Albaer sat up on the bed and put his hand on his head, “Wow, that was bizarre, my legs are sore, and I need a shower. Though maybe it’s for the best if you didn’t use my body to handle the shower part, god knows what you two would have done with it.” He laughed, and then stopped laughing a moment later.

As soon as they’d shaken him awake they were stepping back and kneeling on the floor. That was wrong. Raziel was looking down at the floor one way, Lialah another.

Their wings were drooping, their wings never drooped. Lialah looked like she was on the verge of tears, chewing on her lower lip, and Raziel was clenching her hands into fists. Both of them sat on their heels and rested their hands on their laps, but while Raziel’s hands were clenched, Lialah was fidgeting.

A chill came over him. It was all wrong, all too wrong. He turned to face the pair and said only, “Tell me what’s wrong?!”

The two stiffened.

“Did you screw something up, am I in trouble, am I dying or something… come on spill it!” Albaer demanded, his eyes darted from one to the other and the pace of his breathing picked up as the myriad of possible things that could have gone wrong, went wild in his mind for a moment.

“No, nothing like that!” Lialah answered, “You’re fine, ah, better than fine, actually.” She tapped one of her fingers against the other, “Your body is completely intact and we kind of took care of everything there, but…”

“But?” Albaer asked while leaning forward toward the very contrite looking pair, he rested his forearm on his thigh and added, “Whatever it is… I’m sure it wasn’t on purpose, but what do I need to know?”

“I got into a bit of a fight.” Raziel answered with an angry growl. “It was an ambush! They got me with a stick and knocked me down! I couldn’t run away and I didn’t want to let you get beaten up when we couldn’t take care of you so I fought back!”

Albaer was quiet for a moment and let her tell her story in full, her hands were shaking on her thighs, her fingers opened and dug her talons into her exposed red flesh, her wings went out and stiffened, then shook with anger. “Four of them, there were four of them, they said horrible things, horrible things and I got so angry… I hurt them, pretty bad I guess. I’m not sorry though!” She snapped at Albaer, “I’m sorry I broke your rule about not hurting anyone, really! But I couldn’t just stand by and let them do things to you while I was there!”

Albaer let out a heavy, unhappy sigh when she finally finished. “I guess… I guess I can understand that. It would be hard for me to stand by and do nothing if somebody I cared about was going to get hurt. And from what you say it sounds like it won’t get around.”

“No, no it definitely won’t.” Raziel insisted with a shake of her head that made that beautiful silky cascading hair dance at her back.

“So what about you, Lialah, did you get into a fight?” Albaer asked, he smirked a little, “It’s okay, just tell me what happened.”

“No… no not exactly.” Lialah said without turning to look his way, she explained it all, from start to finish, and Albaer’s already light skin paled.

“You can’t be serious… What am I supposed to say to her?! Why didn’t you just keep going?! Why did you stop and talk to Lisa of all people… and you invited her here?!” Albaer’s voice was full of alarm as he imagined the police coming to his apartment, he looked toward his door, beyond which lay his mother’s room.

“Do you know how much trouble that would make for my mother?! Doesn’t she have it bad enough without having the police show up for the ‘Bad Seed’?!” Albaer didn’t shout, but he hissed every word with a serpent like anger, “And now you expect me to talk to her?!”

“Albear, that isn’t everything…” Lialah said, and he fell quiet while she blinked back tears and explained why she was brought up short, the swollen shut eye from having been hit at least once, and Albaer went quiet.

“It was just an accident, Albaer, my sister didn’t mean it.” Raziel insisted, snapping at him sharply.

Albaer forced himself to calm down, “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. You’re right, you’re right, you’re right. It was just an accident, there’s no way you could have predicted that. I couldn’t have, why should you, and how should you know what to do in that situation, you’re not even from this world.” He wasn’t really talking to them at that point, more himself, and so they remained quiet and waited.

“Lisa Foxworthy is one of the smartest girls I’ve ever known, very much her grandfather’s grandchild. She knows something is up, a regular lie won’t do. Can you erase her memory or anything like that?” Albaer asked, his eyes blinking as rapidly as his heart was now beating.

“There is magic for that, and you humans don’t seem to have defenses against magic. But we don’t have that ‘square’ available yet. We just recently reset, we’ll get it soon, but probably not before she comes to see you.” Raziel lowered her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Right.” Albaer looked up at the ceiling.

“Really sorry… but we’ll get it, even if you tell her the truth, it’s not a high level spell, if she’ll just cooperate for a little while we can use it later.” Lialah said in a squeaky, nervous tone.

“I guess. I guess. I guess.” Albaer muttered, “Okay, that’s fine, I’m going back to school, we’ll see what happens.”

He looked down at them both and put on a charming smile, “Buck up, you two. It’ll work out. We’ve got a few days before she comes by here, and whatever happens, happens. Just build up your magic as fast as you can in ways that will help you make the best of being stuck here, and then everything will be fine. Now if that’s everything,” he glanced out the window, “I’d better go back to sleep. What about you two?”

They both shook their heads. Raziel however, was the one to speak up. “No, we worked your body pretty hard, now we need to convert some of what we got over into mana to put toward advancement. The harder we work your body, the more we can do. Tomorrow we’ll use it on some fighting arts, it’s probably best if we don't take a chance running outside again.”

Albaer raised his arm, tilted his head down, and took a sniff. “Yeah you ran me to a stink.” He then got up and went to the bathroom. “Okay, shower first, then sleep. All the rest sounds fine, though I don’t really get quite what you mean.”

Raziel’s face lit up and she started a professorial lecture, her eyes shut and her fangy smile spread open as she chattered at a mile a minute. “Progress comes by way of training, physical strength and stamina built up by exercise can be ‘converted’ into magical growth. Magical growth can take place by studying magic books with manabindings, that’s the fastest way to build progress for magic, but we don’t have those here, so we have to convert physical improvement in ourselves to magical improvement instead. There’s a cost, if I were to break it down into units, two units of physical growth becomes one for magic. But we get more if we use another body as a host. But to do it, we have to engage in prolonged meditation. Does that make sense?”

“I heard, ‘I’m a magic nerd’ in all that.” Albaer said from within the bathroom while the shower roared to life.

“Hmpf.” Raziel huffed, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and looked away. “It’s true, but a real friend wouldn’t come out and just say it like that.”

Albaer and Lialah smiled from different rooms at the huff, it was hard not to enjoy the indignity of the demon after her impromptu lecture, “Just don’t magic my door open like a pervert while I’m in here.” Albaer said and shut the entrance before peeling off his clothes.

“She always was good at that stuff.” Lialah said loud enough for him to hear, “I’m not half bad either, but she got the technical aspects faster than I ever did, just don’t mind us if we don’t say or do anything till morning. This takes a while.”

“Fine.” Albaer said as he stepped into the steam.

The water cascaded over his body and he leaned back against the wall. Lialah hadn’t made an issue over his lack of reaction to learning that somebody had struck Lisa. The truth was, he didn’t know how he felt about it.

A part of him thought, ‘Serves you right.’ Another thought, ‘I couldn’t have watched it happen.’

For better or worse, that told him one thing, he cared enough about what happened to her to not want ‘that’ to happen. He washed and rinsed his hair, scrubbed his face and then the rest of himself. The hot water felt good on his skin, though they left him a little bit sore. Based on what they said, they each had to have taken his body out for a few miles worth. ‘I should be more sore than I am… maybe it helps to be possessed?’ He wasn’t sure and he doubted they would know. Even if it were true in their homeworld, what would they know about humans?

He emerged, dried, went out, grabbed a pair of boxers from a drawer, and glanced over to where they would normally be asleep. As it was, they were sitting cross legged with eyes shut, their backs straight against the wall, and breathing in a steady, uniform rhythm.

Albaer shrugged, put on his boxers just out of view even if they wouldn’t have seen anything, then went and got into bed.

He fell asleep quickly, and as he dreamt, he relived the course of their actions.