"Lizu! Lizu, you have to check out this thing I discovered," a seven-year-old Inkaro proclaimed, bursting at the seams with excitement that he bordered on exploding if he wasn't careful. Clutching the newly made basic grimoire of his making, the single thought of showing Lizu his discovery kept him going from collapsing out of exhaustion and succumbing to the impending slumber. He'd been pushing off sleeping since he'd learned of his latest discovery, shown by the deep bags under his youthful eyes. As he hopscotched his way down the brick path of the city that Lizu's family house resided in, the grimoire obsessor intentionally planted his little feet on individual bricks, never once stepping on a line between them, which were slightly different in hue compared to the majority.

  Following after the bounding off boy, a barely eight-year-old Lizu walked with grace and dignity down the brick-laid streets of the city, begrudgingly forced to take on a slower pace, and it was for one stupid reason at that. It was something so mundane that it made the young dragolyte desire it was something more unconventional or at least action-intensive, so her issue seemed less embarrassing than the truth: growing pains.

  In the past few days, the girl's already chonky tail had experienced a growth spurt, going from its steady crawl in lengthening to an explosive increase of five whole inches over the span of three days. The unprecedented change to her body had left her everything, from the waist down, screaming from a leg-wobbling soreness.

  The sensation left her legs barely functional and, more importantly, struggling to keep any sensible pace with her friend.

  Briefly pausing in his brick hopping, Inkaro peered over his shoulders and noticed the small distance he'd inadvertently created by not taking into account Lizu's slow pace. So, he waited, patiently watching Lizu cautiously catch up, and only speaking to her once the dragolyte had mostly caught up to him: "Are you still feeling funny in your butt?"

  That question was swiftly met by Lizu plopping her tail in the boy's face to obscure his face from her view, causing the girl to tense up, but she pushed through it with headstrong resolve. "Don't say it like that! You're making it sound like I fell on my butt or something, which is marginally better than the truth... but still."

  "Oh, okay," Inkaro said bluntly, but not in a rude way; with how soft spoken his voice was, Inkaro sounded more playful than anything, no doubt influenced by his interest in sharing his discovery with Lizu. "I'll think of a better way to phrase it next time."

  Although well-meaning as it was, Lizu rolled her eyes half-playfully at her friend's somewhat comforting words.

  If things couldn't get any worse for the young dragolyte, which they did, in the form of a personified landslide that Lizu's loathed— the young Yuuvia, her archest of archrival, trotting her way a little ways off with her personal butler and Unuvi in tow. There was no doubt in Lizu's mind that the annoying noble girl was in town to get some expensive magical tool that she would unjustly brag about having amazing spells in it, despite not having been the one to design them. The thought urked her, but at least it distracted her from the numbness of her body. "Oh great, it's her."

  However, going against her emotionally clouded observation, Lizu raised an eyebrow of inquisitive confusion as she actually took the time to see the thing Yuuvia's attendants were carrying: a large blanket with a coarse surface to boot. It was certainly not something someone with soft skin would enjoy, or so Lizu figured, but maybe Yuuvia's glass-like parts get itchy like how the scales of her tail do from time to time.

  Lizu frowned, disappointed by realising she might have something in common with Yuuvia of all people.

  "With this, my little snakeies will have the best sleep ever!" Yuuvia proclaimed excitedly, trying to speak with the most refined tone of voice she could muster, but it ended up sounding like a poor mockery instead. The scene of Yuuvia not being a pretentious and overzealous girl was almost too hard, or simply inconceivable, for Lizu to believe was true.

  In her biased mind, anyway, Lizu had never allowed the thought of Yuuvia being a normal humalian, with equally normal feelings to boot, to ever enter her mind.

  "I guess some people can find love in their hearts after all," Lizu murmured very softly, flinching as she inadvertently focused on her numbness once again as Yuuvia and her attendants disappeared from view. Slapping at her legs to try and beat some sense back into them, Lizu struggled to stifle a multitude of cutely contorted smiles born of pain as Inkaro looked to her with a blank expression.

  "Love?" Inkaro rocked his head to the side, swaying it to a perfect ninety degrees from its resting orientation. The boy sported a face of unquestionable disbelief and rearing befuddlement, acting like the very concept of the word couldn't be comprehended by him in any shape whatsoever, no matter how much he racked his little grimoire focus brain towards solving it.

  Lizu paused mid-leg slap, almost unable to conceptually process Inkaro's inability to understand such a word. It seemed inconceivable. Her disbelief in the notion matched that of the boy's confusion towards the meaning behind love. The youthful dragolyte racked her mind and rocked her head, struggling to find the words to describe it straight away, purely out of embarrassment at basically having to out herself and personal feelings on the side. Because it was taking her longer than usual, she was forced to physically stir up the contents of her brain until something bubbled to the surface: "Yeah, you know... it is the feeling you get within you that makes your heart go ba-um ba-um, or when you get all anxious... when seeing the person you really-really like that you get all fuzzy inside.

  "Ohhh, is that why you randomly get short of breath sometimes?" Inkaro asked as he nodded emphatically, finding Lizu's explanation logically sound in principle but not in the sense that he personally understood it.

  "I um that...." Once again, Lizu found herself struggling, only now she was too focused on playing defence that any thought of explaining what love is fell to the wayside before she dropped her head: defeated. "There's nothing random about it, you cute dummy."

  Her little grumbles of defence persisted as she followed Inkaro the rest of the way to this supposed discovery of his. Upon arrival, Lizu inadvertently learned that the place Inkaro had brought her to was located nearby the pet-care store Yuuvia had recently visited, so she'd definitely be getting one of those blankets. Also, the store Inkaro brought her to was a magic material antique store.

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  "Off... to somewhere... where the wind... blows," Lizu mumbled incoherently in the present, as she snuggled her face all up in Inkaro's ever-unkempt hair. With the guy free of the curse, Inkaro's smell had returned to normal, for the most part. It brought the slowly waking teen a heart-soothing comfort, urging her to steadily bring her tentative hand, the one that wasn't busy keeping her anchored in place on Inkaro's back, up to her fiancé's face.

  Aiming for his cheek, Lizu's self-pleasing intention was to give the guy a teasing little pinch, planning to get back at him for hitting her in one of her four weak points. But instead of the smooth, squishable cheeks belonging to Inkaro, Lizu felt a fine face of facial hair in its place, shocking the teen slightly.

  For a moment, Lizu remained motionless. But soon enough, she jerked her hand back before bringing it to her face and sniffing it, which confirmed it smelled like Inkaro. The mismatch left her mind all muddled and disorganised, struggling to function at any tangible level as she forced her heavy eyes open.

  But to her continued confusion, when she looked upon Inkaro, he looked completely normal, no beard in sight. She blinked a few times, doing so in slow, calculative motions, genuinely questioning her sanity. So seeing what she was seeing and deciding to check if she was merely experiencing grogginess-induced illusions, Lizu slapped herself in her cheeks a couple of times to properly wake herself up.

  With an amount of slaps that counted into the hundreds, Lizu slowly regained her bearings and sense of reality. After ensuring she was thoroughly snapped awake again, Lizu returned her hand to Inkaro's face as the guy was preoccupied with struggling to manually pop the solidified lens out of their moulds.

  To the dragolyte's awestruck surprise, she noticed the peculiar sensation was still there on Inkaro's face. Poke and prod as much as she liked, Lizu found that Inkaro's face wasn't delectably smooth as it naturally should be; that was what her hands told her. But her eyes told a different story, one where Inkaro had not even the slightest hint of stubble's emergence bearing its presence on his face.

  By all accounts, it didn't make any sense.

  So just for extra measure, and to sate her curiosity, Lizu attempted to tighten the grip of her tail around Inkaro's frame, only to be halted by an unlikely source. Try and try again, Lizu couldn't tighten her grip, which, yet again, made no sense. She was sure that by the size of her wrapped tail's circumference, her tail wouldn't even be in contact with Inkaro. It had her stumped.

  For the moment, Lizu wondered why things didn't add up at all.

  Only then did a potential answer emerge in her mind, followed by her unfurling her tail from Inkaro and letting it drop to the carpeted floor of the bedroom, leading to a discovery: less of her tail was making contact with the ground than usual. To her, it was yet another error in her daily logic.

  Naturally fearing the worst and aided by her prior dream clouding her logic, Lizu sprang from Inkaro's back, flaunting her wings with reckless abandon at the guy and scrambled her way across the bedroom before diving into one of her drawers. It didn't take long for the room to be turned into a battlefield of discarded clothes that once lay in Lizu's way, now lying behind her as she pulled a tape measure with a display on it. Happening so fast her movements seemed to blur, Lizu pulled the measuring part out and snagged the hoop-shaped end around her tail tip.

  Adjusting her posture on her bed somewhat and placing the main body of the tape measure to her side, Lizu fully extended her tail out, taking the measuring strip along for the ride with a mechanical whirl. Her gaze was fixed on the display, watching the number rise and rise swiftly to the six-foot range.

  Checking the number one too many times, Lizu eventually accepted her tail had only grown by a minuscule amount, since her last time checking(three days ago, which might've been the cause behind her weirdly timed dream). The news left her exhaling in relief, allowing the tape measure's measuring part to snap back into its main body. Tossing it to the side, letting the thing bounce off the side of the open shelf before plummeting into the drawer's depths once again.

  However, now she was left with the other questions to solve: why did Inkaro feel like he possessed a beard, and why didn't her tail reach the floor like it usually did?

  As she continued to mull it over with no line-of-logic to follow, Lizu jokingly considered the possiblity the ageing curse had a counterspell attached to it that aged Inkaro up by the same amount he'd lost when the curse was broken. She was about to laugh the possibility away, but then it hit her, leaving her slack-jawed. It also didn't help her case that she was looking right at Inkaro, who was distinctly taller, twice as muscular, and sporting a well-trimmed beard that harboured none of the unkemptness like the guy's hair.

  "Whaaa? Why didn't you wake me up? You should have turned into a hunk!" Lizu exclaimed in outraged shock, jumping to her feet on the bed as she pointed both of her index fingers at Inkaro with enough accusation to put someone away for life, on multiple counts at that. With a silly sense of betrayal fueling her, Lizu frantically drummed her tail against the bed, recklessly messing up all order the pillows of the bed possessed prior to her return to the island of pillows, that she previously spent ages arranging.

  "So, waking you up when something new happens is allowed, is it now?" Inkaro retorted smugly with an ear-pleasingly husky voice that tickled all the right places in Lizu's soul. The guy's voice instantly brought the girl's pouting to a halt, leaving her struggling not to break into a squirming and enamouredly giggling mess, like some obsessed fangirl meeting their idol.

  While maintaining what little self-control she could cling to, Lizu shut her eyes with a funny 'fwoomp' noise accompanying the action, inadvertently brought to reality through her imagination. Not that she noticed her act of tangible memoria manifestation, Inkaro certainly did. But since Inkaro had no concept of memoria, it left him lostly looking around for a more sensible solution, like a hidden speaker or a beegirl making sound effects with their mouth, believing this was some sort of prank.

  Slowly, extreme enthasis on slowly, Lizu eventually managed to force herself to push her obscene thoughts back into her soul, before letting out a heavy breath of air.

  "Ah... oh yeah, I did say not to wake me on weekends no matter what, didn't I?" Lizu uttered shyly but mostly shamefully at her forgetfulness. She dropped to her butt in defeat and rested her chin on her knees. She mentally huffed and puffed, unable to believe her laziness had bitten her in the butt yet again. With nothing better to do, the dragolyte watched Inkaro from the bed, observing the guy struggling to get a single lens out of its mould.

  Strangely enough, the guy's struggles brought a smile to Lizu's face. Despite both of the times the guy had his age changed, Inkaro didn't change in the slightest, on the inside, thankfully. It was certainly reassuring for her as she hopped off the bed and sauntered over to Inkaro. "Let me help with that, you're going to break them if you keep attempting it like that, ya dumb cutie."