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Chapter Two

I open the doorway to find myself in a lavish bedroom suite fit for an emperor’s palace. The scent of the sweetest perfume hangs in the air. I look ahead. Laying on the most luxurious bad I have seen is the woman of my dreams. Clad only in lingerie accentuating every womanly curve on her perfect body, she flips her silver, ankle-length hair in a sultry fashion and beckons me to her. She makes no effort to hide the horns and wings that betray her demonic nature, but I do not care. I stride toward the bed and climb onto the mattress, kneeling on top of her as she presses her lips to mine passionately. I roll under her as she removes the dress from my body and says, “Victoria… we should start getting ready for class.”

I awoke to find my unclothed succubus roommate Eva Naamahspawn lying on top of me as I lay in bed, her ample breasts separated from my own only by my thin summer bedsheets and the nightie I was wearing.

Eva gave me a smirk and whispered inches from my face, “Sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid the rest is pay-per-view.”

That’s when I decked her straight across the face and sent her tumbling off my bed.

Rubbing her cheek as the bruise quickly disappeared courtesy of demonic regeneration; Eva grinned impishly and said, “Oh, so you like to play rough. I should have brought my ballgag.”

“Spare me the image”, I growled. “How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of my dreams?”

“A lot more times than that,” she said matter-of-factly as she rose to her feet. “I just thought you’d want a sweet dream after that all-nighter, and I’ve been told I taste very sweet.”

“Yeah, I’m sure your intentions were just saintly, and the possibility of you getting a meal out of it is just coincidental,” I said drily as I threw off my bedsheets and got out of bed.

“Hey, I didn’t go through with it, did I?” She then gave a sly grin as she continued, “Or is that why you’re angry? You did seem quite eager before I woke you up.”

Trying my hardest not to blush, I told her, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Oh, you think I don’t have options?”

“Not what I meant and you know it.” I walked over to my wall hanger and grabbed my towel. “Isn’t there some sexually frustrated freshman you should be having for breakfast?”

Eva glared at me and said, “Excuse me? I’ll have you know that at least seventy percent of the people I feed on here are neither of those things!”

“Whatever. By the way, did Gorgo go back to her dorm room after I went to bed last night?”

“Nah, she was pretty tired after your all-nighter, so I told her she could sleep on our couch here. She hit the sack after she called her roommate to tell her about the situation. She went to take a shower before I woke you up, so she might still be in there.”

Yeah, after we thought we were “done” with the assignment back when we thought we could avoid an all-nighter, we decided to proofread each other’s assignments and found we both still needed a lot of editing. It was two in the morning by the time we’d finished for real. Gorgo wasn’t exactly the fastest writer in the world, so she said it was okay if I just headed to bed while she finished up the last few paragraphs. Being exhausted from the all-nighter, I was not about to argue.

“I just hope she doesn’t use up the hot water.”

Being cold-blooded, Gorgo could be quite sluggish in the morning, so she usually took a hot bath or shower to get her body temperature up before getting to class. It made me wonder how she’d be able to handle things in the winter months, but I’m sure she planned for that eventuality when she came to Canada to study here.

“Maybe you should worry about whether or not she turned the water up to scalding,” Eva suggested. “I know from my own escapades with the ophidian races that you need some very hot water to get their body temperatures up. That’s why I always used alternative methods up warming up my reptilian meals.”

“I should have known it was a fool’s errand to change the subject away from sex for long when talking with you,” I sighed. “And if you’re going to be headed for class soon, you should probably put some clothes on. The school faculty’s already put you on notice for those last few times.”

“Again, it was one time!” she said defensively.

“Six times, from what I’ve heard,” I corrected her. “It was the dean walking into your classroom that happened ‘just one time,’ if I remember correctly.”

“Okay, that is true,” she admitted. “Fine, I guess I’ll change.”

Eva’s form shimmered briefly, and before a single second had passed, a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform had materialized around her body, although with a noticeable lack of a bra.

“Interesting choice,” I said. “Would this have anything to do with the fact that you haven’t eaten yet?”

“Yeah, when I brought that quarterback here last night, I promised his friend I’d do him in the morning,” she admitted. “It didn’t take a lot of digging through his mind to find him fantasizing about me wearing one of these, so I thought I’d surprise him.”

“Well, enjoy your breakfast,” I said as I headed for the bathroom, eager to avoid further conversations about my roommate’s sex life.

I walked across the dorm living room and found, as Eva had predicted, the door was closed, but the sound of the shower wasn’t going, so I guessed she was still drying off and would be out in a minute or two.

Figuring I might as well let her know I was waiting out here, I prepared to knock on the door, but the moment I raised my arm to do so, it was opened from the inside, and I was greeted by a pair of grainy brown orbs with reptilian slits for pupils.

I really need to get better at guessing how long people will take to do things.

Immediately my body seized up, locking me in the position I was in. You know that soreness you get when you have to hold a pose for a while without moving? Imagine that, except you get to that level of soreness the moment you stop moving, and you’re downright incapable of breaking the pose, even if you wanted to. And believe me, I wanted to.

For her part, Gorgophone wasn’t any happier about this than I was. The towel-clad gorgon immediately got into a fluster, wearing an expression of repentant shock, and her tail rattling and her hair hissing like crazy.

“Oh my gods, Vic, I’m so sorry!” she said as she hurriedly dug her goggles out of the bundle of clothes she was carrying under her arm. “I really should have been wearing my goggles, but they kind of get fogged up when I leave them here when I shower.” Her snakes gradually began to calm down as she rubbing the fog off the lenses, but the rattling was not dying down quite as fast. “I’m sorry, but you really should have knocked.”

I gave a grunt of annoyance while gesturing towards my raised arm with what little facial movement I was capable of and she said, “Oh, right. Yeah, that one’s on me. Sorry.”

By this point, her hair had completely quieted down, and even the rattling was starting to die down by now. As she brought the goggles up to her face, she stretched the goggles’ strap to the back of her head and then snapped the goggles themselves down onto her eyes.

Immediately my muscles relaxed themselves and I could move again. I was sore as hell, so I took the moment to do a few stretches.

“Again, I’m so sorry,” Gorgo apologized for the fiftieth time. “Do you feel okay? I hear the paralysis can get really uncomfortable if you haven’t experienced it before.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed. “At least now I know how Cetus felt.”

“I wouldn’t tempt fate,” she smirked. “Gorgons just a few centuries my elders actually could turn you to stone with their gaze, to say nothing of other species with similar abilities.”

“So no staring contests with gorgons if I can’t guess their age,” I joked. “I got it.”

“That would probably rule out most gorgons that have gone through puberty, I’m afraid. Kind of hard to guess once our ageing slows to a crawl in our thirties. Hades, even other gorgons can never guess my mom’s over five thousand.” She gave a chuckle. “My Aunt Danaë, on the other hand, now she looks every day of it!”

We both had a good laugh out of that.

“If you ever meet her, don’t tell her I said that,” she requested.

“Only if you don’t tell her I laughed,” I replied. “Anyway, I take it you’re all warmed up?”

“Oh, right!” she said as she quickly slithered to the side. “Go ahead, it’s all yours.”

So I stepped in the bathroom and closed the door behind me. As I disrobed and got ready to hop in the shower, I recalled what Eve said and turned the water on before I got in, putting my hand under it to test the temperature.

OW! Good thing I tested it first, or I’d be practically boiled alive before I could even reach for the soap. And it’s not like I couldn’t handle hot water. My parents took my siblings and me to a few hot springs in Korea as a kid whenever we went to visit my mom’s family over there. Of course, that all changed after magic came back into the world, and once the war started over there. Nowadays, no human considered that part of the world an ideal vacation spot, and the monsters living there preferred to keep it that way. I always wondered what became of family members that didn’t make it out of the country before the new regime took over… but I digress.

Anyway, I turned it down to a colder setting and left it alone for about a minute, before putting my hand under the nozzle again to confirm the water had gone down to a comfortable (i.e. survivable) temperature, and got in, trying to think of a less depressing subject.

It is, of course, hard to keep your mind off things once they worm your way into your head.

O-O-O

After I had finished my shower, I made sure to dry myself off and brush my teeth. After throwing on the towel so I’d be decent until I could get properly dressed in my room, I fixed up my waist length reddish brown hair enough to look presentable in class, and tied it into my usual ponytail. The hair colour comes from my dad. Sure, a lot of relatives on my Mom's side of the family have brown hair, but theirs is usually a straight brown, not to mention a much darker shade than my own. Other than my fairly light skin tone, it's pretty much the only physical trait of mine that takes after my Caucasian half more than my Korean half. So with everything I needed to do in there out of the way, I exited the bathroom to find Eva trying out Gorgo as a new target for her teasing, with Gorgo, fully dressed at this point other than the hoodie she was just putting on, trying her best to ignore it.

“I’m just saying,” Eva cooed seductively, “shapeshifters can make for some very interesting lovers,” changing into a different physique (as well as outfits best suited for showing off each physique in question) with each word she spoke, as if just to prove her point.

“I’m sure they do,” Gorgo said with disinterest as she slithered over to the table and started stuffing her things in her school bag. “Look, I’m flattered by the attention, but I don’t really swing that way.”

Eva was silent for a moment before she gave a smirk and said, “Is that all? Challenge accepted.”

The succubus changed her form again, but far more drastically this time. Her breasts shrank into her chest until all that were remained were a firm pair of pectoral muscles. Hips slimmed down as the waist filled out, and muscle began to build up all across the body, in particular the abs and biceps. The face shifted as well, gaining more rugged features, such as a stronger jawline, a more prominent brow ridge and manly stubble. Hair also retreated into the skull, still long when it stopped, but now less “Rapunzel” and more “starring Chris Hemsworth as Thor.” Within seconds of Eva’s transformation, she- or he (I’m getting the hang of pronouns for shapeshifters; as if this stuff weren’t confusing enough with just humans) had become a slender yet muscular man with features that many consider attractive in men.

But of course, Eva (Evan?) couldn’t just stop with the body. No, he thought this form called for a change of clothes… like say, a leather thong noticeably bulging from the size of his new “equipment.”

Reclining down on the couch in such a way to emphasize the pelvic region, Eva(n) said in a seductive baritone said, “Well, what do think?”

Trying her best not to blush, Gorgo stammered, “Well, it’s… something.”

“Glad you like it. I aim to please, after all. But what I’m still wondering is, am I the only one here that would like a bite of something?”

Gorgo’s “best” was no longer cutting it, and her pale brown scales flushed a deep red.

“Um… uh… well… maybe not at the…”

At this point, I was almost certain that if Gorgo was an anime character, enough blood would be shooting out of her nose to constitute a medical emergency. She was speechless for nearly a full minute before she jerked her head in my direction and said, “See you at class, Vic!” and hurriedly stuffed the rest of her supplies into her bag, slung it over her shoulder and darted out the front door.

As the door closed behind Gorgo, Eva(n) stared in the door’s direction before turning back to me and saying, “If she’d rather not, she could have just said so.”

“You really have me at a loss, Evan,” I sighed. “I don’t know whether I should report you to Sapient Resources for sexual harassment or the school psychologist for an eating disorder.”

“You can still call me Eva in this form,” he told me. “After all, it’s a male name as well.”

This was news to me. “It is?”

“Well, it is in Hebrew and Welsh, but I don’t think a lot of people in North America would know that.”

“Well, I know now that you’ve told me. Now, about what I was saying before your little linguistic digression…”

“Hey, I was just teasing. You should know that about me by now.”

“But Gorgo hasn’t known you for this whole month, and I worry your ‘teasing’ might go a little too far, intentionally or otherwise.”

“Hmm, I see your point. Yeah, I’ll admit I can enjoy poking the bear a bit too much sometimes.”

“Just keep that in mind. Now, you might want to change back before you meet with that guy, unless he has more diverse tastes than you’ve let on.”

As Eva’s form changed back to what is was when I had left for the shower, she admitted, “I was considering showing up in that form to see how he’d react, but I guess it’s not worth skipping breakfast over. Speaking of which, are you planning to have breakfast before your classes start?

“Yeah, I’ll grab something at the school café,” I said as I headed back to my room to change. “I’ll be meeting some friends there anyway.”

“Before I go, Victoria, are you doing okay?”

I paused just as I was about to open the door. “I guess. Why do you ask?”

Eva sighed. “My kind can find a being’s innermost thoughts and desires if we focus our senses hard enough. But we sense the surface emotions of all we encounter without even meaning to. I can tell something’s been bothering you since you can out of that shower. And it’s not the first time I’ve sensed these exact feelings from you the month we’ve known each other for. So are you sure you’re doing okay?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” I sighed. “I was just reminded of something I’d rather not think about.”

“Would you feel better if you had someone to talk to about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will someday, but not right now.”

Eva nodded. “I understand,” she said as she headed out of the dorm room and opened the door. “Just tell me if you ever change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I said as I entered my own room and heard the front door shut behind her.

As I put on my glasses and picked my clothes for today, the memories that had been bubbling to the surface since I tested the water lingered in my mind. I’ve never been good at expressing my feelings to others, so I’ve kept the more unpleasant ones bottled up for the past while. I’d long since accepted that these were things ways were since the world changed eight years ago. Magic is no longer “science we don’t understand,” but a science we can understand. The monsters of myth and legend aren’t beings of fantasy and imagination anymore, but our neighbours. These are hard facts I can’t deny. I’m the daughter of scientists. Ignoring empirical evidence isn’t in my nature.

But deep down, I still couldn’t accept that the chances I would ever see those in my family left back in Korea were next to zero. Sure, I was never very close with my mother’s side of the family, but once I heard that they didn’t make it out when Seoul fell, I couldn’t stop worrying about them. Even eight years later.

It is, of course, hard to keep your mind off such things once they’ve wormed your way into your head.

Description
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Chapter Two

I open the doorway to find myself in a lavish bedroom suite fit for an emperor’s palace. The scent of the sweetest perfume hangs in the air. I look ahead. Laying on the most luxurious bad I have seen is the woman of my dreams. Clad only in lingerie accentuating every womanly curve on her perfect body, she flips her silver, ankle-length hair in a sultry fashion and beckons me to her. She makes no effort to hide the horns and wings that betray her demonic nature, but I do not care. I stride toward the bed and climb onto the mattress, kneeling on top of her as she presses her lips to mine passionately. I roll under her as she removes the dress from my body and says, “Victoria… we should start getting ready for class.”

I awoke to find my unclothed succubus roommate Eva Naamahspawn lying on top of me as I lay in bed, her ample breasts separated from my own only by my thin summer bedsheets and the nightie I was wearing.

Eva gave me a smirk and whispered inches from my face, “Sorry, my dear, but I’m afraid the rest is pay-per-view.”

That’s when I decked her straight across the face and sent her tumbling off my bed.

Rubbing her cheek as the bruise quickly disappeared courtesy of demonic regeneration; Eva grinned impishly and said, “Oh, so you like to play rough. I should have brought my ballgag.”

“Spare me the image”, I growled. “How many times do I have to tell you to stay out of my dreams?”

“A lot more times than that,” she said matter-of-factly as she rose to her feet. “I just thought you’d want a sweet dream after that all-nighter, and I’ve been told I taste very sweet.”

“Yeah, I’m sure your intentions were just saintly, and the possibility of you getting a meal out of it is just coincidental,” I said drily as I threw off my bedsheets and got out of bed.

“Hey, I didn’t go through with it, did I?” She then gave a sly grin as she continued, “Or is that why you’re angry? You did seem quite eager before I woke you up.”

Trying my hardest not to blush, I told her, “Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Oh, you think I don’t have options?”

“Not what I meant and you know it.” I walked over to my wall hanger and grabbed my towel. “Isn’t there some sexually frustrated freshman you should be having for breakfast?”

Eva glared at me and said, “Excuse me? I’ll have you know that at least seventy percent of the people I feed on here are neither of those things!”

“Whatever. By the way, did Gorgo go back to her dorm room after I went to bed last night?”

“Nah, she was pretty tired after your all-nighter, so I told her she could sleep on our couch here. She hit the sack after she called her roommate to tell her about the situation. She went to take a shower before I woke you up, so she might still be in there.”

Yeah, after we thought we were “done” with the assignment back when we thought we could avoid an all-nighter, we decided to proofread each other’s assignments and found we both still needed a lot of editing. It was two in the morning by the time we’d finished for real. Gorgo wasn’t exactly the fastest writer in the world, so she said it was okay if I just headed to bed while she finished up the last few paragraphs. Being exhausted from the all-nighter, I was not about to argue.

“I just hope she doesn’t use up the hot water.”

Being cold-blooded, Gorgo could be quite sluggish in the morning, so she usually took a hot bath or shower to get her body temperature up before getting to class. It made me wonder how she’d be able to handle things in the winter months, but I’m sure she planned for that eventuality when she came to Canada to study here.

“Maybe you should worry about whether or not she turned the water up to scalding,” Eva suggested. “I know from my own escapades with the ophidian races that you need some very hot water to get their body temperatures up. That’s why I always used alternative methods up warming up my reptilian meals.”

“I should have known it was a fool’s errand to change the subject away from sex for long when talking with you,” I sighed. “And if you’re going to be headed for class soon, you should probably put some clothes on. The school faculty’s already put you on notice for those last few times.”

“Again, it was one time!” she said defensively.

“Six times, from what I’ve heard,” I corrected her. “It was the dean walking into your classroom that happened ‘just one time,’ if I remember correctly.”

“Okay, that is true,” she admitted. “Fine, I guess I’ll change.”

Eva’s form shimmered briefly, and before a single second had passed, a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform had materialized around her body, although with a noticeable lack of a bra.

“Interesting choice,” I said. “Would this have anything to do with the fact that you haven’t eaten yet?”

“Yeah, when I brought that quarterback here last night, I promised his friend I’d do him in the morning,” she admitted. “It didn’t take a lot of digging through his mind to find him fantasizing about me wearing one of these, so I thought I’d surprise him.”

“Well, enjoy your breakfast,” I said as I headed for the bathroom, eager to avoid further conversations about my roommate’s sex life.

I walked across the dorm living room and found, as Eva had predicted, the door was closed, but the sound of the shower wasn’t going, so I guessed she was still drying off and would be out in a minute or two.

Figuring I might as well let her know I was waiting out here, I prepared to knock on the door, but the moment I raised my arm to do so, it was opened from the inside, and I was greeted by a pair of grainy brown orbs with reptilian slits for pupils.

I really need to get better at guessing how long people will take to do things.

Immediately my body seized up, locking me in the position I was in. You know that soreness you get when you have to hold a pose for a while without moving? Imagine that, except you get to that level of soreness the moment you stop moving, and you’re downright incapable of breaking the pose, even if you wanted to. And believe me, I wanted to.

For her part, Gorgophone wasn’t any happier about this than I was. The towel-clad gorgon immediately got into a fluster, wearing an expression of repentant shock, and her tail rattling and her hair hissing like crazy.

“Oh my gods, Vic, I’m so sorry!” she said as she hurriedly dug her goggles out of the bundle of clothes she was carrying under her arm. “I really should have been wearing my goggles, but they kind of get fogged up when I leave them here when I shower.” Her snakes gradually began to calm down as she rubbing the fog off the lenses, but the rattling was not dying down quite as fast. “I’m sorry, but you really should have knocked.”

I gave a grunt of annoyance while gesturing towards my raised arm with what little facial movement I was capable of and she said, “Oh, right. Yeah, that one’s on me. Sorry.”

By this point, her hair had completely quieted down, and even the rattling was starting to die down by now. As she brought the goggles up to her face, she stretched the goggles’ strap to the back of her head and then snapped the goggles themselves down onto her eyes.

Immediately my muscles relaxed themselves and I could move again. I was sore as hell, so I took the moment to do a few stretches.

“Again, I’m so sorry,” Gorgo apologized for the fiftieth time. “Do you feel okay? I hear the paralysis can get really uncomfortable if you haven’t experienced it before.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I sighed. “At least now I know how Cetus felt.”

“I wouldn’t tempt fate,” she smirked. “Gorgons just a few centuries my elders actually could turn you to stone with their gaze, to say nothing of other species with similar abilities.”

“So no staring contests with gorgons if I can’t guess their age,” I joked. “I got it.”

“That would probably rule out most gorgons that have gone through puberty, I’m afraid. Kind of hard to guess once our ageing slows to a crawl in our thirties. Hades, even other gorgons can never guess my mom’s over five thousand.” She gave a chuckle. “My Aunt Danaë, on the other hand, now she looks every day of it!”

We both had a good laugh out of that.

“If you ever meet her, don’t tell her I said that,” she requested.

“Only if you don’t tell her I laughed,” I replied. “Anyway, I take it you’re all warmed up?”

“Oh, right!” she said as she quickly slithered to the side. “Go ahead, it’s all yours.”

So I stepped in the bathroom and closed the door behind me. As I disrobed and got ready to hop in the shower, I recalled what Eve said and turned the water on before I got in, putting my hand under it to test the temperature.

OW! Good thing I tested it first, or I’d be practically boiled alive before I could even reach for the soap. And it’s not like I couldn’t handle hot water. My parents took my siblings and me to a few hot springs in Korea as a kid whenever we went to visit my mom’s family over there. Of course, that all changed after magic came back into the world, and once the war started over there. Nowadays, no human considered that part of the world an ideal vacation spot, and the monsters living there preferred to keep it that way. I always wondered what became of family members that didn’t make it out of the country before the new regime took over… but I digress.

Anyway, I turned it down to a colder setting and left it alone for about a minute, before putting my hand under the nozzle again to confirm the water had gone down to a comfortable (i.e. survivable) temperature, and got in, trying to think of a less depressing subject.

It is, of course, hard to keep your mind off things once they worm your way into your head.

O-O-O

After I had finished my shower, I made sure to dry myself off and brush my teeth. After throwing on the towel so I’d be decent until I could get properly dressed in my room, I fixed up my waist length reddish brown hair enough to look presentable in class, and tied it into my usual ponytail. The hair colour comes from my dad. Sure, a lot of relatives on my Mom's side of the family have brown hair, but theirs is usually a straight brown, not to mention a much darker shade than my own. Other than my fairly light skin tone, it's pretty much the only physical trait of mine that takes after my Caucasian half more than my Korean half. So with everything I needed to do in there out of the way, I exited the bathroom to find Eva trying out Gorgo as a new target for her teasing, with Gorgo, fully dressed at this point other than the hoodie she was just putting on, trying her best to ignore it.

“I’m just saying,” Eva cooed seductively, “shapeshifters can make for some very interesting lovers,” changing into a different physique (as well as outfits best suited for showing off each physique in question) with each word she spoke, as if just to prove her point.

“I’m sure they do,” Gorgo said with disinterest as she slithered over to the table and started stuffing her things in her school bag. “Look, I’m flattered by the attention, but I don’t really swing that way.”

Eva was silent for a moment before she gave a smirk and said, “Is that all? Challenge accepted.”

The succubus changed her form again, but far more drastically this time. Her breasts shrank into her chest until all that were remained were a firm pair of pectoral muscles. Hips slimmed down as the waist filled out, and muscle began to build up all across the body, in particular the abs and biceps. The face shifted as well, gaining more rugged features, such as a stronger jawline, a more prominent brow ridge and manly stubble. Hair also retreated into the skull, still long when it stopped, but now less “Rapunzel” and more “starring Chris Hemsworth as Thor.” Within seconds of Eva’s transformation, she- or he (I’m getting the hang of pronouns for shapeshifters; as if this stuff weren’t confusing enough with just humans) had become a slender yet muscular man with features that many consider attractive in men.

But of course, Eva (Evan?) couldn’t just stop with the body. No, he thought this form called for a change of clothes… like say, a leather thong noticeably bulging from the size of his new “equipment.”

Reclining down on the couch in such a way to emphasize the pelvic region, Eva(n) said in a seductive baritone said, “Well, what do think?”

Trying her best not to blush, Gorgo stammered, “Well, it’s… something.”

“Glad you like it. I aim to please, after all. But what I’m still wondering is, am I the only one here that would like a bite of something?”

Gorgo’s “best” was no longer cutting it, and her pale brown scales flushed a deep red.

“Um… uh… well… maybe not at the…”

At this point, I was almost certain that if Gorgo was an anime character, enough blood would be shooting out of her nose to constitute a medical emergency. She was speechless for nearly a full minute before she jerked her head in my direction and said, “See you at class, Vic!” and hurriedly stuffed the rest of her supplies into her bag, slung it over her shoulder and darted out the front door.

As the door closed behind Gorgo, Eva(n) stared in the door’s direction before turning back to me and saying, “If she’d rather not, she could have just said so.”

“You really have me at a loss, Evan,” I sighed. “I don’t know whether I should report you to Sapient Resources for sexual harassment or the school psychologist for an eating disorder.”

“You can still call me Eva in this form,” he told me. “After all, it’s a male name as well.”

This was news to me. “It is?”

“Well, it is in Hebrew and Welsh, but I don’t think a lot of people in North America would know that.”

“Well, I know now that you’ve told me. Now, about what I was saying before your little linguistic digression…”

“Hey, I was just teasing. You should know that about me by now.”

“But Gorgo hasn’t known you for this whole month, and I worry your ‘teasing’ might go a little too far, intentionally or otherwise.”

“Hmm, I see your point. Yeah, I’ll admit I can enjoy poking the bear a bit too much sometimes.”

“Just keep that in mind. Now, you might want to change back before you meet with that guy, unless he has more diverse tastes than you’ve let on.”

As Eva’s form changed back to what is was when I had left for the shower, she admitted, “I was considering showing up in that form to see how he’d react, but I guess it’s not worth skipping breakfast over. Speaking of which, are you planning to have breakfast before your classes start?

“Yeah, I’ll grab something at the school café,” I said as I headed back to my room to change. “I’ll be meeting some friends there anyway.”

“Before I go, Victoria, are you doing okay?”

I paused just as I was about to open the door. “I guess. Why do you ask?”

Eva sighed. “My kind can find a being’s innermost thoughts and desires if we focus our senses hard enough. But we sense the surface emotions of all we encounter without even meaning to. I can tell something’s been bothering you since you can out of that shower. And it’s not the first time I’ve sensed these exact feelings from you the month we’ve known each other for. So are you sure you’re doing okay?”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” I sighed. “I was just reminded of something I’d rather not think about.”

“Would you feel better if you had someone to talk to about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will someday, but not right now.”

Eva nodded. “I understand,” she said as she headed out of the dorm room and opened the door. “Just tell me if you ever change your mind.”

“Thanks,” I said as I entered my own room and heard the front door shut behind her.

As I put on my glasses and picked my clothes for today, the memories that had been bubbling to the surface since I tested the water lingered in my mind. I’ve never been good at expressing my feelings to others, so I’ve kept the more unpleasant ones bottled up for the past while. I’d long since accepted that these were things ways were since the world changed eight years ago. Magic is no longer “science we don’t understand,” but a science we can understand. The monsters of myth and legend aren’t beings of fantasy and imagination anymore, but our neighbours. These are hard facts I can’t deny. I’m the daughter of scientists. Ignoring empirical evidence isn’t in my nature.

But deep down, I still couldn’t accept that the chances I would ever see those in my family left back in Korea were next to zero. Sure, I was never very close with my mother’s side of the family, but once I heard that they didn’t make it out when Seoul fell, I couldn’t stop worrying about them. Even eight years later.

It is, of course, hard to keep your mind off such things once they’ve wormed your way into your head.