carl@fire

"What an incredibly strange day," Emma remarked as they descended the stairs.

"Yeah, it's been really weird," Drake agreed. It was definitely tempting to take the portal and leave with Ir'alith after how weird everything's been. She sure seemed happy to leave, especially with how many bags of chips she's bringing back. Also weird.

She pulled slightly at the arm she'd wrapped hers around. "It seems we're all that remains of our small band of champions. You've opted to remain here, I'll note. While it's a continued strain, Mister Storm, I've decided to grace you with my continued presence, if only to stave off my own boredom."

"Oh?" He glanced down at her. "When's your next match, anyway?"

"Truly neither thinking nor consideration for others is a strength of yours," she said with a shake of her head. "Upon my most recent return, you'd no manner of thought aside from plundering this delicate body of mine again and again until you'd become nearly insensate. It's a wonder I'd managed to survive such—"

"Yeah, alright, I'm gonna quote you on this next time you mention that dozen of yours," he said, giving her a chuckle for her efforts.

"I'm certain I've no recollection of such a thing." She frowned disapprovingly up at him, and they stepped out into the hallway. "If you've the thought…" She pulled her arm away and placed one hand at her well-supported chest and one over her exposed navel, turning around to walk backwards along the carpet with a fearful expression. "No, Mister Storm, you must control your libidinous urges, no matter the difficulty with a woman of my beauty so near!"

He rolled his eyes. "Right, my libidinous urges." He slowed, then came to a stop again at the unmarked door and stared at it.

"This obsession with that brother of yours is quite unhealthy," Emma said. She took his nearest arm and pressed it to her chest, leaning into him. "Perhaps if you'll knock this time, he'll deign to reply?"

Drake took a deep breath, then turned to grin down at her. "Nah, I don't care. Zack could never do any of the crazy shit we did today."

"Oh my, such a bold statement," Emma said, showing a small, pleased smile. "You've reached your apex now, have you?"

He shook his head, and his grin turned wry. "I don't think I'm wired that way. It's the challenge, not the result. Always gotta be climbing towards something higher."

She slid his arm around to her side and gave a pull, and they began walking again along the spotless hallway. "With regards to your previous question, Mister Storm, it seems I've no further matches. In my latest skirmish, I'd faced ten opponents simultaneously in this Tral game—a tedious affair with sixty individual pieces to maneuver about—and defeated them all with ease at a remarkably swift pace. Following this, it seems that my remaining challengers had lost their collective will to compete, and so I've no further obligation."

He frowned, then looked down at her. "So…doesn't that mean you could've gone home?"

She smirked as she pressed one hand to his door and shoved it open. "I'd considered it, yes, but once I'd additionally considered how tragic it would be to leave you to your incapability… Without the benefit of my competency, perhaps you—"

"Wait, you stayed?" he interrupted, coming firmly to a stop as she pulled him towards the sofa. "To…be here with me?" I figured this was just a way to have fun and pass time for her.

She sat down on the sofa with her usual grace and poise, which was at odds with the casual, nearly-normal clothes she wore. "Please, Mister Storm, you've no need to completely discount your merits. While it's true I've perhaps been aggressive with my reproach in my continuing effort to remedy your many, varied flaws, have I not also been effusive in my praise?"

He kept his gaze on her eyes as he walked slowly forward and sat beside her. "Have you?"

With a push, she rose up onto her knees and moved to sit astride him, meeting his stare with a small smile. "Permit me to demonstrate," she said more quietly as she leaned forward, engaging him in an incredibly soft, affectionate kiss that caused his pulse to race. She remained in place afterwards with her hands on his chest as she continued to match his gaze. "Do you not feel I've praised you quite thoroughly just now?" she asked in a near-whisper.

He brought his hands up to hold her waist. "You're a really confusing woman, you know that?"

"You're a very strange man, Mister Storm," she replied, trailing a finger slowly down his chest. "Not human, yet perhaps all the better for it."

"You have a thing for non-humans?" he asked with a grin.

"Not specifically, no," she replied, now tracing the small nubs of his horns. "There's many on my world who've a thing for them, as it were, but I'd never considered the matter to any extent. And what of you?" she asked with a smirk as she leaned forward, pressing her considerable bust into him and bringing her lips closer until they nearly touched his. "Have you a human fetish?" she whispered.

"Well…" He snorted a laugh at the idea of it. "Maybe?"

Emma pouted briefly, then she frowned. "Truly you've no talent for wooing a lady," she said as she sat back on her haunches.

"You seem wooed to me," he said, poking a finger into her exposed navel.

She began to giggle immediately as he tickled her, and her hands twined themselves tightly into his hair. "No, you beast!" she shrieked quietly as she thrashed a little.

"Very wooed," Drake said, giving her a final poke before he stopped.

"I'd thought it astonishing the confidence with which you'd confronted Ir'alith earlier," she said once her laughter tapered off. "As though you'd not even considered the possibility of perishing. Perhaps I'd felt slightly wooed in listening to the resoluteness in your voice as she let loose those fearsome roars."

"That was a really fucking crazy plan," he said as he remembered it. "If she'd slammed me against the ground one more time…"

Fingernails stroked slowly along the sides of his head. "I'd felt faith in your success," she said. "You'd seemed determined to aid her no matter the risk, and, as our leader, it was my duty to devise a scheme fit to match that resolve."

He nodded. "Thanks, by the way. I don't think I would've…" At the thought of the knife that was once again in his inventory, he grimaced.

"Do I seem…strange to you for being capable of performing such terrible acts without hesitation?" she asked after a short while, her face regaining its neutral mask.

"Well," he began. How do I phrase this… "I think it takes someone really fucked up to be able to do that. Then again, I was right there with you, and you did sort of tell me that vengeance wasn't going to be pretty before I agreed to it. Everything here has been just so…fucked."

Emma stared at him, and he felt like he was becoming trapped in her eyes, as though the bright blue irises were drawing him in. "I've no notion of what it is to be anyone other than who I am," she said eventually. "You've witnessed the whole of me, Mister Storm. I've no manner of possessions, no territory, no family, not even a proper, decent sense of morality, according to a great many, I'd imagine. Perhaps this partnership of ours is simply some manner of coincidence, an ephemeral tryst borne solely from my newly regained capacity to feel. Despite this, I've decided to offer you the opportunity to remain as my escort for a while longer, though I'll—mmf!"

Drake brought his face forward and kissed her soundly. He wasn't entirely sure why he did it; he wasn't in love, and he was reasonably sure that she wasn't either. Regardless, something about this woman of otherworldly beauty and cruelty seemed like a challenge to him, and he couldn't resist.

"I've retained my voice this time," Emma said a long while later, her head resting on his bare shoulder as they lay on the bed. "Perhaps I'd simply been overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of it on the first occasion."

"No, I took it easy on you out of consideration for your delicate body," Drake said with a smirk.

"How've you got such a lengthy tongue, anyway?" she asked. Her fingers drew shapes along the scales on his side, and she stroked her toes slowly over his foot.

"It's a part-dragon thing." He ran his claws lightly through her hair, and she snuggled closer.

"Well, it's quite a good part-dragon thing in my estimation," she murmured.

They lay there for a few minutes, and Drake's gaze was occasionally drawn to the continued tick of the timer at the edge of his vision.

"You'd not answered my inquiry during our initial encounter," she said, tilting her head back to look up at him. "Have you someone who awaits your return?"

He sighed. "Yeah, sort of. I have a wife, but it's complicated."

She kissed his shoulder lightly. "Explain then, Mister Storm."

"Well…" He grimaced. "My wife, Colleen, and I have been together for… Shit, fifteen years? No, sixteen."

"Small years, I'll assume," Emma murmured.

"Yeah," he said with a single chuckle. "Really small by comparison. Anyway, we were together for a year or so, and things seemed great, so we got married since we were getting older. She was a little odd, but so is everyone, right? Things were going well. I was really busy at work, she had a job, and we were happy. Then my son came along a year later, and…"

He shook his head. "Things changed. Colleen… She'd started getting less affectionate over time. I got worried, and I was thinking all kinds of things, but then she sat me down one day, and she told me she just didn't feel any kind of sexual attraction anymore. Not to me, not to anyone. She showed me all kinds of stuff to convince me she wasn't seeing someone else behind my back. And… Well, I believed her. She wasn't. She just sort of didn't have that part of herself anymore. It dwindled away."

Emma gave him another kiss on his shoulder, this one more lingering.

"She'd always had a low desire for sex," he continued, "and she'd sort of been forcing herself during our whole relationship because she liked me so much. She'd tried some medications, but they didn't work. Nothing she could do about it. She asked if I wanted to divorce her, but… Well, she's still my wife, and she still cared. Just… Not in all the same ways. I still cared too, so we're still together, but it's… It's different."

"Quite an ordeal," Emma said quietly.

"Yeah, it was rough for a while right after," he said. "She came up with this idea that I'd start resenting her if I wasn't having sex. Maybe eventually she would've been right. I don't know. We have some rules, but the gist of it is as long as it doesn't ever touch our household or take up too much of my time, I have a free pass to have sex with whoever."

"A remarkably compassionate woman," Emma said after a minute or two. "I've the inclination to feel some jealousy at such high-mindedness, as I've the notion such arrangements are uncommon on your world."

"She's something, alright," Drake said as Colleen's face came to mind again. "We're…sort of more like close friends now, I suppose. Separate bedrooms, but we still spend time together fairly often. It's weird, but it works somehow."

Emma shifted, rolling farther onto her stomach and steadying her jaw on one hand so she could look at him more easily.

Time passed while she stared up at him.

"Strange in your world, perhaps, but less so in mine," she said at last. "As you've again shared a deeply private detail, I'll reciprocate. Years ago, I'd wed myself to a man for the sole purpose of gaining a method by which I might depart my homeland. He brought me to a different land, the journey requiring nearly a month in the most inhospitable heat which, perhaps while I was unable to feel, caused me to sweat to no end. When combined with other matters, I'd count the period among the worst in my existence."

She grimaced. "And then upon arriving, my new life began. In my arrogance, I'd thought to establish some manner of place for myself, to become someone revered in a nation I'd only studied from afar. In truth, I'd become little more than an unfeeling plaything for my new husband, as there's no status whatsoever to be gained by those unable or unwilling to compete in all manner of physical contest. They've no value for talents of the mind, and so, despite my continued struggles and delusions to the contrary, I'd traded a life of privilege and power in a place I'd disdained for a life as an ornamentation in a place I'd soon come to disdain as well, though my new accommodations had provided me with little little hope of escape."

"That's fucked up," Drake said.

A sardonic laugh escaped from her lips. "Yes, quite. I've a mind to appropriate this phrase from you, Mister Storm."

"Have at it."

"Yes, it's rather fucked up," she said, applying her painfully precise enunciation to it and then chuckling.

He laughed a little alongside her, and they watched each other for a short while, each with a slight grin. "Alright, Emma," he said. "Suppose you could do anything you wanted when you left here. What would you do?"

"Ooh, such a challenging question," she said, letting her hand slip out from under her chin to lay against him again. "Were I to have no demands upon me nor any boundaries…" She grew silent. "I should like to travel, I'd think," she said when she'd finished thinking. "I've no notion of the size of your world, but did you know that, to my knowledge, no individual has ever traversed the entirety of mine? Yes, perhaps that could be quite exciting, to be the first to accomplish a great feat of that magnitude and to see all manner of spectacular sights along the way."

"That…sounds like a big world?" Drake said. "Have people tried?"

"Yes, for hundreds upon hundreds of years," she said as she looked up at him with a frown. "How unbelievably vexing that my sister's obsession with mechanics might prove to be the key to such a journey."

"Can't you just fly with magic or something?" he asked.

Her expression changed, growing amused. "I've not the knowledge of how magic is used among your people, but we humans lack the capability of Ir'alith, and I'd imagine she'd feel considerably insulted at having even been used as some manner of comparison. Magical flight is, even for an individual with great talent for manipulating wind energy as I possess, quite impossible."

"Huh." He frowned. "And no, uh, machines that can fly, I'm guessing?"

"Perhaps… Well, there was perhaps one individual capable of devising such a thing, but I'd wager he's no longer counted among the living. He'd attempted to battle that scorpion woman, and I'm certain even you have the capability to predict the result if she's to combat anyone excepting, perhaps, Ir'alith."

"Dead, huh," he said.

"Almost certainly. As such, it would require considerable dedication to forge such an expedition." Emma looked up at him again, and she tilted her head. "I'd be in need of at least one trustworthy individual, even if he'd no talent for compliments, nor skill with words, nor the ability to restrain himself when presented with even the slightest of seductions, or even if the motions of his mouth failed to match the words that he spoke." One of her hands slid down along his chest. "Ideally, he'd be precisely this large as well, and I'd not mind it in the slightest if he possessed a lengthier tongue than a human."

Drake's eye roll stopped, quickly becoming another frown. "What do you mean my mouth doesn't match what I'm saying?"

"I'd thought…" She frowned back at him. "I'd thought surely you've been utilizing some manner of spell in order to converse? Naturally it's improbable you'd be capable of speaking any language from my world."

"Huh." Answers part of the question about the game's translation function, at least. Not that I'm expecting to ever get real answers at this point.

"No matter," she said, raising her eyebrows. "Mister Storm, do you know anyone who might match those qualities I've listed off?"

"Well," Drake said. I suppose if time was stopped…

"That's a hell of a send-off," Drake said while feeling a little dazed. And a hell of a way to wake up from a nap. How is she that good at kissing?

"Yes, I've surpassed even my own expectations," Emma said, still breathing heavily. "Perhaps I'll remain here a short while and rest. Truly your appetites have left me—"

"You just wanna take another shower," he said.

"Naturally I've a need to maintain my hygiene, as we've previously discussed," she huffed, already walking with increasing speed towards the bathroom.

"Well, have…" he paused and then blinked as his surroundings changed.