WSP 058

  Higher Education

  Jeh and Krays stood before the Academy’s seven towers. They had been here before, multiple times in fact. It wasn’t like the sight was unusual in any way to them, despite the fact that the towers were all brimming with the Colors of magic rather spectacularly. It was just the way things were here in Axiom, like the Palace or the Great Tree; things that just dominated the skyline from almost everywhere within the city.

  Today, it felt different. For today, they were arriving as students. Unusual students, to be sure, who would fly in every weekday on a Skyseed and skip a lot of the classes designed for training magical talent. But they were students nonetheless.

  “It’s time to learn,” Jeh said, punching her fist into her hand. She wore her nice bear furs today, without the mittens, and had her pale teal hair in twin ponytails. A single side ponytail was how Jenny Zero had kept her hair, so Jeh had decided, why not have two to one-up her? Plus, she thought it looked nicer, more… energetic, somehow.

  Krays grunted. “Yes, a place of learning, where on this first day we’ll probably learn nothing.” She wore a simple shirt and skirt, both of which were blue, an attempt to make it clear what Color of magic she was pursuing. As new students, neither of them wore the robes or hats of an actual wizard; they would have to earn those, though Vaughan suspected it wouldn’t be difficult for them to earn their colorless hats.

  Jeh tilted her head. “Learn nothing? We’ve skipped all the classes we already know…”

  “You’ve never been to any school at all. First day is usually dominated by orientations to the classes and brief overviews for idiots who weren’t paying attention to the prerequisites, the magpies that they are.”

  “I’m sure we’ll learn something…”

  “This is going to be a slog the likes of which will turn our brains to mush.”

  “Krays, come on, we’re very lucky to be able to do this at all!”

  Krays frowned. “...Being grateful doesn’t come naturally to me.”

  Jeh rolled her eyes. “I hadn’t noticed.” Jeh put her hands on her hips. “You’re not going to be like this when Auburn takes us to the Wilds, are you?”

  “Depends on how many new tricks I learn here on how to slay monsters.” Krays grinned. “It’ll be a glorious hunting expedition.”

  “Yeah, well, we don’t meet up with Pepper until the afternoon…”

  “Surprise!” Pepper shouted, appearing behind them, her halo of fire flashing brightly.

  Neither Jeh nor Krays jumped.

  “Good instincts,” Pepper said, clapping her hands. “Though, I suppose you are more used to me than most new apprentices.”

  Jeh nodded. “What do you have planned for us today?”

  Pepper put warm, comforting arms over the two of their shoulders—a rather impressive motion, considering the difference in height between the two of them. “You two are going to be utterly humiliated, kicked onto your butts, staring at the sky, wondering how you got there.”

  Jeh frowned. “Hey, I’ve fought some pretty impressive things…”

  “Oooh, sounds like you actually need the humbling!” Pepper stood up and patted her on the head. “But that’ll be at the end of the day, we won’t start with me pounding you into the ground. I’ll make sure to let you two have some fun. And I’m sure you’ll both be really eager by the end of today.” She pulled a notebook out of her cloak and shook her head. “Not a single applications class. You are going to feel like zombies at the end of this.”

  Krays furrowed her brow. “I know it’s going to be boring, but…”

  “Sounds like I just need to let you two experience it!” Pepper clapped her hands. “Go have fun!” She scampered off like she hadn’t yet become a free leaf dryad.

  “At least she will be able to keep up with us,” Krays said as they walked into the ever-pulsing Magenta Tower of the Academy. “Adrenaline junkie that she is, I wonder if she’ll get me killed one day. But lucky you, no worries required, little immortal!”

  Jeh smirked. “I can spend all my time worrying about you then! Don’t worry, princess Krays, I’ll save you from the beast!”

  Krays rolled her eyes and focused her attention on finding the correct classroom. It actually took a bit of asking around to find the right location for their first class, but they’d arrived early for precisely this reason. The Magenta Tower had an organization to it; the halls were arranged in polygonal shapes, not a single curve to be seen on the interior structure. The design was more artistic than practical, and the halls wound in complex patterns that it was easy to get lost in. The rooms were labeled, but not in any sort of sequence or pattern.

  Eventually, however, they found themselves in a room with a few dozen desks. They weren’t the last to arrive, but pretty clearly, most of the others had been there a while. Only two students present had gray hats; the rest were like Jeh and Krays: hatless, though a few of them were wearing robes to try and indicate what Color of wizard they wanted to be.

  Krays and Jeh found a pair of empty seats near the middle of the room and sat down. No one paid Krays any mind, though Jeh got a few odd glances—she looked a lot younger than any student should have been, even with a special dispensation. One student sitting in the back seemed to put two and two together, and his eyes widened.

  Jeh shot him a finger guns gesture and a wink. He almost fell out of his chair.

  “Your reputation precedes you,” Krays muttered.

  “I may not be common knowledge, but lots of people have seen me fly the spaceships.” Jeh shrugged.

  “He’s already spreading word around the class about you,” Krays said.

  “So?”

  “Oh, no, having everyone know who you are can’t possibly be an issue, no, it’s not like you’ll get mobbed by people wanting to ask questions, nor will there be rivals who want to prove themselves better than you for stupid reasons, on and there definitely won’t be teachers who try to put you in your place just because you have a reputation.”

  “...It’s hard to tell with you if you’re exaggerating for effect or not.”

  Krays grinned malevolently. “You’ll find out eventually.”

  “ATTENTION CLASS!” A very old yet somehow very loud cat at the front of the room shouted, getting everyone to shut up immediately. “Welcome to an Introduction to Magenta Integration. In this class, we will explore the methods we use to calculate the effects of Magenta crystals prior to inserting them into any arcane devices.” With a disinterested yawn, he started using Orange to levitate the chalk and mark on the board. “We will begin by going over all the kinds of Magenta connections.”

  A lesser unicorn in the class raised her hoof.

  The professor sighed. “Yes…?”

  “Aren’t there hundreds of those?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Wouldn’t it take a lot of time to go over?”

  “Obviously. We won’t get through them all today; it’ll take a week or so. It’s important that you know them, for once you start designing arcane devices, if you forget a type of connection you can make, you fail to make the most efficient device. Not to mention arcane device repair, where you have to be able to identify every connection that may have been used, even nonideal ones. So you must know them all.” He suddenly turned to the class with hard eyes. “And before you all think you can just always refer to your handbooks, this is foolishness; you will not always have access to such records. This information must be in your mind, and I will be testing you on it.”

  Jeh tensed up. Okay, so maybe I do need to pay attention…

  What followed was the most boring and simultaneously stressful hour of Jeh’s life. It was ridiculous how much she felt like falling asleep and how panicked she was that she wasn’t learning the material. Even Krays seemed a bit taken aback by what was being presented to them.

  ~~~

  The Sourdough Twins were walking through the forest around Willow Hollow.

  And then they were in a desert.

  They turned to each other and nodded, pulling out the water balloons they carried on their person for this exact purpose. Wordlessly, they started assessing their situation. Given the position of the sun, they were significantly to the south of Willow Hollow and a little bit to the west. There were no signs of civilization in any direction. However, there were a lot of very tall cacti.

  Seskii could appear behind any one of them.

  This was far from the first time Seskii had done this. She was, in her own words, training them to “expect the unexpected” while simultaneously “letting it sink in exactly what kind of person they’ve signed up with.” That last part, it had become clear, had carried two meanings. Not just the kind of person Seskii was in terms of personality, but in terms of power.

  The Twins found it interesting that once Seskii wasn’t really trying to remain a huge secret, she was somewhat embarrassed that she had immense power, like the ability to transport them to a desert outside Kroan in an instant. This wasn’t just her trying to be subtle for practical reasons; she didn’t like using her power.

  But they were her students, and they had to become at least somewhat familiar with it. Which meant getting randomly jumped and thrown to bizarre places or, one time, taken to something Seskii had called a “game show” where they had to answer a bunch of weird questions within a time limit while a duck constantly shouted distracting sentences. They hadn’t understood that one, and Seskii had apologized later about it.

  Despite Seskii’s love for randomness and unpredictability, the Twins had started to notice patterns in her tests. Seskii specifically tried to drop in on them during mundane moments when they would least expect it, so they tried their best to always be prepared for those moments. Seskii loved being playful in her tests, so if an action was amusing or funny, the Twins could bet that Seskii was at least considering doing it. She loved making things appear one way, when really they were another, and often liked to hide little tests of character inside her games.

  The Twins had to admit, the tests were kind of fun, and they were training them well, in addition to making them grow as people. It had only taken about a week for them to realize that, for all their planning and careful training to conquer the world, they were totally unprepared for someone with real power taking an interest in them. They should have tried to be more subtle, clearly. Declaring that they wanted to rule the world and then showing the competence required to actually accomplish it had been a bad idea. Now the Emperor of Mikarol knew about them. They had thought this a good thing, proving that they really were on the right track.

  Seskii’s games had shown that this was clearly not the case. She could have effortlessly killed them, locked them away, or driven them absolutely insane. It was extremely fortunate that they were her students, not playthings.

  “I see you’re taking some of the hidden lessons to heart!” Seskii’s voice came from all directions.

  She also seemed to be able to read their minds. Sometimes. It wasn’t consistent, and it didn’t appear to be under her control. They hadn’t figured out the pattern behind it.

  “Probably because there isn’t one. It’s more akin to a work of art than anything.”

  “You’re doing it more often right now,” they said in unison.

  “Good observation, but I’d suggest not worrying about the mechanics of something even I’m not fully aware of, and instead focus on your challenge to—”

  Both of the Twins threw their water balloons at empty spaces where there were no cacti. The one tossed to the northern direction hit something… a painting made to look exactly like the desert scenery behind it?

  Seskii poked her head out from behind the painting. “Well. I’m legitimately unsure how you did that…”

  “Can’t read our minds at the moment?” one of them said.

  “No, and that makes it exciting!” Seskii grinned. “Care to explain h—”

  The other Twin threw a water balloon she’d been hiding at Seskii’s face. Seskii quickly ducked behind the painting, using it as a shield.

  Seskii’s laugh could be heard from all directions. “You still haven’t hit me!”

  “Aren’t you curious about how we found out?” one asked.

  “You were hidden perfectly,” the other said.

  “Let me guess…” Seskii’s voice still gave no indication as to where she actually was. “I’m thinking I have a subconscious tendency to hide in the least likely place, so you identified the two places that looked the most impossible for me to be hiding—places with literally nothing.”

  “Almost…” one said as she pulled out another water balloon.

  “But not quite,” the other added as she matched her sister’s action.

  “Oh?” Seskii asked. “What did I do to give it way?”

  “Your voice…”

  “...while it has no directionality…”

  “...you are still projecting it as you are saying it from wherever you actually are.”

  Seskii was silent.

  “You’re now thinking really, really hard about how that could possibly give anything away,” one said.

  The other nodded. “And you’re not saying anything in case we need more of your voice to give up your position.”

  “But you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “More words won’t help us anymore.”

  Suddenly, one of them jumped backward at an unusual angle. She jumped behind another painting of the scenery, throwing a water balloon right at Seskii.

  Seskii’s eyes widened in surprise.

  Then she caught the balloon in her hands without popping it.

  “...No one has that kind of reaction time!” the Twin complained.

  The other Twin showed up, furrowing her brow. She didn’t even try to throw her balloon. “The balloon should have popped by any touch too; we’ve made them particularly prone to that.”

  Seskii spun the balloon on the tip of her finger like a basketball. “Oh, if I didn’t cheat extremely hard and unfairly, you two would have totally won that round.”

  “Is it possible to surprise you?”

  Seskii smiled. “Yes, though usually not in a physical altercation. People’s hearts often surprise me. For instance, I did not expect peace with Sandy’s little society, nor did I expect the operation in Vraskal to end up with their entire base being uprooted. Sometimes things just go unexpectedly. Ah, but those are large-scale events, you mean small-scale interactions like this one. Well, wasn’t I surprised that you knew where I was at all?”

  The twins narrowed their eyes.

  Seskii shrugged, moving the water balloon along her arm back and forth. “Logically, it must be possible to beat me, as I am imperfect and have lapses in judg—” Seskii paused. “I’m setting myself up for failure. You two aren’t done yet.”

  “Oh come on!” They both shouted at once, groaning.

  Seskii rubbed the back of her head, looking sheepish. The water balloon just… floated there, in the air, where she left it. “Look, I’m old enough to know how these kinds of failures go. Just after I think I’ve really won an encounter, that’s when the real challenge begins. Let me guess, since we had entered the unspoken social contract of ‘well the test is over and now we’re complaining’ you would get close to me and try to jump me then, or perhaps explode the water balloon I have in my hand with a ranged attack of some sort that was nonetheless… one of you has a blowgun right now, don’t you?”

  One of the twins pulled out a blowgun and dropped it on the ground.

  “And only five water balloons have been used, you would have an equal number on both of your persons.”

  They pulled out a total of three more water balloons and laid them on the ground. The last two were extremely small, clearly custom-made—but Seskii had known about those ahead of time. As much as they tried to keep their special order to Krays a secret, Seskii knew to keep tabs on them.

  Still, she was rather impressed that they managed to carry all that on their person without looking overloaded.

  “And the second blowgun, please.”

  The Twins groaned, tossing the other blowgun on the ground.

  “Excellent!” Seskii clapped her hands. “Now, let me see here, given how this is going now, I think you’re probably still feigning dejectedness, as you have me in an unusual situation right now that’s uniquely vulnerable. So I think I’m going to call the test h—”

  There was a small explosion at the base of the false painting Seskii was standing behind. The painting fell over and bopped Seskii on the head.

  Seskii stared blankly ahead. “...Arcane device planted with a delay… that conveniently activated just as I was about to call it off… not triggering the victory condition, but clearly indicating that it’s possible to get the best of me…”

  The Twins shared a glance. “The timing means something.”

  “Yes… yes it does,” Seskii said. She pushed the painting back, allowing it to fall to the ground unceremoniously. With a clap of her hands, they were back in Willow Hollow. “I’ll consider that a loss. Congratulations!”

  “It feels like we got lucky,” one said.

  “You did. But by the time you’re done training with me, hopefully you’ll be able to exploit ‘luck’ from time to time.” Seskii grinned wildly. “In fact, I think this is an indication it’s time to teach you a little more.”

  The Twins perked up.

  “I promised you potions. Well, it’s time for potions.”

  ~~~

  The City in the Sky progressed considerably. There was now a sleeping module, which Claire was immensely thankful for. Having a soft wall you could strap yourself to was simply heavenly compared to the loose sleeping bags they had been waiting for. Not to mention, there was a restroom there. Tiny, cramped, and awkward, but at least it was something. There was also a single, simple laboratory, where they were experimenting with growing plants. Scurfpea had been up the other day, proving that her power worked excellently. Today, though, there were a couple Blue wizards trying to figure out how to replicate the Dryad attribute. To be fair, they’d had some success, but it involved continually changing out the soil and a large amount of excess water. Meanwhile, Scurfpea’s power just… made the plant grow faster, and in whatever shape she wanted. She could even make it grow extra fruit.

  “How does she do it?” The Mikarolian woman asked.

  The Kroanite man shook his head. “I have no idea, the laws of magic still apply to attributes, the mass and energy have to come from somewhere…”

  “I still think it’s being taken from the soil; it’s just that the attribute can act like Green does, targeting specific materials, but Blue magic forces the plant to use its normal methods, which aren’t as efficient.”

  “But how would we prove this?”

  “We’d need Scurfpea present, to see how many plants can be grown in the same soil before it stops working…”

  “If it ever did.”

  The two of them and Claire were the only ones on the station at the moment. Claire found that she didn’t mind their presence, even though she could hear their argument anywhere in the station. As the only permanent resident of the City in the Sky, she never had to deal with any single person for more than a few weeks, and she found the dynamics of continually having new people around novel. It was a far cry from “home” in Descent, where it was the same idiots day in and day out. Here, just when she was about to get tired of someone, they left and were replaced by someone else.

  She liked it this way.

  “The new module’s arrived,” Claire told the wizards as she floated by the door of their lab. “I’m going out to attach it.”

  They acknowledged her with a wave of their hands and continued their argument.

  Guess they’re not all that interested… good, means I’ll get to play with the new toy without being crowded.

  Claire took one of the Mikarolian skyrippers out of the hangar—the new ship designed to dock with the station directly wasn’t quite complete yet, so this was her favorite choice. May the Blimps never find out that she found their cube ships the least useful.

  She evacuated as much of the air from the hangar as their fans would allow in ten minutes—which was a lot but not everything—and opened the doors, drifting off into space. There, attached to nothing in particular, sat the latest module. This one was square on one end, which held the airlock, but on the other end, it was circular. It was also quite long and had a hinge in the center that could change the relative orientation of the cylindrical section to the rectangular one.

  The telescope module.

  She gave a Purple signal to the Kroanite skyseed that had dropped it off, telling them their work was done. She carefully grabbed the module in her Orange Magic and performed the now routine motions of attaching a new module. Careful, slow, but deliberate, the two airlocks slid into place along their guides. Inside the station, a click would have occurred, but Claire had never heard it herself. She was always the one who did this part.

  The thought occurred to her that someone else would probably have to be trusted with it at some point. She greatly disliked that idea, even if she got to personally train them. It was so easy to break something doing this, and if she had to rely on someone else to attach something to her station, she suspected she wouldn’t be able to keep from strangling the offender.

  …She supposed it wasn’t actually her station, but she lived here. That was close enough.

  She took some time to make sure the module was attached properly before returning to the hangar. She closed the doors, repressurized the area, and floated out of the skyripper.

  Stars above, floating is so much better than walking…

  She drifted into the control module, checking to make sure connections were going through. A gari from Kroan currently sat in the main seat, using her will to recycle the air and keep the lights on. He was eating a sandwich and barely paid Claire any mind as she adjusted some crystal conduits.

  One of the sandwich crumbs got in Claire’s eye.

  We really need to put tighter constraints on what kinds of food we allow up here, she thought to herself as she rubbed her eye, extracting the offending crumb.

  With that, she returned to the central module, drifting toward an unopened airlock. She pulled the crank, opening the airlock. There was a brief rush of air, but the module had come with air already in it, so the effect wasn’t dramatic. The powers that be had decided it was better to seal up the air in the module ahead of time, now that the station itself was fully functional; there was no need to strain the fans with continual rapid pressure adjustments. The exception was the hangar, but even that was intended to be phased out for ships with proper airlock designs on them.

  Claire drifted into the telescope module. It appeared smaller than the others from the inside, but that was only because the bulk of the module was the telescope itself. There were a few tables and chairs on all four of the walls, and one singular chair in the “back” of the room that was currently upside-down relative to Claire’s current orientation. In front of that chair were a lot of knobs, levers, and cranks… and a flat glassy surface that dominated the forward view.

  Claire twisted herself into the chair and strapped herself in. She placed her right hand on one of the levers, making contact with the crystals within. She used her left hand to flip a big red switch. She heard a thunk. Given how the glass in front of her suddenly became slightly brighter than truly black, she believed that the switch had opened the telescope’s end cap, as it was supposed to.

  A smile came to her face. I’ve been waiting for this… let’s see what we can look at.

  She checked a star chart literally engraved into the wall to her left, and then compared it to a measurement she had made a note of just prior to attaching the module. Given the station’s current heading and orientation, she would be able to point the telescope at Qi. That would be a good first test.

  The original design for the telescope would have required rotating the entire station to point it anywhere. That idea had been shot down, eventually, and now the telescope itself had a leeway of about ten degrees in any direction. Moving outside that range would require moving the station, but for now, there was no need. Plus, that would require coordinating with someone else, and Claire was in the mood to play with her new toy, not wrangle idiots.

  The smart ones are the worst idiots…

  Orienting the telescope took time. It was decidedly heavy—so heavy that it was prohibitive to build such a thing for use on Ikyu under the force of gravity. Down there, it would have taken massive amounts of power and tremendous machines just to orient the hulk of metal and glass, not to mention keep it stable. Up here, it just took a lot of time for a hand crank to move it. This was actually a feature: it was possible to point very precisely, given how little it moved with a single turn of the crank.

  As she moved it, a flash of light darted across the glass in front of her. A star. It…

  …it was just a point of light. It didn’t look any different. She tried adjusting the “focus” of the telescope—she wasn’t entirely clear on why that was supposed to blur and unblur the image, but it involved moving one of the lenses forward and backward with a knob. However, while she could make the star much blurrier, she could never resolve anything more than a pinprick of light.

  I am at minimum magnification…

  Claire looked to another crank, this one located slightly above her. She turned it. This crank made a lot more noise than the others, for it was not simply rotating a heavy object, but extending it. This increased the magnification markedly, but she could also flip some other switches to add more lenses. This magnified the image even further. However, there was a cost. Something the wizards called “chromatic aberration.” The edges of the field of view got blurred in a way that couldn’t be put into focus, and the edges of bright objects gained a little halo of color around them. Additionally, the overall image became dimmer since the light was being spread out considerably, but she could use Purple to brighten it. She had been warned against this, however, as Purple could not actually recover information that had been lost, so things that appeared featureless when brightened might not actually have been.

  She eventually reached maximum magnification. In the very center of her display, after refocusing, the star was still a point of light, though it had a little rainbow fringe.

  But she could see another, dimmer point of light next to it.

  Two stars.

  Despite the fact that this phenomenon was already known—surface telescopes had been able to identify a handful of binary stars like this—Claire’s grin still widened. She was probably the first to see this particular set of stars.

  Still, it’s a little disappointing… even at this zoom, no features of the stars themselves? How far away ARE they?

  Claire didn’t linger long. She checked her current orientation and turned the cranks once more, pointing to Qi.

  Or, well, she thought she was pointing at Qi. When she was done, the display was completely black.

  Hey, I’m sure this is right… She double-checked her orientation and her notes and where Qi was supposed to be. Everything matched. Except that the display was showing nothing.

  Was it broken? She didn’t understand how it could be; the star image worked just fine. Simply moving it should have changed nothing; the telescope was literally just a bunch of lenses in a straight line that projected light onto the display in front of her through a combination of a pinhole and a mirror. If the telescope was pointed at Qi, she should see something.

  The station would shift as I rotate the telescope, she realized. That would only shift everything a fraction of a degree; surely it didn’t matter?

  …Except she was at maximum magnification. Bother. She should have seen this coming.

  She flipped switches, removing the extra magnification lenses, but left the telescope fully extended. She knew that the extension crank was the most mechanically intensive one, and so should be used sparingly. Fortunately for her, simply removing the extra lenses was enough for her to see that there was a soft glow toward the top left of her display, indicating that Qi was likely just past the edge of her view.

  She didn’t go look at it immediately, though, because she had noticed something.

  Supposedly, she was looking at empty space right now.

  There were a lot of stars.

  Claire blinked. She had known that many stars were too faint to see, and that spirited with better eyes could see more in the night sky, or with telescopes, but still… there was nothing on her chart in this location, and dozens of points of light shone at her from the depths of space. One of them wasn’t even a point, and looked more like a smudge…

  She made a note of its location, but didn’t let herself get distracted again. Turning more cranks—yeesh, her arms were starting to get tired—she finally settled the telescope’s view on Qi. Though she did, rather embarrassingly, start rotating the telescope the wrong direction at first. Fortunately, no one was there to notice her mistake. Once the image settled, she could easily see four points of light in a line centered on Qi. The moons. And… was that a fifth point of light? Or… no, probably just a star, they were everywhere in the image, one just happened to line up with the others.

  Qi itself was… well, it was larger than she’d seen it in handheld telescopes. Both the stripes and the red spot were easily visible, though she still had to squint to identify all of them.

  It would have been mildly disappointing if this were all the telescope could do. But oh no, she didn’t have all the lenses in place. She flipped the switches, inserting the magnification lenses back into the line of the light.

  Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  The brightness of Qi lowered significantly as it was magnified—and it grew to dominate her display. The edges were fuzzy from lensing artifacts, but Claire didn’t care: the center was clear and vibrant.

  Her eyes widened. She leaned forward.

  She had no idea what she was looking at.

  The bands weren’t actually uniform. The edges were marked by swirls, ripples, and wispy patterns. The red spot swirled the bands around it. Smaller red and white spots dotted the planet in numerous locations, sometimes right in the center of the bands. Each band had a different character as well, with some appearing brown and murky, others white and pristine, still others with alternating swirl patterns within them.

  It… it almost looked fluid, but nothing was moving as she looked at it. Everything was static. Motionless.

  The ocean and clouds on Ikyu look motionless from up here.

  With this, she finally activated the primary arcane device part of the telescope. The telescope had been built with one of the best Purple imagers that could be made with a ton of Magenta to store hundreds of thousands of images, or so she was told. So long as someone could keep the picture in their mind’s eye.

  Well, she had no difficulty with that. She took the image and had it stored. She had to write down where in the large Magenta array it was stored—but all she put down was “Qi observation.” She would be able to switch the display to “read” mode to see the image again whenever she wanted, though the telescope couldn’t be used while she was doing that.

  She sat back in her chair, contemplating what she’d just seen.

  She had no idea what it meant.

  …She wanted to look at the moons now.

  The people at that Conference were going to eat all this up, and as the sole permanent resident of the City in the Sky, she was the one who got to see all of this first.

  Even she was shocked by how happy she was at that moment.

  ~~~

  Jeh and Krays stood outside Pepper’s warehouse laboratory just outside Axiom.

  “Now, usually I give the tour on the first day, but you two have already been here.” Pepper grinned. “So it’s time for pain. Just like I warned you!”

  Jeh and Krays took up defensive stances. Krays tapped her side. “Am I allowed to use my swords?”

  “You better, I want to see how you two actually fight.”

  Krays nodded, drawing her Red-infused hunting blade, crafted precisely for her by her husband. On the other hand, she had an armband with embedded Blue crystals. Jeh just cracked her knuckles.

  Pepper didn’t pull out a weapon.

  “Don’t you have a cool chain-scythe thing?” Jeh asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Pepper said. “I won’t need it, though.”

  “We aren’t exactly inexperienced,” Krays pointed out. “I was trained, and Jeh has all kinds of latent talents she might tap into at any moment.”

  Pepper nodded. “I’m well aware. And you might think me arrogant. Which, to be fair, Dia knows I have a tendency to that. But I am the best monster hunter in all of Kroan. I don’t know of anyone in this kingdom who could beat me in a fair fight. …Oh, well, okay, Benefactor, I suppose, and some of the larger Crystalline Ones. But I’m not sure I’d call that fair. So please. Come at me. With everything you have, don’t worry about any damage you might do to me.” She locked her hands behind her back.

  Krays glanced at Jeh. “Alright, pipsqueak, let’s go for…”

  Jeh charged at Pepper, lighting her fists on fire.

  Krays sighed. “Teamwork would have been ideal…”

  Pepper made no motions whatsoever. Jeh thrust her fist forward, and suddenly found the air in front of her very very hot. She didn’t care about the pain; it was nothing to her, but she felt a force. Her fist’s trajectory was moved to the side with a rush of air, missing Pepper’s face.

  Pepper took the opportunity to uppercut Jeh in the stomach. Even without magical enhancement, she lifted Jeh into the air and threw her to the side.

  Jeh landed flat on her face. “Ow…”

  Krays rolled her eyes. “Did you really think that would work?”

  “Not… really,” Jeh admitted, standing up. “Just testing the waters.”

  Pepper turned to Krays. “Why don’t you try to engage on your own? You are correct, teamwork is much better. But this is a learning opportunity.”

  Krays smirked. “Someone’s engaging in some perverse enjoyment right now. I thought you were devout? A little cruel, isn’t it?”

  Pepper laughed. “Ah, you’re going to be so much fun!”

  Krays started heating up her blade, and the Blue crystals in her bracelet started glowing. “Not even going to answer?”

  “Oh, I know you don’t really want one, you’re just trying to get a rise out of me. Which you probably will, eventually, my skin isn’t infinitely thick, I’ve just been around a lot.”

  “Rootless.”

  “Ooooh, quite rude, and targeted at my species specifically, you’re quite a piece of work. Your husband must be quite the character if he finds that mouth attractive.” Pepper’s expression faltered as she bantered.

  Great eights, Krays realized. She’s embarrassed at having said such an insult, even though I asked for it.

  That embarrassment was enough of an opportunity for Krayz. She accelerated herself, pulling a shard of glass out of her pocket with her free hand while pulling her heated Red blade back for a swing. The blade was the obvious part of her attack, intended to make Pepper focus on it. In her embarrassed state, perhaps she wouldn’t notice the feint as Krays threw the Blue-accelerated glass right for her face…

  An explosion went off in front of Pepper’s face, deflecting the glass shard with ease. With a smug grin, she flexed her arms back… and then caught Krays’ blade in between the palms of her hands. The heat seared against Pepper’s palms, but the Green somewhere within her kept her hands from losing their function. The only reaction the dryad had to the pain was a slight narrowing of her eyes. That smug smile remained.

  Krays didn’t let her shock keep her from continuing the attack. She accelerated her fist and aimed it right at Pepper’s head—and Pepper deflected it by manipulating the heat in the air. Krays had seen her do this to Jeh, so she was expecting it, and used the forward momentum to flip backward, trying to kick Pepper in the face as she pulled the sword free from Pepper’s loose grip on it.

  Except… the grip wasn’t loose. Pepper’s hands had baked onto the sword, somehow. Krays was thrown completely off balance, wrenching her arms as she lost her grip on the sword and fell back to the ground, dazed.

  Pepper chuckled. A burst of blue flame flew from her palms, and the sword dropped to the ground. An aura of Green quickly healed the burns. “You’ve definitely been trained. I suspect you’d actually make an excellent assassin-style fighter.”

  Krays stood up, grunting. “Have a bit of a flair for the dramatic, do you?”

  “It’s only fair, isn’t it, considering your techniques?”

  “I could tell you didn’t like insulting my husband.”

  Pepper looked sheepish. “I’m… well, I understand it doesn’t mean anything to someone like you, but… still goes against my nature, y’know? Hurtful words are horrid things.” Pepper put her hands behind her back. “Now, how about you two try something together?”

  Krays turned to Jeh, who nodded. Then Jeh blinked. “Uh, Krays, plan?”

  Krays sighed. “Why nod if you have no clue? Look, she’s obviously really good; we need to catch her unawares and overwhelm her. Try to attack at the same time as me from the opposite side. Also, don’t use fire punch against a fire wizard.”

  Jeh surrounded her fists in some kind of chilling, snowy aura.

  “Ah, cold powers!” Pepper looked excited. “That’s something I never get to train against! Good choice!”

  Krays and Jeh flanked Pepper. Krays didn’t try to rile Pepper up—the woman was already a little embarrassed, and it didn’t seem to have much of an effect on her mental state. Krays would probably need to get her actually angry to get a useful advantage, and it wasn’t smart to truly anger your teacher. So, just a fair fight.

  Krays realized she now believed that they had no chance against Pepper. This woman was a true warrior, despite her demeanor. She was very obviously holding back to give herself a challenge, and she still didn’t even look like she was trying. Perhaps… they could get a hit on her through her overconfidence?

  Krays rushed forward with Blue acceleration, and Jeh jumped forward. Pepper made no move to defend, but Krays still went forward with an attempt at a feint, slowing herself down rather than striking as quickly as she could, making her blade’s swing coincide with Jeh’s punch.

  Pepper didn’t even use magic this time. She jumped over Jeh’s fist and Krays’ blade. Krays tried to re-angle the blade to hit Pepper in the midst of her acrobatic motion, but in order to hit Pepper, Krays would have needed to take a hit from Jeh’s icy punch. She… she has to have gotten lucky; there was no way she calculated that.

  Jeh surprised Krays at this point. She used her other fist to try to swing at Pepper. Jeh twisted her fist behind her back. There would be no force from a traditional punch there, but hers was brimming with icy shards. She released an explosion of snowy particulates.

  Pepper’s eyes lit up in joy. A wall of blue fire appeared between her and the onrush of snow, disintegrating the attack entirely. Pepper fell back, but didn’t land prone, instead using her hand as a spring to jump into the air and come to a graceful stop on her feet.

  “Keep pressing!” Krays shouted. She accelerated herself once again, swinging her heated blade forward, using it as a cover for glass projectiles. It was with great annoyance that she noted the projectiles were some of the easiest things for Pepper to deflect. Jeh punched the ground, creating a burst of icy spikes upon a sheet of ice that approached Pepper, but she sidestepped the attack.

  Pepper grabbed one of the icy spikes that emerged from the ground and swung it around, the point hitting the flat of Krays' heated blade. The dramatic change in temperature caused the ice to explosively vaporize in a burst of steam so strong that Krays lost hold of her sword again, and it sank into the ground tip-down. The nearby grass sizzled.

  Then Krays got punched in the stomach just like Jeh had a moment ago. Great Eights, she’s got a mean right hook. Pepper’s punch was at an angle, throwing Krays’ body to the side, at Jeh’s next attempt at an attack. Jeh quickly removed the magic from her fists so she wouldn’t freeze Krays solid, but the firsts still made contact with Krays’ face, making her head spin.

  Jeh, however, did not let this deter her. She threw Krays over her head and jumped at Pepper again. There was a raw determination in her eyes as she did so. She clapped her hands together, creating a shockwave in the air. Pepper diverted it with a column of blue flame, somehow, but Jeh charged right through it, her entire body accelerated with so much Blue that it lit on fire. A field of Orange appeared around Pepper, pulling her toward Jeh.

  Pepper had less than a second to react. But she did it without breaking a sweat or even losing focus on her halo. Two bursts of extremely hot blue flame cut through Jeh’s hands, dropping them to the ground. Without her magical fists, Jeh panicked—and Pepper grabbed Jeh by the face, twisting her and throwing her to the ground.

  “...I didn’t know you could cut with Red,” Krays said, eyes wide. “Isn’t making a cutting force hard to do with Orange magic?”

  “It is,” Pepper said. “And it’s unimaginably hard with Red. But all you need is extreme heat and focused application; you can cut through most anything in an instant.”

  Jeh’s hands reformed, complete with the red gloves. She calmly removed the gloves and threw them nonchalantly at the charred stumps that were her previous hands. “That was awesome!”

  Pepper chuckled. “I am burning through a lot of my crystals, though, just to make a point. When actually out on a hunt, crystal conservation is important. Which is why we usually have weapons that don’t require such raw control and power, just clever manipulation.” She finally pulled out her chain-scythe from her robes. “I am not a great Orange wizard, but this weapon has devices that grant me incredible control even without much training. Mixed with my mastery of Red magic, I become far more dangerous.”

  “Do we get to fight you using that now?” Krays asked.

  “No, this is a very deadly weapon. Green or not, it’s not worth the risk. At least… not on you.” She swung her arm to the side and, before Jeh could so much as blink, she had been cut in half at the torso.

  “Hey!” Jeh shouted.

  Pepper giggled. “Sorry, sorry, the internal thoughts got the better of me… I should have given you a warning.” She bowed, seeming legitimately apologetic, though she was still chuckling.

  Jeh sighed as her lower body regenerated. She pulled the boots off her old lower half and stuck them on her new feet.

  “So, here’s my initial assessment of you two,” Pepper said. “You are not beginners; you have proper tactical mindsets and know how to coordinate and respond to unexpected stimuli. That’s an immense boon; it can take years to ingrain that kind of thinking in people.”

  “It did,” Krays said dryly.

  “I get the impression your original teacher took it way too seriously. I probably don’t take it seriously enough.” Pepper shrugged. “Regardless, from this fight alone, I have no issue sending you two on beginner to intermediate hunts. Most monsters that need slaying aren’t the smartest, and even a little cleverness can take them down. You both have some pretty obvious weaknesses that trained warriors or more intelligent monsters could exploit. Krayz, you fight with a lot of anger and rage; even though you attempt to rile up your opponents and get them to fall to emotional imbalances, you yourself are almost always fighting with the same disadvantage.”

  Krays blinked. “What? I’m in control of…”

  “Your attacks are more forceful than they need to be. Aggressive. You’re taking the battle personally; this is a flaw. We need to teach you to keep your head under duress. I also…” Pepper sighed. “There’s no nice way to put this, I suspect you have latent trauma from how you were trained previously, and the rage associated with that is weakening your technique.”

  Krays’ eyes narrowed and her stomach twisted. That was different from an insult. That held truth. She did not like that. But the fact that she didn’t like it just proved Pepper’s point, which made Krays even more furious, which proved her point even more…

  Krays ground her teeth. “...Point taken…”

  “I’m not entirely sure how to work through that, but I’ll be praying about it. You shouldn’t have to keep such pain in your heart.” With a nod, she turned to Jeh. “You… are far less experienced and refined in technique than Krays, but you are also far more powerful. You do not fight like a child, by the way; I can see moments in your eyes where you suddenly tap into ancient knowledge of thousands of battles. I would normally consider your recklessness a huge issue, but with your abilities, it may simply be a boon. If you do not need to worry about damage, overwhelm and confuse your enemy.”

  Jeh nodded. “Right.”

  “However, I think it is important that you learn refined combat skills. I am going to make you learn finesse. You will have many training sessions where you must pretend you are a weak human. You lose if you take a single hit.” Pepper grinned. “And, of course, we’ll be testing out your mysterious punching magic. You’re clearly just using it instinctually. But you are training to be a wizard, Jeh. Even those of us who are warriors use our minds to adapt to the situation and think our way out. You may have noticed that I used many clever, precise, and downright bizarre applications of Red magic to come out on top today. If you can learn that, you’ll become unstoppable.”

  Jeh’s eyes glinted with eagerness. “I’m ready!”

  “You’re not, but you will be.” Pepper chuckled. “Anyway, I do still need to see some of your techniques to figure out some more precise refinements on you two. So let’s try using normal weapons, without magic.” Using Orange, she levitated some swords over and tossed them onto the ground. “Krays clearly knows the basics. Let’s see about you first, Jeh…”

  ~~~

  Seskii brought the Sourdough Twins to a tree.

  “This… is the secret stash location for Willow Hollow,” Seskii explained. She turned to the two of them, grinning. “You’re going to be the first people I’ve shown one of these directly in a truly staggering amount of time.”

  “...And now the demons can get it from our mind,” one said.

  “Your minds are disciplined enough that you can keep it from your surface thoughts; they’d have to query reality to get it from you. And why would they ask you two about such a thing?”

  The two looked at each other. For once, there was a different emotional response on their faces, and it wasn’t because one was trying to mess with the others. The pained one looked at Seskii. “We… do lose our control when one of us is hurt.”

  Seskii nodded solemnly. “Back in the Tempest.”

  They nodded.

  “But that moment taught you two to be more careful, didn’t it? Made you realize your weakness?”

  They nodded again, a little less certain.

  “Then I’m not worried. If one of you gets hurt again, the plan has already gone off the rails. Besides, you two are supposed to be bureaucrats and shadow manipulators, not engaging in battles. That’s for other people to do.” She paused. “Most of the time.”

  “And the rest of the time?”

  Seskii pointed at the tree. “You’ll have some help. And help for the other times as well. You just have to be subtle about it.” She knocked on the tree three times, paused, then knocked a fourth. With that, the bark on the tree popped open, revealing a ladder inside leading underground. “Come on in, it’ll be musty and dank!”

  The Twins followed Seskii down into a somewhat large room buried under the tree. At first glance, it was akin to a hidden root cellar, nothing special. Just dirt, old wooden shelves, and a bunch of items stored on the shelves. Anyone who found it might have thought they found a bunch of old jam or preserves.

  But given the way the bottled contents on the shelves sparkled occasionally…

  “Potions…” the Twins said, eyes wide.

  Seskii grinned. “Yep! This is Willow Hollow’s secret stash. You’ll notice it’s disorganized.”

  “Anyone who finds it won’t have any idea what anything does…” one said.

  “...making it harder for them to abuse it,” the other added.

  “Precisely,” Seskii said. “Occasionally, a stash of mine will be randomly stumbled into, and the potions will be used, destroyed, or what have you. Often causes quite a disaster.”

  “...Then why have stashes?” one asked.

  The other nodded in confusion. “We’ve seen you make them out of nothing; you don’t need a stash at any given time.”

  “Observant!” Seskii chuckled. “In truth, most of the stashes are misdirection. I have them all over the place, and the demons occasionally catch wind of them, thinking I’m planning some kind of carefully coordinated armed rebellion with potion ‘weapons’ stored everywhere to be used at a moment’s notice by anyone.” She chuckled. “That’s what they expect me to try. That is not what I’m trying.”

  “What are you trying?”

  “Your minds aren’t secure enough to tell you my full plan. No one’s are.” She locked her arms behind her back and turned away from the Twins. “What we have here is a strange exercise in trust. I have to trust you without perfect confidence, and you have to trust me without perfect knowledge.”

  The Twins nodded. “We already agreed to everything,” they said in unison. “We trust you.”

  Seskii turned back to them, eyes sparkling with pride and joy that she wasn’t even trying to hide. She patted them both on the head. “What good, precious, diabolical girls you are.” With a chuckle, she gestured at the potions. “I’ll teach you to identify them. My potions may seem random, but you can actually use their color to identify their purpose. Usually. I sometimes play a little fast and loose with it on purpose, especially with the ones I don’t leave in stores like this.”

  “What kinds will we find here?”

  “You’ll find health potions, sense boosters, magical aptitude enhancers…” Seskii paused. “I know it’ll be tempting to give Blue one of those to actually grant her some magical talent, but we are supposed to be subtle in our use.”

  The Twins nodded in agreement.

  “You’ll also find a few invisibility potions, pain resistance, teleportation… yeah, there are a lot.”

  “You can make basically any effect you want, clearly,” the Twins said.

  Seskii nodded. “This is true, though I have self-imposed limitations for various reasons. Also, I don’t put any of the really wild and absurd ones in these stashes.” Her grin somehow widened even further. “But guess whaaaat?”

  “...We get to learn about those as well?” one asked.

  “Even better!” Seskii produced a potion with a gray, thick liquid inside. “Behold, an undeveloped potion.”

  The Twins’ eyes widened. “You… you don’t make those, do you?” they asked.

  Seskii shook her head. “Nope! I have no reason to myself, and they are extremely dangerous. Because you can theoretically make any effect that I could make within my imposed limitations. You just have to find the right ingredients.” She suddenly had an entire crate of the undeveloped potions and set it on the ground in front of them. “These are yours now. It’s time to learn how to brew.”

  The Twins stared at the potions with wide eyes.

  “Now, prepare yourselves for the rigorous training of potion brewing!”

  They looked up at her with raised eyebrows.

  “Ah, already know my tricks, do you?” Seskii chuckled. She produced a blade of grass from nowhere and tossed it into one of the undeveloped potions. It turned red. “Yeah, there was no reason for me to make it complicated.”

  “Some of the ingredients are probably complicated…” one said.

  “Oh yeah, if you want to transform into a spider, you’re going to need to harvest spider silk from a particular variety of spider that doesn’t even live on this continent.”

  The Twins started frowning. One tilted her head. “This is going to make it easier to trace us back to you.”

  “Yes, but if you use it subtly, and don’t make it obvious that you have an undeveloped potion, it’s not an automatic connection to me. The stashes do get found occasionally, and potions get used by unrelated people. That’s another reason for their existence. I haven’t had apprentices in so long, they’ll be so shocked.” Seskii spread her hands wide. “All you two have to do is be subtle!”

  The Twins nodded, soaking it all in. “We take it that the demons already know about these undeveloped potions?”

  “Yes, they know about them. Well, they can, if they ask. But if they know you have them, they will want them. Best if you stay away from demons, if you can.”

  Already, the Twins were thinking about how to go about this. In order to still have as much influence, they would have to enlist people to work under them, which… had been part of the plan Seskii originally laid out to them, which made so much more sense now.

  “The more we learn…”

  “...the more we realize how carefully you have planned this…”

  “...and how dangerous and risky it is at the same time.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” Seskii asked.

  The twins tilted their heads to the side. “...We are playing with fire here.”

  Seskii let her face become serious for a moment. “Yes. Your minds may be disciplined, but your knowledge can be queried. If they suspect you of having a direct connection to me, or they suspect who I am, the entire thing falls apart. But, fortunately, we have a time limit.”

  “What’s that?”

  Seskii grinned. “We only have to keep the secret until the interplanetary ship is operational.”

  The Twins looked at her. Something clicked in their minds.

  “We… we won’t be coming back to Ikyu, will we?”

  Seskii sighed. “You two really are too sharp… but that is what I needed.” She paused. “It’s… possible that you two may be able to come back. But I… I should get out of the Gronge Field as quickly as possible.”

  “...Are you running away?”

  Seskii shook her head. “Sorry, can’t say, if you are compromised…”

  The Twins opened their mouths, then shut them, confusion spreading to their faces.

  “Yes, if you don’t say your idea aloud, it is harder for them to query reality for it.”

  “That’s… annoying,” one of them said.

  The other held her head. “I mean, we both know what we were thinking, it’s just…”

  “That’s why you two are particularly well-suited for this.” She put her arms around their shoulders. “You two know each other so well that you can read each other’s minds better than a demon can. And before you go thinking ‘oh, that’s why we were chosen,’ no, there are others who can do the same, some married couples. You two are gifted.”

  They looked at her with… a slight amount of fear in their eyes.

  “No… no, I did not conspire events to turn you two into what you are today. I didn’t even register you two until Blue showed up. You two… are a gift from Dia.” She smiled warmly.

  “Are you gonna try to be our mom?” They said, bluntly.

  Seskii was taken aback; such an extremely rare thing on her features. She looked afraid for a moment, a dark shadow crossing her features. Then… she smiled warmly and pulled the two of them into a hug. “I… I hadn’t thought of that. But… that would be best, wouldn’t it?”

  The twins didn’t say anything; they just hugged her back.

  “...You two… recognized I needed something before I did…” Seskii laughed. “We… we still have to keep plausible deniability, that it’s still just business, that…” A tear rolled down her cheek. “...You two really are Dia’s gift…”

  They spoke, for once, out of unison, stumbling over their words. “W-we… we have to be s-so strong…”

  “There there… You don’t have to be strong around me, not anymore.” She pulled them close and sighed. “I declare your apprenticeship over. You’ve graduated. You… are now my family.”

  The three of them proceeded to relax… and let it all out. Tears of siblings who had lost their parents long ago. Wails of those who had lost so, so much, and couldn’t put the feelings into words. Gari who had suffered, and bottled it all away because others needed them.

  “...Don’t take them away from me,” Seskii whispered.

  She knew it was asked in vain, in some sense. They would eventually die from something. She would not. It would come eventually. It always did.

  But she allowed herself to recognize the desperation that had taken hold in her heart.

  She didn’t want anyone to suffer because of her. She really didn’t want these two girls to suffer because of her.

  “We won’t regret it,” one of them suddenly said.

  “H-huh?” Seskii stammered, wiping her eyes.

  “We won’t regret it,” the other said. “Because… because the three of us… are going to conquer the world!”

  Seskii beamed. “The three of us… are going to save all the worlds.” She realized immediately that saying this was a mistake, that emotions had brought out more words that should have been said, that reality now had a new inkling as to what her plan was.

  She didn’t care anymore.

  It was right.

  ~~~

  Jeh and Scurfpea were visiting the space station. Jeh didn’t have classes on the weekends, and often spent that time ferrying people to and from the station.

  She currently lounged in midair next to Scurfpea in one of the laboratory modules. The walls were absolutely covered in plants, and various bags of soil littered the room. The airlock to the module was currently closed—working with dirt tended to create a lot of particulates, and the rest of the station did not want to have to deal with breathing them in at the moment.

  “I expected classes to be difficult or boring…” Jeh grunted, flipping a page in her textbook. “Not stressful.”

  “Just be calm! Worry never helps anyone!” Scurfpea said as she used her attribute to grow a tomato off a vine. She plucked it and placed it in a little plast arm that held it fixed in midair, so she could cut it open. “I’m sure you’ve got it!”

  “I have to memorize a ton of stupid shapes!” Jeh shouted, groaning. “My memory is terrible!”

  “Then it’s good you’re training it!”

  “Scurfpea, have I ever told you that your optimism can be annoying at times?”

  “You and the Twins both,” Scurfpea chuckled. “But I’m not worried about it, you all tell me you appreciate me later.” She cut into the tomato and removed one of the seeds. She planted the seed in a pot of fresh soil.

  “...You’re right, you’re right.”

  “As always!” Scurfpea grinned.

  “You know, you’re a lot better at…”

  “Thinking? Talking?” Scurfpea suggested. “Not sounding like a stupid baby?”

  Jeh blinked. “Uh, well, I wasn’t going to put it like that…”

  “I didn’t stay with anyone very long until I came to the Wizard Space Program,” Scurfpea said, using her attribute to prompt the tomato seed to grow into a small bush, developing a fruit within seconds. “I was a baby when I left, and… I kind of never learned otherwise on my journeys.”

  “You got really, really lucky.”

  “I just knew how to pretend to be a bush. Amazing how easy a bush is to ignore.” Scurfpea chuckled. “Also, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m adorable, and people love that.”

  Jeh chuckled. “Just like how I didn’t realize much when I first showed up…”

  “You think I have some kind of secret forgotten second life too!?”

  “I mean, do you remember the Glen much?”

  Scurfpea shook her head. “No. They really shouldn’t have let me go; I was way too young. I think now is about when they would have let me go on my journey. But… well, if they’d been smarter, I wouldn’t have gotten to know all of you! And you wouldn’t have someone here to help you make food!” She gestured at the dozens of tomatoes she was pulling off the vine.

  “Aren’t you getting tired?” Jeh asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Scurfpea said, stretching her arms. “Takes a lot out of me. I think we’ll be using Blue to mature the plants when actually on the interplanetary ship, even if they don’t really have a clue which way is up if I’m not growing it. But once you have a mature plant, I can trick it into producing as much fruit as you want, as long as the soil has nutrients. All you need to pack is a lot of dirt, water, and seeds. And with Green, well… hey, you’re better at it than I am.” She gestured toward a patch of dirt that had a dried-up and withered tomato plant in it. “You go for it.”

  Jeh closed her textbook—she really hadn’t been reading it anyway—and used Green on the dirt. The dirt didn’t visibly change that much, but the dried plant was consumed back into the dirt.

  Scurfpea checked the structural integrity of the box holding the dirt by flicking it with a finger. “Still good!” She chuckled. Then she put a new seed in the previously depleted dirt and grew it into a new tomato plant.

  “Eventually, the container breaks, right?” Jeh asked.

  Scurfpea nodded. “This process can only reuse soil so many times before it starts destroying the container. Like… the usual example is trying to repair boats on the water while out at sea? You eventually don’t have the materials for… whatever it is the plants need to grow.” Scurfpea chuckled. “That’s what the actual scientists are trying to figure out, what to make the container out of so the dirt can more readily regain plant food!”

  “Can you eat… dirt?” Jeh asked, suddenly.

  Scurfpea blinked. “Duh.”

  “...But you never do.”

  “It tastes nasty, gives you a stomachache, and dryads have to eat a lot.” She paused. “I guess when we put down roots, we… huh.” She tapped her chin. “Maybe root location does matter…”

  “You should probably ask Pepper.”

  “She’s a free leaf, she chose not to put down roots.”

  “She probably still knows. She knows a lot.”

  “Maybe. It’ll be better than going to Axiom’s Glen. They’ll probably try to convince me to stay and freak out.” Scurfpea shook her head. “Don’t want that.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Yeah! You need me, too! Who else is going to grow all your food?” She laughed. “Pepper? The warrior?”

  “You know, I don’t think I’ve seen her use her attribute befo—”

  Suddenly, Claire’s voice came echoing through the rest of the station.

  “Emergency maneuver! Brace yourselves! Someone get to the telescope module, something is happening, and we need to look at it!”

  Jeh had received training on how to use the telescope module, and she was probably the most agile person in zero gravity besides Claire herself, but Claire was going to be busy performing the emergency maneuver. The City in the Sky started rotating, introducing a very light sense of gravity to the station. Jeh used this to walk along the walls—crushing a few of Scurfpea’s plants in the process—and pop the airlock open. The motion was quick and snappy, as both sides of the airlock were currently connected by the vents. Jeh jumped into the central module and, given the rotation of the station, made use of the fact that the telescope module was “down” to fall into it.

  Jeh grabbed onto the seat and pulled herself into position, staring right at the screen. She removed all the lenses, putting the telescope into minimal zoom, but kept it in its default position—Claire was going to try to aim the station, not the telescope.

  She was remarkably accurate. The edge of Ikyu appeared near the top right of Jeh’s view. And just above the blue edge… was something glowing pink?

  The station stopped rotating, and Jeh took the opportunity to zoom in by adding some of the lenses back. She wasn’t particularly skilled at knowing which lenses were the best for any situation, but she knew basic “zoom in.”

  She started recording images. It was pink, it was oval-shaped, it…

  I’ve seen this before.

  Jeh’s mind flashed back to the time in the Rigid Plague. When she used the black cube and saw the past. One of these things had appeared in the sky then, too. A… portal.

  Through Jeh’s telescope, she saw for a moment the shadow of something shaped like a five-pointed star drifting out of the pink portal. The portal closed, and the star vanished for a moment. But then Jeh saw it again—a five-pointed shadow against the backdrop of Ikyu itself. Dropping to the surface, aiming for… somewhere, Jeh wasn’t sure what that landmass was off the top of her head.

  “I hope you got images!” Claire shouted. “What was that?”

  “...A portal,” Jeh said, even though, without shouting, Claire was not going to be able to hear her. “Something… came out of it…”

  “What?”

  “I got pictures!” Jeh called back. “And it’s weird!”

  ~~~

  The Custodian opened a book that was very, very important, but rarely had any useful information.

  Seskii, its title read.

  “The three of us… are going to save all the worlds.”

  The Custodian stood up straighter.

  “I should never have doubted you,” he said to himself. Then he did something he had never done before.

  Broke his oaths as Custodian and hid the book away where visitors would not be able to find it.

  I hope… that will be enough.

  ~~~

  SCIENCE SEGMENT

  So, the Wizard Space Program hasn’t yet had the bright idea of using mirrors for their telescopes instead of lenses, like we do. This leads to one major issue that isn’t solved in the depths of space: chromatic aberration. Lenses bend different wavelengths of light at different angles. The difference is slight, but lenses are technically prisms and make rainbows. The edges of lenses have a stronger effect than the centers, making the edges of images more prone to the effect. The trick is to use other lenses to “undo” the chromatic aberration while retaining the focus, which does work, but only to a certain extent, and it also depends highly on how perfectly you can shape your lenses.

  The wavelengths of visible light usually behave so close to each other that this effect doesn’t particularly matter for binoculars or even a decent handheld telescope, so long as your lens was manufactured properly. However, when you want large telescopes, well, it becomes a problem that can’t quite be overcome. At least… not if you’re using a series of lenses.

  This is the reason we use reflecting telescopes. Mirrors (at least the ones we use for telescopes) treat every wavelength of visible light equally, all reflecting in the exact same direction. This allows us to get some absurdly sharp images and avoid the problems of chromatic aberration completely. You still have to focus the light from a reflecting telescope. Fun fact: an out-of-focus reflecting telescope often has a black dot in the center of its images! This is because there is literally a hole in most main mirrors, allowing the light to pass through the center to a detector (or someone’s eye). When the light is focused properly, the central hole isn’t seen. So if your stars look like donuts, something’s wrong.

  The James Webb Space Telescope has been making the news lately… and it has a golden mirror. That clearly reflects light differently; it has a color! That’s true… for visible light, but JWST is looking at infrared light, not visible. Its mirror is designed for that.

  The largest refracting telescope ever built is the 40-inch wide one in the Yerkes Observatory. Well, the largest one seriously built for actual science, there was an exhibition of a stupidly large one that couldn’t change where it was pointing and wasn’t very functional.

  You may notice I’m not exactly specifying the diameter of the telescope module in the story; it’s a big space telescope. Its benefits are not collapsing under its own weight, becoming unbalanced, or having to deal with the flickering of stars caused by the atmosphere. An immense tool. I’m not specifying how large it is because that would require me to figure out exactly how much detail the WSP could uncover in their telescope at any given time. I’m rule-of-thumbing it as “not as good at its job as Hubble is” in terms of raw resolution. They also haven’t figured out how to do long-exposure anything; their Purple enhancements of the lighting will lose information, so they won’t be getting a Deep Field image.

  But I wonder what kinds of things they can see and identify prior to the Conference…