"It has been around 15 minutes since you were in trials, how long was it for you? As for the room... well I guess a hefty bill is due? Prepare your apologies too, hehe." Eva giggled as she worked through his questions in order, then squinted at him with the particular focused expression she wore when shifting from one mode of thinking to another. "As for your mushroom friend... I guess take her out of your inventory and let me try if the healing magic works on her."

Aaron didn’t need to be told twice.

He pulled up the inventory and retrieved Alyssa with a care that was immediately and obviously visible to both women in the room. The worry on his face wasn’t the kind that could be managed or tucked away — it sat right on the surface of him, plain and unguarded in a way that Aaron rarely allowed himself to be. Claire and Eva both saw it clearly, read it without needing to discuss it, and felt the weight of it settle into them in the way that other people’s genuine worry tends to. They didn’t know Alyssa. They couldn’t fully understand whatever had grown between the two of them during the trial, a connection forged in circumstances they’d only heard described secondhand. But they knew Aaron, and seeing him look like that was enough.

Alyssa came out of the inventory small and still. She was roughly the size of a medium teddy bear — the kind you might find on a shelf, decorative and soft-looking — her body cool to the touch in the way that mushroom skin simply was, that faint chill that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with what she was made of. It wasn’t alarming. It was just Alyssa. Aaron knew that, and knowing it didn’t stop the particular tightness in his chest from sitting exactly where it was sitting.

Eva moved closer immediately, drawn in by curiosity that she didn’t bother to pretend wasn’t there. She leaned down and examined Alyssa with the attentive, methodical focus of someone who had spent enough time around healing magic to know the difference between what needed urgency and what needed patience. Alyssa’s delicate features, the unique quality of her skin, the miniature proportions of her — all of it was genuinely new to Eva in a way that went beyond simple novelty.

It was a matter of geography and circumstance, really. Both Claire and Eva had grown up in Snombi, a city situated near the centre of the northern continent — what most people simply called the human continent, for the obvious reasons. They were capable fighters, capable travellers in theory, but the reality of moving between regions in Solaris was a great deal more complicated than the ambition to do so. Visas were difficult to obtain and slow to process. The laws governing different races in different territories varied so wildly that navigating them required either extensive research or the kind of reckless confidence that tended to have a short lifespan. Some demon territories operated under laws so absolute and so hostile that the response to any outside criticism of them was delivered in four flat words — ’leave our country, then’ — and that was the end of the conversation. The world was large and theoretically open and practically full of walls.

So neither of them had encountered another race up close. Not like this. Alyssa in person, small and still and faintly luminous in the way that things with their own internal biology tend to be, was an entirely new experience.

Claire, characteristically, handled this new experience by leaning in and poking at Alyssa with one finger, examining her with wide eyes and the expression of someone trying to reconcile what they’re looking at with what they expected to see.

"Heh, Alyssa’s now one of the greatest of their races, she’s the tallest amongst them." Aaron said, a note of genuine pride creeping into his voice as he caught Claire’s expression.

"What...?" Eva looked up from her examination, her gaze moving between Aaron and the small, still figure in consideration. "She’s around the size of your... ahem."

Aaron’s eyelid twitched. He took a breath. Held it. Released it slowly through his nose in the deliberate, measured way of someone talking themselves out of a reaction they’d regret. Fifteen minutes, he reminded himself. For Claire and Eva, only fifteen minutes had elapsed. The vast, layered weight of everything he’d lived through — the mushfolk settlement, the nightcrawler, Bella’s realm, Karen’s white room — all of it compressed, from their side of the experience, into a quarter of an hour. They were still calibrating. He couldn’t reasonably expect them to feel the gravity of things they hadn’t had time to understand yet.

That said, they were in for quite a surprise when they did.

’They both don’t really feel that different since it has only been 15 minutes for them, huh? Well, they are in for a nice surprise~’

"I don’t like the look on your face." Claire pointed out, her eyes narrowing with the unerring accuracy of someone who had learned to read his expressions whether he wanted her to or not.

"Oh my, what a cold thing to say to your boyfriend, my love~" He pulled her in before she could object, his arms finding their familiar place around her as he kept his voice low and warm against her ear.

She harrumphed with considerable feeling and extracted herself from his hands, which had been in the process of conducting an independent investigation of their own. "Did you forget why we were in this room in the first place? No guild has come yet, but there are a few that want to recruit you. The buzznet hasn’t given up either."

The words landed and brought a whole separate layer of reality rushing back in. Aaron blinked as the memories resurfaced — the conversation with Katie, Jaq and Lia, the group discussion he’d slipped away from when his sister called, and then the class trial consuming everything that came after. The guilds had been circling before he’d even entered the trial, laying groundwork, extending feelers, and Buzznet in particular had been operating with the focused persistence of an organization that was accustomed to getting what it set its sights on.

He glanced sideways. Eva had settled into her work on Alyssa with quiet concentration, her hands moving in the careful, deliberate patterns of healing magic being applied with precision rather than force. The results looked promising — something in Alyssa’s stillness had a different quality to it now, less like absence and more like the deep, recharging stillness of genuine rest.

"Well... what are the plans then?" Aaron addressed the question toward the general direction of Eva and the room, though the angle of his attention made clear enough who he was actually asking.

"Hmm, I guess the plans are to keep you locked up here?" Claire’s tone was light, almost musical, her lips curving into something that walked the exact line between amusement and complete seriousness.

"Wha...?" He turned back to look at her, the expression on his face carrying a specific quality of betrayal that only surfaces when the person doing the betraying is someone you had trusted implicitly not to suggest you be locked up.

"What?" She stepped neatly into his line of vision, hands clasped behind her back, the smile fully settled on her lips now with no pretense of concealing it. "You didn’t think that you can just waltz out there with a pair of folded wings and such bestial eyes... right? You’re going to be killed on sight." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

The realization arrived with the particular humbling force of something that should have been obvious. Aaron’s eyes went wide for a moment, and then the whole picture assembled itself. Claire and Eva had been treating him with such natural ease and warmth — such unreserved normalcy — that the mutations had quietly faded from the front of his own awareness. Once they’d confirmed he was their Aaron, the wings and the scales and the unsettling quality of his eyes had simply become part of the backdrop of the conversation. They’d looked past them so completely that he’d almost forgotten to account for how the rest of the world would see him.

He tried to focus on his wings through the familiar sense of them folded flat against his shoulder blades — crystallized and dark, tucked into as compact and unthreatening a shape as they were capable of achieving. They still looked, at best, like a very unusual backpack. At worst, like exactly what they were. Mutations were rare enough in humans that encountering one tended to generate a response somewhere between intense scrutiny and immediate hostility. Humans were already considered the most incomplete race by most standards — the idea that one of them had somehow acquired traits that shouldn’t have been accessible to them was the kind of thing that attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention from exactly the wrong kind of people.

There was no obvious solution presenting itself.

"Phewww!" A long, heartfelt exhale cut through his thinking, and he turned to find Eva straightening up from her work, her expression carrying the particular brightness of someone who has finished something difficult and finished it well. "Finally done! She’s way too hungry for a being her size! Damn, other races are awesome!!!" The cheer in her voice was entirely genuine as she cradled Alyssa’s small form carefully in her palms and turned to face them both.

Alyssa was moving.

Small twitches at first — the subtle, incremental return of a body finding its way back to consciousness from somewhere deep and still. Her fingers shifted. Her face changed. Then her eyes opened, slow and blinking, working through the layers of awareness one at a time until they focused, and the thing they focused on was Aaron.

Her tiny mouth opened. A strange, deep calmness settled over her features — not the calmness of someone waking up disoriented, but the deliberate calmness of someone who has decided exactly what manner they intend to present themselves in.

"Kilan ty rega... za... Greetings, mortal. Recognize me?"