t felt in a long time, not since she’d arrived on this  world. It was the unmistakable pull of magic, the way only someone who has gone so long without it can truly experience it. It was a pool of water on the kitchen floor of the world, and she was a sponge.

Her nostrils flared as she breathed deep and stood up, walking slowly to the water’s edge, and tried to stretch out. It wasn’t something that was even remotely easily done without magic, but she really had been powerful, once, and skilled. Very briefly, she felt the item, touching it with her mind. That was all she’d needed. Slowly, it began to drift across the water towards her. Liz really had done it. The item, she felt, clearly had enough charge to send one or both of them back. Hells, if she was careful with it, she could probably give Daniel a more fitting body, first. That way, the incompetents on the other side wouldn’t have to risk anything. Better she do it. She didn’t trust someone else with his body.

One concern she had was how she was going to access the magic. If it was a staff or a wand, it might take her some effort to attune to it, and without some magic already in her system, that would be hard to do. Magical armor or artifacts like bracelets would work, maybe, but she preferred the magic be in her system. She watched as the object slowly hovered over the water, and slowly but surely its shape became visible.

When she could finally make out what it was, she laughed out loud, for the first time in a while. It was a loud, snorting laugh, and she only just barely managed to stabilize her breathing by the time it was in front of her. Hovering about five feet in the air, bobbing gently up and down by the water’s edge, was a floating hot dog. It shimmered slightly. There was a little tag with a note attached to it, and Eliza flipped it over.

“Sally says you’ll know what to do with this ;)  -  love, Liz.”

That was it. Nothing more. Just a hot dog. Well, that was one way to get magic into her system, she figured. And it wasn’t like she was planning on using the ‘magical artifact’ more than once. All things considered, as a way of transferring power, it was quite clever. She picked the hotdog up and began to eat it . It was awful. Just like it should be. Cheap mustard and overly sweet ketchup mixed together with meat processed from who knew what, and it was perfect.

With every bite, she felt power run through her veins. Tiny bits of it, barely a fraction of the power she’d once held. Once upon a time, she’d have been able to destroy cities on her own and not break a sweat. Compared to that, this was nothing. But she didn’t need much more than nothing. Just a little bit. After the meal, she went back to Daniel, magic buzzing in her limbs for the first time in forever. It felt strangely like one of her limbs falling asleep, or that time she’d bumped her elbow into the table. It was hard to imagine she’d once enjoyed it. She briefly considered just sending him home right away, but she decided against it. She needed to say goodbye. That was important. She sat down next to him again, and waited for him to wake up.

“You know… I picked up this thing…” She fiddled with the sapphire on her neck. “It was pretty cheap. I’m sure it’s fake. But it reminds me of your eyes. Before. When we first met.” She sighed and a tear ran down her face again. “I wanted something to remember you by,” she whispered. With a sniffle, she wiped her face and then looked up at the sky.

“Eliza,” she heard from next to her, and she turned to face him. Now, finally, was the time. The time to talk. The time to say goodbye.

“Yes, Daniel?”

“Is that mustard?”

Tick

Chapter 26

Eliza smirked and stood up. Daniel looked up at her with just a tinge of confusion, messing with the kind of determination he had hoped to take with him out of the in-between void. “Yes,” Eliza said. “You wouldn’t… well, you’d probably believe me. Get up.” She held out her hand, and Daniel took it. He was surprised at how easily she pulled him to his feet. Almost like…

“You’ve got magic,” he said, squinting. She nodded apologetically.

“I do. Are you ready?” She held up a hand and he quickly blocked it with his own.

“Wait.” They stood frozen like that for a moment. “I think we should… we need to talk.” Why was stuff like this so hard? He’d quite literally wrestled with infernal beings, why was even saying  ‘We need to talk’ like trying to pull teeth with a pair of tweezers and oven mitts? He sighed and looked into her eyes. “Please.”

“I don’t think I can do it, Daniel,” Eliza said, her voice soft and fragile, carried across the lake by frozen winds. “I don’t think I can do a goodbye. It hurts. Too much.” He looked at her for a moment. Was she saying what he thought she was saying? Of course, he had hoped that she’d be okay  with him staying, and he’d let himself believe what Sally had said, about him being allowed to want things, but it couldn’t be that simple.

“So… what if we didn’t?” he said. He gently lowered her hand with his own.

“You mean… leave together?” Eliza shook her head and turned half away. “I told you already, Daniel. I’m not going back. I don’t want t--”

“No,” he said resolutely. She turned to look at him again and their eyes met. Really  met again. The way they should have. The connection that had been missing for some time now sparked up. Like a puppy hearing its owner come home, hope, hope for the two of them, perked up its ears and raised its head and considered the possibility that what they wanted was actually possible.

“Oh,” Eliza said. The moment stretched to infinity, and then just a little bit longer, because moments like that are savoured by the universe itself.

“Yes,” Daniel said. Eliza looked at him for a moment and a half-smile painted itself on her face, tears forming in her eyes again.

“No, you--” Eliza shook her head. “You can’t. You hate it here, it’s not… It hurts you and I can’t… You need to go back… Your body isn’t good enough for you…” Daniel shook his head. Sure, it hurt, but the problem wasn’t that , was it? Wasn’t it that it wasn’t good enough for her? And there was more to it than that, too.

“Your body hurts too, Eliza,” he said. Now Eliza was the one to smile, pacing next to the lake. The wind blew her hair in every direction, and she’d clearly given up on trying to go  through the motion of putting strands behind her ear.

“I… It’s been getting better. I can manage, Daniel.” He could read the lie on her face. “I don’t want to compare our pain. That’s not fair to either of us.” She sighed. “I know it hurts. And I’m so, so sorry. But once you’re there, you’ll be happier. I can even…” She raised her hands again, and Daniel saw her hands begin to glow.

“What are you doing, Eliza?” he asked. “Don’t send me back yet!” He was starting to panic and took a few steps forward. Eliza immediately dropped her hands and took a step back, looking surprised.

“Wh-- no, I… Okay, I get why you’d think that,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just… I can give you your body back before I send you home.” She smiled. “Better me than anyone else, right?” Daniel took another step forward. This time she didn’t back away. “Just… don’t come too close when I’m doing this. Magic like this can leak over and there’s not enough in here.”

“Eliza,” he said. She looked at him again. “For the first time since we’ve met, I think you’re the one missing something obvious that I’m not.” Eliza blinked a couple of times.

“What do you mean?” she asked. Daniel smiled, despite himself. She was smarter than him, and a lot better at figuring things out. She was better with people, and better with electric things. She was a powerful mage, and would probably have made a pretty good queen, all things considered. But this, she’d missed, and he hadn’t.

“I don’t want to go,” he said. “You can just… not send me back.” Eliza’s mouth formed a perfect little ‘o’ of understanding, and then she bit her lip, squeezed her eyes shut, tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Daniel, if you’re messing with me right now, I swear…” she said quietly.

“I’m not. I want to stay. Here. With you.”

“Please, tell me that’s the truth. I don’t… If I can…”

“More than anything,” he said. “Sure, this body hurts, but--” Eliza raised her hands again and Daniel stopped.

“ Let’s do that first then,” she said, her smile fragile, her lip trembling. “I want to see you happy, Daniel. I love seeing you smile.”  Her hands started to glow a soft blue and he felt magic pour into him. It was a strange sensation, but it wasn’t the first time. He’d been healed before, and the sensation wasn’t unlike that. Except that there was a distinct feeling of… elongation. He was getting taller, and he could see the gentle light pour off of him. He looked at his hands, already becoming stronger, and he looked at Eliza, smiling at him with her hands wrapped around herself. He made a decision. If he was good enough for her, then this was good enough for him. “Wait, what are you--” Eliza said as he closed the distance between the two of them and took her face in his hands. “It’s going to spill over,” she said softly as the glow spread to her. He smiled.

“I know,” he said.

“There won’t be enough for a full transformation.”

“I know.”

“Or for you to go back.”

“I know.”

“It won’t be enough for y--”

“It will be,” he said, “with you.”

“Daniel?” Eliza said.

He wanted to say it. He wanted to say the words, but they weren’t coming. He felt magic burrow into every pore, every cell, and set his blood on fire, and he could tell the same was happening to Eliza. Her cheekbones sharper, her hair longer and softer, her shoulders a little more slender. Still tall but… softer, somehow. He wanted to speak but he couldn’t. All he could do was hold her.

Well, there was more he could do. Even he knew. He looked her in the eyes, and asked an unspoken question. Through tears and smiles that went on for aeons, the answer was, of course, yes, not because the story demanded it or because it was the right thing to do, but because Eliza, in that moment, wanted nothing more.

So he kissed her. His lips touched hers and nothing else mattered. Nothing else made a difference or mattered or even existed. For a brief and perfect moment, nothing in the universe existed but the two of them. Magic, both the kind that shoots lightning and turns pauldrons into ferrets, and the real  kind, shared between two people who have been dancing around each other for months, poured through them in waves.

She was soft and warm and gentle and he could hear her heart beat  against his chest, her hands clinging to him, never to let go. He was tall, and strong and gentle, and he held Eliza more carefully than anyone had ever held anyone.

The universe held its breath for a perfect, infinite moment, and then exhaled as the two of them finally pulled apart slightly, smiling, laughing with joy and relief, tears streaming down both their faces. Eliza ran her hand through Daniel’s short brown hair, over his stubble and square jaw, and looked at him, the same way she always had. Like she could see him.

“Your eyes,” she said softly and bit her lip.

“What about them?” Daniel asked.

“It’s nothing,” Eliza said. “I’ll tell you later.”

The two of them looked each other in the eyes for a moment, and another moment longer, Eliza’s arms wrapped around Daniel’s neck. For the first time, he was taller than her. Not by much, but it was there. When he moved, he felt like himself again. It wasn’t the same, but it was so, so much better. The changes were, all things considered, not even all that major, but they were enough. Enough for her, and enough for him.

“You look beautiful,” he said. Eliza smiled and cried, so he continued, because truly loving someone does require a slight sadistic streak. “You always have. You’re so, so  beautiful and I… I feel like now that I’ve told you I might never stop telling you, because you’ve always been so gods-damned beautiful to me, Eliza.”

“Shut up, Daniel,” Eliza said with a grin, a grin that finally looked on her face the way it had in her eyes. “You can’t get to me that easily, blight of my life. I’m stronger than that.” She bit her lip and then kissed him again. When she pulled away way, way too fast, he could feel her breath, soft and warm against his lips. “I can’t believe I get to do this,” she whispered.

“Don’t you dare stop,” he said, and it would have been a lot more cool if he’d managed to say it without his voice catching in his throat. There was so much he wanted to say and he couldn’t get the words out of his mouth. All he managed was witty banter, quick responses, or overly dramatic confessions, there to try and fluster her. But there was one thing he wanted to say over and over again. He could say it a million times and he’d never get tired of it. And it was the easiest thing in the world to say. “Eliza.”

“Daniel?”

“That was it.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said with a smirk.

“You’re right,” he confessed and took her hands in his. “There’s more. There’s… so much more. But right now… I just… I want to be here. With you. Eliza. If you’ll have me, gods help me, I would rather have one more moment here with you, than a thousand lifetimes without you.”

“Let’s start with one,” Eliza said. “Together. We can take it from there.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“It does.” They kissed again. And again. And one more time, for good measure, because good things come in the thousands, if you know what’s good for you.

“Eliza.”

“Daniel.”

He felt sillier and sillier. The longer and longer it went unsaid, and when their eyes locked both of them laughed out loud. He could see it in her eyes. The words were there, too, and she, too, wanted to say them. “This is getting ridiculous,” he said with a wide grin.

“It is,” Eliza said, laughing softly. “We are!”

“I just… I can’t go back without telling you, Eliza.” He put his hands on her waist and pulled her in close, kissed her forehead, then her nose, and then, softly, her lips. “I just… need to say it. I need to say it once and then a thousand times more. And then a thousand times for every day I haven’t said it, like the fool I was.”

“Start with once, then,” Eliza whispered into his ear. He could feel her body against his. She was close and she was, in that moment, the only other person in the world. He tried to find the right way to say it. Like this? In an intimate embrace? Or should he…He stepped away. There was no right way, no perfect way, because every way was going to be perfect, as long as she was there, and he was there.

“Eliza,” he said, leaning back so he could, at least, see her face.

“Daniel,” Eliza said with a chuckle.

“I love you.”

It was there, it was said, and not even the winds of Iceland were drifting these words away. The words hung between them, glowing hot, burning them both up inside.

“I love you too, Daniel,” Eliza said, and he wondered if it was as impossible for her to stop smiling as it was for him.

“I love you. Gods, I love you,” Daniel said. “It’s over. It’s out there now, and I’m ruined. It’s all I’ll ever be able to say again. I love you, Eliza, and I’m never going to be able to stop saying it now.”

“Better not,” Eliza said. “I love you.”

“Oh no,” he said quietly. “You’ve caught it too.”

“Oh nooo,” Eliza said as she moved in to kiss him again, because it had been seconds  since the last time, and that kind of transgression she couldn’t let slide. “What will we dooo…” Daniel didn’t even get a chance to say something silly or cheesy. They just kissed, and that was more than enough, and it would never be enough.

In time, they did pull away. For one, the driver would be coming back, and would probably be surprised at how different they looked. That would be an interesting conversation to have, certainly.

“How long?” Daniel asked as they held hands and watched the sun set towards the furthest end of the lake, sitting in the grass by the edge of the water.

“Couple dozen miles?” Eliza said with a grin.

“That’s not what I meant,” Daniel said and nudged her.

“I know. I think… I don’t think there was a moment. Just the way we were together.” She shrugged and kissed his shoulder. “You?”

“The way you got excited about things. Your face would light up,” Daniel said, memories happier with every second now that he knew he’d be making more. “It was the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“You… sap,” Eliza said, but he could see her fight back tears.

“You’re gorgeous,” Daniel retorted.

“Monster.”

“Demon.”

“Not anymore,” Eliza said with a self-satisfied little wiggle.

“There was one thing though,” Daniel said thoughtfully, and he could feel Eliza stiffen a bit next to him, clearly worried. “Something I didn’t want to mention before.”

“What is it, Daniel? What’s wrong?”

“You…” he paused. “I didn’t know how to say this but…” She looked up at him with genuine concern, so he decided to put her out of her misery. “You taste like ketchup and mustard, Eliza.”

With a shriek, Eliza fell backward, hiding her face in her hands. Daniel dropped back next to her and kissed her cheek. Soon, both of them were laughing like happy fools in love, and they stayed like that until the car came to pick them up.

Chapter 27

The car idled gently in the rapidly-dwindling evening light, as Daniel and Eliza almost, but not quite, forgot about their luggage. In their defense, Daniel mused, they had been going through some stuff. If ever they were allowed to be a little bit distracted, now was it. They’d gone from “I can’t go with you” to “I love you and I’m staying with you” in a single day, and that was taking some getting used to. Hells, even wrapping his head around it was a bit much. She loved him! And he loved her back! They were allowed  to be together.

He was shaken out of his reverie by the woman stepping out of the vehicle, and he froze for a moment. Of course they’d considered the fact that they were going to have to explain why he was taller, or significantly broader than he had been before, or why Eliza seemed to have gone up a size in both bust and… hip. But then they’d been distracted by each other again, huddled up close against the cold air, and had forgotten that they’d never actually reached any kind of conclusion.

“Halló,” the woman said with a little wave. “I am back, like you asked.” She looked at Eliza. Then at Daniel, and then back at Eliza. “You look…” She paused and Daniel held his breath. “Happier,” she concluded, then walked around to open the trunk. Eliza let out a relieved chuckle, then dragged her bag to the car, Daniel right behind her. They stowed them in silence, then piled up in the car, as close together as they could within the limits of decency, their fingers interlaced. That was a thing they were just allowed to do now! He could just… hold her hand! Hold her close! Somehow, it was everything, in that moment.

The drive back was as gentle as the ride there had been. After a little bit, the car’s lights turned on and it became too dark to really see anything outside, so Daniel and Eliza just leaned against each other, whispering sweet nothings, until Eliza suddenly stirred.

“I haven’t told you yet,” she said, quietly. He looked at her, no longer up  at her.

“Told me what?” he asked quietly. Her tone of voice made it quite clear there were no nasty surprises waiting in the answer to that question, so he just moved forward with curiosity, and kissed her cheek.

“My name,” she said. “When I got the official documents made, I got to pick my name.” She gave him a little smile. “I didn’t know if… if it was something that would ever be relevant to you and…” She hesitated for a moment, her voice getting small. “I didn’t want you to say goodbye with an unfamiliar name on your lips.”

Daniel took a moment to figure out what to say, and then kissed her. She seemed surprised by the gesture, but leaned into it once it was clear this wasn’t just a ‘go on’ kind of kiss but more one of those ‘Not only do I want you to go on -- in just a moment -- I also want to make it very clear that the next few seconds, at the very least , are going to be very soft’ kind of kisses. When they finally pulled apart, he ended it with a little peck on her nose, like a signature. “Thank you,” he said. “I suppose the thought of leaving without having learned your real name is… sad, for a great number of reasons, but not knowing would have been the kind thing, I think.” She smiled at his reassurance. One more kiss. Just because. “So,” he whispered. “What’s your name?”

“Lisa,” she said. “Even if I don’t go back, I’m not Eliza. Never again. That name is dead to me, and the old demon queen with it.”

“It’s beautiful.” He softly stroked the back of her hand with his thumb while he squeezed her hand. “Did you… eh… pick a last name?” He didn’t want to tell her, not yet, not while all of this was still so fresh, that he quite liked the idea of changing his last name, which was still, for all intents and purposes, Sally’s last name. But that would probably involve taking someone else’s last name.

“You’ll have to promise not to mock me,” she said. Daniel forced the most neutral expression possible onto his face and took a deep breath.

“Promise,” he said. “It’s your name.”

“Okay, so with everything I just said in mind… Drake.”

“Lisa Drake.”

“Yes.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Don’t you dare.” Daniel tried, he really did, to keep a straight face, but he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Lisa bopped him in the arm playfully.

“I’m not mocking you!” he said, and then nudged her with his nose. “I think it fits you. Not quite Demon Queen, certainly. But still a little bit of the dragon in you.” Lisa blushed and nodded. “That fire isn’t going out any time soon,” Daniel said. “It’s a beautiful name, Lisa Drake. I think it suits you.”

“Thank you,” she said and rested her head against his shoulder. Already the outskirts of the city were coming within view. Lisa had done her research. The next flight out was just a few hours away. They wouldn’t have stayed a single night on the island. Sure, it was a beautiful place, but Daniel was happy to let it be a beautiful place with other people. It reminded him too much of a place that was decidedly not home. Home was a flight away, and he’d rather sit on a plane twice in one day than spend another night away from his life with her.

The airport itself came into view not too long after, and the woman parked the car close to the front entrance. They weren’t too far from where they’d rented it, after all, and the whole thing had been paid for. Regardless, he wanted to thank the lady again for coming back for them. He was sure it was something Lisa had negotiated, but the lady had made a pretty boring drive four times, and he liked to think he was still a gentleman.

“You do not have to thank me,” the woman said with a professional smile, “but I appreciate it. I am glad to see she said yes,” she added with a conspiratorial whisper. Daniel blinked a few times.

“Excuse me?”

“The proposal? I thought that was what…” They looked at each other in awkward, stunned silence for a moment. Some moments are so awkward that they can be felt across the universe. Somewhere, a talking cat put its paws over its eyes without knowing why. A psychic vampire in a distant reality groaned with sympathetic embarrassment, and on a terrace in France, a glass of wine turned to vinegar out of sheer sourness. Because sometimes, the universe really does cringe along with you. The woman got back in the car. “I said nothing, I apologize, have a nice trip!” she stammered before she drove off, leaving only Lisa, the bags, and a laughing Daniel in her wake.

“What was that about?” Lisa asked. Daniel was still chuckling when they started to make their way to the front desk.

“A little misunderstanding about what we were doing at the lake,” he said, still vividly remembering the look of shock on the lady’s face when she’d realized her mistake. “She thought we…” He wanted to say it but, well, that would  make it a bit more real, and now that he realized he was staying here there was suddenly a possibility… or a hope… “Well… she had the wrong idea, let’s leave it at that.”

“Oh, goodness ,” Lisa said, getting the entirely wrong idea and clearly seeming to be overcome by certain… images. And apparently, she didn’t mind, if her smile was anything to go by. Daniel couldn’t help but blush a bit in embarrassment as they went through check-in. Where before, their move through the airport had been painfully quiet, now it was deliberate, and they constantly pointed out small things to each other. Lisa remarked on a scarf she liked the colour of. There was a boutique that sold, apparently, fermented shark, which neither was eager to try, and one that had chocolates, which both were eager to get at, especially if they were going to be on a plane for a while.

While Lisa bought them some snacks, Daniel made a quick show of having to run to the bathroom and, on his way back, swung by the store that had the scarf on display . He saw her waiting for him at the entrance to their gate. Considering how lucky he was to be hers, that she had wanted him in her life, it was almost unbelievable that he was still, somehow, lucky enough that she wasn’t looking his way. He gingerly walked over to her and decided against surprising her from behind. Nobody, he reasoned, would respond well to being accosted by a potential stranger in a place this busy, so he coughed.

Lisa turned around to face him and he was going to say things. He was certain  he was going to say things. He’d had words and thoughts only seconds ago, and then she’d turned around and smiled and all of them had sort of dribbled out his ear and taken a stroll through the airport. He just stared at her, dumbstruck at how beautiful she was, how the force of her personality shone in her eyes. And then all of it just slammed into him. How amazing she really was. How clever. How kind. How sweet. How funny. How… he took her face in his hands and kissed her again, because every other important function had momentarily shut down in protest.

“What was that for?” she finally asked when he pulled away.

“For you,” was all he managed, and they both laughed at the silliness and the cheesiness of it. Then he remembered why he’d even walked up to her in a way that she couldn’t see him holding a package, and fished out the light blue scarf. Her eyes lit up when she saw it, and she bit her lip.

“Daniel…” she sighed and took it, wrapping it around her neck. “You’re a sap.” There were tears in the corners of her eyes she was pretending weren’t there, so he decided that the best course of action was for him to do the same. He nodded.

“Yes,” was the best his language center could do before someone called their flight number over the speaker system. They hurried to the gate and it wasn’t long before they were ushered out onto the tarmac, a departure from how they’d boarded the plane through a covered walkway last time.

When they finally got to their seats and sat down, both of them were sufficiently frazzled, as air travel is frazzling and discombobulating no matter what universe you’re from. Lisa sat by the windowside again. She’d offered it to Daniel this time, but he’d declined. It had clearly helped her be a bit more comfortable with the flying last time, and she had clearly been more perturbed than he had. Besides, all he really wanted to look at was her, and if she was on that side of him, he could pretend to look out the window while he fell for her, over and over again, once for each time he’d denied himself the pleasure before.

Well, that had been the idea. Lisa didn’t look out the window once. They spent the entire flight talking, about nothing and everything, while they ate  overpriced -- but still quite good -- chocolates. They talked about food and traveling, seeing different places together. About whether or not they would want to stay living in their little apartments. About Lisa’s career and about how Jenny and Pat and Hayden would respond to their changed appearances and that they might have to tell them something . They laughed.

He wondered if he was good enough for this, for a moment, and then he saw the smile in her eyes and came to realize that he was him and she was her, and of course that was enough.

Chapter 28

Much like hospitals, airports at night are liminal spaces, spaces where reality is just a little bit thin. When one thinks of reality being thin, we think of snarling, eldritch monstrosities on the other side, trying to make their way through and nipping at our ankles. We think of places where we can reach the nth dimension and pull out a hypercube in which to store our infinitely recursive fresh socks.

But the thing on the other side of the walls of reality within a liminal space is, of course, yourself. It is a space that is transitory, where one moves through alone, and the only thing that feels really real is oneself. These are things that will be familiar to those who have worked a night shift and walked home at dawn, right  before the world wakes up, the city quiet and asleep and you, the only one in it. It is familiar to people who have spent a night in the hospital, when the lights are off and there’s a distant machine going ‘ beep ’.

To people who traverse these spaces, in fact, the only  thing in it that feels real is themselves. Like walking through a washed-out Polaroid, or a flashback in an eighties music video, the world is a little out of focus, and it puts you in focus, your tired brain taking stock, taking note, and taking its sweet time to come up with anything useful to say.

This feeling was familiar to Daniel and Lisa, who were moving across the off-white floors of the airport that were tiled several decades ago by someone with more flooring material than taste. The airport was mostly empty, because incoming traffic from Iceland was light at the best of times, and ‘the middle of the night’ wasn’t exactly rush hour. Lisa leaned against Daniel as they waited by a conveyor belt for their luggage, the gentle hum the only sound in the room.

They walked to the front entrance, little wheels on the linoleum floors like background music playing them out. All of it contributed to the distinct sense of place that felt like no place at all. Following signs to an exit leading to more signs and more exits, because it’s not quite a liminal space if it isn’t a little bit possible to get a little lost in infinite hallways that are just a little different each time, maybe with a poster or two that advertise a place that didn’t even really exist half a century ago when they were drafted. Or maybe just a picture of some trees, because trees are relaxing.

And then they stood outside, both of them tired, practically swaying on their feet, and happy to be back. They knew the way home and, hand in hand, they began to walk down the street as, in the distance, the sun began to come up.

As out-of-focus as the city had  been, in the dim light of almost-dawn, so it now slipped into reality again. Daniel couldn’t tell where one state of existence ended and another began. As they walked down the street, first a few, then more cars passed them by. The sun slowly crept down the side of buildings and finally shone a light in his eyes. He stopped for a moment, basking a little in the warmth on his skin, and Lisa stopped next to him, her own eyes closed.

The moment didn’t last forever, and nothing particularly important happened in it, but it was a moment they had shared and, Daniel realized, he wanted to share a lifetime of them with her. He turned to her and kissed her, before she could open her eyes, and she melted into it, her soft lips against his, glorious in the light of the morning.

Then they continued walking, both with a tired smile on their faces, occasionally looking over at each other and then bashfully away like two teenagers on their first date, until they found their building and realized that it was sort of difficult to romantically hold hands on their way up several flights of stairs while also lugging two suitcases, and despite everything, neither of them was particularly keen on taking the elevator.

Finally, the door to their apartment opened, and just a little moment later, closed again. Movement stopped. Noise stopped. They stood there, in what Daniel realized was their home. Not a place where they were staying, waiting for news from their old world. Not Sally’s apartment. Not just a shelter from the elements.

“Home,” Lisa said.

“Home,” Daniel agreed, squeezing her hand, then took a step forward towards the couches. “Do you want to--” he started and then realized how silly it was for him to even suggest that. Sure, he hadn’t wanted to make any assumptions, even as they’d confessed to each other, but still… something probably would change.

“Daniel,” Lisa said with a quiet, gentle smile. “ Of course  I’m taking the bedroom.” She strode right past him to the bedroom, leaving him standing there a little forlorn. Had he misinterpreted or misunderstood? Or was that normal? He wanted to give her the space she needed and deserved, of course, and he was deeply aware of the fact that their closeness didn’t entitle him to any kind of--

His thoughts were interrupted by an exasperated-looking Lisa who walked back into the room, grabbed him by the hand, dragged him to bed without another word, and he made a little mental note to try to stop overthinking things. He failed immediately the moment he stepped into the room, and the two of them stood opposite each other on either side of the bed. Was he supposed to just… crawl in?

Despite her previously authoritative attitude, Lisa was now also awkwardly dawdling on the other side of the room. The awkwardness hung in the air like an unwelcome guest or a balloon with a slightly off-colour joke on it, finally popped by Lisa laughing and Daniel joining her. He walked around the bed and put his hands on her hips, before pulling her in for a kiss, both of them still smiling.

“Do we just…?” Daniel asked. It’s not that this was the first time he’d been with someone, but this felt… significant, somehow, and because of that, he felt awkward and silly and embarrassed. He felt, well, young.

“I don’t know!” Lisa giggled and kissed him again. “Oh, to the hells with this,” she said, still grinning widely, and pulled her shirt over her head. Like a spell being broken. Daniel did the same, and then they stood there again, two awkward fools, but without shirts this time. “Do you want to…” she started and Daniel wrapped his arms around her. He didn’t know if she was cold or he was burning up. Not that it mattered. He pulled her in close and held her against him.

Finally, for the first time in forever, the words came, quick and easy and exactly the right ones. “I would love nothing more, Lisa. We have also been awake for an ungodly amount of time and what I want, more than anything, is to fall asleep in your arms, and wake up in your arms, every day until the world comes to an end, and then we’ll find another one and do it all over again.” He punctuated every sentence with a small kiss, on her nose, her forehead, her cheeks, her lips.

“Aa,” Lisa said and held him tighter. Whether the tears in her eyes were actually there or just a figment of his imagination didn’t really matter. The emotions in them were real. “I want nothing more.” She sat down on the bed and then scooted backwards, crawling under the covers, Daniel joining her. It took them a moment, arms and legs entangling as they tried to figure out for the first time how they fit together. Finally, the two of them found a comfortable position and settled, foreheads pressed together, and the whole world fell away.

There were just the covers, and each other. Every single one of Daniel’s senses was primed to better be here and now, with her. To hear her, see her, smell her and, one sleepy-but-passionate kiss later, taste her.

“This is real, isn’t it?” he asked. Lisa nodded, smiling, her eyes already drifting shut.

“It is,” she said. “If you want it to be.” She paused for a moment and then nudged his nose with hers. “I know I certainly do.” Daniel gave a little boop back.

“I want this,” he said. “I want to wake up with you, tomorrow and every day after.”

“Let’s,” Lisa said, and turned around. For a moment, Daniel worried he’d done something wrong or, god forbid, it had been his breath, but then he felt her back press against him and he wrapped his arms around her. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, but in that moment, she felt small, so small that all he could do was hold her, keep her close and safe and not under any circumstances let go. Well, he could certainly do that.

“I love you, Lisa Drake,” he whispered in her ear, and she audibly purred. He wanted to say more, but he was dragged by the scruff of his neck into unconsciousness, and darkness slipped over him like a curtain being drawn closed.

It felt like only moments later when he opened his eyes again, having no idea of what time it was. The first and only  thing he was aware of, and wanted to be aware of, was Lisa’s warm shape, nestled against him, like they were made to be like this. Her form fit his, and was stirring slightly. That had probably been what woke him up. He made a little humming sound -- words, let alone his voice, not yet at full operational capacity -- and nuzzled the crook of her neck.

“Good morning,” Lisa mumbled. She shuffled a little bit. “What time is it?”

“I have no idea,” Daniel said.

“Good.” They stayed like this, for some time longer. Time didn’t really have any meaning. Not anymore. Not like this, when everything was, for a moment, perfect. Unbeknownst to them, reality itself, too, enjoys a bit of romance now and then, and will sometimes go to great lengths to ensure that a perfect moment lasts just a little bit longer. Reality, like all the best -- if sometimes unreliable -- narrators, is a bit of a sap, after all.

They kissed. They held each other. They made love, because of course they did, and it was every bit as awkward and fumbling and perfect as they had hoped it would be, a mess of limbs and love and shy laughter. That was perfect, as well, and time slipped past quietly, having taken off its shoes so as not to disturb the two opposites that had finally  found each other.

It would all have lasted them for days, because everyone who’s ever been in love would sustain themselves with it if they could, if they didn’t inhabit flawed bodies that did, eventually, have to get up and eat. That’s a hurdle reality had yet to overcome.

They made breakfast together, Lisa having immediately stolen the shirt Daniel had worn before, the one that had changed to fit him when she’d helped him transform, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He kept trying to focus on making… well, anything (he eventually settled for coffee), but kept getting distracted by having to scuttle over to her kiss the back of her neck, to which she’d invariably respond by purring gently and nestling in his arms.

It was somewhere in the morning. They’d slept and loved away a day and a night, and that was perfect, too. They curled up on the couch together, refusing to be apart for more than a few seconds at a time, hips and shoulders touching as they sat down together. As talkative they’d been on the way home, that quiet they were now, simply enjoying each other’s presence in a way they’d never really allowed themselves to before. Both of them nearly tossed the phone out the window when the infernal object rang, although their fury abated a little bit when Lisa picked up and it turned out to be Jenny who wanted to check up on them, to see if they were doing alright after the discomfort that had been the dinner.

“We’re fine, Jenny,” Lisa said, making eye contact with Daniel. “Thank you for asking.”

“Tell them,” he whispered, practically giddy. He hadn’t been this excited to share something for as long as he could remember. Lisa bit her lip and nodded.

“Daniel and I have some news,” she said, and even from where he was sitting he could hear Jenny’s triumphant yawp on the other side of the line. He could even hear the loudly exclaimed ‘Finally!’ Everything after that was warbled  noise, but Jenny seemed incredibly excited. Lisa started to explain some things, but was seemingly cut off. After a while, she said her goodbyes and hung up.

“So?” Daniel asked. “How did she take it?”

“Get dressed,” Lisa said. “We have another dinner to go to.”

“Oh!”

“Come on,” Lisa said. “I have to take a shower, and I need someone to wash my hair.” Daniel took her hand, kissed it, and let her drag him there. He wasn’t interested in pointing out that she’d managed to wash her hair just fine without him before. He had a dinner  to get ready for, and he wanted to make a good impression on Lisa, after all.

Chapter 29

“Nervous?” Lisa had her arm through his. Clearly he was a little uncomfortable. They’d had to make a quick run to pick up some clothes, because he didn’t exactly fit in most of Sally’s anymore, if by shoulder width alone, and she’d definitely wanted something a little more form-fitting.

“For quite a few reasons, yes,” Daniel said, chuckling slightly, and tugging a little at his tie. It had taken seventeen rewatches of a specific video on the computer to figure out how to properly tie one, but after seeing Hayden’s outfit last time, Daniel had been insistent. And he did look fantastic wearing it, Lisa thought to herself. Not that she was any less pleasant to look at. Even she had to admit it. The woman in the mirror was, by all accounts, stunning. The changes had been so minimal, too. But it had really been the little things, and that woman on the other side of the silver glass was her now. And she’d splurged on a new dress, too. One with a side split, that went well with her new knee-high boots.

She’d been okay with her height. She remembered, in what felt like and was, for all intents and purposes, a past life, what it had been like to be close to ten feet tall, after all. But it had definitely not helped Daniel feel any better when she towered over him. That wasn’t a problem anymore, and these new boots definitely made her feel… powerful again. Not in the scary way she had once been but… well, still a little  bit scary, but she didn’t mind being a little intimidating.

“It’ll be fine, love,” she said as they approached Jenny and Hayden’s front door. “You look…” She wanted to say something eloquent, something that would properly convey how she felt whenever she cast a glance at him. “Mmmf,” she concluded, biting her lip. Daniel’s confidence was clearly boosted, evidenced by a proud grin.

“I could say the same about you.” He nudged her. “It… It’s good to see you like this.” She knew what he meant. They’d been so caught up in everything that went into trying to build up a life in a new world, there hadn’t really been a lot of time for things like this before. Once upon a time she’d had a wardrobe , and for quite some time, she hadn’t really considered expanding the one here. They hadn’t planned on staying at first, after all. Now they could peacock a bit, though. On special occasions. “But all that aside… We still have to tell them about… everything.”

“We’ll manage,” Lisa said, raising her head high. “Together.”

“Together,” Daniel agreed. They walked up to the front door and pressed the little button, no less nervous this time than they were the first time than they had been there, although for significantly different reasons.

After a moment, Hayden opened the door, and he went through a wide gamut of facial expressions, like an indecisive slot machine. “Oh, you’re he-- I’m sorry, I thought it was someone e-- Hold on--”

“Yeah,” Lisa said to Daniel, “this is going to be… interesting.” Daniel chuckled.

“Daniel? Eliza? But… it can’t be… but…” Hayden looked genuinely dumbstruck, and Lisa couldn’t exactly fault him for that. She gave him an apologetic little smile.

“May we come in? I think we’d  much rather explain inside.” That, and her wonderful new boots weren’t made for walking extended distances. She should have probably thought of that before walking them in on a dinner date.

“Uh…” Hayden said. “Yes, sure, yes, of course,” he said, the conventions of politeness giving him something to hold on to when he was clearly completely at a loss. Daniel and Lisa walked past him into the cozy living room, and almost bumped into Jenny, who was holding a glass of something with bubbles. She froze when she saw the two of them, first to greet them and then out of sheer shock. She dropped the glass. When Daniel’s arm shot out and he caught it in mid-air, barely spilling, she could have kissed him for being that smooth. Sure, it would add to the surreal nature of the evening, but she also knew that nobody liked cleaning up glass. Besides, it might paint them in a good light. And seeing Jenny blush when Daniel handed her the glass back was delicious all on it’s own.

“D-Daniel?” she asked. He grinned and nodded. Jenny looked at Lisa. “ Eliza? ” Lisa flashed her what she hoped was a dazzling, confident smile, although she made a mental note to address the name part first. Jenny stepped aside as Daniel and Lisa turned around, standing next to each other. Hayden joined Jenny in the gawping.

“So… you two probably have questions,” Lisa said. Jenny plopped down on the sofa, clearly approaching something like shock.

“You can say that again,” Hayden said, close behind her in ability to manage the revelation, and in a more literal sense. “What’s going… What are.. What… What?” Lisa decided not to push him on the fact that she knew him to be a little bit more eloquent than that. He did have a pretty good excuse.

“So the most important thing out of the way first,” Lisa said. She entwined her fingers with Daniel’s, who held up the hand proudly. How could she not kiss him on the cheek? She didn’t even care that that probably wasn’t the most important thing to Jenny and Hayden, who had other questions. It was the most important part to her.  “Your question from last time: a little more than a day.”

“What.” Jenny blinked.

“How long we have been dating. A little over a day.” Lisa said happily.

There is a part of human nature that is often overlooked. Humans can, historically, adapt to almost everything. That is why, even though the arc of evolution bends towards crab, it always makes a pit stop at two-legged bipeds that like domesticating animals for no other reason than to pet them (safety and reliable food sources are, contrary to what most think, just a byproduct).

Humans can adapt to almost anything, in any environment. There is a joke among some other races throughout the universe that humans were put on earth as a way to stunt their development. If they’d been put on a planet not  filled with things that tried to kill them, they would have, the joke states, conquered the galaxy centuries ago. This isn’t a very funny joke to anyone familiar with 15th Century Earth history, but most aliens aren’t.

It is said that a human being can break a limb and keep going, walking on while the limb heals. They can survive freezing temperatures without the use of ExtraVehicular Activity suits or devices, and just sort of sweat off excess heat, requiring only water for maintenance. Humans can (and will) eat anything, and what they can’t eat, they will either use as a spice on food or, in a pinch, smoke it.

Humans are either the cockroaches or the terminators of the galaxy. Your perspective depends entirely on whether or not you’re one of the many things humanity has tried to eat or smoke.

All of this said to draw attention to the fact that Jenny’s look of complete shock melted. Sure, someone she had grown to care about and someone she had only recently started to get acquainted with had suddenly gained bodies that were a lot more affirming. But they were also happily dating now, and that was important too. Shock, getting stale, gave way to excitement.

“I’m so happy for you two!” she said, practically bouncing. She turned to Hayden. “See, I told you him and Eliza fit perfectly together.” Hayden just nodded, taking a bit longer to adjust to the sudden changes.

“That was the next thing,” Lisa said. “I don’t feel like Eliza really reflects who I am anymore. My name was legally changed a few days ago, and I would like to go by Lisa now. I know it’s not a big change, but it makes a big difference to me.” Strangely enough, of all the things they had to go through tonight, this was the part she’d been sort of nervous about. Not that she really had a feeling like Hayden and Jenny wouldn’t accept her choice here, but it was her more personal choice, and saying it out loud carried with it a sense of vulnerability.

“Lisa,” Hayden mumbled. “Okay. I can do that.” He stood up and walked towards them, almost like someone approaching a wild animal. He seemed almost scared, squinting suspiciously.

“We won’t bite, Hayden,” Daniel said, raising his eyebrows as Hayden circled him, like a cat who has been made aware of a new stuffed animal in the middle of the living room.

“Spoilsport,” Hayden said quietly, almost mechanically, and despite the fact that it was clearly almost a reflex, Lisa noticed it still had an effect on Daniel, making him blush. “You got so tall ,” Hayden whispered. “How are you so tall  now?”

“I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for this,” Jenny said, sipping her drink.

“There isn’t,” Lisa said with a wolfish grin, and now it was Jenny’s turn to go red.

“There’s no surgeon that can do this in just a few days,” Hayden said, putting his hand on Daniel’s arm as if to feel he was really there, not really caring about personal space. “Let alone the height… the shoulders… With no recovery time…”

“She’s right, you know,” Daniel told him, locking eyes with Hayden, who froze in place, swallowed, and took a step back. “There isn’t any explanation for this that’s going to come easy to either of you.”

“You should probably sit down again,” Lisa said, and then, striding over to one of the other sofas, “Mind if I do the same?” Jenny shook her head and extended an arm as an invitation. Daniel and Lisa both sat down, and Lisa realized how they probably looked, borderline aristocratic, almost a foot taller than either Jenny and Hayden, dressed to the nines. “So I’m going to try to answer most of your questions as best as I can. Well, we will.”

“So… I mean… how? ” Hayden asked, his eyes now on Lisa and it was hard not to feel a little exposed. Hayden had an intense stare.

“Magic,” Daniel said and leaned back a bit. Lisa smirked. It wasn’t nearly enough of an answer, and both of them knew it, but it was still a fun way to put it. She noticed Jenny and Hayden just staring, waiting for them to continue.

“Magic,” Lisa confirmed. “Magic is, indeed, real.” Jenny and Hayden looked at her like she’d just told them magic was real. Fair enough. “There isn’t much of it in this world, but we’ve found enough of it to make… some changes.”

“Wait… but… that… what? ”

“Not everyone would be able to use it,” Daniel clarified. “I doubt there are any magic users in this world beyond Lisa. I haven’t seen any if there are.”

“And I would have felt any magic reserves if there were any. Sadly, your world is a bit sparse when it comes to things like this.” Lisa looked around. “Though you’ve made do with electricity and technology, I’ll tell you that.”

“You… You’re saying you’re not from this world?” Jenny said with a frown. Lisa wasn’t surprised. This was always going to be the part that the two would have the most trouble with. That’s why she’d done a bit of research, about the world and how the universe worked as understood by the people of Earth, with Daniel’s studious help.

“It’s a long story,” Daniel said, as Hayden got up. “Are you… leaving?”

“If it is a long story, I’m going to need a drink,” Hayden said. “If I didn’t see the two of you sitting there all…”

“Different?”

“Beautiful,” Jenny said with a wide smile, biting her lip. Interesting.

“That,” Hayden said, pointing at Jenny. “If you two weren’t sitting here looking like a couple of fairytale monarchs, I wouldn’t believe a word of what you’re saying.”

A moment later, he came back in with a few glasses, and handed one to Daniel and Lisa each. Lisa raised her glass, trying to figure out where to start. She wanted to make sure to frame their tale as best she could, and she had been getting more experienced as a storyteller.

“It’s easy,” Lisa said, looking at the two through her flute glass, “or even tempting, to think of the universe as obeying the laws of mathematics.”

Tock

Chapter 30: Epilogue

The rays of summer sun were relentless, but ultimately futile in their effort to make Daniel feel even remotely uncomfortable. He was on his knees in the garden, carefully and methodically weeding between the rows of vegetables. As his hands caked with fresh soil and the smell of dirt and healthy plants filled his senses, he realized, not for the first time, that his parents would probably be quite happy with where he’d ended up.

Certainly, once upon a time, lifetimes ago, they had been proud of his rise to hero-dom, but he knew that, in the years before they’d passed away, that pride had long faded and given way to worry. To see him, calmly tending his own vegetable garden, would have made them content. He’d lived a long and arduous life, but in the end, he felt, he’d ended up with something most people could only dream of. Whether or not he deserved it was something he was more than happy to leave up to others. He was just here to enjoy it.

And enjoy it he did. He looked over his shoulder at the house. It was big, all things considered. That isn’t to say it was opulent or had many bells and whistles. It was the kind of house that most people couldn’t afford in the economic climate, which was why they’d bought it with four people. There was more than enough room for a larger-than-average family, and many hands, some people say, make light work. The kitchen could use a good scrubbing, but right now was time for garden work. Not that there was much more to do, but Daniel enjoyed the simple act of keeping things healthy.

Again he looked back at the house, and considered how he’d even gotten here and, just as importantly, what it meant. He’d died to get here, and he didn’t even consider the possibility that, in this particular instance, it might not have been worth it. Once upon a time there had been a witch, close to where he’d grown up. She had told him that, after he died, he could go where the woman believed she would go when she died. Home, whatever that means. He tried to get some of the dirt off on his jeans and, finding that inadequate, picked his shirt off the floor and wiped his hands on it as he got up.

He still worked at a gym, if not the old one in the middle of town. It had been sold, Pat leaving to do some soul-searching and Jenny now running a separate, smaller place nearby. It was remarkable how much easier it was for him to build muscle now, and he tried to stay in shape. Force of habit from a previous life. From before he died.

The house really was very pretty, he thought, and it really was home. Wisteria climbed up the back wall, blues and purples painting the building’s face in the colours of summer. He smirked as he considered the witches words. He had died. He had come home. A silly thought, but one that made him happy nonetheless. Then something remarkable happened. He felt something tugging at him, something he hadn’t felt in years, and where once it would have passed with little notice, it was now completely unwelcome. Like a hook attached to his very soul, something in his chest was tugged at, something decidedly un-natural. While it would have been almost impossible to describe to someone who hadn’t grown up in a world with magic in it, to Daniel it felt like a sound. And the sound was

Tick

He quickly rushed inside as he put his dirt-covered shirt  back on, his eyes taking a moment to adjust from the yellows and golds of the outside sun to the cool interior of the building. The kitchen and living room, one large open space, was a little messy, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood for caring.

“Lisa,” he called out, not wanting to raise his voice just yet. Maybe he’d gotten it wrong. Maybe it was something else, something medical, but he needed to be sure. They’d been here for years now, and he didn’t want to risk losing any or all of it. Of course he wasn’t in any place to hope it was some kind of heart-defect, but for magic to be used on him now felt even worse, somehow. There was no response. He clenched and relaxed his fists a few times. The house was pretty big, and there was always the possibility she hadn’t heard him.

“Lisa!” he yelled out again, and then went for the stairs. Maybe she was working. After having signed a contract to work for a game development firm, she’d spent a lot more time writing and he knew how much she got lost in her work. Rounding the corner to the hall, he almost slammed into her, and without wasting a word, wrapped his arms around her.

“Daniel,” she whispered. “For a second I thought I lost…”

“Me too,” he said quietly, and then pulled away. “You felt it too.” Lisa nodded. The years had been kind to her. She still took the hormones, and even after the literal magic, the changes had still been, well, magical. Her hair now ran down shoulders in waves, framing her face like a lion’s mane, and her new glasses made her intense gaze even more noticeable.

“I did,” she said. “Magic.”

“What does that mean?” Daniel asked, stepping back into the living room. “Do you think we’re getting pulled back?” He started to pace.

“Gods,” Lisa murmured quietly. “I hope not. I couldn’t tell what kind was being done, but I do not  want to leave.”

“Leaving where?” a little voice asked. Daniel closed his eyes and sighed, clenching his jaw, reminding him of the many things someone can lose once they start to appreciate what they’ve got. He knelt down and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders.

“Listen, Samuel,” he said, softly, “Lisa and I think something is going on.” He looked up at her. “We don’t know what yet, but we’re not going anywhere, okay?” The boy nodded. He wasn’t much older than six , and didn’t understand a lot of what grownups did -- it often seemed to involve a lot of numbers, suitcases and something called in-sewer-ants -- but he wasn’t stupid. The little tike wrapped his arms around Daniel, who lifted him up effortlessly. Daniel could already hear the soft sniffling

“I don’t want you to go,” Samuel said, and Daniel nodded.

“Good, because we’re not going anywhere. Where’s your sister?” Even through forming tears, the boy managed to shrug indifferently. Daniel gave him A Look, which in this case was most easily translated to ‘ You probably have an idea and I’m going to need you to translate that idea into words ’, in a way that only those with young children can easily do.

“I think she’s with Jemma,” Samuel said. A small verbal tic had turned a mispronunciation into a nickname. Jenny would be in the adjacent building, either doing paperwork or cleaning up her new gym, and Samuel’s sister would be more than eager to help out, wanting to be as much like her mom as possible.

“Can you go get them for me? Both of them?” Samuel nodded and Daniel put him down. “Hayden too, if you bump into him, but don’t go looking.” He knelt down again to get eye-level with the boy. “This is important, and I’ll want you there too, okay? Family meeting, can’t miss one of our most important members.”

Samuel nodded resolutely, and then sprinted off with all the enthusiasm and flailing limbs that only the resilience of childhood brings. At his age, Samuel didn’t so much bump into things, rather, he bounced off of them almost without noticing. Daniel and Lisa watched him run off and then looked at each other.

“Any thoughts?” Daniel asked. Lisa chewed her lip as she thought.

“It’s… I don’t want to speculate,” she said. “If it’s what I think it is, I’m scared, but I also don’t want to cause unnecessary panic. But even then, there’s so much of it that’s unfamiliar. I didn’t even have the time to get a direction.”

“Hrm,” Daniel said. “Worst case and best case?”

“Worst case,” Lisa said, “something or someone is going to try to force us back.”

“If they try that,” Daniel said grimly, “they’ve got another thing coming.”

“Agreed,” Lisa said, her mouth a thin line, her face a mask of determination. “The other possibility, of course,” she said, “is that someone else came here.”

“Just like that?” Daniel asked. “I know it wasn’t going to be that difficult to make us go back, but the other way around, can that even be done?” Lisa nodded.

“It would require an extraordinary amount of power, but knowing this world was right here, adjacent to our old one?” She leaned against the kitchen counter. “I could’ve done it.”

“Anyone else we know?” Daniel asked. “I can’t imagine knowing any mages who could just--”

“What’s wrong?” Hayden asked as he entered the room with a girl on his arm. Jenny and Samuel were right behind him. The family was all here. Daniel looked at them and realized how he must’ve looked, so he washed his hands as he let Lisa explain things.

“Magic,” Lisa said. “Big magic, and I don’t think it was too far.”

“Magic?” the little girl asked, her eyes big. She was too young for this talk still. The decision had been made to wait until the kids were at least in high school before they’d tell them about Daniel and Lisa’s origins, but it looked like the cat was out of the bag early.

“Yes, Tiff,” Hayden said. “Magic.” The girl’s eyes grew even wider. Sure, one parent saying it was strange, but two? Now that there was confirmation, the possibilities were endless. Jenny stepped forward to Lisa, her arms crossed with worry.

“What does this mean?” she asked. “You’re not…”

“No,” Daniel said resolutely, turning a white towel into a brown one  as he dried his hands. “We’re not. Not by choice, not if we can help it, and not without a fight.”

“But we do need to talk about it just in case,” Lisa said and guided everyone to the seating area of the living room. It was a wide open space, one wall lined with bookcases and another with windows. In the middle of it were three sofas facing each other and away from a wall-mounted projector. Hayden and Jenny sat the kids down, Samuel and Tiffany both clearly anxious just because the grown-ups were being so… grown-up. “Listen”, Lisa said. “Daniel and I are not… from here,” she started, when the doorbell rang. Daniel and her made eye contact.

“I’ll get it,” he said, not believing in coincidences. He made his way to the door as Lisa explained in very basic terms who and what she and Daniel were, leaving out words like “Demon” and “Evil”, a talk to be had when they were older. He heard several childlike gasps of wonder as he steeled himself to open the door. When he turned the handle and faced what was on the other side, he nearly lost his cool. His skin was on fire, telling him to fight or flee, to do something , because what was in front of him was, well… it was wrong.

“Daniel,” Sally said. “It’s really cool to finally see you in person.” Daniel wanted to respond, say something snarky or witty or slam the door shut, but he couldn’t. Not because Sally being at his front door was a shock -- it was -- but because of what was behind her.

“What,” Daniel asked, “are you doing here? What’s going on? Is that who I think it is? ”

He pointed an accusatory finger. A woman, her skin a deep purple, nine, maybe ten foot tall, stood on the front porch, barely concealed by a giant cloak that couldn’t even obscure the horns sticking out of it. She waved with inappropriate enthusiasm.

“Hi,” Liz said. “The world’s ending and we need your help. Can we come in?”

Tock