When they got down to the Harbourmaster's on the evening of Friday 27th, the day having been spent inventing lies to cover for Alice's week and a half of missed college, they once again found Vrotch, Fat Bloke and McBangBang waiting for them, this time accompanied by a very small and very young-looking very-red-haired teenage girl all three men appeared at a glance to be slightly in awe of.

"Excellent, there you lot are," Fat Bloke declared, springing to his feet in a way that seemed a tad physics-denying for a man of his sheer mass. "We were wondering if - oh, where's me manners, Alice, you haven't been introduced - Alice, these are some friends and peers of mine, this is Vrotch, this is McBangBang, and this is, in fact, the one and only Munching Hamster," and from his expression he visibly expected a reaction very other than the one that got out of Alice, who had never before heard of any capital-H hamsters munching or otherwise.

"The hacker?" Val asked, audibly very surprised indeed. "Wait," and she pointed at the littler redhead, "You're who released the TLA's list of assassinated Nihon separatist leaders?"

"Yup and I'd do it again in a heartbeat," the capital-H Hamster declared - on looking closer she had a distinctively Asian, probably Japanese, look to her despite her hair being the reddest hair Alice had ever seen in her entire life - not the muddy orange most people mean when they say 'red hair', actually red-red, the fire engine sort Alice would have instantly assumed dye if the girl's eyebrows hadn't matched. She was clad in a long dark skirt, heeled boots, a webbing belt with attached American-style police badge and holstered handgun, a tight white top (with prominent keyhole) that from the narrowness round the middle had to be over the top of a particularly dramatic piece of corsetry, and a very elderly flying jacket with a Japanese rising sun flag painted on the back.

"This is Val Adamson," Fat Bloke continued, "Annie Kelly and yes she's related, she's his daughter, Nick Macbane, Fiona Macleod, and Mackie Romanov - and as you've probably figured out this is Alice Liddell."

"Excellent, now we're all introduced and we can get down to business," the Hamster declared; she turned to Alice. "I thought I'd better come in person - Fat Bloke told me a few very interesting things about the Immaterium yesterday and your name came up a lot, and on top of this," and she removed a slip of paper with what looked very like an Ogham key on it, "I decided I needed to talk to you people, face-to-face. There's some things it'd be extremely useful to have a personal look at, if you're willing."

"What sort of things?" Alice asked.

"Okay well basically I - with some help from my friends - have over the last few years been engaged in what's most likely the first actual scientific study of magic. How it functions, what its limitations and capabilities are, all with an eye to eventually working out what it is - it's probably the single most important piece of research anyone's engaged in since, oh, since our distant ancestors learned to control fire. How Fat Bloke described magical pulses propagating in the Immaterium may with close examination allow us to ascertain exactly how magic interacts with matter, and the ramifications of that..." The Hamster shook her head. "I can't tell you the ramifications, at this point I simply do not know but it seems most likely to be extremely significant, possibly as much so as to call game-changing," and there was a round of nodding from her companions. "And then there's this," and she again indicated the slip of paper. "What we're looking at is essentially self-compiling magical code mapped directly to the English language, causing any coherent sentence written in it to activate the boundary effect - I don't know if any of you realise how significant a challenge this must have been to actually design, and hearing about it being done with multiple languages over a span of at least a millennium?" She shook her head. "It's a bit like finding a fusion rocket made using medieval tools and materials, and the fact that the languages involved include modern English has a lot of implications."

She turned to Nick.

"Where did you learn this?"

"It's common knowledge where I'm from," he said with a shrug. "You have to be phrasing things right to get it to work, but I cannae think of much of anyone who doesn't have a copy of that - I got mine from my parents, who were given theirs by a neighbour - Mackie's father - and he's been dead a while now so we'll no be asking him where he was getting it."

"How much do you actually know?" Fiona asked, and that got a laugh out of the Hamster.

"Don't ask me any questions and I won't tell you any lies," she said. "I'm sorry but out of all the people in the world today we might possibly want to chance getting access to our data Isobel Mackenzie's about three names from the very last on the list. Let me put it this way: we'd trust the goddamn SOE with this stuff an aeon before we'd trust anyone who's even half as closely mired in her shit as you've got yourself."

"Who the hell," said Nick in the tones of someone who's been dwelling on something for a while, "Is this Isobel Mackenzie person you wankers keep banging on about anyway?"

"She's a mage from Dingwall," said Vrotch.

"A 'mage from Dingwall' my foot," said the Hamster. "She's one of the dozen most powerful magic-users known to exist today - I'd put her at place four on that particular list, topped by Te Ariki, Beltran Cortez, and Sheng. She's about four to five hundred years old and used to be at place three until Project Warlock happened, and yes that is including before Baba Yaga got herself killed, and let me tell you she did not get there by being nice. That woman believes she's still fighting the Jacobite Rebellion and anyone whose first language is anything other than Scots Gaelic," and she pronounced it 'Gay-Lick', immediately getting herself derailed by an irate Mackie Romanov.

"It's the Gaelic," he said, pronouncing it 'Gal-ick', "You numpty."

"Whatever," the Hamster snapped. "That's not important,"

"Aye and neither is the fact where you're from is no called Japan?" Mackie snapped right back - they had a brief glaring contest then the Hamster shook it off with a laugh.

"Okay, that's fair enough," she said. "What was I saying? Ah yes, Isobel Mackenzie believes anyone whose first language is anything other than The Gaelic, note pronunciation, is English, and that includes anyone with the 'bad taste' to be multilingual, and therefore directly an enemy. She's personally, directly, responsible for the existence of wild haggi and from the expression on your face you're starting to get a picture of her body count. That is who Isobel Mackenzie is."

"In my defence," Fiona said, "I didn't know any of that when I got myself involved with herself, all I knew was that someone I loved had been killed by vampires, that Vrotch was not going to be doing anything about it, and that herself said that she would."

"I did try to warn you," said Vrotch.

"And I ignored you, yes. I buggered up. I buggered up really badly and I wish to God I could take it back, but we've all got a pretty good picture of how workable that is," and all four mages grimly nodded their agreement to Fiona's statement.

"How bad?" Alice had to ask.

"I'm one of her witches," Fiona sadly told her. "The bond involved is permanent, and the only ways of breaking it I've ever so much as heard a whisper of a rumour of would kill me."

"And nothing I know disagrees with that summation," said the Hamster, again with a round of nodding from the boys.

"Honestly the only way I know of to do it is to just flat-out kill the witch," said Vrotch. "Well, or kill the mage at the other end of the bond, and let's just say Mackenzie's not exactly easy to off. And yes, I've been looking, since before I met Fiona in fact - there is nothing whatsoever non-grotesque about turning people into tools. If there's a way..." He shrugged.

"Not the sort of thing our Sane Dave's ever just stood back and watched," said the Hamster with a nod. "But the long and the short of it is that if there's a way none of us know it."

"So the long and the short of it is that I'd better go," Fiona said, rising to her feet.

"We'd probably better go along with yourself," Mackie said with a nod. "Nick, Annie, Val,"

"One other thing though," said the Hamster, and the others paused; Nick looked back over his shoulder at her.

"Don't go shouting about this stuff," she told him, and Mackie and Annie and Val too, and when it came down to it she was telling Alice as well. "People who do tend to have things happen to them."

"What's that supposed tae mean?" Mackie growled.

"It means that empires don't tend to like us proles knowing a private individual can be a nation-scale actor," the Hamster told him. "People like any of us four here, or Isobel Mackenzie, or like Alice here will be in a few years time assuming she lives that long, can with a bit of work and a lot of total amorality ramp themselves up to the point they can cause destruction on a similar level to an atomic bomb and that's even before we come to how trivially easy it is for a cybermancer to co-opt any computerised system up to and including the one the Russians have in place controlling their 'nuclear deterrent'. Look, basically any powerful nation, ever, especially 'powers', well there's basically only ever been one that we know for sure did not have some very powerful mage backing them, and that one ended up being blown off the map one soggy summer night in 1944 using high-end magical weapons. When all is said and done we are a threat to those puppetmasters: we have the best possible chance of beating them at their own game and becoming replacement puppetmasters in our own right, and that right there is the one thing they cannot and will not tolerate."

"That's why the big secret then, isn't it," said Nick.

"People who try to shine light in the dark places, or admit publicly to not being entirely 'normal', or just talk too loudly about it, tend to have 'horrible accidents' - or just flat-out disappear," said Fat Bloke with a nod. "And that's including people with a lot more influence than Joe Kelly's daughter."

"Figures," said Val with a groan.

"That's a large part of why what we're doing is so important," the Hamster said. "How far has the development of humanity, cultural and technological, been impeded by those idiotic puppetmasters bumping off forwards-thinkers? What potential has been lost by the deliberate avoidance of development of a safe way to teach magic? It's got to exist: we are living proof that it is possible to learn magic without blowing your own brains out. What could our species possibly have become if those manipulators weren't keeping us down? They content themselves with their petty games when they could long since have brought humanity to apotheosis, for people who've rendered themselves immortal they're astonishingly short-sighted," and her fellow mages had nodded along to all that.

"So yourself's hell-bent on changing the world," Mackie said.

"It needs changed," the Hamster told him, and he nodded.

"Right," said the Hamster. She turned to Alice. "Let's go and have a look at this portal of yours."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"So," said Alice as they walked down into the enormous basement of the abandoned house where her portal currently lurked, shrunk to the size of a pinprick and hiding behind the light bulb in the centre of the ceiling - they'd ridden up there in an uncomfortable silence in McBangBang's car. "Was all that spiel about powers serious or just an excuse to ditch Fiona?"

"Deadly serious, I'm afraid," said the Hamster as Alice brought the portal down and expanded it. "The not shouting about it or waving it about in public part goes for you too, mind - that's a great way to wind up pressganged by the British Empire or just vanishing without a trace."

"Or for a pretty girl like you, Alice, getting 'Recruited'," and you could just about hear the air quotes in Fat Bloke's voice, "By Beltran sodding Cortez."

The Hamster made a retching noise; McBangBang mimed sticking his fingers down his throat.

"Beltran Cortez?" Alice asked as the portal reached its target size, at one and the same time vaguely wondering if she was ever going to get used to the idea of being pretty. "Who in the fuck is Beltran Cortez?"

"What I said about puppetmasters? He's the one backing the British Empire," said the Hamster.

"If you hear references to 'Cortez the Raven', 'the Devil of Cortez', or 'the White Raven', that's who they mean," Vrotch agreed. "We don't actually know how old he is, but the first credible reference to him is from the fifteenth century and the only mage more powerful than him in the world today is Sheng in Imperial China. He established 'the establishment', he's the patriarch of 'the patriarchy', he is the president of 'the old boys club', the Royals are just figureheads, the real power in this empire is most probably sitting and looking smug in the smoking room at the Lexbridge Shooting Society clubhouse in Lexbridge in Shropshire right this moment... What Mackenzie did to Fiona, he's able to do to low-end mages like you - forcibly, and the mage doesn't even know their own name afterwards. So yeah, not being 'recruited' by Beltran Cortez, generally the sort of thing worth striving for."

"I see," Alice said, and made an ushering gesture towards her portal.

"Ah yes, the matter at hand," McBangBang agreed, and stuck his head through it; he withdrew his head with a thoughtful look and said, "I say, has anyone tried hitting the perimeter of the portal with an object such as, oh, a pole...? Not a Polish gentleman, a piece of wood, stop cackling Fat Bloke."

"I have a Jimmy bar," Vicky helpfully offered, producing a short wrecking bar from inside her coat.

"Excellent, that will suffice, give it here!" McBangBang declared, and proceeded to swing it at the edge of the portal with all his might. It bounced off with a dull clunk and enough force to jump out of his hands, drawing a startled "Great Scott!" out of him; Vicky caught it out of the air a hair's breadth before it would have clocked the Hamster in the ear.

"Jesus wept, watch what you're doing with that thing," said luminary complained.

"Bloody hell, I'd expected it to cut the bar!" McBangBang declared.

"It's blunt, and about an inch thick," Alice, who'd performed a slightly less energetic version of the same experiment on the original portal in the control tower, told him. "It's a really confusing shape, it's curved and I would say it was the shape of an inner tube off a really big bike tyre if the curve didn't seem to continue perfectly on the other side of a portal - have a look round the other side of this half of it when I do this," and she stuck her arm through, reached around at an angle that should have had her jamming her hand into her ear, and waved her fingers out of the other side of this half of the portal.

"Neat, it's a four-dimensional torus!" the Hamster declared, delighted by the effect.

"That," said Vrotch, giving the portal perimeter a squeeze, "Is downright trippy, my hand thinks it's in a position where my thumb should have to be sticking through my fingers."

"If you don't mind I'll set up some LIDAR measuring equipment later on and get a topographic map of the portal structure itself," McBangBang said to Alice. "All of the portals I've examined prior to this have been sharp on the submolecular scale - they will cut through warship-quality structural alloy as easily as a hot knife through butter."

"Be my guest," Alice said with a nod. "That said we've been talking about locating my portal somewhere a bit more secure,"

"You're welcome to move it to my caravan park," Vrotch told her. "I've got an old van up on blocks down there, it hasn't run since before the Iron Curtain fell but it's still structurally sound and the door locks work, I've been using it as a toolshed."

"Actually I was thinking about the yard behind the Harbourmasters - how hard would it be to get hold of a shipping container and drag it down there?"

"Simplicity itself," McBangBang told her. "The sheer volume of materials being landed at Dalcross has its ramifications, such as containers being fabricated in situ at an asteroid then sold off for their scrap value by the assorted materials brokers on site and as far as dragging the thing around is concerned I believe that Mr Macbane's father may be capable of assisting you in that matter if, that is, Mr Macbane himself is not able."

"Good," Alice said with a nod. "One of those would give room for the portal and a small laboratory for examining it, and the yard behind the Harbourmasters is fairly private and only going to get more so as we finish roofing over it."

"I'll cover the costs for containers," the Hamster said. "I can think of good uses for three or four of them down there, especially if we sit them tight together and get doorways cut between them."

"Should be room, and I happen to know a Macbane who's a dab hand with a welder," Alice said with a nod.

"Excellent, we have a plan," the Hamster agreed. "Now, let's get a look inside this thing, shall we?"

Alice nodded, and led the way.

The scene within was quite unlike it had been when she'd first showed it to Fat Bloke and her friends; she'd gone ahead and disappeared the badly-done fairytale castle that morning and the portal now stood at the centre of a patch of very sparse woodland perhaps two hundred yards across, with the only other feature a small roughly circular area of flat, hard, ground with wine-red carpet instead of grass, directly in front of and ten feet from the portal, on which sat a very fancy (not to mention suitably enormous) three-piece leather settee suite around a coffee table, the sheer incongruity of which drew a delighted laugh from the Hamster.

"Bloody hell, big old change," said Fat Bloke.

"Well the castle was amusing and all but there weren't so many things I could think of to do with a couple of hundred big empty rooms," Alice told him, sprawling herself on the sofa. "So I took it apart and started over - this ground used to be the castle roof, which was all that was left when I finished disappearing it. I'm not sure what else I'm going to do with it."

"Would there be any possibility of getting the use of a space as a laboratory?" McBangBang asked.

"What? Oh, sure," Alice said with a nod. "Would a container do the job?"

"That would be more than," McBangBang started; the container Alice was thinking of came into being hanging a couple of feet up in the air off through Alice's woods a little, and dropped to the ground with a ringing clang. "... sufficient. Great Scott, that was quite a sight!"

Fat Bloke went straight over to the container to examine it.

"I think," said the Hamster, settling herself on an armchair, "We should probably work on finding the exact limitations of your ability to create. Vrotch told me about these invisible people you and your friends spotted exiting that other portal - tell me, do you have any idea if you can make something like them?"

Alice opened her mouth, sat there with it open for a long moment, and then closed it.

"I honestly haven't a clue, I've never tried," she admitted. "... Do you think I can?"

"I don't see why not," the Hamster said.

"... huh. I don't think I'd better start with actually a person. How about, oh, a kitten?"

"Don't ask me, you're the one the Immaterium listens to every passing whim of," the Hamster said with a shrug.

"Right. A kitten. Kittens! Kitten," Alice mused, cupping her hands.

The newly-extant kitten looked up at her out of them, and mewed.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"You alright?" Fiona asked, about five minutes into Alice's laying flopped on her back on top of her bedcovers in their dorm room and staring blankly at the ceiling while the kitten explored in that particular mad wide-eyed kitteny way.

"Don't mind me," Alice told her. "Just being in a mild state of kitten-related shock."

-/-/-/-/-/-

On the morning of Saturday 28th Alice was awoken several hours earlier than she'd ever intended to be awake, to a rather grey and miserable-looking morning, by a shattering roar. Naturally, she nearly hit the roof; the kitten ended up catapulted halfway across the room, catching onto the curtain dividing her side from Fiona's side and hanging there by its claws swinging and mewing piteously.

The roar resolved itself from just sound into definitely an engine, and oriented itself to apparently coming from up the hall on their floor.

Someone started gunning it, making it even bloody louder.

"What the bloody hell," said Fiona, emerging from behind the curtain. She stuck her head out into the hall while Alice was still scrambling into skirt and pullover.

In a position approximating decent Alice went and joined her, finding that there were a lot of people pushing into the hall, some of them half-dressed, and the roar was coming from behind what was at that point the sole closed door in the entire hallway: specifically, the room shared by Nick and Mackie.

"Oh for Christ sake Nicodemus Bloody Macbane," Annie Kelly declared, and went and pounded on the door with all her might. The roar settled to a thumping tickover, and a moment later a maniacally grinning Nick came and opened the door, letting out a bunch of blue smoke and a stink of exhaust pipe.

"Morning Annie!" he declared.

"Shut that bloody thing off you bloody idiot, what the bloody hell are you doing?" Annie complained.

"Oh, sure," Nick said, and went and shut the engine off, allowing blessed silence to fill the dorms.

"Nick you absolute numpty," Annie continued, "What in God's name were you doing?"

"That's the engine for my new bike," Nick said, angling his thumb into the exhaust smokey room; an entertained-looking Mackie was hanging half out the window. "Just unexpectedly got her fired up first try, next step's sorting out a frame."

"It's no that you great teuchter, it's twenty to seven in the morning on what's suppose to be our lay-in day and you're running a bloody motorbike engine that I note hasn't got a bloody silencer inside the dorms, you wassock, are you trying to get yourself kicked out? Idiot," Annie declared.

Nick opened and shut his mouth a few times, then said, "I honestly thought I was just going to see if it'd turn over, I never expected it to fire first try."

"Then why'd you rev the bloody thing? Of course you revved the bloody thing you idiot, for Christ sake keep the engine testing outdoors and in the bloody afternoon will you man," Annie said with a sigh. The digs manager (a small and rather stout man whose name Alice could not for the life of her remember) chose that moment to arrive.

"What in God's name was that racket?" he complained.

"An idiot who didn't expect a freshly-repaired motorbike engine to start," Annie told her with a sigh.

"Oh come on Annie, it's no like seeing if an engine's wanting to turn over in my bedroom's anything unusual," Nick complained.

"Oh for God's sake Nick, everything your entire bloody family does is bloody unusual, may I remind you most families have to worry about their kids bringing home puppies and kittens and you brought home the landlord's daughter? Running engines in your bedroom is really bloody unusual and not just because it'll fill the entire place with exhaust pipe."

"Miss Kelly is quite correct, you know," the digs manager agreed, post looking at them even more strangely about the 'brought home the landlord's daughter' part. "I'm going to have to insist that you keep your engine-running out of my building, young man, I wouldn't think the environmental health people would stand for it."

"Aye, sure," said Nick with a nod. "I'll be working on welding up a frame next,"

"And you can keep your welding outdoors too," the digs manager declared.

"Aye, that was the plan, using gas welding equipment in an enclosed environment is a really bloody terrible idea even before we get to the vapours that'll come off of a lot of metals," Nick told him with a nod. "Acetylene is heavier than air, if a cylinder of the stuff takes a leak it'll pool on the floor and one spark later you're sitting in front of the Pearly Gates going 'what in the fuck just happened?'. That's why I've got the cylinders under sheets in a gas cage on a trailer, at home I don't even keep them in the barn."

"Yes. Well. Good," said the digs manager, obviously at a bit of a loss as to how to deal with people not having a yes-teacher reaction. "Oh, just run any work you intend to do in here past me first in future."

"Aye, will do," Nick said with another nod. He then snorted and glanced over his shoulder at the engine and pall of smoke. "Have to admit I'm a wee bittie surprised she started so quickly and sweetly, I thought I was going to have to rebuild her wiring loom before she'd even turn over and never mind firing, she'd been sitting out in all the weather for a while but I just had to hook her up to a battery and give her a bit of clean petrol and she's raring to go. That's why I'll be building a frame first - an engine this eager deserves a bike that'll let her stretch her wings out and she was in a hardtail, nae the fast special she should be hitched to."

"And with that wee lecture from Mr Nicodemus 'Pistonhead numpty' Macbane out of the way," said Annie with a roll of her eyes that merely succeeded in widening Nick's mad grin - as soon as the door had opened and the thunder from the engine hit her like a brick wall Annie's cybernetic eyes had taken on the exact same gleam as Nick's, and it had really kicked into gear when she'd heard he hadn't expected it to start.

It was no wonder the two of them were such close friends, Alice decided. They were both just as bad as each other and the whole thing had been a bit rich coming from Miss Annabella 'Reaches under the bonnet to get her totally unsilenced rotting piece of crap daily runner to start and seems to think that's normal' Kelly.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"No you are not," said an outraged Alice Liddel, "Cutting my bloody kitten up!"

It was now just after midday and they'd spent most of that grey and soggy morning post Nick's motorcycle-related public alarm clock emplacing three containers - brought down one by one on a trailer behind Nick's van and lifted off it and into place with screw jacks and winches and a lot of swearing and near-disasters - in a line side by side and hard up against each other in the yard behind the Harbourmaster's, and Alice had just got done with moving her portal into the middle one while Nick got stuck into the left-hand one's guts with the ripsnorter and a new grinding disc.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"I didn't mean cut it up, there's more than one way to see inside something," the Hamster assured her. "I can get hold of an ultrasound scanner - same stuff they use to take baby's first photo - straight off the bat and a magnetic resonance imager should be do-able, I have a set of plans to build one out of old cellphone parts, and either or better yet both will allow us to build up a three-dimensional map of the insides of your kitten, then we can compare to a real kitten - a friend's cat had kittens not that long ago, I'm sure she'd be fine with one going on an adventure. Finding out how much your kitten resembles a real kitten on the insides is going to go a good way to finding the practical limitations of your ability to create - using your container as a reference point, my bet is that your creations follow your knowledge of the real thing, meaning that your kitten is most likely a kitten-shaped blob of unmatter 'programmed', for want of a better word, to act like a kitten. Tell me, what went through your head while you were making that container yesterday?"

"Big metal box about yay size, with double doors at one end," Alice admitted.

"And that was exactly what you got, yes. Have a good look at this container's details, how the hinges and door closing mechanism work, which part is made out of what, the shapes that make up the sides and top, and those little hollow corner things used to stack them, then go and compare your container."

Alice did.

They were similar only in rough size. The real container had corrugation in the sides and back end, its top and sides were made out of multiple pieces of steel each, and it had a wood floor; hers was all made out of what looked and felt like a single piece of entirely smooth metal. The real thing was covered in rough lines that had to be welds and parts round the door closers and hinges that were bolted together; hers was one piece. The real thing had these little hollow corner things, hers did not. The hinges were nothing alike, and neither were the doors - hers was built like a household door and door latch all made out of seamless metal, the real thing was nothing like it.

She took it further and compared the sizes; hers was wider, lower, and shorter, and by the time she gave Nick his tape measure back it didn't take a single word to convey what she was now thinking to the Hamster, who took one look at her and said, "I'll go and get that ultrasound scanner."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Alice? Are you in- Okay," said Annie Kelly as she saw the scene inside the left-hand container half an hour later and perhaps ten minutes after it had finally stopped raining, "Why are you two idiots running one of those thingies for looking at a baby foetus before it's born over a kitten?"

"This," said the Hamster, "Is not a kitten."

"You what?"

"It's a glob of 'unmatter', for want of a better word," the Hamster said. "It has no internal organs, no skeleton, no muscles - it's shaped very much like a kitten on the outside, but on the inside it doesn't even have a complete throat and never mind lungs or a stomach. What this is, is an Immaterial construct shaped like a kitten, powered by magic, and 'programmed', for want of a better word, to act like a kitten. Whereas this," and she handed Alice her 'kitten' back and went and got the kitten she'd brought out of the basket it'd been sitting in, "I can guarantee is an entirely ordinary kitten as its mummy is a friend's cat. Watch the difference."

They did, and Alice said, "Well," several times while Annie slowly shook her head in wonder.

"I would very much like to get hold of one of those invisible people you were on about and have a look inside them with this," the Hamster told her.

"Alice," said Annie, "Do you think you can make people like those?"

"If I dared to I probably could," Alice told her.

"Right!" and the Hamster clapped her hands. "I think that's probably enough of that for today, we'll let McBangBang get her - sorry, his - laboratory equipment set up then get back to it. Let's talk about safely controlling magic; come on, leave your not-actually-kitten in unspace for now if you want to keep it, it's almost certainly an active spell effect and what we're going to do next is going to leave you briefly without anything like enough available magic to support one of those - talking of which we'd better be somewhere out of the way for this, it's not known for being very subtle," and with that she rose to her feet and headed for the front of the pub.

Having stowed the not-a-kitten in a hurriedly-created fenced off kitten-escape-proof patch of ground the far side of her portal Alice followed her, and was led out to an elderly brown car parked just across the road opposite the front of the bar; the Hamster unlocked it, letting Alice climb into the passenger side (carefully avoiding the puddle big enough you'd half expect ducks to move in that was currently occupying most of that side of the road) as she got into the driver's seat and got it started.

"Ugh, I hate stick-shifts, particularly on the wrong side of the car," she grumbled.

"I take it this isn't your car?"

"Nah, I drive an Oldsmobile with an automatic transmission and, I note, the steering wheel on the right side of the damn vehicle," the Hamster said, poking at a satnav that was set up on the car's dashboard. "There we go. This thing belongs to Sane Dave - Vrotch, that is," and after some fumbling and swearing and grinding of gears she got the car moving.

"I'd been meaning to ask, why do you lot keep calling him 'Sane Dave'?" Alice asked.

"Same reason he calls me the Munching Hamster, we know each other by our net names," the Hamster said with a shrug.

They drove almost due south out of Inverness, down past the college digs and along the south shore of Loch Ness, then turned into the hills on a single-track road and finally, after passing a set of crossroads in the absolute middle of nowhere, the Hamster turned onto and drove a hundred yards up a muddy forestry track.

"There should be a clearing about fifty yards thataway," she said, pointing into the sparse scrub and neat rows of young trees. "We're going there."

"Okay," said Alice, slightly dubious at the prospect - however the ground proved a good deal harder than she'd expected, hard enough the heels they were both wearing didn't sink into the earth.

They found a picnic table dumped in the centre of the clearing with a tarp draped over it, which drew an amused snort out of the Hamster.

"Very clever, Fat Bloke, very clever," she said, dragging the tarp off. "Take a seat; it's time we began."

Alice did so.

"Close your eyes," the Hamster continued. "Feel the world around you - you should be able to feel a presence of sorts, flowing over you and around you and through you, almost but not quite like warmth, ebbing and flowing, almost in waves - can you feel that?"

"... Yes," Alice eventually concluded. "Yes, I think, yes I can, in fact I... think I've been feeling for," and she shied away from the realisation that she'd been feeling it since the exact moment that she was blown up.

"That," said the Hamster, "Is the power we call magic - it flows across the surface of the world, flowing along the boundary between land and sky, Earth and Air. Now, you should be finding that as its waves pass through you, and flow over the boundary between yourself and the world outside you, it leaves a little of itself behind - can you feel that?"

"I... think I can?" Alice mused, concentrating on the flows that she could feel around her - and that was when she registered something else, something that threw her and her eyes snapped open; she stared down at the expertly-constructed plastic and metal, built perfectly to simulate living skin, of her hands.

"The... boundary, between 'me' and 'not me'," she said, "It, it includes my hands."

"Of course; why wouldn't it?" the Hamster asked, puzzled, and Alice realised the other girl had no idea how much of her wasn't flesh and blood.

She slowly, deliberately, pulled her jersey off and laid it down on the table, and spent a moment running her fingers over the seams where metal and high-tech plastics met scarred skin.

" Alice Liddel, what in the name of all that's holy happened to you?" the Hamster asked, voice gentle.

"I died and survived the experience," Alice told her, and in a sense finally admitted to herself. "My arms... didn't, and neither did my legs. I don't, didn't, actually look like this - I had grey eyes and my face, I was honestly rather plain and my hair was never anything like this nice. I wasn't ugly, but until I came round in Grace Mitchell's living room nobody ever would've called me pretty... It's still a bit eerie looking into a mirror and seeing this face looking back. But that's not the important part - my hands are high-tech plastics and 3d-printed parts over a light aluminium frame and the magic, it's flowing over them as if they were really my hands."

The Hamster reached out, and took hold of Alice's cybernetic hand.

"Alice," she said, "This is your hand. It's beautifully made; someone went to a great deal of effort to get your hand exactly right for you, if someone was to purchase something like this hand of yours I'm holding from a private cyberneticist it'd set them back hundreds of thousands of dollars... Tell me, when I do this," and she reached out and gently ran her fingertips down Alice's upper arm, from her shoulder to her elbow, "Can you tell without looking when my finger crosses the 'divide' between flesh and cybernetics?"

"... No, no, I, honestly I can't."

"And isn't that all you need to know?"

Alice flexed her fingers - she could see the muscles in her forearm moving.

"It really is perfect, isn't it?" the Hamster said. "You've even got goosebumps, put your jumper back on you silly baggage and let's get on with learning magic."

"I suppose when it comes down to it I'd been stuck on this loop of 'this isn't me'," Alice said with a sigh, doing what she was told; it may have stopped raining but there was still a chill in the air.

"Not unusual for severe injury patients, or so I'm told," the Hamster said with a sad smile and a shake of her head. "Now, shut your eyes again, and feel for where the magic flowing through you, your wonderful precision-engineered arms included, is leaving a little bit of itself behind and Alice, I want you to give me your most solemn promise that when you find it you won't try to make it leave more of itself behind."

"... I take it doing that kills a lot of people."

"Yes," said the Hamster, voice soft and filled with sorrow, and then she shook it off. "Never you mind that, Alice, can you feel the magic in your soul?"

They sat there for a long time - Alice would never be able to say how long - before she finally realised that yes, she could, and oh God was the temptation to reach for more so strong.

"I... think I see why it kills so many people," she said. "It's like it wants to be pulled in,"

"It doesn't want anything at all, Alice, it's a flame - it's just there, and it warms your soul and it feel wonderful and enticing until you get too close and then it'll burn you to a cinder in a heartbeat," and there was that sorrow again and Alice had to wonder exactly who this very young woman had lost that way, and when. "Now, I want you to raise your arm, cup your hand, and point your palm at the sky - keep your eyes shut, now - and push it all, every last scrap, down your arm and out through your hand and up."

Alice did.

The roar was so loud it was more felt than heard, and the light so bright Alice could see it through her eyelids, even with her head bowed to face the table. It went on and on and on, a tremendous, staggering, river of just sheer power, beautiful, lethal, the Hamster was just so right to compare it to a flame - on and on, the seconds even longer than the bombing had been, and then it was over.

"... what in God's name," Alice whispered, "Was that?"

"Look up," said the Hamster.

Alice did, and she was confronted with a patch of clear blue sky surrounded by the sullen grey of the clouds that had blanketed Inverness all morning.

"We'll check online later, but from the duration and amplitude I'd guess that to have reached the edge of Earth's atmosphere," the Hamster told her, rising to her feet. "That was about as much power as a week's worth of output from a small aviation fusion reactor - it was unfocused and basically just light, but there was enough of it to cast shadows in daylight and that lasted for two minutes eleven seconds straight. Come on - we'd better get out of here, people are going to come looking real soon."

"I think," Alice rather shakily said as she followed the Hamster back towards the car, "I can feel it... pooling. In me. Again."

"Try firing it at the sky again - you don't need to bother closing your eyes this time," the Hamster said, and Alice did so; she got what looked for all the words like a white cod-scifi 'blaster bolt'.

"Alice, I want you to promise me something; if you ever get towards the unsafe levels of magic that presence you can feel will start feeling like pressure. If you ever feel that, ever, I want you to promise me you'll just drop everything and get rid of it. This is life-and-death, Alice; the presence turning into pressure is the only warning you get before your head explodes... You must have been pretty close, I'd say you'd been trickle-feeding it for several months without letting any go at all."

"Okay," Alice said. It was about the only sensible answer to that.

"Magic, well, it'd be easy to say it 'wants' to be used, but it's more realistic to say that it has to be used or it will run out of control and that will kill you. The amount you can handle will gradually increase as time goes by, but it will never, ever, ever do so quickly enough to keep up with the pace you collect it without even trying, and that pace increases too," the Hamster said as they arrived back at the car. "Think of it as a pressure vessel; if the pressure grows too high…"

"Bang," Alice said as they climbed into the car.

"Exactly." The Hamster once again juggled the car into gear, and proceeded to very messily reverse it down onto the road, get it turned and, with yet more gear grinding and cursing at the steering wheel for being on the wrong side, get it heading back down towards Loch Ness and the town beyond.

-/-/-/-/-/-

The first thing out of Fat Bloke's mouth once Alice and her friends were no longer in earshot as the group of mages made their way over to Vrotch's car was, "How bad?"

The Hamster shook her head. "Well it was getting pretty damn dangerous, we're going to need to move faster next time - I'd say she wasn't more than a few days from disaster. I timed the initial release; two minutes eleven seconds.”

“Ouch," said McBangBang.

"We're going to have to work harder on detecting young mages before they go 'pop'. That girl hadn't hit the danger point from passive collection, but if she’d noticed her power and started actively drawing?” The Hamster, who had gone round the passenger side of the car, shook her head as she scooted the keys across the roof to Vrotch. “On the bright side, she's a strong one... Gahh, still feels wrong getting in this side and not driving."

"Yeah, I was going to say, two minutes eleven initial release?" Vrotch said. The others having seated themselves, he fired the car and got it moving with a great deal more ease than the Hamster had.

"No joke, you all saw when she let it loose. That girl is going to be very very big news in a few years time, boys. We're all going to have to put assets into making sure people like Mackenzie or Cortez don't get their claws into her – and I don't mean getting her conscripted, McBangBang, Te Ariki is a sight better than the likes of Beltran Cortez but we all know better than to trust him with something like this. If she becomes someone's attack dog, we're all for it – she could very easily be made into the next Baba Yaga."

"Oh, you won't hear a word of argument from me, I assure you," McBangBang promised with an airy wave of his hand. "Mum's the word, loose lips sink ships and all that rot, I may respect the Brigadier but I most certainly do not like the Brigadier and I quite surely would not trust the Brigadier with a young lady's future, he has the most unfortunate habit of using people up and throwing them away."

"Not unusual in his line of work," said Fat Bloke.

"Oh I know that, I've spent long enough rubbing elbows with military intelligence, but that doesn't mean that I have to like it," McBangBang told him with a shrug.

"So how are we going to keep Mackenzie away from her given, you know, she's rooming with one of Mackenzie's witches?" Fat Bloke asked.

"Don't worry about that, man, I've got it covered," said Vrotch with a smirk.

"Okay, certainly, how?" McBangBang asked.

"Ways and means, man, ways and means – let's just say there's a reason I've got away with spending most of the last decade being a thorn in Mackenzie's side from practically right on her doorstep, and it's not her liking my style or anything."

"Don't keep us in suspense," said the Hamster.

Vrotch gave her a smug side-on look.

"Tectonic plates show the boundary effect," he said.

"You fucking what mate," said Fat Bloke.

"We're directly on top of a faultline," Vrotch told him. "It's more or less inactive but it's still a faultline and it runs from Fort William all the way up Loch Ness, right through the middle of Inverness, not so coincidentally directly under my caravan park, up the Moray Firth, and out into the North Sea. And I checked, and it turns out that it's got a boundary effect ripple to match. It's an even more potent boundary than the Irish Wall or even the Canadian border, by a couple of orders of magnitude. So not being the sort to look gift horses in the mouth and having spotted it right after Fiona got herself witched, I used it to power a warding, constructed specifically to protect me and mine from Isobel Mackenzie. And," and he looked especially smug, "As of their accepting my help with their vampire hunts, Alice and her friends count. I checked."

"Do you suppose that about the boundary effect goes for every faultline on Earth?" McBangBang mused.

"It does, but they're all one single vast network of boundary," Vrotch told him.

"That'll be why the effect is as powerful as you're intimating," the Hamster said. "It's not just the fault along Loch Ness driving your warding – it's the entire planet, isn't it."

Vrotch nodded.

"I can't act with impunity," he told her. "The catch is the warding stops her escalating – she can retaliate at the same level as I act. That's why I've kept it to annoying pranks and denial of assets, if for example I tried to have her slotted she'd be free to drop a dozen bull haggi in my porch. She found out about it the hard way, I rigged her garden gate to hit her in the ear with a bucket worth of sloppy porridge every time she walk through it, she tried to make my caravan park fall into the sea, the working backfired and blew her to Bermuda. She tried two dozen different ways of wiping me out before she got the idea. The last one oh so nearly got her, it teleported her into low orbit."

"Mate, she works out how you're doing it you are so fucking dead," said Fat Bloke.

Vrotch let out a maniacal cackle, "It's self-protecting, man, it'd treat someone trying to mess with it as her trying to kill me – she'll find out if she ever works out how I'm doing it."

"Blew her to Bermuda?" the Hamster asked.

"Yup. Loud bang and she's flat on her arse in a ditch in Bermuda... I put a shitload of work into that ward and it turns out to be complex enough and smart enough to cross the construct line and start behaving in ways I hadn't entirely expected. Basically, it has a sense of humour."

“We’d better start cooking up a few simple spells to teach Alice,” said Fat Bloke.

“Yeah,” said the Hamster. “We better had.”

-/-/-/-/-/-

"I take it," said Annie as Alice walked out the back of the Harbourmasters, "That funny bright light was you."

"Light?" Alice asked, then clocked what Annie had to be on about. "Oh, light, yes. That was me and if you want to come into my portal there's going to be another big flash in there in a moment.

"Oh aye," said Nick, scrambling to his feet - he'd been taking a smoke break in between tackling the container alterations with his gas welding gear, "Let's get a look at it then," and the rest of those present - Fiona, Andy, and Mackie - made varied agreeing noises and got to their feet too.

"I don't suggest looking straight at it, this isn't going to be so big but that first one was bright enough I could see it through my eyelids and the Hamster said it was casting shadows in daylight," Alice told him. She paused in the mouth of the centre container and had a glance around, noting that the planned modifications were more or less done – Nick had cut away most of the wall in between the containers and had made a start on actually welding them together and sealing the gap. A quick check showed that you couldn't see it from the outside, they still looked like three separate containers.

"Shaping up," Alice said.

"Aye, I'll be needing to be taking paint to it later, keep the rust off of it, and we'd probably better be building a roof over them, but this sort of alterations aren't exactly complicated if you're no caring whether it's looking pretty," Nick said with a nod. "And besides, I was starting to go potty getting a jig set up for building that bike frame."

"A you what?" Alice asked.

"A jig is something to be making sure everything's lined up properly before you start cutting and bending the parts for whatever you're trying to build," Nick explained as they headed through the portal, the revamped far side of which the others had seen that morning after Alice moved it out of the derelict vampire lair. "Once I get this one right it'll sit round that engine I was getting running this morning with a dowel where the swingarm pivot needs to go, a bit of scrap plastic pipe where the top of the rear shock needs to go, and a bit of dowel where the headstock needs to go, so then I can slip pieces of the right sort of tubing for my bearings onto or into them then weld everything up safe in the knowledge that I'm no building a bike with wonky suspension. I have to admit I'm no entirely up on the best ways to do it, this'll be the first time I've actually built a frame for a bike instead of finding a wreck and reconditioning it and it turns out that it's a bit of a bastard of a job – bloody fascinating stuff though and it's going to be dead satisfying when it's done."

"I see," said Alice, who didn't know a good bit of the terminology Nick had just used but got the general idea and honestly didn't care. "Anyway, you'd probably better look the other way, this is going to be bright."

Nick apparently decided to play macho idiot and didn't take her advice.

It took nearly twenty minutes for him to stop swearing.

-/-/-/-/-/-

"That," said Annie Kelly, "Was even more bloody impressive close up."

They were now sitting on Alice's sofas and Nick had finally lapsed into silence as his eyesight recovered from the dazzling he'd got himself by looking straight at what Alice was doing when she let fly into the depths of unspace.

Fiona nodded her agreement – she's seriously surprised Alice by having been struck speechless, and still had a look of slightly dazed awe on her face.

"Aye," she said. "That was quite bloody something.”

“Now,” Alice said, “I’ve got to draw just a little bit and keep it at that level.”

“Okay, sure,” said Annie. “Why?”

“Because… oh, imagine it like, oh, like steam in a boiler,” Fiona said. “If there’s too much steam in there and it can’t let any off...”

“Bang. I see,” said Annie with a nod.

“Generally, bang in the form of the mage’s brain going on fire, but aye, bang,” said Fiona. “And a mage, any mage, is always going to have some ‘pressure’ - so it’s critically important to learn how to judge how much you’ve got so you can safely release excess. Because if you don’t, bang.”

“Like the pressure gauge and safety valve on that boiler, aye,” said Annie with another nod.

“More like, oh, imagine a boiler with a pressure gauge that doesn’t come with markings, an easy-to-miss flag that pops up as the boiler passes the safe pressure limit, the only safety valve is manually-operated, and it never stops gaining pressure,” Fiona told her.

Annie thought about that for a moment and then said, "Jesus."

“And I’m stuck with that in my brain for the rest of my life,” Alice, who didn’t know a great deal about boilers but got the picture, said with a sigh. “Lovely.”

“You’ll be just fine,” said Nick.

“There’s no way of knowing that for sure, Nick,” Fiona said, drawing an enormous snort out of him.

“Aye right,” he said. “Ken that Vrotch was saying about people who get good hunches the other night?”

“You’re saying you get good hunches,” said Fiona.

“No. I’m saying I don’t often get a hunch but I’ve never been wrong,” Nick told her. “And I’ve got a hunch that she,” and he angled a thumb Alice’s way, “Is going to be very very good at this stuff, and no just because she’s looking the part either. She’s smart, she’s fast, she’s no daft at all, and just as importantly you never have to tell her anything twice.”

“Looking the part?” Alice asked.

“Well aye, you’re dark-haired, pale-skinned, really pretty, and you dress like a seventy-year-old widow,” Nick told her. “You're always wearing the sort of clothes you’d be expecting an old lady who bides alone with a cat and a spinning wheel to be wearing and no a pretty lassie, and now you’ve even got a wee puzzock, you've even got the right sort of air of ‘I used to run with the SOE, what’ve you got’, backed up by the way you've no got a gun visible on you making it look like you've got to be hiding something, all that you’re missing is the pointy hat.”

“You’re saying I look like, well, basically like a witch.”

“… Well not in so many words,” said Nick.

“Aye, he’s saying that you look like a witch, and Alice, he’s no wrong,” said Fiona. "You look like a teenage spey-wife, honestly if anyone in the dorms was hearing you had mysterious powers they'd be saying 'well it bloody would be her now, wouldn't it', I'm pretty sure half of our course are thinking you are one anyway."

"Well so be it," Alice decided. "If I look like a witch and everyone's going to assume I'm a witch I might as well learn to back it up, and not just because it's good for my chances of not having a head explosion either. Gonna do the time, might as well do the crime."

-/-/-/-/-/-

"Okay," said the Hamster. "Now, I want you to try releasing just a little bit of power in that way."

It was now Sunday morning, and after a quiet evening in contemplation of the latest curveball life had thrown her and a night of fitful sleep and weird dreams - not nightmares, the sort that leave you vaguely scratching your head over what the hell that was about when you wake up - Alice was back in unspace with the Hamster, Fat Bloke, and a fascinated Annie.

Alice did; as little a bit as she could. She was rewarded by a spark jumping off of her hand into the depths of unspace with a pop, and the small wellspring of power she'd been keeping diminished sharply.

"Try doing the same but pointing your finger, get it to flow down your finger and go in the direction that you're pointing," said Fat Bloke, and Alice did so, pausing only to draw some more power.

"How accurate can you get it? Maybe make a couple of targets - say, dartboards, you know how those are made, right? Tightly-wound paper held together with steel wire - across the far side of your patch of unspace and try firing it at them," the Hamster suggested.

"Okay," said Alice, and she did exactly that, making two dartboards appear hovering in the air fifty or sixty feet away. "God I feel ridiculous, like a kid playing cowboys pointing their finger - 'Bang! Bang! You're dead!" and she launched a spark of power at a dartboard with each 'bang'.

"Maybe, but go and have a look at what that did to a dartboard," Fat Bloke told her, angling a thumb.

Alice did.

There was a finger-thick hole punched dead centre in each dartboard.

"And that," said the Hamster, "Is the simplest possible actual spell. It's got any number of names - 'spark', 'mage bolt', 'magic bullet', and so on and so forth and so ad infinitum. Call it what you like, it does the same thing and is the big reason any mage classes as armed even when butt-naked. The only real gotcha in it comes when you're casting at a moving target - down here near to sea level in Earth's atmosphere magic travels at about four hundred miles per hour projected like this, so you've got to cast at where your target's going to be when the spell gets there, and it's just as worth remembering what's behind your target when you cast as it is when you fire a gun. Effectively, your cowboy impression is very appropriate."

"Let's go back out to the Harbourmaster's yard and try it on concrete blocks," said Fat Bloke.

Alice gave him a measuring look, then nodded and rose to her feet.

"How well do you think it'd work on a vampire?" she asked.

"As well as it did on that dartboard," the Hamster told her as they walked back through Alice's portal, "Though that said as spells go it's not a very efficient one - you'll notice how sharply it drained your reserves - that said at very close range it will thoroughly over-penetrate a human body, undead or otherwise, at six foot it'll punch a hole in a quarter-inch steel plate, and for vampires you've still got the 'heart or blow head off' problem, finger-thick holes aren't so good at beheading. And, using magic directly to inflict damage like that is quite power-intensive, bear in mind that what you're using here is a leveraging of what's usually an emergency way to vent off excess power before it can kill you. It's typically much more efficient to use magic to, for example, excite something's molecules until it bursts into flames or just melts. The primary reason to learn this first is it is extremely simple and easy to do and can be used to burn off a lot of power very quickly in a slightly less visible manner than blowing a miles-high plume of light into the sky, just do an impression of a cowboy gunfighter and you're dry as a bone in moments - the secondary is that it's a good first step in learning to properly direct magic."

"Okay, so, concrete block," Alice said, looking around the yard for one of those. "Concrete block, where to find a concrete block,"

"Preferably a concrete block nobody's going to miss," Fat Bloke said as Nick, who was marking up some sheet steel, opened his mouth; Nick closed his mouth again with a puzzled frown.

"What for?" he asked.

"Alice is going to explode it with her brain," Annie told him.

"Okay, this I've got to be seeing," he said, and he indicated the pile of rubbish up against the bridge abutment. "There's some old bricks in there, that do?"

"Sure, that'll do just fine," the Hamster said with a nod, and he and she headed over and had a root around, coming out with a couple of bricks that Nick lobbed into the centre of the yard.

"Okay," the Hamster said as she and Nick arrived back beside Alice, "Let 'er rip."

Alice pointed at the nearer brick and let the power go - and one bright flash later there was a loud bang and the brick burst into a cloud of dust and fragments.

"Mental!" Nick declared, delighted. Alice punctuated by blowing the other brick to bits, then blowing imaginary smoke off her finger.

"Interesting," said Annie. "You can do that essentially at will?"

"As long as I've got the reserves of power for it, yes," Alice told her. "Hang on, I'm going to try something," and she ducked back through her portal, released what little power she had left, and ducked back out. "Okay, I just dumped everything, now I'm going to find out how long it takes to drip-feed enough power to do that point and shoot thing. Anyone got a stopwatch?"

"Right here," said Fat Bloke, producing his mobile - it wasn't until later that Alice would realise and be surprised by the way that what the world she found herself in called mobile phones no longer gave her a double take.

"Okay, so start it when I say 'now', then stop it when I fire," Alice told him, to which he nodded along.

"Ready when you are," he told her.

"Now," she said, stopping trying to keep the power out, and let it fly the moment she thought there was enough, splattering mud around at the far end of the yard.

"Almost dead on five seconds," said Fat Bloke.

"One zap every five seconds, huh?" Annie mused.

"Let's double-check, actually I think do that three times and get an average," Alice said, and they did exactly that.

"Okay," Fat Bloke concluded at the end of the third try. "We've got five point one seconds the first time, five point four seconds the second, and five point three seconds the third. I think we can rule most of the variance out for me being fumble-fingered with my mobile - how are you on power, Alice?"

"Bone dry, look," Alice said, and tried to release anything left at the rubbish heap - she got a brief soft pulse of light stretching about a foot from her hand.

"Yes, pretty much completely empty indeed," the Hamster agreed. "Okay! I say you keep at that for a while, then once it feels completely natural email me and we'll look into some more complex spellcasting, okay?"

"Sounds okay to me," Alice, who felt no need to rush about this, agreed.

"Good. In that case I'd better get on, and I'll see you in... well, when I see you."

"There was something else I think I'd better ask about," Alice told her.

"Shoot," she said.

"I noticed something last night after I took the not-a-kitten back out of unspace," she said. "It feels like it puts a bit of a drain on my magic when it's this side of the portal."

The Hamster frowned.

"I'd call that confirmation that it is functionally an active spell effect, meaning that while we don't know for sure it would most likely dissipate if you run out of juice. Now, if that's everything I really need to get moving."

"Just one thing before you take off," said Annie.

"What's that?"

Annie indicated the badge on the Hamster's belt.

"I looked you up," she said. "I really wouldn't have expected to see the loudest Nihon separatist of them all wearing one of those, given how the cops over there treat anyone who doesn't pretend to think the American annexation of Nihon is the best thing ever," and that completely silenced everyone in the yard.

“I have a dear friend,” the Hamster eventually said, “Who when she was fourteen tried to walk through Akibahara wearing a jacket with ‘Free Nihon’ written upon the back. She was beaten, arrested, then six weeks without a word later she was thrown out the back of a speeding paddy-wagon naked in the bad part of Shinjuku, where a bosuzuko gang - biker kids, they've since become very good friends of ours - found her, realised she was still alive, and called an ambulance. She would've died if they hadn't found her... You know, some things are worth having some fat creepy gropey sleaze-bag for a boss, such as getting to dispatch the fuckers you know did that to your friend to an incident right opposite where you know her dad’s hanging with his Yakuza buddies drinking sake and polishing their guns, as far as I know the bodies are in barrels full of concrete on the bottom of the South China Sea. And besides, you're not the only one who'd never have expected to see the Munching Hamster wearing one of these – the last place the TLA are going to look for someone who advocates killing cops even a tenth as often as I do is behind 'the thin blue line', even if it's effectively as a glorified secretary, and that's why I joined the force the very first chance I got. Anyway, I have places to be and things to do; I'll see you lot later.”

They watched her go in silence as she headed in through the Harbourmaster's back door and through into the pub proper.

“Is it really that bad?” Alice asked as soon as she was sure the Hamster was thoroughly out of earshot.

“Is what really how bad?” Fat Bloke asked.

“What the Hamster said,”

Fat Bloke gave her a grim smile.

"There is no such thing as a 'goodie' in international politics, only differing degrees of baddie," he said. "I'm sorry, but the fact of the matter is that you become a world power by being even more of a ruthless amoral bastard than all the other ruthless amoral bastards - and that goes for the British Empire too, bad as Washington is Westminster makes them look like some sort of long-lost third flowerpot man."

That was when a very shaken-looking Mary Macbride came hurrying out of the back door of the pub and said, "There's just been a murder in the toilets."

-/- End: Chapter 3-/-