Heavenly plumbing

[Alex's POV]

"So, ... what do you need to do to take a bath around here?" Alex asked the little doll-like girl in front of him and watched her face lit up with a smile.

"I'll show you!" the little girl said happily as she grabbed his hand and pulled him along. "I've taken a bath here lots of times before! I know what to do!"

First, she dragged him to a small closet which stored the buckets to haul the water with, and then she dragged him along to the river where they got the water.

"What's wrong?" Alex asked when the little girl stopped two meters away from the stream. She looked nervous.

"That's the best part of the river to fill the bucket," she said. "I'm not going to go any closer, because that's where Innes appeared. She was screaming really loudly until Annabelle finally pulled her out. It was very scary."

Alex looked at her for an instant.

"That's very smart of you," he said after a while. "If you can't swim, you shouldn't go near water or you'll drown."

"Right?! Annabelle always says it's no use to be afraid of water," the little girl said, already back to her original excitement-level. In the meantime, Alex tried an experimental scoop with the bucket in the water.

"I didn't say you should be afraid of water. I said that you should be smart and think about what you're doing first," Alex said as he tried to get a feel for the weight of the bucket.

It was a relatively small bucket, approximately 8 liters of water would fit in it at a time. That meant that a full bucket wasn't terribly heavy, but if you needed to haul enough water to fill a bath, it could become a tedious task.

Maybe there was room for improvement?

"Are you afraid of water?" Alex asked the little girl. She'd been watching him with great interest.

"Of course I'm not!" she said, sounding offended. "I bathe once a week!"

"Good," Alex chuckled as he looked from the little girl to the surrounding mountains, right where the river entered the valley. "Then, are you afraid of heights?"

"Are you going to fly?!" she asked excitedly. "Can I come? Please? Please? Please?"

"Oh, boy," Alex thought to himself. Seeing this little girl so excited over something he wasn't used to himself, definitely felt weird. And it didn't help that she seemed to trust him unconditionally, for some unknown reason. It was rather overwhelming.

"Remember what I said about being smart and thinking things through before you do something?" Alex asked. The little girl nodded. "Well, what makes you so sure you can trust me?"

"That's ok," she said cheerfully. "Because I like you and so everything will be fine."

Alex blushed.

"I'm sure mommy will like you too," she continued. "I doubt she'll stay angry for long."

"That's the second time she's called Otto mommy," Alex thought, but didn't say anything.

"Well then, that settles it, doesn't it?" he said instead and reached down to pick up the girl. "What's your name anyway? If we're going to be partners in crime, shouldn't I at least know your name?"

"It's Eva," the little girl said with a huge smile on her face and Alex easily set her in his neck.

"My name is Alex, nice to meet you, Eva. Are you ready? Hold on tight! And please, try not to put your hands on my face. It would be problematic if you'd cover my eyes," Alex said as he started to flap his wings.

He'd flown far enough to get a general feel of what his wings were capable of, so jumping off of a high point seemed rather silly now.

With three mighty flaps of his wings, his body lifted off the ground. Eva squealed in excitement and started giggling nervously when he started flying forward.

They didn't need to go far, so it wasn't necessary to pick up speed. Not to mention that the squealing little girl on his shoulders probably couldn't handle much more excitement.

"This is amazing!" she yelled above the wind, but Alex could tell she was more than a little terrified as she kept clutching his hair. It made a little smirk creep onto his face.

"Ok, Eva," Alex said once they were flying above the river where it entered the valley. "Would you say we are higher up than the houses right now?"

"Way higher!" she yelled excitedly.

"Sounds like this is the perfect spot then," Alex said as he envisioned a waterreservoir and started manipulating the energy around him.

He started with a little aqueduct, branching off the stream. The new shoot led into the bottom of a large reservoir hewn into the side of the mountain. He made it 5 meters in diameter and 3 meters deep. That should be enough to provide the 5 little chalets and the big inn of all the water they could possibly need.

Well, possibly a lot more than they would ever need, now that he thought about it, since the dead didn't need to eat or drink.

"Swimming pool! Swimming pool!" Eva yelled excitedly as they both watched the water of the stream find its way into the reservoir.

"Be careful, or you'll fall off," Alex said as he continued to work on the reservoir. He watched as the water started to stream inside the pool and started to swirl because of the pool's round form. The water level was rising slowly, but surely.

He then willed a second aqueduct into existence. It started on top of the wall of the bassin, on the other side of the mountain surface, in the spot where the water was most likely to spill over, and allowed all the excess water to flow back into the river in one flowing motion.

"That's the biggest waterslide I've ever seen!" Eva cried in amazement. Alex looked at her from the corner of his eyes and quickly raised the flanking walls of the second aqueduct, so no accidents would happen if anyone ever felt the urge to try out that possibility.

"And now, to finish the project," Alex mumbled as he imagined a pipeline going down from the reservoir into the valley and connected it to the little wooden houses. For each bath and sink there would be a connection to the reservoir with a tap.

"There, flowing tap water," Alex said proudly and only now noticed that the little girl in his neck had gone quiet. She was hugging his head as tightly as she could and was shivering from head to toe.

"Hey? Are you ok?" he asked as he touched one of her little hands to get her attention, but startled at how cold it felt.

"You're freezing!" he said. Without waiting for Eva to answer, he scooped her from his neck, magicked a warm blanket into existence, wrapped her in it and cradled her close to his chest to keep her warm.

He quickly started to ascend towards the big inn where he knew that Otto was.

He was such a fool for not noticing earlier that the temperature up this high was a lot colder than down in the valley. He should have told Eva to put on a coat or something. What was he thinking? Taking a girl in a frilly cotton dress up that high? Combined with the wind his wings constantly made, it was a miracle she'd managed to stay as energetic as she had been.

As Alex descended, he noticed two small human figures standing on the terrace behind the inn, watching them. He figured one of them was Otto, so he flew towards them.

"Is that Eva?" the older woman besides Otto asked once he landed in front of them, pointing towards the fluffy bundle in his arms. Before Alex could answer her, Eva did so herself.

"A-A-Annabelle! D-d-did you s-s-s-see me? I f-f-flew! It w-w-w-was am-m-mazing!"

The poor girl was shivering so badly she couldn't get out a single word out without clattering her teeth. Once she'd noticed the state Eva was in, the woman Eva had called Annabelle rushed forward.

"Goodness, Eva, you're freezing?!" she uttered incredulously as she took the child from Alex's arms.

"I'm sorry," Alex mumbled guiltily as he snuck a worried glance towards Otto. So far she hadn't said a word. She just stood there watching him with crossed arms. "I should have noticed sooner. I feel so stupid."

"M-m-mommy! Can he b-b-be my daddy?" Eva said, already chattering considerably less. Otto didn't answer. She merely redirected the stern stare with which she'd been watching him towards the girl and heaved a sigh.

"Annabelle, could you take Eva to the hearth inside please?" she said with a gentle touch to the woman's arm.

"Of course," the woman said kindly and shot him a reassuring smile before she turned and left.

"N-n-nooooo!" Eva wailed as Annabelle carried her inside. "I don't want to go inside! I want to-"

But whatever she wanted, Alex would never know, because at that point Annabelle closed the door behind her and nothing except a stifling silence remained.

He glanced at Otto's face, but ducked his head when he was met with a stern frown. He kept quiet, waiting for her to explain why she was angry with him.

He hated this silence. He wished she was one of those people that started shouting when they were angry, but that just wasn't Otto.

"So, you have wings now?" she asked. It sounded more like a statement than a question.

"Yeah," he answered, his head still ducked low.

"Aren't you going to put then away? They look big and impractical."

"I can't. They are attached to me."

A fact he was truly starting to regret. His normal days were over. He barely fitted through doors anymore, not to mention what his dad would do once he saw him.

Undoubtedly, he'd lock him away in some lab and research him until the end of his days.

"Don't be ridiculous," Otto scolded. "Humans don't just grow wings like that in five days. Which must mean you made them appear. And if you made them appear, you can make them disappear again too."

"You make it sound so easy," Alex mumbled annoyed, but still did as he was told. He folded his wings completely closed for the first time since he got them and was surprised to find that they vanished completely when closed.

It left him confused and made him wonder if Otto had know they would do that. He wanted to ask her but she was still looking at him with an unreadable expression.

"Why aren't you saying anything?" he asked as he dared to look up and was just in time to see Otto's lip start to quiver.

Soon, tears were streaming down her cheeks. Alex froze, uncertain of what to do.

"Thank God you found me," she mumbled just loud enough for him to hear her, leaned her head against his chest and grabbed two fistfuls of his shirt tightly. "I was so afraid tha-"

Her voice broke as she tried to explain, but Alex had heard enough. He instantly wrapped his arms around her little frame and smothered her in a hug.

"I'm SO sorry. It really did take me too long to find you. You must have lost all hope," Alex mumbled into her sweet smelling, freshly washed hair. To his words, she suddenly whipped her head up and started shaking it furiously.

"I wasn't sure if you would find me," Otto said as she stared straight into his eyes. "But I never doubted that you were searching for me."

Alex could have reacted in a number of ways. For example, he could have kissed her passionately (because he really wanted to) or he could have said in a joking manner: "Wait, you thought I wouldn't make it?" But what he actually did, was shriek when he saw the huge smudge of dirt on her forehead.

"You have a little-" he started to say as he tried to wipe the smudge with the edge of his sleeve, but froze mid-sentence as that only made things worse.

Then he noticed it wasn't just her freshly washed forehead he'd sullied, but every part of her body that he'd touched, and flinched away from her. From her bust all the way down to her waist and around her shoulders where his arms had held her, a nearly black imprint could be seen.

Alex groaned half in frustration and half in disgust. He'd never felt less composed in his life. It was even worse than when he'd been too weak to move. The sound of Otto's sweet chuckling pulled him back from his panic.

"Come on," she said as she grabbed his hand and started pulling him along. "Let's get you cleaned up. We can't let your effort of installing flowing tab water go to waste, now can we?"

"Oh, Otto. Honestly, I was thinking of magicking myself clean. It's much quicker than bathing."

She slowed her pace at his words and glanced over her shoulder towards him.

"So you don't want me to wash your hair?" she asked, a faint blush dusting her sheeks. Alex instantly felt his face flush bright red.

"Oh, you... you were going to come with me?" he asked as he swallowed at the images his mind provided. He quickly shook his head to get rid of them. "As in, on the same side of the closed door, while I'm naked."

They hadn't done anything more than kissing in this lifetime. And not because he was too nervous to do anything. No, Amon's memories of his "alone time" with Neferet left him weak in the knees.

Neferet had been a seasoned Egyptian woman, and in Ancient Egypt there was no such thing as prudence towards sex, but Otto was a sixteen year old, modern day virgin. Alex was trying to be considerate of the girl who'd hidden her bright red face in his chest the first time he'd kissed her.

"I can't?" she asked, a strange mix of doubt and disappointment audible in her voice.

"Of course you can," Alex said as he gave her hand a soft reassuring squeeze. "I just don't want you to feel like you have to."

Her blush intensified all the way to the back of her neck.

"But I missed you," she mumbled quietly. He couldn't help but grin at her innocence.