Camilla is jumping up and down, a ball of tightly packed, pinkish energy.

“So, how long are you chewing on those leaves?”

“Huh?” I look at her, confused.

“How long are you going to be tight-lipped, Joey,” Flaminia translates the Elven saying.

“Ha, damn Elves and their weird sayings,” I chuckle.

“Come on,” Camilla prods my side with a finger and makes me jump.

“Yo! Don’t do that! I’m ticklish!” I scream.

“Are you?” the short Elf looks at me with a devilish grin.

“Don’t you dare!” I start running around the place with her immediately in tow.

“Lucillus! Stab her! Do something! This is an assault! Protect me!” I’m running around the unadorned tables that the previous owner left here, trying to lose the short imp.

“We don’t have a contract yet, and I heard that my rates are not going to be that good,” the man chuckles at my plight.

“Flaminia!” I plead while running to her and hiding behind her.

“Come on, Camilla, stop that, we wouldn’t want…”

Flaminia suddenly turns and shouts to Lucillus: “Catch him!”

HUH!?

Lucillus is suddenly behind me and he’s holding me in place.

Goddamn, this Elf is strong!

“Release me! This is torture! Abuse! Help! I’m being assaul—HAAAA!”

Camilla catches up to me and starts tickling me.

“So, Joey, what’s up with Lucinda?”

“HAAAAA!”

She stops for a second, giving me room to breathe. I’m all red and panting, shivering in place.

“You demons! I’m not saying—HAAAAA!”

The tickling torture continues.

Now, you might think this is a pleasurable experience because my executioner is a cute Elf with pinkish hair. Well, think again.

I loathe tickling.

Among the many things that I wouldn’t mind done to me, tickling is not one. I’d rather spend a month in France than being tickled for five minutes. I’m simply too sensitive, what can I say?

“So, ready to talk, Human?” Camilla looks at me with her evil, impish grin.

“I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” I plead.

“Lucillus, please, release him,” Flaminia asks my bodyguard.

“You traitor,” I tell him with narrowed eyes.

“So?” Camilla slowly hunches forward with her hands fingering the air.

“I’m talking! I’m talking! Take your filthy tickle hands off me!”

We are done with cleaning up the place, and I was going to tell them about the first recipe, but it appears that it will have to wait.

“Well, it’s… complicated,” I tell the three around me.

“Lucinda and I shared a kiss, or two. We didn’t talk about it – before we could do that, I got mugged. When I was at the Watch’s Infirmary, I got interrogated by Captain Drusillus. I may have revealed about the kiss and the Captain made fun of Lucinda for it. Then, I tried to act casual and just tell her that—”

“The rose,” Lucillus coughed.

“Yeah, well. I might have gone to her place with some flowers. When she didn’t accept them, I made a rose out of a [Light] spell.”

Oh, shoot.

I shouldn’t have said the last part.

“Well, that should have impressed her. I believe it’s very hard to do something like that, isn’t it?” Flaminia looks at me with her eyebrows furrowed.

Camilla is simply silent, pondering.

“Yeah, I thought I had her. But then, we did the arbiter thing and here we are. That’s pretty much it.”

The two women exchange a look while Lucillus simply stands like a statue.

The poor man has no feminine wit.

“Didn’t you say she was an asshole?” Camilla asks me.

“Oh, right. When she came over to my place, she apologized for the comments she made about the homeless people. But that could have been because she wanted to learn some magic from me.”

I shortly recount the story of Stan to Flaminia and Lucillus.

“The biggest magical talent in all Amorium, possibly the whole region, comes to you to learn something about magic, Joey?”

Flaminia is skeptical.

“Yeah, sounds mad, doesn’t it?”

“You are redefining ‘mad’ as a word, Luciani,” Flaminia looks at me and laughs out loud.

“Well, anyway, that’s done. She clearly doesn’t want anything else to do with me.”

“Yeah, as if,” Camilla snorts, exchanging another understanding look with Flaminia.

“Huh?”

What is she saying?

“Lucinda is very interested in you, Joey. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have reacted like that. She’s probably going to come to you much earlier than you would think.”

“Do her good,” Camilla snorts.

“Camilla!” I look at her with an outraged face.

“She’s got a thing for you, for all the large trees,” Flaminia shakes her head. “How did you do that?”

“Did what?! She walked out on me!” I don’t understand. I’m pretty sure I have a good understanding of women.

Flaminia gestures to me while looking at Camilla, basically saying ‘look at that, can you believe this guy?’

Camilla nods patronizingly, basically saying ‘yeah, he’s an idiot, how did he manage that?’

“I’m not understanding,” Lucillus looks at the two women.

“Lucinda is mad in love with him and she’s feeling vulnerable,” Camilla explains, “she went away because Joey clearly made a big impression. She’s afraid she’s falling, or maybe getting too tangled up with feelings for him.”

“What? Really?” Lucillus looks at me with an eyebrow raised. “She’s falling for him?”

Oh, wow, thanks for the vote of confidence, pal!

“Joey,” Camilla ignores Lucillus, “just wait. She’ll come around. Trust me.”

I mean, it’s not like I have any other choice. After such a reaction, it would definitely feel wrong to keep at it, wouldn’t it?

“Can you explain to me, though, why do you like her so much? She really doesn’t look like your type,” Camilla adds.

Why do I like her?

“She’s hot, obviously,” I laugh. However, my spectators are not impressed with my answer. “She looks… perfect. I—I don’t know. Sometimes you look at someone and you suddenly want to marry them, don’t you? No? Well, that’s me then. I’ve never felt it as much as I do with Lucinda. She’s just special. There’s this weird chemistry between us. Even if we belong to different worlds, it seems like there’s one special bridge connecting us. And I love how she eats like a barbarian monk starved for a week, how she looks at me with mischief in her eyes, and how she can talk for hours on end about magic. It’s cool. I love it. I love… her?”

Everyone widens their eyes at my words.

“There’s this guy where I come from. I mean, he’s dead now. He’s been dead for a while, to be honest. But, he was… a [Philosopher]? Yeah? Yeah. And he said this thing…”

Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching half’ of a human whole… and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him.

“I think she might be my matching half, that’s all.”

I shrink in the chair, looking dejectedly to the table.

“Lucillus, are you crying?” Flaminia’s voice reaches my hear.