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“Hey, Mrs. Mori-Takanashi,” Amelia said, shit-eating grin on her face. “Nice place you got there.”
“Oh, hey Watson,” Cali responded, completely ignoring both Amelia’s verbal jab and her smug face. “Sorry, I just need a moment - HEY! Pay attention to the ley lines, alright! It’s gotta go a little to the left!” She yelled out to an entire crowd of demons in hard hats.
Amelia stood there for a couple minutes with the same look on her face, waiting for the reaper to turn around and pay attention to her. Unfortunately, she was completely absorbed in her task, so the blonde was just stuck grinning at nothing and looking like an idiot. Before one of the construction demons looked at her funny, she toned down her face to her normal level of smugness and whipped out her phone, trying to look busy and mostly succeeding. She thought.
Finally, Calli was done directing the demons, who had just completed the absurd task of lifting up an entire house and then moving it over a couple feet to the left. Whatever was happening to the foundation Amelia really didn’t want to know, but there were a fair few tremors in the ground as the whole process was happening. Apparently, this satisfied her arcane (perhaps literally) requirements, for the reaper nodded in approval and then finally turned back to Amelia and gave her a proper look. Amelia reinstated her shit-eating grin immediately. “Hey, Miss Mori-Takanashi. Nice place you got there.”
“I heard you the first time, Watson.” Calli was still as stoic as she was a minute ago, but Amelia thought she saw just a hint of pink in her cheeks. While the detective knew that Calli wasn’t protesting nearly as much any more, she was still a little surprised about how calm she was with her situation. That being said, she would draw out some lingering tsundere yet, or her name wasn’t Amelia H. “Shut the fuck up” Watson. She let out her trademark Gremlin Giggle anyways (subject to approval from the US Patent and Trademark Office) before taking a better look at the house. It was… well, really quite normal compared to its occupants, a fairly subdued concrete house with two floors. “So… What brings you to, um. Australia?”
“Just had to do a little detective work in Belgium, so I thought I’d stop by since I’m so close.”
“You speak German or French?” Calli asked, raising an eyebrow. “I thought you’d have listed that on your intro if nothing else.”
“Nah, nah, I had Kiara help me out.”
“So should I ask her now, or…”
“In about fifty-seven years, sure.” Amelia smirked, and the reaper sighed.
“Then should I ask you if our house holds up?” Calli asked.
“Hey, hey, I’m not gonna give you any spoilers,” Amelia said, shaking her head. “I didn’t even check it out myself. You know how it is, right?” Calli nodded in acknowledgement; she was well aware of how annoying large scale stable time loops were, and therefore understood Amelia’s determination to never create one around herself if she didn’t need to. The reaper was probably the third most likely among the employees of Cover to get the twists and turns of time travel logic, only behind Jenma who had a job in the field for several millennia and Kronii who knew it better than Ame knew her own heartbeat.
“Fine, fine, fine.” Calli turned back to the demons, gave the house a quick once over, then flashed a thumbs up. “Looks good to me!” The assembled workers gave a smart salute then vanished into purple smoke, leaving behind only a single fluttering business card.
Calli picked it up, then offered it to Amelia, who grabbed it after a second of deliberation. The card read Cambion Construction - The perfect hybrid of mortal and infernal building! in a cheery and altogether not chthonic font. She pocketed it just in case - you never knew when you would need something like that.
“You think they do Minecraft builds too?” Amelia joked.
“Probably, but don’t let Pekora find out,” Calli replied completely seriously. “Anyways, I think this is as good a time as any for a little party. If you could tell the others, that’d be great; Kiara and I still have to do a little interior stuff and of course there’s still streams, so maybe in the next couple weeks whenever y’all are free - “
“How about right now?” Amelia interrupted Calli, pointing to the eldritch portal that had just appeared with Gura and Ina in tow. They even had a cooler, a couple of pizza boxes, and a big bag of snacks in Ina’s tentacle-y grasp.
Calli looked over, looked back at Ame, did a double take, and then groaned. “I thought you hated stable time loops,” she said.
“Only big ones, and this is very, very funny.” Amelia said, Gremlin Giggle at the ready. “Just figured we’d save a little… time. ”
“Shut the fuck up, Watson.”
As soon as Kiara and Calli went public, the entire fanbase erupted.
They’d decided to drop the news as part of the last song of a collab album - management had determined that they would make approximately twelve trillion dollars with that move, and Calli owed Enma, Jenma, and J-chad about that much for the wringer she’d put them through in the whole tax incident, so the reaper agreed without an incredible amount of fuss. After further discussion, she was also convinced that “Civil Union Between Homies For Paperwork Purposes and General Convenience” would be incredibly difficult to stuff into any conceivable rhyme scheme even as an abbreviation, so she finally gave in and just called it a marriage, if only in song - she was still insisting on it when speaking. Cover was hoping that the buzz would give the album a boost, even if the discourse was a little swarmed by Takamori talk.
The resulting stream smashed multiple records for superchat revenue, crashed Youtube’s chat servers for 3 hours, and dominated Twitter trending for the next week. Their later collabs (because of course the lovebirds would queue up a week of collabs) were also extremely chaotic as chat would not slow down even a little. In retrospect, they probably should have seen it coming, but maybe the two dumbasses were hoping that it wouldn’t. Calli and Kiara then decided to take a well deserved honeymoon hiatus to get even the slightest bit of peace and quiet, and that brought them to the present day where HoloEn was chilling in their new house - with some help from Amelia, of course.
“Yo, damn, this only took three days to make?” Gura asked as she annihilated a slice of pizza.
“Oh yeah,” Calli replied. “Ornias does good work. Plus he won a ton of money off of the betting pool, so he was happy to return the favor - hey, Kiara, can you at least sit up yourself?”
She pushed the aforementioned phoenix up, only for her to collapse like a wet sack of potatoes back into Calli’s side. “Ehehehe… I’m living with Calli…”
“Dude, our friends are here. You can get your face out of my tits for just a second.”
“I’ve been waiting billions of years for this,” Kiara said, a far away look in her eyes even beyond her spaced out expression. “I can be baby for just a little bit.” The look went away immediately and Kiara went back to pressing her dopey face into her wife’s chest, but Amelia still felt a little chill at the reminder of how fucking old she was. She’d gotten used to hanging around with people who were a good bit older than she was, but at least they were constrained by little things like the length of the universe. Kiara and Calli… weren’t, really. That being said, she could still smoke their asses in any game ever invented, so that helped bring them closer to earth.
“Alright, fine, go be gay then,” Calli scowled, but still let Kiara snuggle in again, which muffled her giggling to herself. Out of the corner of her eye, Amelia noticed Ina surreptitiously sketching the moment with a couple free tentacles, or perhaps it was the Ancient Ones. She didn’t rat her or them out, of course - more blackmail material was always good, and plus the well drawn image would certainly drive up Audience Social Media Response. (It was certainly a little scary how quickly she could slide back into corp speak, but it did make for some really good bits.)
“God damn, I bet a lotta people would die for that kinda treatment from Calli,” Gura said, mostly killing any hint of A Moment. Good old Gura. “Reaper rack, baby!.”
“If they do, they’re gonna see Death-Sensei, who definitely does not have breasts of any kind. I mean, neither do I when I’m on the clock, so yknow,” Calli said, popping open a water bottle.
“Yeah, I think they're getting a little ahead of themselves. I mean, don't they know that going tits up is a bad thing when it comes to death?" Amelia and Gura snickered at that, but at least Amelia was laughing mostly because of how bad the pun was. Admittedly, that was part of Ina’s charm, but still.
“She’s mine.” Kiara’s voice was just barely audible from her position rammed into Calli’s body, but the intent was clear.
“Yeah, until the next TakoTori collab where you spend the whole thing flirting with Ina and Calli divorces your ass,” Amelia jabbed.
This finally brought Kiara out of her soft-reaper-induced stupor, and she squawked in indignation. “HEY! I was single then, so it was fine!”
Gura chimed in at that, chuckling. “Are we really supposed to believe that one week of marriage is gonna change a billion years of existence?”
“We’re Homies In- “
“Calli, we get it,” Ina, Gura, and Amelia simultaneously said, and Calli immediately gave up. She’d said that more than enough for absolutely no one to believe her, although funnily enough Kiara was happy enough to indulge her.
With a long suffering sigh, Calli continued. “Anyways. The contract is done already, and, y'know, I trust Kiara to not to go overboard after all these years of her not going overboard with me. So she can do as she likes.”
“Ehehehe… Calli is so understanding…” Having waited for the better part of eternity for this, Kiara was taking every opportunity she got to be disgustingly sappy. Understandable, Amelia guessed, but she wished she’d save that stuff for private. Or when they were on stream. Unfortunately, Gura was preoccupied by a chicken wing, so she couldn’t redirect the conversation to something stupid.
Huffing, Amelia took another bite of the garlic bread as she took it upon herself to prevent Kiara and Calli from being too lovey-dovey. “So what’s up with the house, then? Any secret passageways or demonic sigils you’d like to show off?”
“Yeah, and how many of the rooms have you banged in?” Gura asked, having wolfed down the food just to get that question in at the opportune time.
“Dude, what the fuck,” Calli said, rolling her eyes. “Are you chat?” For her part, Kiara giggled a little but deigned to comment.
“I’m not sure you could count that high, sushi brain.” Amelia said, finishing her garlic bread off in that specific way you did when you were way too pleased with yourself.
“Ow, double kill,” Ina said, smiling as she surreptitiously hid away her drawing tablet in another portal.
“Okay, Ame, that was a nice one,” Gura said, holding in a snicker at the murderous look on Calli’s face. “But seriously. Wanna give us a tour?”
“Yes, let’s.” Calli sighed, evidently ready to be anywhere but here. She stood up abruptly, her wife caught by surprise and unceremoniously dumped onto the floor. “Get up, Kusotori.”
“Awww, Calli, can’t we stay like this for, I dunno, maybe a hundred years?” Kiara wasn’t the type to be kept down for long, so she bounced back up to her feet to get in the reaper’s face.
“No.”
“How about a week, then?”
“We only have a week long break!” Kiara fluttered her lashes, doing her best puppy dog impression. Calli looked completely unamused, looking back at the other three and grabbing a wing.
“I bet you’d be able to get away with doing this on stream,” Ina suggested innocently, although they all knew she was one of The Shippers.
“Look, we did one week of collabs - not even in the same house, just fucking collabs - and chat was completely unusable. If we go live with Kiara in the same room as me something’s going to explode, much less with her draped all over me,” Calli exclaimed, crossing her arms.
“They’re gonna find out eventually, y’know,” Gura said. “May as well rip off the bandaid now.”
“Nope. I specifically asked for two separate rooms for streaming, and they’re enchanted so that sound doesn’t leak. No one will ever know.”
“But time zones -“
Calli cut Amelia off. “No one. Please, just let me have this,” she begged, almost as if she knew they were right but just didn’t want to admit it.
“Um, honey?”
“Kiara, if it’s with the rest of the squad, fine, but if you ever say that on stream -“
Kiara interrupted her, holding up her phone. “Right, right, sure, but you’re gonna wanna see this.”
Calli looked at the small screen, and the rest of Holomyth scooched in to see it as well. It was a Twitter post from A-chan, and thus was in Japanese. Kiara, realizing that the others wanted to see as well, translated for them: “Congratulations to Kiara-chan and Calli-chan for moving in together! Let’s all wish them a happy life with each other.” she read out loud.
With a snap, the water bottle in Calli’s hand turned into a bottle of red wine, and she took a chug straight from it. “Motherfucker.”
There was only one bed, Ina noted in approval. The priestess imagined that Calli would have had some excuse ready - a miscommunication with the builders, or saving on heating bills, or something - but even on their vacation together they’d had separate beds, and they were literally mining it for content. This was a new step forward for the couple. She mentally noted down the arrangement of the room in case she needed it for… reasons.
voyeur amusement matchmaking reprobate, the Old Ones ‘said’ to Ina. She hummed in vague agreement. That being said, there were all sorts of innocent things she could be drawing in their room - cuddling, or doing each other’s hair, or even just kinda vibing in the same area… It was just their imagination getting out of hand, clearly.
deflection circumlocution dishonesty
Well, they were free to think whatever they wanted.
acquiescence merriment
Ina chuckled to herself and to her longtime ‘passenger’. “Is something funny,” Calli said, looking at her with a bit of a long-suffering look.
“No, no,” Ina said. “Definitely not laughing at the fact that there’s only one bed. Your secret is safe with me!”
Gura snickered. “You kidding, Ina? This is the opportunity of the century! Everyone’s gonna love this!”
“I’ll give you a KFP four piece set if you don’t, though,” Kiara said.
“Hmm… gonna need a little more than that.”
“And, I’ll let you know that I was fine with two beds.”
Gura thought about that for a moment, then the proverbial lightbulb in her head lit. “You drive a tough bargain, missy. Sold,” the shark did in her best southern drawl, which wasn’t very good.
Calli sighed at all this, having clearly won the battle but lost the war. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s our bedroom, and it just has, y'know, a bed, a nightstand, and two closets. Moving on.” With an air of finality, the reaper strode out of the room, and everyone else struggled to keep up.
Apart from their very decked out streaming rooms (no more gremlin caves for Calli, that was for sure) the rest of the house was fairly normal, if cute. They’d even gotten a cat tree for Kiara’s two cats, where they were currently perched. Sure, the entire foundation was built on a confluence of magical ley lines and there was a direct portal to hell tucked away in the basement next to several old KFP boxes, but it was a typical enough house otherwise. Considering Ina streamed from a shrine to an elder god that existed in slightly more than three dimensions, Gura was at the bottom of Lake Superior at the moment, and Amelia had done quite a few streams at the End of Time just to show off her past self, they might have even been the most normal of the bunch. Even IRyS descended from the heavens to start her stream, so the two of them were still the only ones in HoloMyth who really just showed up and hit play.
"This is actually really nice," Amelia said as they finished up their tour in the living room. "Maybe I will go check out those construction demons."
Ina humu'd in acknowledgement, running her fingers along the collection of Bloom Into You volumes that Calli and Kiara had on their bookshelf. Maybe they wouldn't risk going horribly insane while renovating the shrine. Not that it had happened in centuries, but it was the kind of thing that you couldn't forget easily.
“Yeah, you should!” Kiara chirped.”They were really helpful, honestly. The attic’s even designed to double as a nest for my phoenix form.”
“Can you fit through the window, though?” Gura asked, referring to the very human sized window that the roof had. “I thought you were pretty big as a bird.”
“I’m not going through the window, silly. The roof opens up! Hiyah!” Kiara let out a burst of phoenix magic as she did a silly pose, and with a rather quiet whir all things considered the roof presumably opened up to expose the attic.
“And here I thought this house was pretty normal,” Ina said. “Well, apart from the portal to hell, but I can’t judge on that front.”
“Dude, are you fuckin Batman?” Gura had a completely different take on the situation, as expected. “Calli, you gotta burst out from that thing riding a motorcycle while Kiara flies behind you. That’d be so cool.”
“Hmm… I don’t really like the sound of motorcycles after hearing so much Ghost Rider, but you do raise a good point…” Calli said, evidently picturing it in her mind. “Can we get a ramp in there?”
“If you clean off the skid marks, fine.” Kiara replied. “Also if you make absolutely sure you aren’t going to splatter your mortal body into a paste. I really like that body.”
“You’ve only told us like a thousand times.” Ame rolled her eyes, but clearly in a way that was just for the sake of the bit.
“I’ll say it a million times if it keeps her safe, Ame!”
“You’d say it a million times anyways. There’s more than enough clips that prove that,” Calli retorted. “Anyways, if they already know where we live, I wanna put that on an album cover.”
"Do rappers do that sort of thing? I guess I should look into drawing flame decals, then.” Ina said.
“It can just be a cover of some rock song. I guess the obvious joke is Death Metal, but I don’t really have the voice for that…” Oh, wow, she was actually gonna do it.
judgement attention anticipation
Oh, Ina wasn’t judging or anything, just amused. It certainly sounded like a great idea. Although it would be even better if it was a bubblegum pop cover, or maybe a fusion one… Although that kind of irony was more of an Ame thing.
“That being said, dontcha need a license for that sorta thing? Gura asked. “Like separate from the car one. Dunno how it works in Europe though.”
“Well, it’d be prime content too,” Amelia said. “Everyone would go absolutely nuts for it from the design alone. Add in a motorcycle showcase stream, and you might come close to even outweighing the Takamori talk for a bit.”
“Really?!” Calli’s eyes perked up. Was that what was selling Calli? Ina laughed softly and the Old Ones chimed in their amusement vaguely.
“No fucking way,” came the immediate reply. “The Takamori tag alone is getting more traction than some of the smaller member’s Twitters entirely. You don’t need to time travel to know that you’re stuck forever.” The reaper sighed, realizing that Amelia was just messing with her.
“Jenma said we even had a bunch of interview requests,” Kiara chimed in. “Human interest stories, if that applies or whatever. Not sure if we’re gonna actually do any, though.”
“And now that the whole world knows that we moved in together, there’s going to be a fuckton more.” Calli sighed. “What was A-chan thinking…”
“Look, Gura and Ame were right and there’s no way we were ever getting out of that one. Our sleep schedules would have synced up, and a power shortage or an internet outage would hit both of us at the same time.”
“I guess, but still. She could have at least given us some time to settle in first.” Calli pouted, and Kiara patted her on the head. It was a relatively small thing compared to the multiple overt moves she’d made earlier, but Ina felt like she was the one getting petted with the warm and fuzzy feelings she was getting and all.
“Yeah… but hey, the reaction’s been really positive so far, and everyone’s been really supportive. I think things will work out fine.”
“You really think so, Kiara?” Calli asked, doubt beginning to appear in her eyes.
“Of course!” Kiara beamed. “Because if we’ve got each other, we can make it through anything.”
“Kusotori…” Calli murmured, trying not to sound emotional and totally failing. Ina knew she had always been a romantic, but she was really affected by the cheesy as hell line. Amazing.
“Psst. You think they’ll remember we’re here?” Gura whispered.
“Shh! Let them have their moment,” Ina replied in a low hiss. Gura heeded her words, leaving Calli and Kiara to stare at each other affectionately (and in Calli’s case, failing very poorly to disguise it) while the other three of them simply watched, Ame and Gura trying to contain their laughter and Ina simply letting it all soak in.
cute
Definitely, Ina thought. Definitely.
“Hey, Calli. Can we talk?” Ina asked.
Calli turned around from her quiet position at the window, away from the hubbub of Kiara, Ame, and Gura all causing chaos in their own ways. “You didn’t even make that tako pun, so I’m guessing this is serious.”
“Well, not that serious. I don’t want to put you on the spot or anything. Just… you’re sure you’re okay with this, right?”
“What brings this on, then?” Calli made a rolling motion with her hand, gesturing Ina to continue.
“I just mean… I’ve been really supportive of the whole Takamori thing, right? But now that it’s actually happening and isn’t just a bit, it feels a little strange. I just don’t want you to have made your decision just because we thought it was cute, funny, or both,” Ina said. “Especially given what brought all this on in the first place.”
“Don’t remind me of that,” Calli grumbled. “But yeah, I getcha. J-chad was talking about the same stuff too. The entire damn underground’s been waiting for this to happen ever since she stayed with me that one time, and most of them are really not that subtle. You know me, I’m too damn stubborn to let any of that bullshit get to me.”
Ina humu’d in acknowledgement, trying to figure out how to phrase her response. “So then this wasn’t really about taxes, was it?” she finally asked. “I imagine that you’d have eventually found some way to avoid or maybe postpone dealing with that. And like you said, it’s not like just that pressure would get you to change your mind.”
Calli sighed. “You underestimate the persistence of Underworldian tax collectors.” She paused for a moment, and Ina let the silence stretch on, sensing that she had more to say. “It’s been… nicer than I thought it would be, so far,” she eventually got out.
circumlocution
Ina definitely agreed with Ao-chan’s assessment. That being said, she didn’t see any need to press the matter immediately. “Nicer, hmm?” Ina would play along with Calli avoiding the question, but she couldn’t let her go without a little teasing.
“Shut up.” Calli said, flushing. “It’s been nice just, you know, hanging with a homie.”
“And sleeping with them.”
“It’s the only way to get Kiara to fall asleep before 4 AM. Otherwise she just watches Netflix and falls asleep at some horrible hour.” Ina simply raised an eyebrow at that gem. Calli, still red, tried to figure out what was wrong with what she’d said. At last she puzzled together what she had implied with her statement, and she went from flushed to crimson. “Wait wait wait wait, listen! Listen! I just meant like, in the same bed, that’s all! I didn’t even realize that ‘sleep with’ also meant, like - aaaaargh!”
“Hmm, hmm. Hmm!” Ina vocalized, smiling wider and wider at how red Calli was. “Don’t worry about me, I won’t tell!”
Calli pouted. “And the Ancient One?”
“No promises there!” Ina said, smiling, and Calli slumped down in defeat. “I’ll put in a good word for you, though.”
blackmail favors
“Oh dear, they seem to want something in exchange…” Ina said, raising a hand to her face in feigned concern.
“Grrrr…” Calli growled. “What is it? Don’t make me make takoyaki out of you.”
“Play Bloodborne,” Ina said, and the tentacles on her back wiggled in approval.
“Wait, what?” Calli blinked, evidently not expecting that. “Hell yeah I’d do that, if FromSoft lets us. Hell, I’d make out with Kiara live if I got to play Bloodborne.”
“What’s this about Kiara and Bloodborne?” Gura popped in, having made it over in record time and making the reaper almost jump out of her body.
“Uh, um -“ Calli looked at Ina, who simply smiled and waved at Calli. As far as Ina was concerned, she was on her own here. “I was talking about how I’d make Kiara in Bloodborne once I finally get to play it. You know, in the character creator,” she eventually got out, a rather impressive save for such short notice.
“Ahh, gotcha gotcha. Gotta rep the wifey, I hear you.” The shark grinned, then spun around to call out to the others. “Hey, they’re over here!”
“Eh?!” Kiara asked, hurrying over to catch up with Gura. Ame strolled in at her own pace behind her, finishing up some leftover pizza. “What are you doing over here, Calli? I still have to get as much cuddling as possible before we have to get back to work!”
“Wow, you sure changed your mind fast,” Ame said with a laugh. “What happened to giving her a little space, huh?”
“H-hey! Don’t talk about that!” Kiara stage whispered, although Ina didn’t see the point at all because Calli had assuredly heard her. “Besides, I also deserve some time to get my way, right?”
“All good relationships are built on mutual understanding of each other’s boundaries and needs,” Ina said, “But all great relationships are built on cuddles. Go for it.”
“Wait, don’t I get any say in this?” Calli complained, already back to tsundere mode.
“No,” came Kiara’s immediate response as she sprinted up to Calli, tackle-hugging her. With practiced ease, the reaper caught the phoenix, taking a couple steps backwards to dispel her momentum without being bowled over. She rolled her eyes, but didn’t really do much else about the sudden invasion of her private space.
“Hey, hey, come on! Just because you gotta do married people shit doesn’t mean I’m gonna let you off the hook. We still gotta play Necrodancer, alright?” Gura prodded Kiara as she said that, trying to get her to move. “Down with ye, Calli needs her hands right now.”
“I’m not good at rhythm games, though…” Calli complained, although she did let Kiara down. “I always get too distracted by the music to keep up with the game.”
“Relax, Necrodancer is more about thinking on the fly than it is about rhythm. You can be pretty late or early as long as you’re keeping the beat.”
“Yeah, but I’m even worse at thinking!”
Gura grinned. “So am I! That’s what’s gonna make this great. C’mon, let’s get our asses whooped.”
“Wait!” Kiara cried, following up behind the two. “It’s a two player game, right? Me and Calli have to play it together.”
“Well, I did have dibs, buuuuut you guys are married…” Gura’s voice trailed off as she got further and further, Ame and Ina left behind.
“Remind me to get Gura something for distracting them from the interrogation we just pulled on them,” Ame said. “Couldn’t have done it any better myself.”
“Humu humu. So, Kiara’s doing alright, yes?”
“Yeah. Still in a little shock and low-key terrified that she’s gonna do something to ruin their relationship and that she’s pushed too far already, but I was able to talk some sense into her. I mean, we were having this conversation in the house Calli helped build for the two of them, y’know? Don’t need to be Sherlock to put two and two together here.”
“Calli was much the same, I think,” Ina added. “Didn’t get any straight answers - not that I wanted to hear any, of course, just gay ones - but her tsundere act is really starting to come apart, and I’ve definitely been noticing her smile when she thinks no one is looking.”
“Alright. Good work, Deputy Ina! I’ll make sure to write you and Inspector Gura up for a commendation,” Ame said, clapping her hands together.
“Are you a detective, or a cop?”
“Neither, to be perfectly frank!” Ame said cheerfully. “Anyways, let’s catch up with the others. I gotta see this.”
“You go on ahead,” Ina said. “I’ve got something to send to Enma first.”
Amelia nodded, then followed Gura, Calli, and Kiara at a much more sedated pace. Ina pulled out her Ao-chan tablet, then typed out a quick message to Enma:
Hey, can you look into getting approval for Bloodborne on stream? And Persona 3, now that I think about it.
We already asked, though, came the prompt reply. Good old Enma, always on top of things.
I know, but Takamori is real big right now and everyone’s watching them. Might get another opportunity. Let A-chan know that Calli’s asking, she’ll be able to help.
Why are you asking me if she’s the one who wants it?
Oh, you know. Calli’s on break right now, and if we let her do one thing while away she’ll somehow talk herself into working even more. But she’s expressed interest, and I figure I could do it as a favor for you.
And is there any other reason why you’re asking, and for that matter why you’re telling me to ask A-chan? She’d be overseeing this anyways.
Well, I think this time she’d be willing to give it a more personal touch. After all, she’s also one of The Shippers.
Ina could almost hear Enma groaning at what she was asking. Eventually, she got a simple reply: I’ll do my best.
As Gura had expected, they were getting completely annihilated by the Crypt of the Necrodancer. That being said, none of them were exactly quitters, so Calli and Kiara were up to attempt fourteen while the shark sat this particular one out and Ina and Ame watched and laughed. “We’ll do this with the power of Takamori!” Kiara had cheered in the beginning, but so far the power of Takamori was a lot worse than the power of Deep Blue or King Conga. The shark thought that maybe they were a little distracted by Kiara’s incessant flirting, but she knew by this point that trying to stop that would be like trying to stop the sun from burning.
“Oi, birdbrain, you should stop trying to get into Calli’s pants and start playing the game,” she said anyways. Let no one say that she hadn’t thrown her trident twenty feet into the air during a particularly hot day or two.
“Hey! Who are you calling a - Verdammt! ” Even without her German lessons backing her up, Gura knew roughly what Kiara was getting at as her character got blown away by the skeleton guitarist’s fireball spell. “Anyways, as far as I’m concerned her pants are my pants.”
“You barely even wear pants, though,” Ame said. “What are you gonna do with - wait, don’t answer that.”
“Shh, shh, shh…” Calli growled as she stared at the screen, gripping her controller hard enough that Gura thought she might break it. “Just gotta… now!” Calli’s character lunged forwards with her rapier into Death Metal’s unprotected back, finally killing him. “Hell yeah! Suck it, you shitty third rate imposter!” Gura had to bite her tongue to stop herself from shouting a bad joke about Among Us. She joined the others in cheering them on even so, since they’d finally got past the brutal third zone.
“How does anyone actually play every zone in a row if each individual zone is so tough?” Ina asked. “That sounds incredibly difficult.”
“Nah, I think I can see how they’d do it,” Calli replied, calming down from her adrenaline rush just a little. “It’s definitely not impossible, especially since I think you keep all the stuff. We just suck.” She offered the controller to Gura, who took it a little more gently than she would have otherwise. “Here, your turn.”
“Ehh, you know what? We should probably give it a rest,” Gura said while laying the poor abused controller down. Hopefully they had some sturdy enchantments on these things. “Hate to break it to you, but I’m not sure how long it’d take us to get through Act Four if Three took us like an hour and a half. Let’s find something all of us like to do. Any ideas?”
As always, Ame was quickest on the draw. “Bullying Calli,” she said, grinning.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Kiara said loudly, frowning visibly. “No one bullies my w-Homie.”
“I mean…” Calli said. “I have been known to bully myself from time to time. Even wrote a song about it. Or seven. It’s fair play to say that it’s one of my hobbies.”
“No, Calli! Absolutely none of that in our house. You are wonderful and I will personally beat the shit out of anyone who says otherwise, you hear me?” Kiara clasped Calli’s cheeks rather aggressively as she said that.
“Even me?”
“Even you. We’re about to throw hands right fuckin now, okay? Well, after I beat the shit outta Ame.” She turned to the detective and smiled rather threateningly. “Are you ready?”
Ame backed off, realizing that she might have gone a little too far. “Ah, Kiara, I was just -“
She was interrupted by Kiara slamming down a chess set from absolutely nowhere, the pieces clattering around but miraculously staying on the board. “Round two, baby!”
“Oh dear ,” Ina said, already breaking out into a grin. “Gura, will this do?”
“I think this still might count as bullying Calli…” Gura could barely keep a straight face at the prospect of Kiara v. Ame in chess part 2. Their first intellectual bout had probably driven at least one overeager backseater insane, after all. “But sure, this seems like a good idea!”
Ame breathed a bit of a sigh of relief now knowing that Kiara was (mostly) just messing with her. “Sounds good to me! Have you studied any theory?” Amelia said, setting the pieces back into their rightful places.
“Yep! I even know an opening now,” Kiara said, sitting down on the side of the white pieces. With a shiteating grin on her face, she slid a pawn two squares down on the board.
Ame stared at the board. Gura knew approximately nothing about chess, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what most people did. Shrugging eventually, she made a move in response. Almost instantly, Kiara shot her hand out and made another move. As one, everyone stared at the board, seeing but not comprehending.
“… Don’t you normally move the ones in the middle?” Calli asked, sidling up to her wife. “Sensei never taught me to play, but I did watch a couple of their games when people still could wager their souls against Death.”
“I dunno, this is just the opening I learned. It’s called The Crab!” Kiara said cheerfully.
“So what do you do after that?” Ina asked.
“No idea!”
“You just picked it because it sounded funny, right?”
“Absolutely!” The phoenix said with a grin on her face, revealing that she’d been planning on this the whole time. “Also, Gura, what do crabs sound like? I wanna do an Am Crab video.”
“Ummm…” Gura thought for a long while about how to translate shark ear noises to human ear noises as Kiara threw another move down, this time a third pawn in the center. “You know, sound really doesn’t carry through water in the same way, right? It’s… yeah, I have no clue how to describe what they sound like in a way that you’d understand.”
“Shark ears are really meant for extremely low frequencies because that’s what carries through water best.” Ame noted as she put a knight out onto the board. “Their famed noses are doing most of the work, of course… which makes it even more surprising that this nerd is so stinky all the time.” She grinned at Gura, who narrowed her eyes. Fine then, she wanted to play like that? Then so be it.
When Kiara put her next piece down, the pawn erupted into a waterspout, knocking over the knight that Ame had set forth. The detective raised an eyebrow at the sight, looking Gura straight in the eye as if to ask, Is this how we’re doing things? Gura simply returned Ame’s earlier grin, unafraid.
“Hey!” Kiara yelled, unhappy about the intrusion into their very serious game. “This board is made out of wood! ” Or not. “You better not damage it!”
“Relax, relax, it’s magic water. It’ll fade instantly once I’m done with it. See?” Gura schlorped up the water with her other hand, leaving the board perfectly intact.
“… Did it have to make that sound?” Calli asked.
“Oh yeah. It’s vitally important that the water get schlorped for the magic to work properly. If you fwoop or splut the water, it doesn’t work at all.” Gura nodded solemnly.
“I thought I had a snarky comeback ready, but nope, your real name outdid my joke. Good job, Gura,” Ame said incredulously. “Anyways, it’s your turn.”
“Aha! You forgot about… wait…” Kiara looked down at the board again. “Why is your queen over there?”
Amelia grinned rakishly. Was that the word? Yeah, that sounded good. “That’s where it was the last game on this board. I just… gave it a little help, that’s all.”
“You! Well, are completely in your rights to do that, but still. This means war!” Kiara declared, which would have been much more impressive if Gura hadn’t beaten her to the punch and acted first. It was still kinda cool, though, because Kiara knew how to ham it up. “Have at you!” she cried as her bishop erupted into flames.
“Inaaaa!” Amelia called out. “You gotta help me! It’s three on one!”
“Three?” Ina raised an eyebrow, then thought again, realizing which side the only other idle member would join. “Oh, humu humu. Alrighty, then,” she said as three pawns on Ame’s side merged together into one larger tentacled monstrosity, beating the crap out of a big chunk of Kiara's board.
"... Do I have to..." Calli said finally. Kiara wasn't having any of that, though, and she deployed a weapons grade pout against her wife until she finally relented and tapped the queen, giving her a miniature scythe and a cloak. "Don't say I don't do anything for you," she huffed.
"Oooh! ... What does it do?" Kiara asked, poking at the queen.
"It's a scythe."
“I mean, like, in the game.” Kiara slid her queen out diagonally, but nothing happened except for a bit of dramatic fluttering. “Huh.” She turned to Calli, but the reaper had already gone back to fiddling with her tablet. Kiara sighed theatrically, but then turned back to the board. "Let's settle this once and for all!" she declared.
And thus proceeded the worst game of chess ever played. Not that Gura knew how the game was really supposed to be played, but it definitely didn't involve whatever the hell this was. They were like three quarters of an hour in, and the battlefield had devolved into total chaos. Half of the board was a fetid swamp that Kiara's phoenix-fire reinforced pawns were having trouble advancing through even with Gura’s powers giving them better aquatic mobility, most of Ame's pieces had fallen to the encroaching army and were being glomfed up by the steadily growing tentacle abomination, and the time-traveling queen had appeared no less than 4 times at once in increasingly more unlikely configurations to snipe out key pieces in Kiara's backline. Gura wasn't sure if she believed Ame's claims of queens that "just happened to be floating above the board”, but the universe hadn’t collapsed in on itself yet. Maybe she was just cheating normally instead of cheating supernaturally? That seemed like a thing she’d do.
Finally, when Ina’s pawn monstrosity had managed to carve a rather convincing ritual circle into the chessboard and seemed poised to overrun the remainder of Kiara’s army with the corpses of dead pawns, her queen’s scythe flared red, and the monster was neatly beheaded in one elegant stroke. Kiara cheered immediately with a huge whoop, then turned back to Calli. “Thank you!”
Calli waved her faintly glowing hand dismissively. “You were just taking too long, that’s all,” she grumbled. “We gotta wrap it up pretty soon.”
“Mhmmm… but wait, if you hadn’t done anything, we would have won. You’d have been crushed by my… apawnmination.”
Gura couldn’t tell if Calli was angrier at the pun or the implication that she was helping out Kiara, but she growled all the same. “Goddamnit.” As if responding to Calli’s frustration, the scythe lashed out again, halting the opposing queen in its time-traveling tracks.
The remaining undead pawns, the many time-displaced copies of the queen, and the shambling remnants of the apawnmination did their best to protect Ame’s king, but inevitably Kiara’s pieces managed to corner her. “Now, for my final move! En passant!”
“You can’t do that, though,” Ame said. “That only works if the pawn just moved, and all of these pawns have definitely moved already.” The pawn in question was still shambling towards Kiara’s position even though it was currently on fire. “See? Moving!”
“Oh…” Kiara said with audible disappointment in her voice. “Then I guess I’ll just checkmate you normally…” She put her queen down rather anticlimactically, cutting off all escape for Ame’s king both normally and along alternate timelines (probably). And with that, the entire magical edifice collapsed, and all the pieces returned to their normal pristine condition. Gura schlorped up the rest of the water, leaving the board clean as well. “Good game, good game!”
“Hell yeah! Dumbest game of chess I ever played, and I’ve played with Calli’s boss.” Ame grinned rakishly, and the reaper threw her a glare at the reminder that Amelia Watson still wasn’t fucking dead. In response, she simply doubled down, throwing her finger guns and winking, and Calli decided that it just wasn’t worth it to get angry. “Anyways, we’ve got some stuff to clean up, then we’ll be out of your hair, promise.”
Ina nodded and stood up, her antenna thingies flapping a bit as she checked up on something. “Ah, your cats seem to have done a number on some of the takos I left for them. I should piece them back together.”
“Wait, Ina, none of them ate any of the bits, right?” Calli asked.
“Well…” Ina giggled a little, although she did have the good grace to look embarrassed. “They’re not poisonous at all, so it should be fine?”
Immediately, Calli was up, taking long strides towards the living room. “I’m gonna go check on them. Ina, come with me.”
“Man, she really loves those cats, huh?” Gura said.
Kiara nodded. “Oh yeah, I was surprised too. Even more surprised that they seem to like her back. Usually they’re a little shyer around other people.”
“I bet it’s ‘cause you kept on talking about her to them.”
“Oh no, I didn’t vent my feelings to the cats. That’s what superchat readings are for. Anyways, I’m gonna bounce too. You guys can get this room, right?”
“Aye aye, Tenchou!” Ame gave a lazy salute and Gura flashed a thumbs up as Kiara left to go check up on her cats. As soon as she was gone, Ame grabbed the queen again and held it like a dart above the chessboard. “Let’s see…” she murmured.
“Whatcha up to now?” Gura stabbed a couple of empty bags with her trident, then cleaned up some crumbs with a good old splash-schlorp combo.
“Oh, I’m cleaning up some temporal trash right now,” Ame said as she lined the throw up just right. She threw it over the chessboard and the queen shimmered at a certain spot in its arc.
“Wow, really?” Gura said incredulously.
“Look, all I said was that the queen was there at some point. I never said I wasn’t the reason.” Ame put a hand to her chin. “I think I also did it here…”
“Alright, bozo. You make sure Kronii doesn’t beat your ass.” Although Gura was pretty sure people would pay for that.
“Oh, by the way, Gura?” Ame said casually. “You should clean your place.”
“… Are you insulting me or are you doing the thing where you drop a cryptic hint about the future?”
“Yes.”
“Shut the fuck up, Watson.”
Gura was finishing up cleaning her room when a knock came at her front door. The shark frowned as she chucked an old pizza box into the trash, making the place presentable. Hopefully. Ame’s hints were generally timed to make their recipient just aware enough of the problem to be able to fix it right on, well, time.
“Oi, whaddya want - oh hey, what are you guys doing down here? Sorry, thought it would have been one of the local sailor ghosts.” Opening the door revealed that her visitors were none other than Calli and Kiara, the latter evaporating all the water off of their bodies. The two of them were not quite looking at Gura, Calli’s face flushing furiously and Kiara uncharacteristically looking away bashfully. “What’s up? I assume you didn’t come to the bottom of Lake Superior for nothing.”
“I, um.” Kiara said.
“Ah, do you want me to,” Calli replied shiftily.
“I mean, uh, … yeah…”
“Yeah, okay. Sure. Right. … Um, we need to crash at your place. For, reasons,” the reaper finally stammered out.
“The hell?” Gura raised an eyebrow. “You guys only stayed there for a day. And you couldn’t just grab a hotel room or something?”
“Ah, well, you see…” Calli looked at Kiara again, her blush growing to critical levels.
Kiara chimed in here, but she was about as tongue-tied as her wife. “Um, well! We were doing, ahhh, Homie Activities! You know, totally and completely seiso Homie Activities! And, uh, I may have gotten a little… overwhelmed…”
“Just spit it out. What happened?”
“Thehouseburneddown,” Calli forced out.
“What.” Gura said flatly.
“The house burned down and we don’t think we can stay in other normal rooms in case it happens again and we can't go to the Underworld because there's no internet connection so we came here because your place is underwater.” It was still fast, but Gura was able to pick up more this time. Still, her brain had to go over it several times before she pieced the entire sentence together. Gura stared blankly at the duo, who seemed to shrink at her gaze.
“Wasn’t your place made of concrete?” she finally asked.
"Yeah…”
"Like, magically reinforced concrete from hell? The place that's on fire all the time?"
"Look. It's just, burnt down. That's all that really matters, I think," Calli said sheepishly.
"Wait, wait, no - pht - I gotta know now so you don't get my place too. If all of that fancy demon building shit couldn't prevent your house from burning down, are you absolutely sure that just plain ol water is gonna stop Kiara?" Gura was trying really, really hard to not laugh at her friends who were in a rough spot, but also it was for a really stupid reason.
"Well, um, listen, we won't engage in, um, any Homie Activities in here, or maybe just like, for the next thousand years. So. Everything will be fine. It's just, y'know, better safe than sorry. Yeah."
Gura sighed, still on the verge of tears from suppressing her laughter. "Alright, alright, but if you fuck in my house I'm getting Ame to film it and uploading it to my channel."
As soon as they heard that, Calli went as red as Kiara's still smoldering aura and Kiara went the complete opposite way, becoming so pale that Gura wondered if she had died and was about to resurrect any minute. "We didn’t do any of that!" Kiara exclaimed. Huh, so she was telling the truth about being shy when push came to shove. "Seriously, just, normal, normal Homie things!"
"Uh huh, and that's what caused you to literally go up in smoke. I see how it is." Gura refrained from calling her a flaming lesbian, but she was definitely thinking it. “Mkay, you can stay for sure. I do have a stream in… about five minutes. Are you fine with that?
“Oh shit." Calli and Kiara looked absolutely mortified, refusing to look even in Gura's general direction. "Um, um, um," Kiara said very elegantly.
"Just do whatever you gotta do, dude. We'll be fine, trust." Calli said, dragging Kiara further into the house.
"My streaming setup is at the back, so just take a left! You can hang out over there til I'm done, and DM me if you need stuff!" Gura yelled at their hastily retreating figures. Well. Gura sure hoped that she wouldn't need to call in that threat, but judging by how much they looked like they wanted to sink into the mantle of the earth they probably weren't even going to think about it. Poor bastards.
That being said, they did drop in on her and ask to crash, and Calli did give her the go ahead to do 'whatever she had to do', so she figured that she got to get in a little ribbing at their expense. "Hey chat, sorry for the tiny delay!", she said as she sat at her chair, grinning widely. "But you'll never guess who just dropped by..."