Coldsnap: The Billionaire Alpha's Fated Pregnant Princess (GL)-Chapter 430 - Load Bear-ing Details, pt1

The wind up here really is a living thing. Not just blowing like a breeze on the ground, but something that pushes and tests. Something that finds gap in clothing, should I have still been wearing it - and more importantly under tarps.

Heavy *sounds* impressive as a material descriptor, but considering the contractor bag itself turned into a tumbleweed the moment after I summoned it? I started stealing the loose pots from the greenhouse to help me with the setup phase.

Then eventually decided to just *use* that building, because it is a lot less... out in the elements. Plus it’s messy and destroyed already, if I add to it... who cares?

"It’s like standing out in the blizzard up here, without the snow and ice smashing your face."

"Of course it is. Probably somewhere around a constant strong breeze or near gale."

"Helipad data says 25 to 30 knots sustained, from the north-northeast and gusting about 40."

Webber responded over my earpiece, followed quickly by Claire with more detail. A woman I thought changed ’channels’ after making sure I had everything set up right. At least, she said she would.

"That sounds like a lot of paying attention to *us* and not my son."

"Look, he’s cute and I love him like my own already - but I can only coo at a sleeping puppy for so many minutes in a row. I’ll go in for another round of ten in like, twenty seconds."

"Are you about ready to hang the bear?"

This man isn’t exactly no nonsense, but he really doesn’t care about our in-between conversation. Well, I suppose that tracks from someone who pretty much nodded, asked a few questions about where I came from, then... wished me ’luck’ along with everyone else in this world.

> We had lots of phrases, rituals, and such for wishing fortune on others or oneself. But somehow that word rubs me wrong when people say it here. <

He’d elected to remain in the warmth of the executive floor, monitoring through the headset while I worked. More than reasonable as a choice for an elderly human, even one as healthy as he seemed.

"Almost. The girders above all look like they survived. I’ll test one now to make sure it doesn’t just look solid. Taking out my earpiece."

The metal structure had taken a beating from the storms, some of the window framing looking a little twisted. But this was a thick beam I hybridized then hauled myself up on, letting my full weight hang from it for a few seconds.

It groaned a little, mostly against my claws, but it held without any clear sway. Dropping back to the tarped floor in the middle of the transformation back to a human, I also summoned the bear below me.

Still warm grizzly materialized out of Kyrie’s side of the | Parental Stash |, where I’d made her store it before she left with Luca. An instantaneous landing pad.

> Though I wouldn’t have exactly been hurt to try and land with my bare feet on the ground, it felt like more fun to fall... on a giant carcass. <

"I should try not to evaluate my enjoyment of that any further. There are too many other problems with me, surely that one is nothing."

Holding the last of its internal temperature, despite the days since I’d killed it - and minus the roughly eight minutes before I could store it the first time and couple minutes as Martha evaluated it... the system storage ability had kept it perfectly preserved.

Which is another experiment completed and variables tested. That seems like way more time than we would generally need to hold a single corpse for and as far as I can tell by sight, touch, and smell, this thing is still fresh.

No strange things happened by one of us taking a body out of the other’s side. No sudden zombie bear like Claire warned of. If the meat has grown terrible and tasteless like her other suggestion, I’ll only be able to tell later.

"Still there?"

I ask after reseating the earpiece and get some... mixed messages.

"Yes, I’m still here Citra."

"Who is a good little floofy fluffy pudgy-"

"I won’t ask you not to do that, but please mute your microphone if you are going to listen in."

Webber’s dry chuckle after the assistant’s ’puppy talk’ cut off made me feel a little better. Like I *wasn’t* the insane one here, for making her quit taking up the voice throughput.

For making me uncomfortable that someone is being excessively affectionate with my child. More than I am, if you don’t count nursing, cleaning, and keeping warm. Which... I don’t.

"Tying the legs."

Kneeling by the bear’s hind legs with the rope ready, I prepared to use two separate lines - or rather, two ends of one really long cord. The ’timber hitch’, as this world called it, came back to me from years of sneaking over walls.

A quick spiral over one of its ankles that will self tighten as I haul. My beggar acquaintance appreciated them as a way to hold under tension but could also be quickly undone the moment the weight came off.

Not having to stand there longer than needed to hide the rope again, when bringing up a bottle of a smuggled vintage into the palace, to trade for-

"Focus."

"I am? Looks good. You seem intent on splaying it if I’m not mistaken."

He answers my self-talk statement after I threw the bulk of the rope over the girder. My eyes drift to the drone watching me work.

I have a feeling that Kyrie approved it. She’s probably watching even now. Otherwise I don’t think she’d be very happy with some old wiccan practitioner seeing me on camera without clothes, even from that high angle.

"Why do I feel like you are thinking something rude?"

"Perish the thought, you are a perfect gentleman. I was only thinking of someone else while staring at the camera. Someone who I hope is keeping herself busy and *enjoying* being the effective Queen of Vossden."

"Ah. So you were openly flirting. Don’t mind me."

"I was not... fine, we can call it that. Who cares anymore."

A real stickler for putting things in ’clear-cut’ language, especially after I admitted to ignorance a *single* time. It allowed him to keep me on topic when we talked of magic.

And me to understand everything he spoke which I also did not know, but I still feel like I am being talked down to.

> When someone I must converse with for an extended period isn’t couching their words in self-gratifying aristocratic parlance... sometimes I do not know what to do. <

He was very concise but eloquent during our last bits of face-to-face time, after we talked about what I thought of mysticism in general. Over how he didn’t like the term *witch* for himself because laymen liked to call him ’male witch’.

Like they do ’male nurses’ or ’male flight attendant’.

Technically correct, but the specific addition of gender bothered him - and practitioner was already too long of a word, without neutral connotations for most people. Which let him weed out the instinctual chauvinists from the very intentional ones when they added more to it.

Also went to some length to explain the reasons why he also further hated the terms warlock, wizard, and sorcerer for what he does. The first stemming from a term for oath breakers, the second feeling too much like a fantasy staple, and the third too much about imposing control.

These mystics seem to see the world itself and each piece in it as something of a living thing. Instead of an *unwillful* illusion born from a set of cosmic laws - and our *hopefully* righteous interaction within it.

> So now I know that my world’s methods would really make me a ’sorceress’ here... if I was truly so good at magic as to be a real Mayavini. And maybe that means a warlock is closer to a mystic on the path to being an Asura? <

Her memories of fantasy media do suggest that somewhat fits... demons and seeking power usually for selfish reasons. And often while thinking they have ownership of the darker forces they aim to manipulate.

But we don’t *control* anything. The rules of the world are what they are. We can only align ourselves to them and insist that they be followed - and because it is the order of things, so shall it be.

Like a mother loving their child. A lover seeking to be pleasurable.

Or a predator making reverent use of its prey.

And because I am a hypocritical cynic that often can’t tell myself that I wholeheartedly accept certain things? I was hardly a ’real’ magic wielder in my world.