Just a minute, I yelled, in the direction of the door.

  What followed was approximately ninety seconds of the most chaotic cleanup operation in the history of two worlds. Caleo rolled off me and hit the floor already moving, which I appreciated, and we both grabbed for clothing with the specific frantic energy of two teenagers who had just heard a parent's car in the driveway. I got my trousers on inside out, fixed them, got my shirt over my head. Caleo was already dressed somehow, the man moved like a gymnast even at full panic, and we thundered down the stairs together and I skidded to a stop in the front room and took stock.

  The house smelled like sex.

  Not faintly. Not in the way of a room where something had happened and then aired out. The house smelled like a very specific and extremely productive morning, the warm thick smell of Morning Dew and cum saturating every surface, rolling through the front room in waves that would have been obvious to anyone with a functioning nose within ten feet of the front door. There was, conservatively, half a gallon of combined output on my bed upstairs from the two of us, and the crafting room had its own aromatic history. The whole building had essentially been marinating in Vitalist byproduct for the better part of a week.

  I could feel cum leaking slowly down my leg. I pressed my thighs together and accepted this as a situation I could not resolve in the avaible time.

  Caleo was clearing his throat repeatedly behind me, the specific wet sound of someone whose airway had recently been comprehensively introduced to something it was still processing. He burped twice in quick succession. The smell was extremely identifiable. He pressed his fist to his mouth and looked at me with watering eyes.

  Fantasy world rules, I thought. What can you do.

  I fixed my hair with both hands, running it back into something that approximated intentional, and turned to look at Caleo. He looked mostly presentable except for his hair, which had achieved a level of entropy that spoke clearly to anyone paying attention, and a single escaped blob of cum sitting on the back of his neck just below his hairline that he was completely unaware of. I reached over and wiped it away with my thumb. He looked at me questioningly.

  "Don't ask," I said.

  I went to the door and opened it.

  The man on my stoop was somewhere in his fifties, broad through the shoulders, with the kind of face that had settled permanently into serious and wasn't entertaining offers to change. He wore official robes, dark, well made, with a embroidered insignia on the breast that I didn't recognize but which radiated institutional authority. He had a document case under one arm and the energy of someone who had done this before many times and found it neither pleasant nor unpleasant, simply procedural.

  He looked at me. Then past me at Caleo. Then, briefly, at the general atmospheric situation of the front room, which was doing its best against significant odds.

  His expression did not change.

  "Good morning," he said. "I'm Senior Examiner Drest, Alchemists Guild, Licensing and Compliance Division." He said it the way people said things they'd said several thousand times, the words worn smooth with use. "We've received reports indicating an unlicensed alchemy operation is being conducted at this address." He reached into his document case and produced a folded paper with the practiced motion, and unrolled it with one hand.

  I looked at it.

  I could read it. That was still mildly surprising every time it happened — whatever the system had done to my nguage processing when I arrived meant written text resolved into meaning the same way spoken words did, the local script becoming readable without any conscious effort on my part. The document was formal and dense but the important parts were clear enough.

  Search Warrant. Issued by the Alchemists Guild of the city of, a name I caught most of, under authority of the Municipal Licensing Compact. Authorizing inspection of the premises at this address for evidence of unlicensed alchemical production, sale, or storage of alchemical goods, and unauthorized use of proprietary alchemical processes.

  I stood in my doorway with cum leaking down my leg. In a house that smelled like the a crime scene, a Search Warrant in my face and thought about the fifty vials I'd sold the alchemist three days ago. The hidden wooden case full of product sitting in my crafting room just around the corner.

  I looked at the Senior Examiner.

  He looked back at me with the patient immovable energy of institutional authority that had nowhere else to be and was not going to be talked out of anything.

  Behind me I heard Caleo clear his throat again.

  "May I ask," I said, keeping my voice even, "who made the report?"

  "Reports of this nature are confidential," Drest said, in the tone of a man who had answered that question before. He held the warrant up slightly. "May I come in?"

  I stood there for a moment and did rapid mental inventory. The crafting room. The chair with its custom opening and the goblin club in its brackets. The bowl and funnel on the shelf. The case of vials, some filled, some empty, all of which would require expnation I was not currently in a position to provide. The bed upstairs which was a crime scene of a different variety entirely.

  The house smelled like cum. Comprehensively and in every direction.

  The Senior Examiner had not reacted to the smell. Either his professional experience had prepared him for unusual aromatic environments or he was very good at his job or both.

  "Of course," I said, and stepped aside.

  My nerves sted about thirty seconds.

  I stood in my own doorway and watched Drest step inside and did a rapid assessment of my actual situation. There was no mad scientist boratory. No bubbling cauldrons, no arcane apparatus, no shelves of illegal reagents. The source of everything I produced resided in my pants and was not subject to inspection by the Alchemists Guild under any warrant I'd ever heard of. All he was going to find was some vials, a funnel, a bowl, and a chair that was going to require expnation if he looked at it too closely and which I was betting he wouldn't.

  The nerves settled. I csped my hands behind my back and watched Drest work.

  He stopped just inside the front room and his nostrils moved. His expression, already set to serious, made a brief detour through something more personal.

  "This pce reeks," he said. Not to anyone specifically. Just a professional observation delivered to the room.

  He looked us both over with the quality of assessment that had moved past professional into something with a mild moral dimension to it. Two disheveled young men, one of whom was still occasionally clearing his throat in a distinctive way, in a house that smelled comprehensively like the inside of a very productive brothel at eight in the morning.

  Caleo burped into his fist.

  It was not a subtle burp. The smell traveled immediately and directly toward Drest. Drest's expression moved from mild distaste to something approaching active irritation, his jaw tightening slightly at the corners.

  "Bunch of animals," he muttered, and opened his document case and produced a notebook.

  He moved past us toward the crafting room with the systematic efficiency of someone working through a checklist. I followed at a respectful distance and watched him open the cabinets along the wall, cleaning supplies, a spare cloth, two empty vials I hadn't put away. He made a note. Examined the funnel and bowl on the table, both lightly stained with Morning Dew residue that had soaked into the wood in a way that gave the surface a faint golden cast in the right light. He made another note, his pen moving in short precise strokes.

  He looked at the goblin club in its bracket on the wall.

  It hung there in its custom fitted bracket with quiet dignity. Drest looked at it for a moment deciding whether it was something fell within his professional jurisdiction. He made a small sound. Wrote nothing. Moved on.

  He stopped at the chair.

  He stood in front of it and looked at it with his head slightly tilted, the way you looked at something that your brain was receiving correctly but hadn't fully processed yet. The custom opening. The angle of the seat. The collection clearance below. He looked at it for a longer moment than he'd looked at anything else.

  Then he closed his notebook briefly, opened it again, and moved on without writing anything.

  I felt a profound respect for Senior Examiner Drest's professional boundaries.

  He moved back through the front room toward the kitchen and I fell into step behind him, and as he crossed the threshold I felt Caleo appear at my elbow. I gnced sideways. Caleo had his eyebrows raised and his hand out, the expression of a specific and immediate request.

  I understood immediately. I reached into my pocket and palmed the spare vial of Morning Dew and passed it to him without looking.

  Drest had his back to us, opening kitchen cabinets, his pen moving.

  I looked back at Caleo.

  He had the vial uncorked. He gnced at Drest's back, reached down the back of his trousers with the casual efficiency, and the vial disappeared. He straightened up. Smoothed his trousers.

  He looked at me.

  I stared at him with my eyes wide and my mouth pressed shut around a ugh that was trying very hard to exist.

  He put one finger to his smiling lips.

  Drest turned from the kitchen cabinets, found nothing of interest, and made a note with the agitated energy of a man whose morning was not going the way he'd pnned. He looked around the kitchen once more. He had obviously expected to find something specific, and was annoyed at the absence of it.

  Then his eyes went to the ceiling.

  My stomach dropped.

  He went to the stairs.

  I followed him up with careful measured, maintaining a neutral expression through an act of sustained will. The smell hit on the third step. By the fifth it was obvious. By the time we reached the nding it was the only thing happening atmospherically in the building. It was happening with great confidence and holding court.

  Drest waved a hand slowly in front of his face. The gesture of a man walking through something physical.

  He pushed the bedroom door open.

  The morning light came through the window and fell directly on the bed, which was not doing us any favors. The sheets were a documentation of the morning's activities. The wet patch extensive and still visibly unabsorbed at the center, the sheen of it catching the light in a way that left nothing to interpretation. The smell in the room was its own separate ecosystem.

  Drest stood in the doorway and looked at the bed for a moment.

  "You boys need to get out more," he said, with the exhausted delivery of a man revising his opinion of his career choices in real time. He turned to look at us both and his eyes stopped on my head. "You've got cum in your hair," he said, pointing at me.

  I turned and looked at Caleo with an expression that I hoped conveyed the full depth of my feelings on the matter.

  Caleo had the grace to look briefly apologetic. "I didn't see it," he said.

  "It's right there," I said.

  "The lighting downstairs is poor," he said.

  Drest made a sound that belonged to a man who had not signed up for this dimension of public service. Caleo reached over to my hair with matter of fact ease, located the offending material, and removed it from his finger in the most Caleo way possible — he looked at it for one brief professional moment of assessment, and ate it.

  Drest stared at him.

  Caleo met his gaze with serene blue eyes and said nothing.

  "They don't pay me enough for this," Drest said, to no one, to the ceiling, to whatever administrative decision had put him in this bedroom on this particur morning. He snapped his notebook shut and tucked it under his arm and straightened his official robes with the movements of a man restoring his dignity through sheer force of wardrobe. He looked at us both one final time with the expression of someone who was quite done with this level of bullshit.

  "Stay out of trouble," he said.

  He left. His footsteps went down the stairs at a pace that suggested he was not interested in any further conversation and we heard the front door open and close with the firm decisive sound of a man who was done.

  The house was quiet. I looked at Caleo.

  "I cannot believe you did that in front of him," I said.

  I was ughing. I hadn't decided to ugh, it was just happening, the kind of ugh that starts somewhere in your chest and doesn't ask permission, and Caleo caught it immediately the way he caught everything, his whole face opening up with it.

  "Well," he said, with enormous dignity, smoothing the front of his shirt. "I am a cum sommelier." He paused for effect. "Since the tender age of fourteen."

  I ughed harder.

  He looked pleased with himself the way someone who had been waiting for a chance to deliver a joke, and knew it had nded. He sat down in my front room chair, the normal one, not the other one. He crossed his legs and looked at me with those blue eyes warm and bright and alive with the morning's accumuted ridiculousness.

  I looked back at him. I liked this person a great deal, I thought. The realization arrived simply and without fanfare, not the ring's doing, just a pin fact presenting itself. I had been in this world for a few weeks and I had a house. A crafting operation, and now I had a person sitting in my front room who had eaten a stranger's cum off his own finger. While in front of a guild inspector without blinking and was currently looking at me like this was all completely normal.

  At the edge of my vision, very faint, the bond indicator in my status screen pulsed once. A warmth distinct from the ring's usual warmth, something quieter and more settled, like something that had been leaning against a door and felt it finally open.

  I didn't open the screen.

  "Right," I said. "I'll make breakfast. You can tell me about your father."

  Caleo's expression did the mp-turned-down thing, the quiet underneath the energy. He nodded once.

  "Yes," he said. "Alright."