carl@fire

The car itself was different from any human vehicle she had seen. It was smaller in every direction, seeming to have space for only two occupants instead of the much larger war machines which ferried human soldiers about. So, too, was it sleeker, with curves that resembled sea creatures she had seen when she was young—in particular, the circle-nosed two-fin in some sense. It was a bright green color, whereas the machines used for battle were brown or gray or dark green in order to blend in with the forests they trampled.

Ir'alith analyzed the area where Carl had been sitting. My tail would not fit. And there is the body he is carrying, undoubtedly with the intent to find her elven kin and see her returned to the spirits. She looked over the remainder of the car, then pointed to the raised area behind the spot where she had determined she would not be comfortable. "I will stand there?" she suggested.

"That'd be awfully unsafe," Carl said, seeming skeptical.

Recalling the plodding speed of the war vehicles she had seen, she snorted. He has not seen me fight, so he would not know of my skill. I am not so weak as to topple over if I am pushed. "My balance is sufficient."

"No, I mean, we're gonna be going really fast, so you'd just get knocked off by the wind," Carl said, again seeming to underestimate her prowess.

She pushed a wisp of wind energy towards him with a flick of her finger. "Concern yourself not with wind on my behalf, Carl," she said with amusement, smiling to ensure he did not believe her to be upset.

"Good point."

She was about to climb onto the car when she considered the efforts she typically went to when she shifted to fly while carrying an object. "I can anchor the body to the car with magic if it would be helpful?" she offered, recalling a time when she was younger and learning to shift. Her mother had ridden, unanchored, on the massive back of her flight form as she flew and had been swept away by the wind. The experience had been a time of learning in many ways, and she felt the familiar pain that had been with her ever since Ira'unne had been captured and killed so many decades ago.

She cleared her mind as best she could. Such thoughts would not benefit her now.

"Yeah, that'd be great, actually. Can you do the same for me?" Carl asked.

"Yes?" Ir'alith responded. He wonders whether I can maintain both effects simultaneously? Does… Does he truly believe me to be so weak? Or is it that he looks down on the magic of this plane?

Carl grinned at her in a way that once again set her hearts thumping in a pleasant manner. "Perfect," he said. "Not having seat belts made it a lot harder to really put this thing through its paces." He returned to the place he had been sitting behind the small, leather-bound circle inside the car.

Seat belts?

{Alith, will such a fragile-looking construct support the weight of your current form? And with the armor of the primordial sea god?}

Ir'alith groaned inwardly. You are wise to question this, Papa. She stretched her awareness forward once more, performing a more intensive scan of the crudely etched glyphs which covered the hidden insides of the car. Then she reached out with a tiny fragment of her will and attempted to bend a small part of the metal under the car, finding that it was much softer than she had expected and bent easily. No, it will not. She carefully returned the metal to its original position.

She had not wished to irritate Carl earlier by informing him of the rudimentary nature of the car's construction given that he claimed to be driving it for his entertainment, but she now reasoned that if he had offered to share his enjoyment with her, he would not object to some hasty modifications to make such an activity possible. "A moment," she said.

She was capable of manipulating earth energy to re-inscribe all the glyphs in the metal without significant effort, but this was the car of Carl. Her savior. Not even the slightest imperfection could be permitted, and she would not request that he wait while she created the more complex patterns which would render the car nearly indestructible despite the flimsy metal it was constructed with.

As it was, she closed her eyes and used her tail as a point of contact to connect herself to the car more directly, making it impossible for her to err in the course of her work given the simple nature of her task.

"Uh, what's this?" Carl asked, confirming that he was indeed unaware of the slipshod enchanting work that had been done previously, no doubt not wanting to concern himself with such trivial matters.

Ir'alith completed her task after a short while, then verified that she had successfully fixed all of the errant glyphs. How tedious. The other races behave as children with their crude use of magic.

She opened her eyes and surveyed her work.

The car looked exactly the same, but she no longer felt apprehensive about its ability to bear her weight.

"I inscribed proper glyphs of durability to overwrite the poor quality ones which were present," she explained, revealing the car's flaws in the course of explaining that she had already repaired them. "It seemed unlikely to bear my weight as it was."

"Oh," Carl said, the tone of his voice indicating that he understood the problem all too well from her simple explanation.

Ir'alith leapt up and landed at the spot she had indicated previously, just behind the center of the sitting cavity in the car's middle. The car rocked under her weight, but it did not break. The metal is too weak. There is only so much that such basic glyphs can achieve. "This will suffice for the present," she informed him, "but it would not bear the weight of my axe."

"Er, you're just gonna leave it here?" Carl asked immediately, looking to the axe—likely wondering if the astral presence inside would be upset at the prospect of being abandoned—then looking around and up at her.

Ir'alith shook her head. "No." I would not leave you alone, father.

{I know you would not, Alith.}

She took a moment to enact a spell of weightlessness, just as she would if she were preparing to fly, and luxuriated in the sensation of being light.

The pride of her mother had been immense upon her mastery of this spell. As she always did, she cut the thought of her mother—who was now with the ancestors—from her mind before it could ensnare her in further recollections and the resulting grief.

She brought her hand up and called her soul-bound axe to herself. It appeared in her hand, just as it always would so long as it was within the same plane of existence, and she set about the minor annoyance of catching her helmet with her will as it tumbled from its previous position atop her axe before maneuvering it over to rest between her feet.

Thus prepared, she made her announcement: "I have made myself weightless. When you are prepared, I will enact the anchoring."

Carl turned around and gripped the leather-bound wheel in front of himself.

Ir'alith awaited an indication that the driving was about to begin.

"Hey, uh, Ir'alith?" he called after a short while.

"Yes, Carl?" she prepared tethers of her mind to affix him and the body to the car.

He tilted his head up to look at her in a casual manner she found endearing. "It's taking me some time to get used to using magic," he said. "Mina did this thing earlier where she said she… Something about sucking fire energy into the wheel here," he patted the leather-bound wheel, "and having it travel down the shaft towards the engine compartment so it can generate steam pressure with the heat."

Sucking fire energy into the wheel? Steam pressure? She moved to the right, attempting to see with her eyes the components that he had referred to with the hope that it would help her to make sense of the description. She probed at the wheel with her will, finding it to be some sort of metal under the leather. The metal of the wheel connected to the metal in the rod connecting it to the lower part of the car, which in turn connected to a thin, coiled metal, which connected to an area that she surmised was the engine from his description.

How strange. Sucking fire energy in? Why would such a thing be needed? He intends to heat the engine using this indirect method?

"Oh," Carl continued, still looking up at her in that same charming manner, "she also said it used most of her mana to do it, and that lasted…maybe six or seven hours?"

Ah, so it was a limitation of skill! This Mina elf who created the car was not skilled in any capacity with elemental energy manipulation. She smirked. "Ah," was all she said, feeling that voicing the knowledge of her own superiority in the use of magic would not impress a dragon, who was more capable. I will do this properly. She extracted a strand of the hottest fire energy she could feasibly manage given the fragility of the car and attached it to the spot on the engine that connected back up to the wheel. And…

Seeing again Carl's apparent disregard for willingly placing himself at a lower position than her despite being far more powerful, Ir'alith was unable to prevent herself from displaying some of her growing affection for him. She rubbed his arm with her tail, then wrapped its flexible tip around his hand and squeezed. His disguised form is pleasing to me somehow despite appearing human. What must the hair on his face feel like?

When she realized what she was thinking of, she hastily retracted her tail as her skin turned pink. She turned her head to the side and attempted to banish the thoughts. Foolish! We are friends. I have much to accomplish before I could… She noticed her tail curling back on itself as it did on the rare occasions when she had been exceptionally content and forcibly stilled it.

A short while passed in which Ir'alith imagined that Carl might be impressed by how soft she had made her tail during her uncharacteristic show of tenderness. The thought sent her mind into another jumble of confusing activity.

"What… What'd you do?" Carl asked abruptly, perhaps curious at what she had managed to accomplish with her lesser form of magic.

She finally managed to quell the infusion of pink into her skin and looked back down, where he was continuing to look up at her. "I created a similar effect," she said simply. "It will last longer." And it will not be so convoluted.

"How much longer?" Carl asked.

Ir'alith considered the question. It was a small amount of energy compared to what I could manage were I not maintaining the barrier or if I had spent time to condense it for longevity. "Perhaps a year," she speculated.

"That's," Carl paused, "a long time."

He seems impressed. Ah, he could manage more with his dragon-magic. "It was no great effort," she said.

"Well, thanks anyway," Carl said, showing his gratitude while conveying that he was indeed capable of grander workings. "Ready to go?"

She felt a certain trepidation at the question. What if she did not enjoy this drive as he expected her to? Should she pretend otherwise? No. Never again will I behave in a manner that contradicts my feelings.

"I am," she said, steeling her thoughts. It seemed that she was always defending when she interacted with Carl. This was not how she should behave! No wonder he thought her so weak as to be toppled by mere wind. Where was her strength, the indomitable will with which she had safeguarded her kin for decades?

Ir'alith bound Carl and the body to the car with a simple use of her will to hold them fast, the same as she did for her helmet and lightened feet. He could do such things himself, she reasoned, but his magic was likely too noticeable in this plane where dragons no longer existed; he reserved it for only the most necessary of occasions in order to avoid detection. She decided to create a wedge-shaped wind barrier affixed to the front of the car—the same one she used sometimes while flying—in order to redirect the winds to either side. This car may yet have hidden surprises if he has such confidence in its capacity for amusement.

Then the car began to move. It lurched forward with a rapid change in speed that she had not anticipated, but nothing that could break the posture she had honed over decades spent training in the martial way under her father's tutelage, then further refining in sparring sessions with the most skilled of her kin, and at last perfecting in battles to the death against the most powerful of the humans who were not so-called heroes. She smirked again. If he thinks such a test enough to unsettle me, he has truly underestimated my skill. "This is not fast," she taunted, looking down on him.

Carl moved in his seat, looking back for a moment to see that she still remained standing. "Hang on!"

He began to drive the car again, maintaining a course along the humans' road and raising their speed rapidly—though not as rapidly as the first time now that he had become aware of the foolishness of such tactics.

She grinned. This is amusing. I could propel myself forward with wind at such a speed, but traveling so swiftly with no control over my course Is strangely freeing.

Too soon, however, the car slowed and then stopped, causing her to frown.