Week 1: Elise's Date, Part 2

As they both opened their chosen books, Aífe immediately noticed a problem.

“Wait, that’s not—” She attempted to correct Elise, who, having never read manga before, was unaware that it was meant to be read from right to left.

“Oh, that’s interesting.” Elise mused before Aífe could finish her warning. Aífe sighed in relief as she remembered that most manga volumes published in English had a diagram at the back of the book explaining how it differed from a Western comic book. “I’ve never had a book request that I read it backwards before.” She chuckled at her own joke before flipping the book over and beginning to read from the correct direction.

Aífe gave up her own reading about a minute into it, much too distracted as she eagerly watched for any reaction from Elise. Aífe knew she’d won only a few minutes later, as tears began forming in the corners of the professor’s eyes. Yep. Aífe thought to herself. I knew that scene would get her. She set her volume of One Piece aside as she continued to Elise watch. The older woman’s face cycled between emotions, varying from sadness to irritation to awe, and she occasionally let out small sounds of surprise or excitement as she was drawn into the adventures of Frieren, Fern, and Stark. At one point while reading volume 3, she even sat forward in her seat, her leg beginning to bounce up and down. Aífe was fairly certain that was the fight between Aura and Frieren.

“Sooo, what’s the verdict?” Aífe asked with a hint of smugness in her tone when Elise closed the third volume and set it down.

“I’ll admit it.” Elise said, pouting. “That was fantastic.”

“When did it hook you?”

“I’d say…” Elise hesitated before sighing. “Chapter one.” She admitted bashfully.

“See? I knew you’d love it.” Aífe cheerfully nudged Elise. “There’s plenty of other series I need to show you, too! Ones I bet you’d love even more. Aren’t you glad you let yourself get talked into giving it a try? Now you have potentially hundreds of series to look forward to.”

“Yes, yes, you got me.” Elise smiled back warmly, amused by her date’s enthusiasm. “I shouldn’t have written them off because of the medium in which they were written.”

“I do have to ask, though…” Aífe changed the subject. “Is reading all you have planned for our date today?”

“What do you mean?” Elise tilted her head. “We’re in a library—what else would we be doing?”

“Well, I just figured you also brought me here to help you practice your magic.” Aífe pointed to the witch hat and black robes Elise was wearing over her more mundane attire of khakis and a lightweight green turtleneck.

“Oh…” Elise averted her gaze out of embarrassment. “I have been meaning to practice more, but… Let’s just say that there was a bit of a mishap when I tried using it on our first night here, and I’ve been a bit… hesitant to use it since then.”

“Ok?” Aífe looked befuddled. This wasn’t something anyone had mentioned to her yet. “I’m guessing nobody got hurt, at least. But, even if you are still inexperienced, haven’t you been reading up on how to use it over the past few days?”

“Come again?” Elise blinked in confusion.

“That is what you’ve been doing in here for the four days we’ve been staying here, right?” Aífe continued. “At least, I assume this place has books about magic. Have you not been able to find any?”

“Ah—” Elise’s mouth hung open for a moment before she held her head in her hands. “How did I not think of that?!” She loudly admonished herself, startling Aífe. “I wasted four whole days that I could’ve been using to learn magic!”

“Hey, hey, relax, Elise.” Aífe patted the professor on her back, attempting to comfort her. “It’s not a big deal—you’re in a weird situation, I get it. You probably just defaulted to habit. Besides, we’ve still got 86 days left—or I guess 76, since I doubt there’ll be much time for magic practice on competition days. That’s plenty of time to practice magic.”

“It’s just so embarrassing.” Elise groaned. “I made such a big show about how much I wanted magic and then I waste half a week not doing anything with it.”

“Then let’s fix that.” Aífe got up and offered a hand to Elise. “Scouring a library for spellbooks? Sounds like a fun date to me?”

Elise smiled, and they got to work… stopping only a couple minutes later when they found a room labeled “Magic.”

“I know, I know.” Elise covered her face in shame. “But it’s not my fault—Sera put the shelf with Tolkien right at the entrance! How was I supposed to say no to that?”

Choosing not to say anything, Aífe opened the door, leading them into a room filled with shelves lined with dusty tomes and scrolls. Setting aside their awe, they began searching through the books one by one, hoping to find any hint of a beginner spell for Elise. It was at this point that they came across the second obstacle before them—none of the books or scrolls were in English.

“Crap.” Aífe complained. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t read any of these.” She examined another scroll. “I know enough about what Gaelic looks like to tell that this one is written in it, but I don’t know any of the words.”

“Why don’t we just grab as many as we can and look through them while sitting down?” Elise stretched to ease an ache in her back. “I try to stay limber by doing yoga regularly, but my knees and back have a decade more wear and tear on them compared to yours—I’m a few years past the age where I can stay on the ground for long periods of time.”

“Sure.” Aífe stood up, herself. “Is there a table out there, though? I don’t remember seeing one, aside from the tiny end tables next to where we were sitting.”

“Don’t worry, I already have a plan for that.” Elise smiled as she grabbed a stack of books and led Aífe back to the main part of the library. “This worked out perfectly with what I had planned for lunch.” She began heading toward a push door at the back of the library with a sign that read “Café Au Lait.” They walked through the door with the sound of a bell accompanying their arrival. On the other side, they found a small coffee shop with another entrance on the wall to the left, leading outside. “I hadn’t checked it out, yet, but I asked Sera about it after I saw it the other day, and she said that we could bring books from the library in here.”

As they set their books down on one of the tables, they heard movement from the kitchen, a moment later, a very well-endowed woman—one with curves rivaling Sera’s without the equally tall frame to balance them out—emerged. She had deep brown hair in a low braid, green eyes, glasses, and was wearing nothing save for a skimpy apron over a cowprint bikini. Her other notable features were a set of cow ears instead of human ones, and a tail that slowly swished back and forth.”

“Welcome! Glad to finally have our first customers.” She brightly greeted them as they stood there with their jaws on the floor. “I’m May. My sister and I are the ones who run this little café.”

“Sister?” Elise blankly responded.

“Yeah.” May turned to yell into the kitchen. “Are you coming, April? You want to greet our guests don’t you?”

“Geez, May—you know it takes me a minute when I’m in the middle of work.” Another woman, who Aífe and Elise assumed was April, came out of the kitchen a moment later, adjusting her own bikini top. She appeared identical to her sister, except she didn’t wear glasses and her hair was in a somewhat disheveled ponytail, rather than a braid. “Nice to meet you. I’m April.” She greeted their guests with a slight flush to her cheeks.

“So, I’m guessing you two are twins.” Aífe responded, not sure where to look when talking to them. “And are you two holstaurs?”

“For your first question, yes.” May nodded. “My sister, here, was born at 11:59 on April 30th, and yours truly was born a minute later at midnight on May 1st. Our parents weren’t exactly creative when it came to names.”

“As for your other question—” April interjected. “We’re actually both human. Or rather, we used to be. We were both contestants on another season of this show.”

“Wait, REALLY?!” Elise was astonished. She never expected that she’d meet contestants from other seasons, and certainly not so soon. “What happened? Were you two eliminated?”

“Oh God, no.” May laughed. “We’d be in way rougher shape if that were the case. Our season was cancelled after the first set of transformations. We both had the largest racks among the other pairs, so we got a TF that turned us into cow girls.”

“Wait—other pairs? And what happened to your season?” Aífe was the one to chime in with a question this time.

“Incompetence, supposedly.” April bluntly answered. “Or I guess cutting corners would be more accurate. The Master of that season had a twin fetish, so the Host thought of the idea to have 4 pairs of twins that he knew compete against each other. The only problem was that he only knew 2 sets of twins. The Host decided to fix that by splitting two of his other friends each into two separate bodies and rewriting everyone’s memories of them.”

“So the Host was already on the hook for fraud.” May took over the story. “But the real kicker—the thing that actually got the season cancelled—he didn’t fill out all of the legal and tax forms. So the season got cancelled, Sera offered us jobs here, and the Producers punished that Host by way of demotion.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.” Aífe said with a tone of surprise. “I thought these ‘Producers’ would’ve done something way worse based on what we’ve heard about them, so far.”

“He was demoted to pencil sharpener.” April retorted. “As in literally transformed into a manual pencil sharpener for one of their departments, with his sense of touch still intact. I’ll leave it up to your imagination where the pencils go.” Aífe and Elise both shivered at the unpleasant thought.

“Alright, enough doom and gloom—why don’t you two go sit down, and I’ll bring you both some tea and pastries for while you work. You both strike me as tea drinkers. And April can go finish her work in the back.” May swiftly changed the subject and began making tea while April left to go back into the kitchen.

Aífe and Elise sat down and resumed their search for any bit of text that they could understand. Greek, Sanskrit, Egyptian—there were a myriad of languages, but none of them were ones that they could read. Aífe had just had a stroke of luck, stumbling on a book written in Japanese, which she could at least make out a few words of, here and there, when May arrived with a tray of two cups of tea and a few different pastries.

“Ember said that you like yours plain, Elise, so here you go.” May set down the first cup. “And milk and two spoons of sugar for Lady Aífe.”

“Hold on—” Elise interrupted. “You always told me that you liked your tea plain, too, Aífe.”

“Yeah, about that… I was lying.” Seeing Elise’s hurt expression, Aífe continued. “What? I wanted to impress you, so I fibbed a little. I thought it would make me seem more mature if I said I drank my tea plain.” Quickly changing the subject, Aífe looked at the cup placed before her. “Didn’t you say this had milk? It doesn’t look like it.” Aífe examined the clear, dark liquid.

“Left or right?” May asked with a smile.

“What? Um… left, I guess.” Aífe raised an eyebrow in confusion, raising the other in surprise when May slipped her left breast out of her bikini, positioned it over the mug, and lightly squeezed until a small stream of milk flowed into the tea. She fixed her bikini back into place and lightly stirred until her milk was fully mixed in with the tea. Both guests were once again staring at her, dumbfounded.

“Enjoy, you two.” May playfully waved goodbye as she turned around and walked back toward the kitchen.

“Well, it would be rude for me to not drink it, so…” Aífe blushed as she made an excuse, and brought the cup up to her lips. Wow, that’s good. She stared down at the cup in pleasant surprise.

“Um… s-studying magic!” Elise stammered out, looking for a way to distract herself from what she just watched. “We need to get back to studying!” She stared pointedly down at a bunch of books she couldn’t read, her face red. Aífe followed her lead and began working on, hopefully, finding a sentence with enough kanji she recognized to be able to piece together what kind of spell it was.