I was home alone so of course the first thing I did was take over the apt speakers and start broadcasting a playlist from my phone's Bluetooth. The first couple of notes registered in my brain, but pretty soon the music dropped into the perfect background noise as I flopped into the janky gaming chair in my bedroom and docked my phone into the homework desk so it would project a full size screen and a haptic keyboard.

I set up the RA from earlier to stream videos of powers up in the top left corner and then checked for anything new. There was a reddit thread on conspiracies that looked like it was aggregating the same kind of information I was looking for and I resolved to lurk in it, pinning it to another corner. Then I was out of distractions and had to face the elephant in the room.

This morning had left me with three important lessons. First off, so far it looked like going utility mage wasn't a popular choice. There were direct combat applications to just about all the powers I'd discovered so far. That meant in any kind of confrontation with another trial taker I'd be at a pretty severe disadvantage, so it was important that I kept my powers on the down low.

Secondly, Kevin had shown more and better powers than anybody else so far. He also lasted about a third of a second against a dude with a gun. I replayed his death in my head and grimaced. Meghan had some kind of invincibility thing going, so maybe that wouldn't work on her but I was definitely vulnerable to it. Don't get shot seemed common sense enough it didn't need saying, but what about getting a gun so I could do some shooting myself. I couldn't carry at school, but it was probably worth it to look into getting something to start training with. Despite extensive video game knowledge, actual gunfighting wasn't in my skillset..

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The third and most important takeaway was that I'd screwed up with my runes. I wiggled the nubs that had already grown back on my left hand. Eventually the sharpie on my wrist would wash off, and the whole point of runes was the permanent effects. Unless I could get more Anima somewhere I was limited to about... I paused to feel that internal gauge and contrast it to this morning, maybe half a rune in the tank, so conservatively 1 a day.

Moving forward I need to be intentional with these. Build up a set of permanent runed stuff that would make me a contender in whatever this new world turned out to be. I mentally sorted through the runes I'd used in the trials, leaning heavily on my Akashic connection to check for other possible runes.

It seemed like each rune embodied a single concept. Regeneration, cold, death, safety. I meditated on it a minute, trying to double down on the akashic field and nodded in satisfaction. It felt like it would be possible to combine two of them for a more complicated effect. Hair and Death combined would basically shave anything that came into its area of effect. Not terribly useful, but the first example that sprang to mind.

I started a list of runes I knew I wanted, figuring I could prioritize and sort them later. It was pretty heavily influenced by fiction I'd consumed in the past, but I fought to keep it grounded in reality. It was a bigger challenge than I'd expected and before I knew it the front door opened and my little sister bounced into the apartment to complicate my life a little further.