"Are you sure you wouldn't care for any refreshment?" the attendant asked, discreetly withdrawing the silver plate of espresso cups he had moments ago been proffering. "I assure you, it is of the highest quality."

"No, thank you." Gentry kept his comments about the relative position of the coffee to its highest-quality instance to himself, and merely examined his nails. Yesterday's clear-polish manicure had left him feeling quite well-groomed indeed, which was a sensation he always enjoyed. The attendant bowed and made himself scarce with an artistry Gentry appreciated. To Gentry's right, the wiedergänger let out another rattling shriek, but he ignored it with at least as much ease as the attendant had.

After a few moments, the elevator behind him dinged quietly, and disgorged a classic example of the elder statesman: white-haired, hale but wrinkled, and immaculately besuited. Gentry nodded respectfully as the other man sat down at the table across from him. "Maximus, I presume. I'm grateful for your time."

The other man nodded back. "As am I, Mister... Faulko, I believe it was?"

"Focault," corrected Gentry cheerfully. "It's French. Don't let my accent mislead you."

"I see. Well, this is all quite unorthodox, but I simply could not resist the temptation our mutual friend offered me." Maximus chuckled, nodding in the wiedergänger's direction, and it let out a vibrating howl in response. Maximus nodded again, smiling. "Quite right. Quite right indeed."

Gentry did his best to conceal a smirk, wondering what the other man had heard. "Well, as we are both very busy men, I'll get right to the point. Your stock is currently trading at..." he checked his phone, "eighty-one dollars per share, and I'm certain that you have options to exercise at a significantly lower price point. I'm offering you one hundred dollars a share, effective immediately, on the condition that you sell them all to me as a block."

Maxwell blinked, then settled back. "So it's true. You want to take Chemimax private. I never thought I'd see the day."

"Public trading is very good for making profits, Maximus, but somewhat less effective at making changes." Gentry leaned forward, tapping the table. "I have some very challenging logistical hurdles to navigate, and I don't intend to be saddled with a board while I do it."

Maximus inhaled sharply, then exhaled slowly. "Well, I think you're crazy -- but crazy money spends just as well as sane, so who am I to argue?" He pulled out his own phone and began tapping out an email. "These things take time, you understand -- the SEC will have a field day if we don't cross our I's and dot our T's just so. But if you're willing to make me a billionaire, I certainly won't stop you."

"Perish the thought." Gentry smiled, mentally feeding another quanta of power to his minion to deepen the entanglement and reinforce the glamour. As long as the wiedergänger remained bound to him, those he interacted with would have his presence reinforced in their minds -- a rather necessary requirement for such a long-term endeavour as owning one of the world's most prominent chemical-industry corporations. "After all, if we can't work together for mutual benefit, what's the point of anything?"

----------------------------------------

Enna awoke in the darkness, confounded by the smell of earth and ice despite the pleasant temperature; she groped blindly for her phone for a moment, worrying about being late for work, before her memory of recent events caught up with her and she collapsed back into the sleeping bag with a frustrated grunt. This was going to seriously do her head in.

Groaning, she stretched and staggered to her feet, leaving her sleeping bag a rumpled mess behind her as she made her way cautiously out of the tent. Before her, Orton was sitting cross-legged in front of the fire.

"Um... hey, morning," she assayed. Why are you always so awkward, she chastised herself.

"Hey," responded Orton, not turning. "Sleep okay?"

"Honestly? Not really." Enna walked around the firepit and sat on Orton's right about five feet away; close enough that they wouldn't have to shout to each other or peer through smoke to see each other, but far enough that it wouldn't be uncomfortable. "I keep struggling with that sense of unreality. Everything that happened yesterday seems so crazy."

Orton nodded and grinned, slightly sadly. "Not to mention how 'yesterday' describes the previous day, the subjective year you experienced during it, and probably the previous several days where you were captive. I think you're allowed to struggle with shit that heavy."

Enna wrapped her arms around herself, looking out at the darkness. "Where's what's-his-name? And how long do we have before the next ridiculous thing we have to do?"

"Jiann? He went for supplies. Said it'd be easier for him to get through the cold." Orton stood up and stretched, then sat back down in a less rigorous pose; she supposed he'd been meditating, or something. "Hopefully he'll actually come back. I think we're going to need him, to be honest."

Enna winced. "Do you think we can trust him?"

Orton laughed bitterly. "Oh, sure. He and I go way, way back." He snorted to himself for a few moments, apparently enjoying some kind of inside joke, before his humor subsided and he looked back at her. "But seriously, we'll be fine. He wants to defeat Gentry at least as much as we do."

Abruptly, Enna felt very weak and powerless. "Orton, how the hell are we supposed to do that? He stomped us, and I don't even think he was really trying very hard. Otherwise he'd have just killed us instead of giving me another complex to add to my collection."

Orton shrugged. "I know how it looks, but he's just a guy. A crazy, insanely powerful guy with access to the combined might and lore of virtually everything humankind's ever imagined, but still just a guy." He scratched the back of his head contemplatively. "I've fought him three times now, and one of his favorite techniques is exactly this -- projecting an aura of invulnerability so you don't even try to defeat him. It worked on me once, and I paid for it more harshly than you can imagine." He shuddered.

Enna sighed. "So what do we do then? A training montage?" She tried to arrange her limbs in the meditative posture Orton had had. "More drugs and Sanskrit?"

"Jesus, no." Orton shook his head vigorously. "That's what I tried with you in the last loop, and it was a disaster. You fought me every step of the way, and quite frankly, I think my training works for me because it matches my temperament, not because of any inherent awesomeness it has." He chuckled ruefully, then sobered. "Honestly, you're probably better off talking to Jiann when he gets back. He's a sorcerer, like you, so he might have some insight into the best way to develop your powers. I get the feeling it's not going to involve nearly as many dusty old tomes as my way."

Enna sighed in relief. "No offense, Orton, but thank God. I'm not nearly as much of a nerd as you are."

"None taken. I am, in fact, a prime specimen of a nerd." He poked at the fire with a stick contemplatively, smiling to himself a little.

Enna sat there for a moment, then began to fidget as the silence stretched uncomfortably. "So. Um... yeah."

Orton put the stick down and looked up at Enna. "Yeah?"

"Listen, I just... I don't know, fuck." She ran her hands through her hair, wincing at its filthiness. "I just have a lot of questions."

"Well, I can't promise I have all the answers, or indeed any you might want." Orton smiled. "But it never hurts to ask."

"Okay. I've managed to figure out some things on my own, but there's still a lot I don't understand about magic." She began to tick off points on her fingers. "I know changes we make don't stick around, so we can't like summon castles out of dirt or anything. I know making a change requires power for the duration of the change, so we can't fly or do anything else that requires continuously giving physics the finger."

Orton nodded. "You can leap like an anime character, though, so keep that in your toolbox if you need it. Just make sure you're careful about how far or high -- it's no fun to realize halfway down that you've exceeded what your bones and tendons can handle when you land. Easiest ways to do it are to leap from somewhere low to somewhere high, or to leap down from something normally and use power to cushion your landing."

"Uh... okay." Enna tried not to think about what the fallout would be if she messed that up, and moved on. "I know we can't affect anything we can't see --"

"Anything we can't perceive," Orton corrected. "You can alter something thousands of miles away if you're currently perceiving it across another plane. Like how I cast those spells by being psychally congruent with you."

"You keep using that word, 'psychal'," Enna complained. "Are you sure you don't mean 'psychic'?"

"Damn. My own apprentice thinks I'm making up words. This is a dark day for my tradition of pedagogy." Orton involuntarily remembered the several years he'd been writing "should of" instead of "should've" and winced. "But I guess this is as good a time as any to talk about planes and realms."

Stolen novel; please report.

Scooting over closer to her, he used the stick he'd been poking the fire with to draw a line in the dirt. "Down here, at the bottom of the stack of cosmological perspectivism, is the physical plane -- what people call 'the real world' when they don't know any better. This is your meatspace, your material realm, where quarks get stuck to gluons and ice cream goes splat on the pavement."

Enna rolled her eyes. "I believe we can assume familiarity with this subject on the behalf of the student."

Orton cackled. "Right, right. Some magi also call the physical world 'the mortal realm', because it's where all the phenoma take place that we lose our connection to. As your powers get stronger and your Fade becomes more pronounced, getting too involved with 'regular life' things -- like schools, the police, and hospitals -- becomes more dangerous, because your personal flavor of entropy is so much more divergent than that of any bystanders. Get checked into a hospital at your current level of power, and you might wake up with it on fire or crawling with secret doctor-impersonating cultists, just because you're such a weirdness magnet now."

Enna sighed. "Guess I can kiss my dreams of a relaxing retirement goodbye, huh."

"If you live to see retirement, you'll be powerful enough that you can do whatever you want, including living out subjective weeks or months in a nice relaxing mindscape you design in between the horrific adventures you'll deal with every day." Orton didn't even look up as he drew another line above the first. "At one level removed from the physical plane is the psychal plane -- no, I'm not mispronouncing 'psychic' -- which is where all activity of the mind takes place. This is where we go when we're dreaming, for example, but we also psychally move around in it when we have ideas, when we learn things, and when we relate to other people."

"Wait, so it's not, like, a place?" Enna was confused already.

"It is, but not in the way you're probably thinking." Orton shrugged. "It's basically just a way of visualizing stuff your mind does in relation to things other minds do. It's not 'real' in the sense of physicality, but it's very 'real' in the sense that it's obviously a thing that can be measured. When you communicated with me telepathically, you did it by moving your mind next to mine in the psychal plane so that I could hear you 'speak' to me, exactly the same way you moved closer to me in the physical plane so that you could speak to me out loud."

"But I didn't have to think about any of that," protested Enna. "I just... I don't know, did it."

Orton nodded. "Like I said, things are a little different for sorcerers." He sketched an arrow up from the first line to the second. "Achieving control over the physical realm is done by subordinating it to the psychal realm -- in other words, using your mind to change physical reality. That's the 'breaking through' I talked about that most mages have to go through in order to reach the second tier of power. You apparently got some kind of get-out-of-enlightenment-free card, though, so I guess that doesn't apply to you." Enna giggled.

"Now above that plane, there's the spiritual plane," continued Orton, sketching a third line above the second. "This is something about midway between the realm of thought and the realm of Platonic Forms, which you almost certainly don't know anything about because you are not a member of the Philosophy Nerd prestige class."

"But I remember when you talked about souls before, when you first trained me," Enna protested. "I'm not completely ignorant."

"I told you souls exist; I almost certainly didn't tell you anything about what a soul is," continued Orton imperturbably. "For lack of a better term, your soul is your mind's mind -- the distillation of your essence and constituent beliefs that give rise to the unique pattern of thoughts that you think. Basically, the truest version of your 'self', although that's still not the whole story. But I think you understand enough about this particular brand of Weird Shit that you get it, now."

Enna nodded. "I wouldn't have before I read that book, but... yeah, I think I get it now. The thought-forms are spiritual, and the actual thoughts that derive from them are psychal."

"Very good." Orton sketched another arrow up to the third line from the second. "That's spiritual mastery -- subordinating your thoughts to your spirit. You're probably about here now, or close enough as makes no difference."

Enna pondered. "Because I can cast psychal spells? Or is there some other criteria?"

"No, you can cast psychal spells once you can perceive the psychal plane -- pretty early on, in fact, if you know them and have the background to understand them. But you can't cast spiritual spells until you break through to the third tier, because your spirit is still at the mercy of your thoughts rather than the other way around." Orton looked at her appraisingly. "I could probably do some aura-work on you if you want to know more."

"Maybe later." Enna scooted closer to him. "For now, keep going." She sighed. "Just this once, I'd like a lesson not to be interrupted by a monster attack or me getting frustrated."

"Okay." Orton sketched another, fourth line. "This is where things get hard to understand for most people who aren't mega dorks -- the fourth plane is the astral plane, or meta-spiritual realm. This is where things like forms and gods and political movements hang out. It's pretty woo-woo."

Enna squinted, trying and failing to envision it. "And there's a level above that?"

"Oh sure." Orton sketched a fifth line above all the others. "The noumenal plane, where True Reality exists in its purest form. Theoretically, it's some kind of meta-conceptual thing, but I've never even gotten close to understanding it, much less mastering or transcending it. That's the kind of thing you spend your whole life trying just to have one shot at attaining it. Supposedly, it comes with all kinds of power -- spells that bring people back from the dead, or know everything in all creation at once, or somatic arts to let you break a mountain with one punch. You know, fairy story stuff."

"Wow." Enna rocked back, thinking. "I guess the Fade that comes with that kind of power must be pretty extreme."

Orton nodded. "Yeah. And that's why you only hear about it being wielded by the purest of people, like Buddha or Jesus or whatever. They're the only ones with enough Durance to still be in anything like a regular universe when they attain that kind of power."

"Are you sure it's not the other way around?" Enna turned to look at him. "Maybe it's a requirement. Like, you have to be that good in the first place to master it?"

"Boy, that'd be a comforting thought." Orton grimaced. "I don't actually know, to be honest. But I have a suspicion that if it were true, bad guys wouldn't be able to get those powers, and I just really doubt that reality is quite that generous." He scuffed out all the lines in frustration. "Or maybe this is all just me trying to make up rules for something that doesn't even have rules, and none of this even matters."

Enna laughed, flopping over next to him. "Oh, man! You were doing so well, too. I was really getting into your whole Ancient Master vibe." She laughed for a moment, then hauled herself up on his shirt-sleeve.

Orton smiled at her. "Sorry. I could go put my robe and wizard hat, if you want."

"Stop trying to get me turned on, Orton." And then, abruptly, they both realized the situation -- they were inches apart, staring into each others' eyes and talking about sex. They both inhaled a breath and held it, unsure of what would happen.

"Y'all should hang a sock on the door, if'n you gonna do that," cackled a voice out of the darkness. Involuntarily, both of them jumped apart as Jiann came striding into the circle of firelight, carrying a plastic bag full of gas-station junk food. He hurled it at Orton at full speed, but Orton nonchalantly caught it without even looking. "There ya go -- some nice, nourishin' Finnish snacks for you metabolism-havin' folks."

Orton opened the bag and looked inside, wincing. "No Halva Salmiakki? You really are a monster."

Jiann cackled. "Boy, you're lucky that there bag ain't chock fulla lipeäkala."

Enna looked from one of them to the other, confused. "What's lippy-a-kala?"

"Lutefisk." Orton continued rummaging through the bag. "Tastes like soapy fish, basically."

"People eat that?!" Enna's lip curled involuntarily.

Orton chuckled, digging a Tupla chocolate bar out of the bag and tossing it to her. "You'd be surprised what some people think of eating crawfish. Hope you like chocolate."

Enna caught the bar, opening it and taking a huge bite. "Yuf ffkn kiddin' me? Luff chock'lt." She devoured the entire thing in three bites, then sighed. "Don't suppose you have more?"

Orton daintily removed a package of Pantteri licorice snacks and tossed the rest of the bag to her. "Knock yourself out. Chocolate's basically all he got."

"Most nutrition per pound. Though I s'pose I coulda brought back five pounds o' butter." Jiann grinned and attempted to sit by the fire; it was something of a production, with his limbs as uncoordinated and creaky as they were, and he eventually sort of half-toppled over sideways before clambering up into a seated position. "Damn, but this ain't a luxury ride," he grumbled.

"Are you gonna be able to fight like that?" Enna continued digging through the bag for more chocolate. "I mean, not to be rude, but... you know."

Jiann shrugged. "I reckon I'll do well enough. Guns and spells don't need much jumpin' around."

Orton peered at Jiann contemplatively as he munched a mixture of colorful and black licorice pucks. "I could take a look, if you want. Maybe help you clear some blockages."

"Boy, you keep your cotton-pickin' spiritual appendages outta my ephemeral totality, you hear?" Jiann directed a withering glare at Orton. "I had enough o' you up in my essence to last me quite a while longer."

"Okay, jeez, fine." Orton threw up his hands. "I was just trying to help you, you prick."

I thought the two of them were supposed to be friends? Enna watched the two of them in bewilderment as she ate another chocolate bar, which she had been surprised and confused to discover had some kind of fruity foam in the middle. Chewing and swallowing the last bite, she interjected, "So what's our next move? Where are we going now?"

Orton grimaced. "I don't know. We need a lot of information -- what Gentry's up to, how to beat him. But he's got nine years on us now, and he's almost certainly better at warding than he was -- there's no chance I can track or divine anything about him now, and frankly I haven't got the power to try. I need to rest, research, and recharge, in that order."

"Them last two might be doable," responded Jiann, "but I don't put much stock in ol' Gentry sittin' still. An' my wards might shield us for a while, but I wouldn' count on 'em holdin' up forever."

"I wouldn't count on them holding up at all, if he actually starts looking for us," countered Orton, popping another handful of licorice into his mouth. "He's got an infinite number of demons to throw at us, remember? It'd be child's play to put, say, thirty of them on cracking our wards. We might as well not put any up."

"So." Enna held up her thumb. "We need to rest, but we can't rest." She held up her index finger. "We need to recharge, but we can't sit still." She held up her middle finger. "And we need to do research, but can't do it in one place." She curled down her thumb and index finger, leaving only the middle finger raised. "Have I stated the situation correctly?"

"Fairly much, I reckon," Jiann rocked backwards in irritation. "Ain't no place on Earth we can go an' be safe or protected."

Orton started. "Not on Earth, maybe. But... shit, it'd be a hell of a risk."

"What would?" Enna turned slightly to face Orton head-on.

Orton had a vicious smile on his face -- the strangest Enna had ever seen, and it made her take a half-step back involuntarily. "Gentry sent us out of the world, right? So he expects us to not be in it when he looks." He crumpled the empty bag of licorice and tossed it high into the air. "So let's give him what he expects."