The food arrived and Fainyx had approximately half a second to process what he was looking at before the smell hit him and every carefully organized thought he had scattered without warning.
He knew that smell. He knew it the way you know something that lived in a different life entirely, something that bypassed thought and arrived somewhere quieter and harder to defend against. The spices. The grilled meat. The particular warmth of the broth sitting in the pot beside the main dish. His hand stilled over the table and something moved in his chest that he hadn't been prepared for --- a quiet pulling sensation that had nothing to do with hunger and everything to do with the word home surfacing in his mind before he could stop it.
He pushed it down. Kept his face still. Picked up his utensils.
Liam, beside him, was already reaching for the chopsticks with the enthusiasm of someone who had never used them before and had decided this was not going to be a problem.
It was immediately a problem.
The meat slipped on the first attempt. And the second. And the third. Liam's movements grew increasingly determined and increasingly unsuccessful, his brow furrowing with the particular expression of someone refusing to acknowledge that they were losing a battle against their own cutlery.
Adam watched this for approximately ten seconds before sighing. "Just use the spoon and fork."
Liam frowned deeply. "...Fine."
He set the chopsticks down with the air of someone tabling an argument rather than conceding one and picked up the fork instead. Fainyx watched this exchange and then, without particular thought, picked up his own chopsticks and lifted a piece of meat cleanly, the motion steady and precise and completely natural because it was natural, it had always been natural, it was one of those things that lived in muscle memory from a life that technically no longer existed.
The table went quiet.
He continued eating for a moment before he noticed and then his hand stopped mid-motion and he became very aware of three sets of eyes looking at him with varying degrees of surprise.
He lowered the chopsticks.
Liam leaned forward with sparkling eyes. "Fainyx, have you used those before?"
Fainyx reached for his notebook.
[ No. ]
A lie. A necessary one. He resumed eating immediately, more slowly this time, more deliberately, controlling each motion with the kind of care he should have applied from the beginning. Liam declared him a natural genius and Adam said impressive in the quiet way he said most things and Weinhart smiled faintly and Fainyx kept his eyes on his food and thought careless, I was careless, I can't let things like that slip through.
The taste settled over him as he ate and the homesickness he had pushed down came back quieter this time, less sharp, something he could hold at a distance and observe rather than something that threatened to show on his face. It was real. That was the part his mind kept returning to. Not a memory or a reconstruction but the actual thing, sitting right in front of him in a world where it had no logical reason to exist.
The atmosphere at the table relaxed gradually as the meal continued. Liam started talking about the dishes, asking Weinhart questions, pointing things out to Adam who responded with his usual measured interest. It settled into something warm and comfortable and Fainyx let it happen around him while he ate and thought and kept his senses quietly extended across the room.
Then the door opened.
A young man walked in looking like someone returning from somewhere he had no particular urgency about, black hair, black eyes, the kind of unhurried ease that suggested the concept of rushing had simply never applied to him.
"Ah, I'm back," he said.
The kitchen doors burst open.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?"
The non-human man from the kitchen --- the one with the gold eyes who had nearly found Fainyx upstairs --- stormed out looking like someone who had been holding that question in for a while. The owner scratched the back of his head and offered a smile that suggested he was very familiar with receiving exactly this reaction.
"Ahaha, sorry?"
"Sorry?" The gold-eyed man's voice dropped into something lower and considerably more dangerous. "You disappeared again."
"I got held up," the owner said pleasantly. "Some knights stopped me. An investigation."
"Tch." The man crossed his arms. "You always get dragged into nonsense."
"Maybe I'm just unlucky."
"Maybe you're a trouble magnet."
The owner laughed. The gold-eyed man clicked his tongue but didn't press further and Fainyx, who had continued eating with the expression of someone paying no attention whatsoever to any of this, kept his sound transmission magic running and heard every word.
A pause settled between the two of them and then the owner's voice dropped lower, still audible to Fainyx but clearly not meant for the dining room.
"...By the way. Who are they?"
Fainyx's hand moved steadily to lift another piece of meat.
"Just nobles," the gold-eyed man replied, tone casual. "Those two smaller ones have decent mana. The adult one's stronger." A brief pause. "Still not comparable to me."
The owner chuckled. "Well, yeah. Of course not."
"Because you're a thousand-year-old dragon."
Fainyx set his chopstick down with complete calm and picked up his cup and took a sip of the broth and thought, very clearly, a what.
A dragon.
Working in a restaurant.
He had read about dragons. He had encountered them in the game, enormous and ancient and operating at a level of power that made most human conflicts look like minor inconveniences. He knew they existed in this world. He had simply not expected to find one irritably scolding a restaurant owner about disappearing on a Tuesday afternoon.
He kept his face entirely still and his breathing entirely even and inside he was having a considerably more animated response to this information.
The dragon's voice shifted then, losing its irritated edge and gaining something more focused.
"...Wait."
A pause.
"That smell again."
Fainyx's thoughts sharpened immediately.
"It's the same as earlier," the dragon muttered. "So it wasn't my imagination."
Fainyx continued eating. Slowly. Naturally. Nothing suspicious about any movement he was making because he was a child having a meal and there was nothing unusual about that.
"Hey," the dragon said. "Do you sense something strange from that table?"
A short silence followed.
Then the owner said "...hm?" in a tone that suggested he was already paying attention.
Fainyx did not look up.
He felt it before he could identify it, a subtle shift in the quality of the air around the table, something extending toward them that wasn't quite pressure and wasn't quite mana in any conventional sense but was clearly some form of perception being directed their way.
The owner was looking at their mana.
"Three of them," he said quietly. A pause. "...But."
Silence.
"There's nothing on the child."
Fainyx's chest tightened.
"Maybe he's just talentless," the dragon said.
"No," the owner replied, and there was something very certain in his voice that Fainyx did not find reassuring at all. "Everything has mana. Every human, every living thing. Even plants." Another pause. "And that child has none."
The problem, Fainyx understood immediately and with great clarity, was that his mana concealment was too good. He had erased his presence so completely that its absence was now visible, and visible absence in a world where everything had mana was considerably more conspicuous than simply being unremarkable.
He had concealed himself into a new kind of problem.
He kept eating.
Calm.
Unbothered.
Already calculating whether he could excuse himself, whether drawing attention by leaving would be worse than staying, whether there was any version of this situation that ended without someone walking over to his table.
"...Interesting," the owner murmured.
Footsteps.
Fainyx heard them before he saw the movement, steady and unhurried, crossing the restaurant floor toward their table with the relaxed certainty of someone who had decided to do something and saw no reason to approach it with any particular caution.
He looked up.
The owner stopped a few steps away, black eyes settling on him with an expression of open and entirely uncomplicated curiosity, like someone who had found something they wanted to understand and had simply decided to come and look at it.
Fainyx met his gaze.
Kept his face still.
And thought, quietly, that this afternoon had become significantly more complicated than he had planned for.