It was hard to pin down any part of Tomar as “new.” The city, as an urban unit, had become as big as the wilderness was willing to let it, right now, and they had reached that footprint a generation ago. Eifanei, however, was among the first three provinces defined, wood elves desperate to make sure they had carved out their chunk of land. The center of the province was wood elf construction, blocky and austere and sensible. 

From there, though, a ring of stone elf neighborhoods had formed with a cluster of bull elf blocks. In theory, there was a small sun elf neighborhood somewhere toward the middle, too, but in all the times Sunny had been through Eifanei, he had never found it. And he'd actively looked, boredom giving way to curiosity sometimes during his lengths of teaching. That mystery was probably by design. 

Yasira's condominium was closer to the highway intersection, a tram stop up from the sprawling shopping plaza that covered all corners of it. Lidea stopped briefly at the sign at the entrance to the apartment homes. Ey looked for an ownership tag in the text below the neighborhood name. 

One of the strong connecting threads of all elves was that they rarely had any kind of personal possession over their own home. Everything was technically owned by a clan leader, and you sort of "paid in" to live on your property. Not quite renting. Something that existed in the in-between spaces that humans had designed around property rights.

Eifanei wasn't clan-lands, though. It was direct District governance through Tomar. Ey tapped eir finger to the sign when ey found it. Ey'd figure out what exactly the "Eifanei Council" looked like from a logistical perspective, later. Despite technically living here, in this city on this word, ey kept a lot of distance from it.

"Liddy?"

"Coming." Lidea took a few long steps to catch up to him. 

He brought them down a small garden path, through a lovely shared courtyard where some stone elf kids were playing disk throw, and up a flight of stairs. Yasira must have heard them coming, because he threw open the door for them as they approached. 

“Get in here, you two.” Yasira grappled Sunny around the shoulders and pulled him into a hug, pressing Sunny’s face into his chest. 

“Can’t breathe.” 

Yasira released him, arms staying in a u-shape. He reached for Lidea with a handshake, but ey let him go in for the side hug. 

“It’s great to actually meet you,” Yasira said. “I hear about you all the time.”

“Yeah, I’ve been getting that, lately.”

Yasira hooked them both under the elbow and brought them inside. The apartment was neat and boxy. The left was hallways into the bedrooms. The right side was a combined living room with a frosted glass door leading into the kitchen. It was open, and the smell of baking bread drifted out. A stone elf woman stood in the doorway, hair tucked under a blue scarf, floral dress hiding a profoundly pregnant belly. 

Sunny spread his hands in surprise, gesturing to her midsection. 

"Indy! What the hell, when did this happen?!" Sunny met her across the living space and shared another hug. 

"We had only just found out the last time you were home. I'll pop before you head back out again." Indy patted Sunny on the back, then looked up at Lidea. "You're Lidea."

"Yeah, everyone seems to know me, but I don't know anyone." Lidea shifted nervously, letting Indy give em a side hug as well. 

"Um…I…" Sunny floundered. He was cut off by a loud stomping from the floor above them. 

"This is terrible timing, Sascha." Yasira grabbed a broom leaning against the wall and gave five raps to the ceiling, two evenly spaced then three quicker and closer together. The stomps returned the same pattern. It was one form of the distress signal shared between wanderers-by-trade when they met out in the wild. 

"Damn it," Yasira muttered, dropping the broom against the wall. "Her asshole ex-boyfriend is back. Y'all come with. Maybe it's actually good timing."

Yasira breezed back through the front door, Sunny and Lidea hot on his heels. He brought them up the stairs and back down the space between apartments to the one just above his. The door was cracked open and voices were pouring out, raised and angry. 

"Stay a few steps behind for a second." Yasira yanked the door open and barreled in. 

This apartment was built like the one below, but inside were two people caught in the middle of a screaming match. The woman, Sascha presumably, was a stone elf mixed with a little something else, probably a sylvan grandparent. It wasn't super apparent in her appearance, but it ticked over in her aura. The man screaming at her, backing her into a corner, was fully human and several shades of angry. 

Sunny felt a knot form in the base of his stomach. He had been here before, watching this kind of thing unfold with other friends who had called him in for backup. It never went smoothly for him. 

Lidea touched eir fingers to the outside edge of eir shortstaff, unlatching it from the leather strapping that holstered it to eir thigh. It was an instinctual sort of movement birthed from the tension in the room. Not that ey was much of a fighter. 

Yasira had hopped in between the couple as Lidea and Sunny moved around. 

"Hey, man," Yasira said. "Let's all calm down, come on." He hooked his hand around the human's arm and started giving him a gentle push. 

"Get your fucking hands off me," the ex-boyfriend snapped, yanking his arm out from under Yasira's grip. "This isn't any of your fucking business."

"You're stressing out my pregnant wife with all the yelling, friend; let's bring this all down a little." 

It was standard mercenary technique to attempt de-escalation before ever wielding a weapon in earnest. If he were still an active member of the mercenary guild, he would have a lot of legal leeway to inflict grievous defensive injury without getting in trouble with the law. Even retired he could get away with a fair amount of violence. It was good he was disinclined toward it, and the mercenary screening process had done its job. 

"I told you to back off. " The ex-boyfriend actively pushed Yasira this time, forcing the stone elf to yield a few steps. Sunny moved closer to Lidea, brushing the back of his fingers against Lidea's free hand. Yasira moved in a little closer, hands out in a placating fashion. The ex pulled back to swing. 

Things shifted into slow motion for Lidea, then. It was actually one of the simpler approaches to magic and part of the irst set of systems young magicians learned. It wasn't hard, and ey didn't need to be careful. 

Ey whipped eir staff out into an arc, drew magic up, then slammed the energy down against the human with a sweep. The solidified energy crashed down on his body in a flush of force, and he collapsed underneath it mid-punch. If he'd been expecting it, he probably would have dodged or withstood the magic, but he simply hadn't been prepared. He laid on the floor, flat, facing upward, breath knocked out of him. 

Yasira squatted down next to him. 

"How about you go downstairs, Sascha? Indy was making lunch. Let my friends and I have a conversation with him."

Sascha glanced between them all of them wide-eyed and sweating.

"Okay." Her voice was soft, doe-like, and she scampered out of her own apartment, grabbing her keys in a weird tumult of clumsiness.

Yasira turned back to the ex-boyfriend. The human moved again, breaking out of Lidea's pressure plates. He tried to swing again, but this time it was Sunny who dropped a boot lightly on his chest. Lidea always forgot about his  cursory mercenary training until he did something on the edge of vicious like this. It felt…weird…like another version of him forming in front of em. But then, again, ey had been slowly increasing the pressure of eir own magic the whole time, securing the human aggressor more firmly to the floor. 

Yasira pressed his hand to the ex-boyfriend's chest. 

"Now, look. I like Sascha. She's sweet. Been helping us set up the nursery. And she moved here…to get away from you. Now I've been dealing with your shit for four months, and I’m starting to get tired of it. I've got a baby on the way that I need to focus on." 

The human tried to sit up, and Yasira pushed him back down.

"My good friends here are in town for a bit, and they're a lot meaner than me."

"I'm not sure why this guy isn't black and blue already, honestly," Lidea said. Ey had no idea where the words came from, but they felt right. Felt tough in this weird little playacting they were doing. Sunny ground his boot a little, enough to force a grunt out of the man on the floor. The truth was they were all old and tired and didn't really have the energy to beat up some random twenty-something. 

"So how are we handling this?" Yasira hissed. The question hung heavy for a moment. The human shifted and whined.

"I'll go. I won't…I won't come back." 

Sunny lifted his foot, and Lidea let the magic slide off him. The human rolled to his knees and scrambled out the door, hands brushing and dragging on the floor as he went. Yasira stood back up with a creak in his spine. 

"I expected the tough guy act from Sunny, but you're not bad either, Lidea." Yasira arched backward, hands on his hips. "Okay. Let's head back."

 Yasira led them through the door, locking behind them with a latch from the inside. 

"Be there in just a second," Sunny said, sending Yasira back toward the stairs with a shrug. He turned to Lidea. "I feel like I need to apologize for that."

"Why? You're mercenary auxiliary, so you're going to know mercenaries. And mercenaries do shit like this. You think I've been walking around blind to that this whole time?"

"I…I don't know." Sunny leaned over the railing, looking out over the courtyard below and the glimpses of city beyond. "You were fast in there," he said as Lidea joined him. "I've never seen you do magic quite like that." 

"I mean, that's just what my magic looks like when I don't bother refining it, force and energy."

"Never really thought about it, I guess." Sunny hung his hands on the railing. There were a lot of things he hadn't really thought about. Just moved forward without assessing. "That won't be us," he said, gesturing to the door of the apartment behind him. 

"What?" Lidea asked. 

"That. Sascha's boyfriend. Whatever happened there. We're not like them."

"Well, I mean, yeah. If you ever thought you could come into my home and yell at me, you're leaving in a body bag." 

"I…okay, yeah, that's fair, you'd beat my ass."

"And you'd deserve it." But Lidea weaved eir fingers into his hair, flicking at his ear with eir thumb. “Is that something you were worried about?"

"I thought I had ruined it by pressuring you to live with me."

"Nah," Lidea breathed. "We just needed some air." Ey kissed him on the side of the head. "I just watched you step on a man's chest, and it didn't scare me off. Might take even more than I realized," Lidea mused. "Let's go eat whatever Indy was making."

Lidea dropped eir hand into Sunny's and pulled him toward the stairs. He'd have been satisfied if the "even more" wasn't so terrifying to face.