“It is gorgeous,” Velis rasped, turning the ring this way and that on her finger. “Where did you even get this thing?”
“Inherited it from my dad,” Crick said, fighting back the stinging sensation in the backs of his eyes, taking a deep breath. “It was one of the only things he left me, along with the box. They’re both from his world.” Velis turned her hand back and forth, beaming at it and turning to embrace him tightly. “Oxygen, hon.”
“Oh, right, sorry,” she said, sliding away but keeping her hands on his shoulders. “I gotta call my sister, her head’s gonna explode,” she gibbered, giving him a quick kiss on the end of his hooked, bulbous nose and traipsing off toward the kitchen where she had left her cell phone. Christmas was still a week and a half off, but Crick had felt the timing was right, and so he had finally gotten down on bended knee to ask the Big Question. He had barely had the words out of his mouth when she said ‘yes’ and yanked the ring out of its velvet bedding, sliding it with a small effort onto her hand. Now, he could hear her talking to her sister in half-shrieking tones, her usual veil of bravado as a law enforcement professional cast aside for somewhat more traditional feminine trilling, and he lit himself a cigarette, pulling out his laptop computer and setting it up on the coffee table in the middle of the living room.
As he started to settle down on the couch, he cast about the room, recognizing another facet of his daily life that Velis had changed, probably for the better; his armchair no longer dominated the center of the room, but had its place to the right of the three-seat couch. “It’s just more modern-America,” she had explained, which he’d been comfortable enough going along with. He powered on the computer and loaded up his Skype program, but kept his status on ‘Away’ for the moment, tapping ashes into the rounded glass ashtray next to the computer. When Velis finally got off the phone with her sister, they called Crick’s mother together, with Velis flashing the ring to the preinstalled webcam and dangling her hand back and forth rapidly, Crick’s mom yelping with delight before breaking down into tears herself.
Despite his usual tendency to want to start looking for the trap that surely must lay in wait after such a good start to the day, however, Crick Solomon didn’t go looking for signs of trouble. Instead, he enjoyed the rest of the day with his lady love, watching corny old Christmas movies cozied up together on the couch, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, and intermittently talking over the more mundane details they would have to see to once they were legally bonded through the state of Minnesota. It was a good day, all in all, and by the time they headed to bed that evening, Crick found himself in a curious place indeed- a place known as ‘Being Content’.
**
“There’s a couple of guys out there asking for you, Crick,” said Judy, the morning shift hostess said, hooking a thumb over her shoulder. “Lizardman and some really tall, uh, thing, in a big coat.” Crick gave the Loon Café’s owner an eyebrow raise, and the old-timer just nodded and flapped his hand at the goblin, since there were no tickets on the window at the moment. Crick wiped his hands off on his apron and took it off, hanging it on the doorframe before slipping out into the seating area of the diner to find Sam and Libras seated in one of the booths, the lizardman mechanic looking wide-eyed, nervous.
“What the hell’s got you so spooked, Sam,” Crick asked as he came up beside their table. A quick glance over at the golem drew his attention, as Libras kept his right arm out of sight, tucked under the table. “What’re you hiding over there, big guy?”
“I am, not entirely certain,” said Libras quietly, pulling his arm out of hiding for a moment to reveal his hand. The difference was immediately apparent, the previously stumpy-fingered, thick appendage now appearing sleek and composed of some kind of flexible metallic joints. “Sam and I have a theory, however.”
“We went to my ‘spot’, the one I showed you guys the other day,” Sam said. “Well, we went there this morning, and the eggs? Broken, hatched, fragments left all over the place. But the power is still there, and Lib, he goes over to one of the trees around that clearing, says he can hear it humming, and when he touches it, the whole thing lights up like a firework, and his arm just changes,” Sam rasped, pointing at the metallic hand. “I already called the others, you know, the other magic users, but none of us knows what we should do.”
“And you think I’m the one to come to for this kind of thing,” Crick snapped, hands on his hips. “Why would you think that?” Here, Libras took over, sitting up slightly straighter to deliver his remarks.
“Friend Crick, among our various friends and acquaintances, it is agreed that you seem to be the most level-headed,” said the golem. “You have a steady job, in a steady field. You have ingratiated yourself into your community in small ways. You are seen as one of the foundational members of our support group. You are in a stable relationship with friend Velis,” Libras said.
“Proposed yesterday, by the way. She said yes,” Crick interjected, which brought a dazzling rainbow of colors to the glass plates of Libras’s head, and a clap on the arm from Sam.
“Dude, congratulations, man,” Sam said, seeming to break out of his stupor for a moment.
“Thanks. I was a little worried about it, given it being the holiday season and all, thought it might freak her out, but all’s well,” Crick observed, rolling his right hand to indicate that Libras could pick up where he had left off before the interruption.
“The point being, Crick, you strike friend Sam and I, as well as many of our peers in the support group, as one of the more capable members of our particular community. We therefor bring this to you, in the hopes that you might offer a reasonable course of action for us to undertake. And so, we ask: what should we do now?” Crick thought about it for a moment, knowing himself well enough to know that he didn’t trust any snap decision he might come to while he was on the clock.
“Give me a day or two to stew on this, fellahs,” he said, taking a step back from the table. “Stay away from the spot for the time being, though. We don’t need you to end up looking like a real-life version of Iron Man by the time all’s said and done, Lib.” Before turning away and heading back to the kitchen, he paused, giving his friends a curious glance. “Either of you got plans for Christmas morning?” The pair looked to one another as they clambered up out of the booth, shrugging their shoulders. “Vel and I have been batting an idea around the last few days, I’ll give you a call later on today if we iron it all out. We’ll need help with the details.” Sam and Libras agreed, leaving the diner as Crick headed back into the kitchen proper to see once more to his prep work.
And as he worked, he tried to split his mental time between thinking about Sam’s magically infused ‘spot’ and his own ideas for the coming holiday.
**
“So I assume you have some kind of initial plan for what to do about it,” Velis said later, as the pair lay in bed, recovering from their coupling. She had barely been home from work five minutes when she fell upon Crick, who had himself only just gotten home from the Loon ten minutes before her. He wasn’t complaining, but she had barely given him time to stub out his cigarette in the living room ashtray before yanking him to his feet and half-dragging him to their bedroom by the front of his pants. When they were finished, as she lay with her head nestled on his chest, he had told her about Sam and Libras’s visit to his work that morning, and situation they had faced at ‘the spot’.
“I do, but it’s more a knee-jerk reaction than anything,” he said, running his hand lazily through her scarlet hair.
“Aaaaand?”
“I say we call in the National Guard and give up the ghost on it, or maybe a news crew to blow the whole thing open to the public,” Crick said with a snort. “Probably the news crew, if I think about it for more than five seconds.”
“You don’t want to try and poke around and check it out again for yourself,” she teased, giving him a brief squeeze. “What kind of goblin are you?”
“An American goblin, thank you, which is why I’m paranoid about trusting the government with this sort of thing. Not totally sure the same folks who brought their people the Gulf of Tonkin and MK Ultra should be trusted with otherworldly magical phenomena, if you catch my drift. What do you think?”
“I actually think you’re right on this one, hon,” she replied, sitting up and reaching for her smokes, pulling the sheets up around her lap and bringing their bedroom ashtray from her nightstand over to sit between their knees, lighting one for him before her own, wedging it carefully between his lips. “We’re native-born here, but I think the kind of natural curiosity our people tend toward would be taking a kick in the crotch if we let a bunch of government spooks close this thing off from the public. Sure, maybe they’ll eventually take over handling it, but if we let the rest of the hume world know about it first, they can’t just sweep the whole thing back under the rug. Hell, they might even decide to consult with some of our kind of people about it, especially if there’s more like them around the world.”
“True. So, onto other matters,” he said, tapping ashes into the tray. “That thing we talked about the other night, for Christmas? Do you really want to try that? Or were you just humoring me?”
“Darling, one of these days, you’re going to figure out that I really do trust your judgement,” she said, scratching his back at random. “I already had some folks from group reach out to their folks about it. It’s gonna be a pinch for some, but I think it’s a great idea. We’re gonna have to do a lot of prep in a very short amount of time, though.” Crick reached over to his own bedside table and sent off a quick message to Chef Taylor.
“I already got a chunk of that taken care of,” he said with a grin, having talked the elven chef into helping with the plan, should Velis agree to it. “It’ll be a combination kind of thing, an engagement party/Christmas gathering all rolled into one.”
“That’s very efficient of you, Mr. Solomon,” she said in a faux-hoity toity voice, stubbing out her cigarette and setting the ashtray aside. “Your efficiency, in fact, is very impressive, but I must wonder- does that efficiency carry over to, other, areas of your life,” she teased, laying back and twitching the sheet aside once more.
“I’d like to think it does, ma’am,” he replied playfully, setting his phone aside.
**
“Wrestling a commitment out of my father would be about as easy as lifting a house,” Eddie said as he returned to their living room with three beers in hand, settling into Crick’s armchair with a sigh.
“And your mother,” asked Crick.
“Oh, she was a snap, means she doesn’t have to do a bunch of cooking day-of,” said the minotaur paralegal, reaching down for the lever that didn’t exist. “Oh, right. I forgot, this isn’t a recliner, is it?”
“I’m all of four feet tall, a recliner never seemed to make much sense for me,” the goblin cook replied. “We got the right channel?”
“They’re just checking in on other games around the league before they drop the puck, hon,” Velis pointed out. Her phone hummed, and she picked it up. “Hello? Oh, yeah, unit 207, I’ll buzz you in,” she said, hopping up off the sofa and heading toward the front door of the apartment. A small button that looked like a doorbell just inside the door unlocked the building’s front secure entry doorway, and she came back to rejoin the gents just in time for the ref to drop the puck on the Wild-Oilers game. “Pizza’s on the way up,” she said.
“I’ll grab the plates,” said Crick, swapping places with her and heading to the kitchen. He grabbed three plates down out of the cupboard and set them on the small kitchen table, pausing to consider that they should probably get a new table and some extra chairs at some point. After all, they seemed to have a regular friend group now, and they weren’t always going to be hanging out over at Sam and Lib’s place. A knock at the door took him to the apartment entrance, where he offered their delivery driver a fifteen dollar cash tip and thanked him for the service. Back out in the living room, he sat down just in time to watch the Wild score the night’s first goal on an early power play, and he raised his beer toward the television in salut.
“Congrats, by the way,” Eddie said, pointing at Velis’s left hand. “Don’t think that escaped my notice.”
“Well, we were going to tell you,” Velis said with a shrug. “We just didn’t want it to dominate the conversation tonight.”
“True enough,” Crick added. “We actually were hoping you might have some more news for us from the others from group. Did Peter put out the post on Facebook?”
“Yeah, he did. Let me message him real quick.” Eddie tapped away on his phone, Crick and Velis turning their attention to the game momentarily. A couple of minutes passed quietly, with only the commentators on the broadcast filling the room with sound, and Eddie finally let out a short snort. “Well, apparently, most of us from group are pretty keen on the idea, but there’s not much response from extended family on it. I think maybe we waited until we were too close to the day to really plot this thing out well.”
“I think we should go ahead with it anyway,” said Crick, grabbing the remote and momentarily muting the game. “I get it, I do. Most of our parents, they’ve spent years and years acclimating to the culture we live in here on Earth, specifically, here in the States. But if you ask me, that’s one of the best things about living in this country; there’s always the opportunity to establish a new tradition, to come up with a better idea. So sure, maybe this year, it’s a smaller affair,” he said, looking from Eddie to Velis and back again, setting his plate on the coffee table, hands folded together on his stomach as he leaned back on the couch. “But we let it be known, to everybody at group, that we want this to become a thing, our thing. It’s not compulsory, and it’s not about some kind of ‘us versus them’ idea. It’s just a way of recognizing that, whatever else may make us different from the people whose world this has always been, and despite the fact that we’re in much smaller numbers and pretty scattered, geographically speaking, we’re all here; we’re the Children of Outworld, and we live in the world of Christmas instead of Gifting Day, and we’re Americans, and we’re here.”
It was one of the finer ramblings Crick had spoken aloud in a long time, and in the smiling, nodding silence of his fiancé and friend, he almost wished he had waited to deliver it to their support group.