I had no idea what the trenna rune I had encountered in the tower did. Or even if it was actually real. If it was, it could do just about anything from make a soft whistling sound to rending holes in reality. Unknown runes were best treated with extreme caution, but there were ways to handle them safely.

I started by looking through the data on Oak 3 about laboratory equipment available up here. A lot of it wasn't relevant, but seeing a Tier 2 isolation chamber listed made a little thrill of glee run through my mind. We had one of those back at school! That was exactly what I needed.

By the 5th Law of Ætherics, runes cannot generate mana, only shape and use what is already present. Therefore, they can be prevented with absolute certainty from doing anything dangerous by starving them of mana. The chamber was just down the hall, so I headed over to room 318. Half of the room was just an ordinary, empty office, with a wall of glass covered in runes partitioning it from the isolation chamber. I made sure there was no one in there already before opening the door at the edge of the wall and stepping inside.

Inside was a small, simple room, a bare workbench and stool the only furniture. On the wall was a simple dial, like an old-school thermostat. Perfect. I set my phone and spatial bag outside, retrieving my stylus and a few blank rune plates, then closed the door and locked it. Turning the dial all the way down, I sat there on the stool and waited, enduring the minor discomfort of all the ambient mana in the room being sucked away.

Once the gauge was down all the way to 5%, as low as a tier 2 chamber could go, I inscribed the rune on the plate and sat there for a few moments, verifying that nothing happened. Once I felt sure, I inscribed an ingress rune next to it and linked the two, waited again to verify stability, and pressed my finger to the ingress, channeling some power into it. A lot of it dissipated, sucked away by the chamber, but I could feel some of it "take" and flow into the enchantment.

Still no effect that I could discern. I stopped before I ended up feeling drained. Seemed pretty harmless for the moment. I turned the dial up to 20% and waited for the power level to stabilize, then tried again at a higher mana concentration. No effect, and none when I repeated it at 50.

It felt like the mana was flowing correctly into the rune, but with no immediate feedback, it was hard to be sure. So I shattered the rune plate, returned the room to 100%, and stepped outside, returning to my desk and documenting my (lack of) results on my rune tablet.

Back to the chamber, down to 50%, and this time I inscribed four runes on a new plate, a simple diagnostic pattern. Ingress, light aspect, trenna, egress. I let my power flow into it, saw the second rune light up as expected, a bright, warm yellow glow, but then as the power flowed into the unknown rune, the strangest thing happened. Only the start of it lit up, slowly fading out as it crossed the symbol.

By Aþil's eyes! That didn't make any sense. The Second Law of Ætherics tells us that runes are indivisible units; a flow of power cannot affect only a part of a rune. But that appeared to be precisely what I was seeing here. Either this rune was somehow violating an arcane law hitherto believed to be absolute, or its effect, whatever it was, was highly deceptive in some way.

And the worst part was, given the strange, possibly otherworldly origin of the rune, I couldn't automatically rule out the first interpretation! I shattered that plate and restored the chamber, then went back to my desk to document this bizarre result.

"Hi, welcome to AR," a voice said. I looked up and saw a guy at the entrance to my cube. He looked to be around 40, human, with short, curly red hair and freckles all over, an easygoing smile on his face. "I'm Scott Olsen. Just let me know if you need anything."

"Brad Webb. What's your specialty?"

"Metamagic."

"Wow, that's pretty heavy stuff!"

"Well, no one ends up here if they aren't a heavy hitter one way or another. What about you?"

I certainly wasn't. I'd been put here because a dragon wanted to screw with me. Was I being set up to fail? I really hoped not, but it was hard to avoid a touch of paranoia at those words.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"I'm an enchanter. Just got transferred in here from the Feurdanf project."

"Oh hey! Are you the guy who made that breakthrough on communications? I heard a bit about that. Don't understand all of it but it's supposed to be worth zillions to the company."

I gave him an embarrassed little smile. "I was like... half of that. The lesser half, honestly; I'm not sure why I ended up here rather than my teammate."

"Hey now, none of that impostor syndrome garbage. Looks like you're already hard at work on a project. I'll let you get back to it. Be awesome!" He grinned at me and walked off.

He had barely left when my next new teammate came by, and... oh wow.

Some women, your eyes are just immediately drawn to one specific part of them, usually for all the wrong reasons. This girl, though, I had to catch my natural instinct and hold myself back from cringing. She was wearing a bunny-ear headband!

"Hi, I'm Jenna," she said, holding out a hand to me. "Welcome to AR." She looked to be about 25, long blonde hair, a bit on the heavyset side, with a bright, innocent smile that made me wonder if she just legitimately didn't know how offensive wearing one of those was to Lapyns?

"Brad." I gave her my hand and she shook it vigorously.

"It's so cool to get someone new on the team!"

"Wow," I said, pulling my hand back and making a bit of a show of rubbing the wrist. "Is everyone here, like, super extroverted or something?"

She grinned. "You've met Elanil, right? She just kinda rubs off on everyone sooner or later. You told Scott you're into enchanting, right?"

"Yeah, what about you?"

"Life magic. And a bit of death, but mostly life. Looking into making crops grow better."

"What's death magic got to do with that?" I asked.

"It's a bit of a side project, looking at ways to build more specific, targeted pesticides and herbicides that will be more toxic to nasty things and less harmful to everything else."

"...huh. Didn't know Dyralight was in the agriculture business."

"We are a little. We've got tendrils in all sorts of industries really; not just the big stuff like lighting and automobiles."

"I see. Yeah, that would be cool if we could replace some of the stuff out there with better alternatives."

"I know, right? Well, I'll let you get back to work. Be awesome!"

Ugh, was that the team's catchphrase or something?

As she walked off I couldn't help it; I checked to see if she was wearing a tail too. She wasn't, thankfully.

"I guess it's my turn," a surprisingly flat voice said. I looked and saw a completely unexpected sight. No longer would Apogee count as the most unusual being I had met working here, even if I excluded the Big Guy.

Standing there was an androgynous figure whose skin appeared to be made entirely of some form of polished silvery metal. Living metal. They had no hair, and silvery waves covered them from torso to knees that gave the impression of some sort of robe, or possibly a dress, except that it appeared to be part of their body rather than a distinct article of clothing.

"Umm, hello," I said. "I'm Brad."

"My name is... not something you are capable of speaking. But 'Silver' will suffice."

"Silver. Nice to meet you." I hesitated. "If I might ask..."

A smile crossed the metallic figure's face. "Just what the Abyss am I?"

"I wasn't going to say it like that."

"Even so. I am a metal elemental, summoned to your plane during the Chaos War, then stranded here due to the Fast Keys. Somehow, in the events surrounding the end of the war, I awakened to sapience, and I have been living among you ever since."

"And you just... ended up getting a job in arcane research?"

"It seemed like the thing to do. My principal specialty is automaton theory."

"Automata, huh?"

Silver laughed. "Go ahead and say it. The metal man wants to build more metal men."

"Well, it is kinda funny when you put it that way."

"And not excessively far from the truth. If it is possible for me to attain sapience, why not a golem or Forged?"

I nodded. "I guess there's no good reason why the drive to make more like yourself should be limited to beings of flesh."

That prompted a full-out raucous laugh from Silver. "No, no, I have no particular desire to be a daddy. Or perhaps mommy would be the better analogy?"

"You... don't actually have a gender, do you?"

"No; that is a thing of flesh. My desires are motivated by my intellect, not my body. I wish to better understand myself and how I came to be that which I am today."

"And the best way to understand it is to recreate it?"

"Exactly. I must return to my research, but remember to be awesome." Silver's lips turned up in an ironic smirk, then the elemental turned and walked off. And apparently that was everyone; the AR division (at this office at least) was pretty small.

Meanwhile my mind was whirling again. Silver spoke of the drive to reproduce being a thing of the flesh. That made me think of Joanna. Joanna had a problem with her aura. Gareth had called my barrier spell an aura. Modern arcanotaxonomy didn't agree, but maybe they were close enough. Either way, I wouldn't be able to maintain a barrier spell inside the isolation chamber with the mana setting turned low enough.

...it couldn't really be that simple. Could it?

Hey, have you ever tried an

isolation chamber?

No, what's that?

Can you come up to room 318

at lunchtime? I have something

to show you.

Sure, see you then.