TWO HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT: Here-to-There VIII

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“Your breath smells like recovery sauna potion, and your face smells like bad breath.”

“Thank you so much, Haoyu.”

“You dress better for the aliens. Can I see the egg?”

“This is usually more of an undershirt. I have a couple of pezyvas, too.” Alden passed his carved egg to Lute and leaned away from Haoyu. “The Bromelimas tree looks great.”

They’d put lights on it but nothing else yet.

Alden dropped his messenger bag on the kitchen table beside a partially eaten baguette and a concoction that looked like chicken tenders smashed up with butter to make a spread.

Butter and ramen seasoning, he guessed, spotting a foil packet surrounded by bread crumbs. “Lute, you realize we have campus cafeterias where people make sane food, don’t you?”

“If you think about it, it’s just a chicken sandwich with the filling blended,” said Haoyu, still making sniffing sounds.

“I warned you that the face paint smelled bad so that you wouldn’t take a big whiff of me!”

“What kind of egg is this?” Lute was holding it up and peering at Alden through the gaps in the carving. “Are you going to put a light inside? You should. It would make a sweet lamp.”

“It’s from an o’odee. I haven’t thought about—”

“What does the symbol on your face mean?” Haoyu asked.

“I don’t actually know.”

Haoyu gasped. “Did you crash the Nine-edged Stroopwaffel? Is that why you had to teleport here?”

“I didn’t crash anything.”

A few minutes ago, Alden had left the pavilion where the afterparty was revving up and walked to a neighborhood teleportation point.

The end of the Artonan day had been hectic. Stuart, and other wizards who feared Stuart’s judgement, were still hard at work. The Primary’s son had come to properly bless houses in a manner befitting the generosity of his knights and his own sense of occasion. Half-efforts would not be tolerated.

Alden had heard a couple of wizards commiserating with each other about having been caught up in the young peoples’ first major status exercise. Stuart wasn’t a fully qualified wizard, and neither were the others. But knights fell into their own category. They received privileges wizards wouldn’t until after graduation, and if they wanted to take on more adult responsibilities toward the ordinary class, too, who could argue? It was commendable behavior for their age and their station…it was just a bit unfortunate that they outranked their elders and therefore couldn’t be told to lighten up.

So the volunteers were stuck misting houses and apartments while the ordinary class people enjoyed the party that had been launched late in the night. Leeter-zis had declared that it would continue through dawn so that he could incorporate the light of the new day into his spell.

Alden had promised to be back before that. But for now he was here, on track to make it to MPE in twenty minutes.

Think about what home means. No washing off the face paint on purpose. My thumb still hurts from shutting it in that cabinet at the last house. Emban seemed happy. What does inhaling blessed mist do to a person…so hungry but not for plain bread…now Lute’s sniffing me, too.

He wanted to go be alone in his room for a couple of hours, to reset. But since he wasn’t going to get that, he’d just have to enter school mode clumsily. What’s my priority this afternoon, in this place?

He was drawing a blank. But then Lexi came out of his room to see what the commotion was. The widening of his eyes and his total silence were grounding forces. They helped Alden to see what he must currently look like, having appeared just inside their front door a full Earth day after he’d left. His boots still had some desert dust on them, he was wearing a mystery symbol on his face, and Lute was offering to turn his o’odee egg into a lamp.

“I had it in my head that I wouldn’t miss gym class today,” Alden said to explain himself. “So I came back early from the thing I’m doing on Artona I.”

Lexi blinked at him.

It was too late now to consider the reasons why skipping this MPE might have made more sense.

I’m here. Prioritize. “Do I stink that bad?”

There was the possibility he’d gone numb to the smell, and his self-confidence might not be enough to carry him into a group of forty teenagers if he seriously reeked.

“The smell is disgusting!” Lute said merrily. “What if it never comes off?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Haoyu said. “People won’t even notice if you don’t tell them.”

Alden looked to Lexi for help.

“If you’re worried that you stink, wash.” He spoke slowly, as though he suspected Alden was incapable of grasping too many words at once.

“It’s not me. It’s the paint on my face. I can wash, but I can’t wash with the goal of getting it off because I’m an ingredient in an ongoing ritual type of activity.”

Haoyu laughed.

“No,” said Lute. “That kind of thing comes up on the Triplanets sometimes. It’s not your fault if you get caught in a situation with people being ritually peculiar because—”

Prostration, thought Alden, raising an eyebrow at Lute.

“—it happens to innocent, ordinary guys for reasons beyond their control. Of course…Alden went willingly, so he’s probably not innocent.”

“I’m innocent. I just need a clear answer on if I smell putrid or not.” He turned expectantly to Lexi again.

“I can’t smell you from here.”

“You’re half an apartment away.” Alden started toward him.

“I don’t want to sniff your face.”

“You have to. I can’t trust Lute. He thinks the vacuum works by incinerating whatever it sucks up.”

“You’d better be nice to me, Alden,” said Lute. “I have what you need to not look like a victim of alien magic.”

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The ten people called out for good behavior on Wednesday hadn’t been promised anything special today, only their usual amount of class time with fewer students on the floor. But even as they sympathized with friends who were upset about sitting through what everyone knew was going to be a lecture, they were hoping that they’d get to do something cool.

They weren’t disappointed.

They played a four-on-four game that involved stealing colored armbands from the opposing team, with the entire floor covered in moving walls and morphing obstacles they hadn’t seen before. No lethal injuries were allowed, and everyone had the chance to work with everybody else since Big Snake and Foxbolt were calling them over one at a time for individual discussions and then swapping their team assignments up when they sent them back.

With all of them being rather aware of their inclusion in the friendly, mature group, they were doubling down on their friendliness and their maturity. The harmony and helpfulness was off the charts. Alden felt almost guilty about how much he was enjoying himself while Lexi suffered through whatever Klein and Marion were doing to the others.

After all, Lexi had consented to having a mask of black feathers painted around his eyes by the swift and talented fingers of Lute Velra. He looked badass, and it solved the one flaw that often marred his impressive features. Lexi looking annoyed with you was a little scary; but Lexi, raven lord, looked annoyed in a way that called to mind a high-fashion photoshoot.

Haoyu had his whole face painted with black and white badger stripes that he seemed to be loving.

And Alden had dumb coral paint glasses with pink and red hearts on them, as he deserved for mocking the artist’s deficient understanding of cleaning equipment.

What were they doing? Helping their roommate out with a project, of course. And if there was even a rule against it buried somewhere in the student handbook, it wasn’t being enforced. People had been walking around with “Anesidora Forever” scrawled on their faces for weeks.

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The only downside was that Alden still smelled, and he couldn’t blame the paint because Lexi and Haoyu didn’t suffer from the same problem. That was why he was trying to stay at least six feet away from everyone who spoke to him.

The armband game suited his abilities. People running fast around walls and leaping over obstacles they couldn’t see around were relatively easy to trip, and if Alden was using his skill on an armband, it was impossible to steal with a simple grab. Opponents had to break his shield, without killing him, to take it. Or they had to make him think they were about to so that he’d sacrifice it for the sake of not being rendered useless for the rest of the class period. That was hard for the others to manage when he was backed by teammates.

So far, he’d only lost his band once, when one of Max’s traps had made him a sitting duck for Ignacio, and Alden had decided it was an impractical moment to find out how many seconds it would take for Shrike to saw through Alden’s protective magic with his Meister knives.