The four drakus returned to the cantina for a late lunch where they joined around a dozen others skimming the buffet to fill their own plates. Aaron had already learned that dragons did not mess around when it came to food, but now he saw there was a kind of industry behind it he hadn’t experienced eating with Tia.

Rather than a standard flat tray, the cantina had tiered display stands made of a thick metal wire frame, not that different from the kind that might hold different pies on display at an old fashioned diner or be ushered around a fancy party laden with cupcakes and finger foods.

At over a foot high with a looped handle protruding from the top, each rack could hold up to five separate plates. As he looked around the cantina, Aaron saw that two plates seemed to be the minimum load and most drakus had opted for more. Despite their own abundance of food, he and the delvers chewed through lunch in barely an hour.

Over the course of the meal, Aaron got them talking about their favorite experiences with tabletop role playing games. After Kiara’s revelation about her patented potato math with bags of holding and Albert’s intent to talk the other delvers into a treadmill-powered game for the sake of mischief, Aaron wanted to see if he couldn’t angle for them to start up a game with him.

Barrett might not approve of getting too friendly with the rank and file, but so what? Aaron had mostly cut himself off from his friends more than a year ago and it had been even longer since he’d shaken the clicky math stones and learned what fate had in store for his paper avatar.

Anyways, he wanted to ease into it. If he just threw the idea out there without laying the proper groundwork, it might make him seem clingy and weird. Nevermind that he could be clingy at times and was definitely weird pretty much always, that wasn’t the kind of thing you were supposed to advertise. Better to start with old war stories to plant a seed he hoped to harvest later.

When they had eaten their fill, the four drakus returned to the maze of corridors and made their way to what Griffin described as the shooting range. It wasn’t far from the Dome.

Like the other facilities at the Drakon’s headquarters under the sinister skyscraper in Tribeca, the shooting range was a mix of the familiar and the alien. The room was spacious — the size of a large warehouse — and was mostly an open floor plan.

One entire wall was taken up by individual firing lanes. Rather than paper targets with silhouetted figures on them dangling from clips, each lane had a plate that looked to be made of glass or plastic hanging in the line of fire. These odd panes were transparent, revealing that some kind of gel or liquid was encased within.

“Arcano-reactive targeting, uh, goop,” Albert explained. “We produce special rounds that can be recycled very easily and the stuff in the targets responds to very close proximity. You’ll see later, but it’s super useful for training.”

“Wait, are you talking about actual firearms?” Aaron asked. “Like guns and stuff?”

The delvers exchanged amused glances before Griffin replied. “Of course. What else would we be talking about?”

“I figured it would be bows and arrows and shit like that, you know? Throwing knives maybe, or blowguns, shuriken, and that kind of thing. Are guns even useful for us?”

“They’re not particularly useful against us, that’s for sure,” Albert said. “There aren’t a lot of mythics as hard to hurt as we are, though, so a gun can come in handy. It can be a great way to deal with a shield sometimes, too.”

“How so?”

For the purpose of a demonstration, Griffin performed a complex set of gestures, his lips occasionally moving as he worked through an incantation under his breath. A vertical band of crimson light appeared in front of the big man, six inches wide and roughly as tall as he was. After forming, the band bowed outward into a convex curve, then more transparent fields of energy spread to either side, creating a shimmering barrier. It was the same shield Griffin had used to keep the ogre at bay in the parking garage.

“Most arcane shields work by preventing things passing through them and they usually have certain limitations,” Griffin explained. “This barrier, as an example, protects against physical objects, like a punch, a sword, or a bullet. Making it impede other things at the same time — like a fireball, gas, or light — is exponentially more difficult.”

“Aha, so a bullet can be useful against someone using a shield designed to stop magic.”

“Yes, exactly, but a gun can also be used to overload a shield meant to stop physical attacks, especially if the shield isn’t particularly strong or the caster is focused on other things,” Griffin said. “My shield is shaped to distribute and shed the force of impacts and it’s stationary, tethered to a location. Both of those features make it a lot more durable, but you generally won’t see shields this strong in a fight from anyone who doesn’t specialize in creating them. Bullets pack a lot of punch into a tiny area and they can be fired very quickly, so they can put a real strain on a shield in a short amount of time and potentially overwhelm it.”

“Plus, plinking at a shield with a pistol is a lot easier on the wallet than whipping out a wand,” Albert added.

Other than the firing lanes, there were several areas sectioned off by fine netting for walls. Each of these sections was filled with objects to act as both obstacles and cover. Numerous, free-standing targets littered the spaces made of the same plastic/gel combination as the hanging targets on the shooting lanes, though they were in different sizes and colors instead of being uniform.

Aaron had seen similar setups before, although he couldn’t think of a name to go with them. Was it a tactical course? Or a free-fire range? Something along those lines, probably.

The last feature of the range was the one uniquely suited to the Drakon, one Aaron doubted a normal human would find much use for. Along the wall opposite the standard firing lanes were rooms that resembled racquetball courts, only their floors, walls, and ceilings were made of dark, sooty gray hexagonal tiles. Perhaps the oddest thing about these rooms were the corners, which weren’t at straight angles but had a forty-five degree slope that turned the room into something like an octagonal cylinder laying on its side.

“What are those rooms for?” Aaron asked, gesturing towards the dark chambers.

“Advanced targeting practice,” Kiara replied. “It’s a great way to improve situational awareness and reactive aiming, but it’s much more difficult than normal firing drills.”

“The first thing we should do is get you some more practice with that sick wand,” Albert said.

“That’s… actually a good idea,” Kiara grudgingly admitted. “You were struggling using it back at Mac’s shop and when we set that counter-ambush after Ekwiyakink.”

“I got it to work a little bit eventually,” Aaron said defensively.

Albert snickered. “Not until after you’d poked that gryphon in the eye with it.”

“You know what? We might as well take a minute to get Aaron attuned to his new wand and EDS,” Griffin suggested. “That should make the wand a bit more responsive and there’s no sense letting the pocket go unused.”

“Sounds good to me,” Aaron said.

The process involved in binding Aaron’s keystone as a talisman had been clearly mystic and somewhat elaborate, involving overt ritual acts that anyone watching would associate with some kind of magic spell. The process of attuning objects was way less complicated.

Aaron only had to focus his intent, in much the same way he summoned his keystone or called on his strength, to infuse a sense of possession and ownership over an item. This was supposed to create a highly personalized resonance between the aether bound to the item and his own.

Forming a solid connection proved to be a bit difficult for Aaron. In the end, Albert helped him by manipulating the aether to form a kind of energy tunnel between him and the objects that Aaron’s intent could follow. It was such a small act, but it made the attunement almost laughably easy.

Once his pocket dimension was attuned, Aaron dropped his potions, wand, and phone inside. The feel of the pocket, both against his leg and as he reached into it, was an amazing sensation. Really, it was more like two simultaneous sensations.

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For one thing, it felt like he was sticking his hand into a large, perfectly smooth pocket that, despite the warmth of the day, had refreshingly stayed cool in the shade of his pants. At the same time, the space within the pocket was bristling with his stored objects, each waiting the tiniest fraction of an inch beyond the very tips of his fingers and waiting for him to grab them. He found he could feel around the items individually or cause the one he wanted to find its way right into his grasp without the need to do anything.

It was wondrous, intuitive, and So. Fucking. Weird.

“How come we don’t do a full binding with the pockets?” Aaron wondered aloud. “Seems like it would be more secure that way.”

“There are limits to how many talismans a person can have bound to them, generally tied to their aetheric presence but it rarely goes higher than about a dozen, even for the most powerful eidolons,” Griffin explained. “So it’s generally reserved for things that are absolutely vital.”

Albert chimed in. “Yeah and on top of that, binding dimensional storage is a non-starter. It’s possible, but it’s very, very tricky and can go disastrously wrong, especially as you start using it and shove things in there that aren’t bound to you. It’s also less convenient because you have to conjure it to access it, so it’s an extra step anytime you need some loose change.”

Kiara stepped into the conversation. “Alright fellas, we are burning daylight. Aaron, grab your wand and let’s do this.”

Their first stop was the standard shooting lanes, where a press of a button retracted the gel-filled plastic target into the ceiling to be replaced by a metal one. The specialized targets were only useful for custom-made training ammunition, Kiara explained, and only risked being damaged by standard projectiles, spells, or wand fire.

For the next hour, Aaron practiced firing obsidian darts from his wand. There were occasional hiccups when he failed to produce a shard, but it was much easier to use the wand now that it was attuned to him. That was the good news; the bad news was that his aim was pretty much shit at more than fifteen to twenty feet.

“It would be generous to call it hit-or-miss,” Albert snickered. “I mean, at anything farther out than knife-fighting range, it’s more like miss-or-miss.”

Griffin patted Aaron on the shoulder. “That’s fine; everybody has to start somewhere and that’s why we practice.”

Kiara had been largely silent for the last fifteen minutes of Aaron’s shooting, scrutinizing him closely as he tried to land shots. She was the wand expert of the delving crew and appeared to be much less patient about turning the wand into a weapon that was actually useful than the other two.

“Are you aiming your wand like you would a gun?” she asked.

“No?” Aaron replied. “Or, at least, I don’t think so? I’m not, like, looking down the shaft of the wand or anything like that.”

“But it’s a largely visuospatial thing, right?” Kiara said. “You’re looking at the target and thinking about trajectories and all that standard stuff? Instead of thinking about it in precisely that way, imagine it… hmmm… trying to think of what might work best for you.”

She paused for a second and ran a hand through her thick red hair. “Try to picture the target after it's been hit, then mentally follow the path back to your wand. It doesn’t need a lot of focus, you’re just trying to form a mental construct that works best for channeling the magic of your wand.”

“So aim doesn’t really matter at all?”

“It does, especially for discrete physical projectiles, but there is still magic involved in any use of a wand. That means the way you channel your intent or will plays more of an outsized role than it would with a firearm.”

Aaron nodded and turned his attention back to the target halfway down the range. In his mind’s eye, he pictured a dart of gleaming black stone hitting the target. A runnel of distorted air seemed to stretch from the point of impact back towards him, only it wasn’t exactly where he was holding his wand at that moment.

He adjusted his position so his placement would match the strange phantom visualization more closely and sent a shard of obsidian flying. It soared down range and hit the target with a satisfying plink!

“Nice!” Kiara said. “Keep practicing like that, see how it feels and how naturally it comes. It might not be an exactly perfect imaging technique for you, but I think it fits what I’ve seen of your style of fighting so far.”

Following her advice, Aaron spent another thirty minutes firing his wand down the range, this time with much better results. He was no expert marksman with the thing, but there was major improvement. He landed nine shots out of ten at fifty feet and around seven at a hundred. Even if his precision and grouping weren’t great, Aaron was at least making contact with the target most of the time.

“Any interest in guns?” Albert asked.

“When I was a kid, yeah, but I’ve shied away from them since.”

“The way of so many young American boys,” Albert chuckled. “And so few outgrow it. Let’s see how your aim is with a nice, simple pistol.”

There was a cabinet under the firing lane shelf that held a variety of magazines and those special training bullets. The training rounds seemed perfectly normal, if you discounted the fact the bullets looked like they were made of swirling blue liquid. So, not very normal at all, really.

Albert grabbed a few magazines from the storage space and quickly slotted a number of the odd rounds into them. Once they were loaded, he laid the magazines out in a row on top of the shelf. Then he withdrew a pistol from somewhere in his jacket, ejected its magazine, cleared the chamber, and loaded it with one of the magazines of blue rounds.

“Give her a whirl,” he said, hitting the button on the wall of the lane that caused the metal target to swap position with the enchanted plastic one.

After going through nearly a hundred rounds, it was clear that Aaron’s aim with a gun was even worse than his initial efforts with a wand. He landed less than half his shots.

“Well, nothing to be too worried about,” Griffin reassured him. “Not many people are a natural crackshot and it’s not like we use firearms very often, anyways.”

“Still, one less tool in the kit,” Aaron complained.

“For now,” Albert said, patting him on the back.

“Speaking of improvement, we only have a couple days before we go on our delve,” Kiara said. “Even if we’re on short time, that doesn’t mean we can’t start a training schedule now and make adjustments later. Let’s go over what Aaron needs to work on.”

Griffin started counting things off on his fingers. “CQC is a big one — weapons and unarmed — and we’ll want some time to work on and develop Aaron’s aim.”

“Greg won’t let Aaron do less than three to five hours a day and he’ll probably push for more, even if Captain Japan isn’t personally handling the weapons training,” Albert said. “He takes his weeb shit super cereal.”

“I don’t know if that’ll work, but I bet I can get him to budge a little,” Kiara mused.

“I think Tia is supposed to be teaching me stuff about magic, too,” Aaron added. “And I have to work on my next Tribulation, but that’s nebulous and hard to schedule around. I don’t plan to just stare at it until things fall into place, but I won’t ignore it either. It will need at least some of my time.”

There was some further discussion about scheduling and the best way to enable Aaron to build mastery in so many things as efficiently as possible. He also had some strong feelings about how early in the day to start since he was very much not a morning person, so that had to be taken into account.

In the end, they decided Aaron would start the day with two hours of weapons training in the late morning, followed by an hour on the range, lunch, two hours of unarmed combat practice, and end with another hour of weapons training.

There was some thought given to adding slots to the schedule for Aaron to return to the Chamber of Suffering for general exercise and strength training, but in the end they decided to leave it as a kind of elective. Since Aaron would be working pretty much entirely with the delvers for everything except the weapons training, they could slot some gym time in whenever they needed something to break up the routine.

They stopped back at the armory to talk to Greg Masters, the so-called Shinobi Sensei, to make sure he didn’t object to their tentative training schedule. Albert had been right; Masters pushed for a minimum of five hours training with the kama every single day.

Kiara secured a compromise. She flipped her hair and batted her eyes at him, talking about growth without burnout or mental fatigue. It was brazen and didn’t fit Aaron’s sense of her personality, but it worked. In just a few minutes, she got Masters to agree that two hours of drill in the morning and an additional hour of practical application would be enough to promote solid improvement.

On the whole, the training plan they’d come up with sounded a little like an overachiever’s college schedule to Aaron — three classes and an extra lab session four or five days a week? Who did that? — and that was before factoring in whatever he’d wind up doing with Tia to learn more about magic.

He didn’t want to say anything and paint himself as lazy or a complainer, but he was a little concerned he might get overwhelmed by such an intensive schedule.

Look at the upside, most of the people I’ll be spending time with are people I enjoy hanging out with, Aaron told himself. I think that will make a big difference in keeping this training regimen from being completely soul-crushing.

“Your schedule’s a bit busy,” Kiara noted, describing the obvious, “but after a few weeks you should have a relatively strong foundation, at least in the more practical stuff.”

“Busy? It’s brutal,” Albert scoffed. “We’re going to have to be careful to avoid burnout for the poor guy.”

“It’s an unfortunate situation, but needs must and all that,” Griffin said.

“We’ll manage; I’ll manage,” Aaron said, projecting stoicism to the best of his ability. “I’ve never been shy about taking time when I needed or wanted it and I doubt that’s going to change now that I’m the big boss.”

“I think we can all live with that,” Griffin said.

Kiara bit her lip. “Or, at least, I hope we can.”

“We’ll find out together,” Aaron said. “For now, let’s head back to the archive and see if Katrina has managed to dig up anything interesting.”