The only thing that could have made the night better was a visit from a Dragon.  I opened the door, expecting Peredur on my doorstep.

There was nothing but a few dried leaves scraping across the concrete in the wind. I sniffed, checking for the faint woodsmoke smell that I associated with him. Nothing. I narrowed my eyes and squinted, as if I could see things unseen.  After a moment, I closed the door.

Nen chuckled.

“I thought it was requisite, narratively,” I explained with a shrug.

“We would know if His Majesty decided to pay you a visit,” Rayya pat my arm in a way more sympathetic than condescending.

“His Majesty?” I asked.  “I don’t recall you naming him that before.  Has there been some kind of update I didn’t get notified of? Peredur two point oh? Patch notes?” I asked, spinning my desk chair to attend to my roommates.  “Do I have to reboot the reality now or will it do it when I’m in the middle of something?”

Neither answered, but that at least I expected.

I swung back around to the computer. I had done a few Google Alerts that came up with interesting information that led me down the rabbit hole of the internet for a while.  When I came up for sanity, I made myself some tea and stared at the television for a minute or two.  I read the closed captioning for a bit, and tried to figure out exactly what was chirping, then realized it was my phone.

It was a local number. “Yeah?” I asked. I know, you’re not supposed to pick up the phone for people you don’t know.

“I’m sorry, is this… um, Doctor …E?” it was a woman’s voice.  You know, it’s still better than Windy Frostymist, or Cherry Bloodsucker, or… I don’t know. I’m not good with a lot of “magickal choice names.” Heck, I don’t even know if that’s what it’s called.

But I digress. “Yeah,” I responded in a different tone of voice that hopefully encouraged the woman to elaborate. Okay, I was presuming it was a woman. My bad for gendering based on stereotypes.

“I got your number from Rohana. She said you could help me.”

It wasn’t like I advertised in the Yellow Pages.  After all, I just threw them into the recycle bin when they were forced upon me.  No online presence, no web pages, just one twitter account, and even that was mostly irregular updates of little consequence.  So word of mouth was important. I just didn’t expect Rohana to make recommendations.

“Maybe,” I said. After all, I could cook a decent omelette, but if she was looking for that, I’m not the one you would call. Didn’t want to raise her hopes up without being sure as to what it was. “What do you need done?”

“I… I’m a sigilist. She said you would understand.”

I was really tempted to make a really geeky gaming reference about the City of Sigil and Planescape, but I managed to resist. Unless, of course, Rohana had expected me to do it. I tried to guess if she was waiting to be resigned, or what, but it’s hard to read silence, especially over a cellphone.

“You utilize magic through symbols and/or runes, embuing them with will and power,” I said.

“Yes,” she sounded relieved. Rohana had probably warned her about the Torment she could have gone through. “I do minor charms as well, but mostly personal sigils.  Healing, protection from entropy, that kind of stuff.  Nothing big.  Except…”

Ah, there it was. The magic of ‘except’ or ‘but’ or all those other words that nullify the sentence before them. “Except?” I prompted.

“My sister… she’s got this guy who has been stalking her, so I thought I’d do a… look, could we meet somewhere? A coffee shop or some place? I’d feel better if you could see what I mean.”

“You could take a picture?” I suggested. I mean, we were talking with the technology.

“Doesn’t show up in total. I already tried. Public place and all that. I’m not a mask–mass murderer.”

I wondered at the slip.  I decided a “masc. murderer” was kind of the more male version of a “femme fatale.”  But I had bodyguards who had to worry about that, right? I was perfectly safe. I didn’t say it aloud – even if I didn’t believe in jinxes, it was just asking for it, and when you ask the universe might just answer.

“Good. Neither am I.” Despite being alternately reviled and lauded for having killed a dragon, it was the insects of the world that mostly needed to fear my murderous nature. “Where are you at?”

We spent a couple of minutes triangulating a good place to meet, arranging for secret codewords, and then agreed to be there in about an hour.

Nen looked up expectantly from where he sprawled on the couch.  He had gotten a lot better about the spines of my paperbacks after a little talk I had had with him.

Sometimes you’d think my life would make for a good sitcom. If I were any more interested in men, we could call it “Two and a Half Fairies.” I decided against suggesting it.  A lot of times my life with them was…normal. We did chores. We ate. We hung out and binge-watched Netflix together.

It was the little things.  The things you didn’t expect.  How weird silences would meet what seemed to be reasonable questions.  The strangeness of…well, they never looked in the laundry and found only one sock.

So, yes, that’s a real first world problem, but from the perspective of the first world, it’s really strange. How do you even interact with someone who does not have the essential understanding of a world where washers and dryers took single socks in sacrifice?  It completely resets your world view. What do you really have in common with them? What else do you take for granted for which they share no correspondence?  It really made some things odd.

On the other hand, I always got a pair of socks back when they did the laundry, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.