Handiwork

Yutaka Ogimura led Noa through a door in the back of the hall, which opened up to some wild grass. The back of the building was pocked with small openings. Some were windows, and some were front doors with perches for visitors to wait after knocking. Others were full storefronts: awnings with small platforms built beneath them. 

Noa waited on a bare chunk of brickwork that seemed to have been salvaged from somewhere while Yutaka buzzed up to one of the windows and disappeared from sight. 

This wasn't just a house, Noa reflected. It was an entire neighborhood, of who knew how many people. It seemed that Miyori's family owned the entire building and had reformed it to suit the purposes of at least several dozen pixies, if not more. 

Noa had seen pixie houses and storefronts, before, but none of this size. Or maybe he simply hadn't realized how far they continued beyond the small doorways visible on the human streets. 

Yutaka returned with a heavily pregnant pixie with auburn hair and friendly wrinkles around her eyes. "Miyori's classmate, this is my sister Yuko. She's working on setting things up for herself, and she could use a little human-scale help with it. Interested? And what should we call you, anyway?" 

Noa paused before answering. Ogimura already knew him by his surname, so he hadn't considered it, but…his surname was one more link back to his mother. It couldn't hurt to be careful. "Call me Noa," he said. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Yuko-san." 

"Even more so for me," she said. "Noa-kun, hmm? You look big and strong—just what we need. My husband is decent at piecework, but he's no good at working human-size, and some of the work I need will have that little extra oomph. Do you mind if I ride on you?" 

Noa extended a hand. "Not at all." 

She sat on the inside edge of his palm, both arms wrapped around his thumb. He could feel her delicate weight, ever so slightly overbalanced. "Okay," she said. "I'll just guide you to my place, shall I?" 

***

Yuko and her husband's residence was several blocks away, on the other side of the neighborhood. Noa walked them there and squeezed through an alley that Yuko pointed out, opening into another abandoned-looking yard. Yuko pointed out an entryway on the second floor. 

"It's a bit of a fixer-upper," she said lightly. "My husband insisted that we convert part of his workshop into a home for us to stay in, and he's done a lot of the work, but there are a few things he's just no good at. And he's busy trying to train his new employees…but anyway! Let's check the shed in the back. There should be a ladder we can use." 

The shed was old, leaky, and smelled unpleasantly of mildew. Inside there was a moldering old broom, some other gardening tools, and a few shelves of pixie-sized implements. There was also, as promised, a ladder, covered in cobwebs and moldering dust. 

Wrinkling his nose, Noa wrestled it to the side of the building, then climbed high enough that he could peer into the windows. Yuko fluttered inside and opened these up as far as they would go, leaving Noa just about enough room to reach inside. 

The room was floor-to-ceiling covered in some sort of industrial machinery, each piece easily two to three times Yuko's weight. She went around breaking the spells that had locked them in place, and it was Noa's job to lift them out and bring them down the ladder. The pieces were heavy, but a few carefully used magic words helped to ease the process along. 

"There we are," Yuko said, perched on the windowsill as she surveyed the equipment they'd cleared out. "That's a good start. I thought I was going to have to recruit a dozen cousins to get all this out, and you've done it in just a few hours." 

"What are you going to do with these?" Noa, sitting on the ladder, gestured at the machinery below. 

"Not sure yet," Yuko admitted. "It probably needs some repairs, but we won't know until we take a look. For now, we're just going to put them in the attic." She gestured up to the fourth floor, near the top of the building.

Noa stared. "The ladder doesn't reach that far," he said. 

"That's true," Yuko admitted. "And it looks like it might rain soon." She grinned in his direction. "We've got tarps, but I've got a better idea. How good are you at levitation spells?" 

Which was how Noa, after running back to the Ogimura residence to retrieve the relevant school supplies, ended up building a magic circle out of trash and elbow grease. 

He grabbed the first machine and stood in the center of the circle. "Are you ready?" he called. 

Up above, there was a smallish hole where Yuko had removed a screen that opened up to the attic. "Whenever you are, kid!" she shouted down. 

Noa took a deep breath, drew the final sigil in the concrete slab he'd drawn to fill the circle, and then said a few words of command. 

He lifted slowly off the ground, rising one, two, three stories. At the fourth, he slowed down, stopping just about level with the hole. 

"Watch out," he warned, and pushed the first piece of machinery inside, shoving it as far over to the left as he could. He could feel the suspension of the spell stretching with time, and pushed himself off, sinking back to earth. 

It seemed he'd gotten the timing right, which was lucky. This sort of thing wasn't exactly safe, even if it was effective. His mother might be impressed with this, he thought, but she probably wouldn't approve. That said, equipment aside, he was really only risking himself. And he was pretty confident in his ability to do this the half-dozen times it would take to finish the job. 

Still, he worked as quickly as he dared, and had one scare when a sudden gust of wind threatened to push him off-balance and out of the circle he'd made. He quickly corrected it with a shove on himself in midair, wobbling as Yuko swore and then laughed when it was clear he was safe. 

"You've got guts, kid," she called down as he picked up the last of the machines. "Wouldn't have expected that from a boy at a hoity-toity school like Miyori's. I thought they taught you to do things the proper way there." 

Rising up to her level, Noa grinned. "Well then, I guess you could say there's a reason I'm a drop-out." 

Yuko chuckled. "But seriously, you've got talent. I'll get my husband out in a bit to take a look at this circle. He's gonna love it." 

Noa left briefly to buy his own lunch, and when he returned, Yuko's husband was examining his circle. He wore slightly over-sized spectacles and a frown that Noa quickly realized belied a friendly nature. He introduced himself as Daisuke Matsuda and praised Noa's circle as they ate. Then he brought some of his work outside and gave Noa an impromptu lecture on what he was working on—connections that siphoned off enough power from the magic grid to run pixie-scale utilities. 

"It varies based on the neighborhood," he said. "This is based on the version we used growing up, but lately they've been faulty. There must have been a ritual adjustment upstream somewhere." 

"Does that happen often?" Noa asked. His mother worked with individual installations in different places, so she'd usually had to work on her interfaces from scratch. 

"Every generation or so," Matsuda said. "Depends on what the bigwigs in the government and big business are up to. This whole city is built on dozens of systems all stacked on top of one another, y'know, held together with only our hopes and expectations." 

Noa huffed a laugh and tried not to think too hard about how often his mother had complained about the same thing.