The night had been pleasantly cool, the first phase of fall finally wrestling summer to the ground. It would start building heat soon as the sun came up to wash over the sea of tents and other festival infrastructure. This whole loud, overwhelming event had begun as a constellation of Correlan-wide seasonal celebrations many centuries ago, and now the Stone Moon Grand Tourney had become this…thing. This giant, bloated festival of sports and markets and after-dark side-eye debauchery that brought people in from all over the connected worlds. 

Thankfully, it was in Illuria this year, the best location in the four-year cycle. 

Unfortunately, that meant it attracted the highest numbers, the boundaries of the thing burgeoning out more and more each year until it spread farther out into the countryside. There was only so much open space left in this part of the world, so the physical limits would cinch around it soon enough.

Lidea cracked eir eyes open and met the one-way mesh of a window and the gloamy pre-dawn beyond. Ey sat up on eir elbows groggily, shifting into a cross-legged position. Looking east, shying north, far away in the distance beyond the peaks of tents and the structures of the fairgrounds, a thin, spindly tower poked the pink part of the sky. You wouldn't know the Apolais Beacon was there if you weren't looking for it, and unless you had grown up in the Apolais Independent Incorporation, you probably wouldn’t know what it was. 

At the base was an artificer's tower, a less than literal description of a place a master artificer had made their center of operations. The spindle — the thing that could be seen from such a massive distance — was a remnant of centuries-old magical machinery. Something in the way they used to hold open the space tunnels for the transport circles. Even if ey wasn’t so hungover, ey couldn’t remember all the details. 

Ey was as close to "home" as ey had been since the last Tourney, and it was near enough.

Arms came around eir waist, and ey looked down into Sunny's face pressed into the outside of eir thigh, body contorted into a weird shape. He grunted at em, rubbing his forehead against eir leg. Ey dropped eir fingers into his hair and ran them through. He needed a trim and a shave, by his own typical grooming standard, but ey liked it when he grew a little wild. Maybe ey'd tell him one day. 

"Coffee?" A goblin dropped down on eir other side with a camping-appropriate steel mug, chipper to the point of irritation. Phyll’s clematis complexion was ragged with sunburn, high points blotched with raspberry. Ze was bald, like all goblins, with four small horns in a square around the crown of hir head. One was chipped a little, but that could be buffed out as the horn grew. Otherwise, hir head was round with gigantic eyes, wide mouth, shallow chin, and a broad nose. 

Hir akimbo limbs were knobby, little protrusions of cartilage on the elbows sticking out when ze bent and hyperflexed hir arms. The fingers around the proffered coffee cup had four segments, knuckles popping and wriggling as they curved. 

Ze was short and squat otherwise, the soft body of the troella sub-type proportionate to the four and a half foot frame.

"You look like shit," Phyll said. 

"Never smoking with you again," Lidea croaked. 

Ey closed eir eyes and pieced together the day before. Sunny and ey had arrived the day before, about 

midmorning, and checked into their pre-made single-family tent. In their youth, they would have loaded in all their own supplies and taken to the outskirts of civilian camping. Nope. Not now. Not when Lidea was technically here as an exhibitionist, so ey could rent the space on the Thýlalykófoton’s credit.

Their tent had been, by sheer coincidence, near a three-family rental tent full of goblins. Not just goblins, but members of one of the Miraalan technical guilds who all threw in together to rent a tent so they could trawl the magical engineering marketplace. And among those members of a Miraalan technical guild, was Phyll, someone 

Sunny had been in school with. 

Sunny didn't volunteer stories from university without some kind of trigger, but when he did, something interesting always unfolded. Usually involving a harrowing encounter with a lapidary saw. The instant he saw Phyll was across from him, his whole body had lit up.  

This was fine. Lidea was happy to let him reminiscence with an old friend while ey wandered the first round of vendors. Ey had had to meet with eir exhibition partner, Ajax, to make sure the equipment had made it across the inter-world bridge from Latolan in one piece. 

Their demonstration was on multi-frequency magic, fastest and easiest with multiple magicians. None of this was new technique, just perpetually complicated. A stone elf artificer who used to contract with the Thýlalykófoton, 

Constantine, had cracked a way to get a machine to mimic magic frequency conversion in the same way magicians did it.

Barely. 

Artificery was never going to completely replace what a magician could do, but they inched closer and closer every few years. 

"Are you sure they didn't hook up?" Ajax had asked during a brief lull while they waited for the machine to charge up. He was also a greenwitch, but of the full wood elf variety. His response to the extra-heavy cultural isolation that came with this disposition was to shave his head down to a peach fuzz. 

Lidea had blinked at him a few times.

"What?" ey had replied, still unsure how to respond. 

"Sunny and this goblin friend. Did they hook up in college?" Ajax's face had been passive, no particular feeling revealing itself either way. 

"I don't…think so." Lidea had run through eir memory, looking for spaces in the conversation where clues might have been left behind. "Does it matter?"

Ajax gave the gentlest shift of his shoulders. 

"Not to me, but I'm not the one currently dating him."

"We're not…dating…" Lidea had said, unsure if she even believed emself. Here Ajax had stared at em, eyebrows lifting into the stratosphere.

"Alright. Sure." Then he had turned back to the machine, waiting for damage to present itself. 

Now, Lidea looked down at the arm around eir waste and the low bed ey had shared with him the night before. Ey didn't actually know what they were doing, which was stupid for a person eir age. 

"Fill me in a little, Phyll," Lidea said. "Someone changed out the hookah to something stronger. Sunny said I should stop. I ignored him. Took a puff. Nothing. I got nothing after that." 

"Oh, yeah, your delicate elven constitution was absolutely torched." Phyll ran hir hand up and down eir back. "You passed out, and Sunny hauled you back to your tent. He didn't want to leave you, so I came over here to hang out with him while we watched you." 

"Oh…thank you. That's…I didn't mean to take you away from your friends."

"I see them all the time. It's been two years since I've seen Sunny, and taking care of a passed-out person was a good excuse to find quality time." 

There was just…something…something about the phrase "quality time” that just…sat on em. That squished eir lungs down into eir chest until they refused to expand. 

Sunny finally stirred around eir. 

"Anything specific you need to do today?" Sunny murmured, nuzzling into eir thigh.

"I'll check in with Ajax again tonight to make sure we're ready for tomorrow morning, but no. nothing specific. We can just hang out and relax." 

"We're all going to see the joust," Phyll offered. 

"Maybe," Sunny yawned. "Coffee, then we'll see." 

Lidea ruffled his hair and set down eir own drink.

"I'm going to use the latrine, then we can talk." 

Sunny reluctantly let eir get up, and ey ducked out of the tent, slipping on eir shoes. Across the way, the goblins were already in full-swing, and they waved at eir. Their tunics and breeches and skirts were cut along plainer lines than goblins usually wore. To compensate, each piece was intricately embroidered with brightly colored animals and flowers. They all had coordinating wide-brimmed hats to keep the sun off their faces and their horns covered. 

Ey stumbled past them, bringing a hand to eir braid absently. There were flower petals in eir hair, tucked under the textured strands. Where had…? Right. Flower crowns. One goblin had made eir a flower crown as a blessing on eir upcoming "performance." Ey didn't know where it was, at the moment, but Sunny would have kept it safe. It was bad luck to damage a goblin blessing. 

The latrines pulled up on eir right, and ey stepped into line behind an ariesian with tan horns. They nodded at eir, and ey offered something half-hearted back. 

“Kýriolykós Lidea!” 

It was a young half-elf, bits and pieces of a sylvan heritage populating the other part of their anatomy. Ey recognized them as one of the younger members of the Thýlalykófoton who wasn’t planning on being a mage. 

There were other benefits to finding camaraderie in magical affliction. 

“There’s a problem,” they said. 

"Shit."

“Well, I’m super screwed, maybe.” Lidea burst back into the tent, annoyed. Ey flopped on the floor next to Sunny, legs sprawling. He sat cross-legged in front of a small mirror hung from a tent upright, running a comb through his hair, slicking it back into something that looked like it was intentional. His beard wasn’t quite long enough to do anything but scratch into a fluff with his fingertips, but he was planning on shaving clean again before his upcoming fall lectures.

Lidea absently scratched his chin through his beard, and his opinion started changing. 

“What’s happening?” A fresh pot of coffee was brewing in the percolator, and Sunny flipped it off at the base as it reached temp.

“Ajax let himself be convinced to drink dyerga beer, got too drunk too fast, tripped, fell, and cracked his head open.” Lidea drug eir thermos out of eir bag and half-emptied the kettle into it.

“Holy fuck. Is he okay?” Sunny dropped his comb gently on his leg. 

“They took him to the provincial hospital, so he’ll be fine. Obviously he can’t do the presentation, though, so I went to the radio room to call in. See what they want to do. And, apparently, I need to go solo.”

"Isn't the whole point that it's a two-person process?"

“Eh.” Lidea threw eir head against Sunny’s shoulder. “Constantine isn’t a greenwitch, so it was supposed to be her and two magicians doing the demo. Ajax volunteered because he actually likes this kind of thing then bullied Babylon into doing it with him. She ran into some shit with her kid’s dad that got her stuck on Areylan, of all places. No problem. I draw the short end of the stick for the job. Then Constantine has a fucking stroke, and she’s not medically cleared to come across a gate in time. Okay fine. Ajax and I can handle it just the two of us. I’ve studied the manual and the theory. Then this shit. The whole project is cursed.”

Sunny drifted a hand around eir back, curling his fingers around eir waist and pressing into eir skin. Lidea focused on the sensation of them, warm and rough.

"Ding dong." Phyll peaked around the frame of the still-open tent flap. "Saw Lidea come back. Everything okay?" 

Sunny gave another squeeze around eir waist before dropping his hand to fall behind em. 

"Eir presentation partner ended up in the hospital," Sunny said. 

"Oh, shit. I heard the medical sirens last night. But…" Phyll shrugged. Sunny considered the goblin for a minute, a plan forming up. 

"Liddy, would one of the other greenwitches help you if you asked?" Sunny asked. 

“If I begged and pleaded, maybe.”

"You gonna be in trouble if you let someone else look at the written material?" 

Lidea immediately understood what Sunny was asking, and the realization cracked over Phyll a few seconds later. 

"I can figure anything out from a well-written manual," Phyll said. "Unless it's written in High Elven…"

"It's not," Lidea said, getting up and moving toward one of eir bags. Ey pulled out a blue and red ring notebook, two inches thick. "Some side notes in Traditional Elven." Ey handed it over. 

"Oh, I can read that. That's fine." Phyll opened the notebook, and eir eyes squinted through the text. "Need my reading glasses, but I have this."

"Okay. Okay." Lidea clapped eir hands a few times. "You two combine your powers to make sure the damn thing doesn’t blow up. I'm going to go bribe someone into doing this with me."