"I know you're mildly incredulous that I actually convinced each verdora to freefall off of the Spire's rooftop," Bath remarked.

"They haven't known you more than a month. They might have actually died from that height, especially if they landed on their heads."

"Oh, they would have definitely died if they fell wrong."

"What did you actually tell them to do?"

"I told them that we would race to the ground," Bath said as he looked out over the Spire's balcony. "The concept of a competition lessens the sense of danger somewhat."

Lisa joined him at the balcony's railing. "Sure: I can see why a 'race' would give them a false sense of security, and a diminished adrenaline rush." She bumped up against his shoulder. "But that's not what I'm asking. How did you convince them to jump from that high up?"

Bath glanced her way. "I jumped first," he smiled.

Lisa snorted, shaking her head.

Bath shrugged. "I decided to try something...new with this city."

Lisa just stared. Everything is new...it's made of salt, damn it. "Like...?"

Bath chuckled wryly. "Have you tried using your magnetic sense around here?"

Lisa's eyes widened. No, she thought. I've been roleplaying as my human kursi self this whole time. In an instant, Lisa expanded out her magnetic sense, reading the area around her for any abnormalities.

"Did you lace this entire place with magnets?" she gasped, marveling at the crisscrossing pillars of magnetism within her bubble of perception.

Bath chuckled lightly. "Remember the hole that Virigard dug while searching for arable soil? While the salt content of sediment far underground is still too high, I found highly-magnetic particles everywhere."

"So, you filtered said soil for its magnetic bits and used them to make...?" Honestly, she had no idea what it was that she was sensing. The magnetic field around the area looked as though it had been raked by a cat with claws the size of children.

"It took a bit longer to set up than I would have liked," Bath said. "That's why I kept breathing fire over the city: to keep you all out while I finalized the matrix."

"The matrix?" Lisa echoed.

"Yep," Bath replied. "The matrix. I laced the ground and all the buildings with magnetic particles, doing so with different levels of particle density. I made a few additional towers and platforms explicitly for this purpose. The differential between different magnetic fields will, ideally, allow for a sapient to use the magnetic force to travel in the air. It's much more clunky than your magnetic sense, but it should be sufficient for certain purposes."

"So let me get this straight. You convinced all the verdora to jump off the roof of the Spire by first jumping off yourself. The jump wasn't dangerous because of this new magnetic matrix."

Bath cocked his head. "Essentially, yeah."

Lisa groaned. "Hold on; let's back things up. How does the matrix work?"

"To interact with the matrix, you need to first stud a ribbon of dragonleaf with magnets, oriented so that they repel the magnets below. You string this around yourself."

"So you need to wear a set of magnets," Lisa murmured. "Okay, I think I'm following. However, the magnets underground shouldn't be powerful enough to actually allow anyone to move around," she reasoned.

Bath nodded once. "You're right," he said, rubbing his hand over the railing. "The repulsive force is weak. However, it's still enough to cushion a fall from the Spire's peak to the ground."

Lisa laughed. "I guess. How did you explain to the verdora that they needed to wear magnet-studded ribbons?" After all, why would Thaddeus know about the city's magnetic field?

Bath turned her way and shot her a devilish grin. "Here's the story..."

---

After all the verdora assembled outside of their designated apartment complex, Bath instructed all of them to form five orderly lines. The verdora responded unquestioningly, much like they had when the vanguard first set off and Eyrin held a grievances proceeding. Eyrin regarded the entire spectacle with an appraising eye.

Reminds me of when I got my driver's license, Bath thought, grinning internally. He and Lisa had joked for weeks about the experience of obtaining a driver's license, particularly because they both failed their initial driver's test. They shamelessly blamed their failure on their shared test administrator, a sour, shriveled woman with greasy yellow hair.

Eyrin looked nothing like that woman, and yet, the expression he currently wore gave Bath the most peculiar--and humorous--sense of deja vu. He's watching, expecting me to do something suspect, he thought, sighing.

Bath began leading them towards the upper part of the city. He told them all that they had the civic duty of creating a "map" for the new, "unconventional" city. He used this as a segue to "discover" the irregularity of the city's magnetic fields.

"We should be in the northern part of the city," he said, scowling at he unfinished map the Delelens projected at the front of the group. "The chip reader compass indicated that we were headed North. But now, as I check again, it says that we've gone West..." Bath gave the group of verdora a serious once-over, as though trying to glean from them some kind of insight.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

He looked to Eyrin. "Perhaps..."

The verdora narrowed his eye ridges. "What?"

"This place, it's formed out of salt," Bath said, eyes growing wide with epiphany. "But they can't be completely made of salt. What if..." he trailed off, stepping forward, his chip reader's compass projected above the group for all to see. As he walked, the digital compass--an eight-pointed star--fluctuated like a spinning top.

"I understand," Bath said. "The ground must be rife with magnets!"

Eyrin just looked at him like he was crazy. "Let's not jump to conclusions," he cautioned, looking down at the white ground. "There's nothing I can see that's magnetic."

"It wouldn't be on the surface," Bath retorted. He turned back to the rest of the excitable crowd. "Everyone, dig a small hole, a fist wide, three feet deep, right where you are. Let's see if we can't locate any minerals with magnetic properties."

Seconds later, several verdora cried out in exclamation. Eyrin himself wore an expression of quiet disbelief, his skin paling slightly.

Bath reached down into his own hole and grabbed a fist of magnet-laden sediment. He opened his fist, letting the crystalline salt sediment fall away. He was left with a denser, gray handful of pebbles.

Bath looked toward Eyrin, who in turn looked toward him. The two of them wore impassive expressions before simultaneously breaking into grins that stretched past their veils.

---

"It didn't take long for me to convince them to use the magnets to pursue adventure," Bath explained. "In actuality, we had all used magnet-studded ribbons to leap across the city and slow our descent before we tried jumping off the Spire."

Lisa snorted, crossing her arms. "Why am I not surprised," she said, her eyes full of humor. "I guess I shouldn't be shocked if, over the next hour, everyone else in the vanguard follows the verdora example."

Bath shrugged. "We'll see. Not that it'll matter much--we'll be heading to Dusk's Halo in a few hours."

A comfortable silence fell over the balcony. Bath and Lisa stared out at the vast, white expanse, eyes tracing the sparse--and deceptively-large--spades of salt crystal jutting out from the ground.

"It's funny you mentioned the driving test lady," Lisa said, breaking the quiet. "Just two years ago, when we--well, when I was sixteen--we didn't pay much attention to getting our licenses and being able to drive around."

Bath smiled. "Why bother drive when you can just ride your white wolf?" he chided. "And of course we failed: neither of us had spent much time behind the wheel."

Lisa tsked. "We should've passed," she insisted. "Well, at least you should have." Lisa sighed. "But just think about it: cars, the symbol of mobility, freedom..."

Bath snorted. "Big oil, pollution..."

Lisa punched his shoulder. "I said think about it," she snarked. "But...cars are gone. Outdated. Nil. Doesn't something about that feel sad to you?"

Bath cocked his head. "Nope."

Lisa sighed and looked down. "Maybe it's just me."

"No," Bath replied. "I think many other humans feel the same way."

Lisa's head snapped up. "About cars?"

"About human civilization," he clarified. "In the span of a month, everything classically human was washed away by the tide of COTD. You could make the argument that we transformed all of humankind...such that humankind no longer exists." Bath shrugged. "Though I've never been one for ethics or philosophy."

Lisa frowned. "That's not true," she argued. "People still have friends and families. They still have technology. Access to knowledge is unchecked, and people can do...well, whatever they want. If before I said that cars represent freedom, well, post-COTD society is a definite step up."

"Then why do you feel sad?" Bath asked, his expression genuinely curious.

"I suppose it's the same kind of regret you must feel, looking back," she said, leaning into his shoulder. "Do you think the current Earth is better than the Earth, say, a hundred million years ago?"

"No." His voice was clipped, emotionless.

"...Nevermind then," she muttered. "In my case, I really wish I could have seen the great ancient civilizations of Earth at the height of their respective power."

"Sure," Bath said.

"But I'm glad I live now, when all of this--" she gestured to the Spire-- "is happening. At the same time, while I'm excited to live now, when people don't need cars, part of me wishes that they weren't totally obsolete." Now that Lisa thought about it in these terms, she wondered if her parents harbored a similar sense of longing toward her. They're undoubtedly happy for me as I travel the universe, but at the same time... Lisa knew that they missed her being home.

Bath gave her a wry look. "That's the essence of change," he replied, pulling her into a side hug. "And the purpose of memory. And, specifically, art."

Lisa smiled. "At the very least, we now have spaceships."

"Which, thanks to alien technology, are decidedly better for the environ-"

Lisa pushed him to the side, breaking out in laughter. "Give me a string of magnets," she instructed, stepping onto the balcony. Bath obliged her, forming a lengthy ribbon out of thin air. It would undoubtedly dissipate as soon as it left Bath's long-range manipulation range, but for the moment, it was perfect.

"Wait--how do you put this on?" She was struggling to lace the magnet-studded ribbon around her body. As she wrapped the ribbon around her legs, she couldn't help but feel like she was stringing Christmas lights on a tree. She wondered why Bath hadn't just generated the ribbon on her body like he did with normal clothes.

"It's easier with two sets of arms," he admitted, voice saturated with exaggerated concern. "And while the ribbon's made of dragonleaf, I wouldn't manipulate it if I were you: the magnets are in a very precise arrangement."

Precise arrangement my ass. Now she understood why Bath let her put the ribbon on: it amused him. Lisa rolled her eyes, then took out a strand of dragonleaf from her pocket. She expanded it out into a set of tactile tentacles, then set about stringing the ribbon around her torso and arms. After she deemed the task complete, she directed the dragonleaf to wither and fall off onto the ground.

"Okay, so now what?" Lisa looked back over at Bath, realizing that he, too, was now covered in an inch-thick, tightly-wound dragonleaf ribbon.

"We jump." His mischievous expression left no doubt in Lisa's mind: this would be a race.

In an instant, the two of them launched off the balcony, disappearing into the air. The rules were obvious: they couldn't use anything other than their bodies and the ribbons to descend.

As Lisa fell through the air, she felt the magnets strung around her body react to the magnetic field coming from behind (the Spire was a source of magnetism) and below. Her first instinct was to condense her body into a diver's pencil, her arms outstretched into a point.

She soon, realized, however, that the ribbon she'd laced around her wrists slowed her down and threw her off course. Within two seconds of freefall, she was already spiraling out of control.

Thankfully, instinct and experience kicked in. While Lisa wasn't using her magnetic sense at the moment, part of her initial training had been learning to sense magnetic fields and maneuver within them. She closed her eyes, taking stock of how her body felt within the magnetic field. She kept them closed, relying on echolocation to ensure that she didn't splat on the ground.

She used the magnetic ribbon to adjust her momentum and catapult her forward, pumping her arms, legs, core, and torso to cut through the air.

"Nice," Bath called out. "You stuck the landing."

Lisa, huffing, ran a hand through her hair. "No fair," she panted. "You've done this before." She couldn't deny that he'd beaten her by his own ability. While Bath could change form at will, he didn't use this to his advantage. How else could Lisa beat him in basketball? Instead, he limited himself to human--or, post-COTD, boon-boosted human--capabilities.

Bath looked up, his gaze locking onto the now unoccupied Spire balcony. "Rematch?"

Lisa's competitive spirit practically emanated from her eyes. "Yup."