“Yo Kate, you got any more of them green fruit snacks?” Eve asked. She knew that as a pixie, she now gained no actual nutrition from food anymore, but it was hard to shake old habits. Not to mention, since transforming, she had developed a serious craving for sugary foods.

“Not a problem sis,” Katelyn said, fishing through her open bag. “Catch.” She flicked a fruit snack in the direction of Eve, who had to leap up a few inches to catch it.

“Couldda just handed to to me y’know,” Eve remarked, to which Katelyn shrugged. Eve sat back down on her perch atop Katelyn’s duffel bag, grabbed a fistful of the heat-softened gummy, and began stuffing her face.

Eve, Sybil, Katelyn, and Rowena were all sitting on a bus, sweltering in the heat from the late morning sun. They had been driving for hours, away from Goldfield and deep into the Northwestern mountains. At the moment they were now on some dirt road, driving through the dense pine forest, and a fair amount of dust was being kicked up, much to Eve’s dismay. Sybil had fallen asleep nearly an hour ago, sitting in a nook next to Eve on the large duffel bag with her face smooshed up against the window. Rowena, Katelyn’s pixie, was sitting on the bus seat below, propped against the wall and reading a tiny book.

Eve didn’t know why Rowena had brought so many books to summer camp; wasn’t the point to get outside for a week and get some fresh air? Leave all the studying and crap behind? Still, she couldn’t deny it was awfully cute when Rowena got sucked into a book. Her nose would scrunch up and sometimes she absently mouthed the words she was reading. It was adorable.

A wheel of the bus slipped into another large pothole on the dirt road, causing the bus to violently lurch and fling the students inside towards the right side.

“Whoa!” Eve yelped, grabbing the handle of Kate’s duffel bag to steady herself. Sybil flipped over and smacked into Eve, startling herself awake.

“What the--!” Sybil exclaimed, and they both tumbled off the duffel bag and into Katelyn’s lap.

“Hohoo damn, road’s gettin’ pretty sketchy!” Katelyn laughed, her tanned skin shining in the sunlight. “Hope the wheels on this thing don’t fall off!”

Eve didn’t think that was something to really be laughing about, as she and Sybil untangled themselves. Getting stranded in the middle of the forest was not her idea of a fun getaway. She looked around and realized she had dropped her fruit snack. Peering over the edge of the seat, she saw it on the floor, with a large amount of dust and hair sticking to it.

Bummer.

Rowena closed her book and stashed it in her pixiebag, a type of backpack that was specifically designed to allow room for a pixie’s wings. She stood up and stretched, her bright marigold skin shining as she took a deep breath. She adjusted her large glasses and re-tied her dark vermillion hair into a low messy bun. “How long have we been driving for?” she asked, flitting up to the window and staring out at the vast mountain forest around her.

“Like, I dunno, two and a half hours or something?” Katelyn said. “How do you even do that?”

“Do what?” Rowena asked.

“Just like, turn off the world when you’re reading. I dunno, you tune everything out for a while and it’s pretty crazy. By the way, isn’t this like, y’know, a camping trip? Why’d you need to bring, uh . . ."--she squinted at the book Rowena was holding--"Calculus and its Applications to the middle of the woods?”

“School’s in three weeks, Kate, I’m just catching up on all the material we learned last year. We’re gonna be seniors this year, and I don’t want to fuck up my last chance at high school.”

“C’mon, Rona, you worry too much,” Katelyn said, slouching back and resting her head on the top of the bench. “Just relax and live in the moment, that’s what this whole camp is for,” she mumbled, closing her eyes. Her long, straight, blonde hair tumbled around her.

A pang of envy ached in Eve’s stomach. Kate was so pretty now, now that she’d been transitioning for a while. She was strong and athletic, well endowed, very lithe, and most of all, still human. She had transitioned the “standard” way, by seeing a magic doctor and putting together a transformation spell regiment, then casting those spells consistently every week on herself. As the weeks went by, her body slowly transformed, cell by cell, until eventually she looked identical to a cis woman, and a very good-looking one at that.

Eve sighed quietly. She kinda missed being human. Of course she enjoyed being a pixie and being able to fly, and being near-invulnerable was another handy trait that had saved her butt more than a few times now, but she still felt a few regrets. She missed being strong enough to lift anything more than a dozen ounces, and not having to ask a human for help if she needed to move anything heavier. She missed looking up at the clear blue sky and not having it be clouded by mist, even if it was only partially. She missed having a heartbeat, of all things. Her wings, as beautiful as they were, were proportionally gigantic, and she sat on them and bumped them into stuff all the time.

She had been so close to being a normal human girl like Kate was now. Had the accident not happened, she could have transitioned normally. Of course she didn’t blame Sybil one single bit for the accident; it was an accident, and she’d forgiven Sybil long ago. But still, it would have been nice to be normal. At this point, she and Sybil had been subject to countless studies, research interviews, and nosy scientists wanting to learn everything they could about them. Supposedly, amongst dual-pixie pairs, a human transforming into a pixie was almost unheard of. The most common way they manifest, Eve had learned, was if a fetus started to die early enough in development, there was a chance their half of the soul would switch over to developing into a pixie instead. But transforming? Eve had soon learned that was about as rare as lightning striking a rubber ball in a field of lightning rods.

A wadded up empty chip bag flew through the air and hit Katelyn in the head, followed by the sound of snickering behind them.

“Oi!” Rowena shouted, alighting on the back of the seat “Who threw that??” Her eyes sifted through the bus seats behind them. The snickering increased.

“Careful!” somebody sniggered. “Kevin’s pixie is on the warpath! She might hit you with a book!” 

Rowena’s marigold skin flushed nearly the same color as her hair. She buzzed her wings angrily, and was about to take off when Katelyn’s hand blocked her. She was picked up and placed back down onto Katelyn’s lap, next to Eve.

“Take it easy, don’t do something you’ll regret,” Katelyn said. “They’re not worth it anyways.” She looked back and threw up a discreet middle finger towards the other students.

Rowena fumed. “How can you be so chill with them deadnaming you like that? Doesn’t it bother you?”

“Yeah, it stings for sure,” Katelyn said, shrugging, “but I dunno, by freaking out you just give those fuckers more power. Better to not give them the satisfaction.”

Sybil quietly tapped on Eve’s shoulder.

“There’s some kid staring at us at the front of the bus,” she whispered; “you know him?”

They both peeked out into the aisle. Sure enough, sitting in one of the frontmost seats, all by himself, another boy was staring at them, or staring at Katelyn, they weren’t sure. Shadowed by a dark hoodie, he had a rounded face and medium-brown skin, and dreadlocks that hung around his head, down to his earlobe. Above all that, his eyes were what caught Eve’s attention. They were strikingly pale, to the point of being nearly white, and Eve couldn’t be sure due to the bright light, but were they glowing as well? Between the staring, the hoodie, and the pale eyes, he looked rather unsettling.

He must have noticed Eve and Sybil were looking at him because he looked away soon after.

“Have you ever seen him before?” Sybil asked, as they huddled back down out of sight. “I think I would remember somebody with eyes like that. Looked like he was staring into my soul.”

“Never seen him in my life,” Eve remarked. The summer camp they were going to was endorsed by the school, so everyone here should have been Goldfield HS students. Judging by the wide berth all the other students were giving the guy, no one else knew him, or wanted to know him, either.

Eve flittered back to her spot on Kate’s duffel bag. On top she had her own pixie-sized duffel bag, scarcely four inches long, and began rummaging through it. After digging through extra pairs of socks and hiking gear, as well as an adorable monokini she was dying to wear at the lake this week, she found her gauntlet.

The piece of machinery still amazed her, even after over two years of having it. Custom made by the pixineers working with Meredith and Joanna, they were designed to allow pixies with no human to cast spells, in a sense at least. They explained it as being almost like a magical prosthetic. Both she and Sybil had received one each, and they carried the gauntlets nearly everywhere they could.

She slid the titanium apparatus onto her right arm, the familiar padding wrapping around her lilac skin up to her elbow. Crystals and arcane-conductive stones, many of which she was still learning the names of, littered the outside, connected by runes and sigils she still barely could wrap her head around. The gauntlet was jointed at the wrist and each knuckle, and she flexed her hand around after strapping the thing on.

Sybil had noticed what Eve was doing and landed next to her. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I wanna see if anyone knows anything else about that kid at the front,” Eve responded, shaking out her gauntleted wrist and familiarizing her mana with the contact points touching the tips of each of her fingers once again.

“Are you sure?” Sybil asked. “We only get five charges out of those things before we gotta hook them back up to the charging stand. In case you forgot, there isn’t gonna be a way to charge these out here. You really wanna use one of yours right now, before we even get to the campsite?”

“Well maybe not, but ehh, fuck it,” Eve said.

She closed her eyes and reached down within herself til she felt her own lifestream. She took a deep breath, feeling the sugary magic surge through herself and expand the stream. She channeled that energy through her shoulder, down her arm and into her hand. The glove resisted her at first; it didn’t want to accept the magic like a normal bond between human and pixie would, but with gentle coaxing and a bit of pressure, she pushed the magic through her fingertips.

The sigils and runes on the gauntlet exploded with bright purple light, and the contact points on each finger lit up, trailing purple light wherever they went. Now the tricky part was to weave the magic into the correct format to cast the spell. Eve deftly moved her hand around, sculpting the trails of magic until it matched the correct diagram for a simple “enhance sense” spell, and then touched her ear. The stones embedded on the gauntlet flashed one more time, and Eve’s head was flooded with noise.

Rumble, rrrumble, went the engine of the bus.

Crunch, criKranch, went the tires, rolling against stone and dirt.

Scrreeach, went the bus suspension.

No no, voices. She needed to pick out voices.

“Not a chance, Kate. Grenadeen would fuck up Spinstar any day of the week, it’s a simple matter of physics application. You see, in chapter twenty-seven of the manga, she . . .”

“Ohmygod, and like, Ryan told me about something like the rims or shit on his stupid Mustang, and like I don’t even care . . .”

“Listen girl, yo aunt’s fuckin’ cray-zee . . .”

“Bruh, me and the boys went and wrenched some new rims on my Mustang last weekend, they look straight fire, bro . . .”

“Betcha I can eat all these crackers and still whistle . . .”

“Betcha you gotta run across the camp naked if you can’t, dude . . .”

Come on, this wasn’t going anywhere! Eve focused harder.

There! A whisper.

“Who’s the freak up at the front? He looks like a ghost, it’s scary.”

“I heard he killed his pixie. Probably ate it or something.”

“No way!”

After a minute or so, Eve sighed and cut the spell, and her hearing returned to normal. Everything she had heard during that time just sounded like reckless speculation and gossip. It was clear that no one else knew anything about the strange boy either, and were just being plain mean. She felt a bit of regret wasting a charge of her gauntlet on that.

Enhance Sense was a bit of a high-level spell for someone who was only a junior in high school, but Eve couldn’t deny the usefulness of it. More than enough times it had come in super handy before. Not to mention she had been fascinated with spells and magic ever since she and Sybil had finally learned how to use them. Learning new spells had become a bit of a hobby for her.

“So?” Sybil asked.

“Nothing, just random nasty crap people are saying about him. Sounds like he might not have a pixie? Blehh, shouldn’ta wasted that charge.”

Sybil rolled her eyes. “I told you you'd regret it. You should save them for really important stuff.”

“Yeah? And when's the last time you cast a spell, huh?" Eve said, sticking out her tongue. "You’re just jealous cause you can’t cast spells as good as me.”

“Am not!” Sybil retorted. “It’s just, the matrices are so complicated and I always get the figures wrong, and you have to be so precise and mathematical with it, and I just struggle, that’s all! I dunno why I can’t seem to figure it out! We’re born from the same soul, I don’t know why you’re so good at them and I suck!”

“Hey, easy,” Eve shushed, “I'm sorry I teased you, I know how bad you feel about it." Eve finished packing away her gauntlet and put a hand on Sybil's shoulder. "Don't worry, I’m sure something will click and you’ll get the hang of them soon.”

“Yeah . . .” Sybil sat down on the bag and crossed her arms.

The bus passed around a tight mountain corner and out of the window Eve finally saw Camp Wildwood, the place they’d be staying for the next week.

“Oh look, I think we’re here!” she exclaimed, getting the attention of Sybil, Katelyn and Rowena. All four plastered themselves against the window to get a good look.

Even though the mist hung over and permeated the atmosphere, Eve was getting surprisingly good at compensating for it and picking things out, like pixie eyes were designed for seeing through the Magisphere. A large, crystal blue lake sat, nestled in the crook of the valley they were now descending into. Dense forests surrounded it on all sides, and from her position, she could make out a large clearing and several cabins situated around it. To top it off, a large wooden banner rose from the treetops, with “Camp Wildwood” written in the most cheesy, outdoorsy font she’d ever seen.

The four of them shared a look with each other. This week was going to be fun.