First true experience.

It was my very first time feeling it so… clearly and strongly. I had felt headaches and felt my body warming up when I saw magic happen, so I had come to associate those things with Frey using magic. This time, though, it was different. Very different.

It happened as I was stirring the drink. I felt it in my body like something was moving inside me, like heat traveling in waves inside my very veins and reaching the tips of my fingers. It was disorienting and nauseating, but I managed to keep myself standing firm and stirring the new drink.

Diana didn’t say a word until I set everything down and slid the glass towards her. She looked at my face with a worried frown and asked, “Are you feeling well? You’re pale.”

“Frey said…” I stopped mid-sentence to take a deep breath. “Frey said… this would be my training to learn to use magic by myself. Up until now she’s done most of the heavy lifting and I’m only involved in a small part of the work. She says that if I learn to use it by myself, more doors will open to us.” I took another deep breath and focused on keeping myself steady. “This is the first time I’ve felt the magical energy so clearly. It’s… strange.”

“Want some water?”

“Yes, please.”

Diana poured me a glass of water and I chugged about half of it in a couple of seconds. “Still, I think it worked, but…”

“Alright, let’s try it,” Diana said, taking the glass.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I’m not letting anyone else test our experiments and someone has to do it.” She smiled at me, raised her glass and took the smallest sip. “Oh? Wait… What…?”

“Um… How is it?” I asked her.

“Awful,” she said with a small smile and wide eyes. “But not like before. This is worse, but also completely different.” She tasted it again and licked her lips, her smile turning into amusement. “The flavors are all wrong to the point it doesn’t taste anything like it should. It’s also stronger and more… viscous, somehow. It also leaves a warmer sensation in the chest, but that feels nice. Most importantly, I don’t feel any immediate arousal or sexual desire.”

I grimaced. “A failure, then.”

“A failure on the first try,” Diana corrected. “But if I needed final proof that magic existed, this is the final nail in the coffin.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “And all the other stuff we’ve done wasn’t proof enough?”

“People could’ve just been playing along,” Diana said with a shrug. “But this? A completely different flavor in a mix of drinks I’ve had more than a dozen times and prepared over hundreds of? Now I’m even a little jealous. If magic is capable of this, then with practice and understanding, this could open a whole new world of flavors and combinations.”

Ah, so that’s what the smile was about. Despite the cocktail tasting awful, Diana was excited about discovering a new world of possibilities.

“I’ll get better, I promise,” I told her. “I’ll be happy to help you experiment whenever you like.”

Diana looked at me and smiled wryly. She walked over to me and cupped my cheek. “Thank you, but that’s enough for now. That one attempt clearly left you shaken. Let’s go back to the living room. I haven’t heard any fighting, so either Cake and Red are getting along or…”

“Or one killed the other,” I said, shrugging.

Diana gave me a harmless flick on the forehead for that before we went back. There, back in the living room, we saw the cat and the dog still playing. Cake was sitting in front of Red, who was laying on the floor. She was trying to boop his snout while he tried to catch her paws with his mouth.

“Okay, so… success, apparently,” I said.

“Ugh, do you ever get tired of being right?” she asked me.

“When my bad feelings come true, yeah.”

We sat down together and I took the chance to rest my head. Seriously, it wasn’t like it hit me that hard but it was just so damn strange and dizzying.

After a while, once I started feeling better, we let Mint and Chip free and that was when Cake bowed out, choosing to climb on the couch with us while Red got super excited to meet the puppies. With Cake he kept his distance and let her approach on her terms, but with the outgoing puppies he was jumping and playing with them like he was used to it.

“Alright, maybe your dog is just really good at reading people and animals,” I told Diana.

In another attempt to help them all bond even further, while I was making lunch for us, Diana fed the four pets with their bowls all next to each other. Unsurprisingly, the most hesitant to approach was Cake, but hunger won in the end.

…

Maybe Isabelle was right and Cake really is just like me.

Diana and I had lunch in the kitchen, and I was very happy to accept her compliments on how good it was.

“Alice has a point, you know,” she said, grinning. “You’re surprisingly good at many things. Sure, you have your hobbies, but you’re also a good cook, a good waiter, you make good coffee, you’re very neat…”

“No, I’m just barely alright at things everybody is able to do.”

“I couldn’t cook when I was your age.”

“But you could saddle a horse and milk a cow when you were like 12, didn’t you?”

“...I learned that when I was like 7, but that’s not what I mean. I didn’t know how to drive when I was your age, either.”

“But I bet you rode a horse everywhere.”

“Okay, yes, but… I just want you to feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.”

I chuckled. “I know. And… I AM proud of all I can do now. It’s not much, but it feels like growth. Driving, cooking, working… It makes me feel a bit more independent. Moving away from this house is still pretty scary, though.”

“...” Diana stared at me for a moment before standing up and taking our empty plates, leaving them in the kitchen sink. Then she walked up to me, took my hand and made me stand up as well. “Hey… Let’s go to your room. Now.”

“Now? But…”

I looked towards Cake and the others. With their bellies full, they collectively decided it was nap time. Red was on the floor with Mint and Chip cuddling with him while Cake took a spot by the window where the sun could reach her.

“So… My room.”

“Your room.”

We went to my room.

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