"Come ooon, don't be mad at me-heee" Lizu pleaded while lounging belly-down and across Inkaro's lap on the sofa, her desperate pleas for Inkaro to acknowledge her crusing at an assertively passionate extent. While kicking her legs and flopping her tail in dismay, Lizu huffed and pouted nonstop for minutes on end as Inkaro, face covered in faint bite marks, and she controlled their respective videogame characters on the floating TV. A third character was also present in the game, bouncing around the screen as the occasional saturated violet purple blurs wafted in front of the TV.

  With a joystick flick and a swift button combo from Inkaro, Lizu's character was set flying across the screen before the bold text 'PLAYER 1 LOSES' was aggressively printed across the screen: one agonising letter and number at a time, almost like a second round of beatdown on Lizu's confidence in her gaming skills.

  Following another victory and having to wait for the next stage animation to finish, Inkaro decided now was as good a time as any to finally address Lizu's pitiful pleas while he waited.

  "And, at what point did I say I was angry at you?" Inkaro spoke with a flat tone, not out of coldness towards Lizu but out of necessity; it took all his mental focus to keep himself from passing out after all. If he allowed himself to slip for even a second, Inkaro feared he'd pass out from the remnants of Lizu's elemental breath, which would knock him out like it had many times during his childhood.

  "You didn't have to say it, because you haven't let me win a single match. What else could it mean...," Lizu whined, having lost the will to use her hands and used her chin to weakly control her controller's joysticks and buttons.

  "Perhaps try the demon who has a penchant for honey," Inkaro murmured through a sigh, his message making Lizu bounce a little with buried joy at receiving the truth behind Inkaro's silence.

  The tenseness of her mind and body evaporated in a matter of seconds, like the very concept of guilt had been removed from her very being. Lizu's relief couldn't be understated as she dropped her head into the sofa and she allowed her face to melt into the cushions of the sofa, inadvertently making Inkaro sink a little into it along with her.

  "Oh is that why I tasted honey on my lips... now I'm thinking I'm just trash at this game, "Lizu rambled quietly out of shame and from burying her face in the sofa like some pouty ostrich, "On the notion of this game... why are we playing this instead of you teaching me S. S. S. A. W?" Lizu spoke with an extensive muffled voice, her barely audible message only reaching Inkaro thanks to it vibrating through the sofa and then into him.

  "Because this game, I asked G.Galore to program, functionally acts like a tutorial for how to use Sky-Style Syntax: Air Writing. You know, while you were busy in the tub and then subsequently giving me hick-."

  Not allowing Inkaro the possibility to even attempt finishing that last word by gently but quickly palming him in the cheeks, doing so intentionally this time, Lizu refused to allow Inkaro to sully his tongue by saying such a provocative word: not for him, but for her own sanity. Because in her heart, she knew, should Inkaro say anything along those lines, she wouldn't be able to restrain herself from going full-dragon on him.

  "Hey-hey-hey! Don't phrase it like that! ... you make me sound like a deviant dragolyte," Lizu blurted out initially, only for her to simmer down to a shameful whisper as she consciously considered if she actually was a deviant. The thought alone made her cheeks turn into a blinding pink of reluctant excitement, imagining what Inkaro would think if she really was a deviant in other ways. Mentally writhing in the boiling pot of her overstimulated mind, rampant exclusively with thoughts of Inkaro and honey, Lizu mentally clawed at any way to pull herself back to reality, so Inkaro didn't see her as even more of a weirdo than he already knew she was.

  She was so desperate, she was willing to say anything outside of the absurd.

  So, Lizu had no other choice but to fall upon a classic line that Nuenala readily gets dished out whenever she criminally crushes someone in any video games: "So what you're saying is you won by cheating? Through the use of inside knowledge, I wasn't privy to, to get a one-up on me."

  "I think the term someone who'd say something like that would be called a noob, from what Nuenala tells me," Inkaro retorted calmly as he ran a finger along the ridges of Lizu's horns, feeling the faint tingle of the ionising energy stored within them.

  Deeply groaning seemingly out of the blue, Lizu resistantly peeled her face away from the soft grasp of the sofa cushion under her before shoving her chin into that same cushion with vindictive conviction: "But those terms are so outdated, and I only know that because I got hooked on Pre-Stigmous history a month back. A-aah waait... Ink-"

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Mindlessly allowing his hand to wander, Inkaro carefully drew mini Sky-Style Syntax: Air Writing rings of various colours over each individual ridge of Lizu's horns and turning them into colourful decorations that wouldn't look out of place during wintry festivals. The act was surprisingly relaxing, the texture of the girl's horns having just the right amount of friction and coarseness to allow for an elevated ease of drawing.

  Despite it still being easier to draw directly onto the air, Inkaro saw some benefits in a form of SS Syntax that can be applied more easily without the fear of it slipping. The idea had him recalling how Yuuvia seemed to struggle to control the gravity magic ring when it was applied to her staff; if he had to guess, she most likely had to additionally focus on keeping the ring from shooting out of her grasp.

  It got him thinking. Perhaps if he were to modify the rings to be more sturdy and clingy once created, they would be far more convenient for others to control when affixed to their magical tools, or for him to aim from vast distances.

  His musings continued, even as he overlooked Lizu's steady increase in erratic body movements.

  Almost losing herself at the guy's unwittingly stimulating touch, Lizu's mind was inundated by an onslaught of syntax scripts, demanding her full attention just to keep a hold of herself. If it weren't for the vast stores of ionising energy in her horns acting as a buffer for her, Lizu wondered if her brain would've exploded had the ring been placed on any part of her non-dragonic features.

  If someone were to ask her, she would've thought it was five minutes roughly, and such a fact only became clear to Lizu once Inkaro snapped out of his ring drawing trance and frantically ghosted his hands over Lizu's horns to dispel the rings into fractured syntax characters.

  Instant mental relief for Lizu was the first thing Lizu thought. Finding her physical abilities restored, she shot up to her feet in front of Inkaro, standing with mental refreshment for a few agonising seconds, before flopping backwards onto her slack tail. A tingly fuzz flooded into Lizu and throughout her entire body, leaving her in a somewhat dizzy mental state even when Inkaro's blurry face hovered in front of her.

  "You doing good down there?" Inkaro asked with some hints of concern, which was alleviated the very second Lizu rocked her head in a weak nod and stuck her tongue out at him for extra reassurance.

  "Do..n't tell me, every time you... make one of those rings, you have to actively maintain the entire syntax of the spell and retain it all in the front of your mind?" Lizu uttered, her words barely tangible at the start but slowly crawling back to a fluent clarity as the drumming headache from all those SSS: AW rings had hammered into her skull fizzled away.

  Initially starting his response with half-playful snickering, Inkaro reached over to her and helped Lizu back to an upright position, followed by her falling to her side and planting the side of her head on his lap, clearly taking advantage of her weakened state to get an Inkaro lap pillow.

  "Do you see why I was apprehensive about telling you?" Inkaro asked somewhat jokingly, mostly rhetorically, as he once again found himself scratching Lizu in her unquestionably scratchable chin, much to her tail wagging glee.

  "Absolutely... so... I'd say we're even now, wouldn't you say?"

  "Huh?" Inkaro tilted his head to one side, peering down at Lizu and allowing her to bask in the guy's confusion.

  It was nothing short of tangible bliss; every minor change in his expression sent more sparks of thrilling ecstasy down to the very core of Lizu's bones. She loved every second of it. Donning a content grin of satisfaction, Lizu beamed happily, reaching up her hand to cup and squeeze Inkaro's cheeks. Looking into his eyes, all Lizu saw was that dumbly cute, little Inkaro she'd met all those years ago, so full of endearing obsession with grimoires that just seemed to draw her in no matter how much time passed: "Don't you 'huh' me... I'm talking about me biting you, unintentionally, of course, silly."

  "You almost make it sound like you want to bite me with that emphasis on 'unintentionally', Lizzy."

  "Shush, just shush, I'm reminiscing right now," Lizu mumbled dreamily, her speech teetering on melting into an incoherent mess of pure nostalgia. Nothing would ruin this little moment of hers. Not even the rapidly encroaching drowsiness, brought about as the recoil from the information overload and the new round of chin scratching, could dampen her spirits until it knocked her out cold with a smile on her face.

  "You got any more snacks?" Enetha said between bites of her last banana bread. Whilst she sat on the floor right before the TV with Nuenala by her side, Enetha munched away at her banana bread, taking smaller and smaller bites each time, not wanting to run out of Inkaro's cooking and having to embark on the audaciously arduous task of getting up to get more. The thought of asking Enulatina's worker bees or Morilore to do it for her never crossed her mind.

  With controller in hand, waiting ever so patiently for Inkaro to select his character on the character select screen with fifteen seconds left on the time, Nuenala lightly tapped the tip of her metal-like tail against the floor with unwavering rhythm: "I'd also like to add, can you two not talk about me like I've not been here the whole time?" Nuenala grumbled something else under her breath, causing Enetha to flinch and blush from what she heard, before the yukachuo girl pridefully added, "Also, I totally won our bet; Zueu definitely bit you well over fifty times. So look forward to joining me at the Phasmo Catalyplex tonight."