In the end they were only able to finalize three contracts before Abigail started to flag: Ethan, Jamilah, and Kylus all volunteered to go first. The three contracts all ended up being very similar to the first contract that Jonathan had formed with Abigail; the main differences were that Ethan refused to include any terms about guardianship or being a ward, and Jonathan included a "no harm" clause of his own to ensure that he wasn't going to be in physical danger himself. Also unlike Abigail's contract, none of them included any language about banishing him to the Infernal Abyss, although they had similar agreements that allowed them to dissolve the contract if one party was breaking it without being willing to renegotiate. Ethan insisted on having a term that would allow him to dissolve the contract if he moved out of the orphanage; it was becoming clear that he didn't trust his current good fortune or Jonathan.

Jonathan was incredibly tempted to include a clause that Kylus had to shut up when asked, but he figured that would just result in Kylus constantly breaking the contract and reluctantly Jonathan left it out. For each kid he did, however, include the requirement about answering his questions that he'd established with Abigail.

Abigail's activation of the ritual was completely underwhelming. None of them could even tell when it was active vs. inactive, and the only reason Jonathan knew it was working was that he experienced the same perfect memory of contract terms that he had noticed with Abigail.

While Abigail rested under Mr. Geiller's magic regeneration array, Jonathan showed the kids around the orphanage, and once they'd decided on moving into the room where Kylus and Sandra had stayed the previous night, he conjured some additional bedding with the help of Sandra. They still didn't have pillows for anyone other than Abigail and himself, but at least everyone had sheets for their mattresses and could use the blankets scrounged from the attic.

Abigail came down for dinner, and afterward they were able to get through two more contracts for Sandra and Chris, before everyone retired to bed.

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The next morning, Abigail woke up before Jonathan, although the sound of her getting out of bed woke him in short order.

"How are you feeling this morning, Abigail?" he asked as he sat up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

"A lot better! I think you and Mr. Geiller were right about more contracts spreading the magical load out enough that I can start recovering my natural magic faster than I'm losing it. Maybe we can get Mr. Geiller to take his array back; I'm not a big fan of sleeping under this thing."

Jonathan laughed. "Yeah, we'll have to ask him about that. Do you know if he's coming over today?"

"Yeah, he finished setting up his equipment yesterday, so he's ready for you to test your magic. He said he'll come by before lunch."

"Good, especially now that I'm contracted to eight kids instead of one, I really need to know if magic is actually harming me or not."

Abigail looked unhappy. "Yeah."

"Already told you, kid, it's not your fault."

Abigail nodded, but didn't look fully convinced.

Jonathan pulled his covers back and climbed out of bed. "Well, guess I should get the day started. You want to come downstairs and help me conjure up some breakfast? We're going to need more dishes and utensils now that there's so many more mouths to feed."

"Sure, I'll be down after I get dressed."

Jonathan nodded, grabbed his own clothes, and took them with him downstairs to the bathroom to get ready for the day himself.

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Mr. Geiller arrived while Jonathan was still trying to wash all the dishes left over from breakfast. In addition to their bright pink plastic bowls, they now were the proud owners of six bowls made from what looked like pottery in varying sizes. Jonathan had made sure to ask everyone what size of bowl they wanted, and then used Ethan's desire for food to trigger the conjuration, so presumably this style of dish was normal for this world.

He was going to need to figure out a better way to conjure food, though. It was absolutely exhausting trying to summon eight different servings in eight different bowls at the same time. He was thinking that next time he would try summoning the food into a single container, then serving it out from there. Though that did limit his options for the things he could "prepare".

In any case, thanks to breakfast taking much longer than normal, he was still up to his forearms in soapy water when Mr. Geiller came stumping into the kitchen.

"There you are," growled Mr. Geiller. "Didn't that girl tell you that I would be ready to start testing your magic this morning?"

Jonathan gave him an unamused look. "Mr. Geiller, I've got seven more kids in the house as of last evening. It's requiring just a tad more work than before."

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"Seven? So you actually went through with that crazy idea of harvesting orphans off the street? Well, I just hope they don't murder you in your bed."

"They're good kids. I'm not worried."

"Well, just keep them off my property! Now come on, I'm not going to live forever. Let's go get this over with. Dishes will keep."

Easy for someone who owned more than a single dish per person in the household to say, but Jonathan dried his hands anyway. After the trial he'd undergone summoning breakfast, he didn't want to leave this any longer.

The room where Mr. Geiller had been setting up his magical instruments or whatever they were looked completely different from when Jonathan had last caught a glimpse. The random pieces of metal that had been lying all over the place were now constructed into five different areas. One looked like a large plate of metal, wide enough that a pair of adults could stand comfortably on it; although the seams made it obvious that it was multiple pieces either lying next to one another or connected somehow. Up against one wall was something that almost looked like a shower: a rough circle was sketched out on the ground by metal pipes, and then more piping ran up the wall and a little above head height redirected back into the room with a small metal plate attached to the end. Yet another setup was a chair that appeared to have been dragged in from the dining room with two poles with metal plates attached to their tops sticking up from the sides of it. A fourth appeared to be a free-standing mirror, except with metal rods sticking out from it at odd angles around the edges. The final one was a tripod that looked nearly identical to the one setup above Abigail's bed upstairs.

"What is all this stuff? And where on earth did it all come from?"

"Eh, most of it I just had lying around the house." What the heck was wrong with Mr. Geiller? "And these arrays by and large are magical feedback devices, which are helpful for quickly developing your personal mensus."

"Mensus?"

"I keep forgetting you're even less smart than you look. Mensus is one of the six senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, and mensus. It's your ability to sense and manipulate the flow of magic."

"Six senses? There's only five in my world."

"What? Weird. Although that makes sense if your prior reality had no magic. Hard to sense something that doesn't exist. In any case, using magic is like breathing. A lot of the nuts and bolts of it aren't things that you're aware of, but if you focus on it you can take control over it. One of the first steps to that is developing your mensus, and these arrays will help with that. They'll hopefully also give me a better idea of what exactly is going on with your bizarre situation."

"That all sounds good; where do we start?"

"Sit in the chair."

Jonathan walked over to the dining room chair and sat down. The two metal plates were a few inches away on either side of his head; enough that he could turn his head to look at them without touching them, but only if he held his head carefully in place. "You're not going to zap me with these or anything, are you?"

"Zap you? What in Anthrax's name are you talking about? Now sit still, I need to adjust these." Mr. Geiller started fiddling with the poles; there was evidently some mechanism that allowed him to adjust the height. "Humans can create magical effects in two ways: the first is reflexive magic, and it's the most common form, by far. From what you've said, it's what you're doing. Reflexive magic allows you to duplicate through magic a natural phenomenon that you implicitly understand. You don't have to perfectly understand how the magic arrives at the effect, because your unconscious mind has enough for the magic to work with. Stop slouching, I need you to sit up." Mr. Geiller moved to the other side and started adjusting the second metal plate. "The second way to create a magical effect is to use instructive magic. This is extremely uncommon, because it's absurdly difficult, but in short you very strictly describe exactly what you want the magic to do using some form of abstraction. There are lots of historical schools of thought on how to do this, but these days instructive magic mostly requires lots of math. Although instructive magic is far more difficult, it also allows you to create magical effects whose physical counterpart you do not fully understand because you are explicitly manipulating the magic, not starting from the effect and letting the magic take its own path. It also requires a lot less power to perform similar effects."

Mr. Geiller stepped back and observed his handiwork with a critical eye. "I mention this not because I expect you to ever learn instructive magic, but because you can use effects generated by instructive magic to teach yourself how to cast a similar effect reflexively, which is exactly what these arrays will hopefully do."

Jonathan was starting to get a feeling for why Abigail disliked lessons with Mr. Geiller. The man really loved to lecture. "Can you be a little more concrete? What does that actually mean?"

"Hush, boy, I'm getting there. Has anyone told you yet about the broad magical effects associated with the five realms?"

"No. I've heard the names of the five realms a few times, but no one has actually described them."

"Okay, this shouldn't stunt your creativity too much, because you're using the Infernal Abyss, anyway. The first realm is the Seelie Courts, which creates magical effects primarily involving light and sound. People like to claim that the Seelie Courts affects perception, but that's not strictly accurate. You can't make smells with Seelie Courts magic, for instance, but it's true that most Seelie Courts magic users focus on illusions. The Gaian Wilds creates matter and promotes growth. When you're conjuring a sandwich or what-have-you, that's a traditionally Gaian Wilds bit of magic. The Abaddon Expanse is a bit trickier to sum up, but in short its magical effects exert force or change on the world. Abigail tells me you disintegrated part of a lock; that would be traditionally something associated with the Abaddon Expanse. The magic of the Fractal Gardens affects time and space. You said that a demon stopped time when you were summoned, and that's a pretty classic use of the Fractal Gardens. Finally, there's the Infernal Abyss, which classically is said to be able to duplicate and combine the effects of any of the other four realms.

"Now, this array here is pure Seelie Courts. When you said that you perceive some sort of intangible smoke around people, that sounded to me a lot like an internally-focused Seelie Courts effect. That's not uncommon, particularly for people who start developing their mensus late in life. This array does something similar but is external: it will create a display of light in front of you when you enliven your magic or use magic. We will be using that to start to get a handle on your mensus."

Jonathan's head hurt, and they hadn't even properly started yet.