Written to jeriendhal‘s prompt here to my Giraffe Call.

Year 53 or so of the Addergoole School, 2047

The problem with leaving the family business, Aiden was discovering, was that it didn’t really leave you.

He was trying, trying very hard, to be a good guy. Which, he supposed, his mother and grandmother and so on had as well, but let’s be honest, his grandparents were the sort of people who would take over a city for its own good and take ten percent off the top for living expenses and wardrobe before they worried about the starving children in the streets.

Aiden was trying not to be that person.

The problem was, when your only tool was a hammer, as the saying went — or, in Aiden’s case, a fireball — everything started to look like potential targets.

In this case, he had been moving through a small town when he found out that something or someone had been stealing livestock. “I can help with that,” he’d said, because right, that’s what he did, Mysterious Stranger who wandered through towns and helped fix problems.

And he’d found himself sitting up in a tree, watching for the something or someone, all ready to scorch a wyvern or tiger or whatever and save the city. He’d literally had a fireball to hand – well, of course he did. He was named Fire. He always had a fireball to hand.

The zip of motion that went by was too fast for him to catch. It was too fast for his fireball to hit; it had ended up lighting a portion of the pasture on fire, which had further delayed Aiden as he tried not to set the town alight. That would not be helping.

He was pretty sure the unknown… whatever… had come back twice more while he was doing that, but at least they’d only taken the one sheep. It was only when he was done with the fire and beginning to spin an actual tracking Working – dead gods alone knew if it would work on something that fast – when he actually saw her.

She was skinny, wild-looking, probably-blonde with a dark, burnt-in tan, wearing scraps of rawhide and not much else. She was staring at him, or, at least, he thought she was. She was also vibrating.

“Don’t follow me,” she hissed, and she was gone, very literally outrunning Aiden’s thoughtlessly-thrown fireball.

He stared at the streak where she had been, and thought, a little desperately, that he might be in love.

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