The next week I was the happiest I'd been in as long as I could remember.

I spent my days riding on the wagon, knitting, and occasionally going out with Katrin and Errod to hunt these delicious little chubby rodents that lived in the woods while Granny kept an eye on Elba. When Shitheel insisted we take a break, I would spar with Errod as Katrin taught Elba to read. Then, in the evenings, we'd head off of the road and into the hills a little in the hopes of getting a slightly better ambient mana level and try to come up with games to play around the campfire. I'd cap off the night meditating and trying to understand what was going on behind my Dumines, and planning on what I'd learn once I'd built up more potential.

It was cozy, and I could feel myself slowly moving past the more traumatic bits of my time since arriving from Earth - although I had still avoided reading through Connie's journal apart from what I'd needed to in order to get the contracts written. Best of all, since I was traveling and wasn't being told what to do by anyone I was getting all the benefits of a found family experience without triggering my weird "must run away and live in an abandoned factory" impulse.

That being said, when we were finally at the edge of the Free States and it was time for Granny to turn her wagon down another road I wasn't that sad. She was a lot of fun, and it was great to have her as a babysitter for Elba, but we had several secrets we didn't want to discuss around her. She gave us all quick hugs and overly sloppy smooches on each cheek, and then unceremoniously headed off over the foothills. I didn't find the knitting needles in my wagon until I went to bed that night - they were her better set, not the extras she had been having me use, and I may have cried a tiny bit. For no reason.

We were also trying our best to keep from talking about Earth or my extra Dumines around Elba, but she didn't really seem to care about us sending her off to play while we talked. She almost certainly knew something was up, but I doubted her time with the Sahrger encouraged her to snoop on the adults. While she was running around smacking things with sticks, we talked about topics like the strange threads I could see coming from my chest - and not just mine.

There were a few in particular that seemed notable. While we all had at least two or three that tapered off into nothingness almost immediately, Errod had two that went from his chest to his glove and then, after passing through it, vanished a couple inches after. Katrin had one going to her spellbook, and that one didn't continue past it - it just ended in the spine of the book. Also, the three of us all had at least one going to each other. Also interesting was the one we passed that was stretched across the road, not connected to anything we could see - although my range seemed to be limited, with them all stopping abruptly about twenty feet away from me.

Elba had two of the ones that disappeared barely past her clothes and one that extended to the edge of my range. I, on the other hand, had more than the others combined which made me nervous for some reason. I kept telling myself that when we reached Sentortzi I would see it was a totally normal amount of weird threads to have coming out of me, and that some people had twice as much. I was trying to keep my mana from topping off - another plausible but unconfirmed tip on developing your Dumine faster - so I stared at the threads and thought about them a lot.

"Okay so what if you gather them over time, and that's why Elba only has three," I said after making sure Elba was too far to eavesdrop, "and that also explains why I have the most, although the three of us are close to the same age so... maybe there's more of them on Earth?"

"It seems like a needlessly complicated theory," Katrin said, "and as far as you could see Granny didn't have any at all. Not that we have a lot of plausible explanations."

It was common enough to develop the ability to see magic that was otherwise invisible - Katrin had just learned to see mana to some extent using her own Dumine - but it wouldn't make sense for us to all have active spells on us that were otherwise undetectable, weren't using a noticeable amount of mana, and never seemed to expire. Errod suggested that they might be spirit anchors, but Katrin shot him down because not only should that just require two for most people - one for the mind, one for the soul - it didn't make sense that we were all also linked to each other. He looked discouraged, and I found myself worrying I would have to have some sort of talk with him.

First he got a dud in the Duminere, then his sister got two gifts, and then to top it off he had to deal with the knowledge that without at all deserving it I'd come away with nine. And he seemed genuinely happy for me which, first of all, made me feel like a bit of an asshole because I knew I'd be salty as hell in his position - but also what if he was just pushing it down and one day he was going to snap? He had to listen to Katrin and I learn all this cool shit, and the only thing we'd included him in was some doomed attempts to remove his stupid glove. That hadn't even gone well; both of us pulling as hard as we could did nothing aside from briefly popping his wrist out of place, and when I tried to make an exploratory cut on the edge my blade couldn't even scratch the strange leather.

If Errod was getting quietly upset about all this injustice, I should probably talk to him and let him get it off his chest. But that would be an awkward conversation, and I didn't want to. And anyway, he was probably just a genuinely chill nice person. He had been about everything else up to now... Unless, of course, all that stuff was also down there building up pressure. But probably not. Probably it was fine. I really didn't want to have that conversation.

"When we do our big shopping spree in fantasy New York we need to get a stationary kit or a notebook or something so I can make a proper list of all these thread thingies and... I don't know, be more scientific about this."

Errod raised an eyebrow. "New York is Sentortzi?"

Katrin didn't wait for me to answer. "You said some were thicker than others, right? You still can't see any other differences?"

"Yes, Sentortzi. New York is a big city from Earth. Uh... yeah, I don't know if there's anything else different. I don't think so but... ugh, I keep trying to grab them and pull them closer to my eyes even though I know my hand will go right through. Hang on, I'm gonna make this weird."

I leaned in closer to Katrin's chest than was really appropriate, and tried to scrutinize the threads. Was there something different? I switched back and forth between her and Errod, and thankfully neither of them seemed bothered by me being all up in their personal space. I already knew some disappeared right away instead of making it the full twenty feet and some were thicker. Was there a texture? Not that I could see. What else? Some... were moving. "Is it possible that all the ones that don't disappear are connected to someone else, and that's why I can kinda see some moving? Like, if I'm tethered to... uh... Sige, or Mila, or Hugh. They could be walking around somewhere, and that would make the line jiggle even if I'm standing still."

She nodded. "It's possible. It doesn't explain the ones that only reach a few inches, unless those are left over from people who have died or... no, that doesn't make sense. I also don't see why I've got one going to the spellbook."

"Gosh Katrin, you're so good at telling me all the reasons my ideas are bad. Shame you can't add something constructive." I knew it was mean as I said it. She was trying to help. But there were days I just really wasn't good at social interactions, and my frustration at not understanding what I was looking at had combined with my impatience around building up enough potential for my next unlock. "Sorry," I muttered.

She sighed, looking tired but not angry. "Are you?"

"I..." - a flicker of memory, Bill telling me I didn't need to lie to him - "I'm not, no. But I know I should be. And probably I will be, in a few minutes. I think I'm hitting my wall on this one. And it's fine, I should be able to get other abilities now so it's fine if this one is just seeing strange threads that don't mean anything."

"Except it's not," she said.

"Except it's not," I agreed. I remembered carefully peeling the sticker off of a Rubic's Cube so I could get at the screw underneath and loosen it. I'd popped the pieces off, reassembled them, and then put the sticker back in its place. I could have learned how to do it right - I knew there was a formula you could follow - but I was annoyed and took the brute force approach. I couldn't even do that here; there was nothing to take apart, no colors to... huh.

I meditated, and saw the non-euclidean squiggles twisting off into infinity while also somehow being inscribed on my lutore. I formed a thought in my head as clearly as possible, then focused on the ability that let me see the threads. I'd been saving up potential to work on either Thought or Planar, but this would be cheap - probably - and it was driving me nuts. The ability was attached to all my gifts, so all I had to do was differentiate them and see what happened.

I opened my eyes and blinked to re-activate my view of the threads... and they were in colors. "Hah! Okay, I did a thing. Um. It doesn't help a lot yet, but some of the threads are different colors. They're... it's hard to describe, probably because they're not even really there. I mean, I think I'm seeing colors that don't exist to some extent, and a lot of them are sort of a mix... but... you know how when you mix red and blue you get purple? Imagine if instead you got something that's simultaneously red and blue, and also kinda purple... but not the same purple. It's possible I could spend more potential on it to get a better view, but I don't want to do that right now."

"So you don't know what the colors mean?" Katrin asked.

"The intention was to use it to figure out which of my gifts they most closely corresponded to, but I can't tell which color is which and a lot of them seem like they're different colors depending on how I look at them. One of them is this blend of like four or five different colors - hell, could be more - while others change color just at the end. Like, the ones that disappear? Whatever they start as, they fade into either green or purple as they taper off. Or both, which is a color I cannot even begin to describe."

"Okay," she said, "Let me try casting something and you can see if... well, if you can see it at all, and then if so whether or not the colors match."

Katrin looked through her spellbook, but there was still a lot she either couldn't read or couldn't safely cast. She couldn't find anything that manipulated probability, the planar ones were seemingly incomplete as if she needed to fill in variables herself, and the temporal ones used a ton of mana. Ones that seemed like perception, comprehension, or thought were all inwardly-focused which wasn't ideal for this experiment, and the few relating to spirits would need one as a target.

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The other thing was, of course, that the spells didn't exactly follow the gifts from a Duminere. Much like the abilities I'd unlocked touched on more than one gift, the spells didn't have to fall into those categories. Still, it seemed like most that she could cast were direct applications of power; fire, electricity, force, light. There was a healing one she'd figured out after I burned myself making dinner one night, but it was... not delicate. It hurt like hell and left a scar, meaning it was only good as an emergency measure and wouldn't replace going to a proper healer.

She finally just cycled through a bunch of spells until she ran out of mana. For most I saw... almost nothing. There was something there as she cast, some vague impression in the air that I couldn't quite make out. I caught the color red sneaking in some, but it was so brief and so faint I couldn't be certain. And then she made the tether thing, the one she'd used back before we went to Xeyul when we were being attacked by that Halenvar soldier. She wrapped the tether around a tree, and under the actual color of the visible effect I could see... white? It was one of the most common colors I saw in our threads, though it was often mixed with other shades.

"Also," I said as I squinted at it - as if squinting would help when it wasn't really even normal vision - "it's a flatter white. The ones attached to us are more... silvery... and have hints of turquoise that you can see from the right angles. They're... opalescent. This is just white, maybe mixed with some colors I can't see."

She smiled. "Okay, you wouldn't be able to see Force or most of the other things this is adjacent to, which means the white is probably Binding. Probably. If they really are all different things, we'll need to revisit some of the ideas I dismissed - we can make a list of each one by color and see what the different shades have in common. I'll keep looking for better spells to test with, and maybe you can try on your end too - have you decided if you're working on Thought or Planar first?"

The answer was mainly Thought, but kinda both.

I wanted to - eventually - get a better look at my memories and maybe try to clear out any false or corrupted ones. To do that, I'd first need to decide how I was accessing my memories. While I could do some sort of meditation, or see them in my dreams, or any number of other methods... I was pretty sure the best plan was to rely on offsite storage. The mind, so far as I'd been able to gather, was a spirit that was bound to you naturally when you were little. Before you had a Dumine it might just be smooshed up inside your lutore, but either as a result of meditation or through the Dumine itself it would eventually get projected out to a domain in Ematse, a little personal bubble unique to you.

If I could perceive that realm, I should also be able to do mind-based stuff easier there. It was also private, and since it would align with multiple gifts it should use less potential than doing it other ways. When the time came, just two days later, I spent a whole afternoon tweaking the ability in my mind until I was certain I had it right. The Dumine seemed to be helping me, suggesting different paths to my desired goal and optimizing for minimal expenditure of potential along with whatever else I wanted to emphasize.

Whatever I'd done to understand the information being transmitted from - or through - my Dumines had led to me seeing under the hood a bit, so I could tell how much it was leaning on each of my gifts in a way that sounded very different from what Katrin was experiencing. This one made use of a wide mix, more gifts than a normal person could even have. Planar, Spirit, and Thought were the main ones which made sense - I was reaching into another plane via a spirit linked to my thoughts. But there was also a touch of Perception and Comprehension; I got the feeling that they were somewhat optional, just there to make the connection smoother and easier to use.

For the Planar aspect, I had a decision to make. Since it was better to keep your abilities aligned so they built off of each other I wanted to think about how I was going to use Planar magic later on. My two options were piercing through to another plane to travel there, or pulling the laws of... well, not physics really, but the magic equivalent... over to me. Originally I'd planned on using it more to travel, but that was less relevant to my current goal and besides... the more I thought about it the cooler it would be to apply alternate rules of reality to the world around me.

As we'd traveled to Erathik I'd gotten a crash course from Cyne and, to a lesser extent, Sige. So I knew gravity was different on a lot of the other planes, as was how fast time moved. Those would already be interesting, but the niche uses that came from things unique to a single plane got... strange. There was the "break down manmade stuff and trash and replace them with nature" thing Katrin had told me about, but also Sige had talked about entropic effects and Cyne had described a plane where you could just fly by thinking about it.

Much like Katrin's spellcasting, the extra versatility would be counterbalanced by other limitations - I'd never have the kind of fine control over these things that someone might if it was their whole ability. If you had Gravity as one of your gifts you could do all sorts of shit with it, while I would just be able to make the gravity match what it was on some specific plane. Even then it might be limited within cities due to the wards that kept people from crossing over, and some would be nearly impossible when they weren't in alignment. I kept waffling on it, and wondering if it would be better to borrow Katrin's spellbook and unlock Comprehension for those kinds of effects instead.

In the end I decided it didn't matter too much yet. After all, it wasn't the main way this ability was working anyway - mostly it was just me sending my awareness to another plane, and that was facilitated by me already having an attached spirit - my "mind" - there. So I put the Planar emphasis on pulling the membrane between worlds closer, having it overlap the awareness I'd already linked to my lutore. That was maybe best suited to pulling effects to me rather than stepping over to other planes, but it would work for both to some extent - and having it layered on my lutore would make it more resistant to wards and stuff since that was a part of me.

I told Katrin and Errod to wish my luck, unlocked the ability, and immediately tried to activate it.

The sounds of the fire and distant insects and the wind through leaves just faded away, and I opened my eyes while also keeping them shut. I was in a room - it looked like one from Earth, and it felt familiar although I didn't recognize it. A little bedroom, with yellow walls and an old CRT television on the dresser. There was a small desk up against the window with the nice boxed set of the Jake Ross books that I'd owned at some point, although when I picked up the books and flipped through they were blank aside from a message in the front cover in such ridiculously swoopy cursive that I couldn't read it.

There was a residential street from Earth visible through the window, although as I looked at it things kept shifting around; it was like an AI-generated video, where everything kept morphing into something else. After only a moment of looking around it resembled Theramas more than anywhere on Earth. It was mildly disorienting, so I stepped away and sat down on the bed instead. An involuntary gasp escaped me. "Oh my god."

"What is it?" The voice was faint, like it was coming from another room. I dimly felt hands on me, and I realized Katrin had heard my outburst in the real world and was worried.

"It's fine. It's okay. It's just that I had forgotten how nice beds with actual springs are. It's so comfortable."

"You're on a bed?" The voice was maybe a little clearer, a little closer.

"Yeah. I'm in a room, from Earth, and... that's it. Hang on, let me try the door. Nope, just fog. Okay, so this ability lets me be in a room in my brain I guess. Alright, let go of me and stop talking for a minute. I promise I'm safe."

I lay down on the bed and just relaxed for a moment. There was a little crack in the ceiling and it looked so familiar, like maybe my brain had pulled that detail from an actual memory of a room I used to have. But then why make up the rest of the place? This clearly wasn't a group home, not with only the one bed, and it wasn't from my mom's house or one of the foster homes. It was possibly from a television show, or just made up. Speaking of television... I got up and turned the TV set on, but it only showed static. Bah.

I spent a few minutes poking around; the desk and dresser drawers were all empty apart from a little gold brooch, and the only thing in the closet was a slightly disturbing statue of someone - me, maybe - curled into a tight ball. I closed the closet door so I didn't have to look at it. I was wearing Earth clothes, just regular jeans and a shirt from one of the high schools I had attended - the one they made you wear for P.E., although this one was strangely misprinted. I checked for my Dumines but they seemed to not exist here.

Out of things to look at, I flopped on the bed again. I stared up at the crack for another moment, enjoying the comfort of the bed, and then finally did my best to open my eyes for real. "Whoa. That's disorienting. I was laying down, but actually sitting up."

Errod looked nervous. "You're okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, it was... boring, but interesting. When I was listening to Katrin the whole place felt a little like I was just imagining it, but as long as I was tuning out the real world it felt totally real. Not just how it looked, but the feel of the sheets on the bed and the temperature and... everything. If I can make that bigger, maybe add a food truck and a water slide? That's going to be nice."

And possibly best of all, it didn't feel like it had used much mana. Later, once I built up more potential, the plan was to use that space to access my memories and possibly even change them. It was tempting to snip out or edit a few of the worse ones... "I need to unlock something to get you in there with me, you can start seeing Earth stuff. I have a sudden urge for a chocolate milkshake, I can try to make one for you too."

That night when I went to bed Elba's tossing and turning was making the whole wagon creak, so I ducked into the bedroom to pass some time until she was asleep. It was the same, and after a moment I realized that the drawer I had left open hours earlier was still in the same position. I'd assumed that the room would reset, or change each time like it was a dream - if it stayed, that could actually be useful. Could I write things down, and refer to them later? Could I find a way to add more rooms, more furniture? Of course, the downside was that if everything remembered what I'd done I would eventually have to clean my imaginary bedroom.

I spent half an hour trying to create things, but no matter how I concentrated nothing happened. Eventually I collapsed on the bed to think, and after a while I started to feel funny. It was a little like being high, this disconnected floating feeling. I had to concentrate to hang on to the room, and when I sat up it felt like the walls behind me were drifting off into space - although if I spun around to check they were as sturdy as always. A flickering light caught my eye and I realized that the view out the window was shifting around way more than it had before; looking out, I could see landscape blowing past like distant clouds. There were other things, closer to me - the wagon, a Circle K, the river that ran through Theramas, the park near my mom's house.

I had to have fallen asleep.

I walked over and opened the door, and rather than the formless fog I had seen before it was like a hurricane was outside; I could feel myself being pulled into the dream, out of my bubble, but I held on to the doorframe and after a moment things seemed to calm down. I watched the swirling landscape outside, and very carefully and clearly imagined what I wanted. I waited, thinking, and after a moment I heard a bicycle horn honking.

He came into view a moment later, an old Hispanic man named Jesus on a strange bike - or trike, I suppose - with two wheels in the front on either side of a big box filled with bottles and coolers. It looked like it had been made in his garage, rather than bought from anywhere. "Elote?" he asked, and got out a little cardboard tray before I even had a chance to answer.

"Yeah," I said, "the works."

He sprung into action, pulling out a steaming ear of corn and smothering it in mayonnaise, lime juice, crumbles of white cheese, and chili powder. Then he placed it in the tray and handed it through the doorway. I thanked him and closed the door before he could ask for payment, and sat down on the bed. The elote was still there, in my hands. And it smelled delicious. I took a bite and it tasted just like I remembered - well, obviously it did.

"Okay," I said to myself, "This could be something. I could start to like it in here."