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It was a new day, a fresh start into a week off work after several weeks of hard work to ensure Caigo was at good terms with his new employer. It was all part of a deal between the two, enabling him to move into his admittedly tiny flat, with barely anything beyond a couch to sleep on and a small kitchen that was sufficient to make do for his poor cooking skills though, on his first day of arriving. Like many others, as he had soon gotten to know, he came here unintentionally, suddenly appearing out of thin air in the wild, jungle-like forest that seemed to cover most of this strange world they called Felarya. After he was told what made this world so special, apart from the fact that it seemed to abduct people for no reason, he seriously question whether anyone would ever intentionally come here at all. He also found out that he was really lucky to have appeared so close to the city of Negav that he could already see it from the get go, thus avoiding any contact with the giant predators that were said to roam the world beyond the borders of this city.

Upon arriving, he simply asked his way through, realizing that somehow everyone seemed to speak the same language, his language, and finally got to a market, which was supposed to offer work for newcomers who had nothing in most cases and had to work to pay any kind of stay, be it for just a night or for a permanent home in the city. Suiting his luck though, all those who would usually give work to strangers to at least ensure they could eat for a day and afford something cheap to sleep had either already closed down for the day or all their work taken care of by someone else. The last stall he arrived at, owned by an actually not too poor looking man, judging from his looks, rejected him because he was not hiring newcomers in general, knowing their usual habit of quitting soon after they had secured the job and earned enough to get through until they found something else. When he stood around, thinking about what to do though, it became evident that the man was actually lacking staff, as he was struggling to keep up preparing the fish he was selling and dealing with customers before and afterwards, which even made some people leave because the wait was too long for them. Seeing his chance in that, he quickly went to ask again, offering to take over whichever work was easier to pick up. After the owner, Jaoh´ru, agreed with a sigh, he was told to do the cashier, taking orders and telling him what to prepare in the back, then ask what to charge, while taking the foreign currency in exchange for the carefully wrapped, equally foreign fish that he handed over to their customers. After the first wave of customers was dealt with and they got some time to breathe, he got a quick breakdown of what he was to charge for the most common orders and the value of coins and bills.

After the last two hours of business passed, before the flow of customers eventually stopped and Jaoh´ru told him that they would close for the day, he got his payment for the few hours he had been working and was already on his way to leave, when the impressed owner told him to wait, “The last man who prepared the fish has been gone for a few days now and since he hadn´t told me anything, I would´ve thrown him out if he were to come back anyway. The job is vacant, you can keep it for as long as you like and, in contrast to most other jobs around here,” he gestured around the market, “payment is high enough to pay for a flat, food and to save money to make something of your days off.”

He didn´t need to be told twice; it was a surprise that things could go this smooth to begin with, since he had no passport or anything with him, nobody knew him and he also had no money that would be recognized as currency here, yet here he was, being offered a job on his first day. A job that would enable him to afford a life in this foreign world no less. The only thing that he had to agree on, was that he would be working for the first couple of weeks to make up for the bonus he got in exchange, so he could move into a flat right away without having to lend money from someone to afford the rent.

All this has been several weeks ago and he was still working for Jaoh´ru, even doing both jobs on his own on a few occasions when he had to attend to something else. ‪The other man working for him also never showed up again, they found out that he had joined some strange new cult and had never been seen or heard of soon thereafter. Now that he had been working for several weeks straight and had worked his debt off for a bit, even going as far as working overtime and helping with things that Jaoh´ru would usually do on his own, he had saved up some money to actually make something out of his week off work. On weekends, which were only one day per week for him, he had used his time to see the huge city and to find things that he would like to do once he actually got the time to. One thing that he was quite interested in, which was not really a thing to do in his first week off work though, was learning the language people used to write signs and other things with, since he had quickly noticed on his first arrival that he could understand what they were saying, but actually reading their strange writing was impossible to him.

He had initially intended to walk across high street blindly and see what he could find, even though he had done so a few times before, there was surely going to be something interesting that he could spend his day attending to. Just a week before his first day off however, had he was surprised by someone on his way to work, a short part that he actually despised taking because he had been expecting this kind of thing to happen. The path was actually just a short side-street, right between four houses that were built in a way that it had to bend slightly, allowing for a blind spot one couldn´t see before it was essencially too late. After his initial shock of being spoken to when he walked around the corner on that day, too used to going here by now to actually be cautious anymore, he glanced at a fairly normal looking young man who was holding a kind of poster in his hands.

“Hi there friend, may I have a minute of your time?” he asked. The fact that he seemed to be completely oblivious of the dubiousness of this whole scene actually stunned Caigo for a moment.

“Sure, why not,” he replied hesitantly. There was still a fairly good chance that he was going to get robbed or worse, but with his mind going numb in confusion over the whole situation, he couldn´t get himself to run.

“Oh and thanks for not running off, I know this seems strange but there´s a little dispute going on about this, so I was ordered not to advertise in public for the time being,” he explained offhandedly.

“Uha,” Caigo simply commented, not sure how to take this.

“Just take a look,” the man then said and stretched out the poster, practically waving it infront of his face.

The first thing he could recognize was that it was depicting a woman, though she was surrounded by a flurry of colors for some reason. Taking a closer look, he could see that, underneath the cryptic title, a beautiful woman, clad in what seemed like two pieces of green fabric that gave her a strangely natural touch, seemed to be flying above a forest. He then recognized that she must have indeed been caught flying, as the colorful blur surrounding her were actually her beautiful butterfly wings, carrying her through the sky. “Interested?” The solicitor asked in an awkwardly friendly tone.

“That depends on what this is actually about,” Caigo explained, failing to hide the genuine curiosity in his voice.

“There´s a new fairy-park nearby, it´s an all new thing because fairies couldn´t live in the city freely, but they are genuinely roaming those habitats freely, it´s really quite the sight,” the man explained excited, “and just between you and me, I´m being paid for being here, customers are coming in so much that nobody bothers to check on how many people I talk to either way; I can really recommend it from what I´ve seen myself. The whole argument we´re involved in right now is just some formalities. Still, one´s got to be cautious right?”

After another brief look at the half-naked woman, just brief enough not to make him feel ashamed of himself for gawking at her, he agreed that he should probably go and see it for himself, even though the whole advertising for this attraction seemed fishy to him. With the directions to get there, the young man sent him off, wished him a nice day and continued to wait for more people to pass by. Caigo was pleasantly relieved by the fact that the directions he had received were actually quite short, though those soon turned out to be merely the directions for another alleyway, this time however, there was a poster with arrows on it, plastered onto the wall of one of the houses. Glancing around briefly to find that nobody was watching him, he took a deep breath, then he proceeded to follow the bill´s directions through the narrow street. Strangely enough, he found that the posters directing him through here actually made sense in the context he had been given, but he still couldn´t help but worry about losing his kidneys or worse, now that they actually had him following some lose directions anyone could´ve made up to lure him somewhere.

After he was led into a tiny street between two houses by the arrows that allegedly led one to the park, which continued to gradually grow narrower with every inevitable turn he took, he got more and more cautious, eventually glancing around corners before he took them to see if someone was lurking around them to rob him. Soon enough though, a final turn gave way to a seemingly open space, greeting him with bright light shining right into the last short stretch of the still narrow street that was by now hardly more than just a paved path winding between buildings. Stepping out into the open, he couldn´t believe his eyes as he looked on to find a genuinely large building with two vast, high domes made of glass to let the sun shine freely inside. Outside, he also found larger banners with the different poster designs he had seen before, complete with presumably the same writing on them and the same, content looking fairies glancing at him as if they were inviting him to come see them. Surprisingly, in a way at least, the place was actually filled with quite a lot of people even though he had not seen a single soul on his way here, at least not after he had begun to follow the route the bills had told him to take. Perhaps he was just the only one around who knew his way around the city this poorly and everyone else seemed to take paths that were less prone to invite shady people to rob you on them. It even seemed somewhat plausible to him that there were multiple people advertising this sight and that each of them had a different route that they led people onto. Walking past groups of people and couples, he approached the entrance, checking what had to be the price list, since the only thing he could barely read from what Jaoh´ru had taught him for work were numbers. Identifying what must have been the basic price for a single person, assuming that the slightly lower price for what must be a single person as well was for special guests of some sort, like kids or the very rarely seen older people, he was pleasantly surprised to see a price that seemed fairly low to him, probably thanks to the visible demand on the visitor side and the fact that, from what he expected to find inside, the number of personnel working inside was completely independent on the number of visitors, easily putting a higher number of people visiting for less over a smaller audience paying a higher price. On the other hand, with how secretive this whole place seemed to be towards the general public, they might as well be going after some more shady businesses behind closed doors, which might as well be the reason for the trouble they were having with the government of the city.

Lining up in a queue that was thankfully shortening for the moment, he found himself standing behind a couple of nekos, the male one with rather short, black fur, dressed in long jeans and a green shirt, and his female companion in a cute pair of shorts and a blue top over her dark, brown fur. Nekos, much like any other humanoid species inhabiting this city, were still something he had yet to get used to, since they were, if anything, beings of fiction and wonder in his home world. It was thus, much to his embarrassment, that he found himself staring at the female´s tail swishing from side to side excitedly, especially since he had never really been this close to one other than when he passed by one or when they were customers, who, much to his surprise actually, seemed to be his most frequent customers. It was something he had somewhat expected when he first realized that they actually existed here, but found that it would be an awful thing to expect, just because the respective animals he knew seemed to prefer the same food.

Over his staring, he got lost in his own thoughts as he still watched the tail, even following it with his eyes a bit, before a voice that seemed to address him interrupted, then made him look up in a mixture of surprise and shame when he realized that it was the female nekos voice. “You´re still new, aren´t you,” she said chuckling. Despite her seemingly taking it lightly, his glance raised over at her companion to see if he did the same and thankfully, he too seemed to have a slight grin on his face.

“I´m sorry, I didn´t mean to stare,” Caigo tried to explain himself as he lowered his head slightly, careful not to look towards either of their tails.

“Don´t worry, it´s alright,” the male soothed him. It seemed as though he had read his reaction quite perfectly and recognized the right way to react. Perhaps this was not the first time they had run into a situation like this either.

“You can touch it if you want to,” the female offered, swishing her long, fluffy tail in his direction suggestively whilst smiling encouragingly.

With slight hesitation and another brief glance towards her companion, who didn´t seem to be upset about her offer, he reached for her tail, forming a kind of tunnel for it to pass through in between his fingers, careful only to touch her fur, before she went ahead and pulled it all the way through. It was, to be quite honest, not much different from touching a cat´s tail, yet he knew that it was a kind offer coming from her after he had arguably ogled her before.

“Thanks, it´s pretty soft,” he said awkwardly “So, you´re also here to see the fairies?”

“Yeah, my sister and I have finally settled on going,” the male neko clarified their relation casually, most likely because he had noticed how uneasy the uncertainty weighted on Caigo, “It might sound strange to you, but before we first came here, we got to experience a fairy in the wild first hand, it´s pure chance that we´re still alive. So… We´ve been a bit afraid of coming here when we first came across someone promoting it, even though these can´t harm you.”

“These? What do you mean?” Caigo asked baffled. He might have seen as few fairies in his home world as he had seen nekos, but from all he knew through tales, fairytales, they were tiny, mythical creatures that could grant your wishes at best, but would never harm you.

Before either of the two cat people could answer, they were kindly called over by the cashier who didn´t want to let the people in line after them wait longer than they had to. They quickly hurried to pick up their tickets and entered the large building through an entrance that eventually took a turn to prevent people outside from seeing what´s inside without buying a ticket. Briefly looking after them, Caigo too bought his ticket, unsurprisingly for the slightly higher of the two prices he had identified before, then he followed the two nekos lead into the building. To his surprise, they were actually waiting for him around the corner, “We thought we could go together, since it´s probably a better experience if you know some more about them, right?” the girl explained.

“What´s your name by the way? I´m Dicque and this is Aija,” her brother introduced them simply.

“I´m Caigo, nice to meet you,” he responded. Not wanting to be rude, since he was more or less being invited, he offered his hand to shake hands as usual in his world. Smiling at each other briefly, the nekos took turns shaking his hand, clearly amused by this apparently not unknown, but seemingly unusual interaction.

“So, you said fairies are actually dangerous, how come?” Caigo picked up the topic again.

“The thing is, fairies are predators, like every other humanoid, so they prey on anything small enough to devour, including humans, nekos, you name it. The special thing about them is that almost all of them can use magic to alter the size of their prey, so it doesn´t matter how tall you are, a fairy could always have you for dinner,” Dicque explained matter-of-factly.

“That sounds incredibly dangerous, what are they doing in the city then?” Caigo asked concerned.

“Don´t worry, the city is protected by magic. Any fairy or giant trying to get in here would usually never be able to get in here, so these must be fairies that can´t actually use magic,” Aija added to calm him down, just as they passed by a small stall, selling some sort of food in handy paper bags.

The group then went silent, as they left the dimly lit entrance, entering the vast, purposefully natural looking dome that was the first habitat. The path ahead was basically covered by a glass tube that kept people from getting into the habitat and the fairies from getting out, while the latter were free to roam the vast space that lay just past the thick layer of glass. When they dared to look out onto the vast plain that was the first habitat, they gazed upon a huge, open patch of grass, framed by rocks, imitating mountains up to the very top of the glass dome, with a few trees planted here and there at the far end of the area, the habitat seemingly stretching out for what felt like more space than the entire building covered from the outside. They immediately caught well over a dozen fairies of all kinds of different skin colors on either side of the path, dancing about in the air, dashing after each other playfully and greeting newcomers. It now also became quite clear that they were all of different sizes, ranging from a very puny five inches tall up to the height of a human too, which seemed strange to Caigo on second thought, since from what he knew, he would´ve never imagined them to even get to a height close to that of a human. Some of the fairies were also hovering near the glass to interact with the visitors who could throw in the food they had previously bought at the entrance through hatches on both sides of the path. Almost on cue, a fairy popped up on the other side of the glass when they approached it a bit closer, startling the two nekos for a moment, but leaving Caigo in awe at the sight of the tiny red-head with waist-long hair, also sporting the same green two-piece all the others seemed to wear. Figuring her first and foremost intention, Aija raised her shoulders and gave her a sorry look, signaling her that none of them had bought food for them. The fairy pouted for a moment, but then she flew a quick loop in front of them, waved them to say goodbye and darted off after a friend who had just passed by them.

The sight of those beautiful beings flying and gliding so elegantly, yet playfully and with seemingly no effort filled all three of them, much like any other visitor, with awe. Even with the one that had come up to meet them directly gone now, there was more than enough to see with the fairies showcasing a seemingly unnatural amount of playfulness. To Caigo it almost felt like this could be something most fairies had in common, as a part of the very nature of their species, which was, in a way, a bit frightening, if one were to think about how powerful they really had to be to maintain the survival of their species. Apart from the colorful fairies of different sizes dancing and playing up in the air, there were also a few who didn´t seem to do anything in particular, rather, they were laying on branches of trees or on the ground below them, resting against the trunks or laying down in the grass, too far for most people to notice them, at the far end of the habitat. One of them stuck out to Caigo though, as he noticed that she did seem to be busy with something. Upon more focused inspection, it seemed as though the purple-skinned blonde was working on something at her ankle, which had some kind of tiny, black box strapped to it. Only then did he realize that all of the fairies actually seemed to have such a device strapped to them, their sizes adjusted to that of the fairy to make sure that they couldn´t fall off. Obviously, it was quite hard for him to even tell the purpose of those, but from what he could make out, she seemed to be trying to get it off of her, though there was really no telling as to why. Being distracted from the fairies that were supposed to be the main attraction for once, he was actually hoping for her success, mainly out of curiosity to see what would happen, if anything would happen at all. Moments later, he could swear he saw a hint of her facial expression lighting up, even if she was actually too far away to tell, quickly followed by evidence as she held the mysterious, black box up triumphantly. Caigo quietly congratulated her on her success, his attention still fully on her, in eager anticipation of something neither of them could see coming. In a matter of moments, the fairies eyes went from a joyful expression to one of shock, before she simply fell over to the side, her entire body writhing in pain as it seemed.

The sudden events going on at the back end of the habitat left Caigo speechless in shock and confusion, unable to express anything while he had to watch on as a group of four men, dressed in green uniforms, ran towards the fairy, picked her up and carried her out of the scene, presumably into their medical department. Whatever he had just seen, it almost seemed like the removal of the box left the fairy in great pain, though to what extend and, more importantly, why, was beyond him. By the time he even managed to cast his glance off of the small group of fairies at the trees, who had been staring at the scene just like him, the personnel had already vanished and so did any sign of that particular fairy ever being there. When he turned to look at Aija, who was still ogling the fairies with pure innocent wonder, he was shocked to see that she had simply overlooked such an event, even though he was certain that he was the only one who had seen it happening, otherwise there would´ve probably been an uproar amongst the onlookers by now. Just in that moment, she noticed him looking at her, his glance angled downwards a little as he was a bit taller than her, and looked him in the eyes with hers almost sparkling with excitement, “Isn´t this great?” she asked joyfully. Through her own excitement, she was completely oblivious, not only to what had happened in the same habitat they both had been watching the entire time, but also of his own emotions in that very moment, which he was sure were showing quite bluntly in his face.

Not wanting to ruin the moment for her and perhaps hoping that it was all just his imagination screwing with him, he just played along and gave her the best smile he could muster at the moment, “You´re right, it seems so peaceful,” he said without realizing what he was subconsciously playing at until he had said it. Seeing how her eyes were practically glued to the fairies dancing about, just like her brother´s as he realized when he briefly glanced over at him, he decided to just forget about it as good as he could; the fairy was probably in good hands and would be perfectly fine soon enough. Hopefully. They must have spent at least another two hours watching the fairies of the first habitat, laughing and smiling at their ever so sweet antics, while occasionally enjoying the naturally elusive sight of one of them being close up, without having to fear for their lives, that is, whenever someone close to them presented a full bag of fairy snacks to give to them. Eventually, they managed to break loose from the iron grip the “show” had over them, allowing them to slowly move on to the second habitat just down the long, single path that the tunnel dictated, though not without still constantly watching the fairies as they went.

The transition towards the second habitat was, much like the well maintained first habitat, very artfully made to make the visitor feel like they were actually in a part of the world naturally inhabited by fairies, despite the glass tube surrounding them. As the tube approached the end of the habitat, it seemed like it just cut its way right through the ‪rocky surface of the artificial mountains that separated the habitats from each other. The stretch was relatively short, but still enough to briefly cut off most of the sunlight from outside, coming in from both ends of the tunnel, briefly blinding them as they entered the second habitat and allowing them to take in the entire scenery at its full glory at once. While the first one was a notably open space of grass-land with very few trees at its far end, the second one had a large pond with crystal clear water in it, followed by a patch of green grass around it, except for an intentionally ‪rocky patch on its left side to add some diversity to the scenery. After a couple of meters, the green patch gave way to a light forest that was purposefully kept just dense enough to look natural, but to still allow the visitors to see the fairies resting on the branches of the artificial forest, as long as they were not resting in their crowns. Just like before, fairies were playing games and just dancing through the air with each other. It felt like they were actually being outnumbered by the first habitat, though it was hard to tell whether they were just resting somewhere they couldn´t be seen or if it was just because the second habitat was only being filled with new fairies after the first one had reached its capacity; it was not something they could know as a mere guest. The group of three was once again paralyzed by the sight, watching them enjoy themselves and smiling and laughing with them. When Caigo did look around, however, he noticed that some of the other visitors, primarily men at that, were giving the female fairies some quite obvious looks that gave away the reason for their visit to anyone who would pay attention to it.

“God these guys are ogling them like they are objects,” Caigo complained in annoyance, “Why did they have to dress them up like this in the first place? It´s no wonder people would get weird ideas like this.”

“Actually…” Aija began, unsure how to convey it without throwing Caigo off too much, “most people living outside of Negav naturally wouldn´t dress at all. It´s kind of a human thing, you know?”

“Are you serious?” Caigo asked in disbelieve, glancing out at the habitat and imagining all those fairies dancing around naked.

“I believe they have to at least wear these so they won´t offend human visitors, or attract worse than those guys,” Dicque said, now too frowning at their obscene intentions, “the two of us also had to accustom to it, we didn´t exactly wear clothes to cover our nudity but to suit hunting and stealth purposes, people deemed that inappropriate so we had to adapt. Out there, nobody´s getting offended by anyone who´s not wearing any. It´s just a human thing, really,” he confirmed in a matter-of-factly manner.

“I guess so…” Caigo agreed hesitantly. He did understand his reasoning, but it was still pretty difficult to wrap his mind around it.

They stayed and tried to enjoy the view for a few more minutes, but the thought of what was at least imaginarily going on around them somewhat killed the mood, so they eventually decided that it was time to leave. Walking through the glass tube until they reached a second tunnel that once again led them into one of ‪the rock walls that framed the habitats, they left the second and last one behind, letting the relative darkness of the tunnel engulf them, before they found themselves at the end of the park and back out on the other side of the open space that was surrounding the park. In contrary to his previous perception, Caigo now realized that the whole park was actually built into the center of a pretty vast area for lower tier standarts that was at least paved, but that would definitely be up for further expansion of the park, once they had made enough profit to afford the expansion itself and the fairies to accommodate new habitats.

“So, I guess that´s it,” Dicque stated with a glance at his sister.

“Jup, it was fun for as long as it lasted, wasn´t it?” Aija asked. She briefly looked up at her brother, but then she just smiled at Caigo, waiting for his response.

“Sure, it was,” he agreed without hesitation, “Judging from the space they have left to build on out here, they will probably expend some time, so it´s worth coming back.”

“Yeah, it would be funny if we met again when we came back, wouldn´t it?” Dicque asked, again glancing at his sister.

“Uhm, yes. You´re still new, aren´t you? Do you know how to get home from here?” Aija asked. Caigo didn´t quite get what was going on, but she was giving him a strange look now, almost as if she was a little desperate in a way.

“Actually, I meant to remember how I got here, but I must admit I doubt that I´ll find my way that easily,” he admitted embarrassed.

“I-We can help you get home then, where do you live?” Aija asked quickly, seemingly almost forgetting that she was with her brother for a second.

“I honestly don´t know. I know more or less what the name looks like, but I can´t read it. If you could take me towards the south-eastern gate I´ll be fine though,” he suggested a bit helpless.

“Oh, that´s easy, we live nearby actually,” Aija said, visibly struggling to contain herself.

“May I follow you then?” Caigo asked jokingly.

“Hehe, sure you can,” Aija agreed with a giggle.

With that, they were on their way, with the two nekos initially leading the group of three, but by the time the first pedestrian came their way and Aija had to let him past them, she didn´t catch up to her brother again but instead proceeded to walk next to Caigo.

“So, you´re new, but when did you come here?” She asked intrigued.

“It´s been exactly 9 weeks actually, that´s been the condition my boss had set when he first gave me the money I needed to afford my flat. This is the first week I was allowed to take off,” he explained.

“Oh so you´ve already got a job too?” She asked in amazement. It never occurred to him that it was indeed a rarity to get work that quickly in this city, especially when people were able to immediately direct him towards somewhere people were looking for newcomers to work for them.

“I told you it´s nothing special,” Dicque briefly chimed in from in front of them, smirking to himself.

“So you don´t have one?” Caigo asked, trying to sound as neutral about it as possible.

“No,” she admitted in embarrassment, “Dicque is working as a shop assistant, he´s a prodigy, but I can´t seem to find work that I´m good at.”

“I´m not a prodigy, you´re just overly clumsy, that´s what makes you unreliable,” her brother commented before he left them to talk among themselves again.

“Anyway… where do you two come from? You said you´ve come here from somewhere too, didn´t you?” Caigo changed the subject, trying to spare her further embarrassment.

“Oh we´ve always been in Felarya, but we decided to live in Negav when our tribe was pretty much wiped out by a fairy. We don´t know how many made it out, but we were sure that the tribe would have to disband so we left to live here, rather than trying to find shelter in another tribe. We weren´t particularly hated, but if members of foreign tribes just show up, some tribes tend to be a bit hostile, you know?” Aija explained. She hung her head a little when she thought about their past, indicating that this was perhaps not the right thing to talk about after all.

“That sounds terrifying after what you´ve told me about fairies. I basically just woke up here, just imagine if I had walked into one by chance, I would´ve assumed they were some friendly creatures living in the forest, haha,” he said for a lack of a better topic to talk about.

“True,” she said with a slight smile. It seemed like neither of them could think of anything in particular to talk about and instead fell into an awkward silence. The longer it went on, the more Caigo´s thoughts drifted off though, away from the here and now and back to the fairy he had been watching in the first habitat. However much he tried to tell himself that everything was alright, wouldn´t the other fairies seem less worried, because they´d know at least to some extend what was going on? Yet they seemed utterly shocked and terrified, at least those who witnessed the event. With that thought, he settled on visiting the park again the next day, if only to check if the fairy was back inside the park or not, even if the latter wouldn´t mean much after just one day. Time seemed to have flown on their way back, as they had soon reached the near vicinity of the south-eastern gate of the city, where they only had to walk for another block until they stopped.

“This is our place,” Dicque pointed out, pointing up at a window at the left in the second story of the building, “Do you find your way from here or should we come with you?”

“I think I´ll find my way, thanks for the help,” Caigo said after he looked around briefly, recognizing his location when he saw a nearby café that had stuck out to him before.

“Guess this is goodbye then,” Dicque said to send him off, “If you need something, feel free to pay us a visit.”

“Sure, I will,” Caigo answered. Having found someone to call a friend in this foreign city might indeed prove helpful some time, especially since they seemed to know at least a bit more about the city than he did.

Meanwhile, Aija seemed awkwardly silent still, hesitant and perhaps unsure about what to say. Figuring what was going on though, Dicque gave her a slight, symbolic push to the back, which she seemed to use as a kind of excuse to stumble forward, towards Caigo. When she was basically she a step away from him, she basically fell into a hug to stop her fall, “Come visit some time, ok?”

“Sure,” Caigo answered in surprise, looking over at a grinning Dicque before hugging her back.

**

On the next day, Caigo went to visit the park again, though this time, he took the direct way Dicque had showed him yesterday. This way, he did not only reach his destination earlier, but he was also forced to walk past Aija´s and Dicque´s place. He was not entirely sure why he took this for an upside, really, but he felt awkward about asking her to tag along, though on the other hand he felt that if she just so happened to be on her window and spot him walking by, she´d ask where he was heading and quite surely chose to follow him, after all, this was almost guaranteed to prove interesting. It was naturally nothing he could be certain about, it was actually hard to even call it a feeling in his guts, more like a wish at best, but he was set on sniffing about the place and trying to find something, were the fairy to still be gone. Of course, the hope of Aija glancing out of her window the moment he came by, or the minutes he spent waiting under the window Dicque had showed him yesterday, trying to act as if this was part of some kind of business he had to get done here, proofed to be fruitless effort and so he left to go on his own, telling himself that he might be better off finding out that there´s nothing to worry about if he were alone, rather than making a fool out of himself or dragging her into unnecessary danger.

Once there, he first began to walk around the front side of the building, trying to find some kind of second entrance for employees, which was surprisingly easy to find, though on second thought there was not really a reason to hide it in the first place, was there? Figuring that he should have actually entered and checked on the fairy first thing, he then went to stand in line at the entrance, which took him remarkably little time compared to the previous day, probably still thanks to the rather early time of day. Once inside, he made sure to not look like he was in a hurry when he went to stand at the exact same spot as last time, from where he was able to see the whole event perfectly. Said spot was, obviously, taken this time, so he went with standing next to the young man and his family occupying it right now. His view was luckily still pretty much the same from there, so he could easily see far enough back into the habitat to find the spot that the purple-skinned fairy had been sitting in. Not quite to his surprise, he couldn´t find her though, so he glanced around, trying to find her elsewhere, starting with the trees nearby and continuing on with the remainder of the habitat, but to no avail.

No matter where he looked, he didn´t see her, just two fairies who looked similar at first glance, but who he could tell weren´t her upon closer inspection. Time passed as his search became increasingly frantic, until he eventually realized its futility and stopped all together. Reluctantly, he decided to go back towards the entrance and buy a bag of fairy snacks, which were actually almost as expensive as the ticket price to begin with. If he wasn´t able to see her, perhaps letting his mind drift for a bit while being a little closer to the fairies would get him some good idea on what to do. He would´ve liked to just ask them, clearly they would know how everyone else was doing, but the glass was so thick, it muffled them almost inaudibly silent on their side. Moving over to a quieter spot near the end of the first habitat, Caigo stood in front of the glass, the small bag of snacks pressed against his body as to not make it too obvious, waiting for a fairy to show up. After a moment, he noticed much to his content that a single fairy seemed to be flying towards him intently. One was more than enough to inspire him, if anything, especially since having them swarming around him would probably only distract him. What eventually presented itself in front of him was a beautiful, butterfly-winged girl, with wings colored in shades of blue and green, matching green hair and amber eyes, giving him a sweet smile. She simply hovered on the other side of the glass, a hatch between them to allow for ‪the offering of food in exchange for the fairies presence. When he pulled the hatch open and was about to drop in a few fairy snacks, he suddenly felt some resistance on the other side, which he answered by pulling a little harder, figuring that the construction might just not be a perfect fit.

What escaped the hatch though, before his forceful opening cut it off, was what he swore to be a single word, “Help”. Dazzled, confused and perhaps a bit hopeful, he pushed the hatch back slightly, as an indicator that he had heard the voice, then he saw the fairy on the other side move her lips again, ”I need your help,” she said clearly this time. The sentence hit him like a truck. It was this slight hint of something going on that he had been sensing, or perhaps hoping for, this whole time since he had watched the incident yesterday and now he had his own, personal evidence right before him. The fairy´s smile didn´t change one bit, but he didn´t care, since her voice seemed as sincere and serious as he would´ve imagined it to be, were she to ask him for help.

“Act like we´re chatting about something cheerful,” she commanded with her unchanged, sweet smile,” you´ve seen it, haven´t you? Fionee´s death.”

So she really was dead? He´s had this strange feeling this whole time, but he tried so hard to tell himself that she´d be alright in the hands of the park that he eventually ended up believing it. “She actually died?” he asked to confirm his thought while struggling to fake a dumb smile.

“Her last words were that she felt magic again, that must´ve also been what killed her afterwards,” she explained simply, before she went on, “You´re the only one who´s seen it, you´re the only one who´d help us.”

“Is it that bad living in here?” He asked, honestly wondering if having food brought to you for free was something they would complain about.

“We are forced to always act cheerful, if we don´t earn food from visitors we practically starve. And as long as we wear these things around our ankles we can´t use magic, if we take them off we die. Besides, this space is too little for this many of us, we want real freedom, not just a little space we could never escape,” she explained in a bitter voice, her smile even fading for a moment before she regained her grip of herself.

“I will try,” he said as he dropped a hand full of snacks into the hatch, “but I have to figure something out first.”

With that, he emptied the entire bag into the hatch, nodded at the fairy with a last, genuine smile then he turned and left while she tried to hold up all the food with both hands, trying to share it with the others who were less lucky than her. When he left, he took another quick look at the employee´s entrance to make sure that there was a way to get in there without necessarily using the door. Afterwards, he took the same way back towards his home as he had done before, passing by Aija´s home, this time without looking up, headed for the tiny restaurant cramped between some clothing store and a shop that offered some kind of service he still failed to recognize, though he could tell that it did seem something professional just from the visual impression of the shop. Caigo simply ordered what he usually did when he was here, which the waitress had recently stopped reading out for him since he had given up on trying to pronounce it the way she did. Then he went back to thinking things through, trying to imagine possible risks and outcomes and asking himself whether he was ready to go this far after all. There was a chance of not getting caught, sure, but that was next to nonexistent. Anything else would probably lead to him paying a large fine he would never be able to pay off in this life, or even a sentence to live however long in prison for trespassing and whatever crime freeing a sentient being would prove to be. Ultimately, he figured that he couldn´t possibly let this slide and if he was the only witness, perhaps it was fate after all.

On the other hand, gathering more information might prove to be quite helpful, but then again he had no other information to retrieve from anywhere. Had the fairy known anything, he was certain she would´ve told him and even if she didn´t, going back might raise unwanted attention and perhaps even prove to make things more difficult if the people running the park were to keep an eye on him. It was ultimately useless to try and think things through more, since the number of variables, even those that he could count, was too large to allow for a real plan in the first place. There was only one shot, but that shot was going to be one that was bound to be decided solely by his own luck. With that in mind, he slowly finished his dinner while he watched people pass by on the other side of the restaurant´s front window, just like the sun slowly began to descend and the day passed by, slowly but surely giving in to the night.

Now filled with newfound determination, he strode right back down high street and towards Aija´s and Dicque´s place, looked up at the window and, when he found no one looking out, rang the doorbell that he assumed was theirs, then he waited for a response. Moments turned into seconds, then into minutes and nobody answered. Then the door opened, revealing a young, somewhat stressed out seeming woman with a basket filled with laundry, looking at him with a face that made it quite evident that she was not having the most pleasant of times, but still tried to be as friendly as possible.

“Are you the one who rang?” She asked, making him wonder if he should lie or not.

“Uhm, yes, but it seems like I rang the wrong door, sorry,” Caigo apologized but was quickly cut off.

“No, no, it´s the right place, I´ll let you in,” she said with a sigh, “That girl is incredible, they´ve been living here for so long, but whenever she´s alone she freaks out when someone rings the door, same problem when she tries to get back in, so I´ve got a key in my flat to let her in…”

“Sorry for the trouble, I didn´t mean to disturb you,” he apologized again.

“Oh it´s fine, I was just heading upstairs anyway,” the neighbor explained briefly, “Honestly, it´s more astounding than annoying that she still didn´t get used to almost anything at this point. It´s a bit of a break from taking care of my children, they still keep me up every single night, so I may seem a bit grumpy.”

Once on the second floor, she briefly headed for the door opposite to Havema´s, opening it to let the frantic screaming of her children out, which she only answered with a slight sigh. After putting down the basket she was holding in the middle of the narrow hallway, she picked up a single key from behind the door, then she closed her door again to cut the noise of the crying babies off, for the most part at least, and headed for the other door, Caigo following right behind her. As the key entered the lock, he could swear he heard something from inside the apartment, but the moment it was all the way in and started turning, everything fell quiet as the neighbor carefully opened the door.

“Precaution, you never know how she reacts when you just open the door when she doesn´t expect anyone,” she whispered while she slowly pushed the door open and carefully glanced through the crack as it broadened bit by bit.

All this seemed pretty ridiculous to Caigo, he actually presumed that she might as well be out right now, perhaps picking up her brother at work or doing some grocery shopping, but after the door had fully opened, he had to blink twice to make sure he wasn´t imagining things. Across a floor covered in pillows, shattered glass and some spilled juice, they spotted a pair of shivering, furry ears behind the sofa.

“Will you be ok?” the neighbor asked in a considerably serious tone.

“Yeah, thanks for the help again,” Caigo thanked her before he cautiously approached the sofa. He meanwhile heard the door shut behind him, making the ears twitch slightly in recognition of the sound, making Aija look up over the sofa to see if the coast was clear.

As she spotted Caigo, her eyes lit up with joy, before she realized what she had just done to their home a few minutes ago, fearing the worst when the shrill tone of the doorbell scared her to death. He smiled silently to himself, picked up the pillows as he crossed the corridor, made sure not to step into the broken glass and put them back onto the sofa, then he looked for the kitchen and searched for a dustpan and a paper towel to clean up the broken glass. Once done, he came to pick up the cowering neko girl behind the sofa by offering her a hand, “is something the matter?” he asked with a glance towards the door. Aija was about to answer when she noticed that everything was cleaned up again, not a sign of what had happened before was left and her eyes lit up once more.

“Nothing,” she said with a giggle, “Why are you here though?”

“I need help with something, but I think that´s nothing you´d want to be involved in,” Caigo explained cryptically.

“What is it?” Aija asked. It was quite obvious that trying not to mention the fact that what he intended to do was a crime only peaked her interest more.

He then proceeded to explain what he had seen the day before, how he tried not to think about it too much and how it turned out that the worst case was indeed what had happened. He also told her that the fairy he had talked to said that they wanted nothing but to escape this place, but that they depended on someone from outside to help them do so.

“I want to help!” Aija exclaimed after he barely finished explaining the situation.

“But it´s probably dangerous and illegal! I don´t mean to offend but I was going to ask your brother for advice and maybe some tips on who´d be with me, I don´t want to drag you into this,” Caigo explained. He would´ve never admitted it now that Dicque wasn´t even here, but he had silently hoped that he would´ve insisted on coming as much as she did, but dragging her into this just didn´t feel right to him, let alone the fact that she might actually be a threat to the whole thing were she really as clumsy as her brother had said before.

“If you go I´ll go too,” she said as she put on a pouty face.

“You… even if I wouldn´t have a problem with you coming along, how would I explain that to your brother?” Caigo asked, trying to find a way out of this.

“Forget about him, he´ll just find out about it later when we´re done so he can´t do anything about it anyway,” Aija said. This statement actually surprised him quite a bit, she seemed to have quite the strange idea of responsibility.

Eventually realizing that there was not really a way for him to talk her out of it if she wanted to help, he sighed and agreed to take her with him, “Alright, but you have to be careful, we don´t want to get caught, I´ll hold myself responsible for anything that happens to you.”

“Yeah! Let´s get going then,” she urged him on, clearly indicating that she stopped listening after the first word he said was basically a “yes”.

The two of them thus left her flat, exited the building and walked down the street until they had to take their first turn towards the fairy park. The streets were remarkably empty considering that it was barely past nightfall and the night was still pleasantly warm, almost welcoming people to go outside. Since they actually had a bit of walking ahead of them, Caigo eventually couldn´t hold down his curiosity and tried to dig deeper, “don´t you think your big brother will be mad about you just leaving without him knowing?”

“Little,” she said simply, clearly not answering his question.

“What do you mean, “little”? I´d probably be pretty worried,” Caigo explained, briefly imagining himself in his shoes.

“He´s my little brother,” Aija expanded on what she had said before, “why did you think he´s the older one?”

“I don´t know to be honest,” Caigo said when he realized that neither of them had ever said anything about their age. He had simply assumed that he was the older one because he appeared to be the one who she relied on, not the other way around, “Well it´s hard to tell since you two look like you´re almost the same age.”

“How does that even matter? We´re both grown up and I already was when he was born,” she pointed out. That implication made it fairly clear that neither of the two had an idea of what the other was talking about; Caigo was looking at her as if she was a mad man, while her face gave him a pretty good idea of how stupid she thought he was right then.

“Aren´t you aging?” Caigo asked baffled after a while.

“What´s that?” she asked in a genuinely clueless tone.

“When you get older and start to get weaker and wrinkly,” Caigo pointed out, receiving the same look as before “humans usually get grey hair and such when they have aged a lot.”

“Oh, I´ve seen that before. I think only people from outside of Felarya get that,” Aija pointed out. She had seen a man with grey hair before, but thought that was some weird kind of hairstyle from a world where grey could be used as camouflage, or perhaps a disease, the whole concept of “aging” was new to her, “What happens when you do this aging thing?”

“Your body stops reproducing cells properly and you slowly die, that´s what we call a natural death, since everyone ages to the point where they have to inevitably die,” it appeared strange to him that she seemingly didn´t know about this, though with her apparently not aging, it seemed to make sense that she didn´t know in a way.

“That sounds pretty scary!” she exclaimed. She couldn´t quite imagine how it was supposed to work, she didn´t know what cells were for that matter, but just dying inevitably without being able to do something about it sounded terrifying to her.

“It´s natural to us so people don´t think about it too much,” Caigo tried soothing her, but had visibly little success with it. Her mood soon changed though, when they arrived at the park again. Since it didn´t really provide any light inside that would allow for later visitor, its routine was dictated by daytime, thus it had already been closed for a while. The entire place was only lit by a few lanterns nearby, the building itself was mostly covered in darkness though, as the light of the streetlights barely reached it and those that were built on the place itself were probably just meant to illuminate the area enough to let people know it´s not empty space. On the other hand, the dim lighting gave the scene a somewhat romantic feeling, despite their criminal intentions.

Description
It was a new day, a fresh start into a week off work after several weeks of hard work to ensure Caigo was at good terms with his new employer. It was all part of a deal between the two, enabling him to move into his admittedly tiny flat, with barely anything beyond a couch to sleep on and a small kitchen that was sufficient to make do for his poor cooking skills though, on his first day of arriving. Like many others, as he had soon gotten to know, he came here unintentionally, suddenly appearing out of thin air in the wild, jungle-like forest that seemed to cover most of this strange world they called Felarya. After he was told what made this world so special, apart from the fact that it seemed to abduct people for no reason, he seriously question whether anyone would ever intentionally come here at all. He also found out that he was really lucky to have appeared so close to the city of Negav that he could already see it from the get go, thus avoiding any contact with the giant predators that were said to roam the world beyond the borders of this city.

Upon arriving, he simply asked his way through, realizing that somehow everyone seemed to speak the same language, his language, and finally got to a market, which was supposed to offer work for newcomers who had nothing in most cases and had to work to pay any kind of stay, be it for just a night or for a permanent home in the city. Suiting his luck though, all those who would usually give work to strangers to at least ensure they could eat for a day and afford something cheap to sleep had either already closed down for the day or all their work taken care of by someone else. The last stall he arrived at, owned by an actually not too poor looking man, judging from his looks, rejected him because he was not hiring newcomers in general, knowing their usual habit of quitting soon after they had secured the job and earned enough to get through until they found something else. When he stood around, thinking about what to do though, it became evident that the man was actually lacking staff, as he was struggling to keep up preparing the fish he was selling and dealing with customers before and afterwards, which even made some people leave because the wait was too long for them. Seeing his chance in that, he quickly went to ask again, offering to take over whichever work was easier to pick up. After the owner, Jaoh´ru, agreed with a sigh, he was told to do the cashier, taking orders and telling him what to prepare in the back, then ask what to charge, while taking the foreign currency in exchange for the carefully wrapped, equally foreign fish that he handed over to their customers. After the first wave of customers was dealt with and they got some time to breathe, he got a quick breakdown of what he was to charge for the most common orders and the value of coins and bills.

After the last two hours of business passed, before the flow of customers eventually stopped and Jaoh´ru told him that they would close for the day, he got his payment for the few hours he had been working and was already on his way to leave, when the impressed owner told him to wait, “The last man who prepared the fish has been gone for a few days now and since he hadn´t told me anything, I would´ve thrown him out if he were to come back anyway. The job is vacant, you can keep it for as long as you like and, in contrast to most other jobs around here,” he gestured around the market, “payment is high enough to pay for a flat, food and to save money to make something of your days off.”

He didn´t need to be told twice; it was a surprise that things could go this smooth to begin with, since he had no passport or anything with him, nobody knew him and he also had no money that would be recognized as currency here, yet here he was, being offered a job on his first day. A job that would enable him to afford a life in this foreign world no less. The only thing that he had to agree on, was that he would be working for the first couple of weeks to make up for the bonus he got in exchange, so he could move into a flat right away without having to lend money from someone to afford the rent.

All this has been several weeks ago and he was still working for Jaoh´ru, even doing both jobs on his own on a few occasions when he had to attend to something else. ‪The other man working for him also never showed up again, they found out that he had joined some strange new cult and had never been seen or heard of soon thereafter. Now that he had been working for several weeks straight and had worked his debt off for a bit, even going as far as working overtime and helping with things that Jaoh´ru would usually do on his own, he had saved up some money to actually make something out of his week off work. On weekends, which were only one day per week for him, he had used his time to see the huge city and to find things that he would like to do once he actually got the time to. One thing that he was quite interested in, which was not really a thing to do in his first week off work though, was learning the language people used to write signs and other things with, since he had quickly noticed on his first arrival that he could understand what they were saying, but actually reading their strange writing was impossible to him.

He had initially intended to walk across high street blindly and see what he could find, even though he had done so a few times before, there was surely going to be something interesting that he could spend his day attending to. Just a week before his first day off however, had he was surprised by someone on his way to work, a short part that he actually despised taking because he had been expecting this kind of thing to happen. The path was actually just a short side-street, right between four houses that were built in a way that it had to bend slightly, allowing for a blind spot one couldn´t see before it was essencially too late. After his initial shock of being spoken to when he walked around the corner on that day, too used to going here by now to actually be cautious anymore, he glanced at a fairly normal looking young man who was holding a kind of poster in his hands.

“Hi there friend, may I have a minute of your time?” he asked. The fact that he seemed to be completely oblivious of the dubiousness of this whole scene actually stunned Caigo for a moment.

“Sure, why not,” he replied hesitantly. There was still a fairly good chance that he was going to get robbed or worse, but with his mind going numb in confusion over the whole situation, he couldn´t get himself to run.

“Oh and thanks for not running off, I know this seems strange but there´s a little dispute going on about this, so I was ordered not to advertise in public for the time being,” he explained offhandedly.

“Uha,” Caigo simply commented, not sure how to take this.

“Just take a look,” the man then said and stretched out the poster, practically waving it infront of his face.

The first thing he could recognize was that it was depicting a woman, though she was surrounded by a flurry of colors for some reason. Taking a closer look, he could see that, underneath the cryptic title, a beautiful woman, clad in what seemed like two pieces of green fabric that gave her a strangely natural touch, seemed to be flying above a forest. He then recognized that she must have indeed been caught flying, as the colorful blur surrounding her were actually her beautiful butterfly wings, carrying her through the sky. “Interested?” The solicitor asked in an awkwardly friendly tone.

“That depends on what this is actually about,” Caigo explained, failing to hide the genuine curiosity in his voice.

“There´s a new fairy-park nearby, it´s an all new thing because fairies couldn´t live in the city freely, but they are genuinely roaming those habitats freely, it´s really quite the sight,” the man explained excited, “and just between you and me, I´m being paid for being here, customers are coming in so much that nobody bothers to check on how many people I talk to either way; I can really recommend it from what I´ve seen myself. The whole argument we´re involved in right now is just some formalities. Still, one´s got to be cautious right?”

After another brief look at the half-naked woman, just brief enough not to make him feel ashamed of himself for gawking at her, he agreed that he should probably go and see it for himself, even though the whole advertising for this attraction seemed fishy to him. With the directions to get there, the young man sent him off, wished him a nice day and continued to wait for more people to pass by. Caigo was pleasantly relieved by the fact that the directions he had received were actually quite short, though those soon turned out to be merely the directions for another alleyway, this time however, there was a poster with arrows on it, plastered onto the wall of one of the houses. Glancing around briefly to find that nobody was watching him, he took a deep breath, then he proceeded to follow the bill´s directions through the narrow street. Strangely enough, he found that the posters directing him through here actually made sense in the context he had been given, but he still couldn´t help but worry about losing his kidneys or worse, now that they actually had him following some lose directions anyone could´ve made up to lure him somewhere.

After he was led into a tiny street between two houses by the arrows that allegedly led one to the park, which continued to gradually grow narrower with every inevitable turn he took, he got more and more cautious, eventually glancing around corners before he took them to see if someone was lurking around them to rob him. Soon enough though, a final turn gave way to a seemingly open space, greeting him with bright light shining right into the last short stretch of the still narrow street that was by now hardly more than just a paved path winding between buildings. Stepping out into the open, he couldn´t believe his eyes as he looked on to find a genuinely large building with two vast, high domes made of glass to let the sun shine freely inside. Outside, he also found larger banners with the different poster designs he had seen before, complete with presumably the same writing on them and the same, content looking fairies glancing at him as if they were inviting him to come see them. Surprisingly, in a way at least, the place was actually filled with quite a lot of people even though he had not seen a single soul on his way here, at least not after he had begun to follow the route the bills had told him to take. Perhaps he was just the only one around who knew his way around the city this poorly and everyone else seemed to take paths that were less prone to invite shady people to rob you on them. It even seemed somewhat plausible to him that there were multiple people advertising this sight and that each of them had a different route that they led people onto. Walking past groups of people and couples, he approached the entrance, checking what had to be the price list, since the only thing he could barely read from what Jaoh´ru had taught him for work were numbers. Identifying what must have been the basic price for a single person, assuming that the slightly lower price for what must be a single person as well was for special guests of some sort, like kids or the very rarely seen older people, he was pleasantly surprised to see a price that seemed fairly low to him, probably thanks to the visible demand on the visitor side and the fact that, from what he expected to find inside, the number of personnel working inside was completely independent on the number of visitors, easily putting a higher number of people visiting for less over a smaller audience paying a higher price. On the other hand, with how secretive this whole place seemed to be towards the general public, they might as well be going after some more shady businesses behind closed doors, which might as well be the reason for the trouble they were having with the government of the city.

Lining up in a queue that was thankfully shortening for the moment, he found himself standing behind a couple of nekos, the male one with rather short, black fur, dressed in long jeans and a green shirt, and his female companion in a cute pair of shorts and a blue top over her dark, brown fur. Nekos, much like any other humanoid species inhabiting this city, were still something he had yet to get used to, since they were, if anything, beings of fiction and wonder in his home world. It was thus, much to his embarrassment, that he found himself staring at the female´s tail swishing from side to side excitedly, especially since he had never really been this close to one other than when he passed by one or when they were customers, who, much to his surprise actually, seemed to be his most frequent customers. It was something he had somewhat expected when he first realized that they actually existed here, but found that it would be an awful thing to expect, just because the respective animals he knew seemed to prefer the same food.

Over his staring, he got lost in his own thoughts as he still watched the tail, even following it with his eyes a bit, before a voice that seemed to address him interrupted, then made him look up in a mixture of surprise and shame when he realized that it was the female nekos voice. “You´re still new, aren´t you,” she said chuckling. Despite her seemingly taking it lightly, his glance raised over at her companion to see if he did the same and thankfully, he too seemed to have a slight grin on his face.

“I´m sorry, I didn´t mean to stare,” Caigo tried to explain himself as he lowered his head slightly, careful not to look towards either of their tails.

“Don´t worry, it´s alright,” the male soothed him. It seemed as though he had read his reaction quite perfectly and recognized the right way to react. Perhaps this was not the first time they had run into a situation like this either.

“You can touch it if you want to,” the female offered, swishing her long, fluffy tail in his direction suggestively whilst smiling encouragingly.

With slight hesitation and another brief glance towards her companion, who didn´t seem to be upset about her offer, he reached for her tail, forming a kind of tunnel for it to pass through in between his fingers, careful only to touch her fur, before she went ahead and pulled it all the way through. It was, to be quite honest, not much different from touching a cat´s tail, yet he knew that it was a kind offer coming from her after he had arguably ogled her before.

“Thanks, it´s pretty soft,” he said awkwardly “So, you´re also here to see the fairies?”

“Yeah, my sister and I have finally settled on going,” the male neko clarified their relation casually, most likely because he had noticed how uneasy the uncertainty weighted on Caigo, “It might sound strange to you, but before we first came here, we got to experience a fairy in the wild first hand, it´s pure chance that we´re still alive. So… We´ve been a bit afraid of coming here when we first came across someone promoting it, even though these can´t harm you.”

“These? What do you mean?” Caigo asked baffled. He might have seen as few fairies in his home world as he had seen nekos, but from all he knew through tales, fairytales, they were tiny, mythical creatures that could grant your wishes at best, but would never harm you.

Before either of the two cat people could answer, they were kindly called over by the cashier who didn´t want to let the people in line after them wait longer than they had to. They quickly hurried to pick up their tickets and entered the large building through an entrance that eventually took a turn to prevent people outside from seeing what´s inside without buying a ticket. Briefly looking after them, Caigo too bought his ticket, unsurprisingly for the slightly higher of the two prices he had identified before, then he followed the two nekos lead into the building. To his surprise, they were actually waiting for him around the corner, “We thought we could go together, since it´s probably a better experience if you know some more about them, right?” the girl explained.

“What´s your name by the way? I´m Dicque and this is Aija,” her brother introduced them simply.

“I´m Caigo, nice to meet you,” he responded. Not wanting to be rude, since he was more or less being invited, he offered his hand to shake hands as usual in his world. Smiling at each other briefly, the nekos took turns shaking his hand, clearly amused by this apparently not unknown, but seemingly unusual interaction.

“So, you said fairies are actually dangerous, how come?” Caigo picked up the topic again.

“The thing is, fairies are predators, like every other humanoid, so they prey on anything small enough to devour, including humans, nekos, you name it. The special thing about them is that almost all of them can use magic to alter the size of their prey, so it doesn´t matter how tall you are, a fairy could always have you for dinner,” Dicque explained matter-of-factly.

“That sounds incredibly dangerous, what are they doing in the city then?” Caigo asked concerned.

“Don´t worry, the city is protected by magic. Any fairy or giant trying to get in here would usually never be able to get in here, so these must be fairies that can´t actually use magic,” Aija added to calm him down, just as they passed by a small stall, selling some sort of food in handy paper bags.

The group then went silent, as they left the dimly lit entrance, entering the vast, purposefully natural looking dome that was the first habitat. The path ahead was basically covered by a glass tube that kept people from getting into the habitat and the fairies from getting out, while the latter were free to roam the vast space that lay just past the thick layer of glass. When they dared to look out onto the vast plain that was the first habitat, they gazed upon a huge, open patch of grass, framed by rocks, imitating mountains up to the very top of the glass dome, with a few trees planted here and there at the far end of the area, the habitat seemingly stretching out for what felt like more space than the entire building covered from the outside. They immediately caught well over a dozen fairies of all kinds of different skin colors on either side of the path, dancing about in the air, dashing after each other playfully and greeting newcomers. It now also became quite clear that they were all of different sizes, ranging from a very puny five inches tall up to the height of a human too, which seemed strange to Caigo on second thought, since from what he knew, he would´ve never imagined them to even get to a height close to that of a human. Some of the fairies were also hovering near the glass to interact with the visitors who could throw in the food they had previously bought at the entrance through hatches on both sides of the path. Almost on cue, a fairy popped up on the other side of the glass when they approached it a bit closer, startling the two nekos for a moment, but leaving Caigo in awe at the sight of the tiny red-head with waist-long hair, also sporting the same green two-piece all the others seemed to wear. Figuring her first and foremost intention, Aija raised her shoulders and gave her a sorry look, signaling her that none of them had bought food for them. The fairy pouted for a moment, but then she flew a quick loop in front of them, waved them to say goodbye and darted off after a friend who had just passed by them.

The sight of those beautiful beings flying and gliding so elegantly, yet playfully and with seemingly no effort filled all three of them, much like any other visitor, with awe. Even with the one that had come up to meet them directly gone now, there was more than enough to see with the fairies showcasing a seemingly unnatural amount of playfulness. To Caigo it almost felt like this could be something most fairies had in common, as a part of the very nature of their species, which was, in a way, a bit frightening, if one were to think about how powerful they really had to be to maintain the survival of their species. Apart from the colorful fairies of different sizes dancing and playing up in the air, there were also a few who didn´t seem to do anything in particular, rather, they were laying on branches of trees or on the ground below them, resting against the trunks or laying down in the grass, too far for most people to notice them, at the far end of the habitat. One of them stuck out to Caigo though, as he noticed that she did seem to be busy with something. Upon more focused inspection, it seemed as though the purple-skinned blonde was working on something at her ankle, which had some kind of tiny, black box strapped to it. Only then did he realize that all of the fairies actually seemed to have such a device strapped to them, their sizes adjusted to that of the fairy to make sure that they couldn´t fall off. Obviously, it was quite hard for him to even tell the purpose of those, but from what he could make out, she seemed to be trying to get it off of her, though there was really no telling as to why. Being distracted from the fairies that were supposed to be the main attraction for once, he was actually hoping for her success, mainly out of curiosity to see what would happen, if anything would happen at all. Moments later, he could swear he saw a hint of her facial expression lighting up, even if she was actually too far away to tell, quickly followed by evidence as she held the mysterious, black box up triumphantly. Caigo quietly congratulated her on her success, his attention still fully on her, in eager anticipation of something neither of them could see coming. In a matter of moments, the fairies eyes went from a joyful expression to one of shock, before she simply fell over to the side, her entire body writhing in pain as it seemed.

The sudden events going on at the back end of the habitat left Caigo speechless in shock and confusion, unable to express anything while he had to watch on as a group of four men, dressed in green uniforms, ran towards the fairy, picked her up and carried her out of the scene, presumably into their medical department. Whatever he had just seen, it almost seemed like the removal of the box left the fairy in great pain, though to what extend and, more importantly, why, was beyond him. By the time he even managed to cast his glance off of the small group of fairies at the trees, who had been staring at the scene just like him, the personnel had already vanished and so did any sign of that particular fairy ever being there. When he turned to look at Aija, who was still ogling the fairies with pure innocent wonder, he was shocked to see that she had simply overlooked such an event, even though he was certain that he was the only one who had seen it happening, otherwise there would´ve probably been an uproar amongst the onlookers by now. Just in that moment, she noticed him looking at her, his glance angled downwards a little as he was a bit taller than her, and looked him in the eyes with hers almost sparkling with excitement, “Isn´t this great?” she asked joyfully. Through her own excitement, she was completely oblivious, not only to what had happened in the same habitat they both had been watching the entire time, but also of his own emotions in that very moment, which he was sure were showing quite bluntly in his face.

Not wanting to ruin the moment for her and perhaps hoping that it was all just his imagination screwing with him, he just played along and gave her the best smile he could muster at the moment, “You´re right, it seems so peaceful,” he said without realizing what he was subconsciously playing at until he had said it. Seeing how her eyes were practically glued to the fairies dancing about, just like her brother´s as he realized when he briefly glanced over at him, he decided to just forget about it as good as he could; the fairy was probably in good hands and would be perfectly fine soon enough. Hopefully. They must have spent at least another two hours watching the fairies of the first habitat, laughing and smiling at their ever so sweet antics, while occasionally enjoying the naturally elusive sight of one of them being close up, without having to fear for their lives, that is, whenever someone close to them presented a full bag of fairy snacks to give to them. Eventually, they managed to break loose from the iron grip the “show” had over them, allowing them to slowly move on to the second habitat just down the long, single path that the tunnel dictated, though not without still constantly watching the fairies as they went.

The transition towards the second habitat was, much like the well maintained first habitat, very artfully made to make the visitor feel like they were actually in a part of the world naturally inhabited by fairies, despite the glass tube surrounding them. As the tube approached the end of the habitat, it seemed like it just cut its way right through the ‪rocky surface of the artificial mountains that separated the habitats from each other. The stretch was relatively short, but still enough to briefly cut off most of the sunlight from outside, coming in from both ends of the tunnel, briefly blinding them as they entered the second habitat and allowing them to take in the entire scenery at its full glory at once. While the first one was a notably open space of grass-land with very few trees at its far end, the second one had a large pond with crystal clear water in it, followed by a patch of green grass around it, except for an intentionally ‪rocky patch on its left side to add some diversity to the scenery. After a couple of meters, the green patch gave way to a light forest that was purposefully kept just dense enough to look natural, but to still allow the visitors to see the fairies resting on the branches of the artificial forest, as long as they were not resting in their crowns. Just like before, fairies were playing games and just dancing through the air with each other. It felt like they were actually being outnumbered by the first habitat, though it was hard to tell whether they were just resting somewhere they couldn´t be seen or if it was just because the second habitat was only being filled with new fairies after the first one had reached its capacity; it was not something they could know as a mere guest. The group of three was once again paralyzed by the sight, watching them enjoy themselves and smiling and laughing with them. When Caigo did look around, however, he noticed that some of the other visitors, primarily men at that, were giving the female fairies some quite obvious looks that gave away the reason for their visit to anyone who would pay attention to it.

“God these guys are ogling them like they are objects,” Caigo complained in annoyance, “Why did they have to dress them up like this in the first place? It´s no wonder people would get weird ideas like this.”

“Actually…” Aija began, unsure how to convey it without throwing Caigo off too much, “most people living outside of Negav naturally wouldn´t dress at all. It´s kind of a human thing, you know?”

“Are you serious?” Caigo asked in disbelieve, glancing out at the habitat and imagining all those fairies dancing around naked.

“I believe they have to at least wear these so they won´t offend human visitors, or attract worse than those guys,” Dicque said, now too frowning at their obscene intentions, “the two of us also had to accustom to it, we didn´t exactly wear clothes to cover our nudity but to suit hunting and stealth purposes, people deemed that inappropriate so we had to adapt. Out there, nobody´s getting offended by anyone who´s not wearing any. It´s just a human thing, really,” he confirmed in a matter-of-factly manner.

“I guess so…” Caigo agreed hesitantly. He did understand his reasoning, but it was still pretty difficult to wrap his mind around it.

They stayed and tried to enjoy the view for a few more minutes, but the thought of what was at least imaginarily going on around them somewhat killed the mood, so they eventually decided that it was time to leave. Walking through the glass tube until they reached a second tunnel that once again led them into one of ‪the rock walls that framed the habitats, they left the second and last one behind, letting the relative darkness of the tunnel engulf them, before they found themselves at the end of the park and back out on the other side of the open space that was surrounding the park. In contrary to his previous perception, Caigo now realized that the whole park was actually built into the center of a pretty vast area for lower tier standarts that was at least paved, but that would definitely be up for further expansion of the park, once they had made enough profit to afford the expansion itself and the fairies to accommodate new habitats.

“So, I guess that´s it,” Dicque stated with a glance at his sister.

“Jup, it was fun for as long as it lasted, wasn´t it?” Aija asked. She briefly looked up at her brother, but then she just smiled at Caigo, waiting for his response.

“Sure, it was,” he agreed without hesitation, “Judging from the space they have left to build on out here, they will probably expend some time, so it´s worth coming back.”

“Yeah, it would be funny if we met again when we came back, wouldn´t it?” Dicque asked, again glancing at his sister.

“Uhm, yes. You´re still new, aren´t you? Do you know how to get home from here?” Aija asked. Caigo didn´t quite get what was going on, but she was giving him a strange look now, almost as if she was a little desperate in a way.

“Actually, I meant to remember how I got here, but I must admit I doubt that I´ll find my way that easily,” he admitted embarrassed.

“I-We can help you get home then, where do you live?” Aija asked quickly, seemingly almost forgetting that she was with her brother for a second.

“I honestly don´t know. I know more or less what the name looks like, but I can´t read it. If you could take me towards the south-eastern gate I´ll be fine though,” he suggested a bit helpless.

“Oh, that´s easy, we live nearby actually,” Aija said, visibly struggling to contain herself.

“May I follow you then?” Caigo asked jokingly.

“Hehe, sure you can,” Aija agreed with a giggle.

With that, they were on their way, with the two nekos initially leading the group of three, but by the time the first pedestrian came their way and Aija had to let him past them, she didn´t catch up to her brother again but instead proceeded to walk next to Caigo.

“So, you´re new, but when did you come here?” She asked intrigued.

“It´s been exactly 9 weeks actually, that´s been the condition my boss had set when he first gave me the money I needed to afford my flat. This is the first week I was allowed to take off,” he explained.

“Oh so you´ve already got a job too?” She asked in amazement. It never occurred to him that it was indeed a rarity to get work that quickly in this city, especially when people were able to immediately direct him towards somewhere people were looking for newcomers to work for them.

“I told you it´s nothing special,” Dicque briefly chimed in from in front of them, smirking to himself.

“So you don´t have one?” Caigo asked, trying to sound as neutral about it as possible.

“No,” she admitted in embarrassment, “Dicque is working as a shop assistant, he´s a prodigy, but I can´t seem to find work that I´m good at.”

“I´m not a prodigy, you´re just overly clumsy, that´s what makes you unreliable,” her brother commented before he left them to talk among themselves again.

“Anyway… where do you two come from? You said you´ve come here from somewhere too, didn´t you?” Caigo changed the subject, trying to spare her further embarrassment.

“Oh we´ve always been in Felarya, but we decided to live in Negav when our tribe was pretty much wiped out by a fairy. We don´t know how many made it out, but we were sure that the tribe would have to disband so we left to live here, rather than trying to find shelter in another tribe. We weren´t particularly hated, but if members of foreign tribes just show up, some tribes tend to be a bit hostile, you know?” Aija explained. She hung her head a little when she thought about their past, indicating that this was perhaps not the right thing to talk about after all.

“That sounds terrifying after what you´ve told me about fairies. I basically just woke up here, just imagine if I had walked into one by chance, I would´ve assumed they were some friendly creatures living in the forest, haha,” he said for a lack of a better topic to talk about.

“True,” she said with a slight smile. It seemed like neither of them could think of anything in particular to talk about and instead fell into an awkward silence. The longer it went on, the more Caigo´s thoughts drifted off though, away from the here and now and back to the fairy he had been watching in the first habitat. However much he tried to tell himself that everything was alright, wouldn´t the other fairies seem less worried, because they´d know at least to some extend what was going on? Yet they seemed utterly shocked and terrified, at least those who witnessed the event. With that thought, he settled on visiting the park again the next day, if only to check if the fairy was back inside the park or not, even if the latter wouldn´t mean much after just one day. Time seemed to have flown on their way back, as they had soon reached the near vicinity of the south-eastern gate of the city, where they only had to walk for another block until they stopped.

“This is our place,” Dicque pointed out, pointing up at a window at the left in the second story of the building, “Do you find your way from here or should we come with you?”

“I think I´ll find my way, thanks for the help,” Caigo said after he looked around briefly, recognizing his location when he saw a nearby café that had stuck out to him before.

“Guess this is goodbye then,” Dicque said to send him off, “If you need something, feel free to pay us a visit.”

“Sure, I will,” Caigo answered. Having found someone to call a friend in this foreign city might indeed prove helpful some time, especially since they seemed to know at least a bit more about the city than he did.

Meanwhile, Aija seemed awkwardly silent still, hesitant and perhaps unsure about what to say. Figuring what was going on though, Dicque gave her a slight, symbolic push to the back, which she seemed to use as a kind of excuse to stumble forward, towards Caigo. When she was basically she a step away from him, she basically fell into a hug to stop her fall, “Come visit some time, ok?”

“Sure,” Caigo answered in surprise, looking over at a grinning Dicque before hugging her back.

**

On the next day, Caigo went to visit the park again, though this time, he took the direct way Dicque had showed him yesterday. This way, he did not only reach his destination earlier, but he was also forced to walk past Aija´s and Dicque´s place. He was not entirely sure why he took this for an upside, really, but he felt awkward about asking her to tag along, though on the other hand he felt that if she just so happened to be on her window and spot him walking by, she´d ask where he was heading and quite surely chose to follow him, after all, this was almost guaranteed to prove interesting. It was naturally nothing he could be certain about, it was actually hard to even call it a feeling in his guts, more like a wish at best, but he was set on sniffing about the place and trying to find something, were the fairy to still be gone. Of course, the hope of Aija glancing out of her window the moment he came by, or the minutes he spent waiting under the window Dicque had showed him yesterday, trying to act as if this was part of some kind of business he had to get done here, proofed to be fruitless effort and so he left to go on his own, telling himself that he might be better off finding out that there´s nothing to worry about if he were alone, rather than making a fool out of himself or dragging her into unnecessary danger.

Once there, he first began to walk around the front side of the building, trying to find some kind of second entrance for employees, which was surprisingly easy to find, though on second thought there was not really a reason to hide it in the first place, was there? Figuring that he should have actually entered and checked on the fairy first thing, he then went to stand in line at the entrance, which took him remarkably little time compared to the previous day, probably still thanks to the rather early time of day. Once inside, he made sure to not look like he was in a hurry when he went to stand at the exact same spot as last time, from where he was able to see the whole event perfectly. Said spot was, obviously, taken this time, so he went with standing next to the young man and his family occupying it right now. His view was luckily still pretty much the same from there, so he could easily see far enough back into the habitat to find the spot that the purple-skinned fairy had been sitting in. Not quite to his surprise, he couldn´t find her though, so he glanced around, trying to find her elsewhere, starting with the trees nearby and continuing on with the remainder of the habitat, but to no avail.

No matter where he looked, he didn´t see her, just two fairies who looked similar at first glance, but who he could tell weren´t her upon closer inspection. Time passed as his search became increasingly frantic, until he eventually realized its futility and stopped all together. Reluctantly, he decided to go back towards the entrance and buy a bag of fairy snacks, which were actually almost as expensive as the ticket price to begin with. If he wasn´t able to see her, perhaps letting his mind drift for a bit while being a little closer to the fairies would get him some good idea on what to do. He would´ve liked to just ask them, clearly they would know how everyone else was doing, but the glass was so thick, it muffled them almost inaudibly silent on their side. Moving over to a quieter spot near the end of the first habitat, Caigo stood in front of the glass, the small bag of snacks pressed against his body as to not make it too obvious, waiting for a fairy to show up. After a moment, he noticed much to his content that a single fairy seemed to be flying towards him intently. One was more than enough to inspire him, if anything, especially since having them swarming around him would probably only distract him. What eventually presented itself in front of him was a beautiful, butterfly-winged girl, with wings colored in shades of blue and green, matching green hair and amber eyes, giving him a sweet smile. She simply hovered on the other side of the glass, a hatch between them to allow for ‪the offering of food in exchange for the fairies presence. When he pulled the hatch open and was about to drop in a few fairy snacks, he suddenly felt some resistance on the other side, which he answered by pulling a little harder, figuring that the construction might just not be a perfect fit.

What escaped the hatch though, before his forceful opening cut it off, was what he swore to be a single word, “Help”. Dazzled, confused and perhaps a bit hopeful, he pushed the hatch back slightly, as an indicator that he had heard the voice, then he saw the fairy on the other side move her lips again, ”I need your help,” she said clearly this time. The sentence hit him like a truck. It was this slight hint of something going on that he had been sensing, or perhaps hoping for, this whole time since he had watched the incident yesterday and now he had his own, personal evidence right before him. The fairy´s smile didn´t change one bit, but he didn´t care, since her voice seemed as sincere and serious as he would´ve imagined it to be, were she to ask him for help.

“Act like we´re chatting about something cheerful,” she commanded with her unchanged, sweet smile,” you´ve seen it, haven´t you? Fionee´s death.”

So she really was dead? He´s had this strange feeling this whole time, but he tried so hard to tell himself that she´d be alright in the hands of the park that he eventually ended up believing it. “She actually died?” he asked to confirm his thought while struggling to fake a dumb smile.

“Her last words were that she felt magic again, that must´ve also been what killed her afterwards,” she explained simply, before she went on, “You´re the only one who´s seen it, you´re the only one who´d help us.”

“Is it that bad living in here?” He asked, honestly wondering if having food brought to you for free was something they would complain about.

“We are forced to always act cheerful, if we don´t earn food from visitors we practically starve. And as long as we wear these things around our ankles we can´t use magic, if we take them off we die. Besides, this space is too little for this many of us, we want real freedom, not just a little space we could never escape,” she explained in a bitter voice, her smile even fading for a moment before she regained her grip of herself.

“I will try,” he said as he dropped a hand full of snacks into the hatch, “but I have to figure something out first.”

With that, he emptied the entire bag into the hatch, nodded at the fairy with a last, genuine smile then he turned and left while she tried to hold up all the food with both hands, trying to share it with the others who were less lucky than her. When he left, he took another quick look at the employee´s entrance to make sure that there was a way to get in there without necessarily using the door. Afterwards, he took the same way back towards his home as he had done before, passing by Aija´s home, this time without looking up, headed for the tiny restaurant cramped between some clothing store and a shop that offered some kind of service he still failed to recognize, though he could tell that it did seem something professional just from the visual impression of the shop. Caigo simply ordered what he usually did when he was here, which the waitress had recently stopped reading out for him since he had given up on trying to pronounce it the way she did. Then he went back to thinking things through, trying to imagine possible risks and outcomes and asking himself whether he was ready to go this far after all. There was a chance of not getting caught, sure, but that was next to nonexistent. Anything else would probably lead to him paying a large fine he would never be able to pay off in this life, or even a sentence to live however long in prison for trespassing and whatever crime freeing a sentient being would prove to be. Ultimately, he figured that he couldn´t possibly let this slide and if he was the only witness, perhaps it was fate after all.

On the other hand, gathering more information might prove to be quite helpful, but then again he had no other information to retrieve from anywhere. Had the fairy known anything, he was certain she would´ve told him and even if she didn´t, going back might raise unwanted attention and perhaps even prove to make things more difficult if the people running the park were to keep an eye on him. It was ultimately useless to try and think things through more, since the number of variables, even those that he could count, was too large to allow for a real plan in the first place. There was only one shot, but that shot was going to be one that was bound to be decided solely by his own luck. With that in mind, he slowly finished his dinner while he watched people pass by on the other side of the restaurant´s front window, just like the sun slowly began to descend and the day passed by, slowly but surely giving in to the night.

Now filled with newfound determination, he strode right back down high street and towards Aija´s and Dicque´s place, looked up at the window and, when he found no one looking out, rang the doorbell that he assumed was theirs, then he waited for a response. Moments turned into seconds, then into minutes and nobody answered. Then the door opened, revealing a young, somewhat stressed out seeming woman with a basket filled with laundry, looking at him with a face that made it quite evident that she was not having the most pleasant of times, but still tried to be as friendly as possible.

“Are you the one who rang?” She asked, making him wonder if he should lie or not.

“Uhm, yes, but it seems like I rang the wrong door, sorry,” Caigo apologized but was quickly cut off.

“No, no, it´s the right place, I´ll let you in,” she said with a sigh, “That girl is incredible, they´ve been living here for so long, but whenever she´s alone she freaks out when someone rings the door, same problem when she tries to get back in, so I´ve got a key in my flat to let her in…”

“Sorry for the trouble, I didn´t mean to disturb you,” he apologized again.

“Oh it´s fine, I was just heading upstairs anyway,” the neighbor explained briefly, “Honestly, it´s more astounding than annoying that she still didn´t get used to almost anything at this point. It´s a bit of a break from taking care of my children, they still keep me up every single night, so I may seem a bit grumpy.”

Once on the second floor, she briefly headed for the door opposite to Havema´s, opening it to let the frantic screaming of her children out, which she only answered with a slight sigh. After putting down the basket she was holding in the middle of the narrow hallway, she picked up a single key from behind the door, then she closed her door again to cut the noise of the crying babies off, for the most part at least, and headed for the other door, Caigo following right behind her. As the key entered the lock, he could swear he heard something from inside the apartment, but the moment it was all the way in and started turning, everything fell quiet as the neighbor carefully opened the door.

“Precaution, you never know how she reacts when you just open the door when she doesn´t expect anyone,” she whispered while she slowly pushed the door open and carefully glanced through the crack as it broadened bit by bit.

All this seemed pretty ridiculous to Caigo, he actually presumed that she might as well be out right now, perhaps picking up her brother at work or doing some grocery shopping, but after the door had fully opened, he had to blink twice to make sure he wasn´t imagining things. Across a floor covered in pillows, shattered glass and some spilled juice, they spotted a pair of shivering, furry ears behind the sofa.

“Will you be ok?” the neighbor asked in a considerably serious tone.

“Yeah, thanks for the help again,” Caigo thanked her before he cautiously approached the sofa. He meanwhile heard the door shut behind him, making the ears twitch slightly in recognition of the sound, making Aija look up over the sofa to see if the coast was clear.

As she spotted Caigo, her eyes lit up with joy, before she realized what she had just done to their home a few minutes ago, fearing the worst when the shrill tone of the doorbell scared her to death. He smiled silently to himself, picked up the pillows as he crossed the corridor, made sure not to step into the broken glass and put them back onto the sofa, then he looked for the kitchen and searched for a dustpan and a paper towel to clean up the broken glass. Once done, he came to pick up the cowering neko girl behind the sofa by offering her a hand, “is something the matter?” he asked with a glance towards the door. Aija was about to answer when she noticed that everything was cleaned up again, not a sign of what had happened before was left and her eyes lit up once more.

“Nothing,” she said with a giggle, “Why are you here though?”

“I need help with something, but I think that´s nothing you´d want to be involved in,” Caigo explained cryptically.

“What is it?” Aija asked. It was quite obvious that trying not to mention the fact that what he intended to do was a crime only peaked her interest more.

He then proceeded to explain what he had seen the day before, how he tried not to think about it too much and how it turned out that the worst case was indeed what had happened. He also told her that the fairy he had talked to said that they wanted nothing but to escape this place, but that they depended on someone from outside to help them do so.

“I want to help!” Aija exclaimed after he barely finished explaining the situation.

“But it´s probably dangerous and illegal! I don´t mean to offend but I was going to ask your brother for advice and maybe some tips on who´d be with me, I don´t want to drag you into this,” Caigo explained. He would´ve never admitted it now that Dicque wasn´t even here, but he had silently hoped that he would´ve insisted on coming as much as she did, but dragging her into this just didn´t feel right to him, let alone the fact that she might actually be a threat to the whole thing were she really as clumsy as her brother had said before.

“If you go I´ll go too,” she said as she put on a pouty face.

“You… even if I wouldn´t have a problem with you coming along, how would I explain that to your brother?” Caigo asked, trying to find a way out of this.

“Forget about him, he´ll just find out about it later when we´re done so he can´t do anything about it anyway,” Aija said. This statement actually surprised him quite a bit, she seemed to have quite the strange idea of responsibility.

Eventually realizing that there was not really a way for him to talk her out of it if she wanted to help, he sighed and agreed to take her with him, “Alright, but you have to be careful, we don´t want to get caught, I´ll hold myself responsible for anything that happens to you.”

“Yeah! Let´s get going then,” she urged him on, clearly indicating that she stopped listening after the first word he said was basically a “yes”.

The two of them thus left her flat, exited the building and walked down the street until they had to take their first turn towards the fairy park. The streets were remarkably empty considering that it was barely past nightfall and the night was still pleasantly warm, almost welcoming people to go outside. Since they actually had a bit of walking ahead of them, Caigo eventually couldn´t hold down his curiosity and tried to dig deeper, “don´t you think your big brother will be mad about you just leaving without him knowing?”

“Little,” she said simply, clearly not answering his question.

“What do you mean, “little”? I´d probably be pretty worried,” Caigo explained, briefly imagining himself in his shoes.

“He´s my little brother,” Aija expanded on what she had said before, “why did you think he´s the older one?”

“I don´t know to be honest,” Caigo said when he realized that neither of them had ever said anything about their age. He had simply assumed that he was the older one because he appeared to be the one who she relied on, not the other way around, “Well it´s hard to tell since you two look like you´re almost the same age.”

“How does that even matter? We´re both grown up and I already was when he was born,” she pointed out. That implication made it fairly clear that neither of the two had an idea of what the other was talking about; Caigo was looking at her as if she was a mad man, while her face gave him a pretty good idea of how stupid she thought he was right then.

“Aren´t you aging?” Caigo asked baffled after a while.

“What´s that?” she asked in a genuinely clueless tone.

“When you get older and start to get weaker and wrinkly,” Caigo pointed out, receiving the same look as before “humans usually get grey hair and such when they have aged a lot.”

“Oh, I´ve seen that before. I think only people from outside of Felarya get that,” Aija pointed out. She had seen a man with grey hair before, but thought that was some weird kind of hairstyle from a world where grey could be used as camouflage, or perhaps a disease, the whole concept of “aging” was new to her, “What happens when you do this aging thing?”

“Your body stops reproducing cells properly and you slowly die, that´s what we call a natural death, since everyone ages to the point where they have to inevitably die,” it appeared strange to him that she seemingly didn´t know about this, though with her apparently not aging, it seemed to make sense that she didn´t know in a way.

“That sounds pretty scary!” she exclaimed. She couldn´t quite imagine how it was supposed to work, she didn´t know what cells were for that matter, but just dying inevitably without being able to do something about it sounded terrifying to her.

“It´s natural to us so people don´t think about it too much,” Caigo tried soothing her, but had visibly little success with it. Her mood soon changed though, when they arrived at the park again. Since it didn´t really provide any light inside that would allow for later visitor, its routine was dictated by daytime, thus it had already been closed for a while. The entire place was only lit by a few lanterns nearby, the building itself was mostly covered in darkness though, as the light of the streetlights barely reached it and those that were built on the place itself were probably just meant to illuminate the area enough to let people know it´s not empty space. On the other hand, the dim lighting gave the scene a somewhat romantic feeling, despite their criminal intentions.