Aaron was a reasonable man.

He liked to think of himself as someone who could handle surprises well. A monster attack? Fine. A guild ambush? Sure. An unexpected bill at a restaurant? Painful, but manageable.

But this?

This was something else entirely.

He sat across from his elder sister — his elder sister, a woman he had only just discovered existed in any meaningful capacity — and replayed her sentence in his head. Once. Twice. Five times. Seven. He gave it a solid dozen repetitions, approaching it from different angles like a man trying to find the hidden picture in one of those optical illusion posters.

No matter how he looked at it, the words refused to rearrange themselves into something sensible.

They just kept saying the same thing.

Will you help your dear elder sis here, brother? I promise I’ll be gentle.

Her voice had been light. Almost sweet. Like someone offering to share a snack, not like someone proposing something that made every alarm bell in Aaron’s brain ring simultaneously.

He made a very mature decision.

He leaned forward, picked up the coffee cup straight from her hands, and chugged the entire thing in one go. The heat hit his throat like a tiny, furious fireball and he winced hard enough to briefly consider whether he’d lost the ability to taste. Then he blinked, set the cup down, and looked at her.

Okay. He was ready.

"Are you for real? What the hell do you mean by ’subject’???" he asked, his voice climbing several registers in a way that he would later deny entirely.

Ariana, for her part, watched him steal her coffee with the calm expression of someone who had long ago accepted that people around her would do inexplicable things. She smiled. She was unbothered. This was perhaps the most alarming thing about her.

"Subject as in test subject, brother," she said, as if this was the most normal sentence a person could say over breakfast. "I want to study you. You seem interesting. Interesting enough that I came all the way down here to see you personally."

She then reached over, picked up his coffee cup with the casual confidence of someone who considered all beverages in her vicinity to be communal property, and continued talking.

"And I must say, I ain’t disappointed. The portal fee was worth it."

Aaron’s brain, already running at full capacity just trying to process the first part, snagged on a single word. Portal. He filed it away under ’extremely interesting and concerning, revisit later,’ because right now he had bigger fish to fry. Much bigger. Possibly fish that could breathe fire.

"Well... uhm... what sort of research is it?" he asked, his voice doing its best impression of calm and achieving something closer to ’a man standing on a very thin bridge.’

Ariana reached into her flask — her flask, because of course she had one — and poured a generous helping of whiskey into the coffee she had just stolen from him. She hummed to herself, the picture of relaxation, and replied,

"It’s a research on males. You know, why they are so weak and have weak connections to mana and stuff, all the normal things. You will be safe, trust me. You trust me, right?"

Hell no.

The words formed instantly, loudly, and with great conviction somewhere in Aaron’s chest. They were honest words. Noble words, even. They represented everything he felt in that moment with perfect accuracy.

He did not say them.

He valued his continued existence too much for that.

Instead, he cleared his throat, straightened up, and put on the expression of a man being very reasonable and not at all terrified.

"You see, the research sounds interesting but right now I am in a huge fame mess and several guilds are going to be coming for the recruitment. I can’t just leave this place, right?"

It was a solid excuse. Logical. Grounded in reality. He was quite proud of it.

Ariana turned and looked directly at Claire.

"Huh, why not? Dear Claire is capable enough to handle that, no?"

Her voice was sweet. Perfectly, almost surgically sweet. But her eyes were doing something completely different from her voice. Her eyes were having an entirely separate, much more intense conversation that communicated, without any ambiguity whatsoever, that she would not be accepting a no.

Claire, to her credit, did not combust on the spot.

"Of course she can," Aaron said quickly, because he was not about to let his sister weaponize Claire against him. "But that’s not the topic. The fame is mine, the recruitment concerns me. It’s my job to be here and see it through."

Ariana’s response to this was to lean forward and ruffle his hair.

She ruffled his hair. Like he was seven years old and had just said something adorable.

"Aww... you really grew up into a lovely man!" she said, and she sounded genuinely delighted, which was somehow worse. "But don’t worry, if the guilds and stuff is a problem I can extend an official invitation from the Oscar’s House of Science. Have you heard of it?"

Aaron had, in fact, heard of it.

Everyone had heard of it. Oscar was the kind of name that showed up in conversations the way gravity showed up in physics — constantly, unavoidably, and as a fundamental force that shaped everything around it. It was the biggest private corporation running across the northern continent with fingers reaching all the way into the central continent. It had ties with other races. It was, effectively, the sort of entity that small countries thought very carefully about before doing anything that might inconvenience it.

And his sister, this woman who was currently drinking whiskey-coffee at what was probably an inappropriate hour, apparently had enough authority within it to throw around official invitations like they were discount coupons.

Aaron sat with this information for a moment.

He could see it, laid out before him like a very attractive buffet. Money. Connections. Freebies. The kind of opportunities that people spent entire careers trying to get close to. Any version of him from a few months ago would have been halfway out the door already.

But.

There was always a but.

She wasn’t offering him a job. She wasn’t even offering him the janitor position. No, no. She was offering him a spot as a test subject. The kind of person who gets handled with great care and enthusiasm right up until the point where all the useful data has been collected, and then gets deposited back where they came from — or, if the math worked out that way, somewhere slightly worse.

Was a temporary buffet worth derailing a path he was actually building for himself?

"No," Aaron said.

It was a clean word. One syllable. Unambiguous.

The café around them did something strange.

Nearby tables went quiet — not because anyone had heard the conversation, since Ariana was far too careful for that. No, they went quiet the way animals in a forest go quiet when something large and apex-shaped starts moving through the undergrowth. Pure instinct. The kind that bypasses the thinking brain entirely and goes straight to the part of the nervous system that has kept living things alive since the very beginning.

It was, all in all, a very loud silence.

Ariana, for the first time since she’d sat down, let some of the performance drop. The surface humor peeled back a little, like a stage curtain pulling aside to reveal that the theater behind it was significantly more serious than the show suggested. Her eyes gained a clarity and focus that had not been there before, and she nodded slowly.

"Are you sure? I can guarantee your well being in case you accept, and not only that, you will gain several gifts and favors from our corporation." She smiled. This time, the smile did not quite reach the places smiles are supposed to reach.

Aaron, operating purely on survival instinct now, turned to look at Claire and Eva.

He was asking for help. He was not too proud to admit it. He needed someone, anyone, to throw him a rope here.

Both of them looked away.

Claire shook her head and said, very helpfully, "I honestly don’t know, Aaron. It is your decision."

Eva, displaying the same extraordinary level of support, said, "Same."

Aaron made a mental note to have words with both of them later. Many words. Arranged in a very specific and pointed order.

He turned back to Ariana and, against every instinct screaming at him to simply agree to anything she said and sort it out later, began negotiating like a reasonable adult.

"What will happen to my friends and lovers if I were to agree? Where is the headquarters or wherever you’re taking me? And how long will the research take?"

Ariana answered each question with the brisk efficiency of someone who had anticipated them all. His companions couldn’t come, but she’d guarantee their wellbeing — a loss for her, she noted, with the air of someone making a significant charitable donation. Location was classified, but she’d allow three portal uses, back and forth. Duration was somewhere in the neighborhood of a month or two, give or take however long god decided it would take.

Aaron hummed. He thought. He weighed everything.

And then he thought about the one thing that neither money nor connections nor three free portal trips could solve.

His eyes. The lump on his back. The things that couldn’t stay hidden through a whole research project.

"I think it would be better for me to not go..."

Ariana’s emerald eyes shone. Just briefly. A flash of something ancient and knowing, mystical and unsettlingly beautiful.

"Brother," she said, her voice dropping into something softer and considerably more dangerous, "Don’t worry about your eyes or the lump on your back... I will be your researcher, I won’t want my brother to be caught and thrown into government labs, right?"

Aaron heard the words.

He understood that they were technically caring words, dressed up in the clothes of reassurance and familial warmth.

He also understood, with absolute certainty, that they were a threat.

Maybe both things were true at once.

That, he was beginning to understand, was very much Ariana’s style.