"Look at how quiet and brooding he is, you should go talk to him."

Cyrus sighed at the words he heard from across the room, which prompted one of the other women to comment on how he must be depressed. They were speculating over whether or not he just found himself single. The restaurant was a strange one, especially as they requested his identification at the door to verify he was of legal age to use its services.

At nineteen, he was sometimes mistaken for being younger, but not that much younger. The youngest he had ever been mistaken for in recent months was sixteen, and he was always able to dispel the mistaken notion quickly. The age to drink alcohol at a restaurant in that region was thirteen. All in all, he looked as any other person his age did, even if his platinum-blond hair made him stand out a little more than others.

He looked at the empty glass in front of him, then the half-eaten basket of burger and fires, before looking at the bartender.

"Just keep them coming," he told the employee, a fit man two years his senior and dressed in black slacks and polo, shirt tucked in and buttoned except for the top. "I promise I won't become a violent drunk."

"What kind of drunk do you become?" The bartender asked as he grabbed a fresh glass and filled with an amber liquid from the tap. "If you aren't a violent one, that is. Loud?"

"Innate affinity for healing magics," Cyrus handed him a few bills, then accepted the glass. "Can't get drunk."

Which, in his opinion, was one of the most irritating things about being him. He wished he could drink away his worries, but instead drank for the flavor. His current choice was a hard apple cider, which tasted better to him than normal apple ciders. If he could drink to get drunk and forget his worries, even temporarily, Cyrus knew he would likely be a permanent drunk, and would have been starting when he was five.

His brothers and father drove him to that point.

"A Jewel, huh?" The bartender asked, and Cyrus eyed the necklace around the man's neck. A simple silver chain with a plain band ring hanging from it, though the ring itself was concealed under the polo, the chain itself only visible slightly against his neck. "Don't see too many of those around here."

"I'm just here to meet someone."

"Most are," the bartender responded.

Cyrus nearly tapped into the man's mind to find out what that meant, but decided against it. It was a restaurant with a bar, and it didn't take a genius to figure out the meaning. What did strike him odd was that from time to time, two or three people would head up stairs at the back of the restaurant. Customers. He guessed there was probably some sort of gaming room up there. That, or there were more shops, as the place was a six-story building.

"Hey," a woman came forward and put a hand on Cyrus's arm. "Here alone?"

"Yes," Cyrus drained his glass, then set another few bills on the counter, the bartender snorting as he grabbed another glass.

"Do you want to be?" She asked.

"I'd rather not be touched by some random woman," he grabbed her hand and moved it off his arm.

"Are you gay?"

"Does a guy need to be to not want to be touched by some random woman wearing too much makeup and perfume?" He asked. "You are the sixth woman to come up to me since I arrived trying to chat me up, and every one of you has touched me. Is there some social etiquette I don't know about that says it's fair game to get physical when you're at a bar?"

She stared at him in obvious shock, then stomped off, and the bartender laughed from where he was serveing another customer, having already set Cyrus's glass down.

"No one's ever rejected her before," the bartender told him.

"Not even you?"

"She hasn't tried me," the bartender chuckled. "She's too scared of what will happen if she does."

"She should be a bit more scared for her own safety," Cyrus muttered, then resumed eating, tossing a few more bills forward for another drink.

A few more minutes passed before another woman approached him. Her sandy blond hair cascaded down her shoulders and back in waves, her green eyes looking at him in light amusement. She wore a red dress with silver accents, a slight shimmer to it. Cyrus had noticed her when she arrived, and while she looked at him from time to time, he had noted that she was more interested in the man whose lap she had practically been sitting in.

"If you're here for the same reason as the other women," Cyrus told her. "Not interested. At least you didn't touch me right away. I guess your boyfriend wouldn't have liked that."

"Boyfriend?" She asked, then laughed. "We aren't dating, just regulars at this place. The more difficult someone seems, the more tempting a bite they appear."

"I'm not interesting in finding a woman who only wants me for the looks," he said.

"I get the feeling," she signaled to the bartender, who served her up a drink. "That you don't even know what this place is."

"It's a restaurant," he answered, provoking a laugh out of her. "What?"

"You're in Madam Mara's Crimson Restaurant, and don't know where you are?" She asked.

"Exactly where I am," he answered.

"This is a place," she said. "Where singles or couples go looking to spice up their life a little. Find someone, rent a room upstairs for the night, and have sex."

Cyrus paused for a moment, then tapped into his empathy and telepathy, before sighing as he realized she was right. There were eighteen different groups having sex in the upper floors, and nearly everyone there had thoughts of who they wanted to sleep with.

"That explains a lot," he muttered as he shut off those senses. "I'm not looking for a hookup."

"I figured," she smiled, taking a sip of her drink. "Your obliviousness to the nature of this place didn't flag to me as acting, and I've gotten good at identifying acts."

"Even though you're only nineteen?" He asked. "You'd think you'd be good enough to catch someone out at acting, even without having mind magics?"

She gave him an interested, though stunned, look.

"You're wondering how I knew your age," he said. "I'm a god. Such things are easy for me to find."

Cyrus had a tendency of being able to accurately know the age of anyone around him, at least in approximation. His younger brothers, on the other hand, would know it exactly, even down to the minute.

"You certainly have the look of a god," she gave him a look with a touch of lust added in. "Do you work out?"

"Only slightly," he told her. "If you don't mind, I'm not interested in a hookup, and I'm just waiting for someone to meet me here."

He made a mental note to inform the man to never arrange to meet in a place like that again.

"A meetup?" She asked. "A special friend?"

"No," he answered. "They're possibly selling something to me. Legal something, not illegal. He picked the place, and I thought I said I wasn't interested?"

"Not even in small talk?" She asked. "Just to pass the time until he arrives?"

"I'm not a social person."

"I see," she said. "What do you do for a living?"

"Gods have no need for work."

When he glanced at her as he took another bite of his burger, he noticed she was raising an eyebrow at him. He chewed slowly and set the burger down.

"I have various things I do," Cyrus said after swallowing. "I don't need money, though. It's one thing I have enough of."

"A rich boy, huh?" She asked.

"A god," he drained his glass.

"What do you think of them?" She asked him. "The gods, I mean. Rynovar, Selar, and Kylnar."

Cyrus set the glass down and tapped on the rim of it several times.

"Around three centuries ago," he said. "They ended the Fourth Age of Magic and claimed this world as theirs. Rynovar is the king of them, while Selar is his wife and Kylnar is his right-hand deity. They've allowed no gods from other worlds into their pantheon, though a couple have visited this world in the times since. Not much is publicly known about Selar or Kylnar, but Rynovar…"

Cyrus shook his head.

"He's whimsical," he said. "And a touch insane. He rules us from his floating continent and will allow any mortal to visit him if they can complete a quest. Obtain a special token from the bottom of a magic dungeon, speak with the Silver Oracle, and other such things. They may request one thing of him, ask him one question, and unless it is too extreme, he will grant or answer it. So far, no one has succeeded in his quest, even after two and a half centuries from when he issued it. Mostly because only an insane person would try it."

"You don't seem to have any fear of him," she commented. "Openly criticizing his quest."

"I fear little, if anything," Cyrus shrugged, setting a few more bills down for another drink. "Rynovar doesn't scare me. My guy is here."

A man sat on Cyrus's other side, setting a small metal briefcase on the table between them. Cyrus wiped off his hands on a napkin, then inspected them for a moment before simply generating water to wipe them clean, using fire magics to raise the temperature of the air in order to speed-dry his hands.

With his hands clean and dry, Cyrus opened the case without saying a word to the man. Inside were eight stacks of circular objects made of some sort of strange plastic, uniform in diameter and material. Each one had a hole in the exact center of it, and Cyrus could tell the lady next to him was curious about what they were.

Ignoring her, he pulled out a stack of them and inspected both sides of each item, then did the same to the next stack. In the seventh stack, he paused on one of them.

"I've been looking for this one."

"What are they?" The lady finally asked, and Cyrus gave her an amused look.

"Movies."

"Those aren't recospheres."

"They're discs," he said. "DVD's specifically. Some are shows, some are music albums. They predate the Great Collapse."

They were more than five centuries in age, making Cyrus impressed at their good condition and the high number of them the finder had managed to gather.

"So they use outdated technology," she said. "Collectors' items, then?"

"My brothers can copy their data into a recosphere," he said as he resumed inspecting the discs. "They're the only people in the world who can. But yes, they're collectors' items. The style of humor and interest is much different than in today's media, and much of their 'effects' were done with digital editing, not through actual magic. So I contact collectors, hunters, and scavengers, hoping to find these things."

"For your brothers?"

"Their hobbies I help them with prevent them from much worse hobbies."

"Like?"

"The Skelyna Tower Incident."

He felt her incredulous gaze upon him as he continued inspecting the stacks.

"How many brothers do you have?"

"The ones I was talking about are triplets," he paused for a moment. "They're the only ones I've ever considered brothers. The rest are half-siblings. Being gods, with godly parents, it's to be expected."

"They wrapped an entire building in wrapping paper."

"Yeah."

"Just the three of them."

"Yeah," he closed the case.

"It was seventy stories tall."

"Yeah."

"They did it without anyone noticing."

"Chronomancy," he said. "They slipped out of time."

"That's what everyone was thinking," she sighed. "Isn't staying slipped out of time difficult to do for more than twenty or thirty minutes? There isn't much information on time magics."

"They're gods, too."

"Uuuuh-huh," she said. "Okay, then. Your brothers seriously did that out of boredom?"

"Which is why I try to indulge in their less harmful hobbies."

He handed the finder a stack of money with a band around their middle.

"As we agreed," Cyrus told him. "The goods are as claimed."

"Thank you," the finder said, then left, and the lady looked around.

"Where did the case go?" She asked.

"I put it away," Cyrus answered, then dunked his last fry in ketchup and ate it.

He noticed her looking at his food and knew she was likely wondering when he resumed eating it.

"You said one of those," she decided to return to the movies. "You had been looking for?"

"An eight-movie series adapted from a book series with seven books," he said. "The seventh book split into two for the movie in order to not cut vital things in the adaptation. It's a fantasy series about a boy who learns he's a wizard, then ends up facing off against the Dark Lord. That was the fourth one. I've been delaying watching the movies because I was hoping to find it. I'd rather not have a gap between events in that which I watch, even if I know what will happen because of the books."

"You have copies of the ancient books?" She asked.

"There are a few collectors who have them," he nodded. "Passed down from ancestors in protected storage to preserve them. I have copies of them."

"You read ancient literature?" She asked. "And have copies of them."

"It's interesting," he said. "What they thought magic might be like, before the Great Collapse. And a little entertaining. Another series I enjoy, though the books were sadly lost to time it seems, even if the movies remain, was about a boy soldier who discovered he wasn't an orphan, but had been kidnapped at his birth, the midwife faking his death to steal him from his parents for her master. Only her master grabbed her son by mistake rather than him. He was the target because he was the seventh son of a seventh son, which in some ancient stories meant greater magical power and talent. He ended up finding out he was their kid and meeting them, and apprenticing to the kingdom's head witch. Their magic was largely used through objects rather than simply creating it themselves."

"That is the most I have heard you talk," she said. "Since you arrived. You seem more like the quieter type."

"It needs to be something I'm interested in."

Cyrus set a few bills down as a tip to the bartender, then stood to leave.

"I know you said," the lady said. "That you weren't looking for sex, but if you were interested…"

"I'm not interested in prostitutes."

"I never suggested money," she told him. "Just a night of pleasure."

"The other four ladies I've noticed wearing dresses of that design have all offered it for money," he said. "Prostitutes."

She frowned, and he knew she was wondering how he noticed that, as the other ladies of the night had managed their targets on other ends of the room.

"I'm a god," he told her. "Knowing such things is quite easy for me."

It wasn't any of her business that he had increased hearing capabilities by listening to the vibrations in the air. If he pushed his limits, he could hear up to nearly one thousand feet away with perfect clarity. His normal range stretched around one hundred feet away, and he found it difficult to shut that off.

"I don't always sleep for money," she told him, then hesitated before admitting it. "Though when I put on this dress, it is a sign I'm on-duty for the restaurant. We're allowed one free night a month, though, and I haven't used mine up yet."

"No, thanks."

"You seem like you could use some stress relief," she told him. "You seem the type of guy who takes things far too seriously, and if what you told me about your brothers is true, I can understand why. It'll make it hard to find 'that one' if you're constantly having to take care of younger brothers and keep them from wrapping up seventy-story buildings with metallic green wrapping paper. Are you sure you don't want to let loose for just one night? Release that built-up frustration you likely have?"