one twitter account<\/a>, and even that was mostly irregular updates of little consequence. \u00a0So word of mouth was important. I just didn’t expect Rohana to make recommendations.<\/p>\n“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?”<\/p>\n
“I… I’m a sigilist. She said you would understand.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“You utilize magic through symbols and\/or runes, embuing them with will and power,” I said.<\/p>\n
“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. \u00a0Healing, protection from entropy, that kind of stuff. \u00a0Nothing big. \u00a0Except…”<\/p>\n
Ah, there it was. The magic of ‘except’ or ‘but’ or all those other words that nullify the sentence before them. “Except?” I prompted.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
“You could take a picture?” I suggested. I mean, we were talking with the technology.<\/p>\n
“Doesn’t show up in total. I already tried. Public place and all that. I’m not a mask–mass murderer.”<\/p>\n
I wondered at the slip. \u00a0I decided a “masc. murderer” was kind of the more male version of a “femme fatale.” \u00a0But 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.<\/p>\n
“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?”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Nen looked up expectantly from where he sprawled on the couch. \u00a0He had gotten a lot better about the spines of my paperbacks after a little talk I had had with him.<\/p>\n
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. \u00a0A lot of times my life with them was…normal. We did chores. We ate. We hung out and binge-watched Netflix together.<\/p>\n
It was the little things. \u00a0The things you didn’t expect. \u00a0How weird silences would meet what seemed to be reasonable questions. \u00a0The strangeness of…well, they never looked in the laundry and found only one sock.<\/p>\n
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? \u00a0It 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? \u00a0It really made some things odd.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I always got a pair of socks back when they did the laundry, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Can a dragon have patch notes?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-10-opener"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1670\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}