Rimelion: The Exploiter

I woke up to the ceiling again.

Different ceiling this time, though. Earth ceiling. Familiar water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like a rabbit, or possibly a very aggressive duck. I’d never decided which and will never clean it.

I was grinning.

That was new. Usually, I got here already tired, already calculating everything I hadn’t done yet, already building the mental list of catastrophes requiring my immediate queenly attention. But right now, sprawled across my bed like a starfish that had recently conquered something, I was just... grinning.

We’d done it.

The temporal shards were in my inventory. Tomorrow I’d hand them to Shad, and he’d do whatever brilliant agricultural wizard things he did, and the crops would stabilize, and the recursive null loop or whatever Lola had explained three times while I nodded like I understood would stop being a problem.

Tomorrow, everything started getting fixed.

The empire could still fight us for the world fragment. That thought tried to sneak in through the back door of my brain, dragging cold anxiety behind it. The stupid empire, with their resources and their political reach and their very pointed opinion on who should be holding what pieces of the world.

I exhaled slowly, staring at my ceiling.

I had a team. Katherine, Lisa, Natasha, Rob, Peter, Dmitry, Frozna, Scamantha, TechiLlama, Lunaris, Fty, Tramar, NightSwallow, Luminaria, Pancake, Phédre, Yuki, Lucas, Pearl, Ian, Lucy.

I tried to remember all my friends and the faces of each of them.

I also had—

My cheeks grew warm before I’d fully finished the thought.

I also had Lola.

The warmth spread to somewhere behind my sternum, which was embarrassing and wonderful at the same time. I pressed a hand to my face, still grinning.

You don’t need to be John.

I was going to think about those five words for the rest of my life, probably.

I grabbed my holophone off the nightstand more aggressively than necessary, mostly to give my hands something to do while my face finished being stupid. The screen lit up.

Default wallpaper. Blue-green abstract swirls. The background that came pre-installed because the designers had decided “inoffensive” was a personality.

I stared at it.

It was genuinely the most boring thing I’d ever seen, and I had attended a three-hour municipal budget review last week.

I needed a photo of Lola. That was obvious. I was going to take the most aggressively wonderful photo and put it right here so that every single time I picked up my phone I would see—

Actually, I’d have to be subtle about it. She’d deflect. She’d say something practical like the lighting isn’t good or Lady, we have seventeen urgent matters to address and then look away and be pink about it for the next twenty minutes. I’d have to catch her off guard.

I was already planning it.

I opened messages instead, thumbing to her contact and typed.

hey

we’re back

i have the shards

I paused, then added:

also i’m thinking about you. for normal reasons. don’t worry about it

I hit send before I could rethink the last part.

The response came instantly: You’ve reached Lola during her active time in Rimelion. For urgent Rimebreak matters, please contact the secondary administrative line. For non-urgent matters, try again later.

I read it twice.

Then I set the holo face-down on my chest and stared back at the ceiling.

She was in Rimelion. Probably working. Reorganizing something, or cross-referencing grain manifests at two in the morning, or charming Altandai’s administrative staff into compliance through sheer professional competence.

I’d tell her tomorrow.

All of it. The shards, the plan, the empire. How I felt watching her reorganize my entire day in the cafeteria as if it were nothing. How she’d lain beside me that morning, very carefully professional, very visibly not professional at all.

I’d tell her, and she’d blush, and she’d pick up her tablet, and I’d call her sweetie until she made that strangled noise she made when she couldn’t decide whether to be exasperated or flustered.

I closed my eyes.

Still grinning.

The problem with elven hormones was that nobody had warned me they came with a volume knob.

Human emotions, in my experience, were background noise. Present, manageable, something you could stuff in a drawer when you needed to function. Elven emotions, apparently, were a full orchestral performance in a small room, and tonight’s featured piece was something embarrassingly warm and soft that kept replaying you don’t need to be John on a loop while my face did things I had no control over.

Meditation, Irwen had said. Center yourself. Find stillness.

I sat cross-legged on my bed and tried very hard to find stillness.

The stillness kept Lola in it.

I breathed. Focused. Let the thoughts pass like clouds, like Irwen showed, serene and unhurried and completely unlike what I was actually doing, which was thinking about Lola’s handwriting on holo-manifests and the way she said Lady when I was being impossible and approximately forty-seven other completely mundane details that my brain had apparently filed under critical information.

Lola’s expression when I’d said sweetie floated across my allegedly empty mind. The exact shade of red she’d turned. The way she’d walked away with tremendous dignity and approximately zero composure.

I breathed slower.

The way she’d settled onto my lap in Roberto’s car. How she’d held herself perfectly rigid for approximately forty-five seconds before quietly, incrementally, stopped fighting it.

Focus, I told myself.

Her voice: You don’t need to be.

An hour in, I had achieved something approaching calm. Not full stillness. More of a negotiated ceasefire.

Then someone knocked on the door.

I unfolded myself from the bed, padded to the door, and opened it.

Pearl.

I had seen Pearl in many outfits. I was, at this point, prepared for Pearl’s outfits. I thought.

This was an oversized cropped hoodie with some pastel-haired anime girl splashed across the front, the character who probably wielded a weapon twice her size and smiled about it, the hood pulled up even though we were very much indoors, paired with tiny athletic shorts that all but vanished beneath the hem and thigh-high striped socks that had absolutely no business looking that bold and that self-assured.

Platform shoes added a few unapologetic inches, and her wrists glittered with an unnecessary but impressive collection of tech bracelets and LED bands that blinked faintly. A headset rested pushed back over her hood, slightly askew.

Her makeup had a sharp wing of eyeliner that could probably cut glass, a soft shimmer catching at the inner corners of her eyes like starlight off a loading screen, and a faint gloss that made her look permanently lit by RGB. There was a tiny star drawn just under one eye, subtle enough to miss unless you were looking.

Behind her, Lucas stood in his normal clothes, hands in his pockets, wearing an expression that suggested he was already deeply embarrassed about whatever was about to happen.

“Hey!” Pearl grinned, bright and completely unabashed. “Sorry to bug you. Can we ask a favour?”

I leaned against the doorframe. “Sure.”

“So,” Pearl’s eyes slid sideways to Lucas, then back to me with barely contained delight. “We want—Lucas wants to transform. And we found out he can’t do it too far from you, so...”

I glanced at Lucas, and he looked at a point approximately six inches above my head.

“Lucas,” Pearl nudged him with her elbow. “Go on.”

“I know how to—”

“Lucas.”

He exhaled through his nose. Squared his shoulders like a man walking into something he’d already accepted and hated.

“By heart and horizon—let the wind remember me!”

The wind came. The light came. The whole theatrical production happened in my hallway at whatever-o’clock in the morning, petals and ribbons and the soft rush of displaced air, and then there was Windprincess Lucas, ponytail bouncing, skirts settling, bracers glowing faintly in the dim hallway light.

He looked up at me with eyes, his expression conveying both please don’t say anything and I know exactly what you’re going to say.

Pearl made a sound as if she’d just seen a baby animal. “Okay, but—” she pressed both hands to Luka’s cheeks, “—every time. Every single time. It gets me every time.”

“Thank you,” Luka said flatly. “Can we go?”

“Thank you, Charlie!” Pearl called over her shoulder, already steering Luka away by the shoulders, directing her down the corridor with proprietary cheerfulness.

I watched them go.

Then Pearl, mid-stride, reached over and slapped Lucas on the backside with a resounding crack. “So cute!” she declared, and wrapped both arms around him from behind, nearly lifting him off his feet.

Lucas made a noise.

I closed my door.

I sat back down on my bed, returned to my cross-legged position, and resumed meditating.

Relationships, I thought. Perfectly normal.

I breathed slowly and thought about nothing at all, which was somehow easier now.

The morning light came in pale and unhurried through the curtains.

I was somewhere between meditation and actual sleep, the elven ambiguity again, deeply frustrating, when the knock came. Same cadence as before.

I got up, opened the door.

Pearl and Lucas. Lucas in his normal clothes again, not transformed, looking slightly rumpled and refusing to make eye contact with anything.

“What happened?” I asked.

Pearl’s grin was enormous. “Okay, so. We went back to our apartment first and—”

“We had fun,” Lucas interrupted, the words coming out clipped and extremely flat. His face was red, though.

Pearl nodded serenely. “We had fun. And then we decided—since Luka is going to be transforming regularly now—that we should go shopping for him. Get him some proper clothes for Windprincess mode.” She tilted her head. “Practical, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So we headed down to street level.” Pearl paused. “And when we got to the bottom of the tower... he transformed again. Probably too far away from you?”

I looked at Lucas.

He was staring at the ceiling.

“We didn’t want to bother you,” Pearl continued cheerfully. “Since it was like three in the morning, we just went to take a nap.” She considered this. “Well. Lucas took a nap. I went back out and got snacks. And then I came back. And then I went back out and got more snacks.”

“Three trips,” Lucas confirmed quietly to the ceiling.

“Three trips,” Pearl agreed.

Huh.

Lucas finally looked at me. His expression was the most resigned thing I had ever witnessed. “It’s fine,” he said, in the tone of someone for whom nothing was fine.

“It’s great, actually,” Pearl corrected. “We watched the sunrise. It was kind of romantic.” She smiled at him. Lucas’s resigned expression shifted into something he was clearly trying to hide. Pearl turned back to me. “Anyway! Shopping trip. You want to come?”

I considered the temporal shards. Shad. The meeting. All the responsible, queenly things I was supposed to be doing with my morning.

Then I looked at Lucas, his girlfriend beaming beside him as if this had been a perfectly reasonable series of events.

“Yeah,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”

Pearl’s grin widened. “Excellent. Lucas, she’s coming.”

“I heard,” Lucas said. He sighed. “...Thank you, Charlie.”

“Anytime, Windprincess.”

He closed his eyes briefly.

Pearl patted his shoulder. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“You will,” she insisted.

The lobby of the Rimebreak Tower at this hour was all polished floors and quiet. Phèdre was sitting in one of the lobby chairs as if she’d been placed there decoratively.

She had a small coffee in one hand, legs crossed, wearing something effortlessly put-together in deep burgundy that made the entire lobby look underdressed by comparison. She looked up as the elevator opened, and her expression shifted into warm amusement.

“Bonjour.” She tilted her head. “What are the cuties doing at this hour?”

“Shopping,” Pearl said, falling into step. “For Lucas.”

Phèdre’s gaze slid to Lucas, curious. “Shopping? For what reason?”

Pearl opened her mouth.

Lucas opened his first. “Clothes,” he said carefully. “Just. Clothes.”

“He needs a new wardrobe,” Pearl agreed, with the specific brightness of someone sitting on a secret. “New... situation. New clothes.”

Phèdre looked between them, one brow arching slightly. Something perceptive moved behind her eyes, but she let it rest, turning her coffee cup slowly. “A new situation,” she repeated, tasting the words. “Intriguing.”

“Lucas,” Pearl said, turning to him with a sweet smile. “Show her.”

“No.”

“Lucas—”

“Pearl. No.”

“It’ll take two seconds—”

“The answer is no, it has always been no, it will continue to be—”

“Mon dieu,” Phèdre said mildly, “you are going to hurt yourself.” She set her coffee down on the side table and stood in one fluid movement, straightening her jacket. The smile she turned on Lucas was small and entirely too knowing. “You don’t have to show me anything, chéri.”

Lucas visibly relaxed.

“I’ll simply wait,” she continued pleasantly, “until I find out on my own.”

Lucas stiffened again.

Pearl was grinning.

Phèdre glanced at me, then at the door. “May I come? I find I have nothing pressing this morning, and shopping with interesting company—” her eyes drifted back to Lucas with quiet amusement, “—sounds far more rewarding than sitting here.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oui,” Pearl agreed, already heading for the garage door. “The more, the merrier.”

Lucas looked at me with an expression that said, clearly, you could have said no on my behalf.

I smiled at him.

He exhaled and followed.