Returning to the kitchen, I found Sable plating some side dishes while Lyris was carving a turkey… no, that was probably a cockatrice.
“I thought you were kidding about the Thanksgiving turkey thing.”
Sable scooped a green bean casserole onto a plate and smiled. “Nope, a lot of magical creatures cease to be particularly magical or useful once they die. Aside from being poultry, anyway. Lyris offered to dress the carcasses you brought home while you were out, so I figured we’d make one for dinner. We whipped up a few side dishes while the bird was cooking.”
“You could have called me in to help,” I said, feeling a little left out.
“Aww, but Lyris said she wanted to do something nice for you to make up for kidnapping you earlier.”
Lyris only blushed as she moved slices of white meat to a serving plate.
“Well, thanks I guess. I’ll handle the cleanup.”
Sable shook her head. “You can help clean up, but you don’t know where anything is kept or where it goes yet. We’ll help. And then we can get to the main event of the night faster: the slumber party!”
Lyris clarified. “Sable said there are many things we should both know about, so she proposed this group activity to teach us.”
I raised an eyebrow and looked at Sable, who had a mischievous grin on, but she just kept serving up side dishes. “Right… well, I guess that should be fine.”
Once we all had plates of what was definitely a traditional turkey dinner we sat around the dining table and started in on them. The cockatrice meat was actually pretty good, even on its own. Turkey often ended up a bit dry for my liking, but this was nice and juicy. “Wow, this is a lot better than I was expecting.”
Sable beamed. “We do have to cull some of the creatures in the backyard on occasion for population control reasons, and some of them make for pretty good eating once you get used to cooking them. I’ve cooked quite a few cockatrices. My hunter, Astrid, usually cleans them though.”
“Is she a witch?”
“No, at this point I only have one other proper witch on staff. My other staff have a bit of mana and can often do some kind of magic, we call them hedge witches in the business. Astrid knows how to make silver bullets and enchanted shot and stuff, so she’s great for hunting monsters.”
I tried to figure out a corresponding character class for that description.
“Huh, so she hunts with magic ammo, would you say she’s a Ranger?”
Sable seemed to pick up what I was putting down.
“Eh, kind of I guess? Real life doesn’t always line up with gaming tropes, sadly. But along those lines, we’ve also got an herbalist, a geomancer, and a couple of enchanters. But you’ll meet them when they get off medical leave. Oh, remind me to get you on the team chat later.”
Most of the sides seemed pretty normal, but there was also a dish with pear slices set for me. I tried it, and found that it had a light cinnamon spice flavor and a bit of a creamy texture. It was pretty good, but I couldn’t place the flavor, so I asked. “Hey Sable, what’s up with this pear dish?”
“Did you forget? You collected these this morning and shoved them in your foraging bag. Lyris brought it with the rest of your equipment.”
Ah, right. The boob fruit. “So Lilith’s Pears, huh? Are they good for anything?”
“Other than being a tasty treat? It’s an effective contraceptive.”
I frowned at the pear dish, wondering if eating this thing was going to screw with my hormones in some way.
Sable ate a slice of hers and continued explaining. “You have to brew a potion to get that effect, but it’s a good one for a witch to know, so I’ll show you how to brew it tomorrow. You take it once a month and basically get the benefits of modern birth control pills without risk of side effects. No periods, no problem, and of course no babies, not unless you want them anyway. My mom’s been trying to figure out how to work these into a product that can slip through the FDA without someone noticing the whole… alchemically processed magical fruit aspect.”
I had to admit, I was putting off thinking about things like menstruation and birth control, but I was glad that magic would smooth that out.
“But as a magical food item, it’s primarily just nutritious, promoting breast and skin health.”
Lyris nodded. “Yes, in my language they are called ‘maiden fruit’, and are cultivated widely as a food item for women, though elves generally do not have much need for birth control. Our sex drives and fertility seem to be lower than humans. It is rare for an elf to need help preventing pregnancy.”
Sable smirked and spoke while chewing some cockatrice, “Hence the Marriage Bond.”
Lyris looked away, but responded. “Y-yes, commoners tend to have difficulty maintaining their birth rates, so the population does not grow much. Nobles have many additional pleasures and distractions available, so without the bond to… encourage procreation, it is possible that their lines could go extinct.”
Sensing that Lyris felt awkward about this topic, and feeling pretty awkward about it myself, I changed the topic.
”So, Sable, your mom runs a pharmaceutical company that works with magical ingredients, huh? Is she a witch too?”
”Yeah, she’s currently the head of the company and the family as a whole. Grandma was the head before her, of course. Mom and grandma had different opinions on priorities, so while this house and the backyard were super important to grandma and her research, mom considers it more of a burden. That’s why grandma left this property to me, the next heir, instead.”
“How’d your mom take that?”
”Not great. She hasn’t, like, cut me off or anything, but she insists I run this place without much help from the main office, to prove myself or something. We aren’t a money making division for the most part so she’s constantly on my ass about the budget. And to make matters worse, she’s decided this project isn’t high enough priority to assign my sisters to be my familiars, at least not so far. My next sister in line is currently a familiar for my mother, and my other brothers and sisters will likely end up that way once they come of age.”
”That sucks… are the boys going to…”
”Become girls? Yeah, the Ward tradition is a bit weird compared to most families, but sons of the family tend to become female familiars after they reach adulthood, barring unusual circumstances.”
”And other witch families don’t do that?”
”No, they tend to stop after the first daughter is born, and males are either left to their own devices and not told about magic, or they get married off to another witch family. I’m guessing you’re the former.”
I could feel confusion and intrigue from Lyris, who probably hadn’t heard that I was previously male yet. She looked like she was going over our previous conversations and thinking over the various clues, or at least that’s what I’d be doing in her position. While I wanted to talk to her about that, I had some more pressing questions of my own.
”Wait, Sable, are you suggesting that my mom is a witch?”
”I did tell you that you were from a witch line. Yes, your mother and sister are almost certainly witches.”
”But… mom’s a software engineer for a tech company, she doesn’t brew potions.”
”Not in front of you anyway. Would that company by chance be SAT?”
”Yeah, how’d you guess?”
”Sufficiently Advanced Technologies? Anything stand out about that name to you?”
Shit. It did. It had always just been a funny Arthur C. Clarke reference in my mundane geek mind. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Now it had new meaning.
“Yeah, now that you mention it…”
”SAT was originally a startup composed of wizards and witches who, like you, noticed the parallels between magic and modern technology. The Owens line goes back a long way, but they had kind of fallen into irrelevance in witch circles. Probably why your mom joined up as one of the early hires during the tech boom.”
The past two days had been a serious mindfuck for my perception of myself and the world around me, but having to recontextualize my entire relationship with family over the entire span of my life was a lot for the dinner table. I had let the revelation that I came from a witch bloodline roll off my back like water on a duck, not considering that it might have implications for my actual living relatives.
With both Lyris and I left stunned and thinking over the implications of various revelations, Sable apparently felt the need to change the mood.
”Alright, enough of that. Who wants dessert? Morgan picked up ice cream for us.”
Lyris snapped out of her contemplations and I felt excitement from her. She’d clearly been anticipating this for a while.
”Are you a fan of ice cream, Lyris? Do they have that in your world?”
”I suppose I am a ‘fan’ of it, yes, though I had not heard of it before my master took me in. He would use some sort of frost sigil to make it with berries and milk as a special reward. I did not realize it was a human treat until Sable mentioned it to me earlier today.”
I still didn’t know what to make of her elven master, but if Taliornen was making her ice cream, maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. ”Well over here it’s a fairly common dessert, and it comes in a lot of flavors.”
“Sable mentioned this… I would like to try them all.”
We finished off the last bites of what we wanted to eat from our dinner plates before cleaning those up and getting out the ice cream tubs. Sable showed me how to use Control Flame to soften the ice cream a little. I would normally use a microwave for that, of course, but Sable’s microwave looked like maybe her grandma had perhaps bought the first microwave ever, and it gave me a vibe like it was looking for an excuse to catch fire or irradiate someone.
I got a bowl of chocolate, Sable got half green tea and half vanilla scoops, and Lyris was given a flight of tiny bowls, each with a single scoop of each of the aforementioned flavors, plus strawberry. She dug into them with girlish glee, favoring the strawberry but seeming to enjoy or at least be intrigued by each of the flavors. It was fun to watch. In my short interactions with Lyris I’d gotten a variety of impressions of her that I was having some trouble fitting together.
In our first encounter she’d made the first attack, and in the second she’d shown suspicion but also an open mind. She had declared herself a skilled thief and knew how to hunt and clean a cockatrice carcass, but also seemed to like pretty dresses and had a fondness of ice cream and berries.
On top of that, her native dialect of elven was the noble version, and she seemed to be knowledgeable about noble customs. I found myself wanting to know more about her, but tonight was already pretty heavy with talk about family history as it was. I didn’t know her circumstances, but whatever led her to being a thief and a familiar probably wasn’t due to a happy family situation she’d love to share.
After dessert, we all sprang into action and began cleanup. I’d intended to take the role of dish martyr for the evening but after seeing just how many pots and pans had been sacrificed to produce this meal I was happy for the help.
The house’s aging dishwasher was definitely not going to handle those, so we loaded what we could in and Sable demonstrated some practical magic: after loading up a large pot with soapy water and tossing a sponge and scrub brush in, she summoned a water elemental into it, forming a vaguely feminine blob of animate water about a foot tall, and directed the creature to scrub each of the objects in turn.
We rinsed and dried the dishes by hand and set them aside, but having the dish soap elemental do the majority of the hard labor was nice. After we were done, Sable rewarded her by tossing her some small fruits that I recognized as what I’d harvested from the Emberleaf plant.
”Don’t those explode if eaten?”
”Generally, but water elementals are fond of quenching fire, including draining the fire magic out of things. It’s like a spicy treat for her.”
The elemental popped the fruits into what passed for its mouth and swirled them around. I could see through her face, which was a little disturbing but also fascinating as she apparently started to ‘chew’ the fruit, rendering it down to a rapidly dissolving pulp. There was a small flicker of light when she did so, but no kaboom.
After cleanup and the reward, Sable dismissed the elemental and the water forming her body ran down the drain, the food waste and debris it had collected gathering in the drain net.
Now it was finally time for whatever this ‘slumber party’ was supposed to be.