## Chapter 462 — Nothing Impossible

Friday evening settled over flat 202 without requiring anything from it.

Thomas had come home with the particular tiredness produced by a day in which nothing had gone wrong and several things had nevertheless required careful reading. Isha had worked a climbing-centre shift, eaten something sensible before leaving, and arrived home carrying neither injury nor story worth enlarging. By half past seven the windows reflected more room than sky, and the two of them had reached the part of the evening where tea existed mainly because one of them had made it.

The holiday list was still on the table.

Morioka. Yamagata. Sanriku coast — somewhere simple.

Thomas had added two railway times beneath Morioka and then stopped before research became booking by momentum. Isha had drawn a small line through one hotel whose page had somehow made its baths, breakfast and proximity to three attractions sound like obligations. Neither had chosen anything.

That, too, could wait.

Isha sat sideways on the sofa with one leg folded beneath her, her phone loose in one hand. Thomas was at the table, turning the same mug a few degrees at a time while looking at nothing on the screen in front of him.

“You meant it yesterday,” Isha said.

Thomas looked across. “That narrows it down alarmingly little.”

“When you said you missed talking to him.”

He stopped turning the mug.

“Yes.”

Isha looked back at her phone. The nameless four-person chat was not open yet.

The anger had not vanished because she had described it accurately. She could still remember the particular coldness of learning that a death which had belonged to her body, Thomas’s grief and the years that followed had once also been a choice made elsewhere because a story needed pressure. Ian’s fear afterward did not make the concealment kind. His regret did not change the event into something she would have consented to.

None of that prevented her from liking him.

The last exchange in the chat remained Thursday’s brief report after the passage: Thomas saying the page had gone and another had come back, that he had remained conscious, that the same one-page and thirty-cycle limits held; Isha’s thanks beneath it; Ian’s two words after that.

*you’re welcome*

No invitation had followed. No new impossible destination appeared beneath the sentence. No question about whether they wanted a planet, a god, a lost object or a machine’s answer about somebody who had never agreed to be searched.

The silence afterward had not felt like abandonment.

Isha had noticed that.

Thomas came over from the table and sat at the other end of the sofa. He did not look over her shoulder.

“I don’t want another meeting where we spend two hours discussing whether he should have done something six months ago,” he said. “Not because it doesn’t matter.”

“I know.”

Thomas watched the faint steam above his mug until it dispersed. The meeting he wanted was becoming easier to define by subtraction, which was itself beginning to feel like a warning.

“And I don’t particularly want him to arrive with an activity.”

“No.”

Thomas rubbed one thumb along the side of his mug. “I don’t know what normal conversation with Ian is.”

Isha’s mouth shifted.

“He is English. You could complain about weather.”

“I tried being English for thirty-two years. I don’t remember it working that reliably.”

That earned him a quiet laugh.

It faded without needing replacement.

Isha opened the chat. Kanno would see anything written there. That did not make the conversation hers, but neither Thomas nor Isha needed to manufacture secrecy around wanting to see Ian. Kanno had her own relationship with him and had been firmer than either of them about relationships not becoming reporting structures merely because communication was convenient.

“We should not ask him here,” Isha said.

Thomas understood immediately. Flat 202 was their home. Ian had respected its threshold often enough now that inviting him across it casually would mean more than choosing a room with comfortable chairs.

“No.”

“A neutral place.”

“An actual neutral place, or one of his convincing imitations of somewhere?”

Isha considered that.

“Somewhere which is not pretending to be important.”

Thomas smiled slightly. “That’s extremely specific and completely useless.”

“It should have chairs.”

“Good. We’re making progress.”

The ridiculous specificity helped. Isha could picture chairs and tea without picturing a purpose attached to either.

“And tea.”

“Obviously.”

She looked at him.

“No journey.”

“Agreed.”

Isha turned the phone once in her hand. The practical limits were easy to name because both of them already understood what those words excluded.

“No demonstration.”

“Yes.”

The last condition was less concrete than the others, and therefore more important.

“No reason.”

Thomas’s expression changed by very little.

“That might be the difficult one.”

Isha knew what he meant. Ian’s presence had almost always arrived attached to purpose. Explanation. Apology. Family. Impossible travel. A boundary needing correction. Something offered. Something confessed. Even friendship had frequently entered through a mechanism large enough to distort the room around it.

Wanting to see someone was a reason.

It did not need to become a justification.

Isha typed, stopped once, deleted the first version and tried again.

**Isha:** Ian. Thomas and I would like to see you, if you would like that too. Somewhere neutral, just the three of us. Tea or coffee. No trip, no demonstration, no problem we need you to solve. We thought perhaps we could simply spend some time together.

The reply came after only a short wait.

**Ian:** That would be nice. Do you want a real place or an imitation one like the Golden Acre Park day? I could come to somewhere near you if you’d permit it. Your choice. I don’t know how to use chopsticks though.

Thomas read it first because his phone lit before Isha’s.

The chopsticks line made him laugh once through his nose. Isha leaned across far enough to read from his screen, then sat back with an expression which suggested one detail had been filed for later use.

“A real place would be more ordinary,” Thomas said.

Isha considered it rather than agreeing automatically. A café somewhere in Sendai would contain strangers, staff, cameras, receipts, perhaps somebody remembering the conspicuous foreign woman and the middle-aged Englishman who had apparently arrived in Japan by no ordinary route. None of that was inherently dangerous. It was simply more people’s reality to involve for the sake of proving they could drink tea normally.

“And his coming here would still be the impossible part,” she said. “We would only be hiding it behind a train station and a coffee counter.”

Thomas glanced at the message again. “Whereas an imitation involves an entire place being created.”

“Yes.”

“Which somehow counts as less complicated.”

“For us, it does.”

Isha answered.

**Isha:** An imitation, I think. Somewhere ordinary and comfortable, not designed to impress us. Tea, coffee, perhaps simple food. You may have cutlery.

Ian replied:

**Ian:** With people, or self-service? Food is always good for company, but if we get hungry in the middle you’ll have to accept a bit of magic, which I can keep bound to ordinary food, if no-one is around.

Thomas read that twice.

“The first loophole has appeared.”

Isha looked over.

“Magic for snacks.”

“That is how it begins.”

Her mouth twitched, but she considered the actual question seriously. Real staff in a real café had their own lives. Created staff in a created café would be scenery wearing faces.

“Self-service,” she said. “I do not want people made for us.”

Thomas nodded. “Agreed.”

“And food can already be there.”

“That deprives him of the emergency sandwich defence.”

“He will survive.”

Isha typed.

**Isha:** Self-service. I would rather not have people created just to make the place feel inhabited. Put ordinary food there from the beginning if you like, and then we need not discover halfway through that hunger has become a metaphysical emergency. A little impossible infrastructure is unavoidable. I meant that I do not want the impossibility to be the point.

She added:

**Isha:** And yes, you may have a fork.

The reply came back:

**Ian:** That’s fine by me, send a message when you’re ready.

They settled on Saturday afternoon without difficulty. Isha asked for somewhere café-like but not copied from somewhere meaningful to any of them, with comfortable chairs, ordinary tables, windows if Ian wanted them, food already present and a direct way back to flat 202. She also asked that the entrance remain something they chose to use rather than something appearing around them.

Ian agreed.

---

Saturday arrived without producing an emergency worthy of cancelling tea.

Thomas spent the morning doing very little with unusual discipline. He went to the supermarket, came back with ingredients for dinner and resisted the argument that buying something interesting for Sunday counted as useful preparation for seeing Ian. Isha trained lightly, showered and left her climbing bag where it belonged rather than turning the afternoon into something she needed to dress for.

By two, flat 202 had acquired the faintly artificial tidiness of people expecting to leave it rather than receive anyone.

Isha stood in the bedroom deciding between two ordinary tops.

Thomas, already in jeans and a dark shirt, watched from the doorway.

“You know he has seen you in armour, formal clothes, gym clothes and on Mars.”

“That does not mean I should wear the first thing my hand touches.”

“I didn’t say it did.”

Isha met his eyes in the mirror while holding one top against herself. Thomas had the good sense not to look away as if caught.

“You were thinking it loudly.”

“I was thinking that you’re treating tea with an Englishman as more complicated than your residence renewal.”

Isha looked at him in the mirror.

“The residence renewal had a list.”

He conceded the point.

She chose a soft green knit top with dark trousers, put on her rings and left her hair loose. There was no tactical reason for any of it. Thomas noticed anyway, which was ordinary enough that she merely caught his eye in the mirror and let him deal with the consequence himself.

Neither packed anything.

That required more thought than it should have.

Phones, yes. Wallets, perhaps from habit, though a constructed café was unlikely to demand yen. No camera. No correspondence. No photographs brought to provoke discussion. No object whose presence quietly said *we have prepared a subject for you*.

Thomas checked his phone.

“He said to message when we’re ready.”

“I remember.”

“You don’t have to sound as though I was about to summon him by accident.”

Thomas put the phone away. Their joking had done what it usually did when neither of them needed the joke to solve anything: made the next small action easier.

“You cannot summon him.”

“That is reassuringly not the correction I expected.”

Isha smiled, then looked around the living room.

The sofa. Their holiday notes, moved to one side of the table. The second paper hanging on the wall. Mugi absent, as community cats tended to be whenever anybody imagined them useful for atmosphere. An entirely ordinary Saturday waiting for them when they came back.

She picked up her phone.

**Isha:** We’re ready.

Ian’s reply followed.

**Ian:** Ready, use a door with intent.

Isha looked towards the ordinary living-room door.

Nothing about it changed.

Thomas noticed the same thing. “That is almost disappointingly subtle.”

“It is a door.”

“Yes, but usually doors do not require intent as part of the operating instructions.”

Isha slipped her phone into her pocket. Thomas followed without taking anything else.

She rested her hand on the handle and thought deliberately of Ian, of the place he had prepared and of going there because they had asked to see him.

Then she opened the door.

Cooler air met them on the other side.

The place beyond was recognisably a diner before either of them had time to catalogue why. Chrome caught the light along the counter and table edges. Red vinyl covered booths and chairs. The fittings borrowed heavily from an American idea of the nineteen-fifties without pretending anyone had preserved the building untouched for seventy years. Quiet air conditioning disappeared beneath low background music.

Outside the broad windows was almost aggressively little to remark upon: a road, open ground, distance. Somewhere rural enough that nobody would reasonably wander past, but without mountains, desert or impossible sky turning isolation into scenery.

No staff.

No customers arranged to create atmosphere.

At one of the four-seat tables Ian was waiting.

He occupied one side by himself, holding a strawberry milkshake. On the table were two teas and two coffees, milk and sugar, condiments, a bowl of fries and a modest spread of cakes and other snacks. Enough to choose from. Not enough to suggest that Ian had tried to anticipate every possible preference.

The milkshake was unmistakably his.

So was the apprehension.

Isha slowed slightly as she approached. She had seen Ian frightened before. Guilty. Defensive. Grieving. Delighted by things which should not have delighted a man with access to entire planets quite as much as they did. This was quieter. He had arranged a room specifically so that nothing extraordinary needed to happen in it, and now sat waiting to discover whether that had been enough.

Something in her expression eased.

Thomas followed her gaze to the milkshake and gave a small, involuntary smile.

The door remained behind them. Their way home was visible, uncomplicated and unused.

Isha chose the chair opposite Ian and sat. Thomas took the chair beside her, leaving the fourth empty. Neither reached immediately for the food.

For a few seconds the three of them simply occupied the same table.

“Isha, Thomas. Nice to see you. I hope this is OK?” Ian said.

Isha glanced around once more, because the question deserved more than reassurance offered on reflex.

“It is,” she said. “You did what we asked.”

Thomas reached for one of the coffees. “And you’ve managed to create an American diner where the most conspicuous thing in the room is your milkshake.”

Isha looked at Ian over the table.

“You have also thought about this far too much.”

There was no accusation in it. Her gaze dropped briefly to the hand around the glass, then returned to his face.

“Are you nervous?”

Ian took a sip of his milkshake.

“Yes. I am.”

Thomas’s expression softened first, though he did not rush to contradict the feeling.

“That makes three of us, then.”

Isha looked sideways at him.

“Two and a half.”

Thomas considered that. “You are claiming the half?”

“I am deciding how much to admit.”

The joke left the silence underneath intact.

Isha reached for her tea at last. She tested the cup with both hands before drinking.

“You do not need to make this go well,” she said. “We asked to see you because we wanted to. That does not mean we have decided in advance what sort of afternoon it must become.”

Thomas nodded. “If it’s awkward for a while, that’s probably more normal than anything else we’ve done with you.”

Ian looked down at his milkshake before answering.

“Our previous interactions haven’t always gone”—he paused—“well. So I think I’ve been avoiding meeting, or even interacting, a little. Waiting to see if you reached out.”

Isha did not answer immediately.

“That was probably sensible,” she said at last. “For a while.”

Ian had given them space instead of deciding what reconciliation ought to look like and arranging it around them. She valued that. She also knew avoidance when she heard it, even when the person describing it had supplied the word himself.

“But some of those interactions went badly because of choices you made,” she continued. “I do not want giving us agency to become a way of never risking another ordinary mistake with us.”

Thomas lowered his coffee.

“I did notice you weren’t around much,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d abandoned us. Mostly I assumed you were trying not to crowd us.”

He rubbed a thumb against the warm cup.

“And I appreciated it. But I also missed you.”

Isha picked up one fry and ate it.

“I meant what I said yesterday. I do not need another apology every time we speak. I am still angry about some things. I also invited you here.”

She let those facts sit beside one another.

Ian looked at both of them before speaking.

“I thought you might just continue your life and I become someone you talk about in the past, like someone you went to school with, or a former colleague maybe. Gradually fading.

“So, thank you for reaching out and inviting me, it was nice of you.”

He tried a slight smile.

Isha’s expression changed, more attentive than softer.

“I do not like *nice*,” she said.

Thomas glanced at her, but did not interrupt.

“Not because inviting you was difficult. It was not. And not because I regret it. But if you make this something we did out of kindness because you were waiting sadly somewhere outside our lives, then you are doing part of the choosing for us again.”

“We invited you because we wanted to see you,” Thomas said. “That wasn’t charity.”

Ian answered quickly enough to show the misunderstanding.

“I meant it felt nice to me, receiving the invite. As well as a little apprehension. I have not been in my room being sad listening to the Sisters of Mercy, I didn’t mean it like that. I’ve had real life and the other life as well, which have been normal and ... less normal ... respectively.”

Thomas’s mouth twitched at the specificity of the denial.

“That is reassuringly detailed.”

Isha looked at Ian for another moment, then inclined her head.

“Then I read more into *nice* than you put there.”

The admission came plainly.

“I am glad you have not been waiting for us,” she continued. “Actually, I would be worried if you had. You should have parts of your life which do not depend on whether Thomas or Isha send you a message.”

Thomas reached for a fry.

“Preferably quite a lot of them.”

Isha gave him a brief sideways look. “Yes.”

There was something easier in the silence afterward. Not because the possibility of distance had disappeared, but because Ian had not in fact spent it motionless outside their door.

Thomas ate the fry and looked back across the table.

“So how has the less normal life been?”

Ian’s eyebrows rose slightly.

“Do you want the metaphysical version, or the home making version?”

Thomas glanced at Isha.

“Home making,” she said.

Thomas smiled into his coffee. “I was going to say the same.”

“The metaphysical version will still exist later,” Isha said. “Tell us about the house.”

Ian gave them the brief version: the pale-stone and dark-timber house west of Merrowford, mature trees and rough ground, the stream near the rear rooms, the old garden and the slow process of turning the place into a home rather than replacing everything at once. He loosely described the newer southern land and route as carrying on down towards the river, without unpacking the separate parcel and town-controlled ground involved in getting there.

“I must say property is a lot cheaper there than here, wow.”

Thomas laughed.

“That comparison may be slightly compromised by one economy not having Sendai land prices.”

“And by you comparing different currencies, legal systems and possibly universes,” Isha added.

She had listened more closely to the domestic details than the scale of the purchase.

“You said you are making it into a home slowly,” she said. “Do you like living there?”

“Some days I wish my real body was there. So yes, I do. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy the normality of it, but Lethira makes it easy to like.”

Ian smiled.

“She taught me to cut onions so watch out Thomas.”

Thomas lowered his coffee with exaggerated care.

“I have spent years developing actual knife skills. I refuse to be threatened by one successful onion.”

Isha looked between them. “You should be. This is how escalation begins.”

Thomas pointed at her with a fry. “You are supposed to be on my side.”

“I am on the side of accurate risk assessment.”

The exchange faded naturally.

Isha’s attention remained on the first thing Ian had said.

“That sounds more complicated than liking the house.”

Ian sat with the question.

“I experience both simultaneously, I think? I try not to think about it too much; it becomes problematic. But yes, it is possible to be consumed by a more fantastical place. The power is a lure, elven ears are a lure—”

He coloured a fraction.

“—an emotional connection is a lure. Also, drawing maps is a lure.”

Thomas’s eyebrows rose at the final addition.

“Maps.”

Isha ignored him.

“The maps may be the least dangerous one.”

Thomas looked at her. “That’s a strong endorsement of cartography.”

“It has limits. Ground can disagree.”

That, at least, had already happened.

Isha looked back at Ian. “What would that danger look like?”

Ian smiled, but the answer was not a joke.

“Losing myself in it and ruining the life in which I actually live. As in, the one I can die in. Losing my job, my house, etc.”

He waved both hands.

“I am nowhere near that, but that’s what all addicts say at the start, right?”

Thomas did not laugh this time.

Isha’s expression tightened slightly, though not at the word *addict*.

“I would be careful with *actually live*,” she said. “I understand what you mean. Your biological body is there. Your job and house are there. You can become ill there and die there. But Lethira is not part of an unreal life because your body reaches her strangely.”

Ian qualified it before the distinction became larger than he intended.

“My point on life: if my ‘real’”—he used air quotes—“body dies, I die here as well, the converse is not true.”

Isha nodded. “Then yes. There is an asymmetry I was flattening.”

Thomas leaned back a little. “A fairly important one.”

Ian continued.

“Yes, I think about here sometimes, but I still talk to other people and eat, sleep, leave the house, mow the lawn, go for a walk. I watch a bit less anime than I did, play a bit less computer games. Draw more maps.”

Thomas smiled at the last sentence.

“That sounds less like catastrophic addiction and more like acquiring a second life that is taking some time from your hobbies.”

Isha glanced at him. “A lover and a second household are not a hobby.”

“No. The maps might be.”

That distinction seemed to satisfy her.

“The part I would notice,” Thomas said, “is if your ordinary life became something you only maintain because you know you are supposed to.”

Isha nodded once. Ian’s description did not sound like that. Work, friends, food, sleep, walking, a lawn: the other world had changed how he spent some leisure, not reduced his biological life to maintenance.

Thomas returned to the safer subject.

“How much of the map drawing is because you enjoy maps, and how much is because having the world on paper makes it feel more reachable?”

“I think it’s both. I actually quite like the process, but it makes this more real I think. Then it moves the bloody wall to a non-right angle and I get computer-induced rage.”

Ian smiled.

Thomas laughed properly.

“There it is. The authentic experience of mapping something which has had the discourtesy to exist before your diagram.”

Isha looked between them with less sympathy.

“The wall is correct.”

Thomas turned towards her. “You don’t know anything about the wall.”

“It is there.”

“That is a very aggressive standard of evidence.”

“It has survived long enough to inconvenience his computer. I favour it.”

The humour sat comfortably for a moment.

Isha took another fry.

“Did Lethira laugh at you when the wall was wrong?”

Ian’s expression changed before the answer.

“I like making her laugh, making her smile, making her...” He coughed. “happy. I dislike upsetting her. I think I’ve managed a lot less of the latter.”

“Yes,” Isha said. “That sounds like being in love.”

She let the obvious answer pass.

“But disliking upsetting someone can become a problem if avoiding it becomes more important than telling them something true.”

Thomas stayed quiet. Isha did not turn the sentence into a diagnosis.

Ian shook his head slightly.

“I have never liked upsetting people I care for, in any world, throughout most of my life. I don’t think that changes easily. I am honest with her, at least, I try to be. I was hesitant to start with, but she’s the kind of person you can open up to. More so than many, I think.

“I have also made some other friends, or at least people I can talk to, there.”

Isha accepted the first part without trying to improve him out of it.

“No. Disliking it does not need to change. Only what you do because you dislike it.”

The second part caught her interest.

“Other friends?”

Ian gave a small smile.

“This might drift into metaphysical. I’m happy to answer though.”

He paused.

“I might be trying too hard to not trip up on offending you now.”

“Yes,” Isha said.

Thomas covered a smile with his coffee.

“You are allowed to say things which might annoy me,” Isha continued. “I would rather correct something you actually mean than spend the afternoon talking to a version of you which has checked every sentence for danger first. And metaphysical is not forbidden. We said we did not want it to be the purpose of today.”

Ian nodded and went on.

“Aelira I would definitely count as a friend, she’s not metaphysical of course. We’ve spent a fair amount of time together. She’s the one I can talk to that isn’t Lethira, she’s helped me a lot — practical stuff, personal stuff. She’s a great leader.”

He paused.

“The other two, you may or may not know of them, I’m unsure how widely known their names are. The Waykeeper and the Lifegiver. More likely to have heard of their brother. And their other brother.”

Isha’s eyebrows rose.

“The Waykeeper, yes. The Lifegiver by name.”

She had heard the five-builder account from Lethira and Aelira at Golden Acre, but not enough to make Ian’s phrasing unsurprising.

Thomas looked between them. “I recognise the Demon Lord in ‘other brother’. After that I think I may need you not to assume I have Isha’s briefing.”

Isha gave him a brief glance. “You chose not to attend.”

“I know. I’m not complaining.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

Aelira made sense immediately. Isha knew her well enough to understand why Ian might find conversation with her easier than with almost anyone else available to him. The other two were different.

“You called them friends, or at least people you can talk to.”

“I’d probably say the Lifegiver is friend... wherever that line starts she’s around there. She’s also my employer now. Waykeeper, I might be getting ahead of myself with the term friend.”

Ian paused briefly.

“They are probably not the most balanced folk to have as friends.

“I also met some of Lethira’s friends recently — Mirelen Brookshade and Vaelor Fernward. We spent most of a day with them, they seem a bit more normal. But only met them once.”

Thomas had been following reasonably well until one word overtook the rest.

“Employer.”

Isha’s attention stayed on Ian, though the corner of her mouth moved.

“Yes. I was also going to object to letting that pass.”

The two Wood Elf names interested her, especially attached to an ordinary day rather than court business or a crisis. Lethira having friends Ian could meet simply because they were part of her life felt healthier than a social world composed entirely of his lover, a princess and damaged gods.

“The Lifegiver is not merely eccentric,” Isha said. “Neither is the Waykeeper. I can believe you like them. That does not make what Lethira and Aelira told me less serious.”

There was no warning that he ought to stop seeing them. It was an assessment, not a claim of jurisdiction.

Thomas looked back to Ian.

“But I am stuck on the employment situation.”

“Digging, weeding, general labouring. Occasionally trying to bribe with chocolate for better working conditions.”

Thomas stared at him.

“You have somehow acquired a gardening job from a god.”

Isha’s mouth curved. “That may be the most ordinary thing you have told us about her.”

“The chocolate is doing quite a lot of work in that sentence,” Thomas said.

Isha was more interested in the structure behind it.

“She pays you?”

“The fact she can’t actually hurt me gives us a unique relationship. I like it, and it let me earn some coin so I could not simply be a kept man. I was also worried about her, and I think she needs some company.

“I’m hoping they can come for dinner one day.”

Isha’s attention sharpened at two different points.

“The first part gives you unusual safety. It does not necessarily make the relationship ordinary. And be careful with *needs some company*. You can choose to give her company because you like her. That is different from becoming responsible for keeping her well.”

Thomas had been quiet through that part. At *kept man*, however, he gave Ian a look of immediate recognition.

“I can understand wanting to earn something there,” he said. “Even if the economic logic becomes slightly absurd when the labourer could theoretically alter reality and instead chooses to dig a garden for wages.”

His mouth curved.

“Actually, perhaps especially then.”

Isha glanced at him before returning to Ian.

“The dinner. At the house?”

“Yeah. I think the incongruity of it is fascinating. I might need to branch out from onions.”

Ian smiled.

“Speaking of friends, how is Kanno? I half wanted to invite her, but that is probably not going to happen. I thought she might find it interesting, when she eventually learnt who she was trying to photograph. Or, not photographing because the table was more interesting.”

He smiled again.

“Is she doing OK?”

“Yes,” Isha said. “As far as we know.”

It was intentionally bounded. Kanno had been with them for lunch on Wednesday and had seemed like herself: dry, observant, interested in their ordinary news and capable of remembering the expected passage date without trying to become responsible for it.

Thomas nodded. “She seemed like Kanno on Wednesday.”

“As for inviting her,” Isha continued, “that would be between you and Kanno. She does not need us to decide whether dinner with two dangerous gods sounds interesting or appalling.”

Thomas looked across the table.

“But I think I’ve missed something. Who was Kanno trying to photograph?”

“In the potential future of this dinner party, I found the thought of her photographing a fantasy table, ignoring two deities, slightly amusing.”

Thomas’s expression cleared.

“Ah. Hypothetical Kanno.”

“The most dangerous kind,” Isha said.

She could picture it rather too easily: something impossible sitting three feet away while Kanno became interested in a repaired joint, an abandoned cup or the way afternoon light crossed a piece of furniture.

“But she would know who they were before she agreed to come,” Isha added. “She already knows the broad five-builder account. I would not want her walking into dinner and discovering afterward that two of the guests were gods.”

Thomas nodded. “And she might photograph neither.”

That mattered too. Kanno’s camera was not an obligation created by access.

Ian contemplated it.

“I think I’d like her there. But it might all be too much then. It is but a thought.”

He changed the subject himself.

“Is the new transfer system working better for you?”

Thomas answered first.

“Much.”

There was no qualification in the word itself.

“The last four times I’ve stayed conscious throughout. No headache, no nausea, no confusion afterward. It feels more like holding a complicated Cleanse cast than having something reach through me and switch me off.”

Isha’s expression went quieter.

“We still keep the timer and the emergency instructions. But the difference is large. Before, even after protection, there was always a period where Thomas was simply gone from me.”

Thomas rubbed two fingers together absently, remembering the controlled pull rather than pain.

“Now I can talk while it happens. I can watch the page disappear and the other one arrive. That’s not a small improvement.”

“And the important parts stayed the same,” Isha said. “One page. We choose whether to use it. Kelda’s page is still independently prepared. The thirty-cycle wait remains.”

She held Ian’s gaze for a moment.

“So yes. It is working much better.”

Thomas’s mouth shifted.

“I am also quite happy that the phrase *Best Elf Edition* has apparently survived into the underlying architecture of reality.”

“Me too. Both that reality has continued to do as it’s told, and branding is critical to the universe.”

Ian drank more of his milkshake.

Thomas looked down into his coffee as though considering a professional problem.

“I spent several years working around systems which became less functional every time somebody rebranded them, so I am not prepared to accept that as a universal law.”

Isha reached for one of the smaller pieces of cake.

“The important part is that you changed what we asked you to change and then stopped.”

There was no special emphasis on the last word. She simply tried the cake.

For a while the diner managed what they had asked of it. Quiet music, air conditioning, three drinks slowly disappearing and food selected because it was there rather than because any of it carried meaning.

Isha took another bite.

“The cake is good.”

“No need to rage against the machine, due to cake. Good.”

Thomas laughed.

“I’m fairly sure that wasn’t their central grievance.”

Isha looked between them. “I know enough Earth music now to recognise when both of you are being pleased with yourselves.”

“That is an important cultural milestone,” Thomas said.

“It has not improved my life.”

She ate another piece of cake anyway.

Thomas settled back in his chair.

“We’ve spent a lot of time on the less normal life. What does work actually look like for you at the moment?”

Ian shifted with the question, away from divine gardens and Merrowford property towards an office Thomas could at least imagine without metaphysics.

“I’m still fairly new at my new employer, so still learning the people. It’s IT and cybersecurity, at a company that’s nearly 20 years old and has bought other smaller companies, so there is a lot of palaeontology.

“I have a smaller team than my old place, but a broader remit, in a much, much smaller company. It’s different, I like it.

“The commute is now driving through the countryside instead of a train to the city centre.”

Thomas’s expression changed at *palaeontology*.

“That may be the first description of inherited systems I’ve heard which feels completely accurate.”

He had spent enough of Daniel’s life around organisations whose procedures survived because nobody could remember why they existed to recognise the shape immediately. Different industry, same sediment.

“Old permissions nobody wants to remove because the person who understood them left eight years ago?” he asked.

“And three companies all having a different answer for the same thing,” Isha added.

Thomas looked at her.

“You’ve been listening to me complain about work too much.”

“I live with you.”

She turned back to Ian.

“Do you prefer driving?”

“My boss drives normally, she has a nicer car and I’m not a huge lover of driving. But I do drive myself sometimes. More pleasant scenery for sure.”

Thomas paused with a fry halfway to his mouth.

“Your boss drives you to work?”

Isha looked at him. “That is the part you found unusual?”

“It is not standard management practice in my office.”

“You also work in Japan.”

“That does not make chauffeuring employees normal.”

Ian answered before Thomas could build a theory.

“Yes, I’ve known her for a long time, we’re friends. Actually I wonder if she’s the Lifegiver.”

He left just enough space.

“That was a joke, my boss doesn’t hug me.”

Thomas laughed before he could stop himself.

Isha stared at Ian for a beat, then shook her head.

“You are becoming more comfortable.”

There was dry approval in the observation.

“Long friendship with your boss sounds useful when everything else at the company is still new.”

Thomas nodded. “And mildly dangerous, professionally.”

Isha glanced at him.

“Because friendship and authority blur easily,” he said. “Especially in small companies.”

Ian shrugged slightly.

“Mostly easier in terms of worrying I’m going to get fired for being a bit shit. She leaves me to it more, as she knows my limits, skillset, and the like. I’ve worked for her before, occasionally it’s awkward, generally it’s good.”

Thomas gave a short laugh at the first sentence, but the rest of the answer landed somewhere more familiar.

“That sounds like a fairly good manager. Not because she’s your friend. Because she knows what you can do and doesn’t make you constantly prove it.”

Isha looked at Thomas.

“You would like that.”

“I would like several departments at work to discover it.”

She ignored the invitation to let him complain about university administration.

Ian’s answer had also supplied something she had been quietly checking since he began talking about his ordinary life. He did not sound as though work had become colourless beside Merrowford.

“That does not sound like a life you are merely maintaining,” she said.

Thomas glanced at her, then understood the connection.

“No.”

Isha took another drink of tea.

“Do the people there know you well enough that they would notice if that actually started happening?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Ian slurped the final bit of milkshake up through the straw.

The sound was sufficiently undignified that Thomas’s mouth twitched.

Isha let the answer stand. She had asked because the distinction mattered, not because she intended to conduct an assessment across the table until Ian demonstrated adequate social safeguards.

“Good,” she said.

Thomas leaned back and looked at the empty milkshake glass.

“I think we have probably extracted enough evidence that Ian continues to possess employment, friends, a lawn and basic nutritional behaviour.”

“Milkshake is not evidence of nutrition.”

“It contained strawberries.”

Isha gave him a look.

Thomas abandoned the defence.

Ian turned the conversation around.

“I was happy to allow the knowledge asymmetry to balance.

“Have you been well since your illness, Isha?”

“Yes.”

Isha answered without hesitation.

“The medication stopped months ago. The later blood tests stayed normal, my pulse returned to where it should be, and I have had none of the old heat, tremor or sleep problems. There is still monitoring, but not because anyone currently thinks I am ill.”

Thomas glanced at her.

“She is also extremely good at pretending that being told to reduce training volume is a personal insult.”

“I followed the instructions.”

Thomas’s smile made clear that compliance and enthusiasm had not been the same thing.

“You complained while following them.”

“That is allowed.”

Thomas smiled into his coffee.

“So yes,” Isha said. “I have been well.”

“That’s good, I’m glad.”

Ian shifted his attention to Thomas.

“Lethira has hinted at teaching me archery, how have you found learning that, Thomas?”

Thomas considered the question with more care than the subject seemed to require.

“I like being bad at it.”

Isha looked at him.

“That is not quite what you mean.”

“No. But it’s close.”

He set the remains of his cake down.

“I spent a long time in the other world being the person with the strange answer. Even when I didn’t know what I was doing, I usually had some spell which made me unusually useful. Archery doesn’t care. I use a light bow, stand at eighteen metres, and sometimes the arrows go where I intended. Sometimes they form a convincing argument that I was aiming at several different targets.”

Isha smiled.

“He is improving.”

“Slowly.”

“Normally.”

Thomas nodded. “That’s the part I like. There isn’t a hidden rank underneath it. No spell is going to appear because I need one. My shoulder position gets corrected, I practise it, and perhaps next time the release is cleaner.”

He glanced towards Isha.

“She teaches me sometimes, but she also knows modern target archery isn’t exactly what she spent her life doing. The range supervisor still gets final say there.”

“As he should,” Isha said.

Thomas considered the difference between learning from somebody who loved him and learning under rules neither partner owned. He had found both useful.

“Lethira will probably be very good at teaching you things which are actually useful outside a target range,” he added. “But if she’s anything like Isha, you may discover that centuries of experience have given her strong opinions about mistakes you haven’t made yet.”

“She’s definitely extremely experienced.”

Ian smirked a little.

“I feel a bit like a teenager sometimes. I’m unsure if this qualifies for mid-life crisis fully, I don’t think a soft-top convertible would fit in Merrowford very well.”

Thomas laughed into his coffee.

“Not with the roads you’ve described.”

Isha’s amusement came more slowly.

“It would also make the cart problem worse.”

Thomas looked at her. “You are treating the convertible as a serious transport proposal.”

“I am assessing why it is bad.”

“That is much more dangerous.”

Isha ignored him.

“You do seem younger when you talk about that life,” she said. “Not physically.”

Her gaze stayed on Ian.

“Do you feel younger there?”

“I neither feel old nor young anywhere. I don’t think I’ve changed since I was 18 really. Apart from long hair has turned into—”

Ian raised his eyes a little towards his bald crown.

Thomas followed the gesture and laughed.

“That is a fairly decisive change in hairstyle.”

“But I think I probably do sometimes feel a bit younger, or maybe just less responsibility. Which is maybe the same thing.”

“I do not think they are the same,” Isha said.

She shifted slightly in her chair.

“You have more power there than almost anyone could have anywhere. You have a house, land, a relationship, people who depend on your judgement sometimes, and apparently employment with a god. That is not a life without responsibility.”

Thomas nodded. “But quite a lot of it is responsibility you chose.”

Isha looked at him, then back to Ian.

“Yes. Perhaps that is the difference.”

Thomas picked up the last small piece of cake.

“Being taught archery by somebody with considerably more experience than you also lets you be incompetent at something without it becoming a crisis.”

“Beginner,” Isha corrected.

Thomas broke off another small piece of cake, apparently accepting the professional amendment without surrendering the joke.

“I was using the stronger term for comic effect.”

“I know.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“Is that part of what you like about learning from Lethira?”

Ian pondered before answering.

“There are multiple emotions there I am unsure if I can dissect myself enough, plus it drifts into more private areas. Although Lethira is the least private person I know.”

He smiled and blushed.

“I find her very easy to be myself around, to leave the omnipotence behind, and be a man from Earth in a fantasy world with no idea what I’m doing, doing simple things, being kept.”

He shrugged, not quite finding a cleaner explanation.

“For example we took a rank E job, I found it amusing a B rank adventurer would. I still haven’t been allowed to register beyond ‘aide’. But I was able, to a degree, to track a badger. That was strangely satisfying in a small way.

“This is sounding a bit like therapy now, sorry.”

Ian smiled.

“I don’t mind though.”

“Then don’t dissect it,” Isha said.

The answer came quickly enough to interrupt the direction the conversation had been taking.

“You like being with her. You like being inexperienced at things she knows. You tracked part of a badger trail and were pleased with yourself. Those facts can remain facts.”

Thomas looked distinctly relieved by the change of scale.

“I strongly support the badger part.”

Isha glanced at him.

“You would.”

“Tell us about it,” Thomas said.

Ian gave them the simple version rather than turning it into a saga. A smallholder north of Merrowford had found his grain shed disturbed for three nights. The owner had managed, after Guild advice, not to trample the useful tracks. Ian had identified five-toed digging prints, claw marks and coarse fur, then followed enough sign towards the woodland to find an established sett. He had done it without asking the machine to supply the answer. Lethira had checked his reasoning rather than giving it to him.

The solution had been correspondingly undramatic: barrel the grain, clear spills and reinforce the shed base rather than turn an established badger sett into a killing job. The Guild recorded the contract as complete.

Ian remained an aide.

Thomas smiled throughout most of the account.

“That actually sounds satisfying.”

Isha nodded. She understood better now what Ian had meant about the pleasure being small. There was no accomplishment available through limitless power which could substitute for looking at a mark in mud, being uncertain what made it and working out enough of the answer for somebody more experienced to agree.

“And Lethira let you find it,” she said.

Ian corrected the emphasis.

“The important part was that I did a real job without cheating, even with the constraints of a textual interface.”

Isha nodded once.

“That makes more sense.”

Thomas leaned back slightly.

“You seem to enjoy things where the world can tell you you’re wrong.”

Isha considered that, then gave a small nod.

“Lethira can do that too.”

There was enough dry knowledge in the statement that Thomas smiled.

Ian looked happy rather than defensive.

“I don’t think Lethira has yet done anything that has bothered me, even the criticism or whatever. It’s all been fair, just and with compassion. Never harsh.

“I do love her.

“More tea or coffee? Or is that a good time indicator.”

Isha’s expression softened at the declaration of love, but the sentence before it held her attention longer.

“You have also not been together very long,” she said.

Thomas glanced towards her.

Isha did not retract it.

“I believe you that she has been fair with you. It sounds like her. But if, a year from now, you still tell me that nothing Lethira has ever done has bothered you, I may find that less reassuring.”

Thomas gave a small nod. “Loving someone doesn’t usually improve them into being correct all the time.”

“No.”

There was no attempt to manufacture future conflict for Ian and Lethira merely to prove their relationship real.

Isha looked at the empty cups.

“I would have another tea,” she said. “But it does not obligate us to stay until we finish a second one.”

Thomas lifted his nearly empty coffee.

“Same for me.”

Then he looked across the table.

“If you’re still enjoying this, I am too.”

“May I refill?”

“Yes,” Isha said.

Thomas held his cup out slightly. “Please.”

Isha glanced at him. “You could say thank you before receiving it.”

“I was building towards that.”

“You were not.”

Thomas looked back to Ian.

“Thank you.”

Their cups refilled.

Fresh coffee rose into Thomas’s cup without anyone approaching the table; Isha’s tea returned with a small curl of steam. Neither drink overflowed, moved the cup or produced anything more dramatic than the quiet fact of being there.

Thomas looked down at his coffee.

“Thank you.”

Isha lifted her tea, tested the heat and took a sip.

“That is an acceptable use of omnipotence.”

Thomas glanced at her. “We’ve found the threshold.”

“It is somewhere between tea and rearranging causality.”

“A useful working range.”

The small piece of impossibility passed. Nobody inspected it.

Isha settled back with the fresh cup between her hands.

“We have been talking about taking a trip,” she said. “A normal one.”

Thomas smiled slightly at the qualification.

“Two nights. Somewhere in Japan we haven’t been together. Morioka, Yamagata, or somewhere simple on the Sanriku coast.”

“No Mars,” Isha added.

“No Mars.”

She lifted the fresh tea and let the heat reach her face. The list sounded almost comically modest in this room, which was precisely why she did not want to defend it.

“No doors.”

“Trains are permitted.”

Isha nodded. “We have not chosen yet.”

The holiday had seemed almost comically modest when they first discussed it: a hotel they would have to book, weather they could not control, a train which would run according to somebody else’s timetable. Sitting in a diner which existed because Ian had wanted somewhere comfortable for three people to talk, its ordinariness felt less trivial rather than more.

Thomas took a drink of his coffee.

“I think that’s part of why we want to do it.”

“The one-use tickets remain valid for life,” Ian said.

Thomas paused with his coffee halfway to his mouth.

“That is a slightly alarming sentence considering we’ve already used ours.”

Isha looked at Ian more narrowly.

“The ticket is still in the flat. We assumed that meant the object remained, not that the journey did.”

Ian blinked.

“Oh, I forgot you had used it. My bad.”

The mistake passed without requiring a metaphysical investigation.

Ian’s attention shifted.

“Do you still wear the necklace, Isha?”

Isha’s hand went almost automatically to the neckline of her green top.

“Yes.”

She slipped two fingers beneath the fabric and drew the pendant out. The fine chain caught briefly against the knit before the tiny world settled into her palm, held inside its light lattice.

It had become familiar enough that Thomas had stopped noticing it every time she wore it. That was perhaps the strangest part. The blue curve of ocean, miniature weather and land of another world could rest against Isha’s skin through an ordinary Saturday without requiring comment.

“I take it off to sleep and shower,” she said. “And for climbing, MMA and kyūdō. Anything where a chain around my neck would be stupid.”

“Particularly an indestructible or possibly indestructible one,” Thomas added.

Isha turned the pendant once in her fingers. The chain looked like ordinary jewellery, which was exactly what made its unknown limit unhelpful.

“We never established that it was indestructible.”

“Which is not the direction I want to discover the answer.”

“I wore it much more consciously at first. I checked it too often. Now mostly I just wear it.”

She tucked it back beneath her top.

“I still like it.”

“I’m glad. I also have no idea which bit is or isn’t indestructible.”

Thomas looked immediately at Isha.

“No testing.”

“I was not proposing testing.”

“I know. I am establishing household policy before curiosity develops.”

Isha touched the pendant once through the fabric.

“The chain is the part I worry about. Not because I expect it to break. Because I do not know whether it would.”

Her expression remained dry.

“So I treat it like jewellery which may be much stronger than my neck.”

Thomas nodded. “This is one of the rare occasions where ‘let’s find out’ has no upside.”

Isha looked across the table.

“Do you remember what you actually specified when you made it?”

“No, sadly not. The chapters of reality don’t contain my input. Sometimes I’ll have the history but that doesn’t go back forever.”

Ian considered the count.

“This is 462, I think.”

Thomas stared at him.

“Four hundred and sixty-two.”

Isha’s reaction was quieter. She had already heard from Lethira that Ian experienced their world through written chapters, but hearing a number attached to the afternoon made the abstraction less comfortable.

“So when you read this later,” she said slowly, “you will have what we said, what we did, perhaps what Thomas or I thought if the machine gives it to you—but not your side of the conversation.”

Thomas frowned.

“That explains a few things, actually. If your own input isn’t preserved beside the result, then the record is incomplete by design.”

Isha did not appear to like that phrasing.

“It also means the version of an encounter you can retrieve later may contain more of us than of you.”

The chapter number bothered Thomas less than he expected. What troubled him was the idea that somewhere outside his experience this afternoon could become a preserved account in which Ian himself existed partly as an absence between responses.

“Do you know it is Chapter 462 because the machine tells you,” Isha asked, “or because you have been counting?”

“I have a file called chapter461.txt, and unless it’s forgotten how to count ...”

Thomas laughed.

“That is both much more mundane and much worse than I expected.”

Isha looked at Ian, then at the table as though the laminate might offer a more sensible model of reality.

“So somewhere outside this room there is a file containing yesterday.”

“And today becomes another file,” Thomas said. “At least the universe has version control.”

Isha ignored him.

“Do you ever edit the old chapters after they have happened?”

“Only for my constant typos in what I type when I’m interacting with you now. Occasionally it will mess up and contradict history or something else implausible, but even then only if it would create a right mess. So the simple answer is spelling, grammar only.”

Isha absorbed that with visible relief, though not complete satisfaction.

“Then the chapter is a record more than a draft.”

Thomas tilted his head. “A record with copy-editing.”

“And emergency continuity repair.”

“That phrase is less reassuring.”

Isha took another drink of tea.

“Spelling and grammar do not concern me. Even correcting an obvious mistake in the record is different from correcting us.”

Her gaze remained steady.

“But when you say it sometimes contradicts history and you fix it—does the correction change what happened to us, or only what the chapter says happened?”

“I have no idea, I’m not sure I want to test it either.”

Isha’s expression settled.

“Good.”

Thomas glanced at her.

“That sounded rather final.”

“It was meant to.”

She turned the cup once between her hands.

“If the uncertainty is whether changing the record might also change what happened, then curiosity is not enough reason to experiment.”

Thomas nodded slowly. “Especially when the successful result tells you almost nothing and the unsuccessful one could be catastrophic.”

The low music continued beneath the silence.

“There are things we are better leaving unknown,” Isha said.

Thomas gave a faint smile. “We have accumulated quite a collection.”

He looked across the table again.

“Does having the chapters help you remember us, or does it sometimes replace remembering us?”

“I rarely go back into them. There are some maintained summary files, but they are to help it, not me. I mostly use them for map making.”

Ian smiled.

Thomas looked at Isha.

“Maps again.”

“I told you they were the dangerous part.”

“They’ve now survived three separate subjects.”

Isha’s amusement lingered. There was something unexpectedly reassuring in the answer. Ian had access to written records of hundreds of chapters and apparently used them less as a private archive of people’s lives than as source material for arguing with walls.

Thomas seemed to arrive at the same thought from another direction.

“So the summaries are mostly continuity for the machine. Names, dates, who knows what, where things are meant to be.”

Isha gave him a sideways glance. “That sounds uncomfortably like your work.”

“It does.”

Thomas looked back at Ian.

“Do those summary files ever get things wrong?”

“Yeah. Too much information for it to hold in its ‘memory’. I do multiple passes to maintain the summary files to try and keep continuity. It feels like a job sometimes, although I quite enjoy the process, like I’m tending to something?”

Ian shrugged.

“I travelled in time before but the chapter wrote it linearly, that was a brainfuck to comprehend.”

Thomas had been smiling at the description of maintaining summaries. The last sentence removed it.

“You travelled in time.”

Isha’s eyes narrowed slightly, not in suspicion so much as immediate attention.

Thomas glanced at her. “I’m going to leave that part with you.”

“Wise.”

She looked back to Ian.

“Tending is probably the right word if you are preserving what happened rather than deciding what should have happened. Though I imagine the difference is sometimes uncomfortable.”

Thomas nodded. “I understand enjoying that kind of maintenance more than I should.”

Isha left that without comment.

“When you say you travelled in time, what happened?”

Ian took a moment before answering.

“I was trying to convince a god to stop interfering with the fantasy world. This is not something I am well trained for and unlimited power offers some...”

He paused.

“...very blunt solutions, but that was not what I wanted.”

He gave them the compressed version.

The Worldsmith treated people much as he treated material: structures which could be examined for faults and corrected according to a sufficiently accurate reference. Refusal did not initially alter whether he believed the inspection itself justified. Arguing about consent inside that model had eventually reached a limit because the Worldsmith believed reality itself was the final calibration.

So Ian had attacked the calibration instead.

He had asked a question in the past—genuinely there, not as a memory inserted afterward—leaving Lethira, Aelira and the Worldsmith with both remembered sequences. Then he had shown the Worldsmith a four-dimensional object passing through three-dimensional space, where every local measurement could be accurate without describing the whole. Finally, he had put the Worldsmith’s own realm inside a glass sphere which was itself still inside that realm.

Cause before cause. Outside inside itself. Measurements which were correct and still insufficient.

The point had not been that reality was meaningless. It was that the Worldsmith’s chosen references were not universal merely because they had worked for aeons.

Ian kept the rest brief: the argument had moved from broken reference frames to the possibility that purpose, relationship and the subject’s own valuation were themselves part of what had to be measured. The Worldsmith had agreed to a test he could not conduct from outside—a mortal life with no divine memory, authority or preparation, lived normally and judged only after it ended.

Thomas had stopped eating.

“You persuaded a god to reconsider his methodology by breaking causality and putting his universe in a bottle.”

The absurd summary did not make Isha smile.

She was still on the earlier part.

“You changed the past while Lethira was there.”

Not accusation. Not yet.

Ian answered with the uncertainty intact.

“It wasn’t my intention. When I tried to talk to her via telepathy the machine blocked it, it allowed this. I didn’t change her memory, I literally went into the past. I don’t think you can easily explain that. I would have had to block her perceiving me in the past for it to not happen? Would that have been worse? Plus then her and Aelira would have different memories of the same thing? It was really complicated.”

Isha sat with that.

The distinction was clearer now, although not especially comfortable. Ian had not reached backwards and edited what Lethira remembered. He had created—or entered—a real earlier event which Lethira and Aelira actually experienced. Preventing Lethira from perceiving it would itself have required choosing what part of a shared event she was permitted to experience.

“I think hiding it from her would probably have been worse,” Isha said. “Especially if Aelira still experienced it. Then you would have made Lethira the only person in the room whose reality had been selectively reduced.”

Thomas nodded slowly. “And the machine blocking the direct thought but allowing the historical event suggests it sees a distinction too.”

“That tells us how the rule was applied,” Isha said. “It does not prove the event was wise.”

“No.”

She returned her attention to Ian.

The part she found most unsettling was not that the world could contain two causal orders. There was little useful instinct to bring to that. It was that Ian had been improvising at a scale where an unsuccessful analogy could become history.

Still, he had not described the result as clever triumph. He had called it complicated and a brainfuck.

“Lethira disliked it?”

“She disliked the experience, but I think that was everyone, myself included.”

Isha nodded.

“That matters. If she understood what happened, disliked it, told you she did not want it repeated, and you accepted that, I would not turn her reaction into something stronger than she made it.”

Thomas rested his forearms on the table.

“I think I would also dislike acquiring a past halfway through a conversation.”

“You would complain about the filing problem.”

“I would complain about several things.”

Isha almost smiled, then looked back at Ian.

“What concerns me more is what you said before. You were improvising because the obvious solutions available to you were too blunt.”

Ian’s face changed.

“The Sun Father was more annoying. I was, less proud of myself with ...”

He paused, given who he was talking to.

“the other one.”

Isha understood.

“The Demon Lord.”

She did not help Ian by saying that her former enemy deserved whatever happened to him. The Demon Lord had been responsible for suffering on a scale which made ordinary anger inadequate, and Ian had found him still imprisoned in the place Thomas had sacrificed to contain him. None of that made every possible response equally right.

Ian said, “I acted like a bit of a dick. Even if he is awful.”

Thomas’s mouth moved before he could stop it.

“That may be the most human summary of omnipotent judgement I’ve heard.”

Isha did not laugh.

“Yes,” she said. “You can be wrong in how you treat someone who is worse than you.”

She did not manufacture sympathy for the Demon Lord.

Ian frowned slightly.

“You are being too nice, Isha.”

Her eyebrows lifted.

“No.”

The answer came flatly enough that Thomas looked down at his coffee.

“I am being accurate. You are already telling me you behaved badly. I do not need to make it worse so you can feel properly punished.”

Ian shook his head.

“It wasn’t that he attacked me, I was angry before I went. I knew he could do nothing. It’s the only time I’ve used my power in anger, even though I dialled it right down. That’s why I think you’re too nice. I don’t really care for him, he’s a piece of shit. It was more I didn’t like how I’d done it, not what I did.”

He shrugged.

“That said, I am not losing sleep over him.”

Isha’s expression hardened by a degree.

“Then yes. I think you behaved badly.”

Thomas stayed quiet.

“You went to someone you already hated, knowing he could not meaningfully threaten you, and used an overwhelming advantage while you were angry. The fact that he is the Demon Lord does not make that particular part admirable.”

She took a drink of tea.

“I also think removing his power was probably the right outcome. Those are separate judgements. I am not going to invent a worse one because you think I have been too gentle.”

There was nothing soothing in her face now, but neither was there disgust.

“You noticed what you disliked about yourself afterward. Good. Do differently next time. I do not need you to lose sleep, and I am not interested in making you perform remorse until I believe it.”

Thomas finally moved, taking another piece of cake.

“I think that’s probably as far as this subject goes without becoming a tribunal.”

“Yes,” Isha said.

Thomas looked across at Ian.

“Tell me about this archery range you’re apparently building.”

The change of subject was welcome.

“Lethira is doing the important work on that. She’s marked a shorter beginner line for me, angled the targets away from the eastern boundary and kept an old tree that narrows one side. We have a quote for a broad earth bank behind the targets, but we haven’t decided whether to accept it yet.”

“Backstop,” Isha said.

Thomas looked at her. “Of course you know the proper word.”

“I have been listening.”

“You have also been an archer for longer than most countries I’ve lived in.”

“That helps.”

Isha’s earlier severity went with the subject change. From Ian’s description she could picture the problem: targets angled away from the legal boundary, an old tree which deserved to remain where it was, and a beginner whose first mistakes had to be planned for before the first arrow left the string.

“A large earth bank is sensible,” she said. “Especially if Lethira intends to teach you there. Beginner misses are not always small misses.”

Thomas looked across the table.

“So your new hobby requires property ownership, cart access and civil engineering before you’ve even fired an arrow.”

Isha took a sip of tea.

“This is why municipal ranges are convenient.”

Thomas smiled. “Have you actually shot anything yet?”

“No, I’ve gone on all the adventures unarmed. Then Lethira did the action-packed ones without me. I think the reality machine is teasing me with no elven warden live-action. My choices are currently: unarmed aide or omnipotence. I’m hoping ‘terrible shot’ can be added as an intermediate option.”

Thomas smiled.

“Terrible shot is a very respectable category. I have occupied it for months.”

“You are not terrible,” Isha said.

“Thank you.”

His relief lasted only long enough for Isha to finish assessing the claim.

“You are inconsistent.”

Thomas looked wounded. “That was much less kind.”

“It was more accurate.”

Her attention returned to Ian.

“And I do not think the machine needs to add it. Lethira has already marked a shorter line for you, and she intends to have a backstop built before anyone shoots. The intermediate option already exists.”

Thomas nodded. “Man with bow, supervised by Elf.”

“Unranked man with bow,” Isha corrected.

“Important distinction.”

Her smile faded into something more practical.

“The part I would be careful about is thinking that the interesting version of her is the one you have not been allowed to see yet. Lethira choosing to take dangerous work without you is also part of who she is.”

“And when she does teach you,” Thomas said, “do you actually want to become competent with a bow, or do you mostly want the experience of Lethira teaching you?”

Ian sat with that longer.

“Now that is a good question.

“If it was physically real to me, I think both, absolutely. This method, I think it’s the experience plus maybe being able to participate a little in future adventures more.”

Isha considered the qualification.

“Then I would not worry about whether you become good. Learn enough that Lethira does not have to manage you as another hazard.”

Thomas smiled. “An achievable first milestone.”

Isha ignored him.

“What does participating mean to you?”

“Being with her beyond a passive observer. Or amateur badger detective.

“Mostly just being with her, I think.”

Isha’s expression softened.

“Then perhaps the bow is secondary.”

She did not say it dismissively.

“You do not need a professional role beside her every time she works in order for the relationship to be real. And you also do not need to remain safely outside everything she does.”

Thomas nodded.

“There is probably quite a large space between omnipotent intervention and standing at the edge of the scene.”

“Such as carrying lunch,” Isha said.

Thomas accepted the proposed rank with a solemnity the task did not deserve.

“An honourable support discipline.”

“Or learning enough not to walk through tracks.”

Thomas sighed. “Less glamorous.”

Isha looked back to Ian.

“But if what you mostly want is time with her, do not make competence the price of earning that time.”

“I like her teaching me stuff as well. She wants the range for her own practice too, of course.”

“That makes sense,” Isha said.

She seemed more satisfied with that than the idea of the range existing mainly to give Ian a role beside Lethira.

“Then it belongs to both of you for different reasons. She gets somewhere properly laid out for her own shooting. You get somewhere safe to learn badly.”

Thomas lifted his coffee.

“Again, an excellent category.”

Isha ignored him.

“And teaching can be its own kind of time together.”

Her mouth curved slightly.

“I enjoyed teaching Thomas, even when he checked the same string loop three times.”

Thomas looked offended. “Safety culture.”

“Anxiety with equipment.”

“Those are close relatives.”

The exchange passed easily.

Isha looked back at Ian.

“Does Lethira enjoy teaching you?”

“I think so, yes.”

Ian smiled.

Then he glanced towards whatever measure of time belonged to his own side of the encounter.

“I need to leave soon. I have the boring reality of exercises to avoid lower-back pain, and work tomorrow. It’s 21:40 here.”

Thomas glanced instinctively towards the diner windows, as though the featureless road outside might somehow have become Yorkshire night while they were talking.

“Then you should probably do the back exercises.”

Isha gave him a look.

“What?”

“You were about to say it.”

Thomas stopped, recognising the familiar impulse to turn concern into a useful instruction.

“I was going to say he should go when he needs to.”

“That is considerably less managerial.”

“It is his back.”

Thomas accepted the correction.

Isha looked back at Ian. The afternoon had lasted long enough for the first apprehension at the table to feel distant, though she could still remember it clearly: Ian behind a milkshake, uncertain whether an ordinary meeting could survive being ordinary.

It had.

They had talked about gods, time travel and the architecture of reality, which perhaps weakened the definition, but none of those subjects had become the reason for being there. They had also talked about commuting, badgers, maps, archery, jobs, cake and a girlfriend teaching someone to cut onions.

“We should go too,” she said. “Thank you for today.”

Thomas nodded.

“Yes. I enjoyed it.”

Isha rested her hand briefly around the warm cup before letting it go.

“So did I.”

“I did as well, very much. Thank you.”

Ian hesitated before adding something else.

“Could you ask Kanno if she might want to meet up sometime? Me and her, I mean, not the dinner thing. Her choice, of course, I’ll let her reach out.”

Isha nodded.

“Yes. I can tell her that.”

She considered the wording.

“I’ll tell her you would like to see her sometime, one-to-one, and that whether she contacts you is entirely hers.”

Thomas glanced at her. “That sounds difficult to misunderstand.”

“Kanno is capable of misunderstanding things if people make them sufficiently complicated.”

“So are we.”

“Yes.”

Isha looked back to Ian.

“I won’t ask her for an answer on your behalf.”

Thomas stood, stretching stiffness from sitting longer than he had noticed.

“And I think that’s probably the right place to leave today.”

He smiled across the table.

“Goodnight, Ian.”

“Goodnight, Thomas. Goodnight, Isha.”

Ian stood to see them out.

Thomas returned the farewell with an easy smile and moved towards the door. Isha followed more slowly, pausing beside the end of the table.

For a moment she looked back at Ian.

There was no further boundary to negotiate, no last difficult point she seemed determined to settle before leaving. Her expression was simply warmer than it had been when she entered.

“Goodnight, Ian.”

She joined Thomas at the door.

Thomas opened it with the same deliberate intent they had used on arrival. Flat 202 waited beyond: familiar living room, familiar light, holiday notes still pushed to one side where they had left them.

He stepped through first. Isha remained at the threshold for half a second longer, gave Ian a small final nod, then followed.

The door closed behind them.

The diner vanished from immediate importance faster than Thomas expected.

There were cups in the sink. The room was warmer. Somewhere outside, a motorbike passed along the street and then became somebody else’s problem. Their holiday notes remained on the table with the stubborn patience of ordinary plans.

Isha stood over them for a while without reading.

Thomas went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.

“You’re thinking loudly,” he said.

“I learned that phrase from you.”

“That doesn’t make it less accurate.”

She looked down at *Morioka*, *Yamagata*, *Sanriku coast — somewhere simple*.

“I was nervous.”

Thomas stopped with one hand on the cupboard.

“At the beginning?”

“Yes.”

He took out two cups.

“So was I.”

“I know.”

That earned him a look over her shoulder.

Thomas smiled. “Apparently I was only hiding it less successfully.”

Isha sat.

What surprised her was not that the meeting had gone well. *Well* was too broad a word and threatened to turn several hours of conversation into a judgement. Ian had said things she disagreed with. She had pressed too hard once and misread him once. They had wandered into gods and causality despite arranging a meeting where impossible things were not meant to be the point.

None of that had damaged the afternoon.

“He was less careful by the end,” she said.

Thomas poured the water.

“Yes.”

“I preferred that.”

“So did I.”

He brought the cups over and sat opposite her.

Isha looked at him across the steam.

“I think we actually talked to him.”

Thomas smiled. “Yes.”

For a few moments neither spoke.

Thomas had expected Ian to feel stranger in person after the long reduction in contact. Instead the opposite had happened. The impossible parts remained impossible—perhaps more so after hearing about files, divine employment and time travel—but they had attached themselves to somebody who disliked driving, worried about his job, had a friend for a boss and got irritated when a map refused to make a wall square.

“He’s easier to understand when he’s not explaining himself,” Thomas said.

Isha looked at him.

“That is almost rude.”

“I don’t mean it badly.”

“I know.”

She considered the sentence.

“He also tries too hard not to upset us.”

“Yes.”

“That will annoy me if he keeps doing it.”

Thomas smiled. “You told him.”

“I may need to tell him again.”

That did not sound like a threat.

The kettle clicked as it cooled behind them.

Thomas picked up the holiday list.

“Do you think seeing him made the ordinary trip feel less necessary?”

Isha answered immediately.

“No.”

Then, after a moment, “Less defensive, perhaps.”

Thomas understood.

They did not need Morioka or Yamagata to prove impossible travel had failed to corrupt them. They did not need a railway booking as an argument against Mars, Venus, doors or constructed diners. They could simply want two nights somewhere neither had been.

Thomas drew a small circle beside Morioka.

“Not a decision.”

“I know.”

“A research mark.”

Isha watched the small circle acquire meaning merely by existing on Thomas’s page. Her expression warned him that classification was already winning.

“You are dangerously close to creating a system.”

“I work in administration.”

“That is not a defence.”

The conversation drifted elsewhere.

Later, before bed, Isha sent Kanno a message.

She kept it deliberately plain.

**Isha:** Ian asked me to tell you that he would like to see you sometime, just the two of you. Not the possible dinner he mentioned. He said he will leave it to you whether you contact him. He does not want an answer through us.

Kanno read it within several minutes.

No typing indicator appeared.

Isha put the phone down.

Thomas, already on his side of the bed, looked over.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Thomas settled back against the pillow. The absence of an immediate answer belonged to Kanno rather than becoming a problem for either of them to interpret.

“Good.”

“Yes.”

---

Kanno came by the following afternoon.

She brought no camera.

Thomas was making coffee when she arrived, and Isha had one of the holiday pages open beside the sofa. Kanno took off her shoes, accepted coffee and sat in the chair which had gradually become hers through repetition rather than agreement.

She looked at the travel notes.

“Morioka?”

“Possibly,” Thomas said.

Kanno’s eyes moved down the page rather than up to either of them.

“Yamagata?”

“Possibly.”

She reached the final line.

“Sanriku?”

“Possibly.”

Kanno looked at him.

“You have developed an efficient planning system.”

“Isha has already criticised the system.”

“Good.”

She drank some coffee.

Neither Thomas nor Isha mentioned Ian immediately.

Kanno did.

“I saw the message.”

Isha nodded.

“I assumed.”

Kanno looked into her cup for a moment.

“He wants me to contact him.”

“If you want to,” Isha said.

“I know.”

No irritation entered the answer. Only precision.

Thomas sat on the sofa beside Isha.

“We didn’t tell him anything about whether you would.”

“Good.”

Kanno took another drink.

She had been quiet about Ian lately. Not secretive; Thomas had learned the difference. There were conversations which belonged to her because she had had them, and there was no reason friendship with both sides should turn her into a shared archive.

“I might,” she said.

Isha did not smile as though this were progress.

Kanno noticed anyway.

“Do not.”

“I did nothing.”

“You almost did something.”

Thomas looked between them. “I am staying out of this.”

“Wise,” Kanno said.

She leaned back.

After a moment she added, “I liked that he asked through you and then stopped.”

“So did I,” Isha said.

Kanno nodded.

That was all she offered.

Her eyes moved to the holiday page again.

“Why Morioka?”

Thomas explained the train, the possible walking day and the fact that neither of them had been.

Kanno listened, asked whether they actually wanted a city or merely an easy train journey, and pointed out that *Sanriku coast — somewhere simple* was not yet a destination so much as a category.

Within ten minutes Ian had disappeared completely from the conversation.

The three of them argued mildly over whether two nights justified changing trains for somewhere prettier, whether rain should determine the destination or merely the day plan, and whether Thomas had already read enough hotel reviews to become unreliable.

By the time Kanno left, Morioka had acquired two more notes, Yamagata one objection, and Sanriku a question mark large enough to become decorative.

At the door, Kanno put her shoes on and checked her phone.

She did not say whether she would message Ian.

Neither of them asked.

After she left, Isha returned to the table and looked at the altered holiday list.

Thomas came up behind her.

“I think Kanno made it worse.”

“She made it more accurate.”

“That is frequently worse.”

Isha smiled.

On her phone, the nameless four-person chat remained quiet.

She left it that way.