Private Finished What does the fox say?

The problem with the fire spell on tub four was relatively easy to fix. That wasn't really the reason Yoka was called out though.

She always had ulterior motives. There was very little that Yoka did or said that hadn't been considered, at least a little. When you've been alive for five hundred years, you had a lot of time to play out scenarios.

Yoka hoped to live out five hundred more. She wanted her immortality.

The problem was that she was already finding it creeping into her life: boredom. She never knew where it was going to come from. She kept doing new things, kept staying busy, working, doing everything she could to remind herself that she wanted to be immortal.

Yoka liked the boys that were here with her. Murphy worked for her and Steven saved her life--that put them both in an area where Yoka had a feeling that she owed them a debt. The problem is that, even though she liked them, even though she valued them....she didn't want to get close.

They were mortal. So was she, technically, but she would probably outlive them.

And if they did live as long as she did, they would probably go to hate each other. She couldn't stand some of her old lovers. Hating her old lovers might have added some meaning to her life, but she was bored of even hating them.

Yoka was out of listening distance. She realized there might have been a problem with her carefully rused plan to use Murphy and Steven, with his fire and ice powers, in the same onsen to see how a magical disaster might affect her safety spells.

There were no cameras.

So she really had no idea to know when, or how, things would go wrong.

Yoka stood in one of the wooden hallways, frozen.

She didn't want to get close to them because they were probably going to die one day. But that didn't mean she wanted to be responsible for their deaths.

@Steven @Omino

Yoka was standing in the wooden hallway of the onsen, but her mind was somewhere else.

Belgium, specifically.

Yoka was a selfish creature by nature. When it came down to it, what Yoka wanted most was to be alive, and to be alive in a world that wanted her to die before she became immortal often meant that Yoka had to make the kind of choices that put her needs before anyone else’s.

In Belgium, Yoka did what she had to do to stay alive. She carried a gun, a shovel, and a flamethrower. She made a hard choice and left someone she cared about to die. She hated having to do that, hated that she’d been thrust into a situation by someone else and she was faced with the consequences of cleaning up a disaster that could have been prevented had someone simply stayed behind.

And now, Yoka had repeated the scenario, although on a smaller scale, with two people who didn’t sign up for this. Whether she cared about them or not didn’t matter when she thought about it this way. Yoka took a deep breath and exhaled. Then, she turned back and ran the way she came.

She felt ridiculous running. Everything could be completely fine. Murphy and Steven could simply be relaxing in the onsen, which is honestly why she wanted to bring them here. Murphy worked hard for her, but he was too high strung, and she wanted him to calm the fuck down from time to time. And Steven had saved her life and seen her when she was tensed, she wanted to reward him with the same relaxation he’d brought to her. He’d made sure she could sleep easily that night, and after the hours she’d spent captured, being able to sleep easily wasn’t something Yoka ever thought she’d have.

But Yoka ran because her ulterior motives were normally successful.

For all her pre-planning, Yoka had failed to take into consideration what successful would actually mean to her.

She skidded around the wooden hallway and grabbed two robes, opening the door and forcing herself to look calm while she surveyed the mess that had already started.

Okay, bad, but not terrible.

Yoka caught site of Murphy first, ducked behind cover, and she knew that proximity to him was what would help resolve this situation. It would be her magic versus his magic, and she only had another four hundred years before she was a literal god. That left her pretty damn confident in her abilities. Murphy was…what? Yoka realized she had no idea how old he was. Twenty-something? He was human. His own gift was strong, but it couldn’t possibly be stronger.

Yoka walked through the mess like her heart wasn’t pounding.

“Well, isn’t this something,” she said, and she dropped down next to Murphy, the scalding water barely leaving a mark on her pale skin in comparison to his. Yoka would be calling the staff healer from the Cross Fox the moment they were out of here—he could hang on until she arrived. Yvette was good with things like this. Yoka dropped a robe at his feet and stepped behind him, surveying the area for Steven. The mere fact that she didn’t linger would have been an indication that Yoka wasn’t entirely on her game. She treated her employees well, generally, and burning them with magical water and rockfall was not generally a good way to do that. The only reason she didn’t linger was because she wanted to check Steven’s state of being before returning to Murphy. Fuck, she owed that boy a raise.

Her presence seemed to bring about a momentary bout of luck.

While the arch way over the onsen had cracked and the fire magic in the pool itself had appeared to have exploded before she came in, there wasn’t enough water left in the pool itself for the bubbling and sputtering water to do anything else. Yoka peered over the edge of it.

She took a deep breath and exhaled.

Okay. Well…that was bad, but it could be worse. Yoka made a note for an increase in stabilizing spells and a safety check of some kind for this. She caught site of the other boy and headed over to him, giving him a rather apologetic grin.

“I must admit, this was not the excitement I hoped to provide for you two today,” Yoka said, handing him a robe as well and giving him a moment to gather himself. She offered him a hand to help him to his feet.

There hadn’t been a disaster at the Cross Fox since 1882. Would this count as the first disaster at Yokoso? Yoko didn’t think so. This was nothing she couldn’t fix. Uncomfortable, embarrassing, but not a disaster.

Yoka exhaled her hair away from her face.

“I can promise dinner will be less eventful,” Yoka said, leading Steven to the doorway. Her heart was still pounding. Everything is okay, she told herself. She felt like she was screaming on the inside and Yoka told herself to relax. Just relax. Yoka would not be leaving them alone for dinner.

She felt more certain about the inside of the wooden onsen, which had been far more enforced than the exterior with protective spells against fire, ice, and weather. Buildings Yoka had dealt with before. She’d learned to anticipate the reactive nature of how wood, stone, and magic would interact with all sorts of creatures and powers. Outside the walls she was less certain.

“I’m going to grab Murphy,” Yoka told Steven, flashing him another apologetic and too-charming smile. Yoka still seemed remarkably calm. She was over five hundred years old. She’d been through worse, she reminded herself.

She turned around and took a few steps back outside.

“Murphy,” Yoka said, her voice equally calm. “I owe you an apology, and we’ll call Yvette—“

Yoka’s voice was drowned out by a loud crashing sound and the sudden rise of dust and rubble a step away from where Yoka had been going to go. Her foot was still hovering above the ground.

Her pounding heart was somehow louder than the ringing in her ears. Her tails had slipped out past her disguise and hung beneath her bathrobe.

Her luck had kept her alive.

But she wasn’t so certain about Murphy.

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@Steven
@Omino

I've plotted with ya'll about this so i'm just gonna go ahead and mark it finished! we'll recon for follow-up soon~