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Here is a house.
It is pretty and trim and green-and-cream and really ought not to be able to hold itself up like that, and yet here it is, somehow defying the laws of architecture. It is surrounded by a neatly bordered garden of ornamental and useful plants of all sorts: here vegetables, there herbs, there spell components, there rows of flowers.
There is a sign out front. It says only: Magic. Not, Beware, Magic or Magic Emporium or anything like that. Just: Magic.
Sitting on top of this sign is a cream cat with smoke-dark points of color on each paw, his ears, and his face and tail.
All in all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a witch lives here.
thaumobabble
allthebrightest
Currently one of them is on the back of Bella's neck and the other one is on Bella's jaw.
thaumobabble
Good places!
Also this is - this is getting dangerously nice, Bella is not sure how long she can make out with a hot princess who has been carrying her a lot and has achingly good design sense, and not have inconvenient pining problems later if it's just this once. Maybe she should break off and get clearer answers to those context questions. Maybe. Soon.
Not yet.
Okay, now, really, if this doesn't stop now and then it does stop soon-but-later it's going to be a problem that is bigger than the problem of not wanting to stop.
Bella pulls back and withdraws her hands to herself and looks down and says "I don't know what happens later, and if the answer is 'nothing happens later, I look at the Skyvault and go home alone and never see you again' then I need to stop now or I'm going to be in a bad mood for a long time."
Also this is - this is getting dangerously nice, Bella is not sure how long she can make out with a hot princess who has been carrying her a lot and has achingly good design sense, and not have inconvenient pining problems later if it's just this once. Maybe she should break off and get clearer answers to those context questions. Maybe. Soon.
Not yet.
Okay, now, really, if this doesn't stop now and then it does stop soon-but-later it's going to be a problem that is bigger than the problem of not wanting to stop.
Bella pulls back and withdraws her hands to herself and looks down and says "I don't know what happens later, and if the answer is 'nothing happens later, I look at the Skyvault and go home alone and never see you again' then I need to stop now or I'm going to be in a bad mood for a long time."
allthebrightest
"Huh?" says Tony, blinking.
She takes a moment to shift from kissing-mode to processing-words-and-feelings-mode.
"Um... I think more kissing happens later!" she says. "I would like more kissing to be the thing that happens later."
She takes a moment to shift from kissing-mode to processing-words-and-feelings-mode.
"Um... I think more kissing happens later!" she says. "I would like more kissing to be the thing that happens later."
thaumobabble
"Yeah - but - how much later, is the question, I don't need a time horizon on the scale of months, I don't expect you to be a seer, but I don't want to wind up pining for somebody who only ever wanted to kiss me some over the course of a couple of days, does that make sense?"
thaumobabble
"Okay," says Bella. "Um, let me know if you do?"
She scoots back to have enough room to get her legs out from under her and finds a place to put her bedroll. Over there.
She scoots back to have enough room to get her legs out from under her and finds a place to put her bedroll. Over there.
thaumobabble
"I - no, I really like you, I just think that if it winds up being that we kiss a lot for the next two days and then I look at the Skyvault and I turn around and go home by myself and that's it and that was always going to be it, I'll wind up writing your name in my notebook a lot and then staring at it and frowning trying to figure out what to do about really liking you, and - I have made the amount of that particular tradeoff I want to make, now."
allthebrightest
"Oh," says Tony. "Well... I don't know what the other options are? But I don't like that one much either. Let's come up with a better one."
thaumobabble
"Um, okay. I'm pretty much - a free agent, you're the one who might have other stuff constraining your availability."
allthebrightest
"I'm, uh... not really that good at planning ahead," says Tony. "Actually I'm really bad at it."
thaumobabble
"Oh." Pause. "That might explain why you decided to kiss a random commoner magician female while on an ostensible quest for a husband, huh."
thaumobabble
"I was hardly averse to it myself. That's part of the problem." Bella mutters her cleaning spell before she puts her feet on her bedroll; she hasn't been walking all day, thanks to Tony, but she has been walking a nonzero amount, and barefoot. "If I didn't like you so much maybe I could kiss you as much as I felt like, assuming that this was still a nonzero amount, and not worry about accidentally engaging pining mode."
allthebrightest
"I like you too," says Tony. "I just don't know what to do about it. I mean, out of me and Sherry I'm probably the one with the better chance of actually finding a husband at some point, so... but I don't want that to mean I can't kiss you anymore."
thaumobabble
Bella makes a face. "There might exist potential husbands for whom it wouldn't mean that, but not necessarily for reasons of their personal generosity."
allthebrightest
She snorts. "Or I could just keep doing it anyway, it's not like it'll matter to the succession, you said you could probably get one of us pregnant with magic but I'll bet you can't do it by accident."
thaumobabble
"I can't do it by accident," agrees Bella. "But if you get married you probably should not cheat on your husband. A deadline like that is the sort of thing I'd want to know."
allthebrightest
"I don't know if there's a deadline like that," says Tony. "I don't know if this quest is even going to work! If there were any princes around here who fit the bill, I would've married one already and saved everybody the trouble!"
thaumobabble
Bella chews her lip. "I don't already have a window that does husbands. It's possible I could invent one and then you wouldn't have this problem," she offers softly.