Chapter Sixteen

"Then, perhaps, you and I might finally make peace with one another."

“Holy shit,” Gina said, downing the last of her pirozhkis, savoring the buttery, flaky crust, and the rich, creamy potatoes inside. “Oh, Brovar, I didn’t realize this place was gonna be that good. Von did not oversell this place—fuck.”

Callana nodded her head. “I like food!”

“You said it,” Gina said. She’d gotten a replacement glass after letting the waiter see her cup and feigning ignorance, though part of her still regretted not taking a few more bites out of it. Fullness seemed to be a sensation she’d never feel again, and she realized the danger in that. By all rights, she’d have been content to order another round of pirozhkis, but that would probably kill her bank account. When the waiter finally brought over the pad with the bill, she almost considered not looking, before she realized she’d have to in order to calculate the tip. Damn.

Ninety-eight gnollens.

The meal cost ninety-eight gnollens.

“Fuck,” Gina said, staring at the number, dumbstruck.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing,” Gina said, shaking her head. But Callana leaned over the table and frowned.

“That is a lot of the money,” Callana said.

“It’s fine, I’ll… uh… treat you.”

“You have treated me great,” Callana said, cocking her head. “Let me help.”

Callana reached into her pocket and produced a thin, leather wallet—one of the few Gina had found that could fit in a pair of women’s jeans—and rifled out a five-gnollen note. Then, pain lanced through Gina’s head as Callana took the crisp, wrinkle-free gnollen and unfolded it somehow. Suddenly, she was holding twenty five-gnollen notes. A hundred gnollens. Just like that.

“I even changed the ‘cereal’ numbers!” Callana said. “Do not tell the Von or the Nard. Ugh. Von or Nard.”

“Cal, I can’t—”

“You can! I am paying!”

“Look, you can’t just solve all your problems with magic. That is magic, right?”

“Magic?”

“Never mind. Point is, there’s a principle to the whole thing.”

“Money is fake, Gina,” Callana said with a look so earnest, it shook Gina to her core. “You and Von and Nard say so-cie-ty is broken every day. So-cie-ty made up money, but it hurts you to lose it, because so-cie-ty agrees that it is real. But I do not care about the fic-tion of a broken so-cie-ty, I care about you. And if losing your money on this meal hurts you, I want to help.”

Gina fought to keep tears from streaming down her cheeks, but that battle was lost before it began. “That was oddly eloquent.”

“I have been talking to Nard a lot.”

“Yeah, he’s like that.”

Callana placed the stack of gnollens on the pad in an awkward pile, smugly smiling to herself.

“I’ll cover the tip at least,” Gina blurted, adding a tenner to the heap of cash. After wiping her cheeks dry, she stood up and presented her arm to Callana. “S-shall we?”

Callana nodded furiously, looping her arm through Gina’s and sauntering off with her in tow. They passed rows of tables, attracting a few odd looks, but nothing terribly damning—most people didn’t think twice about seeing two women touching each other… which was definitely a platonic thing in this case. Obviously, this hadn’t been a real date, because that would be… well, what were the odds that Callana would also be gay, right? She probably only found other squid-tentacle-god-things attractive, so… yeah, there was nothing to read into here.

“Fuck, really? Oh, Brovar, that’s fucking wild!” Gina said, lying back on the grass with an empty beer bottle in her hand. This beer bottle, however, had been purchased for its contents, not its shell. Although now that she’d drunk the whole thing, Gina had no qualms about eating the glass, either. Not anymore, at least.

“Yes!” Callana said, taking another sip from her own beer. “And then, he—heehee—he, uh, he yelled in the Ron’s face and said, ‘I wanted bacon, not yo—you—your stupid face!’ Or s-something like that, it was—was—it was funnnnyyyyy.”

Gina couldn’t stop laughing as she reached into their six-pack for the last bottle. They’d driven to the park after getting the beer from a convenience store, and now it looked like they’d have to walk home, having not planned ahead at all. Now, they sat on a mossy hill, right above a small grove of endelwood trees in a semicircle around a pond. The stars glistened through the two intersecting rings above, and the whole galaxy revealed itself in the darkness before them, milky white with swirls of purple.

“I want that one,” Gina said, pointing to a random star.

“Wh—what one?”

“That one,” Gina said, gesturing wildly at it.

“I—I can’t see which one you—you’re pointing at, silly,” Callana said. “That’s so silly!”

Gina chortled. “It is kinda silly!”

“Lemme—uh, lemme get… hold on,” Callana said, struggling to get to her feet. “Uh, it’s…”

Callana reached up into the sky, squinted a little, and grunted as she strained to do something Gina couldn’t see. It would probably hurt if she tried to look, anyway, so she started chugging her drink instead. Then, a faint light. In the palm of Callana’s hand, red, shimmering, made of swirling, fiery plasma, was a star. Miniaturized and divorced from gravity, it bobbed in Callana’s grasp. Chuckling, she shot Gina a toothy grin.

“It’s a—it’s a little one, just a liiiiiittle itty bitty one, but it’s a star, like I said!”

“Holy shit,” Gina said. “Holy shit, holy shit! And… you’re sure it didn’t have any planets?”

“Y-yeah, it’s, it’s, like, not got any planets around it, just a few as-ter-oids, and I didn’t touch them, ’coz I p-put a black hole thingy where the old star was, so it’s, it’s, it’s like, to-ta-lly fine.”

“Was it hard?”

“Oh yeah,” Callana said with a frown. “I—I didn’t like h-how hard it was, it should have been easy. But it’s gonna taste so gooooood, so I’m… I’mma gonna, like—watch.”

Replicating her earlier trick, she unfolded the star in her hands, and like that, another one sat beside it. They started slowly orbiting each other as Callana started chortling.

“S-see, Gina? Here!” She handed Gina the original, taking the new star for herself. Gina reached out, gingerly grasping the outer layers of the star’s corona. Instinctively, she could tell that the star would probably have seared off the skin of a normal human being, but… well, Gina wasn’t one of those anymore.

Brovar’s ashes, she was about to eat this thing.

Callana didn’t wait, downing hers in an instant. “Ohhhhh,” she said, somewhere between an exclamation and a moan. “You’ve g-gotta try it, Gin-Gin. Heehee, Gin-Gin, that’s a… that’s your name now.”

Gina suppressed a chuckle, staring at the orb in her palm. For some reason, this felt like a big step. Perhaps a bigger step than she’d ever taken—and she didn’t have a clue what she was stepping into. And yet, this giggling, four-foot-ten girl beside her, who had just started spinning in place, made her want to take that step. So, she took the star, which was around the size of a particularly large jawbreaker, and popped it into her mouth.

Oh, sweet Brovar.

Words couldn’t describe the taste. It wasn’t quite like any flavor she’d ever had before, but in that moment, Gina felt like she’d touched the sky. All fatigue left her in an instant. She’d never felt so incredible in her life, it was like nothing else.

And then, she swallowed it. Her whole body felt warm now, and she let herself fall back down onto the mossy ground, so thoroughly content that she felt as though the whole universe was at peace.

Callana fell to the ground and rolled over beside her. “It’s goooooooood,” she said in a singsong voice.

“No kidding.”

“It sucks they are so hard to get now,” Callana said. “And that it is wrong to get most of them. That suckssss.”

“That does suck, man, like… that’s such bogus.”

“Heehee, bogus.”

“Such bogus!”

Callana couldn’t stop laughing, and she rolled over right on top of Gina. For a second, they stared into each other’s eyes, giggling.

Then, Gina leaned up and kissed her.

Hello, friends! If you're enjoying this story, consider supporting me on Patreon! If you'd like more stories, I post new chapters to my mainline series every Monday and Friday, and I upload a new short story every other Wednesday! Below are some of my other stories.

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