Lialah seemed to find the whole process fascinating. But when Albaer was finished, she asked, “Do you mind if I just use magic?”

Albaer’s inner D&D nerd raised its happy head and he instantly said, “Please, do. But tell me how!” He rubbed his hands together while Lialah popped the latch on the dryer, stopping the cycle, then removed a thick, drenched black blanket.

The soaked, thick fabric splashed water all over the concrete, but she was nonplussed, holding it over her arm, she uttered a complicated array of syllables while placing one hand over the object, and the water began to rise out and hover in a ball overhead.

It was bubble-like, contorting and shifting in the air as more and more water was added to it until the last drop lifted up from the blanket and from the floor.

She then flicked her hand toward the large white sink nearby as if she were shooting a basketball toward the hoop, and with an echoing splash the ball of water dropped and the sucking noise of the drain picked up.

“Wow, that might even cut down on the power bill, fantastic.” Albaer said it casually, offhandedly even, but inside he was giddy as a kid on Christmas. ‘Magic! Real magic!’ He thought and suppressed the urge to dance with excitement.

“There, all done.” Lialah said with a satisfied nod and looked over at Albaer, “Demons can’t use water magic, so I’ll handle this chore, and believe it or not…”

“She is a pretty good cook, at least with a fire pit and a stewpot.” Raziel interjected.

Lialah turned up her nose, “I am excellent I’ll have you know.”

Albaer saw the fight brewing and headed it off at the pass. “Right so… now let me show you this.” He led them back up the creaking stairs to his room and took his computer off of power save mode.

“This… is the most powerful thing humanity ever made.” Albaer said with reverence while he pulled himself up to the desk after sitting back down on his chair.

Intrigued, Lialah and Raziel leaned over his shoulders at his right and left sides, he was acutely aware of their breath and noted a clear difference. Lialah’s breath was a little cooler than a humans, not cold, but it didn’t have the same heat a human’s would. If humans were summer, she was spring.

By contrast, if humans were an early summer morning, Raziel was a hot August day. He also couldn’t help but notice how near they were. Instinctively he wanted to withdraw, ‘Relax, idiot, they’re not going to hurt you.’ He told himself, though his fingers shook a little with his anxiety at their closeness.

Instead he opened up the most popular and powerful search engine in the world, added a few more tabs, and said, “Name something. Anything.”

“Succubus.” Raziel quipped immediately.

“Cooking.” Lialah added.

“Now name two more things.” Albaer held his smile back as he opened up two more tabs.

“Hylarim’s Dragon Keep… I keep getting lost.” Raziel admitted.

“Uh, Angels, I guess?” Lialah said, unable to think of much else.

“Alright,” Albaer said after typing out each of the things they said into each different tab’s search engine.

“Here, everything you could want to know about angels as humans see them. Our myths, legends, the religions built around them as messengers and servants of god, and so on.” Albaer said, and then switched to images. A long list of pictures of angels from various D&D guides, fantasy art, and anime shows came up.

“See?” Albaer asked, and while Lialah was clearly intrigued, leaning farther over his shoulder so that her breast brushed against him and sent a jolt of excitement through his body, she clearly didn’t appreciate the significance of what he was showing her.

Albaer cleared his throat several times and clicked over to the next tab, “A map of the place you keep getting lost in, along with the locations of all the traps and treasures therein.” He said as he clicked on the wiki entry that came up first.

Raziel darted her hand out to cover his and began guiding the mouse around the way she’d seen him do. Her hand was warm and firm, and had it been gradual, or invited, he would have enjoyed it more.

As it was, it was only a half second before he yanked his hand away from beneath hers while she obliviously clicked the map to enlarge it. “Oh!” She exclaimed. “That’s where the hidden tunnel is.”

She took her hand away, and stared with rapt fascination at the screen.

Albaer waited until her hand left the mouse and tentatively put his own back on it.

He went to the second tab from the left, and brought up the results of searching for ‘cooking’. “Pretty much every recipe ever imagined is found on the internet.” He explained, “Art, music, science, history… This gives us access to the totality of human knowledge for the last twelve thousand years. Everything ever written, composed, or built can be seen, read about, or listened to.”

“Gods are said to have this kind of power…” Raziel whispered, “Gods… actual Gods are supposed to have this.” She watched while he opened up a website, hit ctrl+f and typed in ‘steak’, and the numbered list of mentions came up which he hit the down arrow to take them through so they could get the full effect.

Raziel’s ruby eyes were wide with awe, “Even our greatest Kings can’t have more than one big library, and no clear way exists to sort it all. At least not like that.”

“Like I said, it’s our most powerful tool. I can talk to people around the world in real time, play games with people on any continent, I watch movies from other countries, and even go to higher education from right here at my desk and watch our best lecturers teach us about things.” Albaer’s anxiety was briefly suppressed by his excitement over introducing them to the internet, and then he cursed himself.

‘She searched for ‘succubus’. What is likely to come up for that…?’ Albaer knew exactly what was going to come up since he had the ‘safesearch’ setting to ‘off’.

“I think that’s enough for now, let me show you how I handle the bills.” He said and clicked the address bar to type in the power company URL.

He felt Raziel’s eyes go from the screen to him. “Wait, I want to see what came up for ‘succubus’.”

“We really should move on, I just wanted to…” Albaer tried to say, and thought back to the time he’d found all kinds of insults about him scrawled on a bathroom wall. ‘The school took weeks to clear it all off…’ He never forgot that they left it up, or the indifferent faces of the administrative staff when he asked about it.

“Just don’t pay attention to them, and they’ll stop eventually. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” The bald-headed old principle had said when Albaer dared ask about when it would be cleaned off.

‘Liar.’ He still thought that word about the lazy bastard. And that was only one wall.

“Albaer?” Raziel asked, “Why aren’t you looking, what is it you don’t want me to see?”

Her hand touched his shoulder, and he stiffened again.

“Raziel, maybe you should just trust him, we’ve seen enough, I get what this does now and it’s amazing. Let’s just move on, Albaer has other things to do than indulge us.” Lialah insisted.

Raziel gave a very quiet nod at her sister, “I… alright, fine.” She muttered, and Albaer closed the succubus tab without going to it.

He suppressed his sigh of relief, and created a quick list of sites where the bills were paid.

He then signed in on his mother’s bank account and moved on quickly to ask, “Do our numbers translate well to you? Like… you know, to do math?” Albaer asked, and Raziel gave a quick nod.

“Yes, it’s no problem. So I just do that every day?” She asked, and he shook his head.

“No, once a week, and you check the account before you order groceries. I guess Lialah will handle the food and laundry, you handle the bills and supply shopping, and split the chores. I have a job, and so does mom, so money won’t be a problem.” Albaer said and gestured to the computer with an open hand.

“That settles all the business of living stuff, and now you know about video games, but let me introduce you to something else. Streaming services.” He took up the controller, turned on the TV and brought up his favorite anime streaming service. “There are a lot of fantasy shows you might like, maybe some will have glimmers of what it was like back home for you… if that’s a good thing, I guess?” Albaer didn’t press the matter, but they watched the screen intently.

“So there are people in the box performing plays on demand?” Lialah asked, and Albaer coughed hard several times.

He pounded his chest and waved one hand back and forth in the negative, “No, no not at all. People create these shows, and we have machines that… I guess, remember them, or keep them, the way books keep words, and then you can watch what people did over again whenever you want.”

It was a crude explanation, but it seemed to convey the truth well enough that they had no other questions.

After that he showed Lialah in brief how to handle groceries, and that the food was delivered to the apartment, and at that point her eyes just glazed over.

“I give up. This place is magical, I’m just going to call everything ‘a different school of magic’ and accept it at face value. This is too bizarre, too weird.” She said and put her hands on the side of her head and shook it back and forth. “We have world magic at home and people starve, we can summon heroes from other worlds, and can’t get food brought to our doors… it’s a whole other level here!” She suddenly looked at Albaer with wild hope, “Is there ‘any’ chance that maybe… even if we can’t travel home, maybe we can tell them we’re still alive?! Something to communicate with, could that be a thing somebody made?”

“Lialah… just don’t.” Raziel brought her sister up short, “Just don’t, okay? Not right now. This is a lot to take in and we need time to think about it all.”

Lialah frowned, but Albaer had to fight back his relief when the wild stare left her eyes.

But he couldn’t leave her hanging and hopeless. He thought it over, “No, nothing like that exists now, but… maybe, just maybe, if we study how your body magic works, we could modify something?” It was a wild proposal, a random thought of dubious possibility.

But it had their attention. “You think?” Raziel’s eyes were sharply focused, and Albaer could do little better than shrug and acknowledge it.

“There’s no way to know unless you try, you’re here all day with not much to do, study how our systems work, I make enough that I can afford to buy parts here and there, it might take you a few years, but you won’t succeed ever if you don’t at least make the attempt. In the worst case scenario-”

His words were immediately interrupted. “We’re trapped here with you till we die.” Lialah finished.

Albaer winced, “I’m not the best company maybe… but I’ll do my best to make sure you don’t-”

“That’s not what I meant…” Lialah said immediately, covering her mouth when she saw the stung look on his face. “It’s… this isn’t home, you’ve been wonderful, but you don’t want to be trapped in your town… we don’t want to be stuck hiding in your bedroom… I promise, I didn’t mean anything bad about you… I’m sorry if it sounded that way.” She lowered her hands and clasped them in front of her waist, she bowed and spoke in her own language. “Mao enshila, saphinshi safloa, eto mali, Albert Babtiste Lamark.” She didn’t wait for him to ask, “You’re the kindest host we could have, and I am glad to know you, Albaer Babtiste Lamark.”

Albaer knew how little he really understood about his unexpected guests or their ways, but he had the distinct impression, from her studied posture and the way her words flowed like running water, that she was trying to honor him in her tongue. Or at least express some deep form of gratitude.

The praise should have warmed him, but it had been so long since he had any, in fact he was quite uncomfortable. He blushed and rubbed the back of his head. There was no proper answer he could make except to respond, “It’s no problem… what was I supposed to do, kick you out…?” He asked the question rhetorically, but part of him knew all too well the range of responses they could have gotten. He also knew that most of those would have been much, much worse even than that.

Though he said nothing of those, he cleared his throat, “Alright, now let me get my school work done, you two… I don’t know, read, or cook something, or play games or watch something. If you want to use the internet, be my guest after I’m done. I’m going to sleep early, it’s been a long day.” Albaer said, shifting the subject.

He proceeded to take no note of them as he returned to his school work. Lialah left the room and before long he heard the sound of the pots and pans as she tried her hand at cooking.

Raziel tore into the stack of books he’d brought home and began reading through it while waiting on Hylarim to update with new content, out of curiosity, he watched her through the reflection on the screen. In retrospect it should have been obvious that she was a succubus. The shapely face and gentle sloping hourglass curves, the sort of breasts that no man could keep from noticing, not to mention her captivating ruby eyes and long silky dark hair, she was temptation come to life. Of course her ‘sister’ was beautiful in her own right, which struck him as strange. ‘In the oldest lore, angels had bizarre appearances. Demons sometimes did too, but they were humanized sooner… I wonder if it’s possible that others came here before these two and became part of our mythology?’

He could think of no way to confirm that, but the reality was… they were here now, and Albaer knew he had to think of a long term plan, he couldn’t hide them from his mother forever. ‘I’ll need to learn more about what their magic can do.’ He thought, noticing the way Raziel read through the book in her hand on internet use. ‘I guess I’ll just have to do what I can, the same as they are… and when I leave… I can smuggle them with me if I have to.’

He was just finishing up his work, and Raziel had just started playing her character in Hylarim when Lialah entered the room with a few plates holding a crude mashed potato and meat mix ladled with a little too much butter and gravy.

“My first attempt… from the cookbook there… I hope you like it.” Lialah said with a warm smile as she handed a plate to Albaer and to Raziel.

“Are you sure this will be safe for you two to eat?” Albaer asked, and at that they both nodded.

“Strangely enough, this actually looks like stuff from back home… though it takes a lot longer for us to make it…” She dug a spoon into the bowl and took a mouthful.

Albaer shrugged and did the same. It wasn’t quite perfect, but the explosion of flavor told him that Lialah knew what she was doing. His eyes popped open, “Amazing.” He said and stabbed the spoon into the mix to take another bite with a smile spread all across his face.

She grinned and sat cross legged on the floor with her own plate and tore into the meal. “Thank you.” It was a quiet response, but it was meant, and that was what counted.

Albaer wolfed his portion down, then put on an anime fantasy series and sat back to watch, he barely noticed that he got an audience until he’d streamed six straight episodes and was ready for bed.

The exhaustion of the day hit him like a freight train, from the nightmare of school to the difficult but sometimes enjoyable process of introducing the world to his guests.

There wasn’t really a need to converse, he simply wished them goodnight and flopped down under the covers and shut his eyes.

He barely noticed if they wished him goodnight as well, and fell into a deep, deep slumber.

He was therefore completely unaware when Raziel got up in the middle of the night and stared down at his sleeping body. Her blood red eyes lingered on his face, seeing him clearly even in the pitch black was no problem for her. ‘What were you hiding from me, why didn’t you want to show me what my search would bring up…?’ She wondered.

Albaer was nothing but nice to them, even aggressively protective, and when he came home, she understood why. A demon always knew pain by sight, one look and she knew all the ways he was injured and how much pain he must have been in, walking all the way back. And that had happened before. ‘I still can’t believe my sister didn’t realize he was bruised up before he even left… no, that makes sense, she’s seen no humans and few bruises.’

All in all, Raziel considered it strange he was willing to help them at all. But this rankled. So, she sat at his computer, did as he did, and found the search engine.

She used one sharp finger to tap the keys, his own rapid typing was unusual, but Raziel resolved to practice it a bit later. For now, she keyed the letters one by one and then hit ‘Go’.

The page loaded, and she began to click through the links one by one, including ‘images’.

It was only a few minutes of exploring the way humans saw her, before all the demoness wanted to do was cry.