Love Crafted

Chapter Sixty-Seven

You don’t want to wake up. Waking up in the morning is just not the way things are meant to be. Everyone, mortal or otherwise, should get used to the idea that the perfect time to wake up is somewhere around night time. That way you can hop out of bed, eat a bunch, then jump right back in.

But no, mortals are all busy bodies that want to do stuff right away because they know that they might die at any moment. Even Abigail, who will never die because dying is for other people, is up at the crack of dawn and shaking your shoulder for you to get up.josei

You consider pushing the sun away. Or maybe spinning the planet in the other direction to make the night last longer, but Abigail would get all huffy and you’re pretty sure you already considered and dismissed that plan once before.

“Okay, okay,” you mutter and you push the blankets covering you away. Abigail is standing on the side of the bed. She managed to escape your cuddles at some point and even had time to get dressed.

Was she trying to give you as much sleep time as possible?

This is why Abigail is the best Summoner.

She raises a hand, and presents a clear glass cup to you filled with sloshing juice. “Explain,” she says.

“Juice?”

“No. Wine,” she says. “Wine that I got from the tap when I went to get some water.”

“Okay,” you say.

She makes a little spinny gesture with her hand that means ‘get on with it’ in mortal. “Well, how did this happen?”

Sitting up on the side of the bed you rub your eyes to get rid of the eye crud you accumulated (one of the best parts of the morning!) and then yawn really big. “Oh, I think that comes from my art project.”

“Your art project?” Abigail asks. “I’m... too hungover to deal with that.”

“But it’s really pretty,” you say.

Abigail looks at you for a bit, then takes a long swallow from her cup. “Go on.”

“I found an ugly fountain down the road,” you say while pointing a tentacle more or less in the right direction. “It was very ugly.”

“You mean the statue of the king and queen of Five Peaks? The one with the fountain?”

You shrug. “The ugly one. I made it better. Now there’s a Daphne and a Charlotte and they look really cool. And also there’s my face and I replaced all the water with juice.”

“All the water?” Abigail asks.

“All the water going to the fountain,” you say.

“Which is fed by either the river or the city reservoir. Brilliant.”

“It isn’t brilliant. I didn’t think of making it glow, but I can change that.”

“Please don’t,” Abigail says. She looks around, then with a shrug of her own finishes her cup. “We should head out.”

“Breakfast?” You wonder.

“I have some change, we can pick something from a street vendor. If they’re not too drunk.”

You hop off the bed and are dressed so fast that even time doesn’t know when you went from wearing nothing but a nightgown to one of your pretty dresses. “Let’s go!”

Upon stepping out onto the street, you notice that things are a bit different in Five Peaks this morning. There are a whole lot more people on the roads, and a lot of them seem to be in a very good mood. There are wagons rolling past with barrels behind them and people are singing and dancing, though they don’t seem to be very good at it.

Abigail, who knows where all the best foods are, leads you to another street that you never visited. This one is much wider, and the sides of the street are lined with carts and stands where people that smell like those cows you saw once are crying out the prices of the stuff on their tables.

Abigail doesn’t even pause as she passes all of them by and walks in a straight line towards a stand where an older, matronly woman is stroking some coals over which some sticks with yummy-smelling meat are roasting. Everytime a glob of fat rolls off the meat, it falls into the coals with a satisfying sizzle-y noise.

Abigail waves to the woman and gestures with her hands while she speaks. “One for me, two for Dreamer here,” she says.

“Coming right up, dearies.”

You watch the woman work with rapt attention for a bit, but soon you find that you need to distract yourself or else a tentacle might accidentally slip over to grab one of the meat sticks.

Your art last night was a lot of fun. Maybe you should consider adding more art. Like shrines and altars around the school so that the students can bring you nice things. And in exchange you’ll reward them with a good night’s rest and pretty dreams filled with fun things and tentacles.

It’ll be like having a business. You’ll trade your services to the mortals in exchange for goods. Mortals do that a lot. You follow Abigail’s motions as she pays the woman with some papery bills, then she hands you two meat sticks.

Yes, this day will be a very productive one!

“Is it good?” Abigail asks as you both start walking back in the general direction of the Academy.

You need to chew a bunch before you can answer because you stuck an entire stick in your mouth and the long wooden bit is pushing against your cheeks when you try to chomp on the meat. A bit of tricksiness with your mouth-tentacle and it all goes down. “Yes!” you declare.

“Good, glad you like it,” Abigail says. “Now let’s go find out how Daphne is handling her morning.”

“She was very strange last night,” you say.

“Oh, I have no doubt,” Abigail says.

As you nibble on your second meat stick and eye the remains of Abigail’s you contemplate just how productive you should be now that the day has begun.