#buttonflask

        It was a curious thing, and a thrilling one, to watch more fully-fledged spells flicker forth from Veth's fingertips  ---  how often had Caleb felt the same thrill that he now saw on her face within the pit of his own stomach, had he felt the same electricity that flickers from her fingers within his own hands, clasped together before they softly explode into blossoming power?  It is a heady thing, a strange thing, and yet so exciting  ---  so exciting from memory, yet equally exciting, in its own way, to see the growth within so great a friend.

        With her first spell being a Voltaic Bolt, perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the attempted Firebolt comes out as something a bit more electric  ---  whizzing from the edge of the Nicodranian beach where they've gone to practice to a spot in the sand, just through the wood Caleb had set out as targets, to turn some of the beach into...  a shimmer.  Glass?

YEARNING MEME  ---  no longer accepting! @buttonflask​ cast message:  i sleep better when you’re around.

        This, at the end of everything, is familiar  ---  when the day ends, when the night turns to dusk and whatever protective charm, simple thread or the heavier-duty dome he'd learnt to cast above them, set between them and the wild, it nearly always turns to the same image inside.  Even as they'd begun travelling with others, as they had become two of seven misfit toys somehow stuck together, Caleb and Nott's sleeping patterns hadn't ever fully changed on the road.  When the day closes, Caleb knows that that weight on the side of his legs, almost near his feet, will be the same, surprisingly easy-breathing goblin that he's become used to, the curl of her back pressed against his own, on the nights where they were so jammed they had to sleep on their sides, familiar as that of Frumpkin on his lap, the heaviness of the worn coat on his shoulders.

YEARNING MEME  ---  no longer accepting! @buttonflask​ cast message: are you... jealous?

        ❝ Was? ❞  For all that they know each other  ---  and well, ever at a level of closeness that surprised even Caleb, this far into their travels together  ---  Nott's question takes him off-guard, catches at the edge of his mind and slips.  His tone is not accusatory, not rash, but simply  ---  well, surprised, curiosity knitting its way between his eyebrows as he looks briefly up and over his shoulder, angled towards where the familiar figure sits at the alchemist's tools that take up the other section of the Xhorhaus' library.

        He had noticed Yeza leave  ---  try as he might, the usual all-consuming fog of diving deeply into his latest loaned research from Essek was not happening at quite the speed Caleb would hope for  ---  but the tinkering noises had subsided only slightly, now pausing for a beat as Nott's halfling disguise flickers over the beakers.  She did not have to put it up here, not unless she desired as much, but Caleb also did not ask about it  ---  it was not...  how he had always seen her, but neither were either of them who they had been born to be.  If it was anyone's place not to judge, surely it was his.