A Perverted Path to Victory

Chona

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Chona twisted a hand around her wrist until her fur started to hurt, each strand tugging a little bump out of her skin. She didn’t know why she was doing this. It felt crazy. Totally out of her realm of expertise. Ever since she was a little kid, she’d been the Mage. The one who helped defend her village from bandits and animals, who scared them off so bad they’d never come back.

She turned around, craning her neck over her shoulder to inspect herself in the well-polished glass the University women’s dorm used as a mirror. She was alone among the rows of bunks, since it was in the middle of the day. That was good, because it meant no one had seen her steal someone else’s comb (she’d never had one) to brush her fur from head to toe. Nor did they see her anxiously inspecting the back of her wrap, ensuring the clipped bead was squarely in the middle of her shoulder blades. It was a nicely painted bit of wood carved into the shape of a flower, and she’d bought it at the market yesterday. She’d never bothered with decorating her wrap before, and now that she was using a clip instead of tying it in place, she was constantly paranoid it was going to come undone.

She pointedly shut out the echoing memories of her mom yelling at her about running around in your damn underwear, Chona! She’d always hated the way most clothes felt on her fur, and had long dreamt of getting away with wearing nothing but a chest wrap. When she’d moved to the capital, she’d gotten the chance. Almost no one in the city had met a vanara before, so she’d just… lied to them. Told them it was a ‘vanara thing.’ That it was totally normal for vanara women to cover themselves with nothing more than a six-inch strip of cloth over their breasts, using a short-hemmed sarong to hide their waist. No one had blinked an eye at it. Most didn’t have fur in the first place, and those that did were just catfolk, who didn’t have the same kind of fur. Vanara fur was more like thicker, more coarse human hair, not catfolk fur. How were they supposed to know that no, most vanara did wear full shirts, and it was just Chona that did this?

And it had been great. She hadn’t had a single problem until she’d said that stupid, stupid thing yesterday. Asking Tinvel out on a date. Gods, what had she been thinking? She didn’t know the first thing about courting someone. That was what nobles did! Kissing Ketty a few times behind her parent’s barn back in the village didn’t count. And even when she’d done that, she’d been wearing a damn shirt!

The beaded clip suddenly slipped. Chona’s heart lurched. Her arm swung behind herself to catch it, palm slamming down so hard the metal cut into the skin.

What if that had fallen in front of Tinvel?

Her heart was pounding. A few months ago, maybe even a few weeks ago, the thought would have made her laugh. He was the only one who’d never seemed to get fully used to her wearing what she did, and it had been funny to screw with him. Why did he care? She had fur! Even if her wrap dropped, there wasn’t much more skin showing on her than if she’d been dressed properly. Just as she’d always argued to her parents, it didn’t make sense for anyone with fur to wear more than the bare essentials.

In hindsight, maybe her folks had a point. Now that she was imagining her wrap dropping in front of Tinvel on this date, it suddenly seemed to matter a whole, whole lot more.

Chona put the clip back in place oh-so-carefully, securing the garment. She was wearing her ruby-red wrap, the one that she’d spent way too much money having made out of actual silk. She’d only been able to afford it when that crazy pirate captain– an Admiral, now– had captured a ship carrying crateloads of the stuff. The silk glut that prize had created in sparsely-populated Tulian had been ridiculous. For a little while, silk had only cost a few times as much as cloth. Knowing it was probably the first and last time she’d be able to afford such expensive clothes, she’d put it to good use.

The crimson weave she now wore was so tight and smooth that it barely caught her fur, sliding gracefully over her body every no matter which way she twisted. With a few enchantments she’d added herself, it didn’t even matter if it got wet or dirty– at least not for how it felt on her. She wasn’t good enough to do reinforcement enchantments for a flexible material, and it wasn’t like they’d have been needed. All rain might do was make the silk hug her breasts a bit more closely, showing off the curve of her chest, maybe making the material a touch transparent, and that was all stuff that she didn’t… care… about…

Chona scurried over to the dorm’s window, twisting her neck to judge the skies. The typhoon had finished up overnight, leaving nothing but blue skies in its wake. She could see there wasn’t a speck in sight. She was no soothsayer, but she’d spent a lot of time flying through the clouds. It wasn’t going to rain.

She chewed her lip. Then, hurrying back over to the chest at the end of her bunk, she threw the lid open, searching for something to slip under her wrap. Just in case. She had more chest wraps, a few knives, some of her sarongs, an experimental grenade she’d snuck out of the University’s experimental armory, some bottles of alchemical reagents that she probably shouldn’t be storing next to a grenade, and a linen pack for traveling. There wasn’t really anything that she could use to put over her nipples in case it rained. She didn’t even know what she was supposed to use for that, actually. Human women wore brassieres, right? Or those smaller ‘bras’ that the Governess had started making out of azarketi nylon, she remembered. But now that she thought about it, there had been plenty of times when she’d seen human women’s nipples poking through their shirts regardless. She’d snuck plenty of glances. If that was something they were still dealing with, even when wearing brassieres, there must not be a good solution.

I’m going on a date. With a guy. Shit! What do guys even like?

Back in her village, Chona knew from firsthand experience that Ketty, a farmer’s daughter, had liked to touch her chest, and that definitely held true for guys, too, but that wasn’t something you could just do. She didn’t know how courting worked, but that definitely wasn’t it. Much less on a first date.

Gods, what did anyone do on a first date? The few times she’d tried to imagine herself going out on the town with someone, her mind’s eye had always presented her with a waifish, pretty girl clinging who hung on Chona’s arm as she told dramatic stories about her dangerous exploits. That wasn’t going to work for Tinvel: he’d been there for most of those stories.

Chona shut the lid of her personal chest with a melodramatic sigh. She didn’t know which hell she’d dragged herself down into with this, but she suspected it was one that tortured its victims with the agon of overthinking.

Then, looking down at herself, she scoffed. She’d picked out her nicest sarong. A shiny green one, one of her only skirts with an embroidered edge. She shouldn’t have bothered, though. The only reason she’d finally decided to give Tinvel a chance was because he’d actually stood up and yelled back at her for once.

And because his work on engines had ended up giving that little willow-boned body a bit of tone, she supposed.

And… well, also because of the way he’d piloted the Sunrise against the griffons, taking them down one-by-one with unerring, mechanical precision, almost like one of the machines he’d invented.

And because ever since he’d started flying, he’d started smiling more, and gotten tanner, and that tan smile had gained a little bit of a cocky slant to it that had an irritating way of making something flutter in her stomach.

Oh! And there was the way she’d been blindsided by his help in creating her new spell, because an artificer really shouldn’t have that kind of knack for spellcasting. That had been pretty impressive.

And then there was the way he…

Chona shook her head, clearing her thoughts. There were, possibly, multiple reasons that she asked him out. But the main one, the important one, was that he’d actually yelled back at her. That had been when she decided he had enough of a spine to be worth her time. So, if she was the one making the decision for them to go out, that meant he was the one who was trying to impress her, right? That made sense. Perfect sense. So she shouldn’t worry so much about looking nice for the date. It was his job to be impressive, not her’s.

With a deeply frustrated sigh, Chona smoothed her rumpled sarong, fighting off one last moment of temptation to wear a normal shirt. With an exaggerated sense of confidence, she stomped towards the door.

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So. Step one in Chona’s plan had already failed. It turned out that a city which had just been hit by a typhoon was not, in fact, the best place to have a walking date.

She’d initially imagined they were going to do what they’d already done plenty of times before, when they went around the city to gather goods they’d ordered from various smithies and craftsmen, but for the date, there wasn’t going to be a destination. That plan was easy, simple, and, from what she’d heard, a popular way to spend time courting someone when you lived in a city.

When Chona walked outside and saw the first capsized roof blocking half a city street, its upturned hulk crawling with furiously shouting workers attempting to clear the mess, she realized that Plan A had gone down to shit.

The city was a mess. The new mandatory building codes had done wonders, of course, but that only helped anything that had been constructed since the laws were passed. So much of Tulian was borderline ancient, with the bones of many homes and shops dating back centuries. Now that they’d been left unmaintained for a decade, shortly after having been brutalized by two years of supernatural storms, there was a whole lot that was ready and waiting to fail. The wind and rain of a typhoon was more than enough straw to break the horse’s back.

Even if she wanted to change plans, she still had to go to where she’d instructed Tinvel to meet her, though. That meant squeezing her way through the heaving, shouting press, tiptoeing past some workers and darting between others. Dust and dirt had been caked into their shirtless, sweaty bodies, and she had to leap back several times to not get that disgusting mess pressed into her fur.

The city’s damage wasn’t too bad, she thought. Any occupied dwellings had been making use of cheap lumber (courtesy of new mechanical sawmills, themselves courtesy of artificers like Tinvel) to replace every rotted and weathered beam in their homes. That was only the case for buildings someone lived in, however. It was the abandoned buildings of the city which had suffered, and unfortunately, Tulian still had a great many empty homes.

Gods, what was I thinking? Chona berated herself. The typhoon was literally still happening when I made those plans.

No going back now. Though it required several detours, Chona eventually made her way to the place she’d told Tinvel to meet her. Shading her eyes against the sun as she judged the time, she decided it was a touch past noon. Good. She’d told Tinvel to meet her there before noon, and she’d planned to keep him waiting for a bit.

She didn’t know why she’d done that. Knowing he was waiting on her, instead of the other way around, just made her feel a bit better.

A strange new trend had begun in Tulian, once the Governess had provided a bit of stability to the once-ruined streets. Among all the other shops that had opened back up, all the expected businesses like smiths, tailors, cobblers, and so on, there had also been a few odd additions. Close enough to the docks to be accessible and known to sailors spending their time ashore, but far enough away to avoid the chaotic shouts and clangs of merchant industry, there was an… inn? She didn’t know what to call it. It wasn’t an inn or tavern, really. They didn’t have rooms for any travelers to stay in. The building was built where an old tenement house had collapsed, but it was only a single story, because they didn’t need any extra floors for rooms. No one lived there, no one slept there.

It was a place that just… sold food. Pre-cooked food for you to eat while you were there. Nothing else. You couldn’t even buy ingredients from them.

It was weird. She couldn’t imagine why people spent their money on something so ridiculous. But apparently the food was pretty good, and you got a whole meal and everything. So the rumor claimed, one of the slave-ships liberated by the Tulian Navy had been captained by someone rich enough to bring their personal cooks aboard. After the captain had been hanged, those cooks had set up shop in Tulian, selling what they made to common people.

Chona couldn’t imagine it was that good. Lots of people kept talking about it though, including Tinvel, so she’d decided it wasn’t a bad place to start.

Turning the last corner before the shop, she found herself slightly surprised. The building was in very good condition. Chairs and tables were already set up around the perimeter, the property line marked by a fenced-in section that kept people from wandering between tables of guests (were they still called guests, when it wasn’t an inn?) as they took the corner. The tables were more full than she’d expected, too, and with a different sort of people than she’d imagined would be there. Instead of wealthy businessfolk, shop owners, and passing merchant captains, it was… workers. People wearing smocks with gloves sticking out of their pockets, or covered in charcoal soot from a forge, or even dusted in the dirt and grime of a morning spent cleaning up the typhoon’s rubble.

And there was Tinvel, standing amongst a crowd that was milling around the shop. She spotted him easily enough, partially because he was the only one who didn’t have someone else standing with them, but mainly because he was also wearing that godawful hacked-together flight jacket he’d made. It was hilariously out of place in the crowd, seeing as it had always been a bit thick for the temperatures they saw at their plane’s maximum altitudes, much less the muggy slog that was sea-level Tulian. She hated the ugly damn thing, and had told him a thousand times he needed to buy a proper jacket, but he always refused. He’d rather spend an hour every other day patching busted seams than spend the coin on something that felt, worked, and looked a hundred times better.

He didn’t notice her walking up. He was watching the tables with a furrowed brow, drumming his fingers against his legs.

“Hey,” Chona said as she slid up beside him, startling him. “Sorry I’m late.”

He glanced at the sun. “Really late.”

“I know. Sorry. I didn’t expect there to be so much work on the roads.”

“We started at the same place.”

She winced. Then, too late, questioned why she was making excuses, much less wincing. She’d intentionally come late, hadn’t she?

But Tinvel looked irritated. Her stomach sank. He wasn’t supposed to be irritated by that. He was supposed to be happy to finally see her. She’d heard some of the girls in the dorm talk about that.

I fucking hate this, Chona abruptly decided. The whole thing. Dating sucks. Why did I do this?

Now that she was here, there was no choice but to forge on.

“How was your walk over, then?” She asked. “The city’s a mess, isn’t it?”

He eyed her. “We left from the same place. You walked the same way I did.”

“Clearly not, because you got here first,” she said, rolling her eyes as if he was being ridiculous. He wasn’t, but she couldn’t admit that. “I saw the roof that fell off near the university. If that’s going to be happening with every storm, they’re probably going to have to go around and put new roofs on every building, even if no one’s living in it.”

“Probably. I saw another roof that broke, over by the baker’s street. But only half of that one fell, so they were trying to figure out what to do. No one wanted to get under it, in case the rest came down all at once.”

Chona opened her mouth, an idea occurring to her, then quickly shut it. They couldn’t go over there and help. Not because they weren’t capable, of course; a quick gust of Chona’s spell-powered wind would knock the rest of the roof right off. She couldn’t go because they were on a date, and you didn’t turn a date into work.

The silence stretched. The crowd shuffled forward slightly, and Tinvel went with them. She looked around, confused.

“What are all these people standing around for?”

Tinvel gave her a look. “The food. They’re waiting for a table to open up.”

“Really? This many people want to spend money on this crap?”

“I thought you wanted to go here.”

Chona froze, mental gears grinding. “...I did,” she lied, “It was just surprising. I’m just curious about it. I didn’t think that many people would be actually interested in coming here to eat, y’know?”

Tinvel made a humming noise that told her he really didn’t believe her. Shit, she thought, does HE even want to be here? He talked about the place, but it’s not like he actually said he wants to go there. Or… did he?

She couldn’t remember. The line scooted forward once more, dragging Chona closer toward the inevitable. She hated feeling like this. She was a bundle of nerves, and everything she did, every motion she made, it all felt so terribly unnatural. She couldn’t find a single decent way to act.

“So…” Tinvel shifted beneath his flight jacket, closing in on himself. “Why are we doing this, exactly?”

That was a question Chona had been prepared for.

“Because I wanted to see how you’d do.”

He blinked. “How I’d do?” He echoed. “What do you mean?”

“You know. If you could-”

The instant before the words impress me left her mouth, Chona’s brain flared to life. Far too late, she realized how noxiously arrogant that sounded. Good gods, that was something Affe would say.

“-cooooould… uh. Have a good time,” she finished lamely. “If it would be fun. For us to do this.”

“I guess that is why most people go on dates,” Tinvel said, looking away. The back of his neck was reddening. “But I just… Well, I mean. I didn’t think you’d want to.”

To Chona’s horror, she found a part of herself flailing in panic at that. That he thought she didn’t want to. Did that mean he didn’t want to, either, and was just humoring her to be polite? Or worse, that he was just testing her, too curious to turn her down?

“No!” She blurted, painfully loud. She cleared her throat. “No. No, I wanted to. Did. Did, uh. Did you?”

He turned back around. The flush on his cheeks was cute.

Cute?

She ruthlessly crushed the thought.

“Maybe, I guess,” Tinvel was saying, “but I definitely could have thought of a better time to do it. I had to tell a bunch of people where I was going in case Voth came by, or someone else had questions about a project or the Air Force. We’re pretty damn busy right now, Chona.”

“You told people?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you?”

“No,” she scoffed. “It’s not any of their damn business what I’m doing.”

He sighed, looking up and away. “We’ve got a lot of people relying on us, Chona.”

“Doesn’t mean they need to know where I am all the time.”

“It kinda does, Chona.”

The line advanced forward, finally leaving them at the front. Chona knew he was right, to some degree. And in the past, she usually had told people where she was going. But not today. Not for this. That was crazy. She wanted to ask him if he’d specifically told them he was going on a date with her, but couldn’t find it in herself.

She wanted to say something more. But everything she could think of to say was useless. Everything she’d done, everything she’d thought about, for the last year or more was essentially work. Lessons, spellcasting, fights, engineering. She didn’t have anything to talk about that wasn’t either a brag about her own accomplishments, which he’d been there to witness, or a complaint about whatever she was working on, which he was always working on, too, and certainly didn’t want to be reminded of. She had nothing left to say.

Tinvel jerked his head forward. “Look. That table’s opening up.”

Sure enough, one of the groups in the small courtyard were clearing away the last of their food, handing coin to someone. Tinvel headed off toward the table, clearly having paid more attention to how this whole operation worked than she had been.

They sat down at the table. It was a small circle of wood, but a sturdy one. It didn’t rock when they rested their arms on it.

“I guess I’m…” Tinvel’s face reddened. “I guess I’m glad you asked me to come with you. Maybe we’re busy enough that we need to relax every now and then. It’s just…” Tinvel looked left and right, as if searching for something. He shrugged, returning his attention to her. “I mean. What do you want us to do? To say? What are we doing?”

It was, in its own way, a profound relief to hear Tinvel voicing the concerns that had been screaming through her mind for the last few hours. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to have any better idea than she did.

“I don’t know,” she eventually admitted. She crossed her arms, then rapidly uncrossed them. She’d had her arms under her breasts, pushing them up slightly. She didn’t want him to think… Well, she didn’t know what she didn’t want him to think, or what he would think, but she uncrossed them all the same. “I don’t really know how people do this.”

“Neither do I.” He looked around yet again, frowning lightly. “...kinda boring, isn’t it?”

She laughed. “A little bit.”

They stopped talking as someone silently walked past their table, depositing a sheet of paper between them. Frowning at one another, Chona waited as Tinvel took it, holding it up. She could see a bunch of writing on it, as well as some drawings, but couldn’t make out much more.

As Tinvel read, his eyebrows began to crease. He leaned to his left, looking at another one of the tables, then back to the paper, then back again. His furrowed brow deepened into a full frown.

“What is it?” She asked.

“What they have for sale,” he explained, handing it over to her. A list of food items were written down the left side, accompanied by a small drawing of the item on the right, for the illiterate, along with each item’s price. The prices were… not unreasonable, she thought. A whole hell of a lot more than it would have cost to make the thing yourself, but not that much more. Miserly though Tinvel could be, she wouldn’t have expected him to be looking so frustrated with these prices.

“What’s wrong with them?” She asked. “They’re not as expensive as I expected.”

“Wrong?” He blinked, then seemed to realize what she meant. “Oh, no. Nothing’s wrong with them. I was trying to figure out how they made the list. All of the papers on the tables are the exact same. The exact same. Even down to the lettering, like it came off a printing press. But see up there, at the top? It’s got today’s date.”

Chona looked. It did, to her surprise. The date was taken from the Sporaton method instead of the new Tulian one, numbering the years since the current King ascended to the throne, but she was familiar enough with the system to see he was right. She still didn’t see what the problem was, however.

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“How did they make it?” Tinvel asked, gesturing around them. “Every table has one, and they all look exactly alike. It even says what they do and don’t have in stock, so it’s not like they just paid to have a bunch made ahead of time and write in the date each day. And there’s no way they’re getting the city’s printing presses to make a whole new menu for them every day.”

Now Chona was frowning, too. “Maybe they have someone with a Skill that lets them copy writing really quickly? Or someone that learned a spell to do it, maybe. Professor Garen was talking about how the libraries of Sporatos have people like that.”

“Maybe. That’s what I was thinking of, at first. But Professor Garen also said those spells can’t copy drawings, right? Something about how art has more Intent in the individual brush strokes than letters do.”

Chona hummed, considering. The two of them were in the upper echelons of Tulian’s only University. Even if Chona was a spellcaster first, industrialist second, the idea that some random business was doing something that confused both her and Tinvel was absurd. There had to be something more going on.

“What about those wood etching printing techniques Professor Brown was talking about?” She suggested. “It’s not as good as an iron or steel press, since it wears out so quickly, but it’s the only way they could be doing drawings for cheap like this.”

“But how would they be doing so many drawings of the food?” He countered. “Some meals go in and out of availability, which means they have to change what they print each day. And they are printing the wording, too, because all the handwriting is the same between the menus. Any wood etching would be worn out way too quickly by doing that every day.”

They both contemplated it in silence, the awkwardness of the last few minutes forgotten. After a few moments, someone walking past the table stopped, turning to face them. Chona ignored them at first, thinking they were just looking at something farther beyond the table, until the figure cleared their throat with a polite ah-hem.

“Are you ready to order?” They asked.

Chona looked up. It was a man wearing a strange sort of clothing she didn’t recognize, a long-sleeved shirt tucked into stiffly starched pants. Looking around, Chona realized there were other people dressed exactly the same, all moving between the tables.

“Oh!” Tinvel’s expression was sheepish. “Sorry, we were just looking at the menu, and didn’t really have any time to-”

“How did you make this?” Chona interrupted, thrusting the paper into the man’s face. “Do you have a deal with the printing presses? Or is there a mage in Tulian we don’t know about?”

The man leaned back, eyes crossing as he looked at the sheet Chona had shoved toward him.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am.”

“The words,” she said, shaking the paper. “The letters, the drawings, the prices. All of it. How are you making all these sheets over and over again, every single day?”

“Ah. Well, it’s not something I-”

“We’re part of the Tulian University,” she interrupted. “If you’ve got a mage capable of copying a hundred sheets of paper each day, including drawings, we want to know about it.”

The man took a step back, clearly intimidated. He cleared his throat, looking about helplessly, as if someone might come rescue him.

Tinvel, who’d first been appalled by Chona’s forwardness, raised his eyebrows at the man’s nervousness. “You don’t really have a mage working for you, do you?” He asked. “Do you have any idea how hard the University’s been working to find mages? If you have a mage that can already do this, I’m sure Professor Garen will pay good money for their services.”

“No, no,” the man finally said. At first bewildered, then slowly growing more fearful, he now seemed so shocked by the sudden interrogation that he was practically gasping out his words. “No, we have a, a particular, ah, machine for it. I’ve only done it once myself, but it’s no magic at all, I assure you.”

“How does it work, then?” Chona demanded. “This is, what, fifteen different meals? And they change regularly, too. There’s no way you’re keeping enough printing forms for every different version of the menu. Is it wood etching, or iron, or what?”

Noticing that sweat was now beading the man’s forehead, Tinvel sighed, lowering his voice. “You’re not in trouble, and neither is your boss. Since it’s not a mage doing it, we’re just curious about how it works.”

The man swallowed, nodding. “Well, as I said, I’ve only had the duty once, but it’s fairly easy. We have these blocks of carved wood that we dip in ink, then a machine that we place them in, which lets us press them evenly down onto the paper. Nothing more to it than that.”

“How do you have that many etched blocks ready, though?” Chona challenged. “What do you do if you run out of one food, or make another meal to be put on sale?”

“Well, I suppose we would have another block made, ma’am?”

“So you have hundreds of etchings back there for every single possible version of your meal list?”

“What?” The man’s polite facade cracked, allowing his irritability to shine through. “No, that would be stupid. We have a single block for each drawing and its name, of course.” He cleared his throat. “Ma’am.”

Chona looked at Tinvel. The artificer boy was blinking, staring at nothing.

“Oh,” he said. “I… yeah, that makes sense. I was just thinking that it would be like how the printing presses do pages with drawings, with a whole page printed at once, but if you’re just making a few every day, then… huh.”

The man cleared his throat yet again. It was getting annoying.

“And for your order…?” He prompted.

Chona and Tinvel, feeling embarrassed, hastily picked their meals, choosing nearly at random. The man retreated at the double, taking the list of foods they’d been investigating with him, leaving them alone at the table once more.

“Welp,” Chona knocked her knuckles against the tabletop. “That was disappointing.”

“No hidden mage,” Tinvel agreed.

“Or secret, fancy printing press.”

“Nope.”

After a moment of strained silence, they both began to laugh. It was ridiculous, after all. Here they were, the day after a typhoon, going to some strange place where they were paying someone to make food for them, and their uppity “Tulian University Mage” act had been trumped by some random worker who’d spent the morning dipping wood in ink. No conspiracy or hidden innovation; just them overthinking things. It was funny. They had no choice but to laugh.

“See?” Tinvel eventually said. “That’s what we get for overcomplicating things.”

“It’s a bad habit of ours,” Chona agreed. “Damn. I almost feel bad.”

“I definitely feel bad.”

“About the fact you didn’t think of it yourself, maybe.”

“That’s not the only reason,” he protested, laughing again.

The conversation eased somewhat, after that. They began talking about the printing presses, and how Professor Brown was planning to have the presses powered by steam as soon as he could, and whether or not they thought it would be possible to have those lacking Talavan’s Gift operating such complex works of artificery. Chona still didn’t think so, confident that anyone who couldn’t sense spell energy was going to be utterly baffled by the machines, but Tinvel was convinced otherwise. He was confident he could build an engine simple enough to run that anyone, so long as they had some training, would be able to use them. That then turned into a discussion of whether or not the University would be opening its doors to everyone who wanted to learn, like Professor Brown preferred, or if it would be restricted to the magically talented, like most other Universities, or if they’d have some kind of compromise system, with admissions interviews and all the struggles that would come with that.

For a while, Chona didn’t even understand why the conversation had gotten easier. Just that it had. She didn’t know about Tinvel, but for her at least, the terrible anxiety that had consumed her from the instant she’d woken up that morning was finally banished. Despite the fact that they were sitting alone together at a table, not in the aerodrome or University, the little mystery had felt normal. Familiar. Going on a date was the farthest thing from either of those things, but working together on something, trying to figure out something confusing? That was the kind of thing they always did.

Last night, Chona had been madder at Tinvel than she’d been in a long time. The news of who would be in charge of the Air Force, after all they’d done to put it together, all the work they’d put into every part of it, had been insulting. Degrading. That they could have their accomplishments just wrenched away from them like that, it had set her off like a powder keg. Angrier than she’d been in months. When it turned out that Tinvel, the person she was mad on behalf of, hadn’t seemed a fraction as pissed as she did? Well, that was just too much. She didn’t even know what to do with that. So she’d gotten mad at him, too.

He’d gotten mad back, of course, which she was used to, but what she hadn’t been used to was him being right. More than that, he’d been right because he’d been acting more… mature, she guessed. He was considering the politics of it, acting rationally, not emotionally. She wasn’t used to him being the mature one. They were about the same age, but she’d always considered herself above him in a lot of ways. She was a mage, for starters, not an artificer, and that age-old rivalry definitely played a part, but it was more than that. She’d been in fights before. Real ones, serious ones, with lives on the line. She knew what it was like to fight for something, how it felt to have people you needed to protect, and she’d known that from a very young age.

Tinvel had been anything but. While she’d been burning bandits alive out in the grasslands, he’d found one little damp, soggy artificer notebook he’d looted out of a shattered Old Tulian building, and he’d based his entire life off of it. Even after getting into the University, where she’d met him, he’d practically stunk of that book. Musty, isolated, and filled with pointless abstractions. He had seemed like he’d never change. She’d been convinced that he was trapped in a world of imaginary problem solving, never actually understanding that all the projects he worked so hard on were actually for something, that there was a wider world he had to consider.

That had changed. She didn’t know when it had started, or even when she’d started noticing it, but it had changed. Their arguments had stopped been her insulting him for not understanding the real world, him insulting her for not understanding the complexities of his work, and had become…

Well. Still insulting. But it was them both insulting the problem they were trying to solve, not each other. They had a mutual opponent, and they’d started listening to each other, sharing ideas.

And then he’d taken her into the skies. Asked her to sit in the plane with him, because he didn’t trust anyone else’s spells to keep him safe. She’d said yes, and they’d flown together.

Thinking back, that was probably the first time his smile had looked different. It hadn’t been different, not really. But that was the first time it had made her feel different.

Their food arrived, snapping her back to reality. Chona discovered she’d somehow ended up ordering an entire fried fish laid out on a bed of rice, while Tinvel had a dozen cubes of meat that were poked through with a stick, vegetables piled high on the skewer. She was hungry, and she ate eagerly. As they ate, they kept talking about the shop’s wood-etched printing press, or the University’s plans, or any other number of things. A part of her wanted to change the topic off of work, but it was going too well. All her ideas of what they were ‘supposed’ to talk about on this date (or more accurately, her lack thereof), weren’t needed. She’d started liking him when they worked together on something. It wasn’t like those other girls she’d been into back in the village, who had never understood what it was like to be her. She and Tinvel actually had things in common. She didn’t need to invent something for them to do. She just needed to find something that they both thought was fun.

When their meal was finished, and she’d finally convinced Tinvel to stop trying to haggle with the employee about the price of his meal, they stood.

“So…” Some of the awkwardness Chona had been feeling for herself slipped into Tinvel’s words. “What are we going to do now?”

She shrugged, beginning to walk. As she went, she waved over a boy who was selling broadsheets. “I was originally planning for us to walk around. Maybe go to the parks, or down to the harbor.”

“That sounds-”

“But,” Chona interrupted, “I’ve got a better idea.” She tossed the boy a few copper, taking the broadsheet from him, and showed its front cover to Tinvel. An etching of the Sunrise, its half-red wings rendered in stark black, above which ran a thick, bold headline.

War in the Air! Creatures Attack, Aeroplanes Bite Back!

Parliament Announces Tulian’s New Force of War!

Chona grinned wickedly. “I bet the Air Force is allowed into the city’s armories. Even more than that, I bet you that the Air Force is allowed to grab whatever they want and walk out with it.”

Tinvel blanched. “Chona…” he said warningly.

She wiggled the broadsheet like she was teasing a stray dog with a slice of meat. “Come onnnn, Tin. Haven’t you been wondering about the new guns they’re making?”

He shrugged. “Well, sure, but we can’t just go do that. The Air Force doesn’t even exist yet, and we’re definitely not part of it. Not officially, anyway.”

“Really?” Chona made a show of perusing the article. “From what I read here, the Air Force has been active in secret for months, and has actually been…” She stopped, read a bit more closely, then snorted. “Okay, what the hells? I was screwing around, but look at this. They’re saying we’ve been fighting a secret war against hundreds of griffons. Who’s coming up with this?”

“Someone who wants to make money, I’m guessing,” Tinvel said, taking the paper from her. He read, then laughed as well. “Gods. I wish we had as many planes as they say we’ve already lost. Three dozen. Can you imagine?”

“They’re optimists, I guess. But the important thing is,” her lips peeled in a dangerous, toothy smile, “that because of that paper, the people in the armory are gonna think that there’s an Air Force. And they won’t be hard to convince that we’re real important in it. Important enough to let inside.”

Tinvel looked up from the broadsheet. “We can’t just-”

“And I’ve also heard that the city’s main armory has a bunch of different versions of the army’s new rifled muskets that they’re putting through tests. Professor Brown was saying that they’ve got almost a dozen different versions of the firing mechanisms, and everyone’s been arguing over which is better.”

Tinvel was wavering, a plaintive expression on his face. He knew he’d been caught. “Well. I mean,” he said weakly, “those guns are really complicated things, I’m sure. Maybe they’d want help with them. But Professor Brown’s already working on it, and he knows more about guns than I do. They wouldn’t need me to take a look at it.”

“Maybe,” she said, still grinning. “But once they choose a version, they’re probably going to get rid of all the old ones. Chop ‘em up or melt ‘em down. You’ll never have actually gotten to see them.”

She stepped closer to Tinvel. Closer than she’d ever stepped before, it felt like, even if that couldn’t be true. They’d bumped and shoved one another countless times. But she’d never stepped closer to him for no other reason than the fact that she wanted to be closer. Somehow, the inch of empty air between them in that moment felt a thousand times more intimate than every incidental press of fur against skin.

She was just a little bit taller than him, she noted. Not much. A finger’s width or less. That wasn’t nearly enough of a difference for her to not be looking him in the eyes in the moment when his attention darted downward, flicking ever-so-briefly towards her chest, then back upward. Looking at her breasts, which were a hair’s width from rubbing against his chest.

He’d done that before. Hells, everyone did. Chona had never minded. It came with being a woman wearing what was basically underwear in public, and so long as most people kept it to a polite little glance, she’d never even bothered to remember the moment, much less hold it against them. Hells, she’d done it to other women more times than she could count, and almost all of those had been involuntary. It was just the way things were, and she was used to it.

The sensation of disappointment, however, that came with this particular glance? That was fairly new. And the fact that she was disappointed not because he had glanced, but because it was only a glance? That was entirely unprecedented. But… not unwelcome, she decided.

They stood close to one another for a second. Then two. Then three. She kept looking at him, watching his eyes to see if he’d glance again, practically daring him to. Then she saw the way he was beginning to look terribly uncomfortable, which made Chona abruptly realize she’d been doing nothing other than staring him straight in the eyes for a solid five seconds of complete, utter silence.

Like oil-starved machinery spitefully groaning to life, Chona’s brain dredged up what she’d been saying a few moments before.

“So, what do you think?” She asked.

His face flashed crimson. “A-about what?”

Her grin widened. “Going to see the new guns, of course. I bet we can convince them to let us shoot a few. I think it’d be fun.”

“We… shouldn’t?”

“We’re going to, though.”

“Chona.”

“Come on. Let’s get going.”

After that, Tinvel tried a couple different arguments for why they shouldn’t, but they were all perfunctory, uninspired protests. He had to at least pretend he wasn’t perfectly willing to lie his way into a Tulian Army weapons stockpile. But, just like she’d instructed, his arguments happened even as he was already following her towards the armory.

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When the day ended, Tinvel’s hands were almost as black as Chona’s fur. Blackpowder soot had been smeared across him in wide, dark splotches, covering his skin wherever he’d wiped his hands between shots. Chona’s own fur felt awfully gritty, like she’d been rolling in sand, though it was really just scattered grains of blackpowder. After a few hours of shooting, she’d started being a lot more careful about going near any open flames. As far as first-date mistakes went, she was pretty sure that “blowing yourself up like a keg of blackpowder” was a pretty bad one. Thankfully, she managed to avoid that fate.

Using the armory’s training range, a hundred-yard stretch of alleyway with a big pile of sand at one end, they’d found that a lot of the guns had severe problems. Many had levers, pins, and screws far too complex to keep working through the inevitable buildup of blackpowder fouling. The alternative ammunition they’d been provided, “emcotton”, had worked a lot better across the board, aside from kicking so hard the gun bruised her shoulder. No one was sure if they’d be capable of making enough to outfit the whole army, so every gun design was expected to work with both kinds of propellants.

The fact that it was called “emcotton,” instead of the proper “guncotton” Professor Brown had told them it was named, had proved to be its own little mystery. Learning their lesson from the shop, she and Tinvel had simply asked a few different people if they knew why it was called that. Eventually they met an armorer who had worked with the Professor before, and they’d given an explanation.

When it had first come to the army, everyone actually had called it guncotton. But Professor Brown had been so damn annoying about correcting them– saying it may be guncotton, but might not, because it didn’t fit the behavior of “real” guncotton– that they’d given it a new name: “maybe-guncotton.” That name had quickly been shortened to “M-cotton,” and, since most of the Tulian armory was illiterate, they hadn’t realized it was referencing a letter. Thus, “emcotton” had become all but the official name for the wispy material. It drove Professor Brown crazy, apparently.

Between the shooting, messing with guns, and some spell practice of her own, Chona decided it had been a perfect date. Tinvel ended up spending most of his time fiddling with different guns, assembling and disassembling them, while Chona had gathered up piles of emcotton (after learning how much Professor Brown hated the name, she’d never call it anything else) and lighting it on fire in different ways, training her magical senses on it.

The stuff was bizarre. The white nitrocellulose let out almost as much smoke as blackpowder, but unlike that whispy white fog, it was solid black, the same color as a cookfire. Unlike blackpowder, however, that smoke didn’t linger in the air. It fizzled into nothingness within a second of coming into existence, leaving no trace it had ever existed in the first place.

She couldn’t get enough of the stuff. The energy it released was absurd; at least three times as much as an equal weight of blackpowder, and since it still had the shape and form of cotton, you could pack a lot more of it into the same space. That was actually one of the problems with it, she learned. Unless you wanted to end up detonating a bomb next to your face, you had to carefully limit the amount of guncotton that was put into a musket. Assuming you didn’t do that, however, Chona could see a lot of potential.

Together, she and Tinvel had ended up deciding to write up a report for Professor Brown. Some of the breechloading musket designs were outright terrible. After an admittedly decent first few shots, the mechanisms required to open the gun jammed so often you were better off using a muzzle-loader. Of the other, more competent rifles, there was a much tighter race. They were close enough in design and performance Chona didn’t think you could really tell which would be better until you actually used them in a fight. She felt pretty certain that only extensive field-testing would prove which was better.

Tinvel didn’t think so, however. He made sketches of the designs to take with him, hoping to work through his thoughts properly as he prepared the report. Chona hadn’t been all that helpful in that respect, if she was honest. Downright unhelpful, in fact. Once he’d had the idea to make an essay of it, Tinvel kept forgetting that they weren’t actually there for just that purpose. She all but dragged him back to the gun range to try some new musket or another smith’s work, or, on one occasion, having him see how well he handled a bayoneted rifle. The clumsy charge he’d attempted at a target dummy had seemed more like an angry toddler than a powerful soldier, but to his credit, the sharp end of the thing had gone into the straw target.

Eventually.

It was getting dark when they finally began making their way back to the university. Their trip out had meant they missed lessons, but that wasn’t anything new. She and Tinvel had been outside the regular class schedule for a long time, and if Chona occasionally abused that fact, Tinvel was a first-time offender. Hardly worth getting worked up about. They kept chatting as they walked, discussing this or that from their day, and if Tinvel noticed she was walking terribly slow, tracing a lazy, slow curving trail across the road, he didn’t say a thing about it. He just walked with her, happily keeping pace.

When the university was only a single turn away, Chona slowed to a full stop. Tinvel did, too, still talking for a few moments more, until he eventually realized that they weren’t going anywhere.

“Huh? What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

The nervousness in Chona’s gut was coiling so tightly that she thought she finally understood what human girls meant when they complained about period cramps. Working hard to keep her hands and arms casual, she wrung her anxiety out through her tail, coiling it into a knot so tight the muscles of her entire lower back were trembling. She’d begun to sweat, and that made her painfully aware that she needed to do something before that sweat became visible through her fur.

I shouldn’t be nervous. What was it that I was saying earlier? Yeah. I took him on a date because HE needed to impress ME. And he was fun, and nice, and we had a good time, which was impressive, and so I should… it would only be fair if I rewarded him for being impressive, right? Because it’s not like I want to. It’s a reward. For him. Not me.

Tinvel looked around, clueless to thoughts hidden by her blank expression. “Uh, is there something we needed to pick up while we were out? Because we can, but since we’re so close to the dorms, it’d probably be better if I dropped my notes off first-”

With blood rushing in her ears, Chona struck. Her head darted forward, tilted, and she felt her lips brush against Tinvel’s.

She’d kissed girls before. Two girls, back in her village. They’d both had lips that were achingly soft and so lovely, so that’s what she’d been expecting. Kissing Tinvel was… different. It felt very different. Not quite as soft, not as smooth. Firmer, rougher. Not unpleasant, though. Just different. She felt her nose bump against his, and a bit of his unshaved stubble– he’d never be able to grow a beard, she suspected– brushed against her upper lip. The entire kiss was barely a touch, the briefest grazing of the skin, but in the fraction of a second they were in contact, it felt like her entire face had caught on fire.

She stepped back. Tinvel blinked at her.

She began stomping away.

“Chona-!”

“Shut up!”

“But I-”

“Shut UP!”

She hated the way he could hear a laugh in his voice as he shouted, “I just wanted to say-”

“Fuck! Off!”

“But-”

Chona finally turned the corner and, the moment she was out of sight, broke into a dead sprint.

There was no way in every hell that she was going to let him see the big, stupid smile on her face.

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