Mark and Horan were playing cards in their room using decks in the drawers next to their beds that vaguely resembled the cards Horan was familiar with. More specifically, Horan was teaching Mark how to play cards, for whom learning was difficult due to the fact that he had somehow gotten into his head that cards could only be used to play some kind of game completely alien to Horan.

“So then I turn the six of clubs, and that gets me another eighteen points, because of that six of hearts I already turned back in row 6.”

Horan covered his face. “This is Honeymoon Bridge. Work with me here, dude. I’m pretty sure you’re making all this up on the spot.”

“There’s a method here. I thought you would be the kind of person to see it.” Mark pulled a card out from the bottom of the pile off to the side, then placed it above his six of clubs at a 45-degree angle. “Yup. One hundred and seventy-three points exactly. That’s a victory by hyperspecificity.”

“I give up.”

Mark winced. “To think. You could’ve done that when you turned that ace on round 8 and gotten a victory by ejection.”

Waia leaned through the doorway. “Oh, hey, you’re still awake. Just an FYI, Quet’s in a magic-y mood.” She looked at Mark. “You’re into that kind of thing, right? Yeah, you were the one she was talking to last night. You might wanna go engage with her before she hovers outside your room by the time you’re asleep and levitates you out of the bed. Or something.” She moved on to her room.

Mark and Horan exchanged looks. “Don’t look at me,” said Horan, “I already went up there. It’s your turn.”

Mark shrugged and got up. Horan sighed in response. “Yay, maybe now I can play Solitaire or something. Anything’s better than your game.”

“You say that now. You’ll get the nuances later.” Mark shut the door behind him.

-

By the time Mark made his way up to the roof, Quet had already set up a full rig of… something. A thin line of green light connected a single glyph nestled between two of the spikes on the perimeter and half a dozen glyphs which floated a foot off of the counter, each attached by a sixth of the green line. In the middle of the vaguely circular shape created by the interspersing of the glyphs, a small sphere of rainbow energy vibrated and emitted dozens of strings of alien text, which swirled around the shape before being sucked back into the orb. Below the scene, Quet scribbled a series of lines of geometric shapes onto a massive sheet of graph paper, looking up at the sphere every few seconds and mumbling to herself.

Mark watched Quet work over her shoulder for a good few seconds before clearing his throat. Quet spun around in her chair and looked up at him. “Fancy meeting you in a place like this. What precisely brings you up here at such an hour?”

“I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure. Waia told me it was a good idea to keep you company, and from the state the roof is in, I’m inclined to agree.” He looked up at the pulsing ball of energy. “Is that a bomb?”

“Oh, no-no-no…” Quet turned back around and continued to write in her incomprehensible script. “I’ve set up a thaumic detection apparatus over yonder-” She waved in the direction of the glyph on the edge of the roof. “-which is projecting a model recreation of the source of the magical focusing mechanism. It appears to be siphoning nearby ambient magic and focusing it into a single point, which appears to be somewhere in the castle, judging by the layout of the mechanism. I’m taking an interest because the effect appears to be similar to a project I’ve been developing for the past few months, except this version appears to be far more refined than the garbage fire that is my own take on it.”

Mark pretended to be adequately following Quet’s train of thought. “And this information will be useful in tomorrow’s assault?”

“That seems likely. Even if my attempts at reverse engineering the spell at play here fail, there’s undoubtedly still information to be gained here, be it intelligence on any potential defenses the castle has, or anything on its potential layout.” Quet looked up at Mark. “Actually, while you’re here, a more direct source of a human’s resonance could probably greatly expedite my analysis.” She got up, pushed her chair over to where the green line split into smaller branches, then waved her hand into the stream. The floating sphere fizzled, shrank and turned mostly green until Quet took her hand out of its source, at which point it returned to normal. “I-I can just stand.”

Mark sat down in the now-empty seat and placed his hand into the line, which made the sphere flare up in brightness and size. Quet sucked air in through her teeth. “Ooh, that’s good.” She fished out a pair of welding goggles and tossed one to Mark. “Maybe put these on. Extended exposure to particularly intense magical energy can damage your eyesight. Also, any opportunity to wear the Frankenstein glasses should be taken.”

Mark donned the goggles with no issue beyond trying to wrap them around his head with one hand. It did indeed make the light from all of the magical effects around him easier on the eyes. “So, is this all you’re doing up here? Because from how Horan and Waia acted after coming back down, I thought there was some big emotional drama happening.”

Quet glanced in his direction. “Why? Are you interested in what’s going on?”

“Pfft, no. I just figured that there would be something happening beyond your weird magical woodshop. After all, last time we properly hung out in any meaningful way like this, that kinda devolved into… something I’m not willing to unpack, and I doubt you want to get into that either.”

“Correct.”

Mark nodded. “Great. You know, you seemed a lot more fun to talk to back at the party. Now it seems like none of us can have a nice one-to-one without it turning into the presentation of somebody’s emotional baggage, or even just figuring out the next big thing we need to get through. I’d normally be all for getting comfortable with the next step in our life-or-death operation, but…” He slumped in his chair, still keeping his hand up. “I’ve been looking at you and Horan, and I think all this is starting to get to us. You haven’t slept in days, Horan is… a lot, and- Okay, I haven’t actually spoken to Waia and Omet that much.” He leaned back, taking in the slight creak of the chair as it tilted to accommodate his change in posture. “Wow, I’m the laid-back one this time around.”

Quet nodded slightly without letting up in her note-taking. “Yeah, you said it yourself. There’s a lot going on today. I’m sure something else is gonna go wrong before this whole thing is out. I’m not one to believe in luck as a wilful agent, that’s Omet’s job, but I’m starting to get behind your attitude towards this.”

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Mark nodded in solemn agreement. “Watch, something always happens when we bring this kind of thing up.” He raised his free hand with three fingers extended. “Three, two, one…”

A brief shriek from ground level was interrupted by the sound of a zap and a brief burst of light. Mark buried his head in his lap. “I was kidding.”

Quet lifted her goggles onto her forehead and leaned over the spikes to look at the ground. A charred husk was slumped down on the sidewalk, blowing smoke into Quet’s face. The color of the Ley Line a few feet from the corpse had been replaced with the harsh blue of the sky in a child’s crayon drawing, only fading back to the normal rainbow a few dozen feet away in either direction.

Shortly before Quet arrived to look down at the scene, Yang’s voice hummed from the blue part of the Ley Line. “This is your new leader Yang speaking, here to inform all surviving witnesses that you just saw my brand new citywide anti-crime program! Anyone who has broken Tragnil law- as per the tome of laws I fed into my lightning guy’s glowing magic orb- who comes close enough to any Ley Line will be instantly electrocuted by the aforementioned lightning guy. That also includes anyone I’ve got blacklisted, so if that was Xiao who just got killed, and you can hear me from wherever your soul ended up, suck it.”

Quet turned back to look at Mark, searching through a reaction outside the dark circles of his goggles. “Well, we haven’t died yet. I guess there’s gonna be a lot more parkour in our near future.”

They both heard more zaps and Yang’s canned voice echo through the city streets. A building a block away went up in flames. Mark listened to the sounds of death reverberate all around him, filling Tragnil in a matter of seconds. “It’s a wrench in the plan, but not much of one. The Ley Lines don’t reach Sinkhole, the King’s still safe. For now, at least.”

“And all the people dying out there?”

Mark nodded. “We should probably hurry this up before Yang goes all the way off the deep end. Man, whoever’s looking down at our lives and laughing must really like giving us time limits to work, huh?”

“Y- Uh, yeah. Faster the better.”

Mark looked Quet dead in the eye while she became increasingly aware and uncomfortable with such treatment. After a few seconds, Mark spoke. “Am I a prophet? I keep saying things that are half meant as a joke, half me just being frustrated with how things have been going. But every time, what I say comes true. Is this some ancient, forgotten aspect of being a human in the Down Below, or something? Can I tell the future, Quet?”

Quet pulled her arms up to her chest, one of her right-hand fingers slowly tapping her opposite knuckles. “It seems unlikely, unless large concentrations of ambient magic have some hitherto unheard of effect on your perception of spacetime. Also, what precisely does this have to do with…” She looked over her shoulder at the husk on the ground, which was being loaded into a wheelbarrow and carted down the street. “...literally anything.”

Mark sighed and pulled his hand out of the stream of light while pulling off his goggles. “I figured we could just stay on our own sides. I thought to myself, ‘Quet’s got her own thing going on, but we can manage that later’. I’ve already played therapist for someone tonight, I don’t have the energy to do any more. But unluckily for the both of us, my Good Friend instincts are kicking in once more. Against my better judgment, I’m asking you what’s on your mind.”

Quet still made no effort to move. She knew the movement of her eyes were undetectable, but she still put her goggles back on to be sure. “Who says there’s anything on my mind? No thoughts head empty, that’s me. Ol’ Quet.”

Mark’s stare was much more incisive now that the goggles were off. He didn’t look sad, or angry, or anything. It didn’t seem like he was putting any effort into unraveling Quet, it was like his bored expression was just making it happen, all by itself. “The worst thing about picking up this ‘reading people’ thing from Horan is that it’s useful.”

Quet stared at Mark for a moment, her face blank. Then she walked past him and back to the counter. “How exactly do you know Horan, by the way?” She looked at her notes for a second, then fished two dozen stones out of the drawer. “Like, I know you probably found him after that Thel guy took over, he used to be in charge of his Domain and all, but I actually don’t know when that was. How did you meet, specifically? And then end up how you are now? Because Omet told us about how you both wigged out when Thel threatened the other one. Don’t take offense, but you honestly don’t seem the type to get along with someone like him. I assume.”

Mark snorted and put his hand back up. “I ask myself that sometimes. According to him, he’s some kind of emotional parasite that made me care for him with his insidious mind games. But I can’t tell if he’s lowballing himself or me with that idea. Either way, I know he’s wrong, but I can’t prove it. If anything, him falling out of the sky in front of the emotionally neediest person in Egypt was just dumb luck for him.”

“You haven’t really answered my question beyond the first part of it, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” Mark put his goggles back on. “Contrary to everything I know to be a good idea, I keep ending up getting weirdly attached to people I originally had no intention of putting up with. My original plan was to sell Horan, did anyone ever tell you that?”

“News to me.” Quet put her gloves on and pulled one of the magnifying lenses over the stone lying in the middle of the counter. Once she was sure the light from the nearby light was good, she picked up the wired-up pen and held it to the stone. A painfully bright red light appeared at the point of contact between the two objects and sparks began flying outward.

Mark scooted over on his chair so that he could get a better look at what Quet was doing, still keeping his hand up. “Wh- Is that homemade?”

Quet nodded. “Took a lot of video tutorials, but it’s all hardware store materials and scavenged car parts. Glyphs overheat pretty quick and aren’t as easy to wield, knives take even longer, and industrial laser cutters don’t have the right finesse. Which is their sole purpose, which is kinda sad. So, you just started getting invested in Horan’s safety? Over time?”

“Well, like I said, I’m very easy to get invested in someone. Plus, it didn’t just happen. I’m not gonna want to be someone’s friend just because we spent a few days cooped up in a car. That by itself would probably do the opposite, actually. I’d say the main factor is that he started proving that he wasn’t some rich idiot with wind powers. He definitely made me view him as that earlier on, but he really started coming through while we were going cross-country, a few times. I’m not one to be nice to people who hang around being useless. Speaking of, what exactly are you doing?”

Quet motioned for Mark to take his hand out of the stream, then closed her fist around the nearest floating glyph. The entire system above her fell onto the counter, the green stream and glowing orb vanished, and Mark felt the final glyph smack into the back of his head as it whizzed over to the pile of other glyphs.

Quet pushed aside the glyph she had been working on, the finger of her glove sizzling slightly when it came into contact with the tiny patch of red-hot lines on the stone’s surface. Her space cleared, she gestured out at the seemingly randomly-constructed network of lines and angles spread out over the graph paper. “A full translation of everything I could pick out of my simulation of the spell active in the castle. I could use it now instead of inscribing all of these matrices onto appropriate glyphs, but that would destroy all of this information that took a long time to write down and design. Unless you’re willing to assist me in the transcription of…” She waved her hand over the several dozen matrices. “...In which case the process might be expedited by a few days. But we don’t have that much time, and I don’t have a spare laser pen.”

Mark nodded. “Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna get much out of all this than what you’ve already found. Speaking of, did you figure out anything useful?”

Quet shook her head. “I got more out of that display on the ground than I did in the last hour of research.”

“Okay then… You think you can use the stuff you’ve already got to do something now?”

Quet grinned and pulled up her goggles. “You know, I had the same idea just a little while ago. A little different, but I can work with that.”

“Plus, we might even be able to keep going with those magic lessons.”

Quet pulled her goggles back down. “Now we’re talking.”