Spell-linkage turns out to take a whole lot of context that I completely lacked, so before Vonne gets her explanation, the two of them sit me down for what feels like yet another remedial lesson in magical systems.

I, obviously, am delighted, even when it turns out to be slower going than I’d expected.

The basics turn out to be simple, once I pare them down, and the basics are the important part for now. Somehow, to both of their astonishment, I’ve managed to thoroughly peg myself into having no ability to cast what they called unstructured or Systemic magic; my mana manipulation skills are wildly inadequate to create spellforms, so I’m stuck with runes and Motes and the occasional catastrophic resonance cascade. Figuring that out, and then testing the limits of it to their mounting surprise and Sara’s noticeable dismay, is tedious, but then we get down to the interesting parts.

The spell that Sara used to shut Vonne down is called Incapacitative Dispel, and Sara’s the only living person who knows it. She knows this because she didn’t just get a Feat—or something vaguely Feat-like, she’s being cagey, is always cagey about this kind of thing—when she made it that was awarded “For recreating a spell not known to anyone living”, she holds a Title-like something which she’ll only keep so long as she and her teaching-this-spell line-of-descent outnumbers everyone else who knows the spell.

It’s kind of fascinating, like a blatant piece of meddling from a God—Zekhira, according to both Sara and Vonne—meant to prevent the loss of knowledge. I approve, of course.

Dispel is known everywhere to be a standard tier-one non-elemental spell, something that anyone with any spellcasting ability can cast. I point out almost immediately that it’s clearly not non-elemental, at least according to my Visor, and both of them sort of take the revelation that it’s actually Void-aspected with a sort of mix of disbelief and a poleaxed look.

We move on, leaving that fact bookmarked for later.

Dispel is an odd spell. It’s a contest of will, of focus, of precision in your mana wielding, and also of just how much weight you can throw into it. That’s why Sara made Incapacitative Dispel to punch up the tiers; she’s apparently implausibly powerful for someone in her second tier, but you put an Apprentice up against someone a couple of tiers up and like a Master in their fifth tier, and it’ll be like throwing an egg at a tree; your form just isn’t relevant, at that point.

So, all the other Novice-tier spells. Light and Sound were a flashbang; as much light and as much sound as possible right into the target’s eyes and ears from millimeters away, with the intent to disorient. Intrusive Whisper is linked somehow to Sound, helping it slip through defenses and hit the forefront and hindbrain at the same time, and then Wrest actually tries to siphon mana out of everything available, including both the target’s defenses and the spell Sara’s trying to counter, in order to feed the Dispel.

It’s a ridiculous spell. Vonne takes half an hour to learn it, giggling like she’s having an implausibly good time the whole while, and Sara seems equal parts smugly self-satisfied and astonished when she casts it successfully for the first time. It apparently takes keeping every component of it in your mind at the same time to do properly, but its tier is, as is apparently always the case, only one higher than the highest tier spell that it has as a component, so it’s something Sara can actually use.

It takes a lot more time, and a fair bit of my unanticipated involvement, for Sara to learn Force Bands. The spell is an expression of fundamental fields, mostly but not exclusively gravity, and the math for how it expresses itself is not just complicated on that basis, it also involves a whole lot of calculus due to the inverse square law, which Sara had no particular reason to know about. She knows about it anyway, mind you, but her understanding of it isn’t thorough enough until we get to work.

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I can’t actually wrap my own head around how the spell works, even from an outcomes perspective. I mean, I can observe the effects, but figuring it out from first principles in my head is a non-starter; I lean on the Visor and work through the equations, but the way that the pressure amps up as the target or subject moves is about the only part of it that I can really understand. It’s variably dialed and defined by an area of space around the target—what Vonne calls the anchor point—as well as a resistance gradient in percentages and a time factor that modifies the resistance over time so long as the target’s not on the anchor point, and I can just about wrap my brain around the math for the way the time factor and resistance gradient compound.

There’s also a component that defines where you want the anchor points to be, and that can move, and when it moves there’s a whole slew of parameters. How fast it moves is the most straightforward, but there’s also a bunch of stuff that boils down to “how fast do you want the pressure to ramp up”, a whole complex vector-definition component that Vonne demonstrates by bringing my arm from my side to above my head in an arc that involves my hand waving back and forth as it goes. It’s unsurprisingly inexorable—I can slow it down just a little bit, but it rapidly turns into my arm being dragged into position regardless of how much additional force I exert—but surprisingly gentle; even when Vonne greatly narrows the width of the eponymous bands, which is yet another of the ridiculous array of variadic parameters the spell can take, the way the gradients work means that there’s very little risk of torsion causing any manner of harm by accident.

I wind up dozing in a chair, legs curled up beneath me, while Sara spends hour after hour with Vonne, trying to learn how to cast it. Occasionally one of my arms drifts this way or that way, but it barely rises to the point of my consciously noticing it and stirring; the gentleness of the spell, at least in Vonne’s hands, makes it close enough to unnoticeable that I find myself falling deeper into slumber.

I’m tired enough not to feel particularly bad about not helping more than I’ve already helped, or rather, more than I’m still helping by being a test dummy. The nightmares had disrupted my last night’s sleep, and I’d had a full day with more than its fair share of wild emotional swings, thanks to the mass melee that we’d watched the tail end of, and that wasn’t even the biggest source of my exhaustion. Puzzling and being social are each hard work in its own right, work that I was careful to fuel with copious amounts of food, sure, but that just adds its own layer of why-I’m-tired to the pile, because the pleasant feeling of fullness is another of the several comforts lulling me to sleep.

Fullness, joy, the incredibly comfortable chair, safety, and the ephemeral feeling of community that comes with having people like these around; there're several reasons.

I wake up most of the way, at least enough to be aware that it’s happening and form memories and whatnot, when Amber and Zidanya come back from wherever they were. They’re loud for a split second and then hushed, not whispering but in the kind of pleasant murmured or low-but-full-voiced tones that Vonne and Sara are using, have been using for a little while. There’s a long-ish conversation that I mostly don’t follow, with a whole lot of laughing and giggling and Amber running her hands across my scalp; I get the sense that they’re laughing at me, but with as good as Amber’s touch feels, I find myself not minding.

I’m pretty sure it’s Amber who winds up lifting me gently out of the chair. It’s certainly her who carries me, pressed up against her chest and murmuring in half-protest, half-happiness, down the hallway to a bedroom, and it’s presumably her who undresses me. Without my involvement, to a great deal of quiet laughter and Vonne’s bright giggling; I’m roused enough to say something grumpy about how I’m perfectly capable of undressing myself, and Amber responds in unbelievably dry terms that she suspects otherwise.

Saying that with Force Bands still active is obviously cheating, but that’s what I get for liking women with a sense of humor, I guess.

There’s a dark road down the path of that thought, and my mind wants to walk it, but it actually doesn’t take that long for them to get my clothes off, despite how slowly and gently my arms drift from position to position; and as much as my mind might have been drifting towards wakefulness to retread a dozen conversations and re-plumb those tenebrous depths, that doesn’t wind up happening.

When Amber slides into bed with me and gently wraps my arms around her, I’m asleep before I even hear the door close.