The forge behaved for once, which meant I did not trust the evening at all yet.
The coal burned hot and steady, the draft through the vent pulled straight instead of wheezing, and the lump on my anvil had finally stopped pretending it did not want to become a proper claw.
My helper had only singed himself twice, which counted as heroic restraint for him, and I was just starting to think I might finish a piece without anyone screaming, myself included, which usually meant trouble had already started walking toward my door.
That prediction cashed out when a youngster half stumbled into the workshop and nearly kicked over the quench tub with both feet at once.
He panted, dripped, and talked so fast the words tangled themselves, but enough sense stuck once I snapped a few questions across his ears.
There was a bird made of fire in the lower glen, huge and bright and shaped like nothing he recognized, perched on the flat rock by the stream where nobody who values their feathers ever lands, and every tongue they tried on her had fallen flat.
He added that Rhen was down there too, which he delivered like that detail outweighed everything else, and to be fair Rhen usually finds the center of any disaster without even trying.
I hung my hammer back on its hook and kept picking his story apart until it stopped wobbling.
Had she attacked anyone or even flinched toward a strike.
Had she scorched trees or wings or any feather she could have left untouched.
Had she moved from that rock at all or done anything except stare at whoever tried to shout questions.
The answers came in crooked lines, but one truth kept showing through.
The firebird had not spoken a single word anyone understood, and no matter how many languages they threw at her she only watched their beaks and eyes like she knew meaning lived there and could not quite catch it.
That kind of gap makes me more nervous than shouting ever does, because a fighter who cannot talk also cannot bargain.
I told my helper what he was allowed to touch and what would earn him a bite for pure stupidity, told the fire I would be back if it behaved, and stepped out into the night.
Silverveil never pretends everything is fine when the roots feel uneasy.
Sound slid flatter under the moss, branches that usually left polite gaps between neighbors somehow found room for three more bodies apiece, and the air between the trunks thickened in that way you feel along your primaries and the back of your neck.
By the time I reached the path that curls down into the lower glen, I could hear the crowd before I saw a single feather.
Owls packed themselves into the surrounding branches, shoulder to shoulder and pretending they were only resting, yet every eye pointed toward the clearing and that single strip of rock by the water.
Voices snapped in little bursts, too tense to settle into real conversation, and under all that noise the glen held its breath like a smith waiting for metal to change color.
The firebird sat on the flat stone where the stream bends, right in the spot anyone local avoids on instinct.
She was large enough to make the boulder look undersized, which takes effort.
Her body ran long and lean instead of rounded, wings built for speed rather than quiet drifting, with flights that looked like they could cut air into strips.
Her face came down to a sharper point than any owl's, and her whole frame read like a creature assembled for fast violence rather than tree-perching and idle gossip.
Heat rolled off her in waves, but the light claimed every thought first.
Faint golden lines threaded under her feathers, more like veins than flames, shining steady along shafts and edges whenever she shifted.
She did not blaze like a bonfire, yet she never truly darkened either, even when clouds slid across the gap overhead.
The glow lived under the surface like a patient thought, waiting for someone to give it work.
Her talons were sunk deep into the stone, claws long and hooked, proportions all wrong for any foot I had ever fitted in my life.
Fine chips and hairline cracks along the keratin told me she had spent too long driving bare claws into hard things, and that detail offended me instantly on a professional level.
She stayed silent while I watched from the edge of the crowd.
They had already thrown Greenowl at her, and Trade, and a handful of phrases stolen from travels, and none of it had landed.
She had tilted her head, frowned with sharp confusion, and apparently quit responding altogether once it became clear nothing made sense.
Rhen sat close to her left foot, practically tucked into the shadow of those talons.
That was exactly where I should have looked first, because trouble gravitates to him like filings to a magnet.
His wing still hung in that crooked shape I had been staring at for weeks, badly set and badly healed, and every time I saw it I wanted to track down whoever touched it first and have a pointed conversation with them.
He stared up at the firebird with the ferocious focus of someone who has already decided their future depends on this moment and refuses to blink in case the chance disappears.
Stories hissed through the branches, tangled and contradictory, but one thread stayed consistent whenever I listened.
Rhen insisted she knew how to mend damage no healer could touch, swore she carried a way to fix what had been left to rot, and repeated that his wing did not have to stay ruined because she had a solution.
Nobody could say why he believed that so completely, and nobody trusted his certainty, but he clung to it with both claws like it was the last branch over a drop.
Not one owl had seen her heal anything with their own eyes.
They had only seen a glowing stranger who did not speak, and apparently that was enough foundation for three miracle tales and five disaster prophecies before I arrived.
I stepped out of the trees and into the clearing, and the firebird tracked my movement immediately.
Her eyes caught the leftover light, bright and steady, and for a heartbeat it felt like staring into hot metal just before the hammer falls.
Rhen saw me and acted before I could open my beak.
He lurched a little closer to her, lifted his head, and called out that this was the bird he had told me about in every half whispered complaint, that she could straighten his wing, and that he was done being patient while everyone else argued about the risk.
His voice cracked but his words landed, and that mattered more than smooth tone.
Someone high in the branches shouted something about her getting on with it before Rhen fell over.
He flinched, his damaged wing twitched in that painful way I knew too well, and he turned that look on me, the one that begged for backup and dared me to tell him to sit back down.
I am not a healer, but I know broken work when I see it.
I know the exact moment when hope finally shoves fear sideways, and I saw it happen in his face.
I did not order him away from the rock.
I walked closer instead, because if this turned ugly someone with experience needed to understand how and why.
The heat hitting my face as I reached the base of the stone felt like standing next to a forge after a long day, thick and intense yet controlled.
She mostly watched Rhen, but she tracked every feather of my approach as if she weighed what I might do.
The light inside her feathers shifted, sliding into new paths.
Golden glow gathered along her legs and poured down toward her talons, and the branches quieted as everyone realized something real was about to happen.
Her claws brightened until they outshone everything around them.
The rest of her remained at the same gentle shimmer, but the hooked tips turned blinding, like edges held an instant before a strike.
She did not wait for ceremony.
She lifted one foot with deliberate care, telegraphing every inch of the motion so nobody could claim it was a lunge.
Then she reached down and set two talon tips against the twisted joint of Rhen's wing.
He sucked in a breath and held his ground.
Light surged from her into him in a single smooth wave, like molten metal flowing from crucible to mold.
Feathers around the contact line flared with inner glow, bones inside flashed bright in my mind's eye, and then the radiance sank inward and vanished as if the body drank it.
The wing jumped, then moved, then settled.
Scar tissue loosened and reorganized underneath, the warped bend straightened into the line it should have kept from the start, and that old hard knot I had felt with my claws seemed to melt away.
Burned feathers along the leading edge cracked and fell in a soft spill, and new quills pushed forward, damp, pale, and indecently smug.
Her talons faded back to that earlier ember glow, steady but no longer blinding.
The light across the rest of her body never wavered, and her stance stayed firm and balanced.
All of it fit inside a handful of breaths, and after that nobody in the clearing could honestly claim they had not witnessed real healing.
No blood fell, no long words rang out, no part of her body faltered or collapsed, and no loud omen announced a price.
She touched, light moved, the wing worked, and the air settled around that fact the way metal settles around a finished rivet.
Rhen stared at his own feathers, slowly spread the wing to its full reach, then tucked and flared it again, each movement smoother than the last.
The noise he made sounded like a laugh that had been sharpened on old pain, and I chose to study the stone instead of his expression, because everyone deserves a moment to breathe without an audience counting tears.
That quiet shattered when every owl in the trees remembered they also owned joints and scars.
Requests and demands spilled into the clearing, each one louder than the last, as if shouting could change the limits of whatever she had just used.
The firebird stayed exactly where she was.
She did not step toward a single speaker, did not lift her claws again, and let the voices crash and fade without moving from that rock.
She had acted for Rhen and refused the rest, which meant there was a structure under her choices that nobody understood yet.
I wanted that structure explained, and I wanted it without guessing games.
I climbed the last little rise and stopped near the base of the stone, close enough to feel her heat running up my feathers.
She leaned her head to one side, studying me very directly, eyes sharp rather than hostile.
Habit still demanded a try at spoken language, even when I knew it had already failed.
I greeted her in Greenowl, clear and simple, with all the extra flourishes flattened out.
Then I tried Trade, the version we use for strangers who might know nothing except tone.
She watched my beak move, watched my posture, listened with intense focus, and understood exactly none of it.
Her feathers rippled with frustration that looked suspiciously like mine.
She could tell we were attempting proper conversation, and the meaning still refused to cross.
The crowd kept yelling their favorite pleas around the edges, which helped nobody.
She studied my face a moment longer, then made a decision.
The firebird lifted one forelimb, moved it slowly through the air, and extended her claws toward me.
Every instinct I owned wanted to duck away and probably roll, but I forced myself to hold position, because the flock would scatter if I bolted.
She rested the tips gently against the base of my neck, just where feathers thin into skin, and the light traveling along them brushed my nerves like a warm current.
The glen dropped into muffled quiet.
Sound sank as if someone had packed moss into my ears, and my own thoughts echoed inside my head like hammer blows in a stone chamber.
A second awareness stepped alongside my own, distinct and impossible to mistake.
It felt cautious but present, waiting at the threshold instead of barging through every memory I had ever collected.
I felt curiosity, a little wariness, and a surprising amount of respect, which threw me harder than any show of power could have done.
Every habit I took from the war insisted this was exactly the wrong kind of contact to trust.
I knew too many stories about minds dragged open or tied into knots.
Nothing in that presence matched those tales.
No sharp hooks, no greedy pull, no greasy twisting at the edges of my thoughts.
If anything it waited for my answer, like someone standing with empty claws where I could see them.
I took one steady breath and let the contact hold.
I shaped what she had just done into a clear sequence and walked my thoughts through it.
Rhen's twisted joint, her claws bright with inner light, the surge into bone and tendon, the straightened wing, the new feathers, the clean steady finish.
I stacked that memory into a neat chain and laid a simple question along the top, asking what it had cost her.
Understanding clicked into place hard enough that I nearly flinched.
Meaning slid back across the link, not with words, but with a pattern so clear I could almost have hammered it into the anvil.
She showed me that the healing she had used on Rhen sat on a cycle inside her.
Each time she called it, something like a timer started turning, and until that rotation finished the spell would not answer again.
She had used it already here, and now it sat cooling and locked away until enough time passed, no matter how many wings begged.
There was no ache buried beneath that explanation, no sense of her own body paying little hidden debts.
The spell behaved like a tool that takes a long time to reset, nothing more tragic than that.
Underneath that first answer waited another image, and this one carried weight and sweetness together.
A golden apple appeared in the shared space, nestled in claws, bright enough to seem almost hot.
Teeth bit through the skin, juice ran, and light rolled through a wounded body slower than before but much broader.
Cuts sealed, burns calmed, fractures knit, not in one instant, but with a speed that still felt like cheating every healer I had ever met.
Numbers came with that picture, pressing at the edges.
She had only so many of those apples.
She had already used some in other places that did not speak my language at all.
She could hand out a few more here, if she believed the exchange would be worth cutting into her stock.
That structure I understood at once.
Power stored in objects behaves differently from what you drag up naked every time.
You can count it, weigh it, hide it, and decide who deserves it without ripping your own veins apart in the process.
Outside that mossy muffled edge, the flock yelled themselves hoarse about old breaks and stubborn scars.
Inside the contact, my thoughts turned back toward my own trade.
She carried a rare spell that refused to be spammed.
She carried a limited hoard of healing apples.
She fought with talons that already showed the history of too many bare impacts.
I owned a forge, years of craft, and a brain that cannot stand seeing good tools abused.
I focused on her claws inside the shared space, tracing their shape with mental touch.
I imagined metal wrapped around them, matched to every curve, thin enough to let her feel the ground, strong enough to keep stone from chewing through her.
She watched that thought like a smith watches a blueprint.
Interest sharpened into intent so clear I felt it in my beak.
Fragments of memory spilled across the link, moments of slamming bare talons into armor and rock, flashes of bone deep pain she had learned to ignore because nothing else existed between her and what she guarded.
Between us, the idea of a bargain began to form.
If she gave me some of her apples, and if she trusted me with whatever rare metal she had carried between worlds, I would shape armor around those claws that would let her hit like she clearly wanted without cracking herself every other fight.
Agreement settled over the link like a stamp driven into hot metal.
She liked deals that balanced and made sense, and this one did.
Then she opened her grip and showed me what that metal would be.
Images tumbled forward, ore wrapped in cloth, ugly chunks with an unnatural gleam, pale veins running through darker stone, each catching light in a way that hurt my eyes and thrilled my craft-hungry heart.
A word sat on that metal in her thoughts, heavy with meaning.
Mithril, though I had never heard the sound before, arrived wrapped in everything she knew about it.
Rare enough that you count it in handfuls, stubborn in the fire, light for its strength, valuable enough that people did very foolish things whenever they heard its name.
She had scraped together what she could carry, more through determination than convenience.
Her current plan apparently involved hitting it until something interesting happened.
I tried not to let my horror leak across the link, though I suspect she felt some of it anyway.
She proposed our terms clearly.
If I forged battle claws for her from mithril and finished them within five days, she would pay me with some of her apples, let me use the ore as base metal, and leave me twice as much mithril as I hammered onto her feet.
Behind that promise I felt one more fact, stretched tight across everything she planned.
She did not stay in worlds permanently.
Some larger power caught her up and flung her elsewhere on a cycle that counted in sevens.
She had already spent one day arriving and finding her feet.
Five days remained where she could stand in my forest, with a sliver of space at the end for breathing and farewells.
I counted nights the way I count hammer strikes, steady and unblinking.
One night to learn how mithril moved in the fire and what colors it respected.
One night to draw out rough shapes for each talon and coax them toward the right curves.
One night to fit metal around living claws, adjusting and refining until each piece felt like it belonged.
One night to harden, temper, and grind, turning blank shells into true armor.
One last night to polish edges, check every joint, and test the full set against stone.
That schedule came out tight enough to make any sensible craftmaster walk away immediately.
It felt reckless and impossible and exactly like the kind of job I have a long history of accepting anyway.
I told her I would do it and that mithril would almost certainly fight us both the entire time, but the claws would be ready before the cycle dragged her away.
She answered with quiet confidence and a picture of herself striking with full force and feeling the stone crack under metal instead of bone.
By then I could taste the shape of her name in her own thoughts.
Phoenix, bright and hot and stubborn, not as a title someone handed her, but as something she claimed and kept.
The presence pulled back slightly, and the muffled quality of the glen faded.
Sound returned in a rush, wings rustling, beaks clicking, someone loudly forgetting how whispers work.
From their point of view she had rested her talons against my neck for a moment while we stared at each other, which suited me very well.
I told the clearing that the firebird, Phoenix, was under my protection while our arrangement lasted.
Anyone who wanted favors from her could bring those requests to me first, and anyone who pushed at her without my say would learn how quickly their own claws could become experimental scrap.
Then I went back up the path toward my forge, because five nights do not stretch themselves.
She arrived after dark, once the air cooled and the embers in my hearth settled into a steady glow.
Phoenix ducked through the doorway in a larger battle form that made the walls feel closer, folded her wings as tightly as she could, and laid a wrapped bundle near the anvil without ceremony.
I unrolled the cloth and met mithril in the flesh for the first time.
The ore looked unremarkable at a careless glance, uneven chunks with jagged edges and clinging bits of host rock.
When the forge light caught it properly, pale shimmer ran under the surface like captive moonlight, and my feathers tried to stand despite the heat.
I tapped one piece with the tip of a talon and listened.
The ring came back low and clear and faintly annoyed, traveling through my bones to the base of my skull.
The weight felt dense without that dead dragging heaviness bad metal sometimes carries.
We touched minds again briefly, enough to lock our bargain down.
Five days for the work, with no room for laziness.
Claws finished and fitted before the cycle took her.
Apples afterward, once she could feel the metal settle into its proper place.
Twice-used mithril left stacked by my wall as payment and temptation both.
Then I shoved extra fuel into the forge, adjusted the vents, and set to work.
Songs will eventually turn that week into something neat and tidy if anyone ever cares enough to write them.
From my side of the anvil it turned into a snarl of heat, stubborn metal, ugly mistakes, and very little sleep.
Mithril sulked through the first attempts.
At low heat it acted like rock, refusing to acknowledge the hammer.
At high heat it tried to fracture into thick, sullen flakes that made my feathers puff with every failure.
Only when I found a narrow band of color between those states did it admit that it was, in fact, metal.
Once coaxed into movement it flowed beautifully, long smooth lines rolling under the hammer like tempered river water.
It punished lazy strikes instantly, twisting just enough that I had to rework entire sections whenever my focus wavered.
Phoenix shifted into her larger form whenever I called for fittings.
She filled the workshop nearly to the rafters, yet held still with the kind of discipline you only see in fighters who spent years relying on skilled smiths under worse conditions.
I shaped rough sheaths for each talon, strapped them in place with leather, and watched her step and turn across the floor.
We corrected every pinch, every drag, every tiny wobble before it could become a problem, and if that meant ripping pieces apart and starting again, I did it.
We used the mind link for the small precise details only she could feel.
If an edge bit into flesh when she shifted weight, she sent a flicker of discomfort with a clear sense of direction, and I corrected the curve until the feeling vanished.
If a tip slid instead of biting the way she preferred, she showed me how she liked to strike, and I ground the shape until it matched that path.
My helper hauled water, coal, tongs, and whatever else I barked for, and somehow avoided setting himself on fire again, which counted as progress.
By the fifth night the claws sat in my grip with that particular rightness finished work always carries.
Weight balanced, lines clean, no piece jangling against another, every joint moving freely under pressure.
We carried the set back down into the lower glen for the final test, because I trusted that rock more than my workshop floor for impact trials.
Phoenix stepped onto the same stone where she had healed Rhen, this time with mithril hugging each talon.
Her inner light chased along the metal in thin wandering lines, sinking and resurfacing around edges.
She pressed her full weight down and the claws bit deep, the resulting sound ringing through the clearing like a quiet bell.
She launched into the air with a single powerful beat, turned, and stooped onto a boulder that had been loitering near the bank since before I hatched.
She hit with intent and full speed, focusing the force through those new armored tips.
Stone split under her, sharp cracks radiating out, chunks tumbling to the ground, and when she lifted her feet I saw no fractures along the mithril at all.
She landed, shifted from heel to tip, turned in a tight half circle, and flexed each joint one by one as she tested.
The metal moved with her like gathered shadow, catching light in quick flashes and then dimming again.
Her stance read comfortable and ready, with no stiff hesitation anywhere my eyes could find.
We opened our minds to each other a final time.
I told her the claws would serve as long as she respected their limits, and that if she ever returned dragging a bag of mithril shards, I would complain, then forge a better version while cursing every minute.
She answered with satisfaction that hummed like cooling metal and a fierce pulse of gratitude that I felt in my ribs more than my head.
There was also the faint flavor of a promise, not to avoid danger, but to keep moving forward long enough to make good use of what I had built.
True to her word, she paid promptly and without haggling.
She left me a small stack of golden apples that felt faintly warm even through my claws, each one humming with that slower, broader healing power.
She left the spare mithril where the forge light could find it, neatly piled against the wall, a quiet challenge I knew I would eventually accept.
On the seventh day, the cycle caught up to her.
She stood once more on the stone in the lower glen, claws armored, wings folded, every feather bright.
Light rose around her in a vertical rush that smelled like high air and storm edges, then narrowed to nothing.
When my vision cleared, the rock was empty except for four fresh grooves, a faint scorch along the surface, and a smell like hot stone cooling after a hard strike.
The flock talked for days about the ball of light and what it might mean; I let them.
I tucked the apples under a particular stone shelf, the one I reserve for solutions too good to waste on minor problems.
The mithril stayed by my hearth, waiting patiently for the day boredom and curiosity win another argument inside my head.
Wherever Phoenix finds herself now, in whatever sky or forest she has been flung toward, she is not fighting with bare claws anymore, and for a smith that truth feels like reason enough for every burned feather from that week.
Any thoughts on the next world to explore?
Two Doors might have been a mistake.
It's gotten everyone treating me like glass.
I'm really hoping I get a fun role because I really don't want to talk to people right now.
Because no matter how much they doubt, it really wasn't about me.
It was meant to be a favor to Missy to drag the Youth Guard and stick it to the ball and Chain all in one go, but instead it's dragging me down, and I hate it!
Stained Gloves - Cultist Simulator
Base Cost: -25cp
Lore & Details:
Cultist Simulator is a setting where knowledge is currency and curiosity gets people killed.
Everything important happens quietly, behind desks and rituals and bad decisions.
Stained Gloves are relics of careful work, passed down by people who learned the cost of sloppy hands.
They grant impossible precision, letting you handle dangerous materials as if you have years of practice burned into your fingers.
---
A pair of black gloves. When worn, the hands behave with surgical precision, as if a lifetime of practice had descended upon them.
Addons:
-25cp you can now cast any magic you know through these goves.
Final Cost: -50cp
Bank: 3400cp
HOLY SHIT!
I guess, working with Fortuna was the right decision if THAT is the result!
Serenitea Pot - Genshin Impact
Base Cost: -800cp
Lore & Details:
Genshin Impact runs on gods who quit and people who kept the lights on anyway.
Magic's normal, institutions aren't, and that mismatch drives most of the plot.
The Serenitea Pot is a pocket realm disguised as home decor.
In Teyvat, safety is portable because permanence isn't.
---
You have a pocket dimension you can access at will through a magical teapot.
This dimension comes in the form of a moderately sized mansion, with generic but fitting decor.
Addons:
-50cp for inventory integration
-150cp to merge with Warehouse archipelago.
-800cp Double the size of the space.
-800cp Triple the size of the space.
Final Cost: -1000cp
Bank: 3350cp
!!!
Am I seeing this right…
I can get inside the islands, and I even met Clone!
…
I ended up spending a while exploring the old mansion with clone and the wolfpack.
It's pretty boring, but at least all the junk ended up in reasonable places, like the room thats jam-packed with copper bars and other ores, like all the mythrel I've got left over.
It also reminded me that I've got Libromancy, since there was a room with 5 pedestals and 3 of them were kinda sad looking, so I guess the PRT hasn't been using those shields much.
But one really useful part of the whole thing is that time still passes while I'm in the space.
So if I end up with a really dangerous world when using the portal device, I can just live in the mansion with clone for a week, then go home.
It was a real worry since I confirmed that my phoenix teleportation can't cross worlds when I was in Silverveil.
Fox can do it, but he's like a million years old, and plus, he might just be popping over to the actual portal Fortuna made, for all I know.
Either way, I've got my emergency safety back and the ability to hug the one person I know for sure is on my side, whenever I want.
So today was a great day!
Lung hasn't been doing anything big, and it's really creeping me out.
By this point in Brockton Bay, he'd already fought off the entire Protectorate and begun consolidating the little refugee gangs into his personal empire.
But here?
According to the Ninja, he's just consolidating his cult of personality and having Nuwa build up.
It's uncanny.
…
Everybody still thinks Open Door was about me, which is getting annoying.
The only one who believes me, or at least pretends to, is Emily.
She was rather blunt when she said that if it were about me, there would probably be a lot more incompetence on behalf of every adult involved.
Which is rude, but not inaccurate
---
But she did have the good idea that since everybody just keeps focusing on the last major fanfiction I wrote (with the ongoing merchants thing not seeming to count for some reason) then I should write something completely different just to see how they react.
Therefore, I have decided to start writing about Uber and Leet.
Specifically, I wrote Uber as verbally abusive and constantly demeaning his lover, Leet.
Leet, in turn, is constantly building faulty tech in the hopes it'll take Uber out, but ironically failing to fail correctly.
Basically like a Three Stooges routine but with the classic gamer "Ur Gay" and "Ur Dumb" insults thrown in for good measure.
Let's see how they react to a fic all about how the two of them would fail instantly if they hadn't found the one person capable of proping up their inadequacies.
If I'm lucky, they might just go solo during a stream to prove the point.
If they do, we might even catch one of them.
If that happens, the first thing I'm doing is teleporting them to a PRT branch thousands of miles away.
Probably not, though.
Like I said, I'm sure they're used to the trash talk.
But hope springs eternal, and if nothing else, this should hopefully distract people from the fic I made FOR MISSY.
…
Oh, and Missy dragged me into a "Girls Night" in the Protectorate-Wards Common Room with its Tinkertech TV.
The surprising part was that Vicky had apparently roped Taylor and Elisa into it.
I didn't even know Taylor and Vicky had met, much less were friendly enough to unmask‽
Though the idea of a "Girl's Night" was almost ruined when there was a bang, followed by Chris stumbling out of his lab right in the middle of the movie.
Elisa saved it by declaring him an "Honorary Girl," though much to his horror.
He tried to object, but once the idea was out there, the others shouted him down until he was bundled up in a blanket with Vicky, turning his hair into braids.
I bet he regrets not getting it cut now, Lol.
Other than that, I served my traditional role when Missy and I watch horror movies… Missy's teddybear.
I did try my traditional squirming to escape this role, but Missy is, as ever, shameless about warping space until I have no choice but to submit to the role.
(Or I could teleport away, but I'm not that much of a buzzkill.)
'Tis a hard burden, yet 'tis my burden to bear.'