Eren’s morning routine for the next two weeks looked sothing like this:
Wake up at six. Untangle himself from whichever combination of won had migrated onto his mattress during the night. Emily always ended up horizontal sohow with her legs across his stomach and one arm draped over Rosa who slept curled up like a hedgehog on his left. Selena took the outside position because she woke up first and didn’t want to climb over people.
Get downstairs. Eat whatever Selena had prepped the night before because that woman had apparently decided sleep was optional and food preparation was a personality trait.
Then the real day started.
The farm needed everything. Solar panel mounts had arrived in flat-pack boxes from a supplier in Izmir and the instructions were in a language that was supposed to be Turkish but read like soone had fed an engineering manual through a broken photocopier. Eren spent three mornings just sorting the bracket types before Toris grabbed the manual, looked at it for about ten seconds and said "these go here and those go on the roof poles" and walked away.
Toris couldn’t read Turkish. He couldn’t read anything except basic Elvish. But sohow the man who’d spent two hundred years as a lumberjack could look at a pile of tal brackets and know exactly where they went.
"How did you-"
"Wood or tal, joints are joints." Toris picked up a wrench that he’d never seen before in his life and used it correctly on the first try. "This tool is nice. Very nice. Can I keep it?"
Eren let him keep it.
..
The water installation was worse. The plumber Kalina had arranged ca out twice, quoted a price that made Eren’s left eye twitch and then spent four hours connecting pipes while six elf n watched him like he was performing open heart surgery.
By the third day the elves were doing the pipe work themselves. They’d watched the plumber and apparently that was enough. Oldir supervised with a leaf cigarette in his mouth and occasionally pointed at a joint that needed tightening. The plumber showed up for his second scheduled visit and found his entire job finished.
"Who did this?"
"My employees," Eren said.
The plumber looked at the work and then looked at the six tall n with suspiciously perfect bone structure and matching green beanies covering their ears.
"Your employees are very good."
"They’ve been in construction a long ti."
That was true if you counted over a century of building wooden houses in a magical forest as construction experience.
The beanie situation was Eren’s proudest tactical achievent so far.
The problem had always been the ears. Elves could pass for human at a distance because their features were just "unreasonably attractive" which in Turkey wasn’t even that suspicious. The country had its share of genetically blessed people from every ethnic background mixing together for centuries. A group of tall good-looking foreigners working on a farm near the coast? Nobody blinked twice.
But the ears were a dead giveaway up close. Pointed, elongated, impossible to explain away as a dical condition or a really committed cosplay habit.
Eren bought thirty beanies from a clothing store in the nearest town. Different colors. The male elves who looked most human - Toris, Nimbo, two of the older lumber workers with broader jaws - wore them pulled low over their ears whenever they went into town for supply runs.
It worked perfectly. In February weather nobody questioned a beanie.
For the won it was even easier and the solution ca to him as a joke that turned into genuine shock.
He’d been scrolling through his phone looking at headscarf styles because Emily had complained that beanies made her head itch. Turkish won had been wearing headscarves in a hundred different styles for generations and so of those styles were genuinely fashionable. Colorful silk wraps, patterned cotton scarves, loose drapes that covered the ears completely while framing the face.
"Try this," he said to Selena one morning while holding up a dark green silk scarf he’d bought from a street vendor for fifteen lira. "Wrap it like this."
Selena looked at the scarf, looked at him, looked at her reflection in the bathroom mirror and wrapped it with an effortless grace that apparently ca with being alive for two hundred years.
Eren’s jaw dropped.
She looked exactly like a woman from Istanbul. Not "sort of similar" or "close enough if you squint." Identical. The scarf covered her ears completely and frad her face and her slightly angular elven features with the green eyes and high cheekbones suddenly just looked Eastern European or maybe mixed Turkish-Slavic. A face you’d see on an Istanbul tram and think "she’s probably a model or sothing" and then go back to your phone.
"What?" Selena turned to look at him. "Is it bad?"
She looks like she could be from a coastal cityaround here. So beautiful..
"It’s perfect." He pulled out three more scarves from the bag. A dark blue one for Lyra. A cream-colored one for Rabbu-i that would probably cause more problems than it solved given what that woman considered appropriate neckline depth. And a patterned maroon one for Emily that he already knew she’d refuse because Emily hated anything covering her head.
Emily did refuse.
"I’m not wearing that silly."
"Your ears-"
"I’ll wear the beanie in serious situations." She grabbed a black one from the stack and shoved it over her half-elf ears which were shorter than full elves anyway. "See? Normal."
She looked like a college student on a bad hair day. Which was fine. But her belly, her beauty and pregnancy allure made Eren itch to capture her right this mont and lay in bed and do all kinds of kinky stuff. Nor even sexual, just kissing and hugging all day would be perfect.
She also needed to see doctors but it was covered by Kalina. Next week Emily was goint to a nearby child hospital with Kalina for check ups.
Eren tried to use different putfits and tried to teach elves about the customs of Turkey and how variant and weird it was.
Rabbu-i on the other hand put on the cream scarf and then imdiately adjusted it so her chest was still fully on display beneath it. The scarf covered her ears and the top of her head but everything south of her collarbones was business as usual.
"You’re supposed to-" Eren started.
"It covers the ears." Rabbu-i smiled at him with that look she always had that made Emily’s hand drift toward her katana. "You said cover the ears. My ears are covered."
She wasn’t wrong about that but felt so wrong..
No! I am not imagining that..! She won’t use a head scarf and that’s it.
..
Almost every elf in the group had picked up basic Turkish and English by now. Months of being surrounded by Earth dia and Eren’s constant switching between languages had done the heavy lifting but the real accelerator was the elven brain with Evon system combination.
They were sohow smarter than an average Earthling human.
At first Eren didn’t want to believe that but Elves were superior in anything they did no matter how small was it doesn’t change a thing.
These elf people lived for at least three hundred years even with bad genetics. Their neural architecture was built for long-term pattern absorption. What took a human language student two years of classes and flashcards took an elf about four months of passive exposure and casual practice.
Maybe learning things fast wasn’t the main point because humans also learned fast. So maybe the important part was the help of the Evon system and their long, insanely long ti of experience in life. Like how their tabolism of aging normal and still stay fresh at their two to three century old bodies.
A normal average human would be half of their young days’ performance of learning new things, but elves were the sa in their whole life. Even so of the old anchient elf won were so good at learning tech knowledge!
Elf genetics were insane. Selena could haggle at the local market in Turkish good enough that the vendors thought she was a Turkish woman from another city.
Lyra just ca here in the last weeks but English was better than her Turkish because she’d been binge-watching cooking shows on the old smart phones Eren bought for the last two weeks. And she was using English subtitles but she would join the living room late night Turkish drama club at so point, Eren was certain after seeing how addicted Emily and all the elves beca at so point.
l spoke both languages at the level of a slightly confused but enthusiastic teenager which was exactly what she was personality-wise.
Even the most recent arrivals had functional conversation ability. Not perfect. Lyra still mixed up "kitchen" and "chicken" at least once a week and Toris had apparently learned his Turkish primarily from soap operas which ant he occasionally said things like "I will never forgive this betrayal" when soone used the last of the cooking oil.
The language thing made everything easier. Shopping trips, dealing with delivery drivers, answering the door when the occasional lost tourist wandered up the dirt road looking for the beach access point that definitely wasn’t on this property.
Even so many tourist around the area was handled by the elves in a smooth way.
"Hello yes this is private farm," Nimbo told one confused German couple in stiff English while wearing his green beanie and flexing his forearms because that was apparently just how he rested his arms. "Beach is two kiloter south. Very nice beach. No thanks I don’t drink buddy.. Yeah, Goodbye."
Old German tourists left quickly with happy faces and so beers in their hands..
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