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“Zoey, are you sure about this?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life! Well, except for when we started dating, but I’m absolutely sure of this!”
“Those drawings on the ground don’t look very firm…”
“I did the best I could with the chalk! It's a bit of a tricky material to use.”
“What if you summon something that will bring the apocalypse to the world and not what you are supposed to summon?”
“Then I’m glad to spend my last moments of sanity with you, my love.”
“How romantic you are.”
“I know. Now, Mira, help me put the candles where they’re supposed to go.”
Mira didn't know what had led her to this: draw a circle full of runes and various drawings on the wooden floor, accompanied by a few candles of different colors and scents strategically placed around the circle.
Which would be a complete lie, because she knew she did it because it made Zoey happy, and if Zoey was happy, Mira was happy too.
Zoey wanted to go to the aquarium for the tenth time in a month? Gladly.
Zoey wanted to watch the new five-and-a-half-hour marine life documentary in one sitting? Let Mira get the snacks and blankets.
That Zoey wanted to summon an otherworldly being who would supposedly give them the answers to all their questions? Well, messing around with unknown magic certainly sounded dangerous, but this is Zoey we're talking about, and Mira long ago admitted defeat when it came to resisting her girlfriend's puppy dog eyes.
So here they were, in the living room of their apartment trying to summon… whatever this entity Zoey wanted to summon was. If they ended up summoning a cosmic horror that would destroy their reality as they knew it, it was too late to regret it. It was a good life, at least.
Once everything was in place, Zoey took out the grimoire she'd found in a corner of a library, hidden among dusty books, and which had led them to their current situation. She recited (or rather, tried to recite) the chants written in the book and… they waited.
One minute turned into five, then ten. With no apparent change in sight, Mira was about to tell her girlfriend that at least they tried, but stopped when something in the air changed.
No light show occurred, nor did demonic chants reverberate around the room. No, the world simply fell silent for a moment, and then a buzzing sound filled the room before something literally appeared out of thin air above the circle with a resounding pop, as if a bubble had popped.
A thud resulting from a body falling gracelessly onto the ground (and more specifically, onto the circle), followed by a muffled grunt of pain and apparent discomfort.
Limbs spread like a starfish, a beige sweatshirt, face pressed against the ground, a purple braid—
A purple braid?
Wait.
“Rumi?!”
It turned out that falling face first onto the floor and hitting your head on it resulted in a massive headache and a bit of dizziness. At least nothing was broken, but the purple-haired woman, now lying on the living room loveseat with a cold compress on her head, was left with the beginnings of a bruise on her forehead.
“Well, at least we didn’t summon a cosmic horror or something,” Zoey muttered, sitting on the coffee table near the couch and watching their summoning with regret.
“Yeah, you summoned our next-door neighbor instead… Somehow,” Mira approached with a glass of water in her hand and leaned over the poor woman’s head on the sofa. “Hey, Rumi, how are you holding up?” she asked in an unusually gentle voice.
“Beyond feeling my heart beat in my forehead, everything is fine,” Mira helped her sit down and handed her the glass of water, from which she took a few sips before returning it with a thank you.
“Okay, I know you’re recovering from a pretty bad blow and it’s our fault you got hurt, and we’re really sorry about that by the way, but I have to ask, what the fuck?”
The words quickly escaped Zoey's mouth, causing the other women, each with varying degrees of surprise etched on their faces, to turn their attention to the youngest.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” She waved her hands in a gesture that was meant to be placating. “It’s just— I mean, you have to admit it’s a little weird that you just appeared out of nowhere while we were trying to summon…” Zoey paused for a moment, staring off into nowhere with her mouth half open. “…What were we trying to summon again?”
Mira sighed as she pressed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “That doesn’t matter right now.” She adjusted her gold-framed glasses and raised an eyebrow at Rumi. “What matters is, first, how are you? Are you sure you didn’t hurt yourself more? You sure you just have a headache right now?”
“Yes, yes, I'm fine, I swear, don't worry,” she gave them a trademark Rumi smile and a thumbs up while her free hand still held the cold compress to her forehead.
“Hmm, okay. Now, second,” Mira continued, crossing her arms, “what’s going on, princess?”
“What do you mean?” You could almost see complete innocence behind those brown eyes. Almost.
“Well, not everyone appears out of nowhere on a supposedly magical circle and falls face first into the ground,” Zoey chimed in.
“And not everyone has natural purple hair, but here we are.”
“You know that doesn’t help your case, right?”
A sigh. “Yep, I know…”
“We’re not upset or anything, Rumi, if that’s what you’re worried about. We’re just… surprised,” Zoey half-shrugged. “It’s not every day you get to summon your next-door neighbor using a magic circle you read in a grimoire.”
At that, the summoned woman in question looked at her with a frown and a raised eyebrow.
“Do you still have it?” she asked.
"The what?"
“The grimoire, the book you used to summon me.”
The couple exchanged glances, a silent conversation passed between them, and Mira nodded. Zoey gave her a quick nod before standing up and moving around the couch to grab something from the floor. She skipped back and sat down once more on the coffee table before offering the book to Rumi.
Their guest took the book and opened it in her lap, then she removed the cold compress from her head and handed it to Mira with a grateful smile. As the taller woman returned to the kitchen to store the compress in the freezer, Rumi scanned the pages of the grimoire. She hummed thoughtfully as she flipped from page to page.
Zoey watched her curiously and had to resist the urge to stand behind Rumi's shoulder and take a look at whatever she was reading. The woman seemed to be really focused on figuring out what had happened, if her serious eyes and focused gaze indicated anything.
When Mira returned, she sat next to her girlfriend and kissed her head before focusing her gaze on Rumi. Zoey had a goofy smile on her face, happy to see Mira comfortable enough to show affection so openly in front of someone else.
Of course, Rumi wasn't just someone else.
You see, a few months ago, when the couple heard a rumor that someone else was moving in next door, Zoey was determined to try to befriend their future neighbor (or neighbors) from the very first moment.
The former tenant had been… a fucking jerk, in Mira's own words, and Zoey couldn't help but agree with that description. They were both glad he was gone, period.
So when they saw a moving truck parked outside the building, the couple stepped out of their own apartment to welcome their soon-to-be new neighbor.
Rumi turned out to be quite pleasant company from the very beginning.
Talking to her was easy; it felt almost like talking to an old friend you'd lost touch with. Mira and she had connected through their mutual interest in dance, while she and Zoey talked at length about their love of music and songwriting.
After that first encounter, many more followed. The outings and meetings between them became frequent; movie nights at Zoey and Mira's apartment, afternoons spent in Rumi's small recording studio, greetings that grew friendlier with each passing morning.
It had been a few months since their first interaction, and by this point in their friendship, it was normal for them to share their own spaces with each other. The pair had even babysat Rumi's cat, Derpy, for a few days while she was away, and Rumi had officially met the friendly magpie who frequently visited Zoey's bedroom balcony, whom Zoey had affectionately named 'Sussie.'
You could easily say they were thick as thieves, sharing such a unique connection, as if they had spent their lives together from the beginning.
With so much time spent together and so many things in common, it was no surprise then that feelings beyond the platonic began to emerge in the couple's hearts. It wasn't that this scared them; they knew very well that both were open to a slightly unusual type of relationship, especially if another woman was added to the mix.
So naturally, Mira and Zoey had wondered more than once—and had had a thousand and one conversations about it—whether they could catch Rumi and trap her in the metaphorical net of their relationship.
The problem was that they had tried every way they could think of to flirt with her, but this woman was the most oblivious person they had ever met; she wouldn't understand even a hint of flirting if it hit her in the face.
(Believe them, they tried.)
Smart, pretty, hot, kind, affectionate, dork, oblivious beyond human possibility.
Their long list of "Aspects of Rumi that appeal to us" had to be expanded with the new knowledge they'd acquired in the last half hour. Now they had to add the fact that Rumi was some kind of... what? Demon, monster, cryptid? Because an ordinary human is definitely not summoned by a ritual written in an ancient book found in the darkest corner of the local library…
…Right?
“Oh, I see what happened. You tried to summon my appa.”
A second of stunned silence, then two, and on the third, two voices exclaimed in unison:
"What?!"
“Yeah, my appa,” she said in the most casual and calm way possible as she continued flipping through the pages. “This grimoire has some pretty interesting stuff, but the only thing I can see that’s even halfway understandable in Latin is one of the simplest rituals you can do.” She glanced quickly at the circle a few meters away from them before returning her gaze to the book. “I suspect you used a translation app for this, because the materials used and the runes drawn aren’t quite right. Appa is a relatively powerful demon, and you’d need a lot more than you have here to summon him, so I’m guessing your attempt at a ritual did the best it could with how it was done: summon the nearest demon, namely, me.”
With that, she finished her speech and gently closed the book before turning her gaze to two stunned faces staring at her with open mouths and wide eyes.
“...Too much information?” There was Rumi’s trademark smile again.
It took two cold compresses and a bed for Zoey and Mira to recover from the sudden loss of consciousness that caused them to fall face first onto the floor.
“So, you’re a demon.”
“Half-demon.”
“Human and demon?”
"Yes."
“But you don’t look that different from a human…”
“Oh, well, it’s because I’ve never shown you this.”
“...I thought those were tattoos.”
“You thought what now?!”
“Yeah, we saw them once in passing, when we went to the park that day and you were chased by a chihuahua that looked like the devil himself incarnate and you tripped trying to escape from it.”
“Wow… A chihuahua gave me away…”
“They're pretty though!”
"...Thank you."
“So, Rumi, now that we know your big, dark secret, I think it’s time we were honest with you.”
“You hate me.”
“We want— What?!”
“No need to sugarcoat it, I know me being a half-demon complicates things a bit between us and—”
“Aww, Mira, you kissed her first… Not fair.”
“Zoey, add 'idiot' to the list.”
“Uh… Eh… Huh…”
“I think you broke her, Mimi.”
“Oops.”
“Oh, now that we're girlfriends, does that mean we can summon you whenever we want?”
“Why do it? I live literally next door.”
"Come on, what's the fun in that? Going to knock on your door when we can use express delivery and have our gorgeous girlfriend in our arms right away?"
“What if I’m taking a bath and you summon me?”
“Modesty, princess? It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.”
"MIRA!"
“Si te vienen a contar cositas malas… Do you mind?!”
“Welp, you did summon her while she was taking a shower, Zo. Great timing.”
“Send me back to my shower immediately or I won’t let you pet Derpy for a month.”
“Sending you back, sending you back!”
“You know, I think the fact that you summoned the wrong demon is the biggest mistake you could have ever made.”
“...I still don't understand your ability to make a compliment sound both like that and an insult, babe.”
“Translation: Mira says she loves you, Rumi, and she appreciates that you love her back. I love you too. I love you both!”
“I love you too, Zoey.”
“Aww, Rumi! C'mere, lemme show you how much I love you.”
“And what about me?”
“You too, Mir. Come, hug me.”
“...I love you, girls.”
“Oh! Did you hear that, Ru? She said it!”
“Definitely. She said it.”
“Yeah, yeah, can we kiss already?”
“Bossy.”
“Translation: Zoey loves it when you get like this. Please, be more bossy with her.”
“RUMI!”