We made our way to lunch, more or less on time for second seating.

We walked with a spring in our steps, enjoying the afterglow of the power that had coursed through us from the System. Everything felt sharper, brisker, more enjoyable, and there was that little bit of increase to my feeling of… healthiness was the word I’d used days before. Kelly had declared that reasonable, but there were easily five standard words for the feeling—we wound up spending companionable, enjoyable minutes bickering over which one was best.

We talked about my Status changes on the way, Kelly dodging any mention of hers with remarkable agility. I’d gotten a Skill, a Feat, a Feat upgrade, and a Feat-Skill upgrade back when I’d invited a collection of Gods to collaborate with me as peers, but Kelly already knew about all of that. I went back over it anyway, and not just for context; Spark was constantly improving, growing in tandem with me, and I was now getting a sort of vague intuition about what everything actually meant.

“It’s not real definitions,” I said with some grievance. “And it only works on new stuff, or stuff I got recently. Like, I got it a while ago, so I have no idea: what does Compounding Intuition do?”

“Passively, helps you balance equations, figure out how things will bind, what’s going to be an emulsifier, that sort of thing. Actively, figure out what a compound is going to do; more effective the more you know.” She put a hand behind the small of my back, keeping me from stumbling and also from freezing in place—I was, apparently, just that predictable. “You got it from Advanced Creation, and that one’s well-attested and on record!”

“And I bet you know what the qualifications for that one are, too.”

“Well, obviously!” She huffed as if aggrieved, but she was smiling. “On your first try, make something at least a full Tier and at least ten levels up. You can also get it from making a masterpiece, that doesn’t have to be your first try.”

“Huh. Okay, well, that was the Brightmist. A tier and ten levels, huh.” I kept walking, distantly distracted, thinking out loud about the first real sale we’d made to the Guard and the somewhat-absurd power output it’d had. “I was an Apprentice-Rank according to the System, right? But I was level fifteen. Was it really a level twenty-five potion?”

“You weren’t Ranked at all, Sophie,” Kelly reminded me. “You hadn’t Classed out of Worker yet. We don’t actually know what level the Brightmist was, because potion levels change, but if it was a level one Journeyman potion, then it had a Tier and ten levels on you.”

“A Tier to hit fifteen. Ten more levels to hit apex. But it wasn’t level one, probably? The suspension and the powder… Quicktan was about as tricky, and that was level three.”

“We’re getting distracted again. Gimme the details!”

“Alright, alright, keep your herd-dogs heeled,” I grumbled good-naturedly. “So I mentioned I picked up Collaborate, right? That one feels kind of standalone, and kind of related to…” I closed my eyes, preemptively wincing. “For Though Divine They May Be Still Are They Grist.”

I opened my eyes to see Kelly giving me a weird stare. I wasn’t sure why, the name wasn’t that absurd—well, it was, but it wasn’t.

“I got that,” I said, “for offering to credit whatever Gods helped out with, well, the help they gave us. And I get the feeling that that was related to getting Godfriend, which replaced Godtouched and sort of… will give me a more personal, less uncountable-faceted-aspects lens for communicating with them? I’m not sure, and it feels like that’s missing a lot. Oh, and Touch of Divinity lost Fleeting, which… actually, I have no idea what’ll be up with that.”

“I knew some of those things.” Kelly still had that weird expression going on, something that didn’t really translate recognizably for me and which I didn’t remember being in Jannea’s notes. “Some of these are… whatever! It’s fine, keep going with what you were saying.”

“Okay.” I cast my thoughts back, momentarily coming up with only a blank for what I’d been saying as we walked through the noon-time streets of Kibosh. A few people greeted us in passing, and I managed to almost mimic Kelly’s smoothness in responding. “I don’t remember if I told you about Iterate,” I said slowly. “I got it after the seventh time we revised the experiment, and I think it’s all about… um.”

“Forward progress?”

“No, no, it’s more like it helps me make changes on purpose instead of by accident, helps me figure out which changes had what effects. So, forward progress if you include this failed in a novel way, so we learned a way it can fail.”

“Every ending of a tunnel is one step towards a map,” she intoned gravely.

I looked over at her, blinking, and then broke into giggles when her serious face failed and the grin showed up. “Right,” I said, taking a deep breath and conquering my laughter. “Actually, that’s a pretty good aphorism. Anyway! For—I think—recreating a recipe without any instructions, just working through thinking it should be possible and how, I got First Principles Recreation as a Feat and Rediscovery’s Shortened Path as a Feat-Skill.”

“Those two are known art.” Kelly sounded relieved at that, like I kept delivering surprises or something. “I don’t remember the details off the top of my head, but you’re not wrong!”

“The weird thing is.” I stopped, not knowing what to say, my mind spin-locked on trying to remember whatever it was. Kelly waited for me, walking with me in silence, and eventually my brain sort of got out of its own way. “The funny thing is, I don’t actually know if I’ll be getting the boosts.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“What do you—oh!” Kelly gave me a considering look, eyes flicking upwards. “Is that going to work? How would that work? Do you—never mind, of course you want to test it.”

To distinguish between the recipients of the Skill benefits may be fact, but not all things factual possess importance.

“Don’t be ridic—don’t be that specific kind of ridiculous, Spark,” I said, correcting myself. “Of course it matters. I mean, if nothing else, it’ll matter to Kelly. In one scenario she gets my best effort at figuring out what I know and what I’m getting nudged about, plus my best effort at translating that into words, and neither of those is going to be all that great.

“In the other scenario, she’s got a Spark that isn’t from her own Flame in her head, and she’s allowed to feel conflicted about that.” I shot a look at Kelly, shaking my head as she opened her mouth, probably to object. “No, I’m serious. I know you’ve been uncomfortable with Spark talking to you, much less drawing on your Skills and other stuff like that. Just because you said to keep doing it doesn’t mean your discomfort is invalid, or that you can’t change your mind.”

The supposition that communication must flow only through the beneficiary possesses no merit. Spark’s voice, or I guess Spark’s phrasal meta-data, was a mixture of baffled and chiding. From one to another, and from either to the third. Why would it ever be otherwise?

I stopped, putting my head in my hands and groaning. Obviously, obviously Spark could relay information through me, just as I could have Spark validate my efforts, so it was me being ridiculous.

Kelly patted me on the shoulder wordlessly, and after a moment I started walking again, shaking my head. Whatever, I thought to myself, and I meant it—ridiculous as I was, the two of them somehow found it charming or heartwarming. “I can’t believe I forgot something that obvious and then went off on a rant. Thanks for the reality check.”

“There, there,” Kelly said with good humor and perfect insincerity. “Anyway! If you want, we can swing by the Library after lunch. You could ask there if Safra or Zqar can help with the more esoteric stuff?”

“Um.” I winced, more at my hesitation than at anything else. “No, I think I’ll keep waiting for James. I don’t think this is a Library Associate kind of question, and our very friendly and sweet Senior Librarian keeps very diligently prying at me for stuff from Earth, and it’s exhausting. He doesn’t have the cultural context for the stories! I’d rather wait for James to get back from… wherever he is.”

“He’s probably back now. Wouldn’t be right for him to not be around for Ease, and that means the day before for getting everything in order. And that’s tomorrow!”

“Right.” I’d somehow forgotten about that entirely, or maybe suppressed it due to the… complex memories I had of its closest equivalent in my own history. “But… why? I mean, not why is it Ease, I get the inexorable passage of time. Why would it be a problem if he weren’t around?”

“Well, I mean, it’s… I told you it was the resting day, right? As much as we can manage it, nobody works. And that takes a lot of effort, a lot of setup!”

“So tomorrow, everyone chips in,” I said with a nod, “and everything gets done. And then there’s the day of rest.”

“Second Ease of High Striving.” Her smile went from genuine-but-small to taking over her entire face. “It’s pretty close to the most important thing, Ease is. Festival is more important in a lot of ways, but not, you know, socially.”

“I’d ask why, but I do actually get it. We—the community I grew up in—had one day of rest out of every seven, and it was… important. Religiously and culturally. It was…”

I trailed off, slowing, as—inevitably—the memories hit me like a brick. The smells of braided bread topped with an egg wash, long-cooked stews where the chicken fat soaks into the rice and potatoes, and a dozen other iconic foods and spices; the sense of ease and relaxation, the time spent maintaining social bonds, a hundred voices raised in song and prayer that had long since transcended familiar and grown harmonies and flourishes.

It had been my life, my world. And then I’d left.

I am giving you one chance, my father had said. A laughingstock you make of me, but you do it to my face. One chance, and there is no need that anyone will know. But I had already broadcast it, not trusting myself to follow through, and it was too late to take anything back. Had been since the evening before. And when he realized it, that’s when the fury came and the screaming came, and the sick pleasure in the faces of my sisters, and the despair and fear in my mother’s—

“[Memories Grip, Loosened Enough For Breath].”

The words washed over me, ringing with power. The flashback receded just enough, leaving me gasping on my hands and knees with the acid bite of bile heavy in my mouth and nose, shaking and weak but present once more. Just present enough to drink from the straw presented to me, to deliberately control my breath, to know that Kelly’s hand was on my shoulder and Spark was wrapped around my soul like an embrace.

It was enough to let me get a handle on myself and manage an early exit from the cycle. The memory—all of the memories, from the worst to the best, now turned bitter—fought me, insistently intruding on my senses and mind, but this wasn’t my first time around this particular block.

It wasn’t even my first time in the past week and a half.

I filled my lungs with clean air, standing on shaky legs. I filled my mind with better memories—my first kiss, me fumbling and shy and nervous, her fierce and powerful and glorious; the triumph I’d felt at the first time I made tbeet that was better than what my mother had cooked; the publication of my first real independent research. Kelly’s smile, the glimmer of change in the experimental apparatus that we’d worked on, the expressions on everyone’s faces when the Brightmist had incinerated what we’d been flat-out told would not burn.

My legs steadied, my breathing slowed, and my open eyes started to see the world again. My heart no longer hammered in my chest, and I was myself again: Sophie Nadash, a woman I’d built up out of a dream and determination, a woman who might have been burned out but who would no longer look away from her traumas.

“Well,” I said dryly, voice almost entirely even. Lord of Hosts, I composed, may my heart and mind be healed, as, ironically, the Gods have healed my body; and bless me also. “That was inconvenient.”

I sent the prayer onwards and outwards, into the silence.

“Miss Nadash. Or Sophie, or Alchemist Nadash? Whichever you like best, really, just let me know.”

I turned, somehow not surprised by the stranger’s voice. My memory of that Skill invocation, of the wash of divine power that had helped me pull out of my episode, were tagged as having been hers; Spark, obviously, and wasn’t that interesting.

“My name’s Mera Taphtala,” the woman continued. “I’m one of the two Tenders of the Mind whose circuit includes this part of the woodside. Junior, but Mom’s a stuffy triple, and really, eight and a bit times your age is a bit much, right?”

I took it all in. Her words, her body language, her intonation, the resonating echoes that tickled at the edge of tangibility. “You’re a counselor. Did James—”

“Unless you’d rather not, you can call me Mera.” She cheerfully, soothingly trampled over the question I had started asking, and something told me that it was deliberate. “I’ve been waiting for you. Zenith’s blaze, Sophie; let’s head in and grab a table. I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”