"You'd get a better rate of exchange if we were having a war, but you can probably trade a couple sets of armored silks for one ward around an area not in excess of the clan lands in size," says Isabella, "if we supply the herbs, anyway, and I can buy them no problem at this point."

"I can probably also think of things they'd like, but this was the project that was most recent, so... It seemed kind of obvious. Is there anything else that I can do that they'd probably be interested in?"

"You could ask Zeviana what they've been getting her to do, but you're pretty differently specialized... I think portal bags would be popular."

"I can make a few portal bags, before I go making deals with witches, then. Or possibly just one, to demonstrate - then ask how many they'd like."

"They'll take credit from you, I think, you aren't some random scammer."

"Then just one will do, I think. It shouldn't take long for just a single portal bag. Do you want to come with me to visit when I go?"

"I think so, yes. I can show you around and shield your eyes when there are naked witches."

"Thanks. I'm going to end up making a fool of myself no matter what I do, I'm guessing now."

"There, there." She pats his arm. "I am sure you will do so adorably."

He snorts. "Thanks. That makes me feel so much better."

"It should!"

"I can text the lawyers on the way there, no problem." She has been using her new liquidity in exciting ways to buy things like a wrist strap for her phone, so it won't matter if she loses her grip a few hundred yards in the air. "Unless you mean to teleport the entire way instead of just portaling to Seattle?"

"Hi," says the lounging witch. "You're probably Zeviana's brother. Are you looking for her? I think she's with Luzia, possibly even interruptable."

"Oh, sweetie." Isabella pats him on the shoulder.

"Ana why are you naked," says Adarin shrilly. "Why is this a thing that I have seen?!"

"Because I didn't feel like putting on the silks?" says his sister. "C'mon, Ada, not like you haven't seen me naked before."

"I expected my sister to be wearing clothes! I was prepared for everyone else being naked but I expected her clothed!"

"He really is," agrees Zeviana, amused. "Would it help if I put on the silks? Even if you're being stupid because we both know this is so not the most compromising position you've seen me in."

"Augh! Stop reminding me of that, that is unhelpful!" exclaims Adarin.

Zeviana makes a little surprised sound, then she bursts out laughing. "Careful! I might have to take you somewhere without prudes. And react accordingly."

"That is the absolute best idea. You know what, actually, presents now, then they can put them on and my sister can stop being naked."

Zeviana laughs. "Gee, you got me clothes? Thanks for ruining the surprise."

"Oooo, an armor enchantment! Snazzy! Adarin! Adarin will you make it pretty?" she says, taking her set of silks. "Pretty please? I will stop being naked."

Zeviana giggles madly. The bundle of silks are transferred to Adarin, and she looks proud of her brother-manipulation.

"Eeee!" says Zeviana. Then she starts putting them on.

"There, everybody's clothed," says Bella, when both Luzia and Zeviana are ensilked.

Adarin blushes a bit, but replies primly, "My sister without clothes is a great deal different than Isabella without clothes. Not that it's any of your business."

Adarin gives her a look.

Isabella stifles a giggle.

"Yup!" she replies cheerily. "It's what I'm here for! Innuendos with explanatory gestures!"

"Truly, the plane is blessed to now have you as a denizen."

"I think so," leers Luzia. (Isabella snorts.)

"Awww," says Zeviana. Luzia gets a kiss, for her troubles!

"So, the silks are approximately indestructible, I haven't tested whether they're actually bulletproof but they'll shrug off point-blank arrows," says Isabella. "Very handy. Ranata gets a set too, and we're trading the rest for wards we want done."

"Snazzy! The clan gets new toys, that's always nice. What are you warding?"

"Remember that village you liked?" asks Adarin.

"But you wouldn't leave them there, ri-" She puts the pieces together. "Oh! Ooo, you're a good brother, I'm sorry about the naked thing."

Isabella pats Adarin on the shoulder again.

He smiles, a bit. "I'm all right. Just as long as Zeviana keeps her clothes on around me."

"This is clan lands," Isabella points out gently. "We didn't even warn her we were coming."

"I'm not upset," points out Adarin. "It's just - not something I like to be surprised with. Apparently I will have to get used to it."

"Well, there's plenty of time to do that in."

"So there is," he agrees with a grin.

Zeviana raises her hand. "I can get naked more often if that would help?"

She bursts into giggles.

"Baby steps," laughs Isabella.

"I'll work my way up there eventually," says Adarin. "Probably. Or I'll go with the blindfold idea."

"I cannot recommend blindfolding yourself whenever you are here, but if you have to..."

"Why? Would people point and laugh?"

"That, and you wouldn't be able to see anything. Could be inconvenient."

"Hmm, no, I'll be fine. Just lead me around and try not to run me into trees."

"I'm not a seeing-eye dog."

Adarin snorts. "Then no blindfold, I suppose. Oh well."

"I mean, you could I suppose get a seeing-eye dog if you're that committed to taking it slowly, but you don't seem scarred for life."

"That might be a bit much. I'll just deal with it. It's uncomfortable but I can handle that," shrugs Adarin. "No being scarred for life. Just briefly traumatized."

"It's strange enough that you bother to have preferences about whether people are wearing clothes, I'm just - still more confused about why it'd be traumatizing. Surely you are more or less aware of what is to be found under clothes."

"I am aware, yes. It's just - not... It's like I'm seeing something very, very private? I suppose is the best way to put it?"

"But the privacy is all in your head, that's what confuses me. It's not like you being really scrupulous about not reading over my shoulder."

"I get that logically but my head is not very amenable to being changed. So I treat it as private even if it doesn't really make sense and I don't know why I'm embarrassed."

"It must be really inconvenient not to have editing privileges for your own head." She hugs him. "Oh well."

Hug! "Do you get editing privileges in your head? Mine just kind of - does what it does and I work within its constraints."

"I mean, it's work, but yes, I can edit things in my head if I want to."

"... Huh. I don't have that ability. That's interesting and useful but it kind of worries me a little?"

"Why?"

"My health - and for that matter my continuity of personality - are not the most valuable conceivable things in the universe. But so far I've never been in a position where it seemed reasonable to sacrifice either, and I don't much expect it."

He does not look pleased with this answer, but he does nod. "That's all I can ask, I suppose."

"I like to think I am sufficiently useful in my current form," she says lightly, hugging him.

Hug! "You are, indeed," he agrees. "Please don't think you're anything but."

Zeviana snorts with laughter. "I was kind of expecting it from him."

Zeviana makes a face. "You make it sound clinical! I don't want to know what I've got in common with my parents, my mom was terrible!"

"I didn't say anything about you! I'm talking about me. I made a chart one time, I think I was fourteen."

"That's kind of weird. Adarin, your girlfriend is kind of weird."

"I like her just fine as she is," says Adarin loftily. "Besides, charts are organized."

"... Please tell me you did not make a chart about things you've got in common with our parents."

"I suspect I don't have enough information about either to properly compose a chart."

"I mean, the situation's different, I was principally raised by both of my parents, cooperatively," says Isabella. "I'm sure I resemble them more than you resemble yours."

"Eh. Okay. That helps a bit."

"...I'm now wondering if you've run into information on genetics, though..."

"Our society does kind of obsess over bloodline purity. Speaking from what I've read on Wikipedia, we're not as advanced, but we do get the general concept of it."

"Bleh. People think our entire family's bonkers and we got it from mom."

"Well, there's caring who you're related to and there's, like, understanding Mendelian inheritance, which is different from how your magic dilution thing works."

"I don't know what that means, but I'm going to try to guess. Is it if a parent's weird or got something strange their kid could have it, too? Or like - if their grandparent's got the crazy they can get it?"

"Not exactly. People have - well, the sorts of people studied by Earth science, anyway, maybe you have fairy dust or something - people have two copies of instructions on how to make all their parts. Some of it's really complicated, but some of it works like: there's an instruction for blue eyes and an instruction for brown eyes. The brown eyes instruction is loud and shouty, so if you have one of each, your eyes will be brown. But you could give either one to any given one of your kids. So you could have two brown-eyed parents, who each had a blue and a brown instruction, and then a quarter of their kids would have two blue-eyes instructions and blue eyes. But you will never have two blue-eyed parents with a brown-eyed kid. Like that."

"Yeah, I've got no idea what that is, but I will take your word for it."

Adarin listens intently. "Hmm. Interesting. When I have time I will have to look that up, I'm - kind of interested in learning about genetics, now."

"Yeah, fair warning, most of it is much more complicated than eye color Punnet squares and even those are fantastically oversimplified when I explain it like that because people have more than exactly two kinds of eye color, but it's interesting."

He nods. "Right. It'll be added to my ever-growing list of 'things I should know.' If I ever run out I won't know what to do with myself."

(Luzia coughs. Isabella gives her a look.) "I doubt that will be a problem for the foreseeable future."

"They last indefinitely, unless destroyed - which is rather hard to do. I made them resistant to liquids and heat, along with pointy things. I suppose if you threw them into a volcano they wouldn't survive, but I tested a set in a campfire and they were fine."

Adarin nods. "That sounds agreeable. I haven't made the portal to the place that will be warded, but I trust you to keep your word when I have. It's rather hard to reach except by teleportation or a portal."

Another nod. "I can explain the specifics of the place, if you would like? Along with what we're planning to do with the warded area, as well. Nothing harmful, I would just like to colonize the planet with people from my former home and don't want unsavory mages to be able to find it."

"Yes. If we need more places warded in the future and you've gotten enough portal bags, there are also other things I can make in exchange. I tend to specialize in persistently magical items. Shields, too, but that's less useful in this case."

Adarin helps with unpacking. Once that's done, he gives a brief overview of the safeties of the portal bag. Essentially, try not to get the bag stuck in itself with the slab's portal, and how portals break if the surface they are on is damaged.

The queen listens, then sends a passing witch (stark naked!) off with the objects to be stored somewhere.

"You're entirely welcome," says the queen, and that seems to be the end of that.

"I think you'd mostly wind up looking at the clouds, if we toured the place," Isabella says. "But I'll show you around if you want."

"I will probably end up spending most of my time looking at clouds," agrees Adarin. "But I'm a little curious. Ana's spending most of her time here and you grew up mostly here, so..."

"I actually grew up mostly in Charlie's house. I mean, I spent time here, I did my magic lessons and fighting lessons and some hanging out with Ranata's friends and extended family here, but I slept five nights of seven in a normal mortal house and I attended mortal school through tenth grade."

"So that's clan lands," concludes Isabella, when they are hovering over the beach. (There are naked witches, but they are mostly underwater, swimming around.)

"Yeah, I wouldn't either. The ones who live here full time and are less than a hundred and fifty years old spend a lot of time in nearby mortal settlements, charging their phones and eating things other than meat and vegetables and doing things other than flying around and swimming and hunting and gardening. I am considerably less than a hundred and fifty years old."

Adarin snickers. "Indeed you are. Though the visual of you hunting things is kind of funny."

"I did it a bit when I was around - oh, twelve - just as part of being well-roundedly witchy. I'm a decent archer, I got a pheasant once, got a deer once, mostly just shadowed better hunters who were willing to have me along. It's just not that fun for me, though."

"I don't think I'd find it very much fun, either. Though I might be surprised, if I tried it, I suppose."

"It's much more sitting-and-waiting than you'd think. I mean, on a cloud-pine you can run down pretty much any critter, but the usual method is to just sort of park and hold still and wait for something to come out."

Adarin laughs. "Oh yes, not the kind of thing you'd enjoy. That reminds me, I still need to try out fishing."

"Because you like sitting still holding a stick for ages so much."

"I haven't tried it before, I don't know if I'd like it or not! I might think it's the best thing ever and bring home a freezer full of fish every Sunday. Neither of us know, yet."

Isabella laughs. "Well. At least fish is tasty!"

"That's the spirit! Thank you for supporting hypothetical me if I turn out to love fishing."

"I daresay you could pick up lots of hobbies I see no appeal in and I'd love you anyhow."

Adarin giggles. "Thank you, I have been holding in the urge to pick up lots of hobbies that don't appeal to you. Like knitting, fishing, hunting - quick, what are other hobbies you don't like personally, I need to revel in my freedom."

"Golf. Parkour. Pixel art. Geocaching. Squaredancing."

"... This is somewhat dampened by having no idea what pixel art, geocaching, or squaredancing are. Golf is a game, right? And parkour is building - leaping, climbing... things? I still need to work on absorbing the culture, I haven't managed it entirely."

"Pixel art is making pictures out of the teeniest pieces of digital images. Geocaching is some weird thing where there's designated locations and people leave stuff there for other people to find. Squaredancing involves being arranged with three other people squarewise and following dancing-related instructions on how to interact with them issued by somebody whose job it is to issue those instructions. Golf is a game, involves thwacking little balls into little holes that are very far away with a stick. Parkour is... hard to explain, find online videos or something."

"Huh. Okay. Thank you, one day I will just know what all of these things are and I won't have to ask. On that day, I will find something you don't know about my culture and explain it to you. The tides will turn, Isabella."

"You know we don't have to do it in that order, right? You already explained to me Dead Rat Medicine and the prolonged drunken parties and how your months make so much more sense."

"Shhhh. Shh, my dear, Dead Rat Medicine and prolonged drunken parties won't be what you know our culture by. The months making sense is amazing, though, please feel free to judge my culture by that one."

"Okay, tell me something else nice about your culture," she says, and she gives him a peck of a kiss and wheels the cloudpine around to fly back to Seattle.

"Okay. Couples will sometimes get glass-baubles, and put candles or some other light source inside them. Then, we set them out on lakes or other bodies of water to float away. It's supposed to be lucky if both of them are taken in the same direction."

"Awww! Do you want to do that sometime?"

He laughs, and snuggles her. "Sure! I don't know where we'd get the baubles, though, I don't think anyone here makes them."

"Oh, specific baubles, we can't just get anything floating and glass that will fit a candle in it?"

"We can, but they make some very pretty ones exactly for the purpose."

"When our little colony has glassworks set up," she says. "We can get a pair."

"Sure," he agrees. "I'll look forward to it!"

Nuzzle.

Nuzzle!