“I assume there’s a good reason why you’re sitting in the kitchen, staring fixedly at a wreck of a birdcage that even I can see was never meant to be functional, and which appears to be empty. And I can smell that bowl of potpourri from here, I might add.”
“It’s not empty,” Christian said, without looking away from the cage. “Someone trapped an air elemental in it.” He could see the elemental quite clearly, or as clearly as even a witch could see an air elemental, a vaguely-humanoid androgynous translucent figure with little detail, hovering within the once-decorative wire cage. En fluttered around in sharp jerky twitches that he thought were agitation.
“Uh-huh. And the potpourri?” Judging by Mark’s voice, he was leaning against the counter near the sink.
“Air elementals like smells. I was hoping to help en calm down and maybe communicate more clearly. En’s not really saying much, though. En sings at moments, which is interesting and actually rather pretty, but there are no words.”
“Okay. You can’t just break the cage or something? Where the hell did you find it, anyway?”
“Walked by a yard sale and saw it. And I’m not sure what will happen if I break the cage. There’s a weird spell woven into it and I want to find out what it does before I mess with it. The elemental is pretty impatient, I think, which is understandable. God knows how long en’s been stuck in there. No one in my family did this, but maybe someone moved and this was in their stuff, or something. I hope so, because otherwise we’d be talking possibly decades. But I’m fairly sure that while you can’t exactly kill an elemental, you can destroy one, sorta, and you can definitely hurt one. And this spell might, if I do this wrong. So I’d rather be careful and go slow.”
Presumably a witch had done this, although it wasn’t impossible for some kinds of highly-intelligent liminals—a vila trio probably could, if they saw a reason for it, or maybe a kitsune with a lot of tails, or an older naga. Whoever it had been, it was a terrible thing to do, trapping a sentient being indefinitely in a space barely large enough for en to move much. It went without saying that he had to do something about the situation. He’d already considered and discarded the idea that a single air elemental was somehow dangerous and deserved this kind of treatment. He was left with the conclusion that en had been caged unfairly—maybe to sing on command, maybe just because someone wanted to see whether they could do it.
“Right. Gotcha. So how long do you figure your new project will take?”
“I’m not sure. I’m trying to analyze the structure of the spell. I don’t know of anything in the library that works like this. My grandmother taught me about working spells into objects, but this doesn’t look like the same system. But it’s also possible that I’m over-thinking this, because it really isn’t all that complex and it might literally be just an energy cage built into the wire cage to contain anything that would normally not be stopped by the wire alone, with no extra traps or quirks or anything. Why?”
Mark came closer, rested one hip on the table, and shrugged. “I picked up a new PlayStation game. Turns out that it has a two-player co-operative mode. Each player gets their own character and their own controller. You like fantasy stuff, right? There’s a ton of Dungeons and Dragons books in the den.”
“I, uh... yes?” This couldn’t be going in the obvious but highly-improbable direction, could it?
“I thought it might be fun to check out the two-player option.”
Apparently, it could.
“I... actually, I’d love to. Although I should warn you that I don’t really have much experience with video games and what experience I do have suggests that I’m not very good at them.” A PlayStation couldn’t be that different from a gamer friend’s Atari, right? It was just prettier visuals?
Another shrug from Mark. “So we’ll die a lot. I’ve only played it for, like, an hour or so, just to see what it’s like, so I’m not going to have much more practice with this one. Not much to lose. We create a couple of characters, we run around in a huge catacombs maze underneath an abandoned monastery and kill a lot of weird critters and undead and things like that—no cats or anything that I know you’d object to—that have been summoned by one of the demon lords of Hell, near as I can figure it. We collect cool gear, we level up, we run back to town for supplies and to get gear repaired or identified, then we go back into the dungeon and kill more monsters. There are three classes, warrior does hand-to-hand, rogue does ranged attacks, and sorcerer does magic. I’m not sure the sorcerer would survive long alone, but could probably be pretty lethal with someone else.”
“That’s, um, pretty common, magic-using characters having low life and physical strength but building up to great magic.” A hack-and-slash dungeon crawl was boring in a table-top game, most of the time, but there were situations that could make it fun, and the company was a huge part of that. The same was probably true for a video game.
Possibly he really was overthinking this. “Maybe that would be more comfortable in the living room?” Christian suggested. “Is it really complicated to move it? You, um, could just move it down here and leave it here, actually, I’ve been meaning to suggest that. The TV is bigger.”
“It’s a bit of a nuisance but not really all that hard. There’s a cable that splits into three and you just have to get them all into the right holes on the back of the TV. The living room TV shouldn’t be too bad to reach. You sure about leaving it down here?”
“Yeah, why not? I mean, I understand if you’d rather be alone, but I’m at work or in the library a lot of the time anyway.”
A pause, then Mark said, “Thanks. I’ll move it.”
“As for playing your new game... give me a few minutes?”
“Take your time. Playing a game kinda calls for junk food. Did you have supper yet?”
“No, I, uh... got distracted.”
“Uh-huh. What do you like on pizza? My treat.”
“What? But...”
“Or you can find something in the kitchen.”
Christian took the hint and surrendered. “Hawaiian, please.”
“I’ll get things set up. Let me know if it’s going to take long enough that we should just wait and do it another day.”
“I don’t think it will.”
Mark left the room.
Christian looked at the air elemental in the cage, which trilled a song with all the clarity of glass bells.
“Okay, you. I have yet to see anything about this spell that suggests that it’s anything but simple and straightforward. I don’t want to rush this and risk hurting you, and I’m not taking shortcuts just because there’s something else I’d really like to be doing. Something I think might actually be really important, to tell you the truth, because this is not really something I expected but maybe it’s a good sign about Mark starting to want to be friends instead of just sharing the house? I don’t really have a lot of experience with human friends, other than my Dungeons and Dragons group and they’ve mostly moved on or moved away these days, but I don’t think it’s exactly hard to figure out that an invitation to pizza and a video game together is a friendly kind of thing. So let’s get you out of that cage so I can go take him up on it.”
He laid a hand on the cage, slowing his breathing and closing his eyes, and matched the frequency of the spell. Ultimately, it was just energy that had been shaped and woven into the wire. It was superficial, though. It wasn’t added when the wire was forged, not even when the cage was constructed. It had been done after the cage was already complete, which meant that it wasn’t actually a part of the cage, it was just a layer over it.
So if he simply disconnected it from the cage itself, in the places where it was anchored, here at the top and around the base here and here and here, then he could simply peel it away and roll it up into a ball of energy, which quickly began to deteriorate now that it no longer had a form. He kept watch every instant for any hint of a trap, of retaliation or protections or anything at all that could bite him or the captive, but found nothing.
The freed air elemental trilled again, and rushed out through the bars, swirling around the kitchen in mad ecstatic delight.
“Slow down, please,” Christian said. “I know you’re excited, but if you keep spinning like that, it’s going to...”
The wild dance whipped the air into motion around the elemental. The sudden wind jerked at the curtains over the windows, the pages of the pad of paper by the phone ruffled until the whole thing fell off the counter, and anything not secured by its own weight began to rattle. The potpourri had no chance: in seconds it was scattered everywhere, the bowl all but empty, and much of it remained airborne.
Christian bolted for the open windows and pulled back the curtains. “Over here,” he called to the elemental. “You can get outside and go join your own kind.” He winced as magnets on the fridge failed to hold notes and take-out menus and other bits of paper against the wind; the magnets rained down onto the linoleum, and the paper fluttered around the room like dazed birds. The table shook, and the sugar bowl crashed off it.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “I know, the room feels big after being stuck in that cage, but it’s even bigger outside. C’mon, come over here and outside.” He winced again as heavier and heavier objects began to move. “Please? Before the domovikha decides to never speak to me again? Okay, note to self, I really should have taken that cage outside to release you...”
The air elemental finally oriented on the window and dove for it, passing through the screen as effortlessly as the wind itself.
The chaos in the kitchen settled down.
Christian heaved a sigh of relief and started gathering up papers from the floor and shoving the chairs back into place properly. The sugar and potpourri comprised the biggest mess. Mostly things were just in a mild state of disarray. A broom would take care of the worst of it.
The domovikha stomped into the kitchen. She was small, the top of her head not past the middle of Christian’s thigh, her stocky body clad in a very Old-World costume of blouse and bodice, skirt and apron, her grey hair neatly braided and coiled. She gestured pointedly to the sugar bowl, then more generally at the rest.
“I’m very sorry,” Christian said. “I’ll take care of it. I made a bad decision, I set an air elemental free from a cage and en got a bit over-excited. I’ll clean everything up, you don’t have to do it.”
She rolled her eyes and made a shooing gesture. She chased him entirely out of the kitchen, in fact, ignoring his protests that it was his fault and therefore his responsibility.
He gave in, and went to the living room instead.
Mark was lounging on the couch, legs extended and ankles crossed.
“Heard some noise,” he commented. “Everything okay?”
“I freed en. En, well, reacted about like you might expect after who-knows-how-long in a cage. I mean, about like I should have expected.”
“Ah. Nothing broken? All cleaned up?”
“The domovikha made me leave. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if she feels that the rest of us are incapable of cleaning anything to her standards anyway. She is what she is and I’m not going to argue with that. I offered and that’s all I can do.” He wanted to not think about that particular mistake any more, and definitely not to discuss it. “Did you get the game moved okay?”
Mark gestured at a grey box on the floor in front of the static-screened TV. “All set up, game is in, memory card is in for saving the game in case we go back to it later so we don’t have to start over. Pizza should be here very soon.”
“And I can get us something to drink in a bit, once the domovikha’s done. I’m scared to mess with her.”
“Haven’t seen her, so I’ll just take your word on that. I can wait.” Mark sat forward. “You ever used a PlayStation controller before?”
“No.” It looked more complicated than a joystick. Was this going to be a mistake? Was it going to completely backfire if he couldn’t get the hang of this and Mark got frustrated?
“It’s not all that complicated. Up, down, left, and right with your left hand, four buttons for actions with your right hand. It just takes a little practice.”
“If you say so. I’m sorry in advance if I mess it up completely.”
“How are you going to mess anything up? If we die, we die. It’s a game. It’s supposed to be entertaining, not stressful.” Mark got up and walked over to the TV to turn the game on. The static turned to a black screen, and then a logo. “We start in town and we’re safe there, so you can get used to moving around. We won’t go anywhere dangerous until after the pizza’s here and you’re used to the controls. Characters first, though. How about I take the warrior and you take either the rogue or the sorcerer? I can keep anything from getting close to you and once you get a feel for it, you can cover me. Magic elemental bows, at higher levels, or magic spells, your choice.”
“I assume there’s a good reason why you’re sitting in the kitchen, staring fixedly at a wreck of a birdcage that even I can see was never meant to be functional, and which appears to be empty. And I can smell that bowl of potpourri from here, I might add.”
“It’s not empty,” Christian said, without looking away from the cage. “Someone trapped an air elemental in it.” He could see the elemental quite clearly, or as clearly as even a witch could see an air elemental, a vaguely-humanoid androgynous translucent figure with little detail, hovering within the once-decorative wire cage. En fluttered around in sharp jerky twitches that he thought were agitation.
“Uh-huh. And the potpourri?” Judging by Mark’s voice, he was leaning against the counter near the sink.
“Air elementals like smells. I was hoping to help en calm down and maybe communicate more clearly. En’s not really saying much, though. En sings at moments, which is interesting and actually rather pretty, but there are no words.”
“Okay. You can’t just break the cage or something? Where the hell did you find it, anyway?”
“Walked by a yard sale and saw it. And I’m not sure what will happen if I break the cage. There’s a weird spell woven into it and I want to find out what it does before I mess with it. The elemental is pretty impatient, I think, which is understandable. God knows how long en’s been stuck in there. No one in my family did this, but maybe someone moved and this was in their stuff, or something. I hope so, because otherwise we’d be talking possibly decades. But I’m fairly sure that while you can’t exactly kill an elemental, you can destroy one, sorta, and you can definitely hurt one. And this spell might, if I do this wrong. So I’d rather be careful and go slow.”
Presumably a witch had done this, although it wasn’t impossible for some kinds of highly-intelligent liminals—a vila trio probably could, if they saw a reason for it, or maybe a kitsune with a lot of tails, or an older naga. Whoever it had been, it was a terrible thing to do, trapping a sentient being indefinitely in a space barely large enough for en to move much. It went without saying that he had to do something about the situation. He’d already considered and discarded the idea that a single air elemental was somehow dangerous and deserved this kind of treatment. He was left with the conclusion that en had been caged unfairly—maybe to sing on command, maybe just because someone wanted to see whether they could do it.
“Right. Gotcha. So how long do you figure your new project will take?”
“I’m not sure. I’m trying to analyze the structure of the spell. I don’t know of anything in the library that works like this. My grandmother taught me about working spells into objects, but this doesn’t look like the same system. But it’s also possible that I’m over-thinking this, because it really isn’t all that complex and it might literally be just an energy cage built into the wire cage to contain anything that would normally not be stopped by the wire alone, with no extra traps or quirks or anything. Why?”
Mark came closer, rested one hip on the table, and shrugged. “I picked up a new PlayStation game. Turns out that it has a two-player co-operative mode. Each player gets their own character and their own controller. You like fantasy stuff, right? There’s a ton of Dungeons and Dragons books in the den.”
“I, uh... yes?” This couldn’t be going in the obvious but highly-improbable direction, could it?
“I thought it might be fun to check out the two-player option.”
Apparently, it could.
“I... actually, I’d love to. Although I should warn you that I don’t really have much experience with video games and what experience I do have suggests that I’m not very good at them.” A PlayStation couldn’t be that different from a gamer friend’s Atari, right? It was just prettier visuals?
Another shrug from Mark. “So we’ll die a lot. I’ve only played it for, like, an hour or so, just to see what it’s like, so I’m not going to have much more practice with this one. Not much to lose. We create a couple of characters, we run around in a huge catacombs maze underneath an abandoned monastery and kill a lot of weird critters and undead and things like that—no cats or anything that I know you’d object to—that have been summoned by one of the demon lords of Hell, near as I can figure it. We collect cool gear, we level up, we run back to town for supplies and to get gear repaired or identified, then we go back into the dungeon and kill more monsters. There are three classes, warrior does hand-to-hand, rogue does ranged attacks, and sorcerer does magic. I’m not sure the sorcerer would survive long alone, but could probably be pretty lethal with someone else.”
“That’s, um, pretty common, magic-using characters having low life and physical strength but building up to great magic.” A hack-and-slash dungeon crawl was boring in a table-top game, most of the time, but there were situations that could make it fun, and the company was a huge part of that. The same was probably true for a video game.
Possibly he really was overthinking this. “Maybe that would be more comfortable in the living room?” Christian suggested. “Is it really complicated to move it? You, um, could just move it down here and leave it here, actually, I’ve been meaning to suggest that. The TV is bigger.”
“It’s a bit of a nuisance but not really all that hard. There’s a cable that splits into three and you just have to get them all into the right holes on the back of the TV. The living room TV shouldn’t be too bad to reach. You sure about leaving it down here?”
“Yeah, why not? I mean, I understand if you’d rather be alone, but I’m at work or in the library a lot of the time anyway.”
A pause, then Mark said, “Thanks. I’ll move it.”
“As for playing your new game... give me a few minutes?”
“Take your time. Playing a game kinda calls for junk food. Did you have supper yet?”
“No, I, uh... got distracted.”
“Uh-huh. What do you like on pizza? My treat.”
“What? But...”
“Or you can find something in the kitchen.”
Christian took the hint and surrendered. “Hawaiian, please.”
“I’ll get things set up. Let me know if it’s going to take long enough that we should just wait and do it another day.”
“I don’t think it will.”
Mark left the room.
Christian looked at the air elemental in the cage, which trilled a song with all the clarity of glass bells.
“Okay, you. I have yet to see anything about this spell that suggests that it’s anything but simple and straightforward. I don’t want to rush this and risk hurting you, and I’m not taking shortcuts just because there’s something else I’d really like to be doing. Something I think might actually be really important, to tell you the truth, because this is not really something I expected but maybe it’s a good sign about Mark starting to want to be friends instead of just sharing the house? I don’t really have a lot of experience with human friends, other than my Dungeons and Dragons group and they’ve mostly moved on or moved away these days, but I don’t think it’s exactly hard to figure out that an invitation to pizza and a video game together is a friendly kind of thing. So let’s get you out of that cage so I can go take him up on it.”
He laid a hand on the cage, slowing his breathing and closing his eyes, and matched the frequency of the spell. Ultimately, it was just energy that had been shaped and woven into the wire. It was superficial, though. It wasn’t added when the wire was forged, not even when the cage was constructed. It had been done after the cage was already complete, which meant that it wasn’t actually a part of the cage, it was just a layer over it.
So if he simply disconnected it from the cage itself, in the places where it was anchored, here at the top and around the base here and here and here, then he could simply peel it away and roll it up into a ball of energy, which quickly began to deteriorate now that it no longer had a form. He kept watch every instant for any hint of a trap, of retaliation or protections or anything at all that could bite him or the captive, but found nothing.
The freed air elemental trilled again, and rushed out through the bars, swirling around the kitchen in mad ecstatic delight.
“Slow down, please,” Christian said. “I know you’re excited, but if you keep spinning like that, it’s going to...”
The wild dance whipped the air into motion around the elemental. The sudden wind jerked at the curtains over the windows, the pages of the pad of paper by the phone ruffled until the whole thing fell off the counter, and anything not secured by its own weight began to rattle. The potpourri had no chance: in seconds it was scattered everywhere, the bowl all but empty, and much of it remained airborne.
Christian bolted for the open windows and pulled back the curtains. “Over here,” he called to the elemental. “You can get outside and go join your own kind.” He winced as magnets on the fridge failed to hold notes and take-out menus and other bits of paper against the wind; the magnets rained down onto the linoleum, and the paper fluttered around the room like dazed birds. The table shook, and the sugar bowl crashed off it.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “I know, the room feels big after being stuck in that cage, but it’s even bigger outside. C’mon, come over here and outside.” He winced again as heavier and heavier objects began to move. “Please? Before the domovikha decides to never speak to me again? Okay, note to self, I really should have taken that cage outside to release you...”
The air elemental finally oriented on the window and dove for it, passing through the screen as effortlessly as the wind itself.
The chaos in the kitchen settled down.
Christian heaved a sigh of relief and started gathering up papers from the floor and shoving the chairs back into place properly. The sugar and potpourri comprised the biggest mess. Mostly things were just in a mild state of disarray. A broom would take care of the worst of it.
The domovikha stomped into the kitchen. She was small, the top of her head not past the middle of Christian’s thigh, her stocky body clad in a very Old-World costume of blouse and bodice, skirt and apron, her grey hair neatly braided and coiled. She gestured pointedly to the sugar bowl, then more generally at the rest.
“I’m very sorry,” Christian said. “I’ll take care of it. I made a bad decision, I set an air elemental free from a cage and en got a bit over-excited. I’ll clean everything up, you don’t have to do it.”
She rolled her eyes and made a shooing gesture. She chased him entirely out of the kitchen, in fact, ignoring his protests that it was his fault and therefore his responsibility.
He gave in, and went to the living room instead.
Mark was lounging on the couch, legs extended and ankles crossed.
“Heard some noise,” he commented. “Everything okay?”
“I freed en. En, well, reacted about like you might expect after who-knows-how-long in a cage. I mean, about like I should have expected.”
“Ah. Nothing broken? All cleaned up?”
“The domovikha made me leave. Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if she feels that the rest of us are incapable of cleaning anything to her standards anyway. She is what she is and I’m not going to argue with that. I offered and that’s all I can do.” He wanted to not think about that particular mistake any more, and definitely not to discuss it. “Did you get the game moved okay?”
Mark gestured at a grey box on the floor in front of the static-screened TV. “All set up, game is in, memory card is in for saving the game in case we go back to it later so we don’t have to start over. Pizza should be here very soon.”
“And I can get us something to drink in a bit, once the domovikha’s done. I’m scared to mess with her.”
“Haven’t seen her, so I’ll just take your word on that. I can wait.” Mark sat forward. “You ever used a PlayStation controller before?”
“No.” It looked more complicated than a joystick. Was this going to be a mistake? Was it going to completely backfire if he couldn’t get the hang of this and Mark got frustrated?
“It’s not all that complicated. Up, down, left, and right with your left hand, four buttons for actions with your right hand. It just takes a little practice.”
“If you say so. I’m sorry in advance if I mess it up completely.”
“How are you going to mess anything up? If we die, we die. It’s a game. It’s supposed to be entertaining, not stressful.” Mark got up and walked over to the TV to turn the game on. The static turned to a black screen, and then a logo. “We start in town and we’re safe there, so you can get used to moving around. We won’t go anywhere dangerous until after the pizza’s here and you’re used to the controls. Characters first, though. How about I take the warrior and you take either the rogue or the sorcerer? I can keep anything from getting close to you and once you get a feel for it, you can cover me. Magic elemental bows, at higher levels, or magic spells, your choice.”
