"Lizu~ Lizu. Lizu?" the voice of a young boy called out, his voice somewhat distant, yet strangely proximate. The voice reverberated through that inactive head of hers, a solo choir from the heavens sent to her in the form of her dumbly cute first, and only, best friend.

  Lizu, roughly the age of seven at the time, murmured weakly, practically ignoring the inundation of finger pokes against her squishable face. Reluctantly and begrudgingly doing so from the relentlessly endearing poking and the fresh breeze brushing her sensitve little horns, Lizu barely opened one of her sleepy and heavy eyes, rolling her head on her crossed arms, that she rested on the silver table, to look at the boy sitting next to her: a six-year-old Inkaro, face beaming, hand scribbling away at one of the many sheets of paper as he looked at her in the same moment.

  "You sure do like sleeping every time you get the chance." The soft voice, that befitting a dream, from Inkaro murmured right into Lizu's ear, stirring her fully from the mini-nap she'd briefly eloped into. Deeply sighing, the young dragolyte mustered a smidgen of her strength and pushed herself upright in her seat under the out-of-place, regal gazebo in the middle of the, at the time, normal forest nearby Inkaro's hometown.

  "Sush... your cute... face, you dummy," Lizu bumbled weakly, her face a mix of befuddlement and groggy annoyance that combined to create a cutely pouty face. She rubbed at her face, struggling to remove the lingering numbness in her cheeks that she could feel for some reason. Following a yawn fuelled by mental sloth, Lizu picked up her birch mana ink pen from the table to resume scypting away in her first grimoire: now a silver and beige gradient notebook covered in pale violet, six-pointed hollow stars.

  Seeing her grimoire's appearance, she vaguely recalled how its cover had recently transformed from a pink, leather-looking one to a faintly glowing form. Having not expected it to happen, the dragolyte had an unfortunate tumble off her bed, which left two holes in her bedroom and how she subsequently hid out of shame. Lizu cringed at the recollection.

  "You're being quiet while awake... are you having heavy ideas?" Inkaro asked as he stopped scripting for the first time since he started an hour ago.

  "I- um... just been thinking how my father doesn't pick me up as much anymore, it must be because my tail doubled in size since you and I met," Lizu grumbled, beseaching her tail for having the audacity of getting chonkier day after day without her permission.

  "Then I'll just make some magic so I'll be able to carry you whenever you want." Inkaro sported a beaming smile as he spoke to Lizu, lacking in any hint of hesitancy but overflowing with senserity. Lizu was left at a loss for words, grateful for them sure, but mostly perplexed by how earnestly Inkaro had made such a declaration. While not being entirely sure how to dignify that question with a response rivalling the boy's earnestness, the little dragolyte deemed that simply staring back at Inkaro in silence was the best response.

  However, someone else didn't appreciate the girl directing her attention to anything other than her studies, especially after they allowed Lizu to nap for fifteen minutes straight.

  "Please do try to focus on your work, young lady; gawking at the boy isn't going to help your scripting skills," Lizu's personal tutor said with practised professionalism. Their professional mask was so great that it hid their minor confusion at Lizu's insistence on having her lessons on some random clearing in this particular forest.

  Lizu flinched. Then she felt her heart stall. She wasn't sure why the tutor's words got a reaction out of her so badly, chalking it up to her mind latching onto the use of gawking and how it evoked a certain connotation. But when she turned to denounce her tutor's implication, Lizu paused for thought as she looked upon her tutor or perhaps how she couldn't, her memory a little hazy to recall what her tutor of the time even looked like, leaving the tutor as a blurry image in her dream.

  Dream? Wait, I'm dreaming about Inkaro? How sappy? Hmm... wonder how much longer I have before I wake up?

  Snapping out of her dream, face already reddened to the heights of comedy long before she had awoken, Lizu stared up in bewilderment at the presently non-glowing pseudo-stars on the bedroom's ceiling. The weak burning of her rosy cheeks was embarrassingly fresh, indicative that she'd been grinning like a freak in her sleep: "Honestly, what am I five? Well, seven in that dream's case."

  As her mental focus emerged from the depths of her psyche, Lizu noticed a weight nestled between her chest. Based on the weight, she withdrew Inkaro, sorrowfully so, from the possible options of who was the source of the weight. So, with the guy removed from the roster of suspects, Lizu was left with a select few of individuals: Enetha, Morilore, and Enulatina.

  Knowing Enetha, I wouldn't be surprised if it were her somehow, knowing the princess's luck and past incidents with me.

  Morilore... she must have some Inkaro in her, so no need to overthink why the mana puppet would be on top of me.

  As for the beequeen, I... can't think of any convincing reason why she'd be on top of me. But it's better to review all possible possibilities.

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  Nodding her head, Lizu had her answer, mainly from the low, old-fashioned mechanical beeps vibrating through her and not her deduction. So with her answer, Lizu lowered her vision and basked in the zig-zag pattern holding hair of the sentient grimoire's mana-made body. For a while, Lizu just stared in silence, watching Morilore pretend to sleep with her arms crossed like a wrapped-up mummy and how her obnoxiously large hooded dress was sporting a content charcoal colour.

  "You sure have made it a habit of sleeping there, haven't you?" Lizu remarked, her voice triggering Morilore's auditory receptors and making her open her eyes to look at her creator's fiancée.

  "Indeed, but this time is for self-confort," Morilore stated flatly as her dress briefly flickered to a deep pink before resuming its charcoal colouration.

  "Why might that be?"

  "I was rejected."

  That revelation was a tiny bit much for Lizu, mainly because she couldn't quite wrap around what Morilore could have possibly been rejected from in the first place. Luckily for her, Inkaro was across the bedroom at his crystalwork workstation, so he could answer, which he did when feeling Lizu's stare become directed at the back of his head.

  "She got overly attached to one of Enetha's tapestry golems but ended up having system failure when he ignored her all night, from what her error and high-priority computation records suggested anyway."

  Although the answer answered her unspoken question to a tee, Lizu was no closer to comprehending the how of it. Sure, Morilore seemed rather expressive to the point it felt authentic at times, but full-blown dejection from being ignored was a whole nother level of logic-defying absurdity.

  There was something she couldn't deny about Morilore's reactions: it was something she'd unquestionably do when Inkaro ignored her on rare occasions.

  Placing an arm over her eyes to block out the light of the early morning, Lizu attempted to sigh but ended up weakly yawning out a cute squeaking noise: "Why do you say the most absurd things with a straight face? And before you earnestly answer, that was rhetorical. Also, no commenting on that noise."

  "It's nice to see you're taking full advantage of the weekend by waking up early for once," Inkaro remarked playfully, setting his tools and the gem he was working on down on the workstation.

  "What can I say? I can't enjoy my free time if I'm sleeping, silly."

  "Says the girl who sleeps so much she can tell when she's sleeping," Inkaro mentioned.

  Lizu averted her eyes conspicuously, resting the tips of her index fingers against the other, while wearing a cutely anxious half-smile that screamed 'you snarky wiseguy': "When you say things like that, I can't help but ask: you ain't probing my brain, are you?"

  Lightly scoffing in a playful amount of exhaustion, Inkaro shook his head and followed it up by stating, "Don't need to with a reaction like that."

  Lizu playfully huffed at being called out by Inkaro for being easy to read, not that she didn't mind him teasing her. It made her almost want to tease the guy back by breathing some icy elemental breath down his neck, or something around those lines. Contemplating and deliberating away, Lizu toiled over what her counterattack should be, delving so far into self thought, she failed to notice the slow absence of her bed under her as Inkaro effortlessly hoisted her and Morilore up into his arms.

  It took her a moment, but Lizu eventually noticed her current state of elevation from the bed. She almost went to press her face right up to and all up in Inkaro's solid chest before the issue in logic caused her to stop. How was Inkaro carrying her so easily when she hadn't used any magic to lessen gravity on herself yet?

  If Inkaro had used his Sky-Style Syntax: Air Writing, Lizu was certain she would've noticed, but she didn't see any signs of the guy's usual magic, so she was vaguely baffled and felt that the truth was being obscured from her somehow. That was the case until she caught the truth in the corner of her eyes; with a faded, transparent bronze snowflake etching on the back of his palm, Lizu knew for certain that whatever this new thing Inkaro had was the source of his boosted strength, mainly based on magic colour theory.

  "You made a whole new branch of your personal magic, already? You're making me feel self-conscious about my work speed," Lizu complained teasingly.

  "All it is is a reworking of the Air Writing one, so its ease of completion wasn't that hard to achieve. Especially when I had a piece of the world's finest tapestry glyph nodes and chains standing in the bedroom until an hour back. So making a big deal over it is like being impressed someone passed a test by memorising all the answers right before they took it."

  "Fair enough," Lizu resorted nonchalantly as she finally rested her head against Inkaro's chest and rubbed the tip of her tail against Inkaro's engraved hand before adding, "So~ what does this one do?"

  "Functionally? The same thing as floating type. However, this one comes with far less mental strain and defiance compared to its Air Writing counterpart. Although... in exchange for easier access and less mental toll, they've lost some versatility, malleability and mobility. Then that got me thinking if I could create a curio rune counterpart of Style-Type magic...." Lizu just listened away, gleefully lapping up every word of Inkaro's ramblings, mainly his voice, the actual content of his words, not so much. Just getting the chance to hear him enthusiastically ramble so early in the morning was enough for her to get the gears in her head twirling to life before an idea popped out.

  "How about... Permansor-Style Glyph: Terrae Etching? Just as good as the name I came up with for the other one, right?" Lizu murmured dreamily as she lightly kicked her feet about in a playful manner while wrapping her tail loosely around Inkaro's waist and abdomen. Hearing the name suggestion while thinking nothing of what Lizu was doing with her tail, Inkaro momentarily stopped his Lizu-loving rambling to address Lizu's suggestion.

  "For some reason... I feel like the terrae and permansor parts should be swapped, but naming things falls to you, so I won't pry into your reasoning."

  "Right-o, names should be left to me," Lizu said proudly and boldly, practically claiming all rights to naming Inkaro's creations, as she bear hugged the blank expression having Morilore. "Also, I'm looking forward to whatever that curio you were working on does later."