Cas continued the conversation, running on autopilot until the night grew dark and people’s weariness overcame their curiosity. Eventually, to many disappointed groans, Cas excused herself.

Dinner ended after that, having lasted much longer due to her presence. Quickly, all the fires were smothered with dust, and the people were scattering away to their various tents, and tree branches, and particularly soft patches of dirt.

Sara, being the only Psychic, had her own tent in the officer camp.

“Come in!” she said simply after Cas knocked.

“Oh!” her manufactured smile disappeared after Cas poked her head in. “It’s you.”

“Ok, look,” Cas immediately launched into apologies as she entered into the tent. “I know why you’re mad, and I just want to say: I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.”

“What?” Sara said, pulling a confused face.

“Dating,” Cas said. “I know you call it courting here, but I noticed you seemed mad when I told Anne first. I didn’t think it was that important! I mean-”

“Cas, Cas,” Sara calmed. “I’m not mad at you. Ok, well, I was a bit annoyed when you told Anne first, but that was a professional annoyance. I was just insulted that I’d been beaten to the gossip game, is all! I’m not a little girl, Cas. I wouldn’t get mad because you told another person your secrets before me. We literally met two days ago, now if that’s all you had to say…”

Sara rolled back over into her sleeping bag, with the tired voice of someone who’d been woken up in the middle of the night to hear nonsense.

Cas almost believed it.

“Is that why you stormed off in the middle of the conversation?”

Sara was not one to be caught in a lie, however. “I said I wasn’t mad at you darling, not that I wasn’t mad. I have a right to be angry, don’t I?”

Cas was relieved, though curiosity got the better of her. “Wanna tell me what you’re mad about?”

“No,” a simple answer.

“Is it because of the stuff Anne said about mercenaries?”

Sara let out a long sigh. “Of course not. General opinions are my forte, and I know what people think of me – what they would think of me if they knew, and something as lukewarm as that isn’t going to bother me. Now, if you would please, I must get back to bed,” Sara drew her sleeping back over her shoulder with a yawn. “Beauty sleep is a demanding mistress.”

Cas left the tent convinced that Sara was telling the truth. Although, in the back of her mind, she retained enough self awareness to question if that was because the woman’s words made sense, or simply because Sara had such a talent for convincing others. A charisma stat of seventy five was quite the pendant to wear, after all, and it showed in the woman's uncanny ability to so navigate conversations. It was hard to tell, with Sara.

Cas left the tent and took a moment to appreciate the night sky.

Light Pollution had robbed her of the privilege on Earth, but – whenever she remembered to – Cas liked to look at the sprawl of starlight which decorated the roof of this world.

She wondered how far away those alien stars were, and how large they had to be even as they floated weightlessly above her like pinprick points of light.

Cas then remembered her unusual capacity to measure distances.

She could look at a mountain and discern it was ten miles away – give or take – and when flying she could tell her altitude down to the foot.

It was an unnatural ability. After all, what did thousand feet look like to the human eye, and how was it different from five thousand, or nine thousand, or thirty thousand?

Cas wasn’t sure, but she was able to tell the difference instinctually.

So, why not try the same trick on the stars? Cas thought.

She stared hard at the miniscule points of light, squinting her eyes and straining her senses. Her aura picked up. Cas realized she was swaying side to side.

And then, a moment to late, Cas figured the distance and her hackles raised as she felt herself suddenly engulfed by infinite distance.

It was... terrifying.

Even the moon seemed impossibly far away. The starts were even further than that? Cas, of course knew that the stars were distant points of light, but she'd never felt it like this, before. The knowledge alone had never made her want to throw up.

She couldn't even measure the distance, really. She just understood it was further away than she could ever concieve.

Those little stars, how bright were they, reallty? How large did they have to be?

Cas, of course, already knew this. She’d read the facts in her science textbooks. She knew the sun was so many yottatons, that it could fit a million earths inside of it, that space was so vast it would take light thousands of years to reach them.

But now she could feel those implications, and the universe just didn’t seem to make sense.

How could all of that just be hanging up there? Why all of that just for a light-show?

“So, are you ok, Cas?”

Anne’s manner of speech was always so down to earth, and it dragged Cas down to the same level, letting her take a refreshing breath amidst the coil of her hyperventilation.

“Yeah,” Cas answered immediately without thinking. “I was just… appreciating the night sky,” she smiled, trying to keep the inflecting sarcasm out of her voice. “Beautiful, isn’t it?

“Ya,” Anne said, with a bit of hesitation. “It can be scary to watch it when you have a pattern square, though. I remember I cried the first time I accidentally looked up with my pattern square,” she laughed. “Mama, came running over. She thought I was crying because I stared into the sun too long, but when she found out I stole her square, haha! She spanked me red after that, ya!”

Cas, in a mind to look around while avoiding a view of the horizon, focused her attention on the pin-points of aura that dotted the lower face of the hill.

Most of them were sleeping figures lying out in the open, or hiding within a treetop or ditch. Some were awake, however, either on patrol or in a pleasant conversation or… using their pattern squares. It was shocking how she’d missed it, but about five percent of everybody seemed to be using their pattern squares at any spare moment.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Cas still had no idea what pattern squares were, and she was too afraid to ask. Sara hadn’t answered her when she first asked, so Cas considered waiting until morning to bring the subject up again.

At least, that was until she returned her attention back to Anne and realized that what she’d previously mistaken to be a white sigil on the black shoulder of her armor was, in fact, the bright face of a patten square sewn into her clothes.

That was it, patience be damned, Cas was getting answers, now. She refused to partake in a three-shells situation.

“What is that, by the way,” she asked, pointing to the square sewn into Anne’s armor.

“Oh, a pattern square,” Anne answered.

“Yes, but what does it do?”

Anne looked confused second. “Oh, do you not have these in your country?”

“No,” Cas kept her answer curt, trying to hurry to the point.

“Oh dear,” Anne raised a hand to her cheek. “How unlucky. I couldn’t imagine life without my pattern square.”

“Yes, yes, but what does it do?”

“In fact there’s actually a joke that goes around Drussland,” Anne laughed. “It goes like this: ‘if tomorrow all our swords broke, the army would fight with its shovels. However, if tomorrow the pattern squares stopped working: society would collapse!”

Anne’s laugh was interrupted by the savage shaking Cas induced on the woman’s shoulders. “Yes, yes, yes. Pattern squares are amazing, they’re fantastic, they’re worth their weight in ten tons of silver, but please can you just tell me what they actually do!” Cas was beginning to grow desperate.

Anne, seeing the seriousness, paused to think of it. “Well. It’s complicated to explain. They can do many things, ya?”

“Give me some examples,” Cas begged.

“Well, it depends on how good you use them, but…” Anne searched for some offhand examples, flaring her aura around the pattern square at her shoulder, as if to taunt Cas further with its mystery. “Oh ya!” she said at last, “At least they can do the basic stuff. Everyone can use them for that!”

“What is the basic stuff!” Cas said, drawing an annoyed groan from one of the nearby sleeping tents.

Cas couldn’t have cared less about other people’s sleep in the moment, though, as she grilled Anne for answers.

“Well, like I said, they can do lots of things. Retrieve memories, help with calculations, store knowledge, measure distances, keep track of time uhmm… they just help your thinking, really.”

“Really?” Cas tried to sound more curious than doubtful. “They help your thinking?”

“Ya! My calculations teachers said they become an extension of your mind. Well… he said they help expand your mind.”

“That seems rather impossible for a blank plate,” Cas said, pointing at the glowing square on her shoulder.

Anne, seeming to take Cas’s skeptical note as a challenge, redoubled her effort in the conversation.

“Well, it’s like this,” she said, “what is 20,221 multiplied by 864?”

Cas resisted the urge to simply plug the numbers into her excel sheet and answered. “Well, I wouldn’t be able to do it my head easily, but if I had some paper-”

“Ah ha!” the woman said, elated at Cas finally getting the point. “If you had paper, you could be able to find the answer, or remember the things that happened a long time ago, or to look over your ideas multiple times. A piece of paper is a simple thing, but it can act as an addition to your mind, is it not so?”

Anne grew excited at this victory in the conversation, losing her finer grasp of the language and resorting to the more idiosyncratic phraseology carried over – presumably – from her native language. Even her accent seemed to grow thicker.

“I suppose that’s true…” Cas admitted.

“Well, pattern squares are like that, but you use them with your aura. Here, try it,” the woman said, leaning over so that her shoulder was within reach.

Cas reached out and touched the square, feeling the midnight anger of her aura as it burst up and engulfed the pattern square in blue fire.

[Item Equipped: Pattern Square]

[Advanced Excel Functions unlocked!]

[Excel Graph (Unaffected)]

[Notes (Unaffected)]

[Distance finder (Unaffected)]

[Time keeper (Unaffected)]

Cas overplayed the look of amazement. “Wow, it certainly can do a lot.”

Meanwhile, she was stuck on the subject of… why could she already do what the pattern square did for others.

Looking off to a distant hill, Cas could tell it was exactly 1421 feet away.

That… certainly was more accurate than her usual ability, but the fact that she was able to tell distances and do calculations at all was something to be looked into. Why did she have the ability to do naturally what it took others specialized tools to manage?

Cas looked over the pattern square.

Up close and in the light, it had a certain ceramic sheen to it, and the surface of it glimmered with an iridescent light whenever Anne’s shifting movement swung it through the moonlight.

“How do you guys make this thing, anyway?” Cas asked, deciding to leave the mystery of her abilities for another time.

“Oh!” Anne perked up again, excited to be asked an obscure question she knew the answer to. “They can be made of many things now, but traditionally they were made from the eye of a water prince.”

“A water prince?”

Here Anne hit a stumbling block, mouth twisting in a curious expression as she looked up through the corner of her eye for ideas. “Water prince, water prince” she repeated again, shaking her leg in thought. “You know, those small monsters,” she brought her hands together into a small shape. “They’re found in caves. They eat anything!”

That… basically described every low level monster in Siablo, and unfortunately for Cas, she had played the English version with English labels, and it seemed obvious that ‘water prince’ was a direct translation from Anne’s native language.

Seeing that her description had failed to bring anything up in Cas’s mind, Anne went insead for an action scene. “The way you make it, is that you first find the water princes, and if you get a big enough one, you can pluck out its eye and carve it into a pattern square.”

Cas cringed a bit at that. “That seems… painful.”

“They grow back!” the woman said, allied. “Ugh!” letting out a frustrated shout, she suddenly twisted about to look at the two auxiliaries who had made her acquaintance. “Reg! Dacula!” she signaled them with a waving hand.

They arrived in short order, and with good intentions, but five minutes of conversation proved unfruitful, as far as results were concerned.

Dacula hemmed loudly, as if puzzling over the greatest puzzle. “Well, in my language we call them Bambalinas.”

“What does that mean?”

“Soft,” he answered smilingly. “What about you, Reg? Shouldn’t you know this? You speak this language good, don’t you?”

“I speak it well enough,” Reg spoke in accent-less English, raising a hand to smooth a black mustache. “My parents had good tutors, but my lessons were… rather unconcerned with trivialities such as the names of minor monsters. Besides, I’m sure most people in this region would recognize what you meant by ‘Water prince’. It just borders Drussland, doesn’t it?” he looked over to Anne for confirmation.

“Oh? Tutors?” Dacula expressed his surprise loudly. “I thought for sure you must have been half-Sonarian! You certainly look like the regulars.”

Reg sighed. “I am from Rania, and I’ll ask you not to confuse the matter further,” he said sternly, though calmly as he tapped out his pipe, idly wiping the bowl with a white cloth.

“Oh! Aren’t you the ones who get annoyed when people call you Sonarian?” Anne’s eyes lit up in a display of mischievous intention.

“We do, because we’re not,” Reg kept his cool, sliding the stem of his pipe into the holster of his pouch.

“But you have the same king,” Dacula teased.

Reg looked aside, indignant. “His majesty the high king rules over all men.”

“Sure,” Dacula admitted, “but the high king is the Emperor. Wouldn’t you have a different king if you were a different country?”

Reg looked aside. “I believe we’re straying off topic. We should just ask one of the regular soldiers. I’m sure they ought to know. Hey! You!” Reg yelled suddenly, picking out a blue aura with a low-ranking pendant glowing on his chest.

“Yeah, what is it?” the regular asked, walking forward.

“We want to know,” Dacula engaged with his usual flourish. “What do you call a water prince in your language.”

“The man only raised a dark eyebrow. The hell’s a water prince?”

The same problem, now in reverse. Cas resisted valiantly the ten-thousand pound force which attracted palm to face.

Dacula accused, turning to Reg. “You said the people around here would know what that meant!”

“Do I look like I’m from around here?” the regular interrupted. “I’m from down south, came with the prince’s division, rest his soul. Anyway, I repeat, what the hell is a water prince?”

All at once, the party tried to answer. “-those small things, that live in caves and eat” “‘-soft, we call them Bambalinas-”, “-a completely different culture to you Sonorians-”

Cas cut through it with the impatience of someone who wanted to flip the game board.

“They’re the things you make pattern squares out of!” she said bluntly. “Drusslanders call them Water Princes, but we want to know what you call them!”

“Oh!” The soldier’s lit up in recognition. “Those little jerks! Ha! I’d say water prince is too good a name for them. I swear, if it wasn’t for–”

“Just tell us what the hell they’re called!” Cas screamed, staring at him with the withering end of her patience.

“Alright, alright,” the man calmed. “I happen to know they’re called different things depending on where you go. Up here, I’ve heard people calling them Mires, or Squides, and apparently Water Princes, I guess. Further east, they call em… uhh, Quorin, the pretentious fucks.”

None of those names rang a bell for Cas, so she went to the final resort.

“And, down south. What do they call them there?”

The man shrugged.

“We just call them slimes.”