Raika-seren isn't directly needed for anything right now, and Maitimo's busy, so he goes out to see how he likes flying with his new wings.

Flying is awesome.

He can imagine, with the tiny fraction of his attention that's following Raika-seren.

There's just something so satisfying about it. And the sesnory experience is kind of amazing - feeling the air under his wings, every feather contributing its own individual understanding to the picture as a whole - like a miniature version of eavesdropping on a thousand minds to get a sense of the thoughts of a society. Yeah, he likes it a lot.

Everyone is settled back in. The Internet is back up; he can make public statements over broadcast. The people responsible will never do anything like this again; a couple hundred million of them died in the retaliation but it was restrained, and in any event they're now clear of where the aliens could harm them. The procedures for lost pets, lost data, and lost magic items are as follows. The procedure for eventual reembodiment of people less recently dead is as follows.

It's nice to be able to talk directly to all his people, all at once. He never did ask the Space set how they ran a modern nation.

Oh, and now that it has the room, Raika-seren's soul has taken over the functions of protecting him from nightmares and daffodils. Although it will let him turn off the protection at will, in either case. Useful.

He can do magic items near-instantaneously now - are any of those urgently needed, should he quit goofing off and come do some work?

Not especially; he's earned a break, and they're not supposed to give out the teleport any more, and immortality's handled by a much neater method.

All right. He keeps flying.

He still wants to find out what his Sphere looks like, but not urgently, and flying is so much fun. His wings are the prettiest.

He handles a couple hundred inquiries on complications of abrupt restoration to life and then finds some people who are handling it well enough to have the rest delegated to them.

And Raika-seren eventually says -

Do you have any preferences for where I put the portal to my Sphere on your planet?

You can close it at will, right?

Yeah.

Then wherever.

All right.

He can teleport, so it doesn't have to be convenient to get to; he goes looking for somewhere pretty.

...his sensory power comes in.

It's differently focused from Elaneth-imire's. Instead of a blanket of perception that he can extend outward from himself and reshape or refocus at will, it's countless separate points of view that he can move around freely. He examines the surface of Arda from a thousand angles, giggling delightedly as he circles the sky over Himring.

The spot he finds is an anonymous rocky hillside, no civilization visible for miles around. He teleports there. He makes a portal.

He steps inside.

It's a fountain of light. The golden glow of his healing aura fills the space, and the crystalline castle floating at its centre reflects and refracts that glow until it almost seems to be transparent through and through, a vast crenellated chandelier—but no, when he takes a second look, there's real stone in there somewhere - he takes off and flies up to it.

It is, if possible, even more beautiful up close. He wanted to explore, but he finds himself just sitting down in front of the palace's beautiful front doors, too overwhelmed to continue. The glass platform encircling the base of the castle has faint, intricate patterns engraved in it, a graceful twisting swirl of thin lines glittering in the light, mesmerizing in their complexity. The stone of the castle's inner walls is a soft silvery colour like the mist at the edges of his soul. Why is it so pretty. How is it so pretty. He's not even smug, he's just floored.

I missed that they come with castles. Or is that just you?

Elaneth-imire's Sphere has a palace in it, which is also beautiful but not quite this outrageously beautiful, and the design sense is way different - I think they often start out with somewhere to live, and the exact details depend on the person, and apparently what suits me best is... this...

Even the ground below the castle is lovely, when he looks over the edge. Soft grass rippling in a gentle sourceless breeze, streams of water flowing over beds of white pebbles. It's too much, it's perfect, it's wonderful, he might actually cry.

Awwwwww.

He sits. He smiles. He wraps himself up in his gloriously pretty wings. He does actually cry a little. It's so beautiful, and so perfect, and entirely, perfectly his, his very own place made of his very own magic - he is the source of this beauty... and it's only going to get better, a Sphere grows for as long as its owner is alive...

He stands up and folds his wings to his back and walks through the doors. The doors are beautiful. Everything is beautiful. Soaring arches, white stone aglow in the golden light, perfect in every detail. He loves this place so much.

...I think I'm not going to want anyone in this castle except for you, he says. It would feel too intimate. Thinking back to a few things Elaneth-imire noticed, subtle tells about Sphere-related customs in Suranse, he suspects that's a common way to feel about one's Sphere. He doesn't think he'd mind so much about people being in his Sphere at ground level, but this floating castle is... in a weird way it feels like being inside his own soul.

That should be easy enough to arrange - can't you keep people out of your sphere at will -

Not by default, I think, only by controlling access to the portals, which is much less effective when so many people can teleport. With how strongly I feel about it, my soul might come up with something, but I think it'd only bother manifesting the power if asking people nicely to stay out looked like it wasn't going to work.

Nod.

He walks around the inside of his castle. It's still outrageously beautiful, but he's getting used to it. He could pretty clearly live in here forever; there's food, places to sleep... he'd have to go outside eventually to avoid being consumed by boredom and loneliness, but besides that, it's perfect.

Purely out of self-indulgence, he flops into one of the enormous cozy beds and has a nap. With his wings put away he'd practically drown in this thing, but as it is, his feathers trail on the floor.

That's probably psychologically healthy for him. He fields questions about the safety of their current dimension and the technology the aliens wielded against them and whatever else people think to ask. They're rattled. Asking questions helps.

It's very psychologically healthy for him! He gets a lot out of having a place that's so completely his own, and he gets a lot out of having it be so beautiful and perfect, and after the week he's had, he gets a lot out of having the time to just take a nap for no reason other than because he feels like it. And then he wakes up and he feels like exploring the rest of his castle and going flying, so he does that.

He meant what he said about not wanting anyone in here except Maitimo. He doesn't want anyone else in here, but he would genuinely welcome Maitimo. It would be lovely to see Maitimo enjoying the beauty of the castle, and lovely to be the place where Maitimo gets his wings. And it makes him feel vulnerable, and - there's probably something objectively crazy about finding it intrinsically rewarding to make himself feel vulnerable to someone who keeps hurting him when he does that, but nevertheless, he does find it rewarding and he's going to keep doing it.

Sure, he'll come visit the castle. When's a good time?

Well now Raika-seren is delighted.

Of the two of us I think you have the denser schedule at the moment, he says, laughing. Now would work. Any other time you like would also work.