Erika had put together a simple dinner of salad, tartiflette and buttermilk pie. Tartiflette was a potato, bacon, onion, and cheese casserole that made a great winter warmer. They sat somewhat awkwardly at the table, talking around the topic of Jason’s mysterious return to life.
Jason and Erika had grown up with their mother’s strict rules about not bringing conflict to the dinner table. While Jason never saw a rule he wouldn’t obnoxiously flout just because, it helped him out in this particular instance. He was happy to ask Emi about her life, having been transplanted from Melbourne to Casselton Beach. It was the opposite of his own trajectory.
“I like the weather here,” she said. “It rains more in summer than winter, which is weird. That rain we got last week was really heavy, though.”
Jason absently wondered if his arrival had somehow impacted the weather patterns. Clive would have been able to figure it out.
“Are you alright, Uncle Jason?” Emi asked, reading his expression.
“Yeah,” Jason said. “I was just thinking about a friend. I don’t know when I’ll be able to see him again.”
“Can you not call him because he’s in the place you were?”
“Exactly,” Jason said.
“So, did you do much cooking while you were away?” Ian asked Jason, diplomatically seeking common ground between the siblings after the tension between Jason and Erika.
“A bit,” Jason said. “I got to try a lot of new things, but the ingredients were largely local. That friend I mentioned grew up on an eel farm and taught me a few ways to cook them that aren’t awful. Again, I can’t get my hands on the same ingredients here, but I took notes with some potential substitutes and variations. I’m hoping to find the time to try some things out, now that I’m home. Do you know an eel guy, Eri?”
“I know someone who can sort you out,” Erika said. “You know who will be happy you’re back? Wally.”
“Wally! He moved over to the new show with you?”
“He didn’t just move to the show, but into town too. He bought one of those fancy beach cottages.”
“He was lucky to pick one up,” Jason said. “They almost never go on the market.”
“The Green family sold and Mum gave him an early heads-up.”
“That’s nice of her,” Jason said. “You know, I saw Lawrence Green the other day. He thought I was Kaito.”
“Wasn’t he quite slimy?” Erika asked. “I went to school with his cousin.”
“Still is,” Jason said. “If anything, he’s even more oily. You could lubricate an engine with his personality.”
“Wally’s husband bought the coffee shop off old Mrs Russel,” Ian said. “You can finally get a good cup of coffee in this town.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Jason said. “I’m lucky I’m not a coffee drinker, since they didn’t have any where I’ve been staying.”
“Just like phones,” Erika said.
“Exactly,” Jason said. “The tea was crazy good, though. There was this river, running through a valley with all this tea growing up the slopes. I went through there once, not long after I arrived.”
“Arrived where, exactly?”
“A place called Greenstone,” Jason said. “You’ll be able to see it for yourself, soon. I kept a vlog.”
“A vlog?” Erika asked. “They don’t have radios, but they have the equipment for vlogging?”
“It’ll make sense once I explain everything. Did you figure out a day the two of you can both get free? I did say that you should have someone look out for Emi, but I think she should be involved from the start.”
“Tomorrow,” Erika said. “If it has to be a whole day, then we can’t do it on a weekday and I’m not waiting until next weekend.”
“Tomorrow it is,” Jason said.
Erika narrowed her eyes at him, looking for evasiveness.
“So long as nothing comes up,” he added innocently.
The houseboat produced by the cloud flask was more impressive than what it had been at iron rank, which was already quite luxurious. It was still a far cry from the sprawling wings and towering spires of Emir’s cloud palace, but it was still a small floating island, with multiple levels of open deck and tinted wraparound glass. There was even a glass-walled room beneath the waterline.
The rooftop surfaces were covered in solar panels. Jason could sense them drawing in ambient magic like an overactive mana lamp. It left the surrounding ambient magic even more anaemic than normal as the houseboat guzzled it up.
It seemed largely designed to suck the ambient magic down vertically, drawing it down from the air in a great column. Anyone with magical senses would notice it from halfway across town. It offered far more draw than the motorhome variant, presumably because it normalised magic across the larger space of the houseboat.
The decks and interior of the houseboat were littered with lush, green leafy plants. Jason had largely transplanted them from the jungle astral space, although he had avoided the magical ones. When he had awarded Jason the flask, Emir had also given him a notebook that detailed all his experiments into different kinds of plants with his own cloud flask. It detailed his results with different kinds of flora, magical and mundane. It had exhaustive lists of how different plants withstood being stored away in the cloud flask, weathered the sea air, or adapted to various climates.
“If you aren’t going with magical plants,” Emir had told him when handing over the notebook, “I’d just give the section on getting the plants installed a read. You can shovel a bunch of earth, water, light, and shield quintessence into the cloud flask and any non-magical plants you want will thrive. Once you start looking into magical plants, that’s the time to give it a proper read. There are a lot of quirks you need to be aware of.”
Saturday night, Jason arrived back at the houseboat mentally weary but let out a contented sigh as he drank in the sight of it. It was big enough that Jason’s winter arrival proved to be a good thing; the neighbouring berth was available for Jason to rent when the houseboat spilled over into the neighbouring slip.
He stepped onto the lower deck and then made his way inside. The interior was all light woods and white leather, plus tasteful teal embellishments. The cloud constructs could have their interiors and exteriors set to adaptive or grandiose independently and he had the houseboat set to full adaptive.