The rain poured down from the clouds above with an unruly vengeance. No speck of Solicrave exposed to the sky was left dry or undrenched, while it hammered down on Inkaro and Lizu's home extraordinarily fiercely. The select concentration almost seemed targeted, unfair even. This sudden downpour did not go over well with the chonky-tailed teen smushing her face against a downstairs window. Her eyes of fury darted to the darkened clouds above, struggling to gleam when they'd take a hike.

  "NOO! My perfectly crafted picnic plans!" Lizu exclaimed as she dropped to her knees, hitting the floor with enough force to leave everything around her airborne briefly before returning to the ground. In a stump, she kicked the floor, huffing the entire time as she flapped her wings wildly. "Guess I'll do something stupid... like history sleuthing, or something!"

  Flapping her wings with triple the strength, Lizu lifted herself off the floor before carrying herself up to the second floor and belly flopping onto her shared bed, having no spirit left to even pretend to do what she said she'd do.

  Only gazing up towards the pouting-ambient second floor for a moment, Inkaro lightly smirked, finding the glimpse of Lizu's pouting truly breathtaking. But he knew better than to leave Lizu pouting for too long. So, Inkaro lowered his gaze a little to the warm kitchen as it called to him: "Suppose I should think of something to enlighten her mood. Huh?"

  Inkaro peered at the door, right before he heard a pattern of "Knock-Knock. Knock, Knock-Knock-Knock."

  "The door's unlocked, Enetha," Inkaro called out, having recognised who the person at his door was long before the girl used her unique door-knocking technique.

  Waiting no time at all, Enetha pushed the front door open after struggling to properly tune her mana to disengage the front door's bolt hooks. No matter how long it took her, she wore her permanent cute frown in pride at having done it on her own. She stood in front of the door, with Silver King Golem behind her and using his mana field to teleport the rain away from the two to keep Enetha dry, waiting for Inkaro to acknowledge what she did.

  Morilore and G.Galore readily welcomed the golem's presence as she slowly fluttered both her bodies over to him.

  "It's nice to see someone take the time to use the door properly. Nuenala could learn a thing from you," Inkaro mentioned appreciatively at Enetha's care. If the girl hadn't already been frowning, from that being her resting face, she would've at receiving that sort of praise. Or so she thought, until it clicked in her mind who that name probably belonged to. Recalling the other day, mainly the part where the girl who beat her in the video game brute-forced the front door open, Enetha mentally snickered. It brought the girl standing at the door great satisfaction as she peered at the person next to her golem, before proudly murmuring about how the three of them could enter.

  Back to the fact of who was at the door, it wasn't just Enetha, there was also another with her at the doorstep, an unexpected guest at that: Myhail.

  The prince wore a passible smile, his hidden nerves crackling with dread at how things could've tumbled and spiralled, despite his best efforts to avoid it: he could barely handle how his idea to visit Enetha could've been so disastrous of a plan had Nova not declined his invitation. He still couldn't get over something: how was he supposed to predict Inkaro being Enetha's neighbour? His shock was doubly compounded upon seeing Lizu through the window as they approached earlier. He just stared blankly for a moment, unable to say anything.

  Long after everyone settled into the house and Morilore joined Lizu on the bed, with a cake slice by its nightstand, to pout; following Silver King Golem's return to his chess piece mode, the cause of Morilore's dismay, Enetha slammed her face into the sofa. She'd been the first to be defeated in the arena fighter game again, for the past seven matches from various causes: falling off the arena, Myhail beating her character, Inkaro doing the same, falling off the arena, stage hazard, falling off the arena, and falling over the arena.

  Gritting her teeth, the little princess angrily grumbled, "Why? I shouldn't be this bad...I practised and studied their moves?"

  "I think it's less about your skills and more about his," Myhail remarked, equally exhausted and defeated as he looked at the unfazed Inkaro sitting beside him. Inkaro's character even had a crown sporting a seven floating overhead to attest to his Inkaro's winning streak. Lowering his shoulders at the prince's on-the-nose remark, Inkaro held the controller to the side of his head, allowing the many worker beegirls to take the controller off his hands to have their united turn: "With Nuenala as the only other kid who played videogames in my hometown, I didn't get much in the way of casual gameplay."

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  "I cannot say I'm familiar with the concept... but do feel I understand the sentiment fundamentally, I think," Myhail stated, his tone unusually relaxed, which surprised him with how easily her found himself conversing with someone outside of royalty or ducal families.

  Following another early knock-out, Enetha slammed her tiny fists into the floor, wallowing deeply in her repeated failures.

  For a moment, Myhail believed Enetha was about to break out in a blind rage, only for that image to shatter when the young teen dropped her knees to the floor and bawled her eyes out. The prince jumped in genuine shock, having not expected Enetha to be capable of expressing herself in such a way from his skewed public perception of her, while Inkaro remained neutral.

  As she let the tears flow, Enetha felt a weak bumping force against her right thigh, its strength insufficient to immediately grab her attention from her crying, but sufficient in persistence for her not to fully write the force off.

  Eventually, the bumping object broke through her crying, getting the younger princess to peer to her side and look at the object through tear-stained eyes. Briefly struggling to see, but after wiping her eyes and a twitch of her nose, she figured out what was bumping into her: a hovering plate, with a Permansor-Style Glyph: Terrae Etching etching on its base, carrying a mini chocolate chip cookie mountain. Although not showing it visually, Enetha's cloth-like appendages ruffled with pleasure.

  "I think I can see why she likes visiting now," Myhail murmured mentally as he watched a probably happily Enetha, cheeks soaked in tears, munch away at the cookies.

  Myhail's phone dinged, and he amusedly smirked as he pulled his phone from his cloth-like metal coat.

  "What's that about?" Enulatina asked boldly as she hovered over head, her ahoges twitching and flipping while she got a read on the prince's taste preferences. Only to flop those ahoges when the reading came back with vanilla: she thought he was so bland.

  "Oh, it's nothing, just Nova testing me to vent about a magic puzzle in a dungeon that halted her progress, again," Myhail explained as he got another ding on his phone, incidentally, yet another message of complaining from Nova.

  "What kind might that be?" the beegirl queen asked merrily as she puffed up her semi-filled cheeks that slightly oozed vanilla-flavoured honey, not willing to miss a chance to feed someone honey on something as dumb as her opinion.

  "I didn't really ask, but knowing her, it's probably syntax script-related...." Myhail wished he hadn't said that; in his rare, relaxed state, the prince had utterly forgotten the clear fact that Inkaro had a borderline grimoire obsession, which meant if he showed even the smallest hint of interest in the puzzle, a meeting between Nova and Inkaro was unavoidable. The prince's concerns were only stifened by a sudden thought popping up in his mind: who has he been talking to?

  He snapped his head up, only to be greeted by the honey glinting smile of Enulatina. For some strange reason, he felt like he'd seen her somewhere before. So, to break the silence between him and her, the prince engaged in a little small talk: "Huh... weren't you in the news a while back?"

  "I wouldn't recommend doing small talk with her, she's only got feeding others honey on her mind and will use it to 'convince' you to eat her honey," Inkaro explained, choosing to ignore any mention of scrpting, since that would require going into a dungeon again. Myhail went to speak before being interrupted by Enetha's cloth-like appendages shooting past the guy's heads and reeled the honey generator towards the little princess like a prized catch. The bee queen giddily snickered, in a weird way, as she shot through the air.

  With a quick sniff over to confirm there was honey to be had, Enetha wrapped all her appendages around the bee queen and squeezed her like a ketchup pack to coat the cookies in the honey Enulatina just made for the prince. Once the honey was all but spent, Enetha dug into the glazed cookies, completely forgetting about the other girl trapped in her appendages overhead. Not that the bee seemed to mind the treatment, with how twisted the grin she sported was.

  "Is she... okay?" Myhail asked with half-hearted concern, watching as many of the bee queen's worker bees gathered on Enetha's appendages before trying in united vain to pry their queen free.

  "As a modified thornolyne bee, I doubt a little squeezing would harm her; she's done worser things to hers-"

  "She's a what queen!" Myhail blurted out, cutting Inkaro off before the guy even had the chance to finish his response. Finally, the prince's composure had been shattered.