They were in the restaurant, on their VIP platform. It was nice and early, after all they had a lot to do this day. Well, John had a lot to do. “Let’s jump right into it,” he announced, having finished breakfast. “I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to today.”

“Ya do seem really excited,” Rave commented; the way her boyfriend had thrown said breakfast down his throat had been hard to miss. Then again, everyone else around was also eating at breakneck pace, for which not only the incredible flavour could be to blame. “So how do we do this? Ya just gonna pick one of us at a time and the rest hangs out by the pool… I ain’t complaining if that’s the plan.”

“Half right,” John said and pulled a bowl from his inventory, together with a spiral-bound notepad and a pen. The former he had removed from their own kitchen while the latter was something he had Aclysia get, together with all the meat. He ripped a few of the pages into equally sized pieces and handed them out to everyone.

“A lottery? Really?” Salamander asked.

“It’s just for the order,” John explained. “I do plan to give each of you some time over the day.”

“I pass,” Siena stated slicing her piece into little ribbons with her fingers. “I can’t stand the publicity. I will just keep being in your shadow and laugh at whatever embarrassing thing you will say.”

“And use it against me whenever you feel like it?” he had to ask.

“Precisssely,” Siena hissed and giggled in a dangerous way, “a well placed repetition and the shame might kill you. Ah, that would just be ecstatic to behold.”

Eliza crumpled her piece of paper, “I don’t give a fuck about this either, I will just be by the pool and do some other shit. Don’t want to be in crowds or walk around in circles for an hour, getting flattered.”

“Instead you are going to cuddle that stupid teddy you have and complain that John is out there with other girls and how you are totally not jealous because you still can’t get your mood swings under control,” Metra stated, writing her name on her slip along with some other stuff and then throwing the folded piece into the bowl.

“You are such a fucking ass; I will rip yours apart and readjust your hip bones to be replacement for this bowl, you…” Eliza began with angry shouting but then, proving Metra completely right, slumped back into her chair and silently glared at her. “Sure. Anyway, I am not going.”

“I want to sit in the bathtub,” Undine just said, also forfeiting her right to vote.

“Hey, hey, Undine, hey, hey, listen, I wonder about something,” a tiny Sylph said, writing her name by holding the pen between her arms and then marching the letters, “you said you wanted to bath in the ocean, but you still didn’t do that. When will you do that?”

“When I do it,” the ocean elemental gave a dodgy answer. John felt a tinge of fear from her mind and had to wonder why that was. Nobody else noticed, judging by the lack of comments from the other elementals. Only Salamander’s eyes rested on her sister for a bit longer than it was usual, but she said nothing. Even if there was some related meaning in that look, John decided to make this a talk for tomorrow, today was all about dating and happiness. It was important to have days like this.

Everyone else threw their papers into the bowl, and thus John took it back and did some whirling and shaking so that they were properly unpredictable. Then he reached in and read the name of the person he picked.

_________________________________________________________________________

“Yay!” Stirwin made a happy sound as he was being carried.

“You really think he is necessary?” John felt a bit alienated by this, but his date insisted that she wanted to take the hatchling with them.

“Yes,” Nia answered, holding Stirwin between her arms like a precious puppy. The crocodile’s hind legs and tail were dangling down as he held onto his carrier, looking around with absolute delight at a height he didn’t usually get to experience. This did, however, inhibit her from using her cards, and John noted that she actually hadn’t even taken them with her.

Made him wonder if this was some sort of test by the blank to see if he was still capable of understanding her without those. With Nia, these sorts of ideas could never be discounted as unlikely. ‘I am willing to take that challenge,’ John thought.

“Where are we going?” Nia asked and tilted her head just a bit. That was an easy one, she was genuinely asking. If the angle had been bigger, that would have meant she was confused. “Is there a petting zoo on this ship?” he knew that this would have sounded excited if she would ever exceed the tone ‘apathetic quiet yet firm talking’ that she constantly held. However, he was clueless as to what her gesture for that was. He had the conclusion but not the equation.

He watched her very carefully, trying to find out where she was hiding her emotions. “No, sorry,” he told her and picked up on her eyebrows lowering a little bit. Was that disappointment? He wrapped an arm around her waist, and they wandered up again as she pressed against him as if she suddenly had realized they were magnets of opposing poles.

“I see,” she stated and then pressed her nose against his shoulder. “You found a good replacement,” her muffled voice spoke something like a compliment. “Original was still better.”

“And still lost to Nathalia,” he sighed, “eventually, my dear, eventually.”

“Your dear?” Nia looked up, and her clear blue eyes told him nothing at all. Was she angry about that title, did she want to hear more of it? They slowed down in their steps as Nia concentrated more on him than on walking. Was that good or bad? John decided that he had no other choice than to jump into cold water. He had something on his heart he wanted to blurt out anyway.

“Yeah, you are dear to me, Nia,” he told her. “Honestly, I love you.”

“You love… me?” she was blinking rapidly; she wasn’t just confused but had trouble to even comprehend what he was saying.

“In an incredibly weird way,” he had to tell her; no one should ever say he wasn’t honest with his girls. “When I first met you, I just thought you were hot and alien. Both of those are still true; you definitely have a body pretty much everyone with half a point in Libido wants, and I don’t think I need to tell your powers make you look a bit… creepy.” He had his hand slide over the tattoo like veins of silver on her back. Her breathing increased for a split second as the tingle of his mana reminded her body both of general combat and the sex they had. “But to me that was kind of fascinating. The way every step you take just looks wrong, how your hair waves according to the rules of another world, how your expressionless eyes lock behind them an anonymous character.”

They walked through a crowd that parted around them. Instinctively all beings avoided walking around Nia, humans less so than those whose whole existence relied on magic. Still, they passed unhindered through a crowded mall as everyone observed what John had observed, even if their reactions was completely different from his.

“Something is wrong with you,” Nia stated, “you shouldn’t be fascinated by that.”

“Definitely,” John agreed. “Don’t know if it’s the years of shunning by normal girls or video games priming me for this sort of situations, maybe it’s just who I am and I am attracted to abnormal individuals. But your weirdness just makes you interesting to me; what all of them think is not important to me, I just wanted to see if I could understand you. A challenge to myself.”

There was a moment of silence as he took a breath and ordered his next words, giving Nia an opportunity to speak. They were still walking incredibly slowly, meaning that the pariah’s mood, whichever that was, hadn’t changed since the start of this conversation. Hoping he was on the right track, he continued.

“But the more I saw of you, the more I realized that you aren’t creepy or withdrawn or any of these things. You just don’t express yourself like a regular person and neither do you seem bound by common sense. You are quirky, you have an abnormal love for pets, which they return, you think questions through until the time to ask them has long passed and ask them anyway. You have goals and pride and character all locked behind a sheet of white paper. What started as a challenge to myself became a want; I wanted to understand you because I realized that the girl behind that paper was cute.”

They slowed down a little bit more, a seventy-year-old on a walking stick could have overtaken them by now.

“And then I trained with you, I slept with you, and I saw more and more of what you truly were and noticed these little ticks even you have. You tense your shoulders when you are annoyed; when you are really happy, you actually make a cute little squeal; when you are tired, you lose your otherwise outstanding awareness of your surroundings. I want to see more of them, and I want to see you learn how to express yourself like the rest of us. I want to make you cry tears of happiness and see you smile one day, a genuine smile that makes my heart feel like it doesn’t fit in my chest anymore.”

He had been looking ahead all this time, one of the two had to watch where they were going after all. Now he took a glance at his date, and his eyes stuck. Nia was making an expression. Not the one John had described, hers was a combination of furrowed brows, confused eyes and partly opened lips, yet still an expression. “That sounds really uncomfortable,” her voice and words were typical Nia still, taking what he said at its face value and delivered in a tone that was so normal it turned abnormal.

“I think it will feel pretty great,” John returned, “but what do you say? You are right when you say there is something wrong with me to find you fascinating in the first place, but that doesn’t change that I love you now. How do you feel about me?”

“I… don’t know,” her expression vanished back into her usual plainness when she tilted her head in confusion. If she even noticed herself what she had just done, nobody knew. It was the second time he had seen anything greatly move on her face and the first time it was an actual feeling rather than just a contortion of orgasmic ecstasy.

But that answer stung, it felt like he was being rejected. It prickled his skin and made his stomach crumple together like a discarded bag. He was used to that feeling of social failure, but it had been buried under mountains of confidence brought to him by his successes in the close past. It was valuable that he got this sort of reminder.

Nia placed Stirwin on her shoulder and reached for the bag that wasn’t there. “Oh,” she made a sound that sounded surprised in context but could have sounded like she was just saying the letter out of the alphabet. “I forgot the bag.”

There went his theory about this being a test. “How unlike you,” he said.

“I was just so happy to go on a date with you,” she reported and thus mended a lot of what her earlier words had ripped open again. She wasn’t in love with him; maybe it was time he actually felt something one-sided from his side after all the other girls that had confessed to him first or simultaneously. However, she did like him enough to look forwards to go on a date with him. That had to be enough for now; it meant that this wasn’t doomed to fail and that she wasn’t uncomfortable.

“Did you like hearing all of that at least?” he asked. “Even just a little bit?”

She nodded and that was all he needed to see.

A few minutes later they arrived where he had planned to take her. He showed his VIP card, put the asked sum on the table and then was let into a small chamber. Usual makeup, smooth birch floor, white walls, only difference was that there were mirrors instead of windows on the walls.

“What is this?” Nia asked as John retracted his arm from her and walked one step to then turn and face her.

“It’s a dancefloor that I just rented for the two of us.” In an attempt to look cool, he snapped with his fingers. The world played into his hands and at that exact moment the music started. “I thought learning all about your gestures would be easier if we got really close and watched each other’s moves.”

“I can’t dance,” the pariah informed him.

“I doubt that,” he returned and offered his hand, “but neither can I.” She looked at it for a solid thirty seconds as the soft intro of the classical music rolled by. Then she placed Stirwin on the floor and took his hand in a sudden motion, and he pulled her towards his chest. The music began in earnest, and John realized that he had accidentally picked something way better than what he had gone out for.

Illusions appeared around them as they started to dance. Piano notes falling through the air in a steady stream as the music actually played to their movements. The song started quiet and lagging, fitting their unsure steps around each other. John was too eager to deliver a good show while Nia did seem simply unsure where to place her feet. Slowly the girl in white grew her confidence, taking steps on her own. Quietly, the boy in his suit learned to quell his want to prove himself to the unconquered girl.

They found a rhythm, a simple one at first, just three steps in a triangle. A simple waltz, the music changed with them, and once they had grown comfortable with each other’s movements, it introduced more elements. This living music around them encapsulated them in a storm of visible notes that swayed the melody they were also swaying to, and it challenged them to grow beyond whatever comfort zone they reached. Urging them on with build-ups and sudden, short explosions, the music became their tutor. Bit by bit that transformed their simple dance.

Over the course of… John had no idea, it must have been an eternity he first spent looking at her feet and a short few minutes he then was looking at her eyes. They danced in a wide circle, failing and retrying harder manoeuvres until they finally nailed them perfectly. The music rewarded them with sweet tones caressing their ears; the air was filled with excitement, wonder and grace as the violins beguiled their senses.

Eyes like sapphires, clear as the sky, purer than water, empty of emotion they may have been, but empty of life they were not. Their eye contact broke for one second as he raised his arm up high and she whirled around her own axis. The skirt of her dress and her hair fanned out in an overly fluid manner, over-compensating for those laws of nature they often ignored. Her palms folded right back into his, and they continued their shared path.

The magical orchestra that played just for the two of them moved onto the finishing crescendo; the illusions of flying cords and the lines of a music sheet they used like streets guided their steps through an open pathway towards the middle of the room where they were surrounded by a maelstrom of that black, intermingling with the colours of the rainbow. Three last tones and Nia fell backwards in his arms, and he bowed over her, catching her in a loving pose as the music stopped.

They looked at each other like they had looked at each other throughout all of this. They were breathing heavily. ‘Seriously, how long did that just last?’ he wondered to himself. It took a bit to get two superhumans out of breath.

Nia raised her hand and gently touched the side of his face as she laid in his arms. “There is nothing to wait for,” she said in a tone that had a hint of warmth and guided him down to her lips.

The lack of smell and taste was somehow more poetic than all the music they had just shared.