Nobody actually tried to steal Christmas on Christmas day. It was already too late by that point. Santa had already delivered all of his presents, and all that remained was a series of mundane gift exchanges.

  I never knew what to get people for things like that, but I was still willing to show up and be around friends. I had several different friend categories for that purpose.

  First there were my old squad mates. Most of them had families and friends and other long term connections to the people of Earth and more specifically New Bay. Not all of them kept their work secret, so there was opportunity there.

  I also had others from the Power Brigade. The Portal Squad and I weren’t necessarily close enough for me to get invited to their homes, but Shockwave invited me to come visit them and their grandma if I had nobody else. Their grandma being a retired super I’d trained with previously- Hammerfist.

  Midnight’s family wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas because… why would they? They weren’t even from Earth. I had an open invitation to go visit them, and we had some plans to do so, but not during this holiday season.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up with my apprentice and some of the earlier class-based individuals. Jerome and his mother seemed eager to invite people to their place now that it could fit more than a couple people at a time. Khithae also ended up with an invitation. Izzy had been instructing Tylissa on various aspects of the scout class, so she was invited as well. Ceira was busy at some sort of charity thing where hopefully a large amount of money would be going from the hands of the rich into something useful.

  So it was ultimately a small group of people without extended family on planet, and we all happened to have the same sort of magic. It was easy to get, after all.

  “I thought my suit was out of power,” Midnight commented as we approached. “But it was over half charge so I think it just glitched out. I’m going to get it checked whenever we next go back h- to Celmoth.”

  He almost said home. He’d made the choice to stay on Earth even after the option to return was available, but he might still get homesick occasionally. I heard that was a thing that happened. My home was a pile of rubble with nobody present, so I didn’t really get any similar urges. It wouldn’t be long before he could use Gate alone- and thus be able to return home by treating it as a long commute. Obviously it didn’t take long, but a couple hours of mana regeneration each way wasn’t trivial. Though comparatively, it was easier than most people would have expected.

  “Good idea,” I said. “There’s no telling if something might have gotten banged up in everything we’ve been doing.”

  “It really shouldn’t work like that,” Midnight said. “Since, you know. Nanobots.”

  I was aware of nanobots and things like that. But I wasn’t really familiar with them. I just accepted they were another form of super tech, even if they weren’t always actually super. Sometimes, things just worked.

  I rang the doorbell, and felt Jerome approaching the door. As a bundle of power, I was at least aware of peoples’ presence when there weren’t other distractions. I imagined others should be as well, but our previous tests had shown that to be not entirely accurate. I was pretty good at sensing powers.

  “Turlough! Midnight!” Jerome grinned as the door swung open. “Good to see the two of you.”

  A cleaning robot whistled and beeped further inside.

  “Hello to you as well,” I said.

  The tree with mundane presents reminded me of what I had received from Santa. Last year I got a magic book that shouldn’t have had a method to be delivered across dimensions. This year I got… coal. I didn’t even have a fireplace or a wood burning stove.

  It had ended up back in my apartment, since I didn’t have any reason to keep it in Storage or in my pocket.

  Though he had said hello, Rob’s attention seemed mainly focused on Izzy, who was standing perplexed as Rob continued to repeatedly bump into her ankles.

  “What are you doing? I’m not dirty.” Rob bumped into her again. “Even if I was, you should use the Clean spell. You can’t roll over my shoes.” She gave an exasperated sigh as he didn’t stop gently pushing on her. “Jerome, I think your familiar is confused.”

  He walked over, watching curiously. “You do know how to go around people.” I couldn’t interpret Rob’s beeps, but Jerome was pretty good at it. “You want her to-” Jerome cut himself off. “I don’t know if she’d be interested in you carrying her around.”

  Rob turned around slowly, beeping and booping in response.

  “No, she’s not…” Jerome bent down, whispering. I couldn’t make it out, but I was almost certain Izzy could.

  She rolled her eyes, then chuckled. “Yeah, I’m neither shrunken down, a kid, or a cat,” Izzy commented. “But if you want to carry me I guess I don’t mind.”

  Rob whistled, not even turning around but simply reversing to bump into her shoes. “He does enjoy it,” Jerome said. “So if you’re willing to accommodate him…”

  “Do I just step directly on him? Can he support that?”

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  Jerome hesitated for a second, then looked at me.

  “What?” I said. He frowned, seemingly unable to come up with the question. Or unwilling to ask it. “I’m not a diviner, so I can’t answer questions you don’t ask.”

  “You totally have Advanced Divination Magic,” Izzy pointed out. She probably meant me, but Jerome had actually picked up the same things.

  I felt him beginning to gather mana before Tylissa came into the room. “Rob can support up to fifty pounds easily enough,” she said. “And he won’t break with a bit more than that. He just won’t be able to move.”

  Izzy stepped onto a very excited robot. “Oh, is this the ‘don’t ask women their weight’ thing?” She kept her body still as Rob rocketed up to his full speed of moderate walking pace, occasionally stopping to spin in place. “I don’t think halflings care about that.”

  “I don’t think you care about that,” I commented. “Some do.”

  Jerome frowned. “It’s still hard to ask questions that are… good.”

  “I’m more muscular than a child,” Izzy said. “But I’m still vaguely in that range.”

  “I thought halflings should be one-eighth weight,” I said. “But it’s actually more than that. It helps them function around larger individuals.”

  Izzy wasn’t making it obvious, but I was pretty sure she was having fun riding around on Rob. It would be novel, at least. Maybe I could shrink the rest of us down so we weren’t too big. Midnight excepted, of course.

  Khithae was last to arrive, a few minutes later. The humans were outnumbered by the various others present, though it was pretty much a tie if you counted Izzy with them. I didn’t, but people could have if only going by visuals. But then Midnight would be a cat.

  At some point we opened presents and also talked about Santa presents. Jerome got a hammer, for some reason. Midnight got some new games for his handheld Celmothian game system. Khithae also got a tool but it was some sort of extradimensional gecko tech thing she was very excited about. Izzy got shoes and Tylissa got a hat.

  Then it came to me.

  “Coal?” Jerome laughed. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing worse than last year,” I crossed my arms.

  “Perhaps Santa did not have a full year to review your villainy before,” Khithae commented. “Like asking people to do more work while they’re already working.”

  “You’re the only person I know who can repair stuff like that.”

  I think she would have rolled her eyes if she could do that easily.

  “Is it magic coal?” Izzy asked.

  “Uh… good question,” I said. “I didn’t bring it with me.”

  “Why not?” Izzy said. “You carry all sorts of weird things in Storage.”

  “He’s leaving room for heavy things to drop on people’s heads,” Midnight explained.

  Jerome frowned. “Is that even possible? Wouldn’t it take more power to gain potential energy like that?”

  “Maybe magic breaks the rules. Or mana is just that strong and usually doesn’t get to show it,” I shrugged.

  -----

  It was a good day, taking time off from work and only having to think about the fun parts of magic. Like learning new things and fighting and robot familiars.

  But eventually I had to think about the less fun things, like being too slow to cast Dimensional Anchor, running out of mana, and Midnight almost being catnapped. There was no way Flasher teleported into a random spot and swiped at Midnight just for fun. He’d been after him for some reason.

  Obviously I could imagine he’d be bitter about the whole thing with Iron Shell, but I kind of expected him to just try to laser me or Great Girl or whatever. Catnapping was something different, unless that had just been a clumsy punch.

  Should I tell Midnight? Was he already worrying about it? How could I be faster with Dimensional Anchor so that Flasher couldn’t get away? There was a certain limit to how fast I could draw upon mana, so maybe I just needed to get it some more upgrades and accept the cheaper price. That would be faster.

  I didn’t have a ton of people I could cast it on, but Midnight and I could do that on our own. It would be kind of expensive, since even Dimension Door wasn’t cheap.

  I wondered if it would be easier to break through the restrictions with a higher ranking spell, or if that didn’t matter. Most of the mana probably went to dealing with the issues it already had, not fighting resistance.

  The coal wasn’t magical. I thought it might be a good distraction, but it really was just coal. Or at least a lump of black rock. I supposed I could get it tested in a lab? Maybe Santa had given me some really good coal that would solve some sort of power problem by being super efficient or something.

  Though I couldn’t think of a reason it would come to me instead of someone who cared. New Bay didn’t even use coal plants. It was all powered by super tech or just… tech. The Martians had some good stuff, and stable power generation was one of the things that was most easily approved. The Celmothians probably also had some really good stuff.

  I was feeling particularly festive, so I sent a cross-dimensional Christmas message to the only people I thought would be able to appreciate it. Sir Kalman would likely be confused, and pretty much everyone else I knew was living in New Bay. But I did know Momo and Lady Eglantine, so I sent them a message. And because I was myself, I couldn’t help but test something. The Sending was meant for both of them, because they were bonded together. Other spells should work on them as a pair, so why not that?

  I just hadn’t previously known anyone with a bonded companion that could speak. About half an hour later- a normal turnaround time for a cross-dimensional message like that- I got back overlapping responses from the two of them. Alright, so it definitely worked but it was weird.

  Their responses sounded pleasant so presumably nothing particularly crazy had happened since the last time I interacted with them.

  As I calmed my mind, I felt Midnight drift off to sleep across the hall. Sometimes, it was nice to have a day off. Though I did usually look forward to fighting people. Life was good. I just needed to make sure the people who made it that way stayed safe. Maybe by dropping coal on the heads of my enemies.