Page 120 of Xerxes Ascendant
Why is there glitter in the training room?
Misha
It’s “atmospheric shimmer”
Epsilon
It’s in the ventilation.
Misha
As intended.
Epsilon
If I find it on my shoes again, you're cleaning it up with your tongue.
Misha
Don’t threaten me with a good time, Master.
Epsilon
Fine. Then I'll tell Kyle instead.
Misha
Urgh, I'll see what I can do to get it out
CHAPTER 36
Akira
“Oh, whatnow?” Misha wailed, but before anyone could answer him, the power returned and fluorescent bulbs reluctantly flickered back to life above their heads.
“More fucking outages,” Tau muttered.
“We’ve not had one for a while,” said the man who could always be relied upon to point out the bright side of any situation, yet Akira couldn’t help but agree with his boyfriend. There hadn’t been a single rune outage since the day Kyle had woken in the hospital, over a week ago. For Xerxes and its dodgy magical infrastructure, that was a lifetime.
“Well, duh,” Indira said from behind them. Akira had quite forgotten she was there. She was tapping something out on her runepad and didn’t even bother to look up. “The division of the city resulted in reduced proximity interference.”
“Girl, you know you can’t speak in sexy engineer like that,” Misha admonished with a grin. “It gets me all hot and bothered.”
That pulled Indira’s attention from her device. Blue eyes sparkled as she raked them down Akira’s most shameless employee, checking him out and making him preen. “You’realwayshot, Mishy.”
He gave an indignant sniff. “Like you’d notice. You haven’t visited House Epsilon in forever. Apart from tonight, but do I really have to get myself kidnapped to earn ahello?”
“Can we focus?” Akira said shortly, gratified when it brought them all back to heel. “Proximity interference?”
“Translated to Universal for the five-year-olds in the room,” Indira drawled with a pointed look at Misha, “it means when you have lots of runes in one place, they’re exponentially more likely to fail. They draw magic from the ether, right? So if you have more of them, such as in runic arrays or dense populations, there’s more magical connections being made, and it causes inevitable bottlenecks from time to time.”
Like flowers competing for sunlight and water, thought Akira, although he dared not voice the comparison aloud. He’d encountered various colourful plants while living on the surface, but sadly most of the people in the room had never, and would never, share that experience. The hydroponics sectors that produced the vegetables and starches for mass consumption were dull, clinical environments, and frivolities such as flowering buds and leaves had been genetically engineered out a long time ago in favour of more efficient propagation and growth. They now looked indistinguishable from the plants that were made into the synth-meat to be purchased by Xerxes’ population.
Akira suddenly had a deep and fierce longing to gift flowers to Kyle. Something naturally precious and exquisitely rare, for a man he thought of in the same way. And a present for himself in getting to watch those blue eyes light up with the delight and wonder Kyle took in each new discovery.
“Is that why the outages get worse every year?” Misha asked. “More runes in use?”
“And compared to when the city was nine jam-packed levels on top of each other,” Kyle added when Indira nodded, “now it’s in two pieces, there aren’t as many problems?”
