“Syl,” Jennifer greeted him curtly, scanning his expression. “You weren’t at the service.”

Someone had noticed? He wasn’t surprised that his lack of attendance had been noted, but he hadn’t expected a student, even a member of the Reserve, to call him out on it so fast.

“Had places to be,” he said vaguely.

Jennifer eyed him with increased suspicion at that. “Do I want to know?”

“You’re the one who can tell me whether or not you’d like that,” Syl said. “You have something new in your fab today.”

After the service, the mood around the campus had become sharply subdued. Very few students had wanted to continue working after they’d just buried four of their classmates, which meant Jennifer and Syl were alone in the graduate lab now.

“This exact thing is what I’m curious about,” Jennifer said, gesticulating towards him. “Four students are dead, Syl.”

“I am well aware,” Syl said. He’d seen some of them die, too.

“And yet you’re more interested in what I have in my fab?”

“Aren’t you?” Syl asked, arching an eyebrow. “You forgot that there was even going to be a service while we were at the circuit meeting.”

“That was… unrelated,” Jennifer said. “I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“Let’s ignore the excuses for the time being,” Syl suggested. “You’re used to losing people, aren’t you?”

She started at that, adjusting her glasses to buy time before she spoke. “You’re certainly direct.”

“I’m an engineer and a soldier,” Syl said. “We have that in common. You’re an eighth year. That would have made you twelve during the war. As a prismatic, too? I can’t imagine you’re unfamiliar with loss.”

“You get used to it,” she admitted.

“Not everyone does,” Syl said. “But it seems we have.”

“We? You’re seven years younger than me. You were five during the war.”

That wasn’t strictly true, but the actual answer was a can of worms that Syl didn’t want to open. It was also ridiculously classified, which was another point against explaining.

“I’ve had my fair share of loss too,” he said instead. “You know how people end up with my last name, right?”

Jennifer’s eyes widened. “I—that was insensitive of me.”

Syl shook his head. “I don’t mind. Just trust me when I say I know what it’s like.”

That got a nod out of the older engineer. She fidgeted with her glasses, then the buttons on her uniform blouse.

Flux hypersensitivity, Syl thought. It wasn’t uncommon for that to manifest itself as an inability to sit still even when the worst of it was suppressed by specialized glasses.

“You were working on something,” he prompted her.

“Ah, yes,” Jennifer said, putting her hands down and leading him to her fabricator. “It’s still a work-in-progress, obviously, but I’m hoping to get a prototype done by the time we have to face Cascadia in their games.”

“This isn’t eye equipment,” Syl said, giving her fab a once-over. “You’re modifying an FCD.”

“I am,” she confirmed. “One of my own, in fact. Originally, I was thinking about some kind of surgical implant in the long run to manage symptoms, but the incident at the Gate changed things. I got a lot of data.”

There it was again. Syl could recognize when someone else had been as hardened to death as he’d been. Though she’d said all the right things in terms of expressing sympathy, there wasn’t an ounce of trepidation in her voice when discussing the incident that had ended the lives of four of her classmates and colleagues. It was just data.

“You had measurements going?” Syl asked.

Jennifer shook her head. “Benefit to being Reserve leadership. I got recordings from all the active FCDs in the area.”

Syl fronwed. “That would just get data from Reserve members, though. Shouldn’t you already have that?”

“Ordinarily, yes, but Uriel was running a constant routine to analyze the ambush after it started,” Jennifer said. “Here, look at the monitor.”

She gestured, tapping at a holographic interface until she had detailed readings from a certain FCD.

“Mind if I download it?”

Jennifer considered that for a moment. “You’re acting in official capacity as my lab assistant, so it should be fine.”

Syl downloaded the data, then scanned through it. The readings were mostly noise—tens of thousands of lines of raw input, most of which hadn’t been sorted through.

Jennifer had highlighted the parts she’d found interesting, so Syl skipped to those. If he was reading the report right, Uriel’s perception spell had found details of certain water-based projection, conjuration, and transmutation-type spells.

“Cascadian magic,” he said. “That’s what you were looking at?”

Well, he couldn’t blame her for that. He’d been doing much the same himself anyway.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Their school of magic is substantially different from ours, but… hm.”

She caught herself halfway through launching into an explanation, and Syl sighed. This again. Aurian standards around their research really did make things so irritating. It had taken him so long to assemble a group of engineers who were willing to see beyond what they were told to think, and Incarnate had risen from that.

It hadn’t been him doing most of the assembling, to be fair, but it had still been a pain nonetheless.

“Do you believe that Aurian magic theory is the only magic theory?” Syl asked tiredly. “I’m assuming not, since you’re working on this.”

“No, and it’s frankly ridiculous that we pretend otherwise,” Jennifer hissed. “It—excuse me. Revolutionary talk isn’t good for the lab.”

Syl wasn’t terribly surprised by her position. It was growing increasingly clear that while he’d been active in the field, the newest generation of prismatics had grown steadily more bitter towards the system that benefited them the most.

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He had read banned history books about this phenomenon before. Studies of society before flux integration. This wasn’t the first time that educated, wealthy students had spoken defiant whispers to each other, and it was certainly not going to be the last.

Finally seeing it in action was… worrying wasn’t quite the right word, but it was a wake-up call.

“Then we’re on roughly the same page,” he said, realizing he’d been silent for too long. He was still too used to being around people who didn’t expect him to speak and understood his silences. Jennifer, however, had never known Syl before an FCD had replaced his voice. “I’ve been studying what I remember of it as well.”

“What you—don’t tell me you memorized spells that were being cast at you.”

“That’s besides the point. What have you been trying?”

Jennifer shook her head in amazement. “I can’t believe you haven’t been snatched up by some black ops program yet.”

Syl resisted the urge to laugh. I wouldn’t be the one getting snatched.

“So?”

“Right,” Jennifer said, brushing down her blouse. “I was looking at how the Cascadians cast their spells. They’re fast, aren’t they?”

“Extremely so,” Syl said. “Efficient, too. I can replicate their spells, but I’m stuck on their exact process.”

“Wait a second,” Jennifer said. “You can replicate their spells? After just seeing them once?”

“Do you want to see one?” Syl asked.

“What—I mean, sure, but I can’t replicate them even with these readings! Like, for instance, this one”—Jennifer pointed at a highlighted chunk of lines—“I can’t even figure out what this one did.”

Syl glanced at it, the reading bringing back a memory of one of the spells he’d seen cast. “I can’t perfectly replicate this spell. I don’t know the specific activation process because it was already fully cast by the time I got there.”

“You say that like you can partially replicate it,” Jennifer said.

“I probably can. Do you have a glass of water?”

The green-haired engineer raised her wrist, tapping away at her FCD, and a sphere of water appeared hovering in front of Syl.

“That’ll do.”

Closing his eyes, Syl ran through the spell processes that he did remember. It wasn’t too hard to backfill what had probably been there, though he knew he was almost certainly wrong. This wouldn’t be as effective or efficient as the actual spell without refinement, but he had enough pieces for something of a replica.

He cast silently, as always. There was no point in using a command phrase. He didn’t know what it would be, anyway.

Jennifer’s water sphere suddenly exploded outwards, then froze in place. Syl’s spell had turned it into a structure made entirely out of spikes, swirling in on itself.

“It’s a water shaping spell,” he said. “I assume they upcast a tactical-class spell. I don’t know the actual name of it, but it would have been used for fine control of surrounding water. Compared to regular Water Manipulation, this seems to emphasize beating anyone else trying to take control of it—like, for instance, a drowning magician fighting back.”

Jennifer huffed out a disbelieving breath. “I got maybe sixty percent of that at most when I was looking through it, and that took me hours. You’re a genius, Syl.”

“I appreciate the words,” Syl said, “but it’s more of a party trick than genuinely useful. Also, I don’t think you’ve explained what you’ve done yet. Again.”

“Of course.” Jennifer sighed. “It’s not particularly impressive compared to that stunt you just pulled, but it does show promise.”

She took the FCD she’d been working on out of the fab. Unlike her regular one, this one came in two parts, one of which looked something like a monocle.

Jennifer took her glasses off and winced, looking down and blinking hard before putting the monocle on and looking back up, still squinting.

Syl tamped down on the amount of flux he was passively circulating. There was a lot of flux in his body, and it was probably best if he avoided getting that spotted out. It also couldn’t hurt to extend someone with hypersensitivity a bit of courtesy to not blind her.

“Like you can see, it’s two-part,” she said. “It reads the flux reflected in my eyes and calculates accordingly. It’s much leaner than a detection device this precise would normally be. A win for having to risk blindness every time I open my eyes.”

“That’s an interesting workaround,” Syl said, leaning forward. “Very flexible design, too.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer beamed. “I was looking through the readings, and I noticed something pretty interesting when they were casting. At first, I thought it was just flux fluctuation, which is very typical in a reading like this, but it wasn’t.”

Syl raised an eyebrow. He had memorized a great deal of the spell pattern thrown at him, but he had still been fighting. It was very possible Jennifer had found insights that he hadn’t.

“Now, keep in mind that I’m not sure if my theory is anywhere near the answer here,” Jennifer said, “but I did find an interesting method that has some limited usage. Would you mind taking a quick detour?”

“Not at all,” Syl replied.

They didn’t even have to leave the lab for her detour. Jennifer took them both to a testing pool fifty meters long, twenty wide, and five deep. It was apparently for offensive spell testing and was a near exact mirror of a similar pool used in the practical portion of the entrance examination.

“The special aspect of the FCD isn’t on yet,” Jennifer said. “Here we go. Aqu exlr!”

That was the standard command phrase for Manipulate Water, which she cast with perfect form. Upcast from D to A-class, it was enough to lift a significant portion of the pool up into a simple cube before she let it drop back down, using the spell to keep the water from splashing them.

“By my measurement, that was about four and a half seconds,” Jennifer said. “Took extra time to do everything because I was working with more flux and more water, yes?”

“A solid time,” Syl said.

“Sure, but nothing special. I was never great at conjuration magic.”

The monocle flickered to life, a green light blinking on its frame.

“And here we go again,” Jennifer said. “Aqu exlr!”

She executed the same set of motions with the water—except this time, it seemed to play in fast motion, finishing the entire process in under two seconds.

This, too, wasn’t the exact process that the Cascadians had used. It was, however, far closer than anything Syl had managed so far. Judging from the current rate of information exchange between the two countries, it was likely closer than he’d ever get.

Syl whistled, clapping twice before speaking. “Very impressive. Why are you still in the Reserve with engineering prowess like that?”

Jennifer’s cheeks colored. “Thank you.”

“I’m not saying that just to compliment you,” Syl added. “I would understand if you needed the resources, but you’re a prismatic. You could get a job anywhere. I’m sure Incarnate would take you with skills like this.”

“It’s exactly because I’m a prismatic,” she said unhappily. “There’s a very specific life path set out for the Green family, and I’m on it. I have years before I can start serving my country a different way.”

She practically spat the words serving my country out.

“But that’s besides the point,” she said, recollecting herself. “The point is that I identified a pattern. You get used to doing that when you have eyes like mine. It’s a bit strange, but the gist of it is that when the conditions are right, the natural flux moves in a way that makes certain areas very amenable to being used for magical purposes.”

“Hence the pool,” Syl realized.

“Yes. The flux here is more likely to naturally form water-based patterns. That must have been the case in the Gate, too. More than just forming those patterns, though, what’s important is that it holds them really well.”

Syl had read scientific literature on this point before. It wasn’t a very well-studied phenomenon—at least, not in Auria.

“You exploited that, then.”

“I did,” Jennifer said, her eyes burning bright with passion and possibly also the flux emitting from her. “This FCD runs a program to identify the most effective location to hold a pattern for a given spell and pre-renders an activation process there. Since the flux itself is holding the pattern, it doesn’t take processes away from me, and I can have multiple active at the same time. I have five separate activation process windows available for Manipulate Water right now, for instance, but all of my processes are still available.”

Syl blinked, processing that.

Then he processed it some more.

“Jennifer, you are brilliant,” he said. “This is going to change a lot.”

“You think so?” Jennifer asked, unable to stop herself from smiling. “You’re not so bad yourself, Syl.”

“Save your design,” he said. “If you’re into patents, you should get one, but I don’t particularly care. I’m going to work on your project.”

He filed everything she’d just said away. How had he not thought to look at it that way before?

Because I don’t see the world the same way she does.

“I’m honored,” Jennifer said, deactivating her FCD and putting her glasses back on. “I’ll send you the designs. Oh, and by the way—would you be free to meet outside of school sometime before the circuit? Just the two of us.”

“Why not in the lab?”

Jennifer stared at him, a complex and somewhat confused expression on her face. “Uhhh… because I want to?”

Syl had some ideas for what he could do with this and get back to her on. Doing so inside or outside the lab was immaterial. Doing it outside would be a good practical test, anyway.

He briefly wondered if this extracurricular meeting was what Bianca had warned him about with respect to “being careful,” then dismissed the concern. He could handle himself.

“Of course,” he said. “Let’s do it.”