4
861 Words
Following his connection to his bond, he found her hanging off a man’s red and bushy fox tail, who looked at the arctic fox with bemusement.
He met Matt’s eye and chuckled over Aster’s growling. He shook his tail, causing the fox to sway. The man lifted his tail to waist height, bringing the troublemaker attached along with it.
“I take it she’s your bond.”
“Yes, I’m so sorry. I have no idea what got into her. She’s never done this before, I swear.”
Matt moved to pull his bond off the man’s tail, and noticed that he was wearing an army uniform, and was traveling with a squad of others. Of course, Aster had to attack a Tier 15 or above soldier.
“It’s fine. I’m assuming I’m the first fire fox she’s met, and our elements clashed. I can’t blame her. I’d be a hypocrite of the highest order.”
Matt finally wormed his finger into his bond’s growling jaw, and finally freed the man’s bushy red tail from her teeth. Even if Aster couldn’t hurt the man, it was incredibly rude to bite someone, so he scolded Aster telepathically as he apologized to the man out loud.
“Really, I’m so sorry.” As Matt was going to continue, the man shrugged and scratched Aster’s ears.
“Don’t worry about it. Once she calms down, she’ll have better control over it next time. I remember my first time meeting an opposite element. I bit his ankle and refused to let go. Good times.”
With that, the man left, and Matt looked to a mortified Liz.
“Do you know what that was?”
“Sadly, yes. Opposite elements can have reactions of hate and anger. Fire and ice in this case, but I didn’t think Aster would be affected like this. She’s never reacted to me, and my bloodline is fire-based. Sorry, I never even thought about it.”
Probing his bond, he could tell that the problem mostly stemmed from the man being a fire aspected fox, rather than being a fire aspected individual in general. She clearly felt that all foxes should be ice aspected, and anything else was bad. It was all that she was thinking about.
Matt soothed his bond until she calmed down enough for him to get a message through to her.
“Aster, you can’t do that. You can get hurt or in trouble. You had me worried!”
“Fox ice. Fire bad. Fox ice!”
With as stern an emotion he could push to her, he said, “Aster no. Foxes can be anything. They don’t have to be ice aspected.”
He was interrupted with an inquisitive, “Aster fox. Aster ice. Ice good.” Like she had explained the most obvious thing in the world.
Matt wanted to pull out his hair.
Is this how it feels to raise a kid?
Suddenly, he was happy to have been fined for having his birth control implant missing. It would have been incredibly unlikely, but if this was how it was to raise a child, he wanted nothing to do with it.
With a sigh, Matt and Liz tried to explain how not all foxes were like her, and that she needed to treat them all with respect, and especially not bite them.
She insisted that she was right with the inarguable logic of repeating herself endlessly.
It was a long walk to the enchanter’s building.
2
Matt carried a pouting Aster to the enchanter shop and found that the building was spatially expanded to at least three times its normal size. It was so large he couldn’t see the opposite wall of the building, even though it should have only been a dozen feet away. It shouldn’t have surprised him, given it was a Tier 10 enchanter’s shop, but it seemed excessive.
While he started walking toward the back to speak with a salesman, Matt got distracted by the rows of enchanted items. All of them were in protective glass, and some cases blocked his spiritual sense while others he could feel through. After scanning one of the items that was protected, his AI told him that it was a special item made by the owner of the shop.
Matt didn’t know if that meant the proprietor designed the enchantment from scratch, or if they had just modified something existing, but it was interesting.
The item in question was a flying hairpin that had an armor-piercing enchantment. The hairpin was displayed using a wigged mannequin head. It secured the hair in a bun, leaving the mannequin’s long neck exposed. With a sudden thought, Matt popped up and peered over the rows of shelving. He caught a glimpse of his redhead bobbing in and out of view two isles over, so he called out to Liz.
“Hey, come look at this. I think you’d like it.”
Liz meandered around on her way to the container and half nodded, and half shook her head.
“They’re pretty, but it’s not practical. I have armor on when we fight, which covers my head.”
- Writer
