"My Papa is very particular about his beer. Well, about his inn's beer. He says what he drinks doesn't matter to anyone but him, but what he serves matters to his customers."

Wow, her dad even has humble wisdom!

Be quiet, silly part of Christa. Tanthe isn't actually the hero of one of your childhood adventure novels.

"That makes sense! Hmm, do you know if travelers to Peachport praise the beer there? I'm sort of curious whether Arcadian beer is surprisingly bad of your dad's the secret wielder of lost Beer Magic."

She giggles. "As far as I know, he's not magic, just picky. People do mostly praise his beer, though I think some travelers are even pickier than he is."

She pouts.

"Aww, Beer Magic would've been cool."

"If I discover any ancient hidden magics I'll be sure to let you know. Probably. I don't know, discovering ancient hidden magics might be the sort of thing where I'd have to swear an oath of secrecy about it."

Hmm. This is true. Unfortunate.

"Well, I'll just have to tag along if you ever go on a quest to discover ancient magic, I suppose. We shall succeed through the power of friendship!"

In the basement, Lilian's ceased being fed alcohol. It'll take her a bit to finish burning through it, but not an outrageously long time. And while she does, she'll work the rest of its effects out of her system.

It remains a good thing that Tanthe doesn't find it necessary to listen to everyone in her range.

"The power of friendship is such a good way to succeed at things."

"You know, in most of my adventure novels, the supposed power of friendship really ended up just being the power of friendship-powered supermagic. Absent that I'm not quite sure how to make it work."

"But it's such a good power!" she says. "Understanding people and figuring out how to cooperate with them so you're both better off than you would have been alone! Why would you need extra magic on top of that?"

Aire is quietly thinking that, given her interactions with Tanthe so far, it looks like this is somehow at least partially true, which is ridiculous. Tanthe did almost lose herself because of that general outlook. But also, Tanthe successfully managed that entire "cooperate with them so you're both better off than you would have been alone" thing with someone like Aire.

"Ask all of my childhood adventure novels, not me! But also, sometimes it is hard to negotiate with rockslides. And then you want the ability to apply supermagic to the problem."

Christa wishes that they had some friendship-based supermagic to deal with the Red Queen right about now, actually. She also seems difficult to cooperate with.

(Tanthe is quietly delighted by the knowledge that her approach totally did work.)

"I admit that usually when I hear people say 'what are friends for' the answer is not 'halting rockslides', but in a sense having friends helps halt rockslides too, because if you have a rockslide in need of halting you can ask your friends to help and some of them might be really good at Earth magic!"

If the power of friendship is a large part of what manages to finally put a stop to the Red Queen -

Wait. This alliance is sort of that, isn't it? All these people coming together like this?

No, Aire, don't be ridiculous, this is just people joining together in common cause in their own individual self-interest, because together they can-

Drat.

"The Earth Magic was within the friends we made along the way! Well, I suppose it's still the power of friendship doing it, albeit at one step removed."

"Exactly!!"

"Okay, you've won me over, the power of friendship is surprisingly workable even without friendship-powered supermagic, and can perhaps be used to counter rockslides in some circumstances."

This is good! She's very good at being friendly! Much better at it than punching people!

She gives Christa a little hug when she thinks that.

She's rather glad she was wrong about how all of this worked, back in her cave.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww. Friends being friends! <3

It takes Lilian a while to burn through the alcohol in her system, and even then she’s left with all the lust that it left behind. It takes her a while to even realize what’s happening, as the alcohol wears off and she emerges from her fog of alcohol-induced-stupidity and into a fog of lust.

Maybe it’s morning, and the bar is helpfully “waking her up” so she can go about her day?

Well, surely, she can take a little time to have a last little bit of fun for the road. She had coffee in the morning back home; tentacle sex is perhaps a slightly different way of waking herself up, but she rather doubts anyone in the Pink will find it odd.

The bar gives her a bit of time, lets her work her way through her lust with its tentacles, before interrupting to try to explain. It’s spent enough time out in the wastes to understand the way that non-tentacled can be distracted by lust, or disabled by pleasure.

But, after not too long, Lilian has worked out quite a bit of her lust with the obliging tentacles of the bar and approached something resembling satisfaction. And so it lets her know that her friend is waiting for her upstairs.

Friend? Oh, it must be Aire.

She disentangles herself from the bar's tentacles and turns to head upstairs.

She feels a little silly now about the vague sense of ominousness she got off of Aire, while she was leading her down to the basement. Really, someone leads her off to a friendly bar's pleasure pit and she decides this is something to be worried about? When she comes back to life if she dies, she has friends to come grab her if she gets distracted for too long, and Aire hasn't actually done anything suspicious?

And then she emerges into the main area of the bar and looks around, trying to spot Aire. There's a girl over there who has Aire's build, but she has a different face and hair color, so - wait. That's also Aire's clothes. And Aire's boobs. Lilian would recognize those anywhere.

What in the world is going on here? Creative use of illusion magic to have a new face every day?

And now probably-Aire is looking at her.

Lilian heads over to say hello.

And then she notices the person in the booth opposite Aire, who had, until her closer approach, been blocked from view by the backing of the booth, on account of being a rather small woman.

She's really quite pretty.

Lilian shakes herself out of her distraction, and says, "Um, Aire, is that you? I didn't recognize you with the different face."

"Oh! Hello, you must be Lilian! I'm Aire's host, Christa. I wasn't actually conscious when you were talking with Aire, so hello, it's nice to meet you!"

What. Is Aire a... what are they called again? Skinsuit, her implanted knowledge informs her. They're called skinsuits.

Wait. She and Aire did rather a lot more than talk, yesterday night. Is Christa okay with that?

She opens her mouth to ask-