CHAPTER 15

"I hope that wasn't too predictable for you." Naia held out Dana's jeans. They were already dry, and the panties had been tucked into a pocket.

Dana smiled, and got dressed. "I appreciate it. I appreciate you."

"I know." The two of them embraced then parted. The fountain was filling up again, and Naia floated on the surface of the water. "Feel free to drop by if you're ever feeling lonely."

"I always do." Dana gave the nymph a wave and walked across the garden to her garage. She rarely stayed long after being with Naia. If the nymph minded, she never said a word.

Dana pushed open the door and crossed the messy floor to flop down on her workbench. Rubbing her belly, she turned her attention to the disassembled drone on her bench. She picked up a rotor and frowned at it.

Trying to power a drone with magic had several different problems, but the biggest one right now was power regulation. How could she get a magical stone to regulate its own output without blowing out half the circuits in the drone. She hadn't bothered telling Mike that she and Tink had already blown through a couple grand in parts trying to make it work. Once they reached five grand, she'd have Tink do it.

Picking up a soldering iron, she contemplated it for a few moments before tossing it onto the bench. She was tired of dealing with drones and needed to do something else. Looking around the room, she let out a sigh and began picking stuff up.

It took her most of an hour to clean up her workstation and organize it, and another to clean the garage and sweep it out. Tink had been tossing burnt out components onto the floor, and Dana dumped over a hundred dollars in broken circuitry into the trash. Kneeling down to get beneath the bench, she found a busted rotor blade.

"So that's where you went." She smiled and tossed it away, the memory of a drone bouncing around the room while Tink screamed in terror and hid from it. Somehow, the voltage to each motor had gone out of whack, and the thing had spiraled randomly around the room until it turned into a smoking ball of fire that Tink had knocked down using her club.

Satisfied that the garage was clean, she walked to the rear of the garage. There was a cleverly hidden flight of stairs in the back that led down to a chamber beneath the garage. Her best guess was that it used to be a bay for working on cars, but she had cleaned it out and turned it into her own private refuge with Tink's help. It had apparently been the goblin's room until Mike had moved in, and Dana thought it poetic that her living space was now six feet under ground.

There was a chaise lounge in the corner right by a nightstand filled with books. In another corner was a comfortable loveseat pointed at a wall mounted television. Ever since she had died, sleep was no longer a necessity. However, the tradeoff was that boredom now waited around every corner. She sat on the chaise lounge and opened her laptop, clicking on her languages program.

An hour was spent on French lessons. Dana had always wanted to learn another language, and figured maybe she would travel again once her undead condition was reversed. One odd thing about being dead was that her memory seemed to be much better now. Not the memories from when she was alive—those were still seen through the fog of mortality. New information, however, was burned into her brain with laser-like precision, which meant the learning process was phenomenally faster. She wondered if the issue had something to do with missing so many of her emotions, as if her mind was compensating.

Done practicing the names of fruits and vegetables en francais, she opened up a folder and spent some time looking at pictures of Alex, her deceased girlfriend. It had been over a year now since she had died in a motorcycle accident, but in some ways it still felt fresh.

When Daryl the necromancer had killed her, he had stripped away not only her future, but also her ability to die. While thrilled at the prospect that there was apparently something that came after death that allowed her to be reunited with her loved ones, Dana's soul was stuck with whatever was left of her body no matter what happened. Her love for Alex was one of the few emotions Daryl had left her with in order to make her obey his whims and desires. Unfortunately for him, the women of Radley house had persuaded her that Daryl couldn't be trusted and had found a way to keep her from having to feed on the living.

Looking at so many old pictures made her nostalgic, but it was hard summoning up memories that involved emotions that were now muted. A camping trip where they had set up a tent on the beach made her smile, but the awe and wonder of seeing the Milky Way had been stripped away, stealing more than a little bit of the romance from her memory of the event. Pictures from meals they had shared did little for her now—the taste of human food was simply a fond memory at this point.

Sighing, she closed the slideshow on her laptop. She was doing better than she had been, but looking at the pictures made her melancholy. There was only one solution these days. Crossing the room, partially bent over to avoid smacking her head—the room, after all, had been plenty high enough for Tink— she settled down in her chair and turned on her Playstation. It was the Pro model, which booted up quickly, and she loaded Dark Souls 3.

The game itself was incredibly difficult, but she got a chuckle out of the You Died death screen. It also didn't hurt that becoming frustrated with the game was nearly impossible now. She had never been super into games, but being unable to sleep meant she could only binge so much N*****x before getting bored. She wondered what life would be like if she was stuck this way for an entire lifetime, or even hundreds of years. What sorts of tricks would she utilize to keep her mind busy?