You see, but you do not observe.

Pre-Fall mystery writer.

Johanna was astounded to discover that the local press was a daily affair. The Nashville Crier was out every day, save Sundays, and even delivered to the house of premium subscribers. With the city’s size and importance, there were probably enough items to fill every issue.

Of course, Senator Alberich was a subscriber, and so when they came down for breakfast, he already had today’s issue open, which he immediately pushed at her.

Chaos in the Senate!

Yesterday’s session of the Senate of the Union was quite unlike any other. Harold Wexler, the Executive himself, came to provide an extraordinary petition. Not only that, but he came accompanied by an archmage demonstrating fire powers to strengthen his position. Among the people enlisted was a mysterious Hero whose stealth could suggest he was the California Ghost himself. However, the man looked so young that he was probably not even born when the legendary assassin vanished from the scene.

…

The article went on to speculate on the exactitude of the claims on the Warden’s aims, the likelihood of Talents being so readily available, and cast many doubts, even as the journalist – called merely N.R. – admitted that Senators were “greatly disturbed by the perspective”. The article even went on to notice that Johanna might actually be the “most recent and powerful archmage recorded in the Mages of America”, given her name. There was even an entire, albeit small, side article devoted to figuring out who she exactly was, wondering why a sorceress from the Marches of the Montana would be there to agitate for war against her home. Thankfully, the reporter didn’t have much besides the brief bio in the 11th edition.

“Chaos in the Senate?” she finally said.

“Big titles sell better. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t print a larger edition and were looking to sell more all over the capital.”

“Sell what?” the voice of Wexler came from the entrance.

Johanna pushed the newspaper toward Wexler and he sat and started to read, neglecting the breakfast.

“That was to be expected, of course,” he finally commented.

“Expected?” she asked.

“Senate sessions are a matter of public record. I would have been surprised if there was not at least one reporter there or at least an aide working part-time for one to take notes of what’s happening without waiting for an official record. That’s also partially why I was very cautious about saying from what exactly the Talents parchments were made. At one point, I may have to explain why we don’t have made those Talents yet, but not right now. Too early.”

She pushed herself back into her chair, contemplating her toast.

“Welcome to being famous. At least people don’t yet recognize you. I’ve had enough drawings of me that almost anyone can figure I’m the Executive.”

She grabbed and poured more coffee, as the Senator and Executive wolfed down their own breakfast, then excused themselves almost immediately. She spotted Katia finally coming down.

“You’re not with them?”

“They can deal with the Senate, they don’t need me for that. I have my own things to do.”

“Oh?”

“Well, most cities don’t have a real bureau. Places like your New Sandusky, I use local informants, but Nashville of course has a real office at the City Hall. I was there yesterday after the Senate session, see what reports haven’t made my way yet, and check on their latest mission.”

She paused dramatically and added, “Hunting books, not subversives.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“I’ve sent dispatches to every major area with the same instructions. And orders to ship everything to Vernon as soon as they get hold of books. In the case of Nashville, I’ll have to unlock additional funds from the local Treasury office. I’ll do that later, though. Any projects? Visiting Nashville is a treat.”

“Laura and I went to the Society yesterday.”

“Society? Oh, you mean the Society of Sorcerers and Sorceresses?”

“That one, yes. Officially, to get confirmed as such.”

Katia tried, but failed to refrain from smiling.

“You’re probably a bit much.”

“We listed a few more archmages.”

“I hope you didn’t list me,” she started immediately, alarmed. “Harold made sure we didn’t leave any sign I was more than just help during the Senate initial session.”

“Lord, no. We mentioned briefly some, but learning that basically, the number of such will go from two currently recorded to, well, several hundreds…”

“Well, if she hadn’t learned it from you, she’d learn it soon enough,” Katia gestured at the newspaper.

“She also mentioned Professor Gomez. You have any news?”

Katia made a face.

“Not much more than what was in the reports I got in Vernon, I’m afraid. By the way, I got some items from their investigation, and I was wondering if a parchment could be… altered. Or destroyed?”

“What?” Johanna blurted.

“They had some items that weren’t shipped along the report, and one was this one. I’m not sure what to think about it.”

She pulled out a paper and pushed it across the breakfast table.

The paper did look exactly like a settings scroll. Same size, same circular designs, same font, with a Level, Strength, Shaper, Earthbind labels in the proper position.

Johanna hunched over it, letting Moore get a better view.

Wrong ink, he realized. And, assuredly, the wrong paper too. When she tried to fold it, it bent very easily. Moore had noticed the scrolls created from Pre-Fall books were far more rigid than their thickness would suggest. You could fold them with effort, but they immediately bounced back to complete flatness when left alone. No creasing allowed.

Of course, Johanna had noticed as she pushed away the false scroll and leaned back into her chair.

Where did that come from? Is someone trying to make counterfeits? Already? Moore thought.

“It’s a fake,” she pronounced.

“That’s what I thought, but I wanted to be sure. You’re the expert, after all. Nobody had been able to activate it, and since, based on what you say, it should be trivial to use, I thought it might be broken.”

“It does look exactly like one, but it’s… not as material. It does look exactly like one, but it’s not the right support, the right parchment.”

“Too flimsy. To be fair, they also had two that I think are real, but no one could activate either.”

“Got them?”

She pushed two more pieces of paper, whose appearance was more in line with what was possible. The first was labeled Level, Strength and Fast Skirmisher, which she recognized immediately as a level 8 specialization. The other was a simple Domain of the Forest, which rang a bell, but she couldn’t place it. Except… domains were level 9, right? There were five of them, she thought, one per elemental specialization. She didn’t have a reference to check; Ulrich was the one with a copy.

“No wonder. They’re high-level. Unless one of your agents had the right levels and qualities, there was no way they could activate any.”

“Well, I’ll probably pass them to the army. They can use those, right?”

“If we find the right veteran for them, sure. They came from Gomez, right? I thought he had taken mostly moderately low-level parchments, unlike those two.”

“Yes, they found it in his home. Along with the one you say is fake.”

“I wonder if they didn’t miss more.”

“Well, we can always check,” Katia said. “You’re the experts, maybe you’ll find something the city police or my agents missed.”

“Hello,” Johanna said.

The receptionist in the tall building smiled back.

“Hello. May I help you?”

“I’m Johanna Milton. We were on the expedition to the east with Pr. Gomez.”

“And the answer is still no,” a voice came from behind her.

She turned and spotted a woman with a giant frown coming out from a hallway to the side.

“Excuse me?”

“You want our books; the answer is no.”

Johanna frowned, too, then realized what must have happened. The Executive’s office must have realized that Gomez’s trove of Ancient books was there in Nashville at his university. And of course, Katia’s agents had come back running when she gave them instructions to round up everything they could. She dug into her memories for Gomez’s discussion of his teaching job.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“You must be Mrs. Miller. Gomez spoke about you, when he sorted the books we found east.”

The head librarian frowned.

“You’re one of those Talented he said assisted him to go there?”

Johanna was ready to correct her, but she stopped herself. The woman had it backward, but that was understandable from her perspective.

“Yes. Ulrich, the one who contacted him, isn’t there, but I was on the expedition.”

“Well, I will thank you. We got over 250 books from this endeavor, including many that were never seen after the Fall, like the Mobile Hydraulics Handbook and physics and engineering coursebooks and reference works. Some were used as the basis for modern books, and some books no one knew ever existed. But the answer is still no.”

Johanna snuck a look at Katia, but the woman betrayed nothing.

“You had lots of Ancient books before?”

“Well, our library has always been good. That’s why the Academy is famous, its quality and library. But we had only fifty books that pre-date the Fall. Most of our books are later works, or in three cases, copies of the original that we don’t have.”

300 books, she heard. She could tell when someone spoke and when telepathy was involved somehow, even if she wasn’t looking at Katia and didn’t see a mana pulse when she used the Talent. Peter scouting with the helm made her more used than anything else.

“Well, we’re not there for the books,” she said.

I think. At least me.

“Then what?”

“We were still collaborating with the Professor on matters relating to Talents, actually, before… you know.”

“Ah. He was pretty excited when he came back. I sometimes think he only brought back books so that the Dean wouldn’t complain.”

“Well, he didn’t mention the Dean, but he sure mentioned you.”

The librarian harrumphed.

“We wanted to see if he didn’t leave any clues on his work in his office.”

“Well, the police came. Twice. No, three times; to check and recheck everything. I don’t think they missed anything… but maybe I can let you in? Wait here, I’ll get someone.”

The two were left waiting in the academy’s reception.

“300? Really?” Johanna asked.

“You do realize you probably brought a significant portion of all the Ancient books available in Nashville right now?”

“You’re going to get them back, then?”

“We will try. We’re not going to force the issue too much. 300 is a significant amount, though, 150 soldiers, maybe?”

“Potentially. Between a hundred and 150, yes.”

“I hope your expedition will bring orders of magnitude more.”

“Well, Gomez’s books were on the large side. Before we left, Ulrich gave instructions to Petra to get the smallest and thickest volumes she can find. Height and width don’t matter; only the number of pages.”

“The idea is to pack as many for the same weight,” Katia nodded, looking approvingly.

A young man was approaching, so they shut up.

“Misses? I’m Gordon Moore,” he introduced himself.

Johanna had almost a start. But it had to be a mere coincidence.

Hey, he’s got the same name as dad, Moore thought. But what interested him was the descriptor. Seeing the listed “level 4 maker” had forewarned him.

Gordon Stanley Moore

Male human, 20 years, 8 months

Maker

Level: 4 (5000 XP needed)

55/55 stamina (+16 per hour)

55/55 mana (+14 per hour)

2 unallocated skill points

XP: 4543

STR: 16

AUT: 17 (2807 XP needed)

Mend Object (55)

AGI: 17 (2807 XP needed)

Sharpen (55)

PER: 14

DEX: 16

EMP: 15

55% better vision

55% hand coordination

Now, isn’t that interesting? he pondered.

The probability of having two skills with high multipliers for the specialization was very low, especially for someone who was only twenty. But having the exact same amount of XP earned in the stats after obviously gaining one point in each? That could only mean having been acquired at the exact same time.

If he had a head, he would have shaken it.

This has to be Gomez’s university.

“I am… was in two of Professor Gomez’s classes. Applied power transmission as a major, automation as a minor,” the man was explaining. He’d introduced himself as a student, sent there to escort them around.

“Power transmission?” Johanna asked.

“Wind-powered machinery, usually. Not just how to make better windmills, you know, but other industrial setups. The academy produces the finest people for that type of work. Any carpenter thinks they can make a few gears and slap them together and get stuff working, but it takes real engineers to squeeze the most out of the wind. Torque and all.”

Johanna made an approving nod, but she had very little idea of what the ‘major’ entailed. From her chats with Pr. Gomez, she knew that his academy specialized in engineering, which involved making all sorts of devices, and physics, which—she believed—was about how things worked—or didn’t, post-Fall, which was in the establishment’s title.

“We had a replacement because the Professor wasn’t there at the beginning of the year. Then he came back from that sabbatical or something he’d done and took back over the courses – for all of three weeks until he disappeared and his office got ransacked.”

The young student stopped at a door, and brought out a big brass key, unlocking it.

“Here we are.”

He preceded them and moved to the side of the door inside the office.

Johanna thought Professor Gomez’s office was barely okay. She had pictured it larger, befitting the stature of a major scholar, but most of the offices back at the Talent House’s headquarters were as large or larger.

It was also very bare: a desk with nothing on it, a chair pushed to the wall, an empty coat hanger of all things. She looked all around.

“I don’t understand why the police insist we don’t do anything with it. I mean, they took away everything they could find, at least whatever the people who broke in didn’t get out.”

“Do you know what he had in here?” Katia asked.

“His coursebooks, his lecture notes, all that. No assessments because we didn’t have any yet. All of his research materials, too. You have to understand he’s a theoretician, primarily. All he needed was paper. Lots of it. The rest he needed was in there, he always said,” the young man said, tapping his finger on the side of his head.

“And what do you think would interest any thieves?” the Undersecretary pursued.

“My guess? His research on Talents. Dozens of people who work in physics and teach engineering, including here. But he was famous when it came to Talent stuff. The faculty indulged him because he’s a good teacher.”

“Did you like him?”

“Well, he had this talent – lowercase ‘t’ – to make you feel that if you didn’t care about his stuff, he didn’t care about you. That’s very off-putting. But if you liked studying and working with him through all sorts of exercises, he was the man to learn from. I’m probably in the minority, but yes, I liked him. I hope you find whoever did that.”

Johanna realized that Katia had manalight around her eyes, which had probably constantly running since they had been around. Why not? Like any third-tier specialization with full Talents, at level 8, she could sustain a single Talent for hours.

“He’d been working on Talents for a long while. Why now?” Katia asked.

“Well, after the summer, he was sure he had – I quote – a general framework for Talents. The Unified Framework, he called it. It would shake the world, he said.”

“He told you that?”

“Well, when he returned to relieve his replacement, he said the class that’s what he’d been working on. Watch it, he told all of us: the world will never be the same.”

“Did you believe that?”

The young Gomez hesitated, then answered, “He was never one to overplay. If he said he had cracked something, he had. So yes, I believe that. The professor never disappointed.”

“And three weeks after he came back, he got attacked. Do you know anyone who would have helped that?”

“You’re the first one to ask any of us that question,” he laughed.

“But no, I don’t think anyone would have done that. Well, maybe there is a scumbag among the students who would prefer Duncan – that’s his replacement – and wants a better grade on his finals. But what would anyone in that position be able to tell anyone that would be interesting?”

“Location? Schedules?”

The man laughed.

“Anyone can find that; no need to be a student. You ask for directions at the entrance, and usually, they’ll point you there. I’m just here because it’s been under lockup and stuff. Otherwise, they’d have told you the office number and wing. I mean, it’s an academy. What is there to steal? Drafts for the Vernon Society of Science?”

“Yet people did that.”

He gestured toward the cabinets in the room, and Johanna realized they had locks that had been ripped out.

“Well, they even took the physics books. The Head Librarian was furious.”

“So?”

“Mostly useless. He was genuine, I’d say. Not a single lie. He genuinely doesn’t know how that happened; he just has guesses,” the Undersecretary said.

“So, dead end?”

“My agents checked everything already. You didn’t spot anything?” Katia asked.

“You have Mana Sight, too. If there were any hidden Artifact or something, we’d see it.”

“I’ve spotted six around the city when we arrived, but nothing over the Academy.”

“Same for me,” Johanna confirmed. “What next?”

“I’ll get an agent to open up his apartment. Maybe there is a clue they’ve missed.”

In a mirror of the Academy of Post-Fall Physics, the agent who’d unlocked the door stepped inside and moved aside to let Johanna and Katia in.

The difference inside was considerable. Where the office had been completely bare, the apartment still had lots of things in it. Katia looked at her agent.

“We left it as much as possible, just in case, ma’am. Unlike the academy, no one else has access here.”

“This is where you found the parchments?”

“Yes. In the washroom, actually. They were behind the sink, easy to miss. That’s when we suspected that it was very, very out of the ordinary because, you know, the way one lights up. I didn’t make it work, but Hector did. That’s why we sent it to Vernon.”

“Thankfully, he resisted the impulse of accepting it.”

“You find an Artefact that lights up and seems to talk to you without words weirdly? Nope, definitively nope. It’s like finding a contract from the devil, and you have no idea what’s on it.”

Johanna walked around, looking. There was a central small dining table, clean and empty, and a side desk as large as the table, with a handful of things on it: books, pencils and fountain pens. She looked at it, then startled.

“It’s exactly like you found it?” she asked for confirmation.

“Yes, ma’am,” the agent replied immediately. “It looked like they’d taken a few things, but not much. I don’t know if the books were like that before or if it’s how they left it.”

“Katia, look at this.”

The Undersecretary came over, and Johanna showed her the book cover, Typographic Work, a reasonably modern book. She then reopened it to where the book had been left. Tangerine was the page’s title, and Katia startled.

Wait, that’s an actual font?

Moore would have goggled if he had eyes, but the surprise at seeing the font that made up the setting scrolls demoed in the middle of the book was still real.

It was called Tangerine. The book on which it was listed had a short description and a full list of characters. This font was used in Pre-Fall times, he learned, to balance between handwriting and print format. The reference work said it was there for historical purposes, as it was highly impractical in the “modern” printing industry, like most cursive fonts.

Okay, that’s fucked up.

He’d accepted the weird and fucked up gamelike interface that reigned supreme over his interactions with the real world. All of its stupidity and things that wouldn’t pass muster even in an early access game.

But here was direct proof that this had roots from before the apocalypse that had befallen Earth, back when he suffered from the stroke-like death and decomposition that had left his skeleton behind. Because if this insane skill System used a font that came straight out of whatever online foundry that made it, then it had to be part of it.

This System uses regular resources. It’s not an alien thing. Someone made it.

“Looks like we have our forger,” Johanna said, pointing at a paper beside it.

The paper held penciled lines and a partial “Shap” world made using the very font she’d seen in the book.

“Why would Gomez try to reproduce a parchment?” Katia asked. “Surely, he couldn’t think it would work?”

“Remember what that student says? He was writing papers. He’s a very meticulous person. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to reproduce exactly how a parchment looks for his work.”

Katia snorted in disgust. Johanna looked again at the various papers that the agents had left in place. One in particular attracted her attention. A handful of notes.

“Base is 15, not zero.”

“They all start at 91.”

“Mana is Perception, Stamina Strength. Completely independent.”

She turned to the next page and found one of Gomez’s prototypes for the recording sheets, except that he’d added “15+” on all the qualities. At the bottom, he’d done some obscure calculations: “16 × 3 + 4 = 522”.

“What’s all that?”

“Probably some calculations on Talents. Before he left us, he said he had a good intuition on how our mana pool worked. He had all that old data and said it fit the data Moore – ours, not the student – gave him.”

She turned the sheet, uncovering a five-pointed star diagram with arrows and familiar labels: Metal, Earth, Fire, Wood, and Water.

“That’s the basic Shaper specializations,” she told Katia.

“Why the diagram?”

“He said it was related to the Erlangs. Their homeland uses that system of five elements. I don’t know what the arrows mean, but he thought it could be significant that the Erlangs had way more sorcerers than anyone else relative to their population.”

They finally left.

“So, nothing much,” Johanna noted.

“You always check. But I had low hopes for this. When they kidnapped him, I doubt they let him leave a clue.”

“Why, though? He can’t make them new parchments, after all.”

“They probably didn’t even know that when they broke in. In any case, they could still pick his brains for ideas on how to best use the parchments they got. Back to square one,” Katia said as she descended the stairs from Gomez’s apartment.

“Now what? We wait?”

“Politics don’t move fast. Let’s hope your expedition doesn’t do as bad.”