Devilla
A day of travel passed with surprising speed in Lucy and Feyra's company. I could tell that Lucy remained bothered by Kalice's treatment of her, but the forced smile that had emerged during that encounter made no further appearances after our parting. In its place, I was granted a frankly ridiculous number of its more sincere cousins. I didn't even want to think about what sort of social isolation she must have lived through for our simple conversations to bring her so much joy... Though, perhaps the magnitude had more to do with her feelings for me than the communication itself.
Regardless, outside our bumpy start the day of travel ended without further incident, and before I knew it we were setting up our tents. Or rather, Lucy and Feyra set up said tents, while I observed from a slight distance and did my best to learn. To be honest, I much preferred the idea of creating a stone haven for myself over setting up something so complicated, but Lucy had gone to the trouble of securing a tent fit for two people and I was hardly going to invalidate her efforts.
"Well," I began once the tents had been secured, "now that that's taken care of, I'm afraid I have something that needs doing. In the woods. It won't take me longer than a moment."
"Because that's not at all suspicious," Feyra grumbled. "Why the hell didn't you do it earlier? Instead of, say, standing around uselessly while we were putting up tents?"
"I think it's sweet that Eena wants to learn how to help," Lucy declared, giving me a bright smile. "Though you really could have done it then! I don't mind putting it up by myself."
"Nonsense," I protested. "It's
our
abode, if only for one night at a time. I should at least be able to contribute something to its construction..."
"Next time, then," Lucy promised. "I'll walk you through it step by step if I need to!"
Ignoring the fact that I could practically
hear
the eye rolling coming from Feyra's direction, I gave Lucy a serious nod of my head to broadcast my dedication and turned towards the trees. "I'll be back in a moment," I promised.
Truthfully, Feyra was likely right about me wasting a better opportunity. Delivering my letter to Abigail while Feyra was busy with her tent might have worked to prevent her from paying too much attention to what I was up to. If something went wrong with my teleportation, and I ended up teleporting along with my missive... Well, it would be preferable to have her distracted. At the same time, however, I stood by what I said - Lucy had secured a tent for us
both,
and pursuing my own interests while she set it up for us simply hadn't been an option.
Still, I had to admit that the sentiment had put me in something of a bind. I had little time for my task, if I wanted to preempt any potential shenanigans on Feyra's side. I suspected it would take more than a few minutes of absence for her to get ideas about revealing my true identity to Lucy, but considering the precarious nature of the current status quo... Well, the less time spent away from the duo, the better.
To that end, I reached into my pack, quickly withdrawing pen and paper from within the Empty Bag hidden within. Though I technically had some of the latter stashed in the pack proper - the better to pad it out - the paper I had hidden was wrinkle free. The pen, meanwhile, was best left within the confines of my holy artifact, where there was no chance of it breaking apart or leaking ink on my belongings, no matter how rough I got.
Considering the rush I was in, I chose to share relatively little in my initial missive. The fact that some humans had abilities akin to monster girls needed to be relayed, but I could - and did - choose to leave out the complexities of the so-called cursed and blessed bloodlines. Feyra's existence was similarly significant, paired with the fact that she had learned my identity, and of course the deal I had struck with her. The same precarious deal that necessitated my use of letters for communication going forward. As such I asked that she write anything I needed to know down and place it on the teleport pad, so that I could try and transport it to myself before sending her further information from my end.
Once all of that was dealt with, I stored my pen once again and pulled out my teleportation circle in its place. A simple, if pretty, metal disk, with intersecting lines carved seemingly at random across its surface, and random dots sprinkled about its face. The design was all but meaningless - likely meant only to keep people from copying it too easily - but there was still a certain beauty to be found in the randomness, so far as I was concerned. Whoever had created it had done a masterful job.
In the tower, one could use a circle such as this to teleport by simply standing upon it and pouring magic into it. So long as you - or whoever was operating the thing - knew the
exact
location of its twin, you would instantly be teleported from one circle to the other within an instant. It was a process I had always taken for granted in the tower. It wasn't until recently that I had discovered what should have been obvious to me long ago - that such teleportation magic simply wasn't possible with the meager amounts of arcane magic that the circles required. Indeed, the arcane magic worked as nothing more than a trigger, with the process itself being done through holy magic stored within the tower.
A startling discovery for me, yet it had only drawn a shrug from Abigail. She had gone on to inform me of the numerous 'miracles' the tower provided for its inhabitants - from garbage disposal sites that would simply and cleanly eliminate all waste, to floors where the sun shined down upon our crops despite us theoretically being indoors. And, of course, the lighting of the tower, including my own floor - something I'd never given much thought to, much to my chagrin. Though, in my defense, none of those things had ever applied to me directly! I'd never gone down to the crop growing floors, had never been required to throw out my own garbage, and could see in the dark so well that there was no real difference between night and day for me to begin with. Of course, looking at it another way, that only meant that I'd never taken much interest in how our people managed to stay fed, had never cleaned up any of my own messes, and hadn't cared enough to wonder how people other than me managed to find their way around a tower that barely even bothered with torches, beyond what was needed for ambiance.
...In any case, now that I knew that the tower had holy magic, I was far less concerned with the teleportation disk requesting some of my own to function. As such, I placed the letter upon its surface, pressed my finger down upon it, allowed it to pull holy magic from my body, and immediately found myself standing atop its twin in my bedroom.
"Well, that didn't work as I planned..."
