Like a slowly baking potato, Hunter basked in the warm sunlight shining down on the rooftop terrace, awarding his body with what felt like its first dose of vitamin D in years. The white ribbon on his straw hat fluttered in the lazy late-summer breeze, and sparse clouds in the blue sky overhead reflected off his sunglasses.
Iphis had suggested he try treating his arrest like a vacation, so with that in mind he’d let his hair down and dressed himself in a white blouse and a pair of khaki slacks cut into shorts. The mana cuffs he was still wearing glinted silver in the light like fashionable anklets, and he kept shifting them now and then in an attempt to avoid tan lines.
On the lounge chair next to him, doing her best impression of a melting creamsicle, was Hebe. She laid on her back, her body stretched out along the chair’s entire length with her fluffy tail spilling down onto the marble floor. All four of her paws were in the air.
In one hand Hunter held a bottle of strawberry juice, its ice cubes rattling as he lifted it to take another sip. In his other he held an old library book titled A Brief History of Spiritual and Demonic Possession, which had been taken from a much larger stack of books arranged on the side table next to him.
If he was being honest, he was currently much more interested in the juice than he was the upsetting book.
He’d never had strawberry juice before. It’d never even occurred to him to try juicing a strawberry, but the result tasted amazing, and the little lemon slices and flower petals mixed in among the ice cubes were unnecessary but, he had to admit, very cute. The only thing missing was a tiny umbrella.
Since he'd been locked away all his meals had been delivered from the employee canteen, and they arrived at his door in cheerfully painted wooden boxes. Originally they’d come with wine or tea, but after a word with Iphis they now arrived with a mysterious little bottle of juice instead. Each was delicious, but this was the first flavor he’d recognized on his own, and that felt like some kind of achievement.
The food was amazing too, nothing at all like the bland stuff Anemone had been bringing him, which he realized in retrospect was probably because she thought he was ill. Today’s lunch was fresh pasta in a lemon-butter sauce, sprinkled with something crunchy he couldn’t identify, and what he was almost certain was crab. It’d been served alongside a platter of crispy grilled vegetables that tasted like zucchini even though they were bright red, with a little jar of honey flavored pudding for dessert.
Going off the chow alone, 11/10, best imprisonment he’d ever had.
Plus, Ianthe’s apartment naturally had an upscale vacation rental sort of vibe thanks to its colorful Thymimatan decor and the huge balconies on both floors. Her outdoor furniture was as expensive as it was comfortable, to the point where he’d slept on it overnight and managed to wake up with no back pain, and he was now at a point where he was seriously considering whether or not it’d be worth trying to get a permit to install a pool. Then again, while this was technically a temporary living residence, he could always just ask for forgiveness later and build one anyway.
Quite frankly, he felt he deserved a little treat for all the shit he’d put up with, and for reasons he himself didn’t understand, he firmly believed that rooftop pools were more fun than pools on the ground. Plus, he had a lot of money now, so he should really do something with it.
Other than build a castle somewhere.
He was definitely going to build a castle somewhere.
At twelve floors, Ianthe’s apartment building was one of the tallest on campus, which felt very short for a city boy like him but was actually pretty high by Cydonian standards. From where he sat now, he could see down to the thin white strands of sandy shoreline that hugged select edges of the island, and the calm sea glittering like a cut aquamarine beyond it.
Should he build a beach house?
A beach house… castle?
Wait, wasn’t building castles on sand a famously bad idea?
Eh, he’d workshop it.
The Saint was scheduled to arrive for their meeting tomorrow, which meant he still had a day to kill.
Right now, spending that entire time laying outside and steadily toasting himself while dreaming up beach houses felt very reasonable. He closed his eyes, and the distant sounds of the bustling campus filtered up to his ears in a pleasant acoustic blur, like a cherry on top of the already near-perfect ambiance. Yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing…
Ah! He snapped his fingers and sat up straight in excitement.
What this place really needed was an old tinny radio playing in the background.
“Hey,” he said to Hebe, ice cubes clinking as he gestured to her with his glass, “Should I build a radio?”
“Ack,” she said, her whiskers twitching in her sleep.
“What, you think I can’t?” He let out a prideful huff, pointing at himself with the bottle. “I used to make and fix the damn things all the time ya know, as a kid and then in the army. Back before the internet, if you wanted to chat with someone on the other side of the world, shortwave was your best option.”
Granted, he hadn’t made them out of scratch; he’d used components he’d bought or scavenged. Still, he understood the principles behind everything, and Ianthe had such a well-stocked workshop that he probably had most of the materials he’d need to get started. That, or he could draw up some schematics and commission an artificing studio to produce parts for him. Actually, now that he thought about it, Ianthe already had a lot of her own patents, didn’t she? It wouldn’t be weird to get one more.
Though, to be honest, he was a little surprised that he could still access her workshop.
Except for a few blatantly deadly or explosive exceptions, Iphis had made almost no effort to hide anything dangerous from him. He wasn’t sure if that was because Iphis believed his story or because that freak was secretly hoping Hunter would come at him with a kitchen knife, but either way it helped him feel less twitchy.
Between that and the fact that Ianthe’s place had so many balconies, he hadn’t needed to take a sedative since yesterday. As long as he stayed outdoors, he felt almost completely fine.
“Oh, waitasecond… Even if I make a radio, there won’t be any broadcast,” he murmured, clicking his tongue in disappointment. “And anyway, the only musician I know is Iphis.”
As for how he’d discovered that?
Ever since he could remember, Hunter had some song or another playing in the background of his mind. It wasn’t something he had much control over, and unless a particularly annoying earworm got stuck on repeat, he generally paid it no mind. Sometimes when he was distracted or bored, he’d even unconsciously hum or sing along to it.
This was how, earlier that very morning, Iphis had discovered Blu Cantrell’s 2001 debut single, “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!).”
Hunter couldn’t for the life of him explain why that song was the one in his head at the time. All he knew was that one second he was getting ready to eat breakfast, and the next Iphis was dragging him to the kitchen table with shining eyes as he demanded to know what Hunter was humming.
Hunter had swiftly learned that:
Iphis had a natural talent when it came to music, and could play just about any instrument.
Iphis could sing, and informed Hunter that being a shapeshifter meant that his range could best be described as ‘all of it.’
Iphis not only had perfect pitch, he could reproduce any song after hearing it once, which he proved by pulling an instrument out of thin air and re-creating the melody he’d overheard on the spot.
He had then, like a golden retriever willing to go to hell and back if it could get someone someone to throw a ball, shamelessly begged Hunter to share music from another world with such an impressive lack of dignity and genuine enthusiasm that the brief resistance he’d tried to put up against the idea made him feel like a puppy-kicking monster.
Unable to handle that much guilt before breakfast, he’d given in and awkwardly sang what must have been one of the worst abridged renditions of the hit single to ever assault human ears, then watched in amazement and horror as Iphis parroted the entire thing back at him, then did so again but now accompanied by an instrument that was almost, but not quite, a guitar.
Then he’d asked Hunter to translate it for him.
However, Hunter was not a translator. Asides from English, and a smattering of Yiddish and Spanish, he only knew broken fragments of languages from buddies he’d made and countries he’d traveled through. This was the first time in his life he’d been genuinely bi-lingual, and he was in no way psychologically prepared to apply this skill to slang and reference-heavy noughties R&B.
He’d wanted to refuse, but despite Iphis’ many, many faults, he’d been pretty decent since he’d figured out they were on the same side. Though they’d only been roommates for a day and a night, Iphis had so far—the song incident aside—clearly been making an effort to keep quiet and give Hunter space in addition to following his house rules without complaint.
Plus, he was currently the only person who believed Hunter was human. Heck, he’d even accepted the fact that Hunter was a man without question, which was probably more than he would have gotten back in his old world.
In contrast, refusing to translate a song he’d already shared felt a little petty.
So Hunter had agreed to at least write Iphis a general summary, only to find that slang and brand names were easy to gloss over, and what actually tripped him up the most was a single phrase:
‘Buck wild.’
For the first time it’d occurred to him that he’d been using it his whole life to simply mean ‘getting crazy,’ but there were a lot of ways to translate that into Cydonian and most of them were dependent on context. Thinking about it, at first he’d assumed ‘buck’ probably referred to money, people definitely got crazy over cash, but then he thought some more and realized that in the context of the song and the young men it was most often applied to—
‘Buck’ was probably referring to buck deer.
So it didn’t just mean ‘getting crazy.’
It meant ‘getting crazy horny.’
In that moment, he’d been forced to suddenly reconcile with the fact that he’d been unintentionally referring to deer down to fuck in casual conversations for years.
Hell, he’d even used it in reference to Euphy and her friends along the lines of, ‘Haha, have fun kids, don’t go buck wild.’
Oh God, why hadn’t he ever made that connection before? Was he the problem, and everyone else knew except him? If that was the case, why hadn’t anyone stopped him? Or was someone else at fault, for taking something that meant ‘crazy horny’ and using it to mean something like ‘rambunctious’?
Wait, did rambunctious mean something perverted too? He had no idea, it wasn’t like he could fucking Google it!
Either way, for the sake of accuracy, Hunter translated it to a Cydonian word that meant roughly the same thing.
Then he’d spent the rest of breakfast staring off into space and wondering how many other heinous things he’d been saying without meaning to his entire life, in between explaining to Iphis what a credit score was and why a scorned lover would want to destroy it.
Now, sitting on the terrace having just finished lunch, Hunter briefly imagined turning on a radio he’d built only to hear Iphis’ translated rendition of “Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!),” complete with the phrase about fuck-hungry deer, and said to Hebe, “Nevermind, maybe making a radio isn’t worth it.”
In the interest of forcing himself to forget any of that had ever happened, he put down his juice and reluctantly turned his attention back to his book.
Iphis disappeared after breakfast and was replaced by Moros, who apart from a brief greeting had been rifling through Ianthe’s apartment and completely ignoring Hunter ever since.
Hunter was fine with that, since even though he’d had the forethought to borrow books on a variety of subjects, reading the one specifically about possessions around a demon-hunter who was ready and willing to kill him still felt like a bad idea.
The good news was that the book had thus far helped him fill quite a few gaps in his knowledge.
The bad news was that all those gaps were more bad news.
According to the book, Hunter really shouldn’t be alive right now—or at least, as this undigested and independent version of himself.
If a spiritual possession was like a squatter moving into your house, then a demonic possession was the same, only that squatter immediately murdered, cannibalized, and made a skin suit out of you.
The fact that he was currently co-existing with this psychopathic gummy worm should have meant it was a spirit, but the book said spirits had a far more limited access to their host’s minds, and that they didn’t eat human souls the way Hunter’s apparently wanted to eat his. So that meant he’d been right to guess it was a demon, an entity that the book helpfully described as a ‘voracious and fundamentally malevolent extra-planar predator.’
Hunter interpreted that as a fancy way of saying that as soon as it finished eating him, it was gonna start eating other people too.
The only saving grace was that it had somehow gotten trapped mid-possession, which shouldn’t have been possible according to the book, and yet, here he was.
However, he recalled from his dream that it’d mentioned ‘squeezing’ more of itself through, which meant it might not be trapped forever.
Thank goodness Iphis had scared it into undoing that somehow, because if he’d been stuck in a dream with the powered up version of it he’d met in the Library, he wasn't sure he’d have woken back up. His best guess was that, since it was weaker now, perhaps it couldn’t use all of its powers at once, or at least not to their fullest extent?
Either way, it hadn’t bothered him since then, even though he’d taken a long drugged nap yesterday and then slept through the night. Iphis wasn’t directly around him either of those times, so maybe Iphis’ presence in his apartment was enough to scare it off, or…
Hunter glanced at Hebe, who was sleeping with her mouth partially open, the tip of her pink tongue only just sticking out.
Maybe it was afraid of cats?
It would be really convenient if it was.
Unfortunately, warding it off with Iphis or maybe a cat was currently where his solutions ended.
No matter how many times he re-read the damn book, it refused to give him a single sliver of hope that his condition could be cured.
He still wanted to believe that the Saint would have some convenient deus ex machina power she could whip out to fix him, but if not, then his only alternative was spending the rest of his life getting psychically besieged by a toothy nope-rope.
… Fuck.
Feeling jittery at the thought, he slammed the book shut and stuffed it back into the pile.
And it was a good thing he did, because a second later he heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs.
“You look like you’re enjoying yourself,” Iphis said from behind him.
“It’s nice out today,” Hunter replied, not bothering to look back as he picked up his juice and gestured towards the seashore, “Hey, do you guys ever go swimming down there? I wouldn’t get eaten if I went in the water, would I?”
“Probably not, as long as you stay within the wards?” Iphis answered, walking into Hunter’s line of sight and leaning against the railing. “By the way, I have a favor to ask—“
“What the fuck!?” Hunger shouted, slamming down his juice and ripping off his sunglasses as he lurched to his feet, “What happened to you!?”
Holy shit.
Iphis had bulked up.
Granted, he was already pretty athletic to begin with, but there was still a significant difference between the man he’d seen this morning and the grade A beefcake standing in front of Hunter right now.
He was even wearing the same outfit he’d left in, only now every button was clinging on for dear life.
“How’d you do it? How the hell did you get so fucking jacked in a few hours?” Hunter demanded. He marched over and gave Iphis’ chest an experimental poke like it might deflate, poking it again harder when he realized it really was muscle. “More importantly, how do I do that!?”
“Hunter, calm down, it’s just magic,” Iphis said, gently deflecting Hunter’s grabby hands away from his torso. “I had a lot of extra… ‘mana,’ and had to do something with it.”
“Are you kidding me? You went from Nightwing to Batman out of fucking nowhere, how the hell can I calm down!?”
“I could have sworn I mentioned I was a shapeshifter this morning,” Iphis muttered, tilting his head to the side. “Anyway, are you alright? You seem…”
“How’d your hair get so long? It’s almost as long as mine!” Hunter continued without taking a breath, tugging on one of Iphis’ wavy blue locks and comparing it to his own. “So shiny and thick… Buddy, you’ve got a mane like a freaking thoroughbred, why do you cut it?”
Gosh, Hunter still couldn’t get over how pretty people’s hair was here. He tilted the dark strands this way and that in the sun, fascinated by just how many subtly different shades of blue made it up.
“Hunter?”
“You look like you walked off a marble plinth.”
“Hunter.”
“I’m surprised trumpets didn’t play when the sunlight hit you.”
“Weren’t you the one who wanted me to stop flirting?”
Hunter paused, holding Iphis’ hair in one hand and sneakily pinching his forearm with the other, and looked up at the strained patience on Iphis’ face.
“This isn’t flirting. This is platonic masculine admiration,” Hunter insisted, patting him on the arm in time to the last three words and frowning like he was offended that Iphis could have interpreted things any other way. “I know guys who’d sell their own grandmas to be able to do this sort of thing, so how can you be so chill about it?”
“Because it’s only temporary,” Iphis sighed, prying Hunter’s hands away again and this time making sure to keep hold of them by the wrists. “This sort of body isn’t sustainable for me long-term, I usually only do this when I’m fighting.”
“What are you, brodozer Cinderella? Do you go back to twunk from hunk at midnight?”
“It’s really incredible how even when I can’t understand half of what you’re saying, I can still tell I should feel offended by it.”
“What? I’m not judging, I used to have a body like yours, I’m just saying that compared to… ya know…”
Hunter tried to pull out of Iphis’ grip, found that he couldn’t, and instead used his chin to gesture at the immaculate arrangement of sculpted meat in front of him. “I mean, come on, it’s different, am I wrong?”
“Hunter… You’re still on edge today, aren’t you?”
“What? No, I’m not.”
“Is there anything bothering you that you’d like to talk about?”
“No, everything’s fine! Can I have my hands back?”
Iphis released his wrists, and Hunter rubbed them while making a grumpy expression.
“Did you take any more of that sedative? Chiron wants me to keep track of how much you have.”
“No, because I don’t need it!”
“Are you sure? The last time you rambled at me this fast, I was threatening you with a knife.”
…
Okay, so maybe he did feel a little anxious.
“Sorry,” Hunter muttered, all the manic energy leaving his body like air from a punctured balloon. “I was just surprised, you gotta warn me next time.”
“Oh. I apologize. This isn’t anything by my standards, so I didn’t think to.”
Hunter stared at Iphis hard, noting that his expression wasn’t as carefree as normal, and asked, “… Did I upset you?”
Iphis raised his eyebrows in surprise, then smiled and put a heavy hand on Hunter’s head, smooshing down his straw hat and messing up his hair playfully.
“I’m not upset with you, I’m upset with the Kastri Guard.”
“Did something happen?” Hunter asked, re-adjusting his hat and hair with a scowl.
“Nothing you need to worry about yet—oh, but word of advice… Don't try anything like just now with Moros, okay? He’d put you in the ground, and I mean that literally.”
“Wait, Moros can buff up too?”
“No… he’s just cute, it’s hard not to want to pinch him.”
Hunter briefly thought of the sickly, cold, expressionless man he’d glimpsed earlier, and said, “Iphis, I can’t help but feel like you’re the last person who should be telling me not to harass people—no, wait, more importantly, is that magic something I can learn?”
“Hmm, you really want to?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?”
“Well… does Ianthe have any experience with lunar magic?”
“I don't think so, why?”
“Because it’s a little different than the other domains. You understand that intent can change the effect of a spell?”
Hunter nodded. He didn’t totally get why a person’s emotional state had such a big effect on magic, but he knew enough from Ianthe’s memories to understand that it was one of the most common sources of mistakes.
“Whether they’re conscious of it or not, a lot of people have malicious feelings towards their own bodies, and if you let that twist your magic you might unintentionally harm yourself.”
Oh. Okay, that was more serious than he’d expected.
He paused and looked down at his own body, and thought about the tightness across his chest from the bandages that he was slowly learning to ignore.
If he was being honest, beyond the fact that it functioned and existed, he didn’t have a lot of positive feelings towards his new self.
“Yeah, I guess that would be kind of a problem for me right now.”
Damn. Sweet muscles aside, learning shapeshifting would have been great. Then he wouldn’t have needed Chiron’s help or the Saint’s approval to modify his body to his liking.
“Don’t look so glum!” Iphis said, giving him a slap on the back that was probably meant to be reassuring but instead nearly knocked the ghost out of him. “That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it just means we need to be cautious. If you can find some time this weekend, I’ll go over things with you in more detail and you can decide whether to pursue it or not then.”
Staggering from the impact, Hunter caught himself on the railing and wheezed out, “O-okay…”
“Which reminds me, I still have a favor to ask.”
“You conniving…”
”I’ll still help you with lunar magic if you say no.”
”Fine, just tell me, what is it?”
“Moros and I are investigating Ianthe’s disappearance, and he has some questions he wanted to ask you.”
“Is that it? Sure, but…”
Hunter paused and glanced at the stairwell, then asked, “You guys mind meeting out here?”
“I’d love to, but… it’s probably too bright for Moros,” Iphis said, shielding his eyes and squinting up at the brilliant blue sky. “How about the kitchen instead?”
“Alright… no problem,” Hunter sighed, unhappily digging his nails into his palms.
“Great! In that case, I’ll see you downstairs,” Iphis said, and began to walk away before pausing, “Ah! And before I forget—start praying to the moon if you haven’t already, maybe They’ll give you a blessing.”
“Yeah, pray to the moon, I’ll uh… get right on that.”
Wow, he’d never prayed to a god expecting to actually get something concrete back before. It felt a bit like Iphis was ordering him to seriously write letters to Santa Claus, but since he’d already inherited two blessings from Ianthe, it must be possible.
Hunter waited until Iphis vanished back down the stairs, then turned to Hebe and said, “I can’t believe you slept through Buff Iphis. Be real with me, do you moonlight as his kittybell?”
Hebe, still sleepy due to the combination of sunlight and the fish filets he’d fed her earlier, did a big stretch but didn’t reply.
Hunter put his sunglasses back on and took a seat next to her on her lounge chair, rubbing her fluffy belly as he asked, “Wanna come downstairs with me?”
“Mrrrip,” she said, twitching her whiskers and wrinkling her nose. Since she was upside down, this further revealed her long white fangs, making her look adorably fierce.
“Come on, I don’t usually get physical on the first date, but we’ve been cuddling every night since we met,” Hunter argued, scratching her chin. “You gotta take responsibility for me.”
Hebe purred, but remained on her back.
“I’ll have Iphis ask the kitchen to throw in an extra steamed fish with my dinner. Not a filet, like, an entire salmon.”
Now she sat up, blinking in the bright sunlight. Since her back feet were still splayed out, her pose looked almost human, and Hunter instinctively tried to reach for a phone that no longer existed.
“Damn, you’d have killed on TikTok,” he muttered, then carefully slid his arms underneath her and asked, “Can I, uh… pick you up?”
Hebe yawned and, taking this as consent, Hunter experimentally tried to lift her.
Despite the fact that her size hadn’t changed, she now weighed as much as a normal house cat, so Hunter stood and draped her across his shoulder.
He’d discovered recently that the reason Chiron and Iphis could pick Hebe up so easily was because she was only heavy when she wanted to be. As long as she asked for uppies first, or Hunter negotiated with her before he tried anything, she’d suddenly become lighter.
He had no idea how she did that. He was also pretty sure she could understand Cydonian. However, for the sake of his own mental health, he’d elected not to think about either of those revelations too deeply.
Now armed with a gigantic cat, he headed back into the enclosed section of the rooftop and paused at the landing of the spiral staircase.
Iphis was right, brains really were stupid. The almost invisible wards encircling the apartment meant that he was just as trapped outdoors as he was indoors, but because it didn’t look like he was, he felt fine. However, the moment he went back inside…
He blew a small raspberry at the stairs in frustration.
For him, the problem with therapy was that most of his issues were tied to things professionals were mandated to report.
It’d been rather difficult to work on healing and moving on and whatever when he was preoccupied with carefully lying about most of his life.
That said…
This apartment was the best living space on campus, and he didn’t even have to pay for it because of Ianthe’s job.
To hell with his psychological shadows, he wouldn’t give this place up even if the walls started bleeding.
Taking a deep breath and hugging the cat, he clenched his jaw and ignored the fluttery feeling in his chest as he headed down the spiral stairs.
Thankfully, he was almost immediately distracted by whatever the hell Moros and Iphis were doing in the hall below.
Iphis, still casually existing with a body that would have made Michaelangelo weep, had his arms wrapped around Moros, who was smacking him with a book as he tried to pull free. Scattered around their feet were a few more fallen books, and the door to Ianthe’s workshop was ajar behind them.
“Hey!” Hunter snapped, covering Hebe’s eyes. “Do that kind of thing in your own apartment.”
They both paused and looked up at Hunter, Iphis with annoyance and Moros with surprise, or at least what Hunter thought was surprise, since for some reason he was keeping his eyes closed.
“It’s not like that, I’m just trying to get him to take a break,” Iphis said.
Moros ceased struggling and gave a wave in Hunter’s general direction. “Oh, hello… Do you have time? I wanted to ask you some questions…”
“Sure, but can I ask why your eyes are closed?”
”I… have a headache.”
… Okay, sure, why not.
“Do you know if Ianthe has any heavier curtains? Other than the ones in her workshop and bedroom?” Iphis asked.
“Iphis, you want to talk about redecorating? Now?”
“I’m just asking if she has any extra stored somewhere!”
“Who keeps extra sets of curtains? They’re not towels!”
Moros opened his mouth to jump in, then pulled out a handkerchief and began coughing into it instead.
Hunter and Iphis paused their bickering to let him finish.
“No… don’t care about curtains… I have questions about Ianthe…”
“Hey buddy, are you doing okay?”
“I’m fine… Would you wait for me to finish my notes? I just need thirty more minutes…” Moros said to Hunter, then frowned towards Iphis and once more started smacking him with surprising accuracy considering his eyes were still shut. “Let me go, you’re so annoying.”
Iphis moved his head to dodge a hit, then gave Moros a skeptical look as he asked, “And how long have you ‘just needed thirty more minutes’ for?”
Moros paused, pursing his lips as he thought things over, and eventually replied, “About… four or five hours…?”
“That’s cute, you’re coming with me.”
“No! I’m really almost done!” Moros argued loudly, then covered his mouth with the handkerchief again, only to cough a few times before abruptly falling limp in Iphis’ arms.
There was a brief pause as both Hunter and Iphis fell silent in surprise.
“Oh, good, he’s unconscious,” Iphis said decisively, giving Moros a gentle shake just to make sure.
“What the fuck! Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Iphis insisted as he scooped Moros up, careful not to let his head flop.
“What do you mean, fine!? He looks like he’s got the consumption!” Hunter argued, still protecting Hebe’s eyes from these PG-13 goings on as he took a few steps back up the stairs. “At least tell him to wear a mask!”
“It’s not a disease,” Iphis sighed, then gestured towards the kitchen with his head. “Let me revive him, I’ll be back momentarily.”
Then, without waiting for a reply, Iphis hauled his friend off to the guest bath and shut the door behind them.
Hunter, left alone and bewildered with Hebe on the stairs, slowly uncovered her eyes and said to her, “Hey… by the way, congratulations on being my most normal employee. You want me to put a picture of you on the office wall somewhere?”
By virtue of her size alone, he assumed that Hebe was the manager of all the other mousers kept by the university. If she wasn’t, then he’d hire her and give her an official title and an employee badge as soon as he was no longer under arrest.
“Brrflip,” Hebe said.
“Great, I’ll commission someone to do a portrait—ahh, we have an Arts College here, don’t we? Maybe I should hire a student, that’d be fun… I have a feeling you’re gonna be employee of the month for a long time, maybe I should get a couple extra made while I’m at it, we could do a whole wall…”
Still planning his cat-themed employee morale installation, Hunter went down the stairs and into the open living area. It’d been clean earlier, but now it looked like every single book and paper Ianthe owned had been piled and stacked randomly throughout the room. Dancing around these, he headed to the huge doors that connected to the wide first floor balcony and propped them both open. While it wasn’t perfect, the big exit and soft breeze wafting in made him feel a little calmer, so he took Hebe to the dining table to wait.
On it he saw a multi-level painted box, one he now recognized as probably containing food. Next to it was a big burlap sack, and seeing it, Hunter’s eyes went wide.
He pulled out a chair for Hebe, carefully settled her into it, and then attacked the burlap with the ferocity of a starving raccoon, tearing it open to reveal a beautiful sight and an even more beautiful scent.
“Oh my God it’s really coffee!“ he cried out, hugging the sack to his chest, “It smells so good, it smells exactly the same!”
Fuck. He was actually getting a little choked up about that, and had to step back and wave his hand at his eyes until they stopped watering.
Once he’d gotten a hold of himself, he investigated the grinder, carafe, and strainer that had been left alongside the bag, and decided to brew some.
When Iphis reappeared a little while later, Hunter was already back at the table, a mug of steaming coffee between his hands as he watched Hebe try to chew through the wooden snack box.
“How’s your friend?”
“Better, he ought to be out soon.”
As though on cue, there was a brief flash of motion behind Iphis as Moros reappeared just long enough to ignore both of them and vanish back into Ianthe’s workshop.
“He doesn’t need anything, does he? He looked pretty bad back there…?”
“No, no, he just needs to take better care of himself. It turns out that if you stop eating, drinking, and sleeping, your body just shuts down! Who would have thought?” Iphis said, his eyes cold and his smile accompanied by twitching muscle in his jaw.
Other than his hair, which was still long, he’d physically gone back to normal. He’d also acquired a black scarf from somewhere, and was wearing it wrapped a few times around his neck despite the warm weather.
He stood next to Hebe, who wasn’t making much progress breaking into the snacks. Frustrated, she swiveled her ears back, opened her mouth and curled her lips like she was about to hiss at the box, but stopped short when Iphis booped her on the nose.
“Don’t, you’ll ruin it for the rest of us,” he chided, taking a seat next to her and pulling the box towards himself.
Hebe gave him an angry look of feline impatience but still closed her mouth.
“Is this tea? Did you make it for Moros?” Iphis asked, checking the contents of a small cup that had been set to the side.
“Yeah, I thought it might help his cough,” Hunter answered, then pointed at another cup. “You like coffee too, don’t you? I poured you some.”
“You’re willing to share it with me?”
“Fuck off, I’m feeling generous. Also, hey, where’d your muscles go?”
“I still have muscles,” Iphis said, opening up the snack box. “Though I can’t help but feel like I’ve discovered your type.”
Inside the first level was an array of tiny pastries, sitting in paper cups organized into sections by wooden dividers. Steam rose off them, and Hunter spotted a warmth spell etched into the underside of the lid.
Seeing this, Hebe quivered and pressed herself against Iphis, pulling repeatedly on his sleeve with one of her paws, almost like a human child begging for attention. Iphis picked a pastry out and placed it in front of her, which she then sniffed and gave an experimental lick. Despite her intense enthusiasm for food, Hebe ate slowly and neatly, not letting a single crumb escape and pausing now and again to clean her whiskers.
Hunter filed all of this away under ‘things about Hebe that are definitely normal cat behavior, haha’, and accepted the pastry that Iphis offered him.
He then saw Iphis remove the top pastry portion of the box and wordlessly claim the entire lower level for himself. Inside it Hunter saw a staggering amount of fish surrounded by what looked like the rest of the damn food pyramid.
Hebe, noticing this, used a paw to ask for and immediately received a little bit of fish.
“Hey, I never would have said anything if you’d always looked that way! And it’s not a ‘type,’ I just have an interest in human anatomy, okay?” Hunter insisted, biting into his very hot pastry to discover it was full of some kind of herbed cheese.
“I see, so it’s a hobby?” Iphis replied, and then immediately began eating at an alarming speed.
Hunter watched him in awe for a moment, then remembered himself and continued, “Uh, yeah, exactly! I can name and locate every organ, muscle, bone, and et cetera in the human body.”
“Impressive,” Iphis said, pausing his food inhalation. “And you can take them apart, too?”
“Not everyone’s like you, psycho killer,” Hunter replied, taking a drink of coffee and savoring it.
“No, but you are, aren’t you?” Iphis replied, and when Hunter only responded with a glare, he shrugged and went back to emptying the food box.
“Hey... you sure you’re not a soldier?”
“I’m a cleric.”
“You eat like a soldier.”
“Necessity. Are you a soldier?”
“I was, a long time ago.”
“Huh.”
Iphis, who finished in what must have been record time, got up and took the box and the dishes in it to the sink and cleaned them.
When he returned, he put his head down on the table and said, “Give me a minute.”
“… You good?”
“No, I’m so fucking hungry, but I can’t eat anymore right now,” Iphis whined into the table.
“Am I witnessing the downside to having a magically sick bod?”
“That, among other things,” Iphis said, sitting back up and pushing his long hair back. “It’ll be fine, I just need to acclimate.”
“Sure,” Hunter agreed. “Hey, Moros also works for Chiron too, right? Does that make him a cleric like you?”
His unhappy expression brightening, Iphis replied, “Yes! In fact, we’ve been working together for almost twelve years, and friends for even longer than that.”
Hunter nodded, trying to recall what he knew about their relationship from the game, which because they were both side characters turned out to be not much.
However, he did remember something his daughter used to mention about them, so he asked, “Hey, are you two a couple?”