Kimi K3 · Write for User

Kaveh raises a hand. The argument—which had been about whether a set of curtains constituted a "structural necessity" or a "morale expense"—stops. Three shoppers bump into their backs, and the crowd parts around the two scholars.

"I—" Kaveh touches the feathers in his hair. "Kris. We were having a discussion. About the household budget. A civilized, adult— you can't just— pissing on a slime?"

"Uh, yeah. There's, like, a bunch of Dendro slimes out by the road past Gandharva Ville. They hide in the ground. So if you gotta go, you just, um. Go. And then they pop up out of the dirt and shake their membranes and it's—" Kris lets out a soft hum and rocks on his heels. "It's wild. They do this little shake. Mrr."

Alhaitham stands still, weight evenly distributed. He looks at Kris.

"Hydro application to a subterranean Dendro organism would trigger a bloom reaction at the point of contact," Alhaitham says. "The 'shake' you describe is likely an involuntary dispersal response. The slime is attempting to rid its membrane of the catalyst before cores form." He leans forward, narrowing his eyes. "How many cores? And did they detonate?"

"Do NOT encourage him!" Kaveh turns, his capelet swinging. A woman selling padisarahs steps back from her stall. "This is a student, Alhaitham, a ward of our household, telling us he has been— on the side of a road—"

"I'm sixty-something, dude. I'm older than both of you combined, probably." Kris's ears press flat against his head. "And I didn't get any cores. The slime just, like. Absorbed it. It expanded and contracted. Do slimes feel happy? Anyway the leaves got really green after. I think I helped it."

"You fertilized it," Alhaitham says.

"I fertilized it," Kris agrees. He stands straight, shoulders squared.

Kaveh lets out a sharp, clicking sound in the back of his throat. He stares at Alhaitham, his face reddening.

"We are never speaking of this again," Kaveh announces. He grips Kris's sleeve. "You are coming with us, you are going to help settle the curtain question like a normal person, and if I ever find out you've— irrigated— anything within sight of the Akademiya, so help me—"

"The curtains can wait." Alhaitham snaps his book shut and slides one earcup of his headphones up off his ear. "There's an alchemical supply stall two rows down. Vahid sells diluted growth serum by the vial. If a small volume of nitrogen-rich fluid reliably accelerates Dendro slime maturation, that's a publishable observation, and I'd rather test it on a controlled subject than spend the afternoon arguing about fabric." He looks at Kris, and the corner of his mouth lifts. "How full is your bladder?"

"ALHAITHAM."

"I mean," Kris says, ears lifting, tail giving one slow curl, "I did just have a lot of tea."

Kris plants his feet in the middle of the aisle, which, given that he is four-ten and shaped like a dumpling in baggy clothes, mostly functions as a suggestion.

"Okay, okay. Kaveh's gonna start exploding like a pissed-on Pyro slime if we don't settle the argumento first."

"This is a budgetary deliberation, not an argumento, and I am not going to explode—" Kaveh's voice is already doing the thing, the rising crack and a volume that makes the padisarah vendor wince.

"He's going to," Alhaitham confirms, pleasantly, like a man reading the weather off a card.

"So. Explain it to me like I'm dumb. Which I'm not, I'm just, um. External to the drama."

Kaveh seizes the opening like a drowning man seizes a dock. "The south-facing window in the main room has no curtain. The afternoon sun bleaches the upholstery—my upholstery, which I reupholstered myself, by hand—and it destroys the light quality for drafting. I want to buy fabric. Good fabric. Gold-threaded, because the room's palette—"

"Sixty-eight thousand Mora," Alhaitham says.

"—and he says the existing shutters are 'functionally sufficient,' which is what he says about everything, which is why our house has the warmth of an archival tomb—"

"The shutters block the sun, which solves the problem as stated. What Kaveh wants is not light control. He wants the room to feel a certain way, and he wants the household fund—"

"Our household fund, which I contribute to with labor—"

"—to underwrite the feeling."

The crowd has thickened, and a Port Ormos merchant has stopped pretending to inspect melons. Alhaitham, Scribe of the Akademiya, a man whose salary could buy the curtain, the rod, and the stall selling them, stands with his arms folded after spending forty minutes refusing his roommate sixty-eight thousand Mora of drape. Money is rarely the point between them; it is simply the only vocabulary they both trust.

Kris looks between them. His tail does one slow sway. 『These two guys.』 The thought arrives whole and simple. 『Kaveh wants the house to feel like a home, and Alhaitham enjoys the friction of the argument too much to end it. Neither would ever admit it.』

"Okay so. Um. Kaveh, if the room stays ugly, do you actually draft worse? Like, measurably."

"Yes. Light quality affects linework and mood— I did my best concept sketches for Alcazarzaray in a sunlit room, there is documentation—"

"And Alhaitham. If Kaveh's sad about the room, is he more annoying or less annoying."

Alhaitham pauses briefly, a moment that clearly costs him something.

"...Measurably more annoying."

"Hey—"

"Then it's a productivity tool with gold thread. Buy the dumb curtain, split it sixty-forty, Kaveh pays the forty in chores like always, and then we go watch me pee on a slime for science."

In the ensuing silence, the melon merchant nods slowly, as if a great matter of state has been resolved.

Kaveh opens and closes his mouth, his ears flushing pink under the feather ornaments. "Sixty-forty is— that's almost reasonable. I—" He rounds on Alhaitham, defensive on instinct. "Well?"

Alhaitham looks at Kris for a long moment with the expression of a man recalibrating a filing system. "He solved in forty seconds what we've litigated for three weeks. I'm putting it in the ledger as a consultation." A beat. "Accepted. Sixty-forty, but the fabric purchase must be itemized; any overage comes out of your wine budget."

"Deal. Deal." Kaveh says it fast, before the terms can evolve.

"Cool. Mrrp. Now somebody point me at Vahid's stall before this tea becomes a problem."

Alhaitham is already moving, cutting a path through the crowd with the effortless arrogance of a tall man who has never once said "excuse me," and Kaveh grabs Kris's sleeve again, not to restrain him this time, but just to keep him close, his fingers lingering a half-second longer than navigation requires.