Breakfast in the morning was eggs, gamey and bigger than chicken eggs, but eggs nonetheless, and toast. Apparently these folks had been around long enough that they'd been able to secure mostly terrestrial-ish food, and he was absolutely here for it.

After breakfast, Gideon took him on a tour of the house. It was small, humble, and very boring, exactly what you'd want if you were hiding in a secret lair behind enemy lines.

The interesting parts were what Gideon called the lab and the range, hidden beneath a secret trap door at the bottom of the enormous hearth in the kitchen. The fireplace had a rack for wood, which, when pushed aside, revealed a metal door stained with soot and glowing with a yellow mana to Oliver's mana vision, the same color of mana that had enveloped the house at which he'd stayed back in the previous city.

"And down here," said Gideon, hoisting up the trap door to reveal a ladder leading down into the darkness below them, "is where the fun begins."

He descended into the darkness with a habitual, practiced ease, and Oliver followed, trying in vain not to get soot from the fireplace on his hands and clothes. It wasn't altogether the most convenient of secret hiding places, but it was common for a fire to be lit in the fireplace, deflecting suspicion and making it impossible for any searchers to open it until it was cooled.

Some twenty five or so feet later, Gideon reached the bottom and he flicked a switch or button on the side of the wall. A magical lamp illuminated above them.

"Magical circuits," commented Oliver as he reached the floor besides Gideon, who'd stepped out of the way for him. "Nice."

"Oh, that's just the beginning," said Gideon.

There were two doors at the bottom of the hallway, which had a ceramic white tile floor and wooden supports on either side, holding up the ceiling above.

"This is where the range and the lab are. We'll spend most of our time in the range."

"The range?"

"It's what we call the place where we experiment and practice with new abilities at first."

"Seems dangerous to keep it right beneath your house. Experimenting with magical spells doesn't exactly seem like a low-risk activity."

"It generally wouldn't be, but we've spent a lot of time proofing the range. Also, we save the really dangerous stuff for the cabin," said Gideon, leading Oliver down the hallway and choosing the doorway on the right. It led into a room that was only partially illuminated by the hall light.

"The cabin?" asked Oliver, coming up behind.

"It's a safehouse we built away from the city, about ten miles away in a wooded area, to keep it safe from prying eyes and gossipy neighbors."

Gideon flicked on a switch on the inside of this new room, revealing another, larger room perhaps twenty feet to a side and with a ceiling twenty or so feet up. Its open area was unbroken by supports, and plainly it was what had forced them to build the ladder so deep underground; wanting to leave room for its volume.

The walls and floor were covered with more of the white tile, square panels of about a foot to a side and fitted together very tightly and neatly giving an impression of hospital-like sterility and security. Some of the tiles had scorch marks on them in blast patterns, and a handful were cracked, but on the whole it was an amazingly clean and inorganic room and stood in stark contrast to the largely organic and natural environments he'd been surrounded by for the last month.

Oliver had never expected to find himself nostalgic for the sterility of modern design and materials, but this room certainly did manage to produce the sensation of home, and it flooded him with memories.

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"Welcome to the holodeck," Gideon said. "Brace yourself."

"Brace myself? What for?" Oliver looked over at him from his examination of the room to see him at a panel set into the wall beside the switch. It had a single knob in the middle of it, laden a number of extremely dense mana dark red strands, upon which Gideon placed his hand.

A strand of mana departed Gideon's hand questing out towards it, and was met by a strand of the dark red mana from the panel stretching to meet his hand in return. It was the first time Oliver had seen mana flooding an inanimate object and acting with any kind of intelligence, and filled him with an instinctive kind of mild revulsion, like one might feel upon seeing a robot that looked a lot like a human; a sort of uncanny valley effect.

"It might be a bit strange at first when we fire it up, but it's all perfectly normal. Just brace yourself," Gideon was saying.

Oliver braced himself, and then suddenly the room was filled with a wash of light. He reared back, expecting to feel the momentary disorientation he'd come to associated with the light hit him, but it didn't. Whatever this was, it wasn't in his head.

A moment later, the lights died down and then resolved into shapes, like a camera lens coming into focus; they were standing in a white room with two chairs and an old-fashioned television sitting in it. The walls and the door behind them had vanished completely, replaced by an infinite white plane stretching into the distance.

"Have you seen The Matrix?" asked Gideon, walking over to one of the chairs.

"Yes," said Oliver, walking over to the other chair.

"This is our version of the Construct," said Gideon, "the place that Morpheus first shows Neo how the Matrix works. It's a light-based illusion spell, so intricate physical interactions are out, but we've incorporated force pulse spells at strategic points in the illusion that create a reasonable approximation of material interaction. Have a seat."

And so saying, he sat down in one of the chairs.

Oliver gingerly sat down in the other, feeling give at first, then an increasing resistance until he was suspended in the seat. He looked down with fascination; he was resting on the surface of the leather seat. He felt beneath him; only a smooth resistance presented itself, not the rich texture of the leather his mind expected to feel as he brushed his fingers over the surface of the chair.

Cognitive dissonance made itself known as his body wanted to protest that he was sitting on empty air that only looked solid, and his senses had a good all-out argument for about fifteen seconds as Gideon watched. Nausea began to rise.

"You're not taking to this well, are you?" he asked.

Oliver looked up at him. "It's… strange," he managed through the dissonance of the physical sensations.

"I find it best not to think about it too hard. Think about it too hard and you'll revert to your subconscious expectations and biases, which, here, are all wrong. Just accept the sensations and move on."

"Right," said Oliver. He tried to do so, focusing on the conversation. "How is this even possible?"

This was the largest-scale and most magical magic he'd seen yet, certainly more impressive than just about anything he'd borne witness to in his time here so far. Oh, the magical lasers and the flying danger ladies were dangerous looking, and the dragons had been downright terrifying, but ultimately straightforward enough: nature, taken to an extreme sustained by magical biology.

This was altogether different; a materialization of a human concept that had so far dwelt purely in the realm of science fiction, something that couldn't be replicated back home with any amount of resources.

"The computer you saw Sung working with upstairs was the proof of concept for this place. We built that one first, then extrapolated from it and scaled up the spells to get this system working. We built it to make training with magical spells possible without having to put yourself into situations of actual combat."

"Training?"

"It didn't take us long to realize that the magic this world contains is unlike anything you've ever seen or experienced. In fact, it's so far out of your range of expectations that your brain and body have no in-built reactions, instincts, or intuitions that it can use to control it. Why is this important? Because the only way to get better with this magic is to practice it."

"And if you're not careful, you'll get yourself killed immediately," said Oliver, thinking back to his experiences with the millisecond counter in his system.

"Exactly. It's so far from your normal range of expectations that your brain hasn't developed safety mechanisms yet, of the kind with which evolution has provided us aplenty back home. Think of standing on the edge of a cliff."

Gideon raised his hand and snapped his fingers. Suddenly their chairs were located on the edge of a cliff, a great gap opening up before them and sky beyond, a beautiful sunset filling the sky. Oliver leapt back, falling out of the chair away from the edge with a muted yelp.

"You see that?" asked Gideon. "That reaction is what you don't have to magic. We've spent thousands, hundreds of thousands of years as a species learning how to climb and how dangerous it is to fall. But we've never seen magic before. All the safeguards that the people here, who've evolved with magic over who knows how long? We don't have them. In fact, we might as well be a different species, despite similar we look. Graves calls them Homo sapiens magicus. Magical humans. We need every advantage we can get. And this?" He gestured to the room around them. "This is just one of them."