Page 37 of Oh No! There's an Incubus in my Hot Spring
“How is it you say?” he asks, looking at me. Then he leers. “Ah, yes. Abracadabra.”
There’s a loud crash from the room behind us, and I jump, squealing in a very undignified way. I release Apollo and run for the entryway. There on the floor is a massive pile of timber freshly cut to the size specifications I gave him. The red carpet has disappeared, and what remains is flat concrete slab all the way into the mountain.
“Erm, when I said replaced with wood, this isn’t quite what I was expecting,” I say, disappointment ebbing in where excitement once was.
Apollo chuckles beside me. “You thought you wouldn’t have to work at all?”
I grimace. “I did.”
He grips the back of my neck and whispers against my temple, “Where’s the fun in that?”
I glare at him from the corner of my eye. “We’re still lacking a carpenter. No one in town will help us.”
“We’ll have to help ourselves, won’t we?”
“You really can’t just…magic these into place?” I ask, staring at the pile of lumber.
“There’s nothing on the premise that would serve as a suitable adhesive, though I’m sure I could find materials for nails within the stone.”
I huff out a long sigh and cross my arms. Without a carpenter, this would take months to do on our own.
“You’ve never done this before.”My mother’s voice rings loud in my head.
“You can’t do this.”
“Just go home. Jason will take you back.”
Yeah, that’s not an option in this universe or any other.
I glance at Apollo. “Help ourselves, huh?”
He nods with a warm smile.
I pull out my phone. “All right. I guess I’m showing you ViewTube first.”
ten
Renovation Revolution
“And this woman lives somewhere nearby?” Apollo asks over the instructional video of laying hardwood over concrete slab.
I turn on the captions for the video. “Maybe? I dunno. She could live anywhere really, but given the infrastructure of this house I’m guessing somewhere in the US.”
“Incredible. Is she there right now, doing this?” he asks, touching the screen. The video pauses. “What happened?”
I laugh. “This is just a recording. She uploaded this video two years ago and over twenty thousand people have upvoted it.”
“Upvote…”
“They liked it. As in, she did a good job. So we can trust the information is correct,” I clarify.
“Interesting. So other people have seen this demonstration and rated its accuracy. That’s very useful.” He touches the screen again and the video resumes. “Astonishing.”
I smirk as I watch him just for a moment as he marvels at a technology I consider common. He’s so old-timey and cute.
After a few videos, I have a good idea of how to go about this. There’s a hardware store in town with all the goods, so I load up the digital cart and do curbside pickup. I don’t want any chances of running into Mark the Fart.
I’ll need to come up with a better name for him.
