It wasn’t as simple as making the deal and going straight to help Halmir of course. Ratface found Suncat the next day and the girl had just rolled her eyes and taken her to her experiment room.

She put Ratface on the table one the middle and strapped her down. Ratface watched as Suncat hesitated to tie the straps.

“What are they for?” she asked.

“A glamour isn’t part of you but with one as ingrained as it is for you, the removal and snap back are going to be painful. This is to stop you moving around too much and hurting yourself in the process.”

Talking about it seemed to steady the other goblin and she was able to put Ratface into the straps.

“I’m not used to the patient not struggling,” she admitted afterwards. She looked troubled at the thought of it.

Ratface tried wiggling in the straps to no avail.

“Better?” she asked.

Suncat snorted and went to the next part.

“Today we’ll be testing your limits. I have no idea how long helping Halmir will take but if it can’t be solved before your glamour snaps back, it may do more harm than good. To that end, we’ll be testing you under different levels of strain.”

She pulled out a small crystal.

“This is a glamour holder. They used these in Never City to capture glamours and sever them from their host.”

“Why not just do that and then make her portable?”

Ratface wasn’t going to go through with that. She’d made a deal with the glamour, and she needed its cooperation to save Halmir. She was curious though.

“At the best case, it sends the severed one into a long sleep. I read even elves struggle to recover so I can’t imagine what’d do to you.”

“So, no severing the glamour, got it.”

Suncat snorted and placed the crystal over Ratface’s head. It felt like part of her memory stepped out, she felt foggy. She couldn’t focus, and the glamour snapped back into her mind. She winced in pain.

“Yeah, that’s about what I expected for this,” said Suncat, “are you okay to try again?”

Ratface nodded.

They spent most of the day working at it. They had no idea what helping Halmir would look like, so they had decided to go for worst case scenario.

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The crystal didn’t simulate a world, it was just a cage. That meant the glamour couldn’t run around in it to simulate effort either.

To get around this restriction, Suncat had made a conversion of crystal distance to amount of effort. Right next to Ratface being just sitting, and halfway to the house being a dead sprint. They needed to hold that dead sprint for at least one hour before they’d be happy with it. It was unlikely the glamour would be moving that much, but it gave them a flexible time if she did have to fight something.

They didn’t make much headway. It was a completely new experience to Ratface. Her brain felt weird, like it wasn’t all there and concentrating on not taking it back took effort. It felt a little like stretching, in that it hurt a lot and Ratface felt like she was making no progress.

The snapbacks got more and more painful the further they went out as well. Halfway across the room would leave her with a full-on headache. She didn’t know what further would get them because they hadn’t made it that far.

After a particularly brutal snap, Suncat called it. She handed Ratface a small pile of herbs which she instructed her to swallow. Ratface recognised the weed Dirthand had given her, but she didn’t know what the rest were. It tasted awful but its effects were almost immediate as the headache disappeared. Ratface wondered if there was a rule about the terrible taste to medicine effectiveness.

“You made good headway,” said Suncat.

Ratface frowned. It didn’t feel like she’d done that, they were barely through the room.

“How long until we can make it? Can Halmir make it?”

Suncat shrugged.

“No idea to the first, but in terms of the second, Halmir can feasibly last as long as you take. I can keep him going and it’s only the aether he has an issue in. It isn’t urgent, just important.”

She stared hard at Ratface. Her face looking as serious as she could.

“Do not rush this,” she said, “you can only hurt Halmir by doing so.”

Ratface grumbled but did as she was told. Sometimes you had to differ to the experts.

What followed was a gruelling couple of weeks. Ratface trained on this every day which meant she made no headway with Claudette. They’d tried once, and the demon had said trying to hold her mind was like a sweaty pig and sent her on her way.

Abigail also had her doing physical training again. It was a lot of sparring and occasionally Albert joined them. He trounced Ratface every time.

As a result, Ratface lived in a dreamlike experience, the only difference between being awake and being asleep the absence of exhaustion.

Her actual dream with the glamour became less dreamlike. The world became clearer the more training they put in which she found interesting. She asked the glamour about it when they met in the city.

“It is interesting,” the glamour agreed.

The two of them watched as their usual server walked over to them with their fake drinks. They had definition now.

They went for a walk until they came past a group of young elves. They had small glamours running around them as they were deep in concentration.

“You know when kids are first learning how to use their glamours they have to send their glamour to do a task out of eyeshot. It’s to help them get more in tune with it supposedly,” said the glamour, “I wonder if your crystal training is a more extreme version of that?”

“You’re awfully chatty,” said Ratface, “you won’t get into trouble for telling me something like that?”

“In trouble with who? There’s only me. You could’ve got that information from a book anyway.”

She shrugged.

“Besides, all this training means I get stronger as well. There is literally no down-side to all of this for me.”

The glamour was quite nice when Ratface didn’t push on the memory she was hiding. It was weird enjoying an elf’s company, but Ratface took solace in the fact that she was an elf living in her head so didn’t really count.

They arrived at the jellyfish illusion again. They always came here when the dream started to fade.

“It’s a pity,” said the glamour as the dream faded, “you’re making good progress with this training. If you were an elf, you’d be a prodigy.”

Ratface shuddered at the thought of being one of them as the dream faded.