A Perverted Path to Victory

Sara Brown

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“You’ll know it when you feel it,” Sara said encouragingly. “It’s not like anything else. The reason everyone sucks at describing it is because there’s nothing to compare it to. But it’s there, I promise.”

Her dad’s brow furrowed, sweat beading in his receded hairline. “That doesn’t help. How am I supposed to look for something I can’t even imagine?”

They were sitting side-by-side behind her dad’s desk, the room lit only by a single crystal sitting a foot before his folded hands. It had only been a few hours since she’d left Vesta’s home, and it would be another hour more before the sun rose over the eastern ocean. Her exhaustion, growing steadily after having only slept six hours of the last fifty, was nearing the breaking point for the strangest reason.

Her dad’s office. It was so… him. Even on another world, even when he was teaching wizards and witches and diving deep into the art of enchanting, her dad was still her dad. The smell of limestone chalk mixed with aging parchment and puffy clouds of dust, a brew that always left unaccustomed visitors sniffing and sneezing. His shelves were full of interesting rocks he’d snatched off the side of the road, stacks that had begun with some semblance of order. The lower layers were sorted by size, color, or shape, but that structure fell apart as the pile rose, his half-hearted organization effort quickly overwhelmed by an inability to pick favorite. Every shelf supported a brewing avalanche sitting above and below rows of heavily-worn books. Every flat surface of the room, or at least the precious few remaining sections still uncovered by notes and half-empty mugs, was covered with a thin layer of dust, myriad chisels and magnifying glasses all that remained of some innocent stone’s brutal dissection. Thanks to Garen’s help, her dad had even replaced some of the fossils he’d once proudly displayed, though these new ones were left exposed to the open air, his old hermetic preservation cases (that he’d spent an unholy amount of money on) having not yet been invented.

As a young girl, Sara had spent long, long days in a Detroit office just like this. Once the sun came up and students began filtering in to ask him questions, as was a constant in his old office, it would become the closest thing she’d found to a home in the two years since she’d left Earth. Since she’d moved out of his place, really. She’d never been attached to the apartments she’d rented over the years, and while she and her wives now had a house in the city, one that they’d even spent a few months living out of, it wasn’t yet a home. But somehow, even though she’d barely seen it, this new version of her dad’s office was.

Stifling a yawn, she gave her dad an encouraging shoulder-bump. “Sure it helps. It lets you ignore pointless stuff. If you recognize what some thought is, you can ignore it, because you know it’s not the magic you’re looking for.”

He moved a hand closer to the shining light. It was a surgical crystal, bright enough to blind, and it cast strange shadows across the room as his fingers neared it.

“I still don’t feel anything,” he grumped. “It’s not even warm. About the only thing anyone’s told me is that they can’t describe magic, which is pretty much the least helpful bit of advice I can imagine.”

“C’mon, dad. It’s maaaagic.” She warbled the word out, waving her fingers at his face like a hokey magician. He chuckled, but that was all, so she blew a dramatic sigh and fell back in her chair. “I mean, really Dad. Apparently I wanted to do magic so bad that I ended up with the ability, and I’m not half the nerd you are. You can do magic. You just didn’t get the bullshit Champion Class that I did.”

“I haven’t got any Class at all.” He let his hand rest on the table, choosing to mentally focus on the magical crystal. “Garen thinks that’s not abnormal, by the way. At least if we’re operating on a model that assumes Classes are involved with, but not fully involved with, what they call a ‘soul’.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You’re believing in a soul, now?”

“Honestly? I might be.” He finally opened his eyes for a moment and pointed to a section of over-stuffed shelves. “Read some of those if you get the time. There’s a lot of surprisingly compelling evidence for it. I mean, they didn’t use modern scientific techniques or anything, but the sheer volume of study is enough to be compelling.”

“But, I mean, Dad. You? Believing in a soul?”

He shrugged, as if to say what do you expect? “I’d like to think I’m a man of my principles, Sara. And my main principles are to follow the evidence. Back on Earth, I didn’t believe in souls. A thousand different people had tried a million different ways to prove they existed, and every test came up empty. Here, though? Yeah, there’s some interesting reading to be done.”

She hmphed. “Alright. I mean, it’s not that hard for me to believe in them. Just surprising that you would.” She drummed her fingers on the table, stifling another yawn. “So do you think it would help you with casting spells, then? Figuring out what’s going on with souls?”

“Oh, definitely.” He pushed his chair back from the desk— the world’s first combination reclining and rolling chair, so far as Sara knew— and used his feet to paddle over to a bookshelf. He grabbed a purplish, ancient tome from the shelf, then kicked off the wall to slide back to Sara. He muttered an ow as his belly clipped the desk’s corner, and then he slapped the book down. “Alright. As far as the sources I’ve got access to claim, magic can come from lots of different places. Namely Classes, Skills, Levels, Body, Mind, or the Soul.”

He opened the aged book to a page even more worn than the rest. Faint ink, rubbed pale by tracing fingers, depicted what Sara knew to be a magical glyph, the kind artificers used to enchant various objects. This glyph was far more complex than any that could be inscribed by a Tulian artificer, however, with pentagonal edges fractured by dozens of interwoven outgrowths. Some of those resembled raw crystal sprouts, others gnarled tree roots, and some others seemed to mimic the capillary system that carried blood through a body. Every single element of the glyph featured an explanation, but the words were written in text so infinitesimally tiny that the original writer could only have penned it with the aid of a Skill.

“When he first started trying to teach me magic, Garen didn’t think any of this mattered, so of course I listened to him. But now that it’s been too long without any success, we’ve started to get into the weeds with it.” He began tracing the diagram with his index finger as he spoke. “Pretty much every mage, even Archmages, claim that the source of magic doesn’t matter, only the method that you use to manipulate it once you’ve got it. Some people get access to magic from their Class, some from a specific Skill they get when they Level up, and some other people just learn how to do it with good-old-fashioned hard work, which means their Mind. Evie casting that sword-dulling spell is an example of that last one. She doesn’t have what they call ‘Talavan’s Gift’, the spark that enables magic, but she can manipulate the magic around her, the ambient stuff that’s kinda just floating everywhere.”

He frowned. “No, not everywhere. Garen keeps telling me to stop thinking of magic as atmospheric. It’s closer to a… a dense, adhesive fluid. Like thick mud, or maybe tree sap. It oozes from living things and sticks to everything else around it. ‘Course it’s not actually that physical, it’s not like there’s a ‘layer’ of magic over anything, that’s just an analogy for how non-living things can appear to exhibit magical properties, and…” He shook his head, refocusing. “Okay, anyway, that’s what Evie is using to fuel the sword dulling spell. The ambient magic around her. Since she lacks Talavan’s Gift, she has to manipulate it by rote memory and repetition, and can’t extrude her own magic from within herself. Whoever taught her how to do it wasn’t teaching her how to do magic, they were…” He pursed his lips, thinking.

“Like a blind man learning to paint?” Sara suggested, recalling the phrase from some conversation locked deep in her Blessing-aided memory. She could tell it was from before her Blessings explicitly gave her a perfect recollection of conversations, because it was muddled and uncertain. When the Blessing had upgraded to its higher tier, it seemed to have crystallized how well she remembered old conversations at the exact moment she’d gotten the Level. That ensured she’d never forget more of them, but it didn’t suddenly make her remember every discussion in her entire life. She wished it had. All those years in school might have actually done something for her, if that was how it worked.

“Yes!” He beamed at her. “Yes, that’s exactly it. Just like a blind painter, she’s just holding a paintbrush to the canvas and following someone else’s instructions, moving her arm when and how they tell her to. It’s real magic, but she’s not the one doing it, not any more than some CEO is actually building the products a factory spits out.”

“Weren’t there blind painters on Earth, though?” Sara asked. “I remember seeing some buzzfeed article or something like that. Couldn’t you learn how to do magic while you’re still ‘blind?’”

Through lidded eyes, Sara watched her father hunch over the page, his excitement doing more to light the room than the crystal on his desktop. “Maybe, but it’s obviously not where I want my magic to come from. I’d never be able to actually cast a spell for myself, only repeat what someone else showed me how to do. I’ll take it if I have to, but I’m not that desperate yet.”

“I still think you need to try more spell foci,” Sara said. “You’ve tried books, staffs, rings, all the standard stuff, but what about things that don’t exist here? Weapons are how I cast my spells, and that obviously doesn’t fit you, but there’s definitely stuff that does. What if you had, like, a typewriter?”

“Maybe, but we can get to that later. I wasn’t done talking about the sources of magic.”

“Well I was feeling pretty done,” Sara said, not letting him move on. “I think it’s your best bet. What if I had Hurlish make a typewriter for you? Pretty much every major accomplishment you’re proud of in your life was a paper you published or something, right? A typewriter makes sense for a magic focus.”

He made a face. “Oh, come on, a typewriter?” He leaned back in his chair and held out his arms with puffed cheeks, miming the effort required to carry around a solid chunk of steel. “Can you imagine that? Me waddling around the city with a fifteen pound typewriter and click-clacking out a whole paragraph to cast a spell?” He dropped the impression. “No, that’d be silly.”

“A lightsaber, then,” Sara proposed. “Come on. Tell me you wouldn’t love casting a spell with a lightsaber as your magic wand.”

He laughed. A big, proper, hearty laugh. It seemed to hit Sara like a brick, forcing her back deeper into the soft leather of her chair, as if relaxing her muscles by force alone. Sara blinked, taken aback by her own reaction. It felt so… warm to hear that again. It was her dad’s same old laugh, the one she’d known all her life, full of honest, untarnished happiness. It was the sort of laugh that told her he thought her idea was silly, but he didn’t— and wouldn’t ever— think less of her for having suggested it.

“Sara, honey,” he said, still laughing, “if you can get me a lightsaber, please do. I’ll beg for it. I don’t care if it casts spells or not. If you find some artificer that can make me an honest-to-god lightsaber, I’ll be the happiest person in the world.” He adjusted his glasses, pushing them back into place after his bout of laughter had sent them askew. “I still don’t think it’ll let me cast spells, though. It won’t be that easy.”

“Still worth a shot.”

“Like I said: if you can get me a lightsaber,” he put his hands together as if praying, “please do. But my gut says that it won’t help me cast a spell, and Garen said my gut’s the most trustworthy source we have here.”

Thanks to her Blessings, it was trivial to hide her frown, but the emotion that spawned it was still there. She wanted her dad to cast a spell. She wanted it more than she wanted herself to cast a spell. Magic had saved her life a number of times across the last few years, but if she was somehow offered the choice, she’d toss all that magical ability to her father in an instant. He deserved it. Some of her oldest memories were of her, ages two or three, tucked into a warm bed. Her dad was sitting next to her, a fantasy novel in one hand, his other making wide, sweeping motions as he described the fantastical stories of wizards and witches going on magical quests. The excited passion with which he’d told those bedtime stories had been absolutely terrible for helping her fall asleep, but neither of them had ever stopped enjoying them. All the way up until her teens, right before she moved out of the house, they’d often spent the last hours of the evening in the living room, doing their own thing while listening to an audiobook playing through a speaker.

Sara cast her eyes to the ceiling. C’mon, Talavan. What the fuck is your problem? I’ve met a thousand fucking mages that deserve your ‘gift’ less than my dad does.

“Sara?” He prompted. “You listening?”

“Uh, no.” She rubbed her eyes. “Sorry. Just tired from waking up early. What were you on?”

“I was starting to talk about people who gain access to magic from Classes.” His face wrinkled with concern. “But you weren’t tired right there. You looked angry.”

Damn. Can’t remember the last time someone knew what I was feeling when I didn’t want ‘em to. Am I tired enough to be slipping that hard?

“Angry that I had to wake up this early, maybe,” she joked, then quickly tempered the statement. “But it’s worth it, don’t worry. I wasn’t going to leave without trying to help you out with magic stuff.” She leaned to one side, freeing her blacksteel rondel dagger from the sheath hidden beneath her shirt. It was one of the few weapons Hurlish had made before Tulian had run out of useful amounts of blacksteel, alongside Evie’s massive revolver. She set it on the table. “Hurlish made this for me, y’know.”

He nodded. “I know. You’ve told me-”

“It’s a masterpiece,” she continued. “The best dagger I’ve seen in this world. Not a dent or anything on it, even after I’ve used it to kill god-knows-how-many Knights with it.”

“Honey, you’ve shown me it plenty of times-”

“I love this damn thing.” Sara gave it a spin, watching it spiral over the wood. “That’s, apparently, what lets me cast a spell from it. I can’t just use any weapon. It’s gotta be one I love. One that I’m attached to, invested in. Easiest way to get that is to have Hurlish make it. If you want a spell foci, what’s it going to take? You think that Garen making you one would work?”

“He’s tried,” her dad assured her. “But I don’t think a friend is the same as a wife.”

“Friend. Sure.”

Her dad didn’t pick up on the subtext, blissfully unaware as he continued speaking. “And I’ve had other foci made to fit certain criteria, too. The first textbook I wrote in this world, for example, didn’t work as a spell foci. Not even my own handwritten version. I tried archmage books, spell tomes, staffs, gemstones, everything. Really, Sara, I know that a spell focus was what made magic work for you, but I don’t think it will for me.”

She let out a tired breath, wiping an eye as she picked up her dagger and sheathed it. “Alright. The source of magic stuff, then. Which one were you working your way up to, Dad? I know how you like to do lectures. You mentioned like five different ways to start doing magic, but I know only one of those was the one you thought actually mattered.”

He put a gentle hand to his heart. “Aw, Sara? You actually listened to my lectures?”

“Sometimes,” she grunted, letting a sly smile slip to one corner of her mouth. “But only sometimes. Don’t get too proud of it.”

“Still, I’m touched.” He cleared his throat, moving a finger to the top left of the pentagonal glyph. “I was actually getting to it. I think the one that matters most for me is Class.”

Unlike all the other outgrowths the diagram showed, this one was contained, organized. Like a family tree, there was a line that started at the bottom, went up a small distance, then broke into two, then each of those two split again, and again, on and on until there were dozens of different branches. If Sara was remembering her highschool statistics class right— a bad gamble to make— it was called a decision tree, representing the branching paths one could take. A bit like those problem-solving flowcharts that OSHA-mandated safety briefings loved to use when she was welding for the city, but more straightforward.

“You got magic from your Class, didn’t you, Sara?” Her Dad prompted. She nodded. “Right.” he said. “Well, so far as Garen and I can tell from the history books, so did every other Champion. Not a one of them ever had to figure out how to cast their first spell. They just did it. That’s how people who cast magic from a Class first do it. I know I’m not a Champion, but I’m still from another world. And I think that means that any magic I’m going to be using is involved with the Soul, too.”

She blinked dumbly. “Huh? When did we get back on souls?”

“Because of the Class?” She met him with a blank stare. “Oh. Sorry, I guess I didn’t get into that. Been reading so much I forget everyone else hasn’t read what I have, too.” He moved his hand off of the book, leaning back in his chair as he tucked his chin to his chest and thought. “Uh, magic that comes from the Soul, according to a lot of scholars, is the purest magic, because the earliest emanations of it are always related to what someone wants. People who get access to magic from the soul are the ones you hear all the bad stories about; some kid getting bullied, tries to cast a fireball, but ends up burning themselves alive because they have no dang idea what they’re doing. Chona is one of those. Without the burning to death.”

“Makes sense that it would be the most dangerous,” Sara agreed. “Anyone whose introduction to magic comes from really needing it then and there is gonna be pumping way too much power into it.”

“Actually,” her dad said, using the word in just the right way that she knew he was excited to correct her, “you’ve got it reversed. Needing the magic isn’t, apparently, as important as wanting the magic.” He leaned forward, eyes glittering with excitement. “If some kid only needed to do something, if it was some dramatic moment where you had to defend yourself or save someone all hollywood-style, it’s just as likely that it’s how they get their first Level, even if it has nothing to do with magic. To get magic from the Soul, it’s only about wanting it. Wanting it more than anything else. Kids that cast their first spell from the Soul are just as likely to manage it the first time when, like, they’re trying to impress a cute girl, or win a race, or jump really high to grab an apple.” His tone changed, quieter, speaking to himself. “That’s one thing that I need to get some of the students doing a meta-analysis on, actually.” He fumbled for a notebook and pen, muttering quietly. “Documenting case rates of abrupt magical development by objective. Maybe break it up into violent vs nonviolent? No, that dataset would be too limited. Objective, maybe. But there could be so many objectives. How can I constrain it?”

“Dad.” Sara snapped her fingers. “Teaching comes later. I care about your spells, not theirs.”

“Oh!” Reluctantly, he put down the notebook. “Sorry. What was I was saying…? Oh yeah! My magic. I think the Soul path is where I best want to go for it.”

“I thought you said Class was how you were going for it.”

“Well, I am. By the Soul.”

I wonder if this would be any easier to understand if I wasn’t so damn tired.

“Okay, look, Class and Soul are really intertwined, because any kid who first casts magic from their Soul almost always ends up getting a magic-based Class the moment they cast that spell, no matter what they’d been doing their whole life before that. And since it happens because they want it, and holy crap do I want it, Garen and I think it’s the best path for me to pursue. No foci, no Skills, no clever tricks. Cast a Spell, get a Class, and boom, magic.”

“Alright.” Sara mulled over her next words, selecting them carefully, not wanting to crush his optimism. She looked at him sheepishly. “But… if all that’s needed is wanting it…”

“Why haven’t I got it yet?”

She winced. “Yeah.”

He took a deep breath through his nose, looking back at the ancient tome. “Well. Uh… Garen and I don’t really know. I should, really. I totally should have it by now. But I don’t. So we’re pretty sure that there’s something screwy with me being from another world without being a Champion. That’s not supposed to happen. Like, maybe Amarat didn’t give me a soul or something when she dragged me into this world.”

With an exasperated groan, Sara dropped her head into her hands. “Dad. Please don’t tell me you’re going to go all depressed about being soulless or something.”

He raised his hands. “I didn’t say it was a bad thing! If I didn’t have a soul on Earth, I don’t see why I should care about still not having one here. I’ve only got a problem with it if it’s stopping me from doing magic.”

“If souls are real, Dad, you have one.”

“Here’s hoping, I guess.” He smiled at her, rubbing his hands together. “But now that we’ve got all this out of the way, here’s what I think is the big thesis statement. You ready?”

“Desperate for it, Dad.”

He spread his palms flat, grinning even wider. “Okay. So. Put it all together: Soul magic is the most likely candidate for me, I’m showing symptoms of not having a soul—”

“You’re what?”

“Oh! I didn’t tell you about that?”

“No!” She half-shouted, exasperated. “No, you didn’t tell me you had ‘symptoms of not having a soul’, whatever the fuck that means.”

“Language. And, uh, I guess to keep it short, Garen cast some soul-based magic on me and it acted really weird. It didn’t fully fizzle out, but it didn’t work very well at all. So it seems like there might be at least some kind of soul-screwery going on.”

Sara kept holding her head in her hands, trying not to envision whatever soul-altering magic Garen had apparently tested on her dad. “Okay. Sure. Just… keep going, then.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, three things: I should be a great candidate for Soul magic, most kids who use Soul magic for the first time get a magic Class then and there, and I’m literally the only person ever known to be more than 20 natural years old and still lacking a Class.”

“Natural years old?” Sara repeated.

“Like, I wasn’t some baby put in a time-freezing spell or whatever.”

“Which is obviously something that can happen.”

“Magic’s real here. Anything can happen.”

“I guess so.” She cleared her throat, forcing herself to sit straighter in her chair. “Okay, whatever. What’s next on your big conclusion?”

Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, he blinked owlishly at her.

“That’s it.”

She blinked right back at him.

“That’s… it…?”

“I mean, basically, yeah.” He pointed to something on the diagram, as if that made any sense to Sara. “I’ve got a weird soul, I don’t have a Class, and I can’t do magic when everyone says I should. We’ve managed to isolate, I think, the three most important variables in the whole problem.”

“That’s… cool?” Sara tried to sound impressed, but it came out flat.

“It’s important, Sara! Before all this, we didn’t know why anything was happening. It’s like, uh… a car! Like that awful Civic you had-”

“I loved that Civic.”

“And I have no clue why, but the point is, imagine if you were trying to fix some problem with it, but you didn’t know what was broken. For all you knew, it could be the trunk latch, the battery, the entire engine, or a bulb in the backseat.”

“Suzy didn’t have a backseat, Dad, she was a two-door.”

“Alright, fine, not the bulb thing, but you get what I mean, right? For me and Garen, we’ve finally narrowed down the problem from ‘literally anything and everything’ to, probably, three or four different spots.”

Sara pinched the bridge of her nose. “Sure. It could ‘just’ be your entire soul, the interference of an all-powerful divinity that brought you to this world, or the Class system which influences every single sentient creature’s entire life.”

“Sentient doesn’t mean intelligent-”

“Dad.”

“It doesn’t, though!” He sat back in his chair, his smile somehow even wider. “Look, Sara, I know you’re disappointed for me. That’s so lovely. But look at all this!” He spun in his chair, indicating the room all around him. “I’ve spent months and months researching magic! Real, actual magic! That’s the second happiest I could ever be, and just because I know I’d be even happier if I could actually do magic, it’s not like this is still great! I’m loving it!”

Tapping into her Blessings, Sara put on her best grin. “Yeah, okay, fine. I knew you’d love it here, Dad.”

Inexplicably, his expression faltered, his smile tainted by a touch of concern.

“What’s the matter, sweety?”

Sara’s grin froze. He shouldn’t be able to see through that smile. No one should. Not even Evie or Hurlish could, though she hardly ever used her Blessings on them. She tried not to on her dad, in fact, but considering her exhaustion, she’d decided to cheat a bit. Yet her dad had seen through it anyway. When wisened elves and hard-bitten generals had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker?

“What do you mean?” She asked slowly.

“You’re trying to look excited. You don’t have to fake it for me, y’know.”

“I…” she blew out a breath. Swiped her hair off her face. If he really could tell, there was nothing for it. “It’s just… I don’t know. I can’t get excited about second best.”

His concern turned to a frown. “Sara. You know I never wanted you to think like that.”

“Yeah, Dad, I know, but this isn’t for me, it’s for you.” She shot a pointed glare to the ceiling. “You know why I asked you to bring him here, Amarat? Because he deserved it. He deserves magic a thousand times more than I do. The fuck’s your problem?”

Her dad chuckled. “Which one of us is it that’s gonna get in trouble with the gods again, Sara?”

Sara waved dismissively. “She’s my patron. I get special permission to bitch at her. You don’t. But seriously, dad. How can you have magic at your fingertips, right outside your grasp, and just be… satisfied with that?”

He leaned even further back in his chair. The leather squeaked, wood groaning. Folding his hands atop his belly, he spent a few moments thinking it over.

“...Because,” he began at last, “I’m a lot older than you.” He held up a hand that made her swallow down a snappish response. “I’m a lot older than you, and that means I’ve learned how to be happy with what I have, not with what I want. And what I have right now is pretty damn great, Sara.” His smile turned… older. Wiser. His nerdy habits always made him seem youthful for a man in his sixties, but that smile was anything but. Like his age was finally catching up to him— in a good way. “I’ve got you, for starters. You’ve got a beautiful family and a little son. I’m a grandfather, now. Back on Earth, that’s about the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I kinda didn’t think you’d ever have kids, but if you did, I don’t think I could’ve ever been happier. And here? Where I’ve also got all of this,” he indicated his overstuffed office, “to learn from, and an actual, honest-to-god wizard to help teach me about all of it? Winning a hundred lotteries wouldn’t have made me half as excited as living here does. Sara, I won’t lie by saying I wouldn’t be disappointed to spend the rest of my life without magic. I’m gonna keep trying to cast a spell ‘till the day I die. But if it doesn’t happen, it wouldn’t be enough to make me sad. I couldn’t be. Not with you around, still making me proud.”

She sat back in her chair. That was… something. Lots of people had their parents tell them they were proud of them. If she had to guess, a lot fewer heard their dad say it was more than worth trading a lifelong fantasy for. And only one of them, her, had the ability to know that he was being honest. No exaggeration, no twisting of the truth, not a single hidden caveat.

“Well.” Sara stated. She wiped her nose with a wrist and glanced away. “I still want you to end up as a cool-ass wizard. So we’re gonna keep working on it anyway, alright?”

Her dad laughed. “Just try and stop me. But you don’t need to go out of your way to worry about me, alright?”

“Mm.”

“I said, alright?”

She made a face at him. “Okay, yeah. Alright. I’ll try not to worry about it.”

“Good. Now get some sleep, Sara.”

“I just woke up.”

“No you didn’t. You haven’t slept since you got to Tulian.”

“I did. I took a few naps-”

“Sara. Go to sleep. Right here. Your chair reclines too, y’know. I had two made for a reason.”

“That’s…” she ran a hand through her hair. With everything going on, it felt like it should have been tangled with sweat and stress, but of course it fell from her fingers perfectly curled. “I can’t. Do you know how much important shit I have to do, Dad? I need to talk to you about the cannon that killed the griffon, for starters, and Tinvel and Chona’s rockets. Neither of them are what I expected. The cannon that killed that griffon, Dad, it wasn’t one of the Bofors that Hurlish built before she left. It was an all-original creation. Someone in the North Star rifled out a swivel wall gun and figured out a way to rig a blackpowder shell with an impact fuse. It’s a breechloader, too. Rate of fire’s probably not impressive, but shit, Dad, we were both planning to have that kind of weapon be years away. Not here, now. We underestimated how much of a difference Classes and Skills are making. We’re losing control of the entire Industrial Revolution. We need to reevaluate our plans as soon as possible.”

“I know, honey. You already told me about that. But you’re not going to be much use while you’re about to pass out—”

Suddenly remembering something, she snapped her fingers and slammed a fist on her chair. “And I need to get updates from Garen about his enchanted wheel creation. That’s so important, Dad. If we can get rotational energy from magic, directly, without using crystal or enchantment obfuscation like the Tinvel Engines, Tulian will never have to worry about power generation again. Put a fancy wheel in a forest and you’ve got enough electricity to run a whole damn city. You have to see how important that is, right?”

“Sara, I’m the one working on that—”

“It’ll be like starting the Industrial Revolution off with a fusion reactor in our pocket, Dad. We need it done as soon as possible. It’ll solve almost every problem we have except for the war.”

She flung an arm out at the darkness-shrouded city. “And speaking of the fucking war! My Blessings have found a whole fuckload of spies in the city that I need to help the city guard round up. It’ll be best if I can just break their door down in the middle of the night, tonight, because otherwise it’ll be damn hard to come up with plausible ways for us to explain how we caught them. Evie still wants my Blessings secret, and after you telling me about all that Turing Enigma crap, I agree with her.” Her fist curled. “And shit, what about the hidden drydocks and airbases we’ve been establishing? I wanted to visit them myself, but didn’t have time. I at least need to go over the designs and paperwork. The projects are so secret that they’ve got basically no oversight, and we don’t know if they’re even going to finish in time for—”

“Sara. Listen to me.”

Her dad’s patented teacher voice cut through the room. With all the confident dramatics of a man slowly revealing his winning poker hand, her dad opened a desk drawer and pulled out a light wooden box. Its glass face showed a communication crystal within, unactivated, ready to start transmitting at the first touch of a finger. He put his thumb on the lid lock.

“Sara, you’re busy. I get it. But you’re also way, way too tired. If you don’t go to bed this instant, you’re going to be in trouble.”

She chuckled, standing. “Oh, c’mon, Dad, really? I’m not a kid-”

“This crystal connects to Hurlish’s.”

Sara froze.

“That’s… but I still need to…”

“What you need is to get some sleep. Just a few hours. You don’t have anything on your itinerary until sunrise.”

“Nothing official. I’ve got plenty of shit to do.”

“Sara. If you don’t sit down in that chair and close your eyes in the next five seconds, I’m calling Hurlish.”

“I already told you I’m not a-”

“Five.”

“But-”

“Four.”

With a theatrically agonized groan, she dropped into the seat.

“Oh my god, Dad.” She muttered some profanity as she used both thumbs to rub her eyes. “I swear I’m not even that tired. You better not…” she pushed a yawn into her elbow, “...think that I’m just gonna sit here for long.”

“Fine. Five minutes. Can you spare me five minutes, Sara?”

She squinted at him, suspicious. Finally, she nodded. “Alright. But then I’m gone.”

“Good. And just so you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time, I’ll start reading some of these notes here about magic. Spells cast via Skills, for example, are a lot different from the other ones, because they’re an entirely different method of energy manipulation, even if the end result is functionally the same…”

Sara nodded. She shut her eyes again, moving to rub them.

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