We both heard noise below, and turned to look down over the edge. “Were you right?” Serru asked, raising her voice enough to be heard.
“I was,” Terenei said, combing his long hair back out of his face. “Whew. That wind is getting fierce, and it’s starting to rain. At full size, there’s a hose tucked behind a little door outside, I ran it out and put the end in the stream and anchored it with a couple of rocks on either side. We should have running water.”
Seriously?
I spun away and turned on the little sink in the workroom.
After a pause and some gurgling noises, water appeared.
“It looks like we do,” Serru called down.
“Kitchen too,” Aryennos agreed. “And if it’s the sort with running water, then there should be a spike that extended deep down to make sure there’s no problem with waste or waste water. At least, that’s my understanding.”
I went back downstairs long enough to give Terenei a hug, since that was clearly the best way to thank him for anything, and why would I pass up a good excuse for a mutually-enjoyable hug?
“You’re a bit damp,” I said. “Maybe worth changing to something dry?”
“I think you’re right,” he said ruefully. “I really should have done up my coat, I completely underestimated what it’s like out there. Bringing the ornithians inside ter will mean getting wet again, but this is not comfortable now. I gather your culture has some taboos about bare skin, so I’ll go use the bedroom I assume is upstairs. I’ll be right back.”
My own quirks and associations were annoying sometimes. Some things could cling with frustrating tenacity. Well, I could work on it.
I checked my mana level. It had mostly recharged from switching to centaur immediately after getting up, casting a Diagnosis on Aryennos to check that all was well, and switching to human so I could ride in the wagon. I could get away with making a bunch of potions, and still not run myself out completely.
Just getting a really good, organized look at what materials were avaible would probably take a while. I’d have felt worse about using a lot of what we both gathered, without the fact that even a mid-level potion sold for more than the required materials separately, and I was consistently achieving at least that. And the better I could make them, the more they were worth, and that needed practice, so...
Terenei joined me from the bedroom, now in very loose drapey pants that shaded from dark purple at the top to white at the bottom and a cropped white sleeveless top that left his ft tummy bare, his long violet hair brushed and pulled into a neat tail. While he admired my efficient new workroom, he spotted the gss holders on the walls with lumina stones in them; it was just as well, since the windows were behind us and the sunlight coming in was limited as the clouds deepened.
The experienced hands and suggestions were invaluable to getting organized.
After a while he left me to fuss around with the details.
“Nathan?” he called upstairs a moment ter. “Would music distract you?”
“I’d love it,” I said honestly. “Weather like this makes me brace myself for a very long difficult shift with constant calls, and the reaction doesn’t go away just because I’m not working. Music would be great.”
“Gd to hear it! This house has built-in speakers, I’ll link my pyer to them and we can all have something to listen to other than the wind and rain.”
I could still hear the storm, of course. I would have even in my human form, let alone with my felid senses. The music helped, though, and so did concentrating on assessing exactly what was avaible and what I could do with it. Making potions worked better if I was absolutely meticulous about every detail, right down to the precise pcement of each ingredient on my special tray-ptter-thing, and that kind of intensity kept some of the other thoughts at bay.
Eventually, I wandered downstairs to see about a cup of the catsear tea my felid nose told me someone was brewing.
The living room was the focus of the music, but it wasn’t deafening even there; the lumina stone holders in here, which they’d already activated, had gss of varied gentle tints, which gave the room a subtly pyful and friendly feel. The drawn curtains made it easier to ignore the rain beyond.
I found Aryennos on the couch, with extra cushions possibly from one of the hanging seats supporting him so his injured leg could rest extended on the seat; he had his journal out, although it was anyone’s guess what he was writing about at this point.
One of the two hanging seats was simply a ring supporting a cup made of soft mesh, suspended at four evenly-spaced points by thick soft-looking ropes that held one edge higher to give it a back of sorts, and in the bottom was a rge round quilted cushion. Terenei was sitting upright in it, legs crossed, drawing something. He’d pulled the table over to hold his water jar and the boxes of paints, not precisely in easy reach but accessible without too much disruption at least, but he wasn’t currently using them.
Serru was in the well-lit kitchen, and had swapped her orange communicator for the shiny yellow headphones-choker that went with the pyer attached to her waistband. Maybe she had an audiobook or something on, something that didn’t csh with the more general moderate-volume music from the living room.
She fshed me a smile. “Tea will be ready soon. Don’t expect the kind of supper we’ve been able to get in towns, I only do road food even in an actual kitchen.”
“I would never compin about your cooking,” I said. “Have you been messing around in the kitchen all this time?”
“I’m not that patient,” she ughed. “I held still to be a model for Terenei for a while after he finished helping you, that’s nothing new and I had a story on to distract me while I did. It’s still not sunset, but it’s getting rather dark. I’m starting to think we should bring the ornithians in early.”
“Not a bad idea,” Terenei said, from the living room.
“I’ll go get them. You went out earlier, and it takes forever for felids to dry, and Aryennos is absolutely not doing it.” She picked up her bag from the counter extension, rummaged in it, and brought out a long hooded coat, dark green with a doubled set of bright yellow wavy stripes running down from each shoulder to meet in the centre at hip level, front and back. Leaving her pyer and headphones on the counter, she fastened the double row of buttons up the front securely, and pulled the hood up on her way to the door.
The wind tried to pull the door out of her hand; she caught it and smmed it closed.
Terenei and I made it to the door at about the same time.
“I hope they aren’t going to shake like wet dogs,” I said.
“I think it might be worth sacrificing a couple of bnkets to dry them off at least somewhat.” He spun around to find the bag of camping gear.
The ornithians needed no coaxing to come inside out of the wind and rain. Everything turned briefly hectic, as Terenei and I threw a bnket over each ornithian, beak to tail, and Serru followed them inside, and we forced the doors closed.
“Enough rain to make even you decide you’d rather be out of it, hm?” Terenei chuckled, patting Peace down with care for his purple-red feathers. I did my best to imitate it on blue Cheer, who leaned happily into my hands. “All safe and sound.”
Serru hung her wet coat on one of the series of convenient hooks between and beside the gss doors.
Cheer chose that instant to shake vigorously.
Peace’s bulk mostly sheltered Terenei, and Aryennos was too far away, but Serru and I both yelped.
Serru looked down at her clothes and sighed. “I stayed dryer outside. Do you want the bedroom to change, Nathan?”
“I might as well finish this first,” I said.
She nodded, left her boots under her coat, and walked over to her bag.
Terenei and I did what we could to dry the ornithians, who seemed appreciative of the attentions, and then left them the damp bnkets to paw into a nest that would also absorb any further water that dripped. They curled up together, heads resting on each other’s fnks, eyes drifting closed.
Serru, meanwhile, made use of the bedroom to change to the dress I’d seen her in when we rescued Aryennos from the river, calf-length and only loosely fitted, sky-blue and white, with the creamy-yellow open cardigan over it that she’d loaned to me at the time.
I took a turn in the bedroom to try to dry my now-damp fur with my clothes, and switched to my green-and-blue top and skirt. I didn’t have much experience with skirts, I’d given up before getting comfortable with them, but I liked how this combination felt.
“That was a good choice,” Aryennos commented when I came back downstairs, and Serru made a mmhmm noise of agreement.
The other suspended chair turned out to be perfect for my felid self. It resembled a regur hammock with the ends gathered up and attached to either end of a heavy wooden bar which was then fastened to a single ceiling ring, but one side was gathered much more tightly so it did have a back and a gently-cupped seat. There were several matching cushions inside it that could be adjusted to personal taste. Swaying gently in that, feet tucked up, felt amazingly good. I never wanted to get out of it again.
As the gloom outside increased, we all settled down in the cozy living room, each with a cup of tea, and not too long ter, with supper. Shelter, light, food, comfort, music, friends, absolutely no need to go outside... what else was there to ask for?
The other three taught me how to py one of the games that the table was made for—it had pying pieces inside, and other boards that could be swapped into pce. This one involved round tokens, distributed face-down at random in set locations along the complex path marked on the board; dice told you how far you could move, but not which direction at branches. The goal was to get one of several combinations of tokens, like a poker hand; you could choose to pick up the token or not when you nded on a space, but you could only have seven tokens in your possession and the combinations all needed at least five, so you’d soon need to start tossing them into the discard pile. When the board was too bare, the discards were all flipped face-down, shuffled around, and id on the spaces again.
Over by the gss wall, one of the ornithians let out a contented humming sigh, nestling closer to his companion. They were due for a meal, but no one had the heart to disturb them. We could make sure they had something to eat before we went to sleep.
The game rules were fairly simple, more than many of the board games I’d grown up fighting with my sister over, but the strategy involved was another matter entirely. I don’t think I was the only one startled that Aryennos was actually very good at both pying, and expining to me why he was doing what he was doing.
Serru and Terenei took the bedroom, once we decided to call it a night; the couch really did fold out into quite a comfortable bed that was easily rge enough for two human-sized occupants, and I shared that with Aryennos.
The sleepy-time no-dreams Drops, which had worked perfectly st night, failed. I woke with my heart pounding and my mind full of driving rain that blurred everything and turned the tri-coloured lights into a surreal kaleidoscope.
Rather than waking anyone else, I used all my felid stealth to slip out of bed. Serru had left her pyer on the kitchen isnd, and she wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it. Aryennos had expined the controls on Terenei’s pyer earlier, and this would be the same. I curled up in the comfortable chair up in my workroom, which turned out to be a recliner, and searched until I found a recording of a py that she’d marked as ‘funny’. It took a while, but eventually I dozed off again, listening to a comedy out of which I only caught about half the humour.
