“Oh, come on Jack,” Chi’s voice was pleading. “It’s not like I sold you into chattel slavery or anything. I just told her that if she’d only wait—”

“Until you were through with me?” he grumbled without looking up from his work.

“Until you were ready to leave Mund,” she corrected. “And I didn’t give you to her give you to her,” she struggled. “I made it clear to her that she’d still have to win you over....”

He raised his head and turned to glare at her. “You gave her hope,” he accused. “Encouragement. Neither she nor I need any of that in this regard. You should have been discouraging her. Like I’ve been.”

“I’m sorry, okay?” she raised both hands in surrender. “It’s not like you were doing anything more successful.”

Timony Rechsnel, the blacksmith Jack had recruited for the revolver project stuck his head in through the back door, saw them still going at it, and vanished back into his forge room. He wanted nothing to do with that mess. There were still things he could do without further input from the artificer, and he’d keep doing them until the adventuress wandered off or made peace with him.

Jack put both elbows on the workbench and laid his head in his hands, shoulders tight. He squeezed his eyes closed and pressed them into the heels of his palms, gritting his teeth. He did not need this right now. He had too many things on his plate to get even more sidetracked worrying about what might be happening that far down the road. Chi had gotten the girl to hold off. Look at it that way. That was a win, right? Right?

“You said something about being able to show me how to recharge the laptop?” he mumbled in a tired voice.

“I can,” Chi perked up, hurrying forward to join him at the workbench.

He slid the papers and drawings he’d been working on out of the way and stood, undoing his equipment belt and laying it and his belt pouch on the bench. He’d need to open it wide to get the other pack out, and that was a colossal pain while he was wearing it.

He laid the laptop, mouse, and charger out. After a moment of thought, he laid his smartphone and that charger beside it. He couldn’t remember what sorts of notes he had in the phone, but he might just as well charge it up if he could. He might not get any bars a universe distant from the nearest cell tower, but the phone was a computer in and of itself.

Chi took the charger and examined the information sticker. “Nineteen volts DC,” she said. “Easy. “Four point seven amps. You know you can make do with plus or minus about two amps, right?” She looked up. “Harder on the battery, of course, if you go a little high, or too low, but four point seven is still pretty easy.”

She drew her knife from her belt pouch and brought the blade up against the output cord of the charger, pausing. She caught Jack’s eye and raised an eyebrow questioningly.

“Cut it,” he said, grimacing just a bit.

Chi slid the knife through cleanly, and set the main body of the charger aside. It was the work of a moment to strip back the wire cladding several inches and separate the central wire lead from the woven wire wrap. She paused again.

“You want to watch me do it the first time?” she wondered. “It might be easier to learn once you’ve seen it done at least once.”

He nodded wordlessly.

Chi returned the nod and reached back into her pouch, retrieving a pair of plain metal rings. These she placed on the middle and index fingers of her right hand, humming a quiet tune. She tucked the center lead beneath one ring and the twisted braid of the outer lead beneath the other. With one last glance at the sticker to verify polarity, she leaned forward to raise the lid of the laptop. She paused again before plugging the charger cable into its port.

“Oh,” she asked absently, “you’re able to use fairy sight, right?”

“Fairy sight?”

She narrowed her eyes, quirking a lip. “Fairy sight, inner eye, third eye, aetherial gaze, wizard’s perception, goddess’ view.”

“Inner eye sounds familiar,” he chuckled in spite of himself. “I suppose it’s hard to keep them all separate after awhile, huh?”

“You have no idea,” she sighed. “Alright, so, to repeat, has anyone trained you to use your inner eye?”

He nodded. “Sure. Luciandro showed me how it’s done when he first starte—”

“Luciandro?” she blurted, eyes wide. “You mean the mouse?”

He cocked his head. “The rank thirty-plus wizard,” he corrected. “He was the first denizen of Mund who actually bothered to teach me anything. And a good thing, too,” he added. “He and his folk have saved my life more than a couple of times. And let’s not forget his part in saving your sister.”

“The mice,” she repeated. Then she shook her head, hard, like she was trying to dislodge something. “Fine. Right. So, open your inner eye and watch my hand.”

She lay her hand on the tabletop, palm up, fingers spread, and began a low chant, barely audible. “D’you see anything in my palm?” she queried.

“Hang on a sec,” he had his eyes closed. He wasn’t good enough at the inner eye thing yet to just drop instantly into it. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds. “Yeah, like a shallow puddle of quicksilver.”

“What color is it?” she asked.

He cocked an eyebrow at that. “What?”

“It looks different for each person who sees it,” she told him. “That’s why I’m asking. The color you see may not be what I’m seeing.”

“So what does it matter?” he wondered.

She frowned. “Are you always this difficult to teach?”

“Sorry,” he hunched his shoulders, embarrassed.

“Whatever color you’re seeing,” she told him, “is five volts. What your phone uses. As the voltage increases or decreases, the color changes.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “Okay, kind of a pale yellow.”

“Alright,” she nodded. “How about now,” and the color brightened.

He concentrated. “More like a ripe banana,” he announced.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Ten volts,” she supplied. “Now?”

“Kind of a yellowish green,” he said. “Like an unripe banana.”

“You’ve got bananas on the brain,” she sighed. “Anyway, fix this color in your mind. Don’t lose it. This is nineteen volts.”

He studied the little puddle of electricity in her palm, etching it into his brain. “Okay,” he said after a minute or so. “I think I’ve got it

“Let’s see, then,” she grinned. The color began to fade. “Stop me when I get to five,” she ordered.

He called out what he thought was the proper shade of yellow when she reached it. “Close,” she nodded. “That was six and a half.”

The color faded just enough to note. “Five,” she announced. “And back up.”

He stopped her at eighteen. Then four and a half. Then twenty. Then five. Then eighteen and a half. Then five again. When he’d gotten both benchmarks correct three times in a row, she called it good.

“Whew!” he said after she’d declared success. “I was beginning to think you were going to keep me after school.”

“You wish,” she giggled.

“Now, the hard one, she looked up to make sure he was paying attention. “Amps. Amps is flow. Like water. Watch.” the little quicksilver puddle began to vibrate. “About thirteen milliamps,” she informed him. Basically ambient. You get this just waving your fingers around.”

A threadlike finger of quicksilver oozed slowly away from the central mass of the puddle and began to crawl around her palm. “That’s one,” she said. “Now you’re looking at, say, an electric clock or something, depending on voltage.”

The thread thickened and sped up, circling her palm. “There’s your target,” she announced. Four point seven amps. Fix it in your mind.”

They went back and forth like they’d done with voltage until she was satisfied he could duplicate the feat.

Finally, she plugged the cord in and directed the flow down the proper finger. “This part’s tricky, too,” she warned. “You need to focus pretty hard the first couple of times you do it. Reversing polarity is bad for batteries. After awhile, though, it gets to where you can do it almost on a subconscious level.”

He nodded again and watched. And kept watching. “Uhm,” he ventured after several minutes. “How long does it take?”

She rocked her head back a few inches and her eyes sharpened. “I’m feeding it the same voltage at the same amperage as the charger,” she sighed. “You tell me. By the way,” she added. “See if it’ll turn on. I’m not a smart charger, so we’ll want to watch the onboard gauge and stop at ninety-five percent. Just to be sure.”

It took another ten minutes before the laptop would power up, and then they waited some more, as the sun sank towards the horizon. He was mad to dive into the files, but the harder he used it, the longer it would take to charge, and they were already looking at being chained to it for more time than he felt comfortable with. “How long can you keep this up?” he wondered after twenty minutes or so.

“That depends, she grinned. “What kind of games do you have loaded?”

“I’ve got a copy of Steam and Chao—”

“NO!” she shot back so quickly he flinched. “I hate that game,” she added in a more measured voice.

“You’ve played it?” his eyes widened. “Bob led me to believe that there weren’t many copies distributed.”

“Fifteen,” she nodded, frowning. “It was only offered to thirteen online accounts, and seeded in two brick and mortars. And only in the United States. Oh, and one guy in Western Alberta, in Canada.”

He whistled. “And your people knew about every one, huh? Spies, or just really good guessing?”

She gave him another shrug. “No idea,” she said. “We were just given the targets and sent on our way.

“So how did you get a copy?”

She didn’t answer right away. She got the sense that he already wasn’t quite over being angry, and she didn’t want to freshen that anger. “Kahn,” she said, finally. “My brother. He broke into your house one morning while you were at work, hacked your password, and cloned a copy of your game service account. Then he logged on with our laptop and downloaded a fresh copy.”

“The hell?” his eyes flared with the fresh anger Chi had been afraid of. “Why me?” he demanded. “Why not any of the other fourteen?

“Because you were the one,” she told him seriously, holding his eyes with hers. “That didn’t take us long at all to decide. We knew within the first month. Of all the possible candidates, only you checked anywhere near enough boxes. And so we wanted your save files as well as the game itself. To map your playstyle, in case something went wrong and you somehow made it to Tarr.”

“My saves, too, huh?” he asked, voice tight. “So what happened to the others?”

Again, she held her answer for a long time. “While we were pretty sure they were decoys,” she told him. “Our master wasn’t in the mood to take chances.” She hesitated again, careful to keep the emotion from her voice. “You had him pretty worried for some reason. Well, one of you, if not necessarily you in particular. So we mapped their routines and put them on the list. Then we concentrated on you.

"When word came down, you were all to be dealt with in order, from most likely to least.”

He thought about that for awhile before responding. “So, the others are probably okay, then?”

She took a deep breath before answering. “No idea,” she said. “We can ask Cha when she wakes up, I suppose. She and Kahn may have finished the mission, or the Dread Lord may have pulled the plug after you dragged me into the void with you. Or he may even have sent other teams to deal with them. I just don’t know.”

“Great,” he growled. “More lives on my conscience.”

Chi didn’t see it that way, but she didn’t protest. He had a habit of carrying burdens, had her Jack, and trying to talk him out of them wasn’t generally a profitable pursuit.

“So,” he ventured after feeling sorry for himself for awhile. “You’ve played the game.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say that,” she corrected. “I said I hate it. There’s a difference.”

He cocked an eyebrow, but she’d clammed up. “And that is?” he wondered leadingly.

She flashed him a short glare from her orange-red lava eyes, but he seemed intent on knowing. She huffed and rested her chin in her hand, elbow on the bench, forcing her eyes back to blue. “S&C isn’t a normal game, you understand?” she asked in a slightly brittle tone.

“I got that, yes,” he nodded.

“It has a number of features that aren’t exactly... obvious,” she went on as though he hadn’t answered. “One of them is that it defaults to record mode. I’m not even sure the feature can be turned off.”

“Record mode?” his eyes sharpened.

“We watched you play,” she confirmed. All seven playthroughs.”

He’d beat the game ten times, and had been nearly through his eleventh playthrough when she and her sister had come a’calling, but he didn’t correct her. The number even gave him an idea of when they’d broken in.

“The game was supposed to record your voice and expression as you played,” she continued. “But you’d apparently disconnected the mic on your computer and covered the camera, so we didn’t get any of that.”

Her voice grew harsher as she recounted the particulars, but he wasn’t sure why.

“Chi?” he interrupted at one point. “I don’t get it. Why...? I mean, I get the impression you’re no great fan of this Dread Lord. So what is it about me killing his—”

“Feuerbacher Eisen Bergwerk,” she spat. “Ring a bell? The Dead Swamp Iron Mine?”

“Ah,” he gave it some thought. “Yeah,” he said, “it was a sidequest. I only did it twice, though, since it—” He stopped dead, eyes going wide.

“That isn’t what it’s called on Tarr,” Chi’s voice was gravel. “ And we were never told what was behind that final door. Just that we couldn’t allow anyone through. At the cost of our very lives.”

“Chi,” his voice was measured. “I’ve never actually been to Tarr. Not yet, at least. And I’ve never been to the—”

“You killed me!” her voice broke. “Twice! And my little sister and big brother, too.”

He put a hand over his eyes. “I obviously didn’t,” he sighed. “You’re here with me, very much alive, and your sister is—”

“By proxy, then. It was still me, or would have been.”

This was getting silly. “Chi,” he tried again. “Are you honestly angry about my killing a not particularly high resolution video game representation of a demon who might have been you before I knew who you were?”

“Twice,” she emphasized. “And there wasn’t any might about it. I was there. For a stupid rifle that wasn’t even very good.”

“Which was why I only did the sidequest twice,” he started before realizing what he was saying. “No. Never mind that,” he shook his head.

“Chi,” he gave her a level stare. “You hit me with a bus! Not a video game representation of me, but the actual me. With an actual bus!”

“And you were angry about it,” she accused.

“Of course I was angry about it!” his voice climbed. “It was a bus, Chi! Steel and aluminum and... not pixels arranged in the rough two-dimensional shape of a bus, but an actual friggin’ bus!”

“I said I was sorry,” she countered.

He flopped back on his stool, flabbergasted. “Fine,” he said. “I’m sorry I...” he stopped himself before he could dig the hole deeper. “I’m sorry I killed you in the game.” and when he saw her draw breath to respond, he added, “both times.”

Chi deflated and sagged back. She still hated the game, and she would probably never come to grips with how his character had slaughtered them in the boss room of the mine, but she would accept his apology. It was probably a dumb thing to be angry about anyway.

“So,” she asked after she’d calmed herself down, “what other games have you got on this thing?”