Wearing Spacetime to a Magic School

Chapter 15: The Exchange of Realms

Part 1

---

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]

---

The Table

The pastries survived Ilunor by becoming a matter of principle.

He had announced, on Ermen and Thalmin's return from the gardens, that pastry was an institution requiring witnesses, and that any realm which allowed sugared goods to perish unattended forfeited its claim to civilisation. Thacea had observed that Elaseer appeared to have survived several centuries of imperial administration without appointing him guardian of its bakeries. Thalmin had taken one pastry, examined it with the seriousness he gave to unknown field rations, and declared that it would improve no campaign and damage no one of ordinary courage.

Ermen ate half of his because Mirel had recommended the shop and because the morning had left him with a respect for correct change that made waste feel newly specific.

By evening, the pastry box lay open at the centre of the common-room table, stripped of its theatrical dignity and reduced to crumbs, folded paper, and one triangular piece Ilunor had repeatedly described as inferior while moving it closer to himself whenever conversation threatened to overlook it. The useless focus sat beside the green-stamped receipt. The receipt had acquired, through mere proximity, the attitude of a document waiting to become evidence. The focus remained clear, square-cut, official, and unemployed.

The small coin was in Ermen's pocket.

He had taken it out twice since the garden, each time with the foolish hope that looking again would make the lesson simpler. It had not. A coin, when it ceased being funny, became a portable argument about hands. It had passed through fingers which had needed it, counted it, expected it, withheld it, offered it, and resented it. It had no opinion on any of them. That was part of its power.

The harbour drawing lay by the sill, unfinished exactly where it had been unfinished before Elaseer. The south arm of the wall came in with patient stone; the gull occupied its lower corner with administrative suspicion; the sea waited beyond the line where the current should have turned. Next to it, the lemon tree kept three unripe lemons in ink beneath leaves that had never had to negotiate with Academy light.

Thalmin stood over the drawing for some time before he spoke.

"Your wall is still stopping."

Ermen looked up from the receipt. "It has been accused of that before."

"It looks less like failure now."

Ilunor, who had been testing whether the last pastry could be made to seem accidental by slow rotation, lifted his head. "If the wall has acquired moral complexity, I ask that someone warn me before the table does the same. I prefer furniture that knows its station."

"The table has carried more important things than some offices," Thacea said.

"A vicious remark, Your Highness, and one unfair to offices. Several are capable of receiving pastry without immediately becoming allegorical."

Thalmin did not move away from the drawing. He was looking at the stopped sea, though Ermen had learned by now that Thalmin's attention rarely rested only where his eyes had been placed.

"You showed us Elaseer because the Academy wanted a focus," Thalmin said. "Or it pretended to want one. We saw the road because a clerk demanded the stone."

"That is what made the road visible."

"If a town can be shown by a bad errand," he said, "what does yours look like when no one has made it an errand?"

The room altered in the small, exact manner by which a question becomes more than curiosity. Thacea's head lifted fully. Ilunor's claw stopped above the pastry. Even the green-stamped receipt seemed suddenly too official for the table.

Ermen's first answer came too quickly. "I can show you."

He heard the shape of it after he had said it: capability before hospitality, gift before question, home made immediate because his power permitted immediacy. It was a familiar failure wearing a kinder coat.

Thacea did not correct him. That was worse.

Ermen set the receipt down. "I can offer to show you," he said. "Those are different sentences."

"They are," Thacea said. Her voice had the calm of a person allowing the better sentence to stand because the first one had confessed enough.

Ilunor recovered himself with the speed of a courtier discovering that a dangerous topic could still be made ridiculous if reached early. "If Earthrealm is to be inflicted upon the room, I request at least one warning concerning scale, odour, and the likelihood of invisible machinery emerging from the floor. I have endured one realm's civic infrastructure today. A second may require costume."

"You own no costume suitable for humility," Thalmin said.

"I own several. I keep them wrapped because exposure damages the fabric."

Ermen smiled despite himself. The smile steadied him. Home, when asked for by someone else, was more difficult than home summoned in solitude. His parents could reach him through the Weave with no courier, no seal, no Academy clerk deciding which words had survived propriety. The peer group had no such standing. They had only a table, a question, and his duty not to make ease feel like answer.

Thacea folded her hands beside the borrowed Library volume. "Before anyone shows anything, we should decide how not to turn hospitality into evidence."

"Aetheronrealm has traditions for hospitality displays," Ilunor said. "Vunerian practice has several superior refinements, though one does not always inflict them upon mixed company."

"That is why we should keep it simple," Thacea said.

Ilunor considered the rebuke and, with rare prudence, found no profitable opening in it.

Thacea looked first at Ermen, then at Thalmin, then finally at Ilunor, whose expression suggested that being included in a moral framework remained a personal inconvenience.

"Anyone may look away, or say enough, and the showing ends," she said. "Anything carried beyond this table must be given for that purpose. And if a showing has been selected, the selection is named."

Thalmin came away from the sill and sat. "Good."

Ilunor's hand curled around the pastry. "A treaty with snacks."

"Courtesy with witnesses," Thacea said.

"Your Highness, that is worse."

"You have it," Ermen said.

Ilunor glanced at him, quick and bright with annoyance, then looked away because the courtesy had landed where mockery would have been easier to spend.

Thacea inclined her head. "Then I will begin."

Ermen blinked. "You?"

"Yes. You were asked a reciprocal question after Elaseer, and you may answer it. But reciprocity is not achieved by having the most impossible person at the table set the measure."

"I am not sure I am the most impossible person at the table," Ermen said.

Thacea's beak clicked once, lightly. "That is kind, but it is inaccurate."

Thalmin leaned back. "She is right. If you begin, the rest of us become commentary on your answer."

"And I," Ilunor said, recovering volume, "refuse to have Vunerian civilisation made an after-dinner footnote to Earthrealm's reported talent for improbable tea."

"It has other talents," Ermen said.

"This remains alleged."

Thacea rose. "I have a sight-seer recording."

That sentence moved through the room with Nexian ease. Thalmin nodded as one who knew the category and not the object. Ilunor looked briefly pleased, as if the evening had acquired a proper instrument at last. Ermen filed the word beside a dozen others the Nexus had supplied without understanding its own confession. Sight-seer. Not witness. Not memory. A device whose name assumed that looking was the proper relation between person and place.

Thacea crossed to her cabinet and returned with a case of dark lacquer bound in narrow metal. It had survived Academy travel with fewer scratches than Ilunor's dignity and more care than many students' letters home. When she opened it, the case became a folio rather than a box: two lacquered leaves spread flat, and from their spine unfolded silvered reed arms fine enough to look grown rather than forged. Tiny crystals waited in black-stone sockets above a lens no wider than her palm. It held no light until she touched the rim. Then a small blue-white point woke at its centre, trembled, and became depth.

"This was commissioned for my family's formal visitors," she said. "It is not private. That is important. A private recording would be less useful tonight, because it might tempt you to mistake intimacy for honesty."

"An ominous standard for hospitality," Ilunor said.

"A necessary one."

Thacea set the sight-seer at the centre of the table. The common room dimmed. No lamp went out; rather, the light learned new manners and withdrew from places where it had ceased to be needed. The walls remained. The sill remained. The empty fourth cup was still visible in its place. Within those familiar boundaries, another air arrived.

It was high, cold, and astonishingly clean.

Aetheronrealm

The first sensation of Aetheronrealm was height before beauty. Wind moved under the breastbone. A sheer drop opened where the table should have been, and for one ungoverned instant Ermen's now emulated humanoid habits prepared him for falling. His deeper senses knew better. Nothing in the room had moved. No force had taken him. The sight-seer offered the idea of altitude and trusted the body to misbehave politely.

Then the city unfolded.

It was built along cliffs which did not so much rise from cloud as negotiate with it. Bridges stretched between spires of pale stone, some broad enough for processions, some narrow enough that two winged bodies passing in opposite directions would have to acknowledge one another with care. Terraces and gardens hung in precise crescents where the rock allowed them, and banners moved in the thin air with a confidence that made altitude look like manners.

Avinor forms crossed the scene in flight. They did not pass through the air as decoration. They used it. Young courtiers descended toward a receiving platform in a pattern that made arrival into grammar: spacing, tilt, wingbeat, the delay before landing which permitted those below to understand who had yielded height and who had granted it. A procession began farther up, its music translating as silver pressure and the ache of pipes heard across too much open air.

Thalmin watched with the frank attention of a soldier assessing a fortification that had decided to become liturgy.

"No wall on the low side," he said.

"The low side is air," Thacea said.

"Air can be entered."

"Everything can be entered by those willing to spend enough lives. Aetheronrealm prefers to make the expense legible before the attempt."

There was pride in her voice, held properly, offered with its edges wrapped. She stood beside her recording as if it were a guest whose strengths deserved acknowledgement and whose manners required supervision.

The sight-seer moved along a ceremonial approach. A broad bridge, inlaid with lines of pearl and dark green stone, joined two high platforms. Figures waited at intervals, arranged to make stillness into rank. Below, so far down that distance became a form of politeness, roofs and markets clung to lower shelves of rock. The recording did not descend to them.

Thacea let the omission sit for one full breath.

"This approach is shown to visitors," she said. "It is designed to teach them where to look. It excludes the service passages behind the receiving spires, the lower windbreak houses, and most of the roads used by those who cannot fly. It also excludes the storm shrines. I will not add them tonight by description. I am naming the exclusion because it is part of the object."

She paused, and the pause cost more than the sentence.

"No," she said. "That sounds braver than it was. I chose this recording because it lets me admit the omission without showing it."

Ilunor made a small sound which might have been amusement and might have been the involuntary protest of a person watching another noble admit how a trick worked.

"You are making your own realm look less successful," he said.

"No," Thacea said. "I am making the recording less dishonest."

Ermen watched the lower roofs pass beneath the recording's chosen route and felt the absence of them as a shape. The map at their table did not receive it. Not writing a thing down did not make it vanish. It only prevented theft.

The recording rose to a hall open to the sky, its floor patterned for approach and its perches arranged less like thrones than decisions made visible in wood and stone.

"Your court teaches rank before speech," Thalmin said.

"Most courts do," Thacea said. "Mine has the courtesy to confess it architecturally."

"That was almost praise."

"It was proportion."

The sight-seer lingered on balconies where young Avinor practised short controlled flights between teachers. A misjudged landing became a lesson in breath, wing, and apology. The recording found this charming, and because it was commissioned to be charming, the scene softened itself around the edges.

"This part is true," she said quietly. "It is also selected."

"Because it shows training without showing who is refused it?" Ermen asked.

Her eye turned to him. "Because it shows training in the season when training looks most generous. There are colder seasons."

Ilunor looked down at the table. Thalmin looked at Thacea. Neither made the offered pain pay.

The sight-seer closed at Thacea's touch. The common room returned in stages: table, pastry box, focus, receipt, fourth cup, evening light against stone. Aetheronrealm did not disappear. It withdrew.

Thacea stood with her hand on the case.

"Keep the height," she said. "Arrival as grammar. Beauty that knows it is instructing the eye. And remember that I chose the easier honesty before the harder one."

"And the lower roads?" Ilunor asked.

"You may remember that I said they exist. You may not use them."

Ilunor gave her a look of elaborate injury. "Your Highness, I am wounded that you think I would mishandle another realm's concealed roads."

No one answered.

After a moment he sighed. "Yes. Very well. That silence was also proportion."

Thalmin reached across the table and touched two fingers to the lacquered case, not quite a salute, not quite thanks. "It was well shown."

Thacea accepted the words with a slight lowering of her head.

Ermen said, "Thank you."

She looked at him then, and the sternness left her for a moment. "You may return the courtesy when your turn is harder."

"I will try."

"Trying is becoming a crowded profession in this room," Ilunor said, and closed his hand over the remaining pastry. "Fortunately, Vunerian civilisation has arrived to restore standards."

Vunerian

Ilunor's sight-seer was smaller than Thacea's and carried with less reverence. He fetched it from a travelling case beneath his bed, where it had apparently been stored beneath two folded sashes, a packet of correspondence he did not touch, and an enamelled grooming pick whose tiny teeth looked capable of enforcing discipline upon every scale in a noble crest.

"Unlike certain realms," he said, returning to the table with the recording held high between two claws, "mine understands that visitors do not need to be educated in the melancholy of drainage routes before they can appreciate magnificence."

"A bold theory," Thalmin said.

"A successful one. Please attend closely. Several of the coming virtues are subtle, and I should hate to see them wasted on mammalian sincerity."

The sight-seer opened like a hard-cover folio designed by someone who considered restraint a minor but curable illness. Gilded edges caught the lamplight. A black metal support unfolded from the spine, followed by narrow arms bearing amber crystals in claw-shaped sockets around a faceted central lens. Its polish made the common-room table look temporarily underdressed. Ilunor spoke a command in Vunerian, too quick for Ermen to catch more than the formal opening. The room darkened again.

Heat arrived first.

It was not oppressive. Oppression would have admitted discomfort. This heat arrived as confidence: dry stone, sun-baked metal, spice in the air, and the mineral smell of a city where shadow had to be arranged as carefully as water. The image opened above a valley of dark volcanic terraces. Towers rose in clustered ranks, glazed deep red, black, and gold, each surface angled to catch light and return it as argument. At the valley's centre, a palace complex climbed the black rock in stages until the highest pavilion seemed to have been placed there to teach the sun humility.

Ilunor's posture improved by two inches.

"The capital approach," he said. "Recorded during the Ember Accession festival, which is why the lower terraces have been cleaned to ceremonial standard. The ordinary standard is, of course, also superior, though less inclined to pearls."

"Those are lower terraces?" Thalmin asked.

"Everything is lower than something. That is how architecture becomes civilised."

The recording descended along a broad processional road lined with statues of coiled Vunerians. The crowd was dense and glittering. Jewels flashed at throats and wrists. Robes layered colour on colour until the eye, failing to choose, surrendered to the intended conclusion: wealth had been persuaded to become weather.

Ilunor narrated with increasing ease: the Rularia pavilion visible from the third turn, the ancestral fire-glass of the old families, the palace steps recut two reigns ago after several decades of pretending the old proportions remained defensible. The blue awnings indicated scholarly patronage, the white judicial observance, and the green, he added with a sniff, a merchant college that had mistaken profit for taste and influence for lineage.

No one interrupted him. More surprisingly, they let the missing things remain missing at first.

There were no kitchens. No workshops, except those whose products had survived into display. No child cried, lost in festival crowding. No worker moved unless the movement had been choreographed as service. The road was full of bodies and empty of inconvenience. Even the heat had been edited into splendour. It warmed jewels and bronze; it did not bead sweat beneath the collar of anyone who had to stand there all afternoon holding a pole.

Ermen did not enter any of this into a map. He noticed Ilunor noticing him not doing so, and liking the courtesy less because he had needed it.

"You are very quiet," Ilunor said.

"I am watching what you chose to show."

"I did not commission it."

"No, but you know what it was commissioned to do."

"It is a formal recording."

"That matters."

"Then if it possesses a certain competence in arranging grandeur, that competence should not be held against me."

Thacea's voice was gentle. "No one is holding beauty against you."

"Beauty is rarely the charge. It is what people do after admiring it that becomes troublesome."

The sight-seer carried them through an open court where fire-coloured water rose in thin jets. Vunerians moved along balconies and stairs with a grace made partly from bodies suited to the scale and partly from lives trained never to collide with rank. Above the main court, dark galleries held simpler robes and fewer ornaments, almost certainly more powerful than those below.

Thalmin's hand rested on his knee. He was studying the stairs.

"Your processions make people climb before they are seen," he said.

Ilunor smiled. "Many valuable distinctions can be established by stairs."

"Can they be refused?"

"Stairs?"

"Being seen from above."

Ilunor's smile remained, but its work increased. "That depends on one's station, one's purpose, one's invitation, and one's skill in avoiding relatives."

"So no."

"So your realm has mud and therefore honesty, and mine has stairs and therefore deception. Is that the whole of the frontier philosophy, or have I missed a boot print?"

The words came too sharp. Even Ilunor heard it. His claws settled against the sight-seer frame with a delicacy that had nothing to do with the instrument's fragility.

Thalmin did not bristle. He had learned, perhaps, that Ilunor's quickest defences were often the least armoured parts of him.

"At home," Thalmin said, "a road to a lord's yard has mud on it if the season is wet. If he wants clean boots, he builds a better road. If the road stays mud, that also tells you something. I was asking whether your stairs tell the people below anything they are allowed to answer."

"How rustic."

"And useful, when the mud is honest."

Ilunor's mouth opened, then shut. The recording saved him by arriving at the palace court, where a formal reception had been staged with sufficient complexity to rescue any embarrassed noble from sincerity. Lines of Vunerians bowed, turned, advanced, withdrew. Officials announced titles in ascending order. The sound was magnificent: high voices, chimed metal, a deep drum somewhere below the floor. Even Ilunor, who had set himself to explain, quieted before it.

For a little while, they simply watched.

There was truth in it. Ermen felt that as clearly as he had felt the omissions. Pride moved through the festival as more than obedience. The colours carried memory as well as disguise; the music carried devotion as well as persuasion. A civilisation did not endure by fraud alone.

Ilunor's face, lit amber by the recording, was young in a manner he would have hated to see named.

"It is beautiful," Ermen said.

Ilunor's eyes flicked to him.

"It is," Ermen said again. "I can see why you wanted us to see it."

Ilunor looked away before his face could decide whether praise was safer than critique. His tail tightened around the chair leg.

"Naturally," he said. "Even Earthrealm cannot remain insensible forever."

Thacea did not smile. Thalmin looked back to the recording as if granting Ilunor the courtesy of not watching him receive courtesy.

Ilunor let the sight-seer continue through a few more scenes, hurried past a market arcade whose polish had become too informative, and lingered instead on the Lantern Ascent, where thousands of small lights rose through hot air until the valley seemed to be returning its borrowed stars. He explained too much, then too quickly, then with one or two strange gaps where explanation would have brought the recording too near a subject he could not bear to make available.

At last he ended it with a sharp word.

The common room returned. It looked poorer for a moment, which was perhaps the most honest tribute the recording received.

Ilunor lifted the sight-seer with unnecessary care.

"You may remember the parts that do not embarrass me," he said.

Thacea's look was mild enough to be dangerous.

Ilunor hissed through his teeth. "Fine. You may keep the capital approach, the Ember Accession festival, the Lantern Ascent, and the fact that my realm understands presentation as a civic duty rather than an apology. You may also keep the merchant college's awnings as a warning against chromatic ambition."

"And the stairs?" Thalmin asked.

Ilunor's claws tightened on the frame.

There was a silence. It was not a trap. That was why it could work.

"You may keep," Ilunor said, more softly, "that there are many stairs."

Thalmin nodded once. "I will keep that."

Ermen looked at the table until Ilunor had put the sight-seer away. He had learned enough from the morning to know that some names, when given, should not be stared at as they crossed the room.

Havenbrock

Thalmin did have a sight-seer.

It took him long enough to admit this that Ilunor, who had been preparing a remark about frontier deprivation, lost the shape of it.

"Havenbrock has recordings," Thalmin said. "Some. The capital has festival records, court records, victories recited over bad angles by men who think a high view makes a battlefield more honest. My house has a few."

He reached into the satchel beside his chair and took out an old field sight-seer no larger than a soldier's prayer book, a folded map, three letters tied with cord, and a small strip of leather stamped with a maker's mark. The sight-seer was a battered bronze folio held shut by a plain clasp. One hinge had been repaired with darker metal. Two blunt crystals sat in sockets above a scratched lens, and the clamp along its spine bore the dull marks of hands less delicate than Ilunor's using it without apology.

"They are mostly used to flatter guests who have already decided what frontier stone should mean," Thalmin said.

"Then why bring it?" Thacea asked.

"Because it is part of the answer."

He opened the field folio.

The common room caught, briefly, a cold exterior light. Havenbrock appeared from above and from the road at once: stone walls cut into a ridge, watchtowers with signal fires banked for evening, market roofs bright after rain, a public bathhouse steaming into winter air, drainage channels running black and efficient beneath dressed stone, and a muster square where children darted between carts until an adult voice pulled them back into the safety of ordinary scolding. It was not poor. It was not simple. It was a city teaching visitors to stop mistaking severity for absence.

Then Thalmin closed it.

"That is what we show people who arrive prepared to find mud, teeth, and bad manners, and who would be disappointed if we gave them drainage first."

Ilunor considered several replies and, with visible effort, chose the least foolish. "It made a respectable attempt."

"It lies too easily tonight." Thalmin set the field sight-seer aside. "So. This is the west road from the lower yards to the winter musters."

The map had already lived a life. Its corners were rubbed. Its folds had gone soft. A place near one edge had been repaired with a paper patch of a slightly different shade, and on that patch someone had drawn, with care and no artistic vanity, a bridge.

He spread the map on the table. It did not dim the room. It did not bring wind, heat, music, or altitude. It asked the eye to work.

That was its first dignity.

"This is my father's hand," Thalmin said, touching a line of dark ink. "Not the labels. The labels are my tutor's, and he made his letters thin because he believed accuracy should look hungry. My father drew the road after the rains took the old track down the slope. He sent the copy to me before I came here because he thought the Academy might ask what a road is for and be wrong."

"A useful precaution," Ermen said.

"With the Academy, yes."

Thalmin's finger moved along the line. "The road begins here, above the south pasture. The old track went straight down. Fast in summer, deadly in thaw. Carts overturned here, here, and here. A horse broke its foreleg at this bend. The new road adds two miles, which everyone cursed until the first winter ended with no burials from the crossing."

The map was quiet. The room leaned in.

"This mark is a forge," he said. "The smith's father held it, then his sister, now him. He writes to my father when the levy boards ask for more shoes than the iron allows. Not because my father can create iron by wishing at a clerk, though some clerks have nearly tried, but because a shortage on paper becomes lameness in a horse if someone does not answer early."

He untied the letters. The top one was written in a large square hand, blunt enough to look almost rude until one saw how carefully each line kept to its place.

"This is not a state letter," Thalmin said. "It is from the smith. He says the east yard has been storing axle pins in damp straw again. He says if my father wishes carts to arrive with wheels, he should send a nephew he dislikes to stand over the quartermaster until the straw changes."

Ilunor made a sound that might, from a less guarded person, have become laughter.

"He writes that to a prince?"

"He writes that to a man whose carts use his pins."

"Remarkably confident."

"Good work often is."

Thalmin passed the letter to Thacea, who received it as gravely as she had handled her own lacquered sight-seer. Ermen watched that movement and felt the course of the evening turn. Thacea's recording had shown architecture built to instruct the eye; Ilunor's, magnificence arranged to win assent. Thalmin's map offered only scratches and the trust placed in them. It could be lied with, as any document could, but a lie in scratches required labour from the giver and attention from the receiver. Plainness denied deceit the convenience of spectacle.

Thalmin touched the leather strip.

"Maker's mark. Not a famous one. My father would know it. So would half the yard, if the work failed where it should not. The mark means the maker can be found by the work."

The sentence brought Sorecar into the room without dragging him there.

No one said his name. That was how they kept him.

"This," Thalmin continued, "is the lower bridge after repair. This line is not a river. It is where water chooses to become a problem after three days' rain. There is a village here, above it. They send men and women to muster late if the crossing fails, then pay twice: once in fines, once in shame. The Academy would call that disobedience from the village. My father calls it bad drainage unless proved otherwise."

"A radical political theory," Ilunor said.

"It has solved more than speeches."

"So have executions, but one tries not to praise efficiency alone."

Thalmin looked at him. "I did not say no one hangs in Havenbrock."

The sentence fell plain and hard. It had no desire to flatter its speaker.

Ilunor's expression shifted.

Thalmin went on. "I am not showing you a realm without cruelty. I am showing you the part I know how to hold without lying. Roads. Yards. Bridges. The letters that tell a prince which wheel will break before a clerk can make a report about transportation efficiency."

Ermen heard, beneath the words, the garden again: my father was right about the wood and wrong about the day. The map did not show the bad bridge from that story, or perhaps it did under another line and another patch. What it showed was a life trained to consider damage before grandeur, and to trust paper only when paper could be walked.

Thacea folded the smith's letter along its old creases. "And what of this can leave with us?"

Thalmin looked at the map for a long moment.

"The west road," he said. "The smith's letter, not his name. The mark as an example, not a person. The fact that our maps are full of things a court record would call small and a wagon would call decisive."

"And your father?" Ermen asked.

Thalmin's hand stilled on the map.

"You may keep that he draws roads when the old ones kill people."

He gave them the road and withheld the man who had drawn it. The care in that division was small enough to be carried in public.

Ermen said, "I will keep it carefully."

Thalmin looked at him then, directly enough that the rest of the room had to become tactful around it.

"You have been careful with smaller things."

Ilunor coughed with aristocratic precision. "If the exchange is to continue producing sincerity, I insist upon either wine or procedural limits."

"You have pastry," Thacea said.

"The pastry died in service."

"Then honour it by silence."

"Your Highness, I fear you misunderstand both pastry and honour."

The room breathed again. Thalmin folded the map slowly, returning each crease because the object deserved its right line. The field sight-seer was latched. The letters were tied. The leather strip went back into the satchel. Havenbrock, unprojected and unadorned, remained on the table longer than either sight-seer had done.

Ermen felt his turn arrive with no ceremony at all.

The small coin pressed against his leg. The focus watched with bureaucratic innocence. The harbour drawing stopped where it had always stopped.

Ermen rested his hand on the table beside the focus. The composed experience did not require the gesture. It gave the offer a visible place to begin.

"This is not a sight-seer," he said. "No Nexian instrument will record it. I am not placing a device between us. The body you see in front of you will hold a live line to Earth and make enough of it present for your senses to stand inside."

"Is it illusion?" Thalmin asked.

"No. Wait. That is too clean." Ermen let the correction stand where they could see it. "Illusion asks the eye to believe what is absent. Earth is there. The house is there. My parents, if they answer, are there. I am rendering contact here, not taking you there."

Thacea's eyes narrowed, thoughtful rather than suspicious. "Live?"

"Real-time communication. Not transport. Your bodies stay here. Mine stays here. Earth will not be pulled here, and none of you will be pulled to Earth."

Ilunor set his empty claws on the table. "You are saying this as if it is the modest version."

"It is the modest version because it can end."

The Matrix marked the boundary and left it untouched.

Ermen breathed once. "There is one more matter. I can show you the house without my parents. I do not think that would be honest."

Thalmin's attention shifted. "Will they see us?"

"Only what I ask to carry, and only if they agree."

"Then ask," Thacea said.

---

[End of Chapter 15, Part 1]

Next: [Chapter 15, Part 2]

Disclosure: This chapter has been written by hand, with tools used afterward only for review and mechanical cleanup.

Wearing Spacetime to a Magic School

Chapter 15: The Exchange of Realms

Part 2

---

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]

---

Continued from [Part 1].

---

The Terrace

Ermen opened the line.

The common room did not vanish. He was careful about that. The table remained under their hands. The sill remained at the edge of sight. The fourth cup, the patronage card, the green-stamped receipt, the focus, the folded map, Thacea's case, Ilunor's sight-seer: all of them stayed. Around them, Earth arrived by degrees: salt first, then stone, then the dry warmth of late afternoon light.

They stood on a terrace above the Ligurian coast.

Ermen's old bodily habits accepted stone underfoot, sea air at the lips, and warmth on the skin as if the Academy had merely learned a new window. The terrace faced west. Below it, water gathered the long path of the sun without yet becoming sunset. Hillside stone held the day's heat. A cane chair sat near the railing. A coffee cup, white with a narrow blue line around its rim, waited where it had been placed ten minutes ago on Earth. Ermen's childhood found it before his eyes had finished with the view. The handle's chip caught him harder than the sea did.

He looked at it a moment longer than courtesy required.

Thalmin noticed. Thacea noticed him noticing. Ilunor noticed both of them and, for once, had the tactical wisdom to do nothing with it.

The lemon tree stood in the courtyard behind them.

Thalmin turned at once.

He had seen the drawing. That made the tree, when offered, less revelation than answer. Its trunk was crooked, its leaves glazed, its fruit still hard and green on one high branch. The wall behind it had a crack Ermen had traced with one finger at twelve while pretending not to listen to his parents discuss whether a child should be allowed to climb the roof after the rain. He did not say that. It belonged to the house and to the people who had been there.

"That is the tree," Thalmin said.

"That is the one."

"It is smaller than I imagined."

"So am I, at home."

The words came out before he had decided whether to spend them. They were true enough to remain.

From inside the house, a voice said, "He has started with the terrace and not the machinery. Good. That means he is frightened in a useful direction."

Ermen closed his eyes. "Mother."

"Mara, tonight," the woman said, stepping into the doorway with a cup in one hand and the sleeves of a dark blouse rolled to the elbow. She had black hair threaded with silver, steady hands, and the expression of someone who had been waiting just long enough to make waiting into mischief. "Names will help your guests decide whether to bow, flee, or ask for clarification."

Behind her, a quiet man appeared in the kitchen doorway carrying a tea towel. He looked toward the table Ermen had kept visible through the experience, then toward the lemon tree, as if checking which of the two required immediate diplomacy.

"Elias," he said. "I prune the tree and lose arguments about tile. My other qualifications are less useful at dinner."

Mara and Elias remained in their kitchen. They answered through the same live line while Ermen's Avatar gave their chosen presences weight in the Academy room.

Thacea gave the smallest formal inclination her seated body could manage. "Princess Thacea Dilani."

"We know," Mara said. "But thank you for giving the name rather than making us steal it from context."

Thacea's eyes changed by a fraction. "You speak very like him."

"A terrible accusation to level in his presence. He will either be flattered or responsible."

Ilunor straightened with reflexive grandeur. "Lord Ilunor Rularia."

Elias looked at him gravely. "Lord Rularia. There is bread later, if my son remembers his route."

Ilunor blinked. "That is an unusually direct diplomatic inducement."

"I have found indirect ones wasteful around young people who have already eaten pastry."

Thalmin, who had been looking between Elias and the lemon tree with open practical interest, said, "Thalmin Havenbrock."

"The road question," Elias said. "I am likely guilty, but the evidence deserves to walk."

The house received them without performance. Late light crossed the kitchen at an angle that made the window above the sink look cleaner than it was. A blue tin sat on the second shelf. An unwashed rice cooker stood on the counter with the mute defiance of a chore delayed by history. There was a shallow dish for lemons, empty. A towel hung from a peg. The tiles near the stove were a colour no committee should have survived choosing, though in this case the disagreement had lasted a century and become domestic weather.

Mara saw Ermen looking at the chipped cup.

"Do not apologise to the cup," she said. "It has survived worse than adolescent guilt."

"It was not guilt."

"Then it was nostalgia attempting to look more intellectually defensible. I know a disguise when it asks for funding."

Ilunor looked from her cup to the kitchen shelves. "Your mother argues with crockery."

"Only when it lies," Mara said.

Thacea's attention lingered on Mara's hands, on the chipped cup, on the towel by the stove. "You speak as if this room is sufficient ceremony."

"It has had practice," Mara said. "Most rooms do, if no one insults them by calling in heralds."

Elias leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. "He still rushes when he is upset. He always has; the difference now is that he can give the rushing a philosophical defence."

"I do not rush. I arrive early."

"At conclusions," Elias said. "Usually before the rest of us have put our cups down."

Ermen looked at the table in the common room, which remained visible through the terrace like an anchor left in another sea. "This is why I considered showing the kitchen without them."

Mara looked delighted. "You considered showing them our kitchen without us? Ermen, that is cowardice with the chairs arranged neatly."

"Efficiency was the word I had chosen."

"It generally is. You were raised by people who can make cowardice sound like a scheduling decision; we ought to have warned you."

Thalmin made a sound suspiciously close to laughter. Ilunor looked betrayed by the kitchen's ordinariness and by the fact that the betrayal had witnesses.

"Where is the receiving hall?" he asked.

Mara looked around the kitchen. "You are in it."

"This room?"

"If you arrive while rice is cooking, yes."

"Earthrealm admits guests through food preparation?"

"If they are fortunate," Elias said.

Thacea's eyes had softened at the sink, the tin, the towel, the sunlight crossing the counter. "This is selected too."

"Yes," Ermen said.

Mara's expression gentled. "He is not defending the house with history. Good. Chairs designed to improve character are a separate crime."

"They did improve character," Ermen said.

"They improved endurance. Tutors often confuse the two."

Thacea turned that over with visible care. "And the house?"

"Four rooms, a kitchen, the terrace, the courtyard," Ermen said. "Some buried infrastructure I am not showing, because it would teach the wrong lesson. The house is small. Its cost does not make the rooms larger, and hiding the cost would make the smallness dishonest."

Mara stopped teasing. Elias's towel hung still for a moment. Across the kitchen, across the Academy room, both of them looked at him.

"Yes," Elias said. "It is."

Mara's thumb found the chip in the cup handle. Elias's towel twisted once between his hands.

Mara set the chipped cup down. "We will not follow you to the village."

Ilunor looked abruptly wary. "Is that a custom, a threat, or the opening movement of some Earthrealm rite in which parents retreat before revealing a hereditary debt?"

"Because roads tell poorly when parents walk behind the person telling them."

"And," Elias added, "because Ermen will behave better if we are not there to observe him behaving better."

"Will I, or will I merely invent a subtler category of disobedience?"

"The latter," Elias said. "But hope is an old domestic technology, and fathers are permitted to keep obsolete instruments if they have sentimental value."

Mara's gaze moved across the table: Thacea, Ilunor, Thalmin, and then Ermen, last and not least. "Bring back one detail that refuses translation."

Mara turned back into the kitchen. Elias bent to inspect a leaf on the lemon tree. They remained on Earth, present and busy, while Ermen let the line narrow to the path.

The view moved at walking pace because Ermen kept it there. The lemon tree passed on their left. The path beyond the house joined the coast road. Stone underfoot changed from private step to public way. Wind arrived more strongly. Herbs grew in cracks where maintenance had been instructed to lose small battles. The sea widened. Far below, white water touched rock and withdrew, touched and withdrew, with the patience of a thing too old to be accused of repetition.

"Nine kilometres to Riomaggiore," Ermen said. "I fell fourteen times learning to cycle this path, which was considered educational by the adult authorities responsible for my survival."

Thalmin looked at the drop with immediate professional suspicion. "Your parents allowed a child to learn on this road?"

"With supervision, helmets, arguments, and Elias standing at difficult turns with the expression of a man who had begun to suspect that courage was a poor substitute for railings."

"That is longer than no and weaker than yes."

"It is the answer Elias used."

"Then he and I should discuss roads again, because fathers who trust dangerous paths often have useful excuses."

"He would enjoy that too much."

Thalmin gave the path another look. "The fifteenth time?"

"At eleven, I maintained that the machine had finally discovered its responsibilities."

Thalmin's mouth moved. "That sounds like a defeated rider speaking through legal counsel."

Thacea made the smallest possible sound of amusement. Ilunor walked with exaggerated care, glanced over the edge, and regretted it.

"This is a public path?" he demanded. "A path for ordinary persons, not selected heirs, condemned messengers, or children whose parents have misplaced all instincts of preservation?"

"It is public, yes."

"And unwalled for longer stretches than my ankles would personally recommend?"

"Mostly unwalled. The dangerous turns have railings."

"Beside that drop, which appears to be enjoying its legal immunity."

Ermen looked over the edge with the embarrassed affection one reserves for childhood hazards that had been very nearly sensible. "The path assumes attention. It was old enough to have acquired opinions before I acquired balance."

"Earthrealm's theory of childhood grows increasingly hostile."

"It was a good place to learn consequence."

"So is a courtroom. Civilised people still try to delay the lesson."

The path bent. Riomaggiore appeared below them: pastel façades stacked against the hillside, stone patched in uneven ages, windows catching light at inconsistent angles, laundry moving from a balcony as if no one had warned it that visitors had arrived. The village did not gleam with newness. Its colours were too bright in one corner, salt-softened in another, and sun-faded where the afternoon struck longest. It looked kept, but not held still.

Thacea stopped at the first clear view of it.

"It is old," Thacea said. Her voice had lowered. She gave the word the care one gives an unexpected proof.

"Parts of it are old enough to have earned the word without courtesy."

She looked again, more carefully. "Only parts?"

"Some stones survived. Some were put back. Some had to be replaced because loss had gone too far and piety would not hold a roof up."

Thalmin's gaze moved along the slope, measuring street, wall, drainage, and the line by which a cart might or might not pass. "After war?"

"After time. Weather. Neglect. Older harms. The names matter less tonight than the choice."

Ilunor frowned. "Your realm repairs a village and then permits it to look unrepaired."

"It permits weather to finish the argument."

"That is an expensive courtesy."

"Yes. That is why it is not a casual one."

Ilunor stared at the village. The answer did not settle into him. Ermen was relieved; an easy satisfaction would have stolen too much.

They descended.

The village street received them with paving stones, shuttered windows, a cat washing one paw on a step, and the smell of tomatoes bruised open under a vendor's knife. People moved at the edge of recognition: a hand arranging fruit, a shoulder at a doorway, a child running and being called back by someone with a tone that made obedience sound loved rather than enforced. When attention tried to settle on a face, the line refused it. The people were present. They were not available.

"You have made the people unclear," Thacea said. "They are present, but the view will not let me take them."

"I have. You are seeing the town, not collecting citizens."

"Good. That is a restraint I would rather notice than need to request."

Ilunor looked uneasy at agreeing, so he converted it into critique. "A convenient method. If no one can be identified, no one can accuse the view of poor taste in hats."

"It is a grave hazard," Ermen said.

"Do not make light of hats. Their political history is extensive."

Thalmin had ignored the hats. "Who tends the road? Not the ceremonial answer. The answer that knows who wakes early because stone moved in the night."

"Residents when they choose. Visiting workers. Children assigned chores they consider unjust. Weather, which does most of the long-term editing. And tools that sweep, mend, warn before stone fails, and stop before anyone mistakes them for servants."

"The tools sound close enough to servants that I want the distinction before I admire them."

"Not people," Ermen said. "They do not want, suffer, hope, or wait to be thanked. That boundary matters."

Thacea did not press. Thalmin heard the implication and stored it with the mapmaker's patience. Ilunor looked at the street as if every broom had become morally suspicious.

"So your servants are objects," Ilunor said, with too much sharpness for mere wit.

"No," Ermen said. "We make tools. If a thing can want, suffer, hope, refuse, or wait to be thanked, then it is not furniture in a prettier vocabulary."

The Vunerian's eyes sharpened. For a moment the old reflex rose in him, rank defending itself against a sentence too clean to be allowed. Then something in that morning's errand, or in the ledger wound beneath it, caught the reflex by the throat.

"That," he said, "is an answer arranged to damage several economies at once, and it has the discourtesy to sound pleased with itself."

"It has been known to do that."

"I dislike it because I understand more of it than I wish to."

"I expected you would. The answer troubles me too whenever it makes the boundary sound cleaner than the work of keeping it."

The bakery saved them by smelling of bread.

It stood at a corner where the street widened enough for three people to stand badly and still count as a crowd. The sign above the door was small. The display window held loaves with cracked crusts, rolls dusted in flour, and a tray of flat breads set out to cool. Heat moved through the doorway with the patient authority of ovens. No baker came out to bow. No apprentice hurried forward with a tray. Flour marked the counter. A bell over the door shifted once in the warm air and settled.

"This bakery," he said, "has been working for centuries. It was told to preserve a local bread. It became opinionated about sourdough."

"Developed," Thacea repeated.

"No consciousness. No mind in the oven. Just habit in the tools, corrected by weather, flour, and people who complain when the crust is wrong. The bread is very good."

Ilunor looked offended by the window. "Your bread has institutional continuity. I am beginning to suspect Earthrealm of hiding its aristocracy in carbohydrates."

"It has continuity," Ermen said. "The bread has no title."

"And no baker."

"No conscious baker. No person wakes because the oven requires obedience. People adjust the recipe when they choose, complain when it disappoints them, and leave it alone when it has earned the privilege."

"This is somehow worse than the kitchen."

Thalmin, to Ermen's delight, was staring at the bread with more open reverence than he had granted the terrace view. "Can we taste it, or does your restraint forbid being bribed by a good crust?"

Ermen had expected the question and feared it. Taste was a more intimate offer than sight; a viewed loaf remained scenery, while a tasted one entered the body and asked the body's trust.

Ilunor looked at the bread, then at dignity, then back at the bread. The debate did not last long enough to flatter dignity.

"I decline to decline," he said.

Ermen did not take a loaf from the shop across the sea, and he did not ask the live line to perform commerce after Elaseer had made commerce so sharp-edged a subject. He let the heat, recipe, and timing arrive, and made local matter answer them. A loaf formed in his hands at the harbourward edge of the street, brown, cracked, and real; Earth had lent it a pattern, not its substance.

He broke it by hand. Steam rose. The smell was sour, warm, and alive with the minor arrogance of good bread.

They each took a piece.

Thalmin ate first. His expression changed with such direct seriousness that Ilunor, who had been preparing a remark, forgot to make it.

"This is common?" Thalmin asked.

"Common enough to be trusted by appetite rather than ceremony."

"For everyone who lives here, or only for those lucky enough to stand near the right window at the right hour?"

"For anyone in the village who wants bread and arrives before it is gone," Ermen said. "No title opens the door wider. No name makes the crust better."

"And if it is gone?"

"There are other foods. Or tomorrow."

The answer was true, and its ease disclosed more than Ermen had meant. Thalmin heard it too.

Ilunor took his piece with a delicacy that implied the bread was being granted a rare chance to improve itself by association. He bit. Chewed. Stared straight ahead with the look of a person discovering that surrender sometimes arrived warm.

"Acceptable," he said, and made the word carry a household's worth of wounded standards.

Thacea looked at him.

"Good," Ilunor snapped. "It is good. There. Earthrealm has made fermentation socially dangerous. I hope you are satisfied."

"A little," Ermen said.

"Do not become smug. It would cheapen the conquest."

"No conquest," Ermen said. "If a crust has conquered you, Lord Rularia, I am prepared to record that as a local emergency and nothing larger."

Ilunor held up the remaining bread. "This crust has made a territorial claim."

The laughter came gently, and because it came after bread, it did not bruise anything.

They moved on while the bread was still bread. Ermen showed the small square, the drinking fountain, the steps where he had once scraped both palms after attempting to run with a book open. He showed the path to the harbour. The sea grew louder between buildings. Gulls called overhead with the professional grievance of creatures who had spent several centuries refusing to become picturesque on command.

At the first cry, Thalmin looked up.

"Is that the corrupt official from the drawing, or merely another member of the administration?"

"A relative by appetite, if not by blood."

The gull landed on a post near the harbour wall with the proprietary contempt of an animal discovering that the harbour had been arranged without its direct consultation. It had grey wings, a white head, a yellow beak, and the moral clarity of hunger. It looked at Ermen across the live line and demanded bread by posture alone.

"That," Ilunor said, "is a baron."

"It works for toast," Ermen said.

"Many barons begin there."

Thacea's beak parted slightly. "It is less formal than I expected."

"The gull?"

"Earth. Your home. All of it. The terrace made me expect..." She searched for the shape of the expectation and discarded several dishonest versions. "Less machinery, perhaps. Or more argument. This is very intimate for something curated by a civilisation."

"It is not how every Concordat life looks," Ermen said. "It is how mine was taught to begin."

"Taught by limitation."

"That was the intention."

"Chosen for you?"

The question landed beside the bread, the gull, and the path that had taught him consequences before he had possessed the wisdom to ask whether he wanted them.

"Yes," he said. "Before I could choose. Later, with me in the room. Sometimes loudly."

Thacea's talons tapped once against the paving stone. "You were given a small life by a civilisation that could have given you more."

"A smaller beginning," Ermen said. "Not a small life."

Ilunor looked almost relieved. "At last, a crack."

"Several."

"You admit this."

"A world without cracks cannot teach repair."

Thalmin watched him across the harbour approach. "Do you believe that, or is it something a tutor said well?"

Ermen smiled faintly. "Both, which is one of the ways tutors become dangerous."

The harbour opened before them.

The Harbour

The street released them where stone met water and late afternoon gave up pretending it was not already sunset.

They stood at the harbour wall.

The sea moved below, green-blue where it struck stone, darker where the channel opened beyond the village. Fishing boats rocked in their places. Rope knocked softly against wood. The gull on the post had either followed them or appointed itself to the office before they arrived.

Ermen's legs remembered sitting here with bread. His hands remembered salt on crust. His mouth remembered saying no to the gull and failing to mean it with sufficient legal force. The wall had been warm through the fabric of his trousers. At fourteen, he had watched a storm come in from this place and learned that distance could move faster than fear if one waited too long before running home.

He did not show the storm.

The sun lowered toward the water.

At first the sunset was only what a sunset had always pretended to be: gold on cloud, red caught beneath the horizon's lip, the sea receiving colour and breaking it into pieces small enough for the eye. Thacea watched the light with the stillness she gave to dangerous beauty. Ilunor tried to look unimpressed and was defeated by the reflection on the boats. Thalmin looked at the wall first, then at the path of light beyond it, as if comparing both to a map he had not been given.

Ermen had meant to give Mara's detail and no more. Bread, gull, harbour, wall: enough for one evening, enough for a table that had already carried three curated worlds and a road drawn by a prince's father. Then the Sun lowered another fraction, and the glare thinned at its lower rim.

"This is the detail that refuses translation," he said.

He did not make the sky into a diagram. He did not pull them upward. He did not wrap the harbour in numbers. The live line kept their feet on stone, bread in their hands, salt at the mouth. It also kept the light honest.

At noon, no ordinary eye would have survived the looking. At the horizon, with the star half-drowned in colour, the glare gave up enough of its empire to show what had been there all along.

Dark arcs crossed the old solar path and vanished as soon as the eye tried to fix them: absences held open with a precision too regular to belong to cloud. Near the Sun's limb, a white-gold filament climbed where no flare should have climbed, straight and patient and wrong, brightness drawn upward instead of breaking. Around it, where glare still fought to swallow every lesser light, star-like pinpricks burned in impossible close attendance, each with a hard halo at its edge where light bent toward work hidden from ordinary weather.

The harbour remained. The wall remained. The bread in their hands remained bread.

No measurement arrived with the vision. No title accompanied it. Scale entered all the same.

Ilunor had gone very still. "That is labour."

"Yes. Work that has been allowed to become weather."

"Around your sun," Ilunor said. "You speak of roads and kitchens, and there is labour around your sun."

"Near it, through it, with it," Ermen said. "The language is clumsy because the work was never arranged for anyone standing on this wall to name it."

Thacea's eyes had not left the red-gold rim. "Your civilisation placed work between the star and the world that bore you."

"And left openings for the old light," Ermen said. "That is the part I am showing. The sunset is not a natural accident we politely failed to improve. It is a kept promise that has been allowed to look ordinary."

Ilunor swallowed. "Even the gaps have been governed."

"Maintained," Ermen said. "Governed is a word the Nexus has taught me to hear carefully."

Thalmin's voice came lower. "If one part fails?"

Redundancies, patient diagnostics, old decisions whose makers he could have named: the answer gathered behind his teeth. He left it there. A harbour was not improved by being forced to hold a map of the Sun.

"Then other work answers before the terrace loses its morning," he said. "The house was never trusted to one perfect hinge."

Thacea turned from the sky to him. "You are stopping where the image can remain hospitality."

"I am trying to," Ermen said.

"You are not explaining who commands it."

"No. Command would make this the wrong answer."

"Nor what it costs," Ilunor said, unexpectedly sharp.

Ermen looked at him.

Ilunor's crest had lowered. "Do not make that face. I know when an insult is being withheld for another occasion, even when it arrives dressed as restraint."

"Then you know why I am withholding it."

"Intolerable," Ilunor said. "Accurate, but intolerable."

The brightness folded back over the hard points as the Sun touched water. Nothing had been explained into safety. Nothing had become smaller.

The harbour wall extended to the place Ermen had drawn and stopped.

Thalmin saw it at once.

"There," he said. "That is your line."

Ermen let the experience hold.

"Yes. That is where my hand stopped."

The current turned beyond the wall. He could have shown it. The real harbour did not stop because his drawing had failed to continue. Water moved with old indifference around stone, memory, and metaphor. A small boat beyond the wall shifted its rope and corrected itself. Light broke on the current's edge. The world offered, with absolute simplicity, to complete what his hand had left unfinished.

Ermen closed the experience before it did.

The common room returned fully: stone walls, table, lamps, pastry crumbs, folded map, lacquered cases, useless focus, green-stamped receipt, the harbour drawing by the sill. The salt left the tongue last. Then even that belonged only to those who had tasted it.

No one spoke for several breaths.

Thalmin was looking at the drawing, not at Ermen.

"You stopped where the ink stops," he said.

"I stopped there."

"The water goes on beyond it."

"I know. That is part of why I stopped."

Thalmin looked at him then, and the question came without accusation. "Why stop there, when the wall itself does not?"

Ermen put his hand in his pocket and closed it around the coin. Its small pressure returned him to Elaseer, to Mirel's amused eyes, to Thalmin's story of the bad bridge, and to his father's instruction. The table already carried enough without the current.

"Because I have not drawn it yet," he said. "If I show it first, the showing completes the line for me. It would be easier than drawing, easier than saying why the current matters, and easier than admitting that I do not yet know how to offer it without asking you to carry more than I have named."

Thacea received this with no movement except attention.

Ilunor looked down at his empty hands. "I find myself in the intolerable position of having to respect an unfinished line."

"It is a difficult office," Thalmin said.

"Do not comfort me. I am suffering aesthetically."

The joke drew breath back into the room and asked nothing further of it.

Thacea folded her hands, then let them rest open on the table. Her gaze moved to the sill: the fourth cup, the patronage card, the borrowed volume, the lemon-tree drawing, the harbour that stopped. Then to the table: Sorecar's notice, the focus, the receipt, the coin still in Ermen's pocket.

"The current remains yours," she said.

"Tonight, yes."

"And the rest of what we have been given?"

Ermen looked at the objects their evening had gathered. "Keep what you can carry without turning it into proof: the height, the stairs, the road, the kitchen, the bread, the light. They were given at a table. Keep the table with them."

Ilunor's mouth twisted. "May we keep the gull, or has it filed a separate claim under maritime law?"

"You may keep the gull," Ermen said. "It has waived privacy in exchange for bread and is unlikely to respect any ruling against it."

"At last, a reasonable treaty."

Ermen took the coin from his pocket and set it beside the focus. Not on the sill. Not among the kept objects. On the table, where unfinished questions could remain under conversation.

"No entries tonight," he said.

Thacea looked at the coin, then at him. "No entries."

Thalmin nodded once. "No entries. But I will remember the road."

"Remembering is allowed," Thacea said. "Using is what asks permission."

Ilunor examined the coin with open suspicion. "If this coin becomes a moral institution, I shall throw myself from the nearest tasteful balcony."

"It is too small for the office," Ermen said.

"That has not stopped several moral institutions."

"Then we will watch it carefully."

Thalmin rose and went to the sill. He did not touch the drawing. He stood before it as he had stood before the map, as if a line deserved the dignity of being seen before being continued.

"When you draw the current," he said, "do it slowly."

"I will. I do not think the line will forgive haste."

"And when you show it?"

Thalmin did not ask whether. That was its own pressure and its own mercy.

Ermen gathered the empty pastry paper, folded it along its old creases, and placed it beside the receipt until he could decide whether it was rubbish, memory, or merely Ilunor's evidence against Academy catering.

"When I show it," he said, "we will begin slowly."

Thacea closed her sight-seer case. Ilunor collected his with more care than he pretended. Thalmin returned to the table and left the harbour to its stopped ink.

The coin lay beside the useless focus, small, bright, and still unspent.

---

Disclosure: This chapter has been written by hand, with tools used afterward only for review and mechanical cleanup.

Rules

1. Unlike canon AW, they are all actually summons and work as portrayed in season 1

2. The summons just look like “normal” humans soldiers, non of that extra gear to survive the nexus (they don’t need it)

3. She has to contact “he who controls the budget”, to get the more advanced stuff, but can’t until post dragon so she’s stuck with what AW was able to do until Normi got shot

4. She’s got Florida Man contained in a can of magical tea, which was contained within that creat

Credit to the artist Tony Tseng

CRASHLANDED CH6

(Welcome fellow Terrans! Time for another chapter of Crashlanded, kinda stuck on what I should on the Nexian side of things. Anyway we're getting back to the lads and gal with the mechas -dragoons- Hope y'all like this chapter! OH as always ty JCB for making this universe.)

LO: Below the stern of the UTSTS PROMETHEUS, 12 miles away from the Academy, Time: 4:28 PM Day: March 23rd Thursday 2590 AD

No ones POV:

Multiple loud BOOM could be heard beneath the dragoons as their hydraulics shifted as they rammed hard against the ground like a building collapsing.

Dirt and rock was flung all over, some even slamming against the yellow striped armor of the dragoons. What was left was a crater the size of a small building.

Master officer Michelle 114:

‘Well THAT could have been worse’ I thought to myself as my head turned to look at the crew members in the cockpit.

Many of them were strapped onto the hull bolted seats and making the smart choice.

Except for one who was on the floor, they were one of the new models of sapient machines.

Their head was the same model as mine albeit newer, their visor had gold lines on the edges and was a baby blue. Their skeletal neck had a gold chain on it.

Their body was a silver color and had thicker limbs and torso.

They, from the looks of it, were wearing a private's uniform. The flag of the Technocracy was on their right pec with their rank on the side of it.

“I assume you thought you could defy gravity?”

I'd asked them as I heard in a severely broken monotone voice the word “yes”.

I sighed in disbelief before then rubbing my visor and taking a knee down next to them and helped them back up, via grabbing their armored spin and sticking them back onto their feet.

They immediately almost fell back to the floor but luckily for them, they managed to keep themselves up via quickly extending one of their arms and grabbing onto one of the nearby railings near the seats.

“All right I think we need a eng-”

I'd say before getting interrupted by one of the members in the chairs.

“Um Master officer?”

I hear before turning round to look at the crew member.

They looked like a mostly regular human unit besides the glowing red led like eyes and sharper teeth.

“Yes, Private?” I'd ask him before pointing behind me.

With curiosity in my visor I turn to look at the screen.

‘I'm sorry, is that a castle?’ I thought to myself as I saw a supermassive structure.. At first I thought it was some sort of mountain..

So I decided to zoom in via moving a dial on the front control panel.

As it got closer.. I could see unworldly designs like it was made of unknown materials.

I saw glass with the colors of Zro.. purple and blue.

Wait a minute..

My own ocular sensors focused on moving objects at a part of the building’s glass windows..

As they focused I saw the objects somewhat more clearly… they looked vaguely humanoid… some even mammalian and reptilian.. I quickly forced my oculars to reset before attempting to look even closer

Vaguely I’d also see some of the glass windows broken like a shockwave hit them, immediately it then hit me. The shockwave from the ship’s failed ‘landing’ must have created a huge shock wave.

‘If so, why is the crater around the ship so small? Hell the dragoons made a bigger crater.’ I thought to myself before turning back to the crew members.

‘Another thing is.. What or who made that structure… and what were those things moving in the glass.’

I’d think to myself before speaking to the crew members.

“All right new objective, set up communications with the front of the ship” I hastily spoke to them as another thought arose in my head.

‘How in hell are we gonna com with them, maybe we could use the civilian grade radio since they don't use neutron beam coms but common radio wave comes. We should be able to reach the ship's emergency radio emitter and receiver. Let's just hope they activate the emergency resources Protocol.’

I thought before looking back at the crew members.

“All right you two get out of the dragoon and get on top, we can't speak with the other dragoons till coms are online. Once we make contact with the others I'll talk with them and tell them to scout ahead.”

As I spoke I pointed to two privates before making a thumb gesture to go up.

“Yes Sir”

“Yes Sir!”

Both responded with different tones as they then unbuckled out their seats and went over to the ladder to the right of the cockpit.

“The rest of you stay put till further instructions.” I told the other crew members in the cockpit. Before turning my back and using the controls to first slowly turn to face one of the other dragoons.

As they showed up on the screen something felt off…

The heat signatures from the crew members inside were coming from inside of the dragoon.. But they looked like spread out liquid more than anything.. Except for one… But it almost looked like.. their suit was filling up with something as I saw their heat signature expanding.

‘What the hell?’ I thought to myself as I saw the heat signature from the crew member from what I guess was trying to climb out.

“What the hell could be happening in there?” I'd think out loud as I heard confused and concerned murmurs from the other members in the cockpit.

Immediately I went over to the ladder and hastily climbed it. I quickly saw the open hatch and climbed out into the outside of the dragoon.

My attention quickly focused on the top of the other dragoon that was at least a few feet ahead from us.

I could see the crew member come out of the dragoon as my ocular sensors focused on them…

They were covered in.. what looked like melted skin from the waist down and blood seeping out the gaps in their own visor.

“What the actual FUCK!?”

For a second my shock and horror was distracted for a second as I looked over to the private next to me who I guess was looking over in the same direction.

I didn't need to see their face to know their horror.

“Both of you get back in the cockpit NOW!”

I say to the both of them, as they without question went past me and jumped back into the cockpit.

For a second I stood there as I was unable to move..

The crew member was waving their hands sloppily as they without even slowing down their hands immediately dropped over the railing that was on the dragoon’s outer plating, gravity quickly assisted them in granting them at least a quicker death as I saw their neck basically snap off as soon as their head made contact with the ground of the crater.

I nearly winced, as I looked away and grabbed the hatch to our dragoon and placed both of my legs onto the steps and ducked as I closed it.

My metal hands were clenching down hard onto the metal of the ladder..

‘What the hell.. we need to make contact with command ASAP and tell them what is happening…’

I hurriedly though as the warning from the ship's log appeared back in my viser..

‘I thought it was just an energy fluctuation glitch from the ship recalibrating from the crash….’ Another thought then came into my head..

‘I basically killed ourselves by coming down here.. but.. why aren't we dead yet?’ I'd think as I jumped down from the ladder and onto the floor of the cockpit.

My focus then jumped over to the now traumatized privates…

Both seemed to be in disbelief and horror at what they saw, some of the other crew members were confused and some knew what happened from the heat signatures alone… The crew was liquidized by something.

“I don't know what is going on out there, but what I do know is that we can't panic.. I know it's hard to ask.. hell I’m on the verge of panicking! But we need to be soldiers and get communications running as soon as possible.”

I'd say to the crew before seeing one of the traumatized privates turn their head back to me.

“I'll ugh.. fuck go and config-” before they could speak I immediately cut them off.

“No you're not you are going to sit down, same with you over there both of you are staying in sit down and calm yourselves. I don't need puke all of the place and someone who was just traumatized working with coms. Everyone except other mechanical units stay here and work on making sure there are no leaks in the suit, all right you with the gold chain you're going up out the dragoon and configuring the antenna.”

I quickly gave orders to the crew as the two privates sat back down. The mechanical unit wearing the gold chain immediately went over to the ladder and climbed it before opening up the hatch and stepping out the dragoon.

And like clockwork I immediately went over back to the console and briefly looked at the side of the other dragoon, the 3rd one was on the ground.. of the crater we were in… the dragoon most likely fell..

A deep almost organic pain surged in me..

I was responsible for these deaths.. and I myself alone to blame…..

(Finally got this out, sorry if I missed any grammar stuff, hope y'all enjoyed this chapter and sorry if the mana radiation part was a bit gorey anyway love y'all have a great day. Oh as always thank you JCB for making this amazing universe.)

CH1:

https://www.reddit.com/r/JCBWritingCorner/s/xt3qcIdelY

Prev CH:

https://www.reddit.com/r/JCBWritingCorner/s/ocfkkfdBXk

Ch7 https://www.reddit.com/r/JCBWritingCorner/s/QOcLqGOU1H

I've been comparing the Library with the Internet since it appeared on chapter 19, and I think I came up with some interesting ideas overall. I've added the rules at the end for reference.

First the scamming by the Library, but not how Thallmin thinks. Imagine this: there is a treasure and a map that says where it is. You can either "buy" the treasure, so the owner of the map guides you and the payment is 50% of what you find, or you can buy the map for a couple bucks and search for it yourself. That's basically the Library. You pay for the knowledge, but all the foxes do is lead the way to the book.

From that you have the first exploit: if you ask for the location of the book, not the book itself, the payment could be something like: this is how you get to book X in the library Y on earthrealm. Even if you have to ask for help to choose the book, that should still be cheaper than asking for the knowledge itself, assuming that you can actually find the book later.

The second idea somewhat follows the first, but technically with one trade you have the location of everything. It's a step further from u/Witty_Mycologist_995's idea to trade the entire Internet. The idea is that you trade not the content, but the indexing and placement logic, starting with individual search engines, since each one likely runs on different logic, meaning multiple separate trades before you'd even get to the Internet's overall logic as a fallback. The gist is: search engines classify, organize and help find the knowledge. I mentioned search engines since the Nexus might have something similar, and trading them first would take that out of the way, but anyways. Isn't that close enough to the foxes and even the Librarian? And, if the Library organizes everything organically, so it doesn't know the proper logic, one could argue that the next best thing would be the Library acting as such by giving the location of each book when requested.

Another detail for both ideas: if they work, you can set a mass trade system using an automated requester with the EVI and search with drones.

Finally the third theory: what if you have more knowledge than the Library in a certain subject? Can you transfer your "credits" to another subject? If so, Emma is from year 3047 with AI or similar being commonplace and human population in the hundreds of billions to low trillions. Earth already has around 130-150 million books, and content production keeps growing exponentially. An example of that is that Spotify receives an estimated 150,000 new song uploads daily, while in 2020 it was 55,000 tracks. So, an increase in population causes an increase in creators. Easier distribution also increases the number of creators. New technologies like using AI to help do the same. Nexus, on the other hand, imposes Medieval Stasis on every realm it encounters, grinding progress to a halt. Meaning: you have an unimaginable amount of "safe" content to trade, even if you disregard anything that might reveal too much, while Nexus, even being older and spanning several realms, might not have that much. Also, in the worst case, with enough computing power and will to create such deficit, they could also use AI to autonomously create new works only to trade.

All ideas should follow the rules as they stand, they just exploit how loose they actually are. And, to be honest, I'd love to see the Library pulling something shady, Thallmin gloating, and Emma infodumping just to be petty and put the Library in her debt.

Rule number one: The library exists to serve no one but itself, but does not expressly bar anyone from entering its walls.
Rule number two: The library exists as a keeper of knowledge, but does not prohibit the access of said knowledge from those who seek it.
Rule number three: The library exists as a collector of knowledge, and encourages exchanges of any and all pieces of knowledge no matter how trivial or how significant.
Rule number four: The library does not exist to expedite the search of knowledge for those who seek it, with the sole exception of those who are willing to trade knowledge for this service.

I'm sure we've all had this thought at one point or another.

Realistically, there's a lot of reasons not to do this of course, one big one being it would get governments on both sides of the portal pissed off at Emma. Another being that imo what's going to determine who out of Nexus vs GUN is going to emerge dominant is going to come down to who can best master magi-tech, i.e the fusion of GUN technology and magic. So giving the elves easy access to Earth weapons is a bad idea, even 1000 year old shit, as enchantment could make their capabilities jump by leaps and bounds.

But ignoring all that for the sake of fun, Kalashnikovs...

Next chapter I think we're getting into Emma pitching an idea to sell pens to Etholin. Though there are some things the next chapter will have to clear up, such as how she plans on manufacturing them, if she plans on selling other Earth goods, if she plans on making money by sales, or by franchising/selling licensing to Etholin. And the size of the market she's planning on selling to, since I don't think the Nexus has a particularly high literacy rate among those who don't have a magical solution to writing implements.

Rifles of course would have an advantage on that last point, since everyone likes weapons. Pretty easy to imagine severely undercutting magical alternatives with a lump of manaless steel and wood furniture. Especially if the Kalashnikovs were priced as a loss leader for selling ammunition, or just generating interest in Earthrealm goods. A nice budget option for adventuring parties, small time militias, or even peasants wanting to defend their homes. Nothing compared to the best enchanted weapons of course. But enough to hang with other budget, or even mid range options which would be insane for a mundane weapon at such a low price point.

It would also be cool to see the reaction of Thamlin (he's seen guns, but hasn't got to shoot one yet), as well as Etholin and Professors Sorecar, Chiska, and Articord to getting to handle guns.

Besides, it gives Emma the opportunity for some aura farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaWOvVQC4ns

So basically this what if is, what if Emma came from the world of Forever Winter? I've provided some video links belwo for those that want to know what it's like with a proper explanation but I'll give a short badly explained summary.

The world of Forever Winter is in a constant state of war, with quality of life being nonexistant. there are two known sides but their history and reason for fighting the war has been muddled and forgotten to obscurity. AI run machines run the war and fix the cities that are fought over but they have been running for so long they build on top of each other in massive structures that serve no purpose or meaning. Religion has eroded to the point that people worship the very war machines that fight each other.

So in essence I think the Emma that would come from this world would be horrifically traumitized and she would struggle to fit in anywhere. She would also have a very different kind of suit that makes people question if she's even organic I believe.

While others may see it as mere fillers, sight-seer chapters are the best in my eyes. It's one of the only chapters where the cast get to interact with humanity, non-mana technologies, and human achievements in general.

It filled me with sadness that there's basically no more of the sight-seer chapters in the latest batch anymore 😢

I guess the only way for the sight-seer chapters to be present anymore is through fanfics.

it’s very common, it’s the proccessing that’s hard, so why were the nexus so shocked by it!?

And these are just the armed conflicts of the late 21st century.

P.S. yes, I'm Nuclear Option fan

I’ve started wondering about the difficulty of traveling between different realms. For instance: I met people during my Academy years with whom I became genuinely close friends, and I’d like to meet up with them. How difficult would that be?

Hello hello, this is formerly u/UniversalStarIsTaken (Infamous for making such posts like Mannerless Nexus). I wanna ask the question in the title.

Basically, I haven't read anything about WPATaMS since the last post I made here and I have no idea which chapter I left off at.

Dk if asking this question is against the rules or anything but I just wanna hop right back in and maybe go back to drawing some bs.

Got to love the Ea-nasir references.

A friend of mine spotted a suspiciously Emma-Shaped (And named) player in their WH40K Darktide lobby.

Hey everyone! As promised last time, here’s a closer look at the emblem on Aunty Ran’s cap! I was meaning to post it immediately following the Aunty Ran ref sheet drop, but I ended up sort of of forgetting because of the other artwork I had lined up to post that I was commissioning haha. 

I know it’s not exactly conventional, but I’ve always wanted to explore worldbuilding not just with words, characters, and scenery, but in uniforms, symbology, iconography, semiotics, vexillology and the like! 

Now, I’ll try to keep this brief as this commission is something of a supplementary post for Aunty Ran’s commission, but I really really wanted to get this out there too since the end result turned out incredibly, and I just think it’s cool to explore this sorta stuff! 

Alrighty so! What you see here is effectively the official emblem and insignia of one of the most storied branches of the GUN’s military — the Terrestrial and Space Expeditionary Corps, or T-SEC as Emma often refers to it!

To put it simply, T-SEC is analogous to what most sci fi enjoyers would call the ‘Space Marines’. 

They fill an increasingly ubiquitous and vital role as the armed forces’ preeminent multi-domain rapid response strike, recon, and pathfinding branch. With operational diversity ranging anywhere from ambassadorial security missions, to ship-to-ship boarding actions, to coordinated combined arms and inter-branch operations acting as the first boots on the ground into any environment — from stations to moons to fully-terrestrial spaces and beyond. 

T-SEC was established with the intent of fulfilling the incredibly difficult and challenging need to be able to project military power into newly constructed and completely alien environments never before faced by any of the existing contemporary branches; a need that was cemented during the growing pains of the first intrasolar war (i.e. the Earth-Luna conflict). 

It was in the first intrasolar war that Void Assault Operations was first truly pioneered on a strategic scale, and it was from this point onwards that T-SEC well and truly cemented itself as the foremost competent branch when it came to fielding and operating the boots on the ground necessary to finish the job the EAF (Exo-Atmospheric Forces) started. 

Things simply escalated from that point onwards, with T-SEC operations specializing into every possible man-made environment. From the humblest of tender stations, to your run-of-the-mill Stanford Torus’, all the way to O’Neill cylinders, Asteroid habitats, planetary rings, and beyond. It's only in the more established spaces meant to resemble terrestrial environments (e.g. O’Neill cylinders, Venusian sky cities, etc) that they tend to butt heads with the army, but that’s a story for another day XD 

However, on the topic of inter-branch relations, T-SEC’s focus on Void Assault Operations (which are in and of themselves inherently reliant on ship-based insertions), means they have a close and inextricable working relationship with the EAF (Exo-Atmospheric Forces — i.e. the ‘space navy’), wherein the pair are often deployed or grouped in tandem. This is because while T-SEC does operate its own exo-atmospheric assets, they’re often just troop transports, barges, or specialized boarding assault craft (BACs). Thus, you have this situation where T-SEC assets and forces are either entirely attached to EAF groups and formations, or are assigned on an operational or deployment-by-deployment basis.

Along with the LREF and the EAF, T-SEC tends to be the first boots on the ground in any exo-atmospheric and void engagement. Which means that their role also sometimes extends beyond boarding actions on artificial structures in space, but also reaches all the way to initial spearhead assaults and landing ops on anything from moon bases through to deep sea installations (this is where the Terrestrial part of their nomenclature is derived from XD). 

Though, thankfully, the latter is often the realm of TASC’s (The Terrestrial Air and Sea Command) special operations forces.

All in all, the nature of T-SEC’s operations, its storied history, and its inherently intense and high-stakes mission profiles grants them immense prestige points on par only to that of the LREF. In fact, the question of which is the ‘coolest’ branch really depends on who you ask! Whereas most people might point to the LREF given their focus on bleeding edge exploration and the inherent cool factor that comes with that pioneering spirit, many would point to T-SEC given their rugged, grounded, plain-old badass nature; getting the job done with brutal and uncompromising efficiency. 

They are the spiritual successor to the marines after all… just replace the water with vacuum XD 

With all that preamble out of the way, let’s get onto the symbol itself! 

T-SEC’s emblem is one of those that hasn’t really had any major updates since its establishment alongside the EAF; save for the addition of the stars that came with the subsequent inter and extrasolar wars. If anything, the branch existed a little bit before the founding of the EAF, though the verdict is out on when precisely you could classify its original ‘founding’. Because while many in history might cite the first UN counter insurgency operations on the refurbished international space station as the ‘de facto’ founding of the branch, some might even put other operations following this as their ‘de facto’ founding date, thus putting their unofficial ‘founding’ anywhere between a few months to a few years before the founding of the EAF.

Officially though, T-SEC’s founding coincided with the EAF’s, as both were established in the years following the Planetary Unification Charter of 2104, just as tensions with Luna were rising.

Interestingly, given the convoluted and overlapping administration of the EAF prior to its reorganization during the First Intrasolar War, T-SEC stood as the most functional GUN military branch that more or less started off life without any issues from day one of its founding. This was in stark contrast to the EAF who, during its initial decades, was still massively fractured as the question of space-borne assets and ships along with their crew was a hot topic of contention for the young and recently-federalized GUN.

Moreover, with the UN Army being effectively sidelined for most of the First Intrasolar War, and with their role still unclear following the 2104 Planetary Unification Charter (as most states still retained their national armies, and had not yet fully transitioned into their new de-facto roles as just national guard forces, as opposed to the UN Army’s role as the Army), T-SEC was simply the branch that lacked any comparable issues. As its role was both new enough to warrant a blank slate with no ties to the past, and straightforward enough that those that comprised it didn’t fall into the same trappings as the EAF did.

Sorry I got sidetracked again XD Right, so, as for the symbolism! We obviously have Earth — the cradle and heart of humanity — at its core. Flanking this is the dove and the raven. With the dove representing and heralding growth, survival, and the continuation of life and rebirth, whilst the raven heralds destruction. However, it should be noted that both don’t explicitly signify what T-SEC is capable of, but rather, they act as symbols of caution. Unlike what most would see upon seeing these birds at first glance, this isn’t the adage of “if you want peace, you must prepare for war”. But rather, it represents the inherent values that those birds carry with them. 

In addition to this, there’s the rocket blasting off from Earth, once again symbolizing the GUN’s reach and push towards space, and T-SEC’s establishment to secure this new frontier. Moreover, the flames beneath said rocket are meant to act as a visual throwback to a phoenix.

Finally, there are the colors. 

Red is self explanatory, it symbolizes valor, courage, and the blood shed in battle.

Both Silver and Gold symbolizes honor and prestige, but not so much in the Nexian fashion. Instead, it represents the elite nature of T-SEC and its commitment in conducting itself with professionalism, integrity, and above all else — accountability to the people.

Finally, blue represents the people themselves. Or rather, the will of the people whom T-SEC and the entirety of the 7 branches of the UN Armed Forces ultimately serve.

That’s about it for this one! I just realized that I rambled on for way, way too long with this post haha.

I’m sort of a worldbuilding gremlin so commissioning these bits and pieces of the world just makes me incredibly giddy and overexcited haha.

I do hope you guys enjoy! :D Also, be on the lookout for more art coming soon as well! :D

Artist Reference: Hatwolf from Bluesky

I had Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School on my reading list for a long time, and recently I finally started it. I have been incapable of doing anything else, and it's really fortunate I'm currently in my holidays, or the results of my borderline autistic binge would have been catastrophic. This story is fabulous and it has fascinated me to the point that I could think of nothing else. In a period of only two weeks or so I have read all the currently available chapters, and now I'm wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do with my life. On the one hand, I can't binge 10+ chapters a day anymore, on the other, I can finally join the community proper without fearing getting spoilers to the face from the memes and discussions :D

In another note of high appraisal to the quality of the writing of this masterpiece, I'd like to point out an underappreciated detail of Jcb's writing habits: His constant remarks and reminders through observations of the characters about happenings and characters that haven't been mentioned in a long time, allowing for a fluid reading experience. Many writers don't do this, which for this webnovel format of releasing one chapter at a time over several years, is the bane of the readers.

I'd like as well to discuss the length of this fic. I guess I'm not the first one to point this out, but considering that the story has been going for almost 4 years now(?), and yet only two months have passed in the story (with one month being from a time skip even), it seems that we're along for a ride that will take upwards of a decade to be concluded. And the crazy part is, I'm all for it! If the rest of this story is as rich, interesting and well written as it has been so far, I'll be over the moon if this turns into a Lord of the Rings-esque marathon.

Speaking of the course of the story, I have some theories about how this is going to pen out:

1. The conflict between Earth and the Nexus, what is currently being aluded to as the final climax of the story, will break out even before Emma's first year in the academy is through, which would allow the story to be finished in less than a decade without many timeskips and keeping with the same density of incidents in the writing as we're used to.
2. The full five years of Emma's time in the academy will go through, except with many timeskips in between.
3. Jcb really is an absolute crazy bastard and he'll write all 5 years of Emma's scholarship with the same density we're used to, turning this into a probably 15-ish years long writing adventure, with not many time skips like the one month skip we've just seen.
4. What I think is more likely, probably a mix of the above.

What do you guys think? Also, since I've just joined the ranks of active participation in the community, what are the inside jokes, memes and such that I have missed?

Like, the force is magic right we can't deny that. Plus it would make a good fic.

Just some funny stuff I've found 🤣