Instead of the elevated train, they took the street-level rail one borough over into Oslo. The slower ride let them cool down from all the hurried travel so far and enjoy the gentle slide from packed buildings into something resembling the suburbia of more industrialized areas. Sunny’s terrace home was up in a slightly hilly area about three low-speed tram stops from Giddington Academy, the all-through school he lectured at in short stints a few times a year. Lidea stood at the hip-high iron gate that sat at the end of the paving stone path. Ey had only ever seen the outside, and that had only been a few times, standing in this exact spot. 

It was a cute house. All the terrace houses were. Quaint little boxy things purpose-built as a cohesive neighborhood. There was a walking park, playground, skating arena, and swimming pool with slides and fountains all within a few blocks. These were the neighborhoods that contrasted the more ephemeral quality of the rest of the city, the place where people hunkered down and actually stayed for generations on end. The all-inclusiveness of the neighborhood made it happen. This area had a strong proliferation of magician families, drawn to the magical education juggernaut that was Giddington. Even young magicians who stayed in more general schooling took night and weekend extracurriculars at magical schools, and Giddington was happy to offer them to all locals who qualified.

So Sunny’s neighbors, peeking out their windows to see his return, knew him pretty well in an academic sense, even if he was only “home” half the year at most.

The "trees" on Latolan were a fibrous flowering plant that grew fast and strong, twenty feet tall and five in diameter. They imported steel for the twenty-story buildings of Old Town and Westlake and the roller coaster park in the Lochburg river loop, but the local plants were perfectly sufficient for houses and even larger, low-stress buildings. 

Sunny's townhouse unit was part of a cluster of four that shared the front courtyard, all painted coordinating pastel colors with white trim. Sunny's was peachy-pink. Leafy, thorny bushes underneath his front windows had been threshed back, but only barely. His neighbors on either side had made the smarter choice of having totally potted plants, but even these overspilled their containers. 

"Liddy?" Sunny looked back down the path. He had spent the whole day so far looking back for em, it felt, constantly searching the path behind him. 

"Will your door plants bite me?" ey asked. Sunny dropped his hand to the tangle of vines by the door, and one of them lifted to him. It wrapped around his finger, testing his aura and looking for bio-magical familiarity. It gave a little squeeze, then retreated, satisfied. 

"George is fine," Sunny replied. His plants liked him specifically because he didn't cut them back unless they really, desperately needed it. And even then, they usually asked first. Deadheads and poorly developed leaves were an energy drain. 

In the front window, a roll of vines pressed against the glass, seeking Sunny’s aura through the barrier. Lidea moved up behind him, giving a little space to the plant that was now creeping up to sense em out. “George” brushed against eir leg, decided it approved, then circled back into the mass of thickety bush. 

“See?” Sunny let them inside, opening straight into the dining area of the first floor. To the left, bleeding in from the dining space, the far wall of the kitchen created a division between the spaces, a little window peeking into a sitting room beyond. The stairs along the right wall disappeared into a dim upstairs. 

The walls were a mellow olive green from front to back with complementary neutral clay tiles all the way through. Sunny set his bag down on a small, round, wooden dining table, just big enough for four chairs. Based on the extra shine along the back of the chair and the marks in the floor, he only ever used one spot. Lidea followed suit, laying eir bag on the table next to his.

Ey had planned to pick out only the things ey actually needed from storage. Then ey saw all of it in a single three by four space and didn’t know how to process that eir whole life fit in a closet. Sunny encouraged em just to have it sent over to his house to sort through, and it was still on the way.

Lidea followed as Sunny drifted through the house, frozen in a state of disuse. The kitchen cabinets were blue white, the more ecru of the refrigerator standing out awkwardly in contrast. Sunny opened it to reveal only a handful of things in the door, mostly bottles of sauce and jars of jam.

“Need to go to the market,” Sunny said, closing it again. Lidea moved along the right wall, peeking into the living space. A matching overstuffed couch and chair floated in the middle of the room, a dark vegetal purple, tied together with a simple, low-pile rug in dual-toned stripes of mustard yellow. Around the corner of the outer wall of the stairwell, built-in bookshelves were packed full of military histories, chronicles of technological invention, and engineering manuals. Even so close to overfull, the books lined up like soldiers, small gaps created with bookends to separate out different sub-subjects. 

The left wall, facing the couch, had a low wooden cabinet with a boxy television on it. On the first shelf of the cabinet, the face of a gray videotape player peeked out from the blackness. Lidea toed open one door of the cabinet to find rows and rows of neatly shelved video and audio tapes.

Even after all these years of traveling, it still felt weird for video tapes to just…exist in someone's home like this. 

Things like film and recorded tapes didn't cross gates well, making it functionally impossible for the average person coming across on foot. It took the level of shielding that only governments and large corporations could construct. The demand for Purvailan-recorded media was high enough, however, that going through such a complex trade process still proved lucrative. It brought with it a trade — often underground —  in Areylan-recorded media as well. The higher the magical density, though, the more that ambient pressure degraded various kinds of film and tape. Not everything could be transferred to a magic-friendly format, so you either invested in more shielding or expected to lose the recording eventually.

So on Correlan, where Lidea grew up, the expense of importing videotapes and television sets made them a communal purchase. Gathering at eir grandmother's home with eir cousins and a few of the neighbor kids for weekly movie nights was a fond childhood memory. 

Latolan was a lot closer in magical density to Purvailan, so a lot of those problems disappeared. Thus, a personal collection of media became more accessible. 

A cord hung out of the back of the television, hooking into the wall. Latolan also had live broadcast television of shows created on-world, and ey had no idea how that worked. Ey could work eir head around videotapes because it was just photographic film and phonographs spliced together somehow. Ey perfectly understood the propagation of sound waves through the atmosphere to create radio. How both light and sound could travel through a cable in the wall right into your television was too weird, though. Too foreign.

Eir brain would probably pop if ey ever actually went to Purvailan. 

“Liddy,” Sunny grumbled from the bottom of the stairs. He started moving up them, expecting Lidea to follow. Ey stalked up after him, running the edge of eir pinky up the railing. The wall at the top of the stairs was full of photos in simple wooden frames. Lidea glanced over them, recognizing faces of people they both knew in some of the group shots. Lidea emself was in a lot of these photos. More than ey was prepared to actually face in real life. 

Sunny went for the closed door to the left first and opened it into a small workshop room with a thick artificer’s workbench and a pegboard wall full of perfectly aligned tools. Lidea knew, without looking, that around the corner of the door would be stacks of drawers with tiny bits and baubles in them. Every artificer workshop was the same. Sunny’s were probably actually labeled, though.

Everything as it should be, Sunny moved down the hallway, past one door into the bathroom, toward his bedroom, feet loud as they moved off the rug runner to the tiled floor. He was waiting for em to notice, to voice the thing he had been purposefully avoiding drawing attention to because it raised too many additional cascading questions. His bedroom was as he left it, large bed against the long wall to his right. Directly across from the door, the sheer curtains on the window let in the softer light that the flowering plant there preferred. He walked over to the low console table to greet Josephine, and it flicked a thorny vine at him.

“Hello, darling.” He checked the self-watering valve with a turn, letting it drip a little into the soil. It squeaked, so he followed the flexible tube with his eyes across the floor. It went through the attached door into the bathroom, then up under the sink. Lidea moved into his field of vision as he checked the connector points, and ey could see the thoughts churning as ey looked over his neatly made bed. 

“Is your couch a convertible bed?” ey asked. 

“Uh…no.” 

“Your workroom-“

“This is the only bed in the house,” Sunny said. 

“So…what are we doing? Are we temporarily converting your workshop?”

Sunny turned to look at em head-on. 

“We share a bed all the time.” Sunny flopped his hands against his thighs.

“It’s different when we’re on the road. We don’t usually have a choice.”

“Okay, come on.” Sunny sat on the bench at the end of the bed. “We almost always have a choice, and we always choose to share. I don’t know why you’re denying that.”

“And I don’t know why you’re pressuring me like this,” Lidea snapped. Sunny pressed his jaw tighter, thinking, making sure he didn’t say the wrong thing. 

“I’m sorry if that’s what it’s feeling like.” Sunny stopped before he talked himself into a corner. He ran through a few options before settling into uncertainty. “I don’t know what you want me to do or say from here.” 

Lidea sighed.

“Let’s just go get some groceries,” ey said.

Despite eir irritation with him, ey found emself grabbing his hand as they took the tram down to the grocers. They were part of a small group of people who disembarked in front of the large, low building. The doors auto-opened for them, inviting them into the foyer with the cart corral. Sunny picked up a rechargeable ice box from the station and attached it to the cart, pushing forward into the store.

Lidea didn’t really buy batches of groceries when ey was on world and had grown up in more of an open-air market with independent food sellers kind of environment. With so much importation, Tomar relied on a more corporate supermarket system. One that was at least aware that most people used public transport. Sunny eschewed grocery delivery, preferring to actually feel the items he planned to eat. 

“What do you want to eat this week?” he asked as they moved through the fruits and vegetables first. 

“You going to cook for me?” Lidea asked, putting some apples into a biodegradable mesh bag then settling them into the open area of the shopping cart. 

“I cook for you all the time, already,” Sunny pointed out, referring to the road rations he frequently made for both of them. 

“Yeah fair. Okay.” 

They moved through breads and chips and other snacks, picking up things here and there, until they wheeled around to the meat and cheese and dairy and fish counters. These all went into the ice box to be kept cold and delivered separately. 

"Professor Childress! I thought I saw your lecture on the schedule, but I wasn't sure if you confirmed." The ariesian woman caught them as they were debating on which ice cream they wanted to add to their cart. She ran on the petite side, pearline horns peeking out of a puff of black coily hair in its natural spun-sugar state. She honed in on Lidea sharply. 

"Is this Lidea?" she asked with a sharp smile. She reached for Lidea's hand, and ey took it numbly. "I’m Dana Sinclair. My wife is head of the department he lectures under."

"Oh! Fun!" Lidea managed, gagging on the words and unsure how to react. 

"How long are you in town for?" Dana asked, leaning on her grocery cart with a sharp elbow, almond eyes flicking under sharp eyeliner. 

"Uhm. I don't know yet. Usually just a couple of weeks. I haven't picked up my next contract, yet, though." Lidea found eirself twiddling with the end of eir braid over eir shoulder. Dana clapped her hands sharply once. 

"How do you feel about bookbinding and printing?" 

"Neutral?" Lidea replied, but Dana was already digging in her purse for something. 

"I work at a local shop, and we have some magic inlaid filigrees and blah blah blah. And regulation says we have to have at least one registered mage on staff to monitor etc etc." She found what she was looking for in her bag and came away with a business card. "Our current one is retiring this week, and the new one was supposed to start next Monday. But! They've been delayed by another job. We have a makeshift solution, but if you can fill in for eight weeks-"

"Eight weeks?" 

"Yeah, if you're available! Come by tomorrow, and we can talk about it in more depth. Mid-morning." Dana tapped the address on the card, then vanished around the end of the aisle, some of the mystery spoiled by the squak and squeal of the cart. Lidea looked down at the card then shoved it in eir pocket. 

"We should get chocolate," ey said, reaching for the small cardboard carton and dropping it in the icebox.

"Are you going to go check it out?" Sunny asked when ey kept silent. 

"Eight weeks. I haven't stayed in one place that long in a really really long time."

"Maybe it's a chance for something new."

"I'll get restless. I can't…I don't think I can settle down that long."

"Have you ever tried?" Sunny asked, trying not to snap. Lidea stopped, leaning on the handle of the basket, knuckles paling as ey gripped tightly around it. 

"No. No, I've never tried." Ey ground eir jaw. "I can maybe do that, at least."