Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-wizard — wizard who hasn't magically changed overnight or anything just because you learned they're a wizard now
"Here," Perigee says, sliding a cup across the tavern table, "drink this."
Emmi moans, lifts her hungover head, gingerly grasps for the cup, and gulps it. Then she doubles over the table, yelping.
"How was that?" Perigee says, in her best coolly analytical research alchemist voice.
"Ughhhhh," Emmi says. "Like staring into the abyss, unable not to, for an infinity of time, and realising that the abyss stares back exactly like a disappointed parent. With brain freeze."
"Interesting," Peri says, gently pats her hair, and starts scratching notes into her little notebook. "And the hangover?"
"Better," Emmi concedes, cheek to the cool wood of the table.
"Promising!"
Perigee has a theory that standard alchemical hangover cures sell surprisingly poorly because they simply work, while people are accultured to regard the hangover as a quasi-karmic consequence. They may want relief, but they don't believe they deserve it; and so Perigee, while they make their living as Professor Fantabuloso's Medical Travelling Wagon and Light Entertainments, experiments constantly with making a hangover cure that will sell better due to its properties of catharsis.
"So last night," Peri says.
"Ughhhhh," Emmi says wretchedly.
"I know you like your mead, but it's not every day you disappear with a stranger and turn up trouserless in a fountain, singing Papa Was A Strollin' Gnome—"
"Not a stranger," Emmi mutters, and Peri is silent for long, long moments.
"No?" she says finally, like an icepick of unstoppable enquiry.
Ughhhh. "We knew each other when we were children."
"Old flame," Peri says, and Emmi laughs, flat and sour.
"So far as I'd know," she says, "which is not very far, she's never shown any interest in girls. But it's entertaining, isn't it, when someone's so desperate for attention that you can suggest just about anything to them and they'll do it for you."
She closes her eyes and holds off a mental montage of childhood derring-do and misdemeanors, frights and tumbles and ruined clothes suffered for the possibility of a smile.
"Well, you wound up trouserless," Peri says, in the manner of a cadaver-poking student making an incision just to find out what's inside.
"I think she magiced them off," Emm says. "Don't," she adds, swift and unaccustomed sharp; "I know you're about to snort about drunkenness and oops where did they go. Don't. It's just funny, that's all, isn't it? A drunken pathetic pleaser in a fountain, how do we make that funnier—"
"Sounds not entirely friendly, to exploit a weakness for approval," Peri says, not just analytic but in an icy judgemental way; and Emmi picks her head up, lips pursed, enough to look at her. But Peri isn't looking at her — past her, to her other side; so Emmi looks that way too, to the lithe figure standing by their table, pointed hat pressed to her chest with a white-knuckled hand.
"Goodness, no," the wizard says, likewise looking not at Emmi but right over her to Perigee; "if someone were desperate enough for affection, someone might exploit it anyhow, mightn't they? Feed them untried potions to find out any harmful effects—"
Emmi gropes on the seat beside her for her lute, and as Peri opens her mouth, pointedly plucks a string. "Oh my," she says. "A disagreement. Should we settle our differences through the friendship-forging power of dance?"
Peri shuts her mouth with an appreciable click at the threat of bardic compulsion.
"Oh," the wizard says, and gives Emmi a long, newly appraising look. "You're the Light Entertainments!"
"Of course," Emmi mutters, "you assumed I'm just guinea pig and dogsbody—"
"I thought I might need to smooth over your morning with an apology to a girlfriend," the wizard says, eyes alight with a terrible, calculating interest, now that she no longer considers Emmi to be anyone else's creature to be rightfully made to do tricks for.