A/N: I should really not be starting a new story, but my muse is a glutton for punishment it seems. This story is something that attacked me during my most recently playthrough of NWN2 when I discovered a conversation with Sand that I'd never seen before. Basically it inspired a one shot (which is now chapter 4 and 5) that bloated itself out into a full blown story. The entire story in general is meant to be a romantic comedy of sorts, so please don't take it too seriously. I don't have a beta reader for this, so feel free to point out typos and inconsistencies to me if you feel the urge. I'm pretty certain there won't be a "Complete" version to this...I mean, we all know how NWN2 ends, and any way you slice it, it doesn't look good for Sand. To be honest, I'm mostly writing this to give myself something happy(ish) and sometimes silly to mess around with for fun. There's a drawing of my future KC Nai on my dA page in case anyone is curious.

Disclaimer: I don't own Sand, NWN2, or any events/dialogs/etc and so on besides my lovely little Nai Farlong. There will possibly be vague references to certain aspects of the Bishop Romance for NWN2 in future chapters and I do not own any of that either - all credit is due to Domi Sotto.

Oh, and any italicized internal monologues are all Sand - his head is simply much more fun to crawl inside that Nai's.

A Lesson in Limits

"Duncan?" Sand's eyebrows shot up as the filthy tavern owner strode purposefully into the moon elf's shop. "My, this is a surprise. You have not graced me with your presence in…hmm, let's see…an impressive four days now." His expression shifting to disdain, Sand waved the glowering half-elf away. "As I told you then, the supplies for the ale purgative will not be here for another ten-day. Crawl back into your hole until…."

"I'm not here for that you half-copper hedge wizard," Duncan spat. "If I had a choice you can well believe I'd rather dunk my head in hot sewage than seek you out, but…well it wasn't my choice." Sand raised an eyebrow in curiosity as the half-elf stood aside and gestured to a small, hooded figure behind him. "This here's kin."

Standing at well under five feet tall, the demure creature approached and pushed back her hood to meet the moon elf's eyes coolly. Underneath the outer cloak she wore thick robes and a circlet around her brow, marking her as a spellcaster. Her smooth bluish-silver skin blended perfectly with the shoulder length crop of faintly floating hair that framed her delicate, almost childlike face. Faintly glowing pale blue eyes distracted from everything else about her. Sand did his best to keep an expression of only mild interest on his face, but it was not every day that he found an air genasi standing in his shop. Did he say "kin?"

"Not really seeing the family resemblance…."

Duncan ignored him. "We need you to take a look at those shards again, a good look this time you charlatan."

"Shards?" Sand finally dragged his eyes away from the genasi, who was still gazing wordlessly at him, and frowned at the barkeep. "You mean those bits of silver you showed me years ago? If you're going to try to pawn them to me again, I'm afraid I've lost interest."

"They're not for sale," the genasi said softly but with a possessiveness that Sand easily picked up on. "We need you see if anything has changed about them since you last looked. That is all."

How very interesting. Sand offered her a facial shrug and explained, "Well there was little to tell last time if I recall. They seemed to have lost whatever magical properties they may or may not have possessed, Miss…?"

The young woman's face remained neutral as she stretched out her hand and lay one of the small, unassuming silver shards on the countertop. "Nai Farlong, and I'm fairly sure you will find things have changed since you last examined them."

Duncan fished in the pocket of his apron and produced a similar, slightly more rounded shard and set it beside the first. Hmm…something is different. Sand frowned and studied the objects silently for a moment, turning each over in his hand before laying them back side by side on the counter.

"Very well," he said authoritatively, pushing his sleeves up above his elbows, "let us see what my keen arcane senses can detect…."

Nai took a nervous step back, her luminescent blue eyes shifting from Sand's face to the shards and back again. "You're going to try to scry them? I don't think that's…."

The violent, sonic explosion took Sand utterly by surprise and he grunted as he was thrown back against his alchemist workbench. That's going to be a bruise tomorrow. Jaral, Sand's feline familiar, bolted from an overstuffed chair along the wall, hissing as he darted up the stairs, and Duncan cursed loudly as he picked himself up off the floor. "What in the Nine Hells did you do you damned fool?! Nai…Nai, are you alright?"

The explosion had opened a split in the counter all the way down to the floor, and through the faintly smoking fissure Sand could see the young woman kneeling down, clutching her chest in obvious pain. Sand swept around to crouch beside her, but she was already shrugging Duncan off and pushing herself upright.

"I-I'm fine," she stammered, her hand still pressed to her chest. There was a touch of rebuke in her expression as she looked up at Sand and added, "Don't do that again."

"Certainly not," he assured her. "One demolished counter is enough for me to learn my lesson." He turned to find both shards still stubbornly atop the counter, one on each side of the crack. Retrieving them, he turned them over in his hands thoughtfully again and shook his head. "Are you sure these are the same shards? The power in them…well, it's immense."

"Oh, so now they're magical!" Duncan shook his fist impotently at the frowning moon elf. "Well, I'm not paying you for two failed divinations you thief!"

"It's not a matter of divination, you one tankard drunk."

"Enough." Nai's voice cut them both off and she turned to Sand. "How could you not sense the magic from these shards the first time? I can tell just by holding them."

Duncan snorted, "Because he's incompetent?"

Nai closed her eyes briefly and pinched the bridge of her nose before gazing at Sand expectantly once more. "Since you seem to have been given all the brains in the family," Sand drawled with a sneer at Duncan, "I'll be honest with you. I don't know. Perhaps they were dormant the last time. It is quite a mystery." With a last wondering look and a frown, Sand offered the shards back to Nai.

As she reached for them, Sand's eyes widened in amazement as the shards began to glow faintly. "What…?" he whispered, and pulled the shards back before she could take them. "Watch," he said in answer to the questioning frown she leveled at him.

He captured her outstretched hand in one of his own and turned it palm up, cradling the shards in his other and slowly moving them closer to the genasi. Her eyes widened, just as his had, as she watched the shards brighten until they lay in her palm, pulsing with a pale inner light of their own. "What in the Hells…?"

"There is something about you that makes them resonate," Sand murmured, so intrigued by the discovery that it was several seconds before he realized he was still holding her wrist. A strange thrumming tingle tickled his fingertips where his skin touched hers, some trait of the outsider blood in her veins that sent electric currents across her skin. He was momentarily fascinated by the phenomena – and curious as to just how much control she had over such things – but he relinquished his hold and turned his focus back to the shards.

"Unfortunately, there's nothing more I can offer you," Sand explained with a helpless and mildly frustrated shrug. "You need a historian, not a mage, and that's simply not my area of expertise. What you need to do is speak with Aldanon…."

Nai seemed to only be half listening as the two men rambled about her options, which was best, which would most likely get her killed fastest, but her eyes were almost always on the shards in her hand. Eventually she cut them off with a tired, false smile. "Thank you both. First thing tomorrow I will see what I can do about tracking down this Aldanon."

"It was my pleasure," Sand murmured with a charming bow of his head.

Duncan glowered at him and attempted to steer his niece toward the door. "Practice your fair-weather charms elsewhere, you viper. Come on, lass, you must be starved."

"Thank you, uh…Uncle Duncan," she was clearly still getting used to the term, "but my stomach is still settling from the ship. If you don't mind, I'd rather see if Sand has some of the spell components I'm running low on."

Duncan scowled, but nodded reluctantly. "Alright then, but don't pay a copper more than you usually would! He'd bleed you dry without a second thought."

With a dramatic sigh, Sand pressed his hand to his heart. "Your lack of faith wounds me so. I assure you, I shall treat her with the same respect I would my own kin."

"That worries me even more," Duncan snorted on his way out the door.

As soon as she was sure her kin was truly gone, the air genasi collapsed gracelessly into the large, overstuffed chair that Sand's familiar had previously vacated and dropped her face in her hands. Stunned, and a little terrified that she might be about to make some kind of tearful feminine scene, Sand stared at her awkwardly but after a few silent moments she sat up on the edge of the chair and gave him a rather passive look.

"Sorry," she said, her voice neutral. "I just needed a moment to clear my thoughts. It's been a long trip and you've given me a lot to think about."

"I'm sorry I wasn't able to offer you more answers," Sand replied almost warily. "To be honest, I think my curiosity matches your own, and I would be delighted to hear anything more you might discover about these shards."

"Of course." The corner of her mouth twitched almost imperceptibly upward as she stood and approached him, her eyes drifting across his destroyed counter. "A shame about the damage…but I did try to warn you."

Sand scanned the damage with a sigh and shook his head. "You did indeed. Are you by chance a wizard, then?"

"…Yes," she answered with a definite hesitation in her voice. "Of a sort."

His pale blue eyes turned cold as Sand asked flatly, "A sorceress then?"

"Oh, no, I am a wizard for certain," she replied, appearing almost amused by the disgust in his voice. "It's just that…I do not depend on the art alone to defend me." She pushed her cloak back a bit to reveal two mismatched short swords belted at her hips.

Interesting. "Well feel free to look around and let me know if you need something. The workbench is at your disposal as well. Anything for Duncan's family." Noting the sour look on the young woman's face, Sand chuckled. "I take it you have not had long to get to know your dear uncle."

"Considering I didn't even know he existed until about three weeks ago, and that I only just met him a little over an hour ago, no not really." With a distracted, introverted frown, she began perusing his shelves as she muttered, "Not that he's any worse than his brother."

Curious in spite of himself, Sand asked, "And his brother would be…?"

"Daeghun," she answered shortly. "The one person who has answers and refuses to give them."

"Hmm, well every family has at least one of those I'm sure. But family secrets, as with all secrets, do not last."

The genasi shook her head and gave him a weary look. "You don't know my foster father. As long as he is set on keeping it to himself, nothing could convince him to reveal it."

"Ah, you are an orphan then. And here I thought some wayward relative of Duncan's had gone off and developed a fetish for elementals."

Instead of being offended, the genasi just shrugged and continued to shop. "Clearly my mother had, but she was no relative of Duncan."

"You speak of her in the past tense," Sand observed, silently questioning why he was so curious about her. You're obviously just bored.

"She is long dead. Died giving birth to me." Something about the way she said it told Sand the subject was off limits.

"I see." There was a short pause, but Sand found his interest could not be contained. "So you just arrived here by ship, is that what I heard?"

"Mmm, yes from Highcliff," she answered distractedly as she leafed through the pages of an aging text on evocation. "I originally set out from West Harbor, though."

West Harbor. Something about that name was eerily familiar to Sand, and not in a pleasant way either, but he couldn't for the life of him place why. He made a mental note to research it later.

Nai gathered a few spell components to resupply her stock, and Sand charged her the exact market price for them, a fact that brought a faint smile to the young woman's lips. "Thank you for everything Sand."

"You are most welcome. Feel free to stop by whenever you'd like, dear girl."