Multiplying abundantly into a truly wild storm under Lizu's direct guidance, the glistening golden and bountiful cyan sparkles of memoria swirled throughout Inkaro's isolated magic testing grounds, unobstructed like the wind. Moulding and melting into one another, Lizu controlled the memoria to combine into a singular substance, like gelatin cubes being dissolved into water, until something peculiar occurred that Lizu haddenly anticipated.

  Within the swirling memoria, a, although blurry, showed a visual recollection of the past neither of the duo had personally experienced. Intriguing Inkaro, and mildly embarrassing Lizu.

  On a day, one long in the past, emphasis on the past part, which could even be considered ancient, sat a little dragon. High on the lonesome-made peak of the tallest mountain that overlooked the dragon village nestled inside the mountain range, the young cloud dragon watched the other kid dragons, all in humanoid forms and hailing from different magical types, play various games that all consisted in sharing one similar theme: combat.

  Unlike the others of her kin, she could hardly consider herself the combative type, in the physical and fighting way; if she wanted something or had someone trying to push her around, she'd hardly stand around like a statue. However, her inability to enjoy the act of combat came much to the cloud dragon's dismay, solely for it being her father's main leisure activity, making hanging out with him a rather mind-numbing slog for her.

  At times, her father's proclivities made it rather confusing for her to rationalise how her mother, a humorian, could have ever fallen in love with him. The thought of her mother having an unnatural obsession with dragons never crossed the cloud dragon's mind; after all, her mother was a peerless gem who would never stoop to such superfluous activities, such as obsession and needless hyper-fixations. The cloud dragon was rather stumped by the whole dichotomy of her time spent in her father's world and her mother's being as different as night and day were, constantly apart but occasionally overlapping. The cloudy dragon's predicament left her stumped, so much in fact it caused her to subconsiously release thick, muted cyan clouds from her body that seeped out through the gaps of her scales.

  "This story sure is pretty nifty, wouldn't you agree?" a kid Lizu stated as she put her story book down, with the Lizu of the past's introduction to the video, the memoria's clarity was cleansed, allowing for the present duo to make out their past counterparts hanging out in one of the gardens of Lizu's childhood home. Kid Inkaro vaguly nodded his head in response, only sparing the bare minimum mental power to complete such an action, as he pondered over something he'd seen in the memoria vision.

  "Do you think you could do that thing like the dragon girl did, Lizu?"

  Lizu almost didn't hear Inkaro's question initially, almost missing the boy's question in its entirety, had it not been for how unorthodox the boy's question was to the girl. Bringing her tail swishing to an end as abruptly as she also swung her head in young Inkaro's direction, the slightly older Lizu, compared to kid Inkaro, sported a cutely befuddled half-open mouth as she tried looking into Inkaro's passion-intensive eyes, only to struggle maintaining eye contact with the boy: "Huh? D-do what?"

  Inkaro repeated himself, beat for beat, without any degradation to his words, even after the third time saying it after Lizu repeated her confused question for only a second time.

  "The scale thing, the one where her tail went all swoosh and cloudy and fluffy!" Inkaro announced excitedly, playfully flapping his hands up and down as he even mimicked the sounds the cloud dragon girl's conjured clouds produced when displayed by the memoria. The young dragolyte could only murmur in shy embarrassment at the question, unable to bring herself to outright refuse a task she otherwise was sure she couldn't do. However, Inkaro's cute, expectant, and, she couldn't forget, cute face was just too hard for Lizu to ignore or deny in the slightest.

  "Oh-oh, that, let me see. Just give me a second; I've never tried anything like this before, so don't get your hopes up yet," Lizu bumbled, stumbling over her words to some extent, already anticipating how excited Inkaro would be if she could pull something like that off.

  Sure enough, the memoria-made recording of Lizu blindly stumbled her way through replicating what the cloud dragon had inadvertently done. To the past Lizu's surprise, it was surprisingly easy for her to get a feel for how her body was supposed to produce a similar phenomenon as the cloud dragon, leading to a faint buzz rumbling from within her horns. Catching her off guard by how loud the buzzing of her horns was in her ears, Lizu almost stumbled over her own feet from the shock she incurred as her tail, which had recently experienced a mini growth spurt, shot directly to the sky. Naturally, the sudden motion combined with her tail's new length and weight caused her loss of balance to completely go out of her control, and with frantically flapping wings, Lizu toppled right on top of Inkaro.

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  She landed with a hefty thud, even when landing on picnic blanket-covered grass.

  With a deep grunt of pained annoyance, Lizu felt the full weight of her traitorous tail press down on her and force out all the air from her lungs, along with a mini blast of electrified flames that the released breath had been converted into. Luckily, the way she fell meant her accidental attack missed Inkaro, because she was completely on top of him.

  Then it hit her. She landed on top of Inkaro like a sack of potatoes. Worrying that, as a squishy human, he'd been on death's door or even worse, Lizu pushed herself off the gardeny ground just enough to give Inkaro enough space to breathe and for her to see his face again.

  "Inkaro! Are you-"

  "Wooooah! That was sooo coool! How did you do that!" the young Inkaro exclaimed excitedly, catching Lizu even more off-guard than her tail had. Seeing the state Inkaro was in, she wasn't sure whether to be worried about his bloody nose or relieved that the damage behind that very bloody nose was probably superficial for the most part. In the current situation, Inkaro's amazement for Lizu was only matched by the girl's unbridled self-consciousness, displayed by her iridescent red cheeks as she scampered off Inkaro and crouched beside him. But she was sure of one thing: Inkaro was fine, so she could sigh in relief. And so, she did, multiple times to the point Inkaro thought she'd forgotten to breathe for a second.

  Not once did Lizu notice the new glow underneath her tail's scales, and the plating of horns faintly pulsated, shimmering and in time with her breathing. Inkaro did, but chose to remain quiet, assuming Lizu had already noticed and was simply more focused on checking he was okay to mention it herself. That thought, briefly, made Inkaro consider something: was he being childish by focusing on his hobby instead of himself when Lizu's first thought was to check on him?

  "Ahem... sorry for getting overly enthusiastic... I didn't mean to," the memory of past Inkaro mumbled, feeling deeply ashamed. His comment stunned Lizu out of her relieved state. Hearing her silence, followed by misconstruing it for silent disappointment, he was about to apologise again, thinking he'd messed up again, which only made his preceding confusion extra strong as Lizu began to uncontrollably giggle, and unreservedly flap her wings in sharp motions.

  "There's no need to be all reserved, you looking all cute when you're happy is what I lo-." That was the most past Lizu could say before the memoria cloud containing the memory harmlessly burst into tiny dust that pitter-pattered to the smooth testing ground floor. Much to present Lizu's played-up disappointment as she slumped her wings to the sides of her legs.

  "Aaaww, this memory's one of my favourites, shame I ran out of memoria at the best part," present Lizu mentioned endearingly, fully inammered by the visage of her younger self getting so easily flustered by Inkaro being Inkaro. It was pure elation that nothing else could hope to beat. "I know this goes without saying, but is your brain still wired to only care about magic to the point you neglect your own health?"

  Inkaro lightly shrugged, indicative of him not being all that offended by Lizu basically calling him a loony with all his screws loose. Again, not that he minded, purely for the fact most of the best mages in the shows he's watched were referred to in much the same way. In fact, Inkaro somewhat took the comment as a compliment, only somewhat, given the look Lizu gave him made it readily clear that it wasn't intended as one.

  "It's fascinating, even though neither of us has personally witnessed the scene mentioned in that book; the fact that the memoria was able to recreate a somewhat comprehensible image, I wonder if this only works for real events, or if fictional stories will have a clearer clarity or perhaps fictional stories won't work altogether? Many possibilities for you to discover."

  Hearing the guy ponder away, Lizu lightly smiled as she listened to the guy's ramblings, mainly on how he'd already thought of such a strange application for memoria as some history verification method, whilst she not-so-lightly wrapped her tail around his waist: "You...really love magic, don't you, Aro."

  Inkaro huffed amusedly and cut his ramblings short to comment back at Lizu.

  "What can I say, magic is just like you: I simply can't get enough of how interesting the both of you are," Inkaro said calmly, stating such a fact with a straight face so impervious to hesitation that Lizu almost missed and mistook what Inkaro had said for a normal response. Her error didn't last long, however. Her cheeks turned faintly red before she lightly tapped her fist against the guy's leg. His words made it glaringly apparent how his comment easily highlighted that she was just as weak to the guy as she'd been as a kid, not that she had any real issues with acknowledging such a self-pleasing and reassuring fact.

  "Flattery won't get you anywhere this time, so no more sneak peeks until I'm more versed in this memoria stuff," Lizu teased as she hit Inkaro with a few more leg taps. Much to Inkaro's anticipation, he'd expected such a retort from Lizu, made clear to her when he defeatedly sighed, making the girl snicker faintly at seeing she wasn't the only one who was weak to the other. But as she readied herself to recommend heading back to their shared home, a thought popped into Lizu's mind: "Say, seeing as where back, why don't we go say hello to our families? I know you didn't greet your folks a single time when you were checking in on Paruneha, now did you?"