"Is this the thanks I get after doing my best to give you a taste of home?" Friya replied, opening a Warp Steps leading straight to their destination.
It was a large grassy clearing surrounded by widely spaced trees. Much to Nalrond's surprise, Friya had chosen for their date one of the parks at the outskirt of the city. It was still hours before curfew, yet no one else was there.
The crescent moon high in the sky reflected on the nearby small lake whose surface was disturbed only by the wind. Small groups of waterbirds rested near the pond, looking to the newcomers with curiosity and expectation.
They started to quack at the couple, hoping for some treats.
He had to admit that it truly was a romantic location, maybe too much for a first date.
"Why do you think I never came to visit you in the Desert?" Nalrond replied with a scoff. "I had plenty of home during our trip to the Fringe. There's nothing for me here but bad memories. So, yes. This is all the thanks you get."
"Wow, you are a real fun guy. If you don't like it, we'll go somewhere else. What do you have in mind?" She asked while feeding the birds with fresh bread.
Ducks, swans, and other smaller creatures surrounded her in a colorful parade that seemed to sing her praises.
"You decided everything and I have to come up with an alternative? It's too late now and the few establishments I know are already full at this time. We'll have to wait hours for a table." He replied.
"If you want to be as grumpy as Lith, you should always have a contingency plan like he does." She chuckled. "I'm hungry now and I'm not going to wait one minute more than necessary. Join me or leave. It's up to you."
Friya took what looked like a huge cloth ball out of her dimensional amulet and threw it a few meters from them. Upon contact with the ground, the ball opened, revealing the presence of thin metal pieces that assembled themselves into four long poles.
A couple of seconds later the ball had transformed into a white canopy tent with the side towards the pond open and a transparent roof. An already set table and two wooden chairs appeared as well and Friya sat on one of them, waiting for his answer.
Seeing how much thought and preparation she had put into their date Nalrond felt like a jerk. He sighed loudly and joined her, discovering that not only was the inside of the tent heated, but the roof also amplified the moonlight.
The silvery glow illuminated everything as clear as day, as if they were under a clear sky and a full moon. The plain white porcelain plates shone like silver and the tableware seemed enchanted.
Yet the beauty of the scene was nothing compared with the sparkles that the moonlight created by reflecting on Friya's eyes and multi-colored hair, making her look like a fairy queen out of a bard's tale.
Nalrond opened his mouth to thank her but his throat was too raspy and dry to talk. He swallowed loudly several times but his voice simply refused to come out.
"That's the first nice thing you've said tonight." She giggled while pouring some water into his glass.
'Pull yourself together and stop acting like a jerk.' He thought to himself while drinking furiously. 'Are you always this unpleasant to those who try and be nice to you or are you just walking an extra mile for her?'
"Thanks for the water." He said three glasses and a few rehearsals later. "And for being so patient. This place is amazing for a date."
"You are welcome." She politely nodded while conjuring small plates of different kinds of appetizers from her dimensional amulet. "I just thought that we could use some privacy.
"I didn't want to meet Lith at Haug's and I know you don't like being surrounded by people. Dining at my place was a bit too intimate for a first date so I decided that a night picnic would be the perfect compromise."
"Do you call this a picnic?" He pointed at the cherrywood table, at the enchanted canopy tent, and at the gourmet food.
"I'm rich and for once I'm dating someone who doesn't look at me like a fat wallet. I'm allowed to show off." Friya said with a smile.
The dinner was delicious and they spent the meal talking about everything that came to their mind. Nalrond appreciated the quiet of the park and despite his first negative impression of Catreesh, soon he felt at home for the first time in a long while.
Without people around he could freely use Light Mastery just like back in his village and with no kids to take care of, he could finally relax.
"It's too bad that the Harmonizer was a bust again. There's only one left and I doubt that Faluel will manage to save it." He said after they started to talk about their latest mission. "If I had one, I might fix my life forces just like it happened for the monsters."
"Do you really want to be trapped for life inside a mana geyser? I thought you were planning to leave." Friya rose an eyebrow in disbelief.
"Of course not. Yet if the Harmonizer works on me, Faluel would be capable of using her breathing technique to study what my perfect life force and mana cores look like. Then, I would finally have a clue to work on." Nalrond sighed.
"While you guys were in the Desert, I studied Protector's kids every day. I hoped to find a way to break the barrier between my life forces and become a hybrid like them but to no avail. That's why I'm planning to leave. I need to find more hybrids to examine."
"Don't you think you're being too hard on yourself?" Friya said. "You should stop thinking of your condition as of something broken. Before Lith reached the violet core, his situation wasn't very different from yours yet he was happy."
"We are nothing alike." Nalrond replied too harshly even for his own liking, but the comparison stung at a never healed wound. "Sure, he had two life forces as well, but he still had hope.
"His conflicting natures weren't fixed like mine and even if something went wrong, he still had options. He would have either entered the Master's Organization or the Beast Council.
"Solus and Kamila would have still accepted Lith so no matter the outcome, he would have lost nothing. As for me, unless I find a way to move forward, I'm stuck at a crossroad."
"As I see it, your situation is not as bleak as you make it out to be. Your tribe lived happily in the Fringe for centuries and-"
"Happily?" Nalrond cut her short. "We were prisoners in our own bodies and cut out from the rest of the Mogar because we were too afraid of being captured again. There are many ways to describe a gilded cage but happy is not among them."
"Still, dedicating your whole life to a single project at the cost of giving up on your adoptive family seems a bit extreme to me.." Friya replied.
