Oliver had went to visit all of his old haunts, although some of them were truly haunted for the green kilin.
Oliver almost had an episode near the old apricot orchard. He and his friends had been wassailing together one winter solstice, each of them completely drunk. As he smelled the place, the voices started singing again. Snatches of conversation flashed through his head. Each time it happened, it made his head hurt. The troubled, young elf boy named Edmund: was he alright? Could Oliver have done more for him? And there had been that song they all used to sing together that he had gotten so teared up over. Flash! And there was another set of memories, at the planting, where he had begged for some labor to help with money. The owner had told him he had all the farm hands he had needed, but some repairs needed to be done on the equipment. Three weeks of trying to live up to the fib he had told about his blacksmithing experience, nearly getting himself killed, but he had finally figured out how to fix a plough. Flash! That moment when Oliver had started breathing heavily and drooling while immersed in conversation with the twenty-something son of the man that owned the orchard: had he seen? Was he disgusted with Oliver? Flash! And during the harvest...
“Oliver, are you alright?” Celestia asked, her sparkly pink face showing concern.”
Oliver shook his head to clear it, quickly banishing the thoughts from his mind. “Uh, I was listening,” he answered, trying to get his mind to focus on his conversation he had been having with Celestia. “In fact, I could have used that information about steel alloys while trying to repair a ploughshare, once,” he said.
“I don’t think it would be useful there,” Celestia said with a frown. “I mean this one is interesting chiefly for its magnetic properties. While it would seem more efficient to enchant some lodestones the old-fashioned way, one of the colleagues of my mentor has been studying the applications of this alloy in magitech.”
Oliver cudgeled his brain to try to make sense of her conversation that had transpired during his wool-gathering, daydreaming, indolent, thoughtless, self-centered moments of inattentiveness. Going out on a limb, he attempted, “Ah, yes. So magic that uses lodestones could be magnified by these human crafts. Elisa’s blacksmith showed me a sword that he had made, with the help of some crystals. It could cast lightning.” Oliver was fairly sure that his reply was at least somewhat related to Celestia’s present vein of conversation.
After pausing for a moment, during which Oliver briefly worried that he had just said something stupid, Celestia began dancing around, and the pink kilin girl briefly produced some bizarre out-of-context waterfall tears, among some other zany emotes. “You have to show me, Oliver! You have to show me!”
“I love you,” Oliver slipped in, using a flat, dismissive tone.
“And I love you, too!” Celestia cried.
“So we are officially an item, now?” Oliver asked.
“Are you kidding? I have been waiting for you to say that from the minute we first met!!!” Celestia enthused, latching herself around his waist like a burr. “Celestia’s got a boyfriend!” She sang.
Oliver laughed nervously and produced one oversize sweat-drop as everything seemed to become a little farther away than usual. “What have I just gotten myself into?” resounded in his head. Somehow, Oliver was almost certain that this female was going to turn out to be almost impossibly horny. The question, in the long-run, was most likely going to be one of how he was ever going to keep up.