Adelle's eyes moved up and down my body, as if she was undressing me with her gaze.
"You wan' me to get you a new bike while we here, Ads? Or are you planning to transmogrify Alec into a bike so that you can ride him all night lo…"
A violet raptor hand swatted Candace in the head, interrupting her provocative monologue.
"No to new bike. I'd rather fix my baby," Adelle said with a chortle in the fox's direction. "Fiddling with a new build is an effort."
"Aight, I'll text Goobs n' order rune filler," Candace said, rubbing the back her head.
"Oi," she hissed at Kristi, rotating to face the raptor. "Why must you swat me?"
"Why must you inject inappropriate commentary into every second of my existence?" Kristi asked.
"Who made you the Lord Marshall of appropriated-ness?" Candace hopped around Kristi, her chest puffed out, trying to reach the raptor's full height by stretching as much as she could. "You wanna fight bout' it?"
"Maybe I do," Kristi growled, muscles tensing up. "But I doubt that you could handle me."
"Oh, oh!" Candace's sideways wiggle-hopping intensified. "Big words for a big green chicken!"
"You're acting like a fox who's never been told 'no' in her entire life," Kristi's growl deepened.
"Damn right! I'm the Rhinehart Prima!" Candace declared. "Nobody would dare to deny me my speaking rights! Want me to behave? How about a quick fighting round then? You win, I will be extra prim and proper forevermore as you desire. I win… and you'll have to wear that semi-transparent diamond dust dress you got today… all day long… commando style!"
Kristi's feathers puffed up, eyes narrowing to slits. "You're pushing your luck, fox."
"Whassa mattah birb-bae, scared of getting yo shiny purple ass kicked?" Candace taunted, bouncing on her toes. "Afraid to lose to a smol, adorkable fox?"
"Hey," I interrupted, trying to de-escalate the situation before the two prads started a brawl in the street. "Remember our deal?' You're supposed to be supporting each other, not starting public claw fights to win placement hierarchy."
"No claws," Candace said. "Soft takedown only! First to pin the other down for seven seconds wins. This ain't for hierarchy rights, is for fox-speaking rights. Also, this is supportive! Think of the morale boost you'll get when Kristi struts around Dragon Alley only in diamond-dust. It's team-building through public embarrassment. Very therapeutic."
"How's public embarrassment therapeutic?" I asked.
"It's therapeutic for you," Candace grinned. "Cus you get to enjoy the view of raptor pus–"
"I will therapeutically staple your ears to your tail!" Kristi barked, lunging at the fox.
Candace seemed to expect the attack. Something cracked between her fox chompers igniting her mouth with a red flash from within. I guessed that it was another Superstore acceleration candy. She blurred in the air, easily bypassing the swing and caught Kristi's outfit from the front in her white paws. "Unbind visibility."
"Ack!" Kristi yelped, blushing violet and covering herself as her top and bra turned invisible.
Candace flashed, appearing behind Kristi. "Unbind nerves."
The half-naked raptor fell forward into the fox's waiting arms. In a beautifully executed twist, Candace brought Kristi softly facefirst into the cobblestone street below and then sat atop her, wiggling happily.
"One," she counted slowly.
"You… that… what the fuck?! You cheating fuck!" Kristi snarled trying to bite the fox.
"Two," Candace idly admired her white, shiny nails. "Foxes cheat at fights against birbs. Such is life. Four."
"Alec!" Kristi's face snapped to me.
"Gonna cry to the Alpha about fairness?" Candace asked. "Is that really da raptor way? Crying to authority? Six. Seven. And I win."
A phone flashed into existence in her paws and she took a selfie of herself and the blushing raptor below.
"Bind visibility," she said and Kristi's sporty outfit and bra appeared back on her. "Bind nerves."
"Ughhh," Kristi slumped into the 'boyfriend waiting couch' next to me.
I tried very hard not to stare at her chest and abs. The slightly-transparent diamond-dust dress clung to Kristi like a second skin, every violet scale beneath catching the boutique's crystal dragon lights in ways that made my brain short-circuit sideways.
"This is all your fault." She let out.
"My fault? I didn't start a street brawl with a sneaky fox Binder."
"You could have stopped her!" Kristi growled, arms crossed.
"And deny Dragon Alley the most beautiful sight it's seen in a thousand years? I think not." The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Kristi's scowl melted into something softer. Her scales flushed a deeper violet. "A thousand years?"
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"I… don't know how long I stayed in the Supercenter," I admitted. "Time there is fucked up and wrong and I stopped counting the days, stopped looking at the date on Nessy's phone after everyone in Bedshire died."
"Oh," the raptor's expression softened further.
Her clawed hand reached out and rested atop mine. "I shouldn't have rushed headfirst at the Magnetic Lynx… I should have been there for you. I'm sorry."
"You would have died from old age or been subsumed into the Supercenter as tiles like Vivianne," I said with a shrug. "Either way I would have lost you. That damned place broke, corrupted, killed everyone… I was the last human there for a long, long time. Reconstitution stopped me from aging, stopped me from becoming a shelf or a lamp."
"M' sorry." Violet-scaled arms wrapped around me fully. "I didn't realise… it was that long Alec. You're… you're strong for having endured that."
"It's fine," I said. "I'm fine. I don't remember most of it. I spent a lifetime here on Prad Earth, grew up in SUSA."
"It's not fine," she hugged me tightly, resting her head on my shoulder. "You're not fine at all. I remember you jumping off a cliff and breaking your neck when we first met and from what I learned thus far, your life in Little Rock Citadel wasn't in a good home."
"Yeah," I agreed. "The cliff jumping was a pretty stupid move on my part, I must admit. But then again, I thought that you were going to destroy Bulwichu if I didn't do something dramatic."
"Exceptionally stupid and dramatic," she said. "But… it actually defines who you are. I get it now."
"Oh?"
"You." Kristi shifted, dress sparkling. "The way you charge headfirst into danger. How you refused to back down from the Advanced Dungeoneering class. Why you casually walked to the edge of Highway Sixty Nine and taunted the Butcher of Delvers till she gave you an impossible Quest." Her amber eyes met mine. "You've never been afraid of death."
"Yeah, I suppose so," I replied. "Since I woke up in that bath tub, I haven't been the same."
"It seems like out of our fucked up pack of absolute knobs, you're the most broken one."
"Gee thanks. Gonna tell me I need a thousand years of therapy?"
"I don't know what you need," Kristi sighed. "Maybe a conversation to start?"
"Converse away," I offered. "If you want. Unless you're up for more shopping."
"Nah," she said. "I've got enough overpriced outfits as it is."
She fell silent, seemingly not sure what to say, so I decided to break the ice with some questions of my own.
"So… what do you think of our packmates?" I asked, nodding toward the muffled giggles coming from the direction of the changeroom.
"Ah." She smiled softly. "Well… I like Nessy. A lot. Too much, if anything. It's like she's a pivotal part of me that I didn't know I was missing. Her music makes me smile. I'm immeasurably happy that she's back, no longer being sucked like a prune by that damned Well of Severance."
"And Adelle?"
"When I first met her at school, she was constantly picking fights with everyone like a hooligan, smoking in corners, getting drunk, skipping classes. Stank of cheap booze and aggression. Now in your pack she's almost... tolerable, calmer. Not constantly drunk. She makes sense in a weird way. It's like… she just needed someone to tell her what to do as her Alpha, I guess?"
"And Candace?"
Kristi sighed. "She's… Nessy on steroids. All the mischief, the invasiveness, the constant prodding, none of the restraint. Every rule exists for her to break it. She pushes every button she can find just to see what happens. And she can see the buttons using her cleverness and Astral gazing or whatever better than anyone. It's like she wants to embarrass me all the time on purpose and is motivating everyone around her to act out."
"I should get a spray bottle," I joked. "Keep my 'harem' from pawing each other at inappropriate times."
Kristi rubbed her face. "Please don't call us that. I never thought I'd be part of a... whatever in the Abyss this ridiculous relationship star is. Candace naming our group chat 'Yo Harem' is absurd enough."
Candace popped out from behind a rack, wearing a swimsuit that consisted of little more than a few strategically placed strings. "Spray bottles won't work on me! I'm not a cat—foxes are fine with getting wet!"
"Where are your clothes?" Kristi demanded.
"Back in the changing room, duh," Candace tapped her phone. "Wanted to tease Alec and you with this one," she jiggled her chest at us, making Kristi growl. "Also, I'ma change our group name per your commentary."
"To what?" Kristi asked warily.
Candace tapped on her phone, then held it up triumphantly. "There! Group name updated!"
I glanced at my phone as it buzzed.
[Kristi's Harem 🐾✨🐆🧑]
"You cheeky…!" Kristi lunged to grab at the fox, but Candace flashed into the changing rooms, cackling as she slammed the door shut.
"I'm going to strangle her," Kristi muttered.
"Will you really?" I asked.
"Feh, I probably won't," she said reluctantly. "But I can't stop thinking about wanting to smack her."
"I think that she wants to be smacked," I said. "She's being a tease on purpose."
"Yeah." Kristi settled back next to me, her tail curling around my foot. "The worst part is how much I'm starting to like her. She's infuriating but... she makes things less dull, I guess? Mostly, I like that she makes Nessy happy, complete, less wrong."
Both of us fell silent for a moment. Kristi studied me. "Hey… Alec… How many times have you died?"
"In total? Across two livetimes?" I paused, trying to recall. "Honestly, I've lost count. Thousands of times. The G-Supercenter is an exceptionally hostile territory. If the interdimensional 'shoppers' don't kill you, random products or the corrupt employees do."
She winced. Her tail snaked around me higher, feathers tickling my side.
"How many times have you killed yourself?"
"Lost count," I shrugged.
Kristi's stare intensified. "Why?"
"Sometimes it was the only way to reset," I explained. "When the Supercenter got into my head too deeply, when I started forgetting who I was, or started to become infected with 'otherness', I'd... end things. The death would shock my system back to reality, remind me I wasn't just another product on a shelf. Plus, it kept me from suffering like Vivianne did. She died… slowly. Became immobile, turned into plastic tiles over the week."
"Wait, wait," Kristi blinked at me with orange-gold eyes. "If conceptual conversion infection got inside you, how did you fully reset yourself? Surely just slicing your throat didn't reseat all of you back to being human."
"Ah," I said. "That. Vaporisers."
"Vaporisers?"
"A type of product. The Supercenter permitted a 'freebie' as a demo per single product," I said. "I killed myself a bunch of times until I found a vaporiser that hurt the least and bought it."
"What?" she let out.
"I had to experiment for a while until I settled on the 'Extra-Extreme hair dryer' for 899'99 credits that atomized 99.99% of my physical body at the highest setting when pointed directly at my own head," I explained.
Kristi's jaw dropped, her scales paling to a shade of violet-gray. "You... vaporized yourself? Repeatedly?"
"Yeah" I nodded. "Quick and… mostly painless. Reconstitution would kick in, rebuild me from the some minute bone particle that remained behind."
"Fuck," she said, hugging me tighter. "Alec… what the fuck? How many times have you done this?"
"No idea. It all started to blend together after some point," I said.
"Shit," she shuddered, eyes wet.
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