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Mydei got the script for Planarcadia late one night, the urgent noise breaking him out of his dreams. He struggled awake with a grumbled huff, and blinked his eyes open into the darkness. Phainon, next to him, shifted slightly, his nose scrunching up.
Mydei petted his hair. “Go back to sleep,” he said, and picked up his phone to check his inbox.
Then he shrugged, and set it back down.
“Whuzzhewan,” Phainon mumbled, as Mydei drew the covers back over the both of them.
“Elio?” Mydei said. “This script, I stay home and open the door when Silver Wolf shows up. That’ll be in a few hours from now, so.” He yawned, and threw an arm back over Phainon’s torso, scraped his teeth over Phainon’s shoulder to draw a pleased, sleepy hum from him. “We can relax.”
Phainon nuzzled into Mydei’s arms, then shifted a little and said, “Goin’ back to sleep. You can relax however you want, though.” He wriggled his ass, teasingly.
“Mm, I plan to.” Mydei patted his boyfriend’s ass, then Phainon turned over and once again fell back asleep, snoring in a second. “Sweet dreams, Deliverer,” Mydei murmured, his chest growing warm with overwhelming affection, then kissed his way down Phainon’s spine.
He had time. He could take it easy.
--
Mydei awoke once more when he heard the rapping on their door—two knocks, a pause, then two knocks again. He sighed, and reluctantly disentangled himself from a very clingy Emanator trying his best to entrap Mydei in the bed.
Sure enough: “No, tell 'er to go’way,” Phainon whined.
“The script, Phainon,” said Mydei, fondly, and kissed his temple. Phainon grumbled in response and scooted into the space Mydei left behind, mushing his face into the pillow and going straight back to sleep. Mydei chuckled at the sight, then got out of bed and dressed himself in a chiton to go and greet his fellow Stellaron Hunter.
Sure enough, Silver Wolf was standing outside of the door to their quarters, tapping her foot. She was there in person, he could tell immediately—they had an open window at the end of the hallway that was letting in a draft, and Silver Wolf’s hair moved with the breeze. “August,” she said. “Did you get the script?”
Mydei said nothing, but opened the door further to let her in, as an answer in itself. She came in and looked around, taking in the nice furniture, the antiques from different planets, the unsightly curtains Phainon had triumphantly won the right to hang up in a bet. “Huh, this is way nicer than the rest of the fortress,” she said. “Except the curtains.”
“Phainon loves them,” said Mydei. “So Planarcadia?”
“Yup,” she confirmed. “Phantasmoon Games.”
Mydei blinked at her, then ran his history lessons through his head again. It had been ages, but he could almost remember… “It’s only been fifteen years,” he said, surprised. “That’s. Irregular.”
“Yeah, you think?” Silver Wolf said, dropping onto their couch with a sigh. “We have plans to gain a mask. Or, okay, we had plans to gain a mask, but you’ll never even guess what happened.”
“Someone stole it?” Mydei asked.
“Dan Heng and Sunday stole it,” said Silver Wolf, and Mydei raised an eyebrow, surprised at that particular combination of Express crewmates. “With the help of the Foxian amicassador, too. Embarrassing. So now,” she waved a hand, “I have some hacking to do. Gotta check their police systems, I found some breadcrumbs about some guy named Ashveil, but I can't be near the planet for now.”
“So you came all the way to Castrum Kremnos?” Mydei said.
“Your city moves,” said Silver Wolf. “Even if they track me to Amphoreus, they’re gonna have a hell of a time finding me at all.”
Well, he couldn’t dispute her on that. “Fine,” he said. “But let me cook your breakfast.”
“Ooh, deal,” said Silver Wolf, brightening. “The breakfast of gods. I’ve missed it.”
She hung her jacket up on a coat rack that Phainon had bought from Kafka’s favored furniture shop, and flopped onto a kline that Mydei had scavenged and fixed back up. She let her head fall back with a relieved sigh, and Mydei resisted the urge to step closer and ruffle her hair. He could do that if Firefly was around to bully Silver Wolf into accepting the ruffles, but without her he figured she’d probably hiss at him like a cat.
Funny how she called herself Silver Wolf, really, when he thought about it like that.
He went to the kitchen, and assembled the ingredients for eggs and soldiers—an egg to boil, bread to toast and tear into strips, some powdered sugar and a little bowl of clarified butter. It was as he was toasting the bread that he heard Phainon’s yawn, then the sound of footsteps.
Silver Wolf, gaming on the couch, glanced up. Her eyes narrowed, but otherwise she didn't make a move. “Khaslana,” she said.
“Silver Wolf,” said Phainon, warmer. When he wasn’t trying to sleep, he’d started trying to ease his relationships with the other Stellaron Hunters. He’d told Mydei once: This is your family, and you care what they think, so. I want to get along with them. “What’re you playing?”
“Nothing,” said Silver Wolf, with the obstinacy of a teenager. “You wouldn't be interested anyway.”
“I’ve seen the same things over and over for millions of cycles,” said Phainon. “I’ll be interested.”
Silver Wolf squinted at him, then glanced over towards the kitchen. Mydei carefully dropped the egg into the boiling water, leaned back, and said, “He will be. You should see all the videos he watches, he’s fascinated by anything.”
“Fine,” said Silver Wolf, and shifted over to make some room for Phainon on the couch. She tilted her console’s screen towards him with clear reluctance, and Phainon’s eyebrows went up into the fringe of his hair as he watched whatever was happening onscreen as intently as he studied maps of where in Amphoreus still needed cleaning up from the Black Tide.
Mydei watched them for a little while, smiled, then went back to the cooking.
He heard Phainon say, “So when you press that button you do a special attack that does elemental damage?”
“Yeah, that’s the basic gist of it,” Silver Wolf said, sounding reluctantly impressed, as if she really hadn’t expected Phainon to actually mean it when he said he’d be interested in whatever she was doing. “You can chain basic and special attacks together into a combo, if you wanna deal extra damage to the enemies.”
“Pretty cool,” said Phainon, and the two of them drifted off into quiet murmurs.
--
It was over soldiers and eggs that Silver Wolf said, “I need to use your bathroom for a little soak.”
Mydei said, “Absolutely not.”
“Please,” said Silver Wolf, plaintively.
“You’re not hacking your way into Planarcadia in the tub,” said Mydei, flatly. “Use the damn couch instead.”
“But I’ve been working like six hours!” Silver Wolf said. She didn’t whine, not quite, but Mydei knew what she sounded like when she really wanted something.
“Then you could have stopped off at Okhema and enjoyed the baths there,” said Mydei. “Aglaea will not stop you, you know that. And the Marmoreal Palace is much more expansive than our single tub—”
“—that we’ve done many varied nasty things to each other in,” said Phainon, who’d been quiet as he nibbled on some toast. Off Silver Wolf’s horrified look, he shrugged. “I'm only saying. We’re in a relationship, we like each other. We’ve had sex most places in these chambers.”
“Eww,” Silver Wolf said, and after that she’d agreed to set up on the couch.
Afterward, Phainon pulled Mydei out into the hallway, and said, worriedly, “What’s happening that she needed to come here? Unless it's a part of the script that you can't tell me.”
Mydei shook his head. “It’s not, Elio would have informed me if it were,” he said. And then the script itself would make damn sure Mydei couldn’t tell Phainon much, if at all—Firefly had tried her best to talk to Caelus back on Penacony, but she had never been able to confess until the moment the script allowed her to. A thousand little things had gotten in the way. But Mydei didn't say that. “Why, are you worried?”
“Well, yeah,” said Phainon. “For her and for Caelus and March.”
“How did you—”
Phainon shrugged. “I just guessed,” he said. “You’re all close to Caelus, so.”
“If you throw a rock in this universe you have a very high chance to hit someone who’s close to Caelus,” said Mydei. “And. She’s trying to get us into Planarcadia’s Phantasmoon Games.”
“Phantas-what?”
“Aha’s idea,” said Mydei. “The legends say that THEY painted a moon into the sky of Planarcadia, and on seeing such a miracle, eight Mourning Actors attempted to gain an audience with the Aeon by catching THEIR attention somehow. That was the first Phantasmoon Games—they’ve only gotten bigger since then.”
Phainon said, “Games that big don’t get that way without a glorious reward for the winner.”
“You’re right,” said Mydei. “Whoever wins the Games is said to gain the power of the Aeon of Elation for one minute.”
“Oh,” Phainon said. “Silver Wolf with that kind of power—wonder what she’d do with it?”
“Most likely,” said Mydei, “make sure the games she preordered are actually good.” It was a flippant answer, but it was the best one he had. “Or it’s part of the script. I can’t say for sure because I don’t know, and you’d likely have to ask her.”
Phainon fidgeted a little, and said, “I don’t know. She doesn’t like me much.”
He wasn’t wrong, but she had thawed towards him. “She’s accepted that you are a part of my life,” said Mydei. “She’ll come around. Didn’t she show you her video game?”
“I’d kind of assumed she just did that because I was asking questions and she wanted me to leave off,” said Phainon. “What is she, like, twelve? I vaguely remember being twelve. I was a horror at twelve—uh, not a literal horror.”
“She wouldn’t show me her video game,” said Mydei, and Phainon blinked at him. “She claims I wouldn’t understand it.” She wasn’t wrong, he wasn’t very fond of it. What plot there was seemed little more than an excuse to keep gamers like Silver Wolf hooked, to lure them towards the in-game store. “But if she showed it to you—she is trying, Deliverer. She recognizes your efforts and she is putting in her own.”
Phainon fiddled with his sleeve. “If I did ask her,” he said.
“She might tell you,” said Mydei. “She might not. Some scripts are stricter than others.”
Phainon was silent, eyes cast downward, the faintest crease between his eyebrows. Mydei knew that look—that was the one Phainon wear when he was thinking something over, then coming to a decision.
“I’ll ask,” he said.
--
“What do you think?” Silver Wolf said. “August's right. I want the games I pre-ordered to be good.”
The two of them had been set to cleaning up a balcony while Mydei cleared a part of the library of wandering monsters, and Phainon had finally asked her what she planned to do with the power of an Aeon. Now he squinted at her, confused over such a simple wish—but then, once upon a time he’d had wishes just as simple as hers, too.
“Is that really it?” he asked, carefully wiping down the marble railing. From up here, he could see the ruins of the city that the Kremnoan detachment back in Okhema once called home.
Silver Wolf looked at him, then said, “Auggie likes you.”
“A miracle,” Phainon said, “and one I’m grateful for every day, considering.”
Silver Wolf drummed her fingers on the railing, and purple squares rose and fell with her fingers. Before his eyes, she’d managed to clean and polish the marble without even breaking a sweat. “It doesn’t mean I trust you as much as he does,” she said, “but. I’ll give you this for free: life is but a game, and I play to win.”
“You sound like the villain in one of your games,” said Phainon, cheerily, and snorted a laugh as she smacked her fist into his shoulder. “You’d have to punch harder than that!”
“August would be so mad if I did,” she said. “Anyway, you shut up, they’re stupid. I’m better. That's why I will win. Just as soon as Blade and I can find that stupid mask.”
“How's that going?” Phainon asked, and got a long, drawn-out groan in response.
“The stupid private eye tried to sell us out for peanuts,” she said. “Bananas, I mean. Ass.” Why bananas, she didn't explain.
Phainon patted the top of her head, and smiled as she leaned into the touch, not unlike a cat. “You’ll get it,” he said, encouraging. Probably he shouldn’t, considering she was a Stellaron Hunter, but in this moment, all he could see was Mydei’s adoptive sister—Mydei’s family, for good or ill.
“I’d better,” huffed Silver Wolf. “Ugh, I can't believe the Astral Express beat us to the mask. I think that makes it two they’ve got, ‘cause Caelus has one too.”
Of course Caelus had one. “Trouble just follows him around,” Phainon said. “How long till you need to leave for Planarcadia? I can’t imagine claiming this mask you’re so gung-ho about will be easy to do from Castrum Kremnos.”
“Give it an hour, hour and a half,” said Silver Wolf. “In the meantime?” She gestured to Phainon’s half of the balcony, which was still a dusty mess, and said smugly, “I think I win this round.”
“Mydei!” Phainon yelled. “I’m going to dunk your colleague into a pool!”
“Hey!”
“Get her electronics off her first and then you can dunk her!” Mydei shouted back.
“What the hell, Auggie!”