It's a very pretty day; fluffy clouds and birdies chirping death threats at each other and woodland animals scampering about and all that. Unfortunately, Xel has just gotten back from the physical therapist (having sworn up and down to allow no needles whatsoever), and is therefore in no mood to appreciate it.
Oh, her slack-jawed complete failure to even understand the shape of the muscles around his leg was entertaining. He didn't try to explain; telling someone that your leg was broken when you were three and magically healed by someone too green to understand that it needed to be set properly first, that your medium-soft tissues had grown into place around a knobbled, shelf-like structure of bone-scarring as a result, and that you'd just re-broken it and whittled away said structure without leaving a scar and the muscles were now going to have to adjust to a tibia that is suddenly the correct shape--well, it would just take too much explaining. And there would be follow-up questions. So he'd just smiled at her and said Ahahaha, well, it's complicated, but this is how things are, you can see the problem, ne?
So, yes, the reaction had been amusing, but the following hour. Just. Well. The break had been painful, a delicious tide of crimson, but...
The thing is, Xel wasn't born a masochist, but Zelas-sama knew how to remedy that before he'd been mazoku even a few years, and now he has both the mazoku
and the normal human reactions to pain. And that hour. And. And. He'd decided to keep trying to take evening shifts at the pub. Meaning spending
hours in public and putting on at least two shows at once before getting any alone time with his person. Or chickening out, which is no shame for a Guildsman but would mean spending the entire day completely alone. Which might be even worse.
So the mood he was in, carving banister posts someone had ordered into giraffe heads to focus himself before heading over to the B&B, when the doorbell rang, was really a little bit indescribable. Especially since the birch-wood is warded to keep the uninvited out. Taking all that into consideration, it's probably understandable that he somehow failed to put the carving knife down.