***** Zona’s POV *****

“I think that’s just about everything for my part of the room. Is there anything that I missed?”

“No Mom, it looks like you got everything. Your section looks great!” I replied.

“It sure does! How about my section?”

“Your section looks great too Dad. Why do both of you keep coming back to me to ask for approval on things? You’ve both been running this city for longer than I’ve been alive!”

As always, my parents had somehow managed to wear matching outfits while still dressing in two completely different styles. This may seem rather odd for those who didn’t know anything about them, but for those who knew them well, their outfits not matching would mean that something's wrong. After all, my mother is a dryad and my father is a cyad – they both claimed and looked after their territories in a similar manner, but one of them lives in a forest while the other lives in a city. To put it simply, their outfits tended to match their natures: completely different on the surface, yet fundamentally the same underneath.

It is thanks to them that this city was able to exist at all. The strength of their love for each other and their refusal to back down when the world tried to tell them that their relationship was impossible had brought them to the attention of the Lord of the Amazon, the undisputed ruler of South America. He was looking for a way to build a truly modern city in the heart of his power (a.k.a., the Amazon Rainforest) without having to tear down said forest. Long story short, two minutes before the local magistrate was about to deny their marriage license for the final time, the Lord of the Amazon showed up and offered both of them 8 billion Brazilian reals (about 2.05 billion U.S. dollars) per year to help him build the city of his dreams on the condition that they got married first. They’d have to move to a different country, which is no easy task for them with their ties to the land that they live on, but he was going to pay them very well to live the life that they always wanted to.

My parents were rather skeptical at first, asking why he was going to pay them so much and why he wanted them to get married. The answer to the first was simple: when hiring a craftsman to do a job that is important to you and you find a craftsman that is trustworthy and well skilled, it is generally a good idea to pay them well. Besides, if his plans worked out, both he and they would be making far more than that in the long run.

Their second question was more complicated. As a Forest Lord of the Fae, the Lord of the Amazon had access to massive amounts of Fae glamour, which most people think is illusion magic. In actuality, creating illusions is a useful side effect of what glamor actually did – creating, projecting and modifying realities. The more effort is put into making the projected reality real, the more power is required. What he wanted to do is use glamor to create two different realities that were stacked on top of each other, one with his city, the other with his forest. In order to do so, the glamor had to be anchored strongly and evenly to both realities, which is not something that he could do on his own. His power simply can’t do much with cities other than smash them to bits, which isn’t exactly helpful in this situation.

However, the process of getting married, with all of the ways that it ties two people together, makes it far easier for two people of differing powers to work together, especially with a love match like my parents'. In other words, the Lord of the Amazon could create the glamor, which my parents could then anchor properly.

There was more negotiation than that, but that was just minor details really. Once they understood his offer and what he wanted them to do, they jumped at the chance and only paused to invite some of their friends along. After that, they never looked back.

I came back to reality just in time to hear my Dad’s answer.

“Yes, we have done this for decades, but this is your show now Niña. Unlike us, your power sees very little distinction between city and forest. Even as a little kid, you were already running around and fixing the places where your mother and I had trouble reconciling the two magics. Before you came along, some sections of the city/forest were only working at all because the Lord of the Amazon wanted them to work, so they did. After all, this is the heart of His territory – how could it dare disobey?”

“Oh. I vaguely remember that now. I thought they were puzzles that the three of you had built for me and hidden all over the place. Now that I think about it, I only found the first ones because even with his power sitting on it they were only just barely working. The city and the forest were rather unhappy about that.”

“As much as I’m enjoying this conversation, don’t we have an event to prepare for?” my mother interrupted.

“I think we’re done actually. Let’s each look over everything one last time,” I said. “It never hurts to have an extra pair of eyes.”

“Fair enough, let’s go.”

The event in question was a business dinner we were hosting for the top-ranked health organizations and other business leaders from around the world. Our goal was to show them our city, to show them that, despite the troubled days behind us, we had a very bright future ahead of us. Hopefully, we would be able to convince them to invest in our city, but we’ll just have to see how things go.

For this purpose, we had selected the amphitheater in the heart of the Space Lord’s Tower. It was originally called Amazon Tower, but when the Lord of the Amazon had gotten appointed the Terran Space Lord, he decided to rename and expand the tower. Now, in addition to being the center of government for South America and home to the ruling family, it’s in the process of becoming the headquarters of the Terran Space Navy.

As for the room itself, it was about 50 meters in diameter with a stage taking up roughly a third of the room at the front. There were two sets of double doors at the back, 7.5 meters on either side of the center of the room. There were circular buffet tables scattered evenly around the room which were currently empty – the food would be teleported onto them when the time was right. The Space Lord had said something about putting more food on those tables than their surface could hold while still having it all easily accessible, but the food is his responsibility, not mine.

Also scattered around the room were tables and chairs for our guests. These were made by my father and then decorated by my mother. The purpose of this is to represent the rough early days of the city when my parents were still learning to work with each other and the Lord of the Amazon to build his city. That’s not to say that they didn’t have their elegant charm that somehow managed to work, but there was a very clear line where my father’s power stopped and my mother’s power began.

After my parents were finished with the tables and working on their respective decorations along the back wall, I had come along and fused their work together properly to varying degrees. The closer to the stage a given set of table and chairs was, the more fusing that I had done.

The stage itself was mine and mine alone with one exception: the empty space where the Space Lord and his wife, the Moonlit Shadow, would sit. For some reason, they would be bringing their own chairs.

As for the decorations at the back of the room, Mother had some planter boxes with some saplings in them, even if they were only saplings by the standards of our rainforest, while Father mirrored them with models of various buildings from around the city.

Looking around the room, everything looked like it was ready to go with one exception.

“Hey Mom, Dad, where does this granite brick of a chair go?” I asked. “Also, why is it sitting on a table? I could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago.”

“Hmm? Oh, that’s the Space Lord’s Throne. I’m not entirely sure what enchantments he has on that thing, but I think it has some sort of limited ability to teleport itself,” replied Mom.

“The one time we tried to ask about it he was in a rather bad mood and all he told us is that it is where he wants it to be. Mostly. When it counts at any rate. Somehow it’s never come up again since,” added Dad.

Then a man appeared in the middle of the room and deposited a frame of some kind with what looked like three enchanted items on it.

“Oy! You’re not supposed to be in here!” Mom yelled at him.

Then the enchanted items activated, more or less in unison. The first item sealed the room so that nobody could get in or out except through the portal created by the second enchanted item. So naturally, the third item put up a shield around all three items so we couldn’t get at them.

“Protect the forest!” yelled the man as he pulled out a sword of some kind and swung it at my mother.

I had been kind of suspicious about this man, so I had already started drawing power from the city shield. When he made his intentions clear I had drawn just enough power to deflect the blade away from Mom before I shoulder checked the man away from her.

He recovered much faster than I expected and he was already swinging at my head. I don’t know how, but somehow I managed to dodge his swing just enough that he missed my head and took my left arm off instead. If I’d been in human form, that would have been a problem, but in my cyad form here in the heart of my territory, this simply meant my arm was on the floor.

Fortunately, there was nothing wrong with my right arm and he’d left me an opening in his defenses, so I wrapped the rest of the shield energy around my fist and punched him in the chest as hard as I could. I would get more as the city shield generated more, but it would be a little bit before it was warmed up to its current maximum – it was still just a prototype after all. Until it warmed up, I would be limited to one punch every five seconds or so.

Anyway, it turned out that he was wearing a very good magic shield himself, so instead of stumbling backward with a slightly singed chest, he flew five meters backward. Given the nature of energy shields, when two of them contacted each other they violently repel each other, generating forces far in excess of the ones that pushed them together in the first place. If neither shield is overloaded by this force, the shields will transfer this force to their anchor points, thus applying Newton's Laws to the anchors rather than the shields themselves. For the assassin, his anchor point is probably the harness he's wearing. For my shield, the anchor point is partially the bedrock under the city, but mostly some sort of extra-dimensional space that is much larger than my city. There's only one way the resulting shoving match can go, and it is not in this man's favor.

Then Broohn, the Firstborn Son of the Lord of the Amazon, announced his presence by roaring at the man as loud as he could while throwing some sort of spell-bolt I’d never seen before at the man, who once again proved to be a slippery little bugger by dodging.

At this point, I knew we simply had to hold out until help got here. Between the wards for the various government agencies in the tower, the generalized security wards for the entire building, and the personal wards of the six dragons that called the tower home, our attacker had probably tripped at least twenty different silent alarms. Even if he hadn’t, someone was going to come and see what Broohn was roaring at, realize they couldn’t get in, and then call for help.

“Be careful of his sword! If it took my arm clean off it can probably do some serious damage to you too!” I called to Broohn.

“I noticed, thanks!” he replied.

“You’re not supposed to be in here you blasted fruitcake of a lizard!” yelled the man as he darted around Broohn to swing at him from behind.

“Why not? This is my home!” replied Broohn as he tapped his dragon’s strength and jumped away from the man over a table.

He must not have been expecting that because he paused just long enough for me to punch him with another shield, sending him flying through a table and even farther away from the portal.

Speaking of the portal, I glanced in that direction and saw several people in some sort of tactical gear attempting to establish a beachhead on this side of the portal. So far my parents had managed to hold them back. It looked like Dad had distracted them while Mom turned some of her “saplings” into a combat avatar. Prior experience told me that they would then switch places.

Satisfied that they had things under control, I went back to helping Broohn with the first man. While I had been looking away, Broohn had pulled a sword of his own from somewhere, except his appeared to be made entirely of energy.

After a fast and furious exchange of blows that I couldn’t track, the attacker broke off and came after me again. Since I didn’t want his ridiculous sword anywhere near me again, I shield punched him before he was even close enough to hit me.

Unfortunately, his bonce wasn’t as predictable as it had been before, so instead of going straight backward like I’d intended he flew off at an angle crashing into Broohn and sending them both tumbling to the ground.

The attacker put on a brief burst of speed, as is he wasn’t fast enough already, and was back on his feet before Broohn got even halfway there. He started raising his sword above his head for a killing stroke and there was nothing I could do as I’d just used everything I’d been able to pull from the city shield for the moment.

Then Broohn managed to pull a partial transformation, temporarily sprouting a pair of dragon-wings from the middle of his human back. One of them was pushing against the floor, the other shot straight into the attacker’s face. To my surprise, this threw the attacker into the air hard enough to leave a small crater in the twenty-foot-high ceiling. Then I realized that a dragon's wing is capable of lifting more than half the weight of a dragon, which is measured in tons. Anything with that kind of strength would have no trouble launching a human quite a distance.

The really nice thing is this separated the attacker from his sword then briefly buried him in the wreckage of the table he had landed on. I’m not sure whether he was really tough or if he just had a very good shielding enchantment, but he was still moving.

It also gave me an idea since the city shield had just finished warming up.

I ran over to the table as the attacker managed to extricate himself from it.

“Hey Broohn, I got a present for you!” I yelled as I shield punched the attacker over towards Broohn.

“I don’t want him! Take him back!” *punch*

“I don’t want him! He’s got cooties!” *punch*

“You’re a girl. Don’t you already have cooties?” *punch*

“No, it’s boys who have cooties!” *punch*

“No, we don’t!” *punch*

“Yes, you do!” *punch*

“Regardless, I still don’t want him!” *punch*

“Too bad, you’re getting him back!” *punch*

“Are you sure you should be doing this?” *punch*

“What do you mean?” *punch*

“You’re hurt!” *punch*

“It’s just a flesh wound!” *punch*

“But your arms come off!” *punch*

At this point, Dad walked up and held my left arm in place for the brief instant it took me to reattach it. I was having too much fun playing with the man to think about why Dad had time to bring me my arm.

“No, it’s not! See, it works just fine!” *left-handed punch*

“Alright children, that’s enough. Let the poor man lay down and rest, we’ll take it from here. The two of you did a good job keeping the assassin busy until we got here, but we must not let him win. We have to clean up this room and get it ready for the event tonight – again.”

“Yes, sir!” I said at the same time Broohn said. “Party pooper.”