"Yeah."

Neck thickness and length, pectorals and waist and hips and thighs and she looks up at him and lifts an eyebrow again.

"—it's a physiological response! You're really close and touching me all over—"

"Well, get your boy down, I'm not up for partying until I'm done with this and it'll take me a while."

"It'll go down on its own," he says, trying not to think about the implications she's implying because if he does then it'll take longer to go down.

Upper and lower thigh circumference, length, calves, feet, overall height, and she's done. "Now is the time for requests. Colours, shapes, styles..."

"...I like showing skin? And—probably darker colours?"

"How much skin?"

"I don't... really know."

She sighs. "You're making my job a lot harder. Here—" She vanishes a third time and returns carrying a thick tome of what turn out to be sketches. "Go through these, tell me which ones you like and which you don't and what you like about them, we'll build something you like. Are you hungry? I'm hungry."

"I could eat," he says, accepting the book.

"Excellent, you're human, congratulations. I'll assume you meant to answer in the affirmative and I'll get you something."

Sure. And he'll... go through these sketches.

This is really not how he'd imagined his evening would go.

Evelin doesn't let Vallynn go until they have finalised a design he feels happy with, which takes more work than it needs to because Vallynn keeps imagining she's more limited by designs that make sense than she actually is. Her goal is to have something he'll wear forever, and while he's sceptical this is something they can achieve overnight like that he has to admit that if she pulls that off that wouldn't be a look that'd be out of place amidst those powerful adventurers in Eden.

They do, once that's done, end up in bed together. Vallynn has to admit that seeing someone so insanely committed to her goals like that was more than a little bit attractive, even if she's also riding a bit of a manic high, and if the only reason she wanted to sleep with him was because of his looks, well, it's not like he's ever objected to that kind of objectification before. 

The next morning she kicks him out and tells him she'll find him once she's done, and again he's finding himself questioning his judgment—and hers. That was too, too much, too fast, his brain is still reeling from it. And he doesn't know what he's going to do today. 

He didn't know what he was going to do yesterday, either. He supposes he should explore the library? That's what he'd been doing before. But something feels... incomplete. It's...

...he slept well and it's now morning and he has the whole day ahead of him and he doesn't actually know what comes next. He's on retainer so the Guild might call on him if they need him but he doesn't have anything in particular he wants to practise or any plans for what to do and he'd kind of assumed there'd be more structure to this part of his life but it turns out there's less instead and. And.

He wants to be a powerful wizard who does good things in the world but his plans for that had a black box step here at the Mages’ Guild and now that he's opened the box he's found out that it's empty and he needs to fill it with something.

He's too young to be having existential crises. And this sounds like maybe the kind of thing he should ask his senpai about.

He'll have to wait a little bit in the mess hall but eventually Astrid does in fact show up to have breakfast. "Morning. Looking for me?"

"Yeah."

"Wait, actually? Okay, sure." She gestures for him to follow her as she grabs her food and goes to a table. "Sup?"

"What do you… do here… all day?"

"...like, general-you or me in particular or…?"

"Yes."

Snort. "Well I've been following the spell dev lectures I told you about and the next one is in half an hour, you could drop in? Might be a bit dense but you'll catch up. And then, uh, there's this spellforms guy who's been helping me with spell variation research one-on-one in exchange for me collecting some reagents for him so I'll probably go hit up the underwater cave for that stuff—"

"Underwater cave?"