How come elevator music is always so boring? I know, I know; not exactly an astoundingly meaningful question shining a ray of intellectual light through the impermeable fog enshrouding the true nature of reality or such, but that doesn't automatically make it any less valid. I mean, soft jazz wasn't exactly my favorite genre to begin with, but I was pretty sure it had better tracks than the auditory equivalent of drying paint coming from the ceiling of this elevator. No, wait, I take that back. I would rather watch paint dry than listen to this thing quietly seeping out of the speakers above me.

Maybe it was so that people would want to vacate the premises as soon as possible, and thus speed things up for the passengers who wanted to get on? Or maybe it was one of those old-timey things, like how when escalators were first invented, people were so afraid of them they had people whose entire job was to hand out free drinks as rewards for the people who dared to take a ride? Maybe it was supposed to relax people back then, or failing that, make them so bored they would fall asleep and thus wouldn't be terrified of the dreadful metal box ferrying them between floors.

This train of thought of mine was regrettably fated to never reach my thought station, as a soft ping alerted me to the fact that I reached my destination. The elevator door slid aside with a quiet whirring noise, revealing the by now familiar long corridor leading to Lord Grandpa's office. This time around all the side-doors were all closed shut and the whole place was eerily quiet, but it didn't really change the ambiance of the area too much. More importantly, at the other end of the hallway I could already see a familiar face, so I made my way over to him without any further ado.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Dunning," the bearded artificer of possibly Scottish heritage greeted me with a tight-lipped smile that didn't quite reach his eyes, and I returned the gesture with an outstretched hand in tow.

"Just Leonard will do," I told him. He took my hand and shook it without any reservations. "Can I call you Gowan?"

"Certainly," he confirmed as he let go of my hand. "Are you here to visit the Lord as well?"

"That's the plan. Is there a problem?"

"No, he just already has a guest inside. I'm also here to meet him; we need to discuss some things about the symposium."

"Speaking of which, is there any news on when it will be held?" I asked as a form of small-talk, as it was only polite to follow up on a topic already offered.

"It's actually the very topic I have to discuss with Lord Endymonion. Due to the lockdown the School imposed on the island, a lot of the guest speakers had to rescind their plans to attend. I hoped we could hold the symposium this week, with only the attendees already present, but the Lord also has to keep the Assembly delegation in mind before allowing such a gathering. It's not easy."

"I can imagine," I noncommittally agreed with him, which he seemed to appreciate. "I'm still interested in attending the event, so if you have the date set in stone, please notify me."

"Is that so? Marvelous!" The bearded enchanter followed up his exclamation with a belly-rumbling chuckle and he seemed to be equal parts relieved and excited by the prospect. "One of our key speakers couldn't make it to the island in time, so we would be much obliged if you could fill in the gap."

"I'm... not much of a public speaker," I tried to excuse myself in the face of the sudden proposal, but my conversational partner's smile only widened in response.

"Don't worry, none of us are. So long as you can demonstrate your craft, everything else is secondary." Gowan paused here for several seconds, glancing between the closed door in front of us and me until at last he reached some kind of resolution and he gestured for me to lean closer. "But speaking of the craft, can I ask for your opinion on something?"

I responded with an uncertain "Depends," which he took for agreement, and he soon fished out a small object from his thick apron's pocket.

"I'm ashamed to say, but I can't seem to get this one to work."

While saying so, he presented me with a trapezohedron-shaped piece of metal small enough so that he could completely wrap his thick fingers around it. Even a cursory glance told me that the item in question was enchanted, yet it was also peculiar in that the usual colorless light of magic was only flickering around it. It was like one of those old neon tube lights that really wanted to burn on, but just couldn't quite manage to do so. While I observed it, he held the item between his thumb and index finger and began to explain what it was about.

"It's an experimental modification I did on the common Trithemius-pattern etching array. Honestly speaking, it's but a passion project of mine, so I didn't dare to use School resources for my experiments, but even after years of work and numerous iterations, I just can't seem to get the array to work. All sixteen of the cardinal points are bound, and it can interface with the carving arm just fine, but it just doesn't seem to function at all."

For the time being I nodded along, pretending that I had the slightest clue about what he was talking about. He also tried to hand it over to me, but I refrained from, doing so for the time being.

"I see, but before getting into the details, could you tell me what exactly is this?"

"It's… an engraving head," the artificer told me, apparently really surprised by my question.

"For engraving enchantment arrays?" My question earned me an increasingly skeptical nod, and since it didn't feel particularly dangerous, I gingerly took the item from his hand. It was heavier than I thought it would be, but otherwise it was fairly unremarkable. "So you use something like this? The shape feels a little unwieldy for precision work."

"Errrm… Normally an engraving head is set into the inscription device on the enchanter table," he explained, looking even more uncomfortable than before. "Could it be that you don't use one?"

"I can't say I do," I responded absent-mindedly as I observed the pointy metal whatchamacallit in my hand. "But now that you mention it, I think I have seen one of these enchanting tables you speak of."

That was, of course, through Far Sight, but that was an irrelevant detail entirely beside the point. Anyhow, it seemed that there was something wrong with this particular piece, but I couldn't tell anything more than that from observing it from the outside. However, before I would dive in, there was one thing I had to make clear.

"For the record, I'm only going to take a look and see if I can find anything weird. I'm still recovering, so I'm not doing any manipulation work."

"I… didn't expect that you would," the amicable artificer told me with a reassuring smile, though his smaller gestures still betrayed the fact that he was suddenly very skeptical about my abilities.

I didn't let it get to me. Instead, I raised the enchanted item in question to my eye-level, and after fixing my gaze onto it, I used one of the phantom limbs to dive into it. For a moment I wondered what would have happened if I used both, but then I already found myself inside the non-Euclidian representation of the enchantment. That was surprising, as typically this took subjective ages, yet this time I made it in before I even knew it.

I quickly found the enchantment by looking around (in a certain sense of the word), and it was… weird, but not in the usual way.

At the moment my disembodied point of view was inside what felt like a large sphere. Not a spherical cavern, but more like walking on a globe turned inside out, where I walked on the inner surface. It was kind of as if I was staring at the reflections on one of those large, mirror-shined bearing-balls, except from the inside. As for what was 'reflected', there were a series of glowing nodes around me, all interconnected by various tendrils of solid light. I tried to take a closer look, but when I moved, it felt like the whole scenery shifted around me. Distant nodes started out huge, grew smaller as I got closer, then at one point they seemed to 'snap' into boring old Euclidian geometry and grew in apparent size until I practically bumped into them.

I spent a while familiarizing myself with the place, but once I overcame the initial confusion, the whole thing kind of came together, and as I began to poke around with my ethereal extra limbs, the enchantment began to make sense to me. In fact, it made a lot of sense. Normally at this stage I would've been running around and trying my best to find a grip on something so that I could begin to unravel whatever enchantment was in front of me, but this one… this one was like an open book. I have practically figured it all out already, and I barely even warmed up.

In fact, I have probably wasted more time on adapting to the environment and trying to figure out why this particular enchantment was so easy to understand than actually 'reading' it, and I soon had a working theory as to why. Simply put, so far I have been operating on three kinds of enchantments. The first group was the non-modular constructions I had to take apart and rebuild from the ground up anyway, like the Magiformers or the communication artifacts. Then there were the really obtuse enchantments full of redundant and broken parts I had to sift through, like the dragon-slaying spear, or they were incredibly complex stuff that dealt with souls. In other words, so far I'd been working on the magical equivalent of ticking mechanical watches and sports-cars running at top speed on a highway, while now I was looking at something more akin to a mystical angle-grinder.

Anyhow, once I figured out that instead of the enchantment being weird, it was my expectations that screwed with my senses, examining the internal workings of the thing in front of me became borderline relaxing. I spent some time tracing the various connections while moving from one node to the next, I ascertained what each of the nodes did, what the tendrils were doing, and then based on that I came up with an educated guess as to why this thing wasn't working as intended.

I could've probably spent some more time messing around, but I didn't want to make Gowan wait for too long. While there was a certain amount of time-dilation involved whenever I did this, it was somewhat unreliable, so I resolved myself to leave and promptly exited the weird space of spherical geometry. It was at this point that I realized that I could've used my phantom limb on the curved space itself to access the enchantment as a whole, but there was no sense crying over spilled milk, so I wrote this up as yet another learning experience.

Once I was 'out', I blinked my tired eyes and let out a long, slightly stale breath before handing the trapezohedron back to the artificer in the company of the words, "I think I found the issue."

"Already?" he blurted out as he took the item, all the while looking at me like I just grew another arm. Well, another visible one, I mean.

"You just have to know where to look," I responded with a modest smile, but for some reason it still didn't seem to inspire much confidence in him, so I promptly elaborated on the point. "You tweaked the part that is responsible for tracking the exact shape and physical location of the item being worked on, right?"

"Yes, yes I have," he confirmed my words, his eyes suddenly alight with a sense of pleasant surprise.

"You see, this Tri-whatever array has DRM protection, and you kind of triggered it."

"Dee… Ar-Eem?" he repeated after me, putting a lot of unnecessary emphasis on each syllable.

"It's an acronym that stands for 'digital rights management'… or in this case, maybe 'magical rights management' would be more accurate? Let's call it MRM then." My answer apparently didn't make any sense to him, so tried my best to explain the problem in simple terms. "The entirety of the array uses a nested system, where each subsystem locks together, and the interlocking parts form an independent array around the functional parts. If the entire thing is reproduced perfectly, then the interlocking part also works, which then allows the core array to work. However, when you change any of the subsystems, like the one responsible for scanning the object, or the one that projects the blueprint to be engraved, it also causes changes to the interlocking parts. This breaks the MRM array, which creates a feedback loop in the central control array, and then poof, you have a bricked enchantment."

"So, what you are trying to say is that the Trithemius-array is… resisting modifications?"

"It would be more accurate to say that it was purposefully designed to break down if someone tried to tamper with it," I corrected him, and I only just realized that the artificer was about as dejected as if I just took his puppy away.

"Are you sure about this?"

"Yeah, it's pretty obvious when you look at the way the various elements of the array come together. It's kind of like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Pretty ingenious, if you ask me."

"If that's true, then… Wouldn't that mean that I have wasted my years trying to modify it?"

"From a pessimistic point of view, I suppose it would," I told him, but then softened the blow by adding, "On the other hand, now that you know about the sub-array, it shouldn't be too hard to crack it."

"Crack?" Gowan muttered in an apparent daze, and seeing that there were signs of him slipping into a thousand-yard-stare, I decided to soften things a bit further.

"You know what? Let's make a deal. One of these days, when I have some free time, you give me a tour of your facilities and show me how you work with enchantments, and in return, I will help you circumvent the protection on this array of yours."

"That sounds… reasonable," he granted me, finally looking slightly less rattled, but then he raised the subject of our conversation to his eye level and gave it a long, hard stare while he absent-mindedly stroked his beard. In the end he shook his head and pocketed the trapezohedron, after which he looked me in the eye and asked, "If I may ask, what kind of technique did you use to inspect the enchantment array? I didn't see you cast a spell, so—"

All of a sudden, the friendly artificer's eyes opened wide as saucers, but he didn't say anything else, so I had no other choice but to prompt him with a cautious "So… what?"

"Do you, perchance, possess the Oculus of Trismegistus?"

I instinctively blurted out a confused, "The what of whom?", but then my brain quickly caught up with my mouth, and I hastily amended, "I mean, whatever that is, I can guarantee I don't have it. Absolutely. Scout's honor. "

My conversational partner was visibly stumped for a second, but then I could practically see the cartoon iridescent bulb light up over his head and he leaned closer to tell me, "I understand you. Let's pretend I never asked that question," in a conspiratorial whisper.

"I would very much like to do that," I acquiesced, at which point the artificer let out a long sigh that hovered somewhere between relieved and excited.

"As for your request, I would be honored to show you our department's enchanting apparatus. I'm certain we can learn much from each other."

"Oh, I'm sure of it…"

At this point there was a long lull in the conversation, and I had a sneaking premonition that I might have just created yet another misunderstanding, but considering how things have turned out, I was sure that if I tried to correct this man's misconceptions, they would only lead to even more annoying shenanigans. For now, I took solace in the knowledge that I managed to secure an opportunity to visit the workshops. Or rather, a visit with someone who could actually explain what each and every magitech doodad could do. Just getting to the workshops with Phasing wasn't that big of a deal, but getting an eager tour guide was a different matter entirely.

In the meantime Gowan looked like he wanted to say something else, but before he could do so, we were alerted by a creaking sound as the door in front of us opened a crack.

Not a moment later, I found myself looking at a new face. The young girl on the other side of the door blinked in surprise, then stared at me with wide-open eyes. I returned the gesture and spent a second looking her over from head to toe. At first glance, she looked to be a middle-schooler, give or take a year, but she was surprisingly tall for her age. She wore a long, loose blue dress richly embroidered around the hems, plus some kind of thin shawl of the same color around her neck. Her long, wavy brown hair was loosely tied in the back, and she had a light chestnut complexion with a pretty face only marred by a somewhat prominent hook nose.

Overall, she was quite attractive, though certainly not 'Josh's love interest' attractive. I would've also been quite surprised by her appearing from the old mage's office, except I wasn't because I cheated and took a look with Far Sight well before I came down here. In fact, the only really interesting thing about her was the thick thread of magical light coming out from the top of her head and vanishing at (and most likely, through) the ceiling, but that was a detail for another time.

"Oh... Oh my gosh! Sorry, I didn't know you were waiting out here!" she exclaimed with a high-pitched, girlish voice, following which she took a large step back and opened the door wide. "Come in!"

It took nearly inhuman effort, but I successfully stopped my facial muscles from twitching, and instead I sent a glance at the artificer at my side. Gowan was a little slow on the uptake, but at last our eyes met, and he hurriedly gestured towards the entrance.

"You can go first. I have time."

I curtly thanked him for the courtesy and walked inside, and the girl unexpectedly followed right after me and closed the door behind her.

"Hello, old man," I greeted the arch-mage sitting behind his desk. He wasn't exactly a spring chicken to begin with, but right now he looked about a decade older than the last time I saw him in the flesh. Or maybe it was just the contrast with the outwardly youthful girl in the room?

Speaking of which, she was unabashedly staring at me, even going as far as to lean left and right to get a better look, and before the old coot could greet me back, she cut in with an amazed, "Wow! You're, like, sooo tall!"

"I get that a lot."

My flat response didn't hinder her enthusiasm at all; if anything, she looked even more interested than before.

"Could it be...? Are you the famous Chimera slayer of the island?!" My poker-face was getting strained, but I still managed to give her a decently nonchalant nod, and the girl beside me practically squeed in response. "Really? Oh my gosh! I'm, like, totally a fan of yours!"

"No autographs," I stated emphatically before stepping up to the desk in the middle of the room and putting a folded-up piece of paper in front of Lord Grandpa. "The only person who is going to sign anything this time around is him."

"I presume this is the requisition form I sent over to you with Pascal," the owner of the room mused, his voice sounding so exhausted I could almost imagine him keeling over at any moment. He unfolded the page and skimmed through its contents, only to stop midway and glance at me with one eyebrow raised high. "You require the fish tank?"

"It apparently has sentimental value."

Whether it was because of my answer or the cheeky grin that accompanied it, I received a not at all subtle eye-roll for my trouble. The arch-mage might've even followed it up with some choice words, if not for the soft yet pointed harrumph coming from my side. By the time I looked over, the source of the sound was giving me an adoring smile that made me more uncomfortable than a southern baptist at a gay parade.

"Ah, yes. Please excuse my tardiness. I am afraid I forgot to introduce you two," the old coot said to us in a disturbingly off-key grandfatherly voice. "Leonard Dunning, this is... Errr..."

"I'm Sahi, nice to meet you!" she introduced herself in a hurry.

"Yes, that is her name," Lord Grandpa emphasized the point with a serious expression. "She is the granddaughter of a... distant relative."

For a moment I could see sparks flying between the two, but I naturally ignored them and tapped my finger on the desk to get the old man's attention.

"That's nice and all, but I'm still waiting for your signature."

"Certainly, but I have to examine the items in detail first, so... the two of you should go over there and talk while I do so."

"Oh, you sneaky bastard," I muttered under my breath too softly for him to hear, but when the old guy still sent a questioning glance my way, I amended a more audible "Nothing, let's go," to the end of it, and gestured for the 'granddaughter' to follow after me.

She did so without further prompting, and it didn't take more than a few steps for her to start talking again.

"Hey? Hey? Did you, like, really kill a Chimera with your bare hands?"

My first instinct was to deny her words, but then a different, much stronger impulse slowly bent my lips into a small smile. I just got an idea. An awful idea. A wonderful, awfully fun idea.

"I don't want to brag or anything, but yes, I did," I told her with a voice so humble it would put mother Theresa to shame.

"Wow, really?!"

"I had to work with what I had on hand... which was my hand!"

That earned me a throaty chuckle which told me that 'Sahi' here was either trying really hard to appear affable or had a naturally terrible sense of humor. Either way, in for a penny, in for a pound; now that I started spinning this tale, I would see just how far I could take it.

"Do you want me to tell the whole story?"

"Do I ever?" the brown girl exclaimed with unbridled interest, so I didn't leave her waiting.

"So, you see, this Abyssal guy kidnapped my friend and took him to the school, so we mounted a rescue operation with my friends."

"Shouldn't it be, like, the local arch-mage's job to deal with things like that?" she innocently asked, even going as far as to slightly tilt her head to the side and put a finger on her chin. She was a pro at being cute, it seemed, but it took more than that to get to me at this point.

"I guess he was busy at the time, but you'll see later. So, as I was saying, we came to the school, only to find that the whole place was crawling with Fauns! Have you ever seen one?" She shook her head, so I raised my hands high and told her, "They are thiiis big, and they all have animal heads and they are aaall muscle from head to toe! There was about thirty of them!"

"Thirty?" Lord Grandpa muttered in surprise, meaning he was eavesdropping on us instead of doing his job, but I paid him no attention and continued my story instead.

"And then it went from bad to worse when the Chimera showed up! It was even bigger than the Fauns, and it had six hands and eight eyes and a row of venomous fangs in his enormous maw!"

"Oh my gosh, really?!"

"Really!"

"Really really?!"

"Really really really!"

"Wicked! What then? What happened?"

"You see, I told my friends to hold back the Fauns while I squared off against the Chimera. We traded blows for a while, and we were equally matched, but it became obvious that it was unlikely I would win in a contest of endurance. You see, Chimeras can not only regenerate their wounds, but they can also change their shape to adapt to their opponent!"

"That's totally bogus!" she exclaimed with both hands in front of her mouth locked open in apparent horror.

"I know, right!? So, since we were evenly matched in strength, I decided to outwit the creature. For you see, the most dangerous weapon is not the sword or the gun, but," I paused here for a long beat, then I tapped the side of my head and finished with, "... the human mind!"

"Woooooooooooah! Then what? How did you outwit it?"

"You see, I had no weapon strong enough to kill the creature, but I still had a way to deal with it. First and foremost, I expertly lured it up to the roof of the school building. Then, I exploited the secret yet fatal weakness of all Chimeras."

"They have a weakness?"

Considering how her ears perked up, I was now certain I had my audience hook, line, and sinker. Now I had to reel her in.

"Yes. You see, their weakness is... whistling!" This was the perfect moment for another beat, so I waited just long enough to get her to second guess me before I doubled down with, "But not just any whistling! It has to be a special, magic-infused kind of whistling! It completely drives them mad and they start flailing about like they are drunk!"

"Really? I totally didn't know that!"

"Not many people do, but that's where being an information broker pays dividends. You can never know when a little secret can save your life!" I waited for a moment to see if she had anything to add, but since she stayed quiet, I took it as my cue to continue. "Here comes the good part: I lured the beast near to the edge of the roof, and then had one of my friends whistle. It disoriented the creature for a while, allowing me to tackle it through the railing and so we both fell down."

"Ohmigosh! How do you survive?"

"You see, while I had no weapon, the earth itself can become a great weapon if you hit someone with it hard enough! Since the Chimera was still confused, I made it so that it would land first, both cushioning my fall and allowing me to deliver a vicious elbow drop on its neck, breaking it and making it so that the creature could no longer heal itself."

"It couldn't?"

"No. Little known fact, but the Chimera's other fatal weakness is its spine. If you break it, its brain cannot communicate with anything downstream, and thus can't heal it. By breaking the neck, the Chimera is done for. Of course, breaking its neck is easier said than done, but then that's why us Chimera Slayers are so rare."

"That's so wicked! You are so knowledgeable about Chimeras!"

"Of course! They are nearly invincible creatures of legend! No one could accidentally defeat one by just randomly falling off a building! That would be just silly!" The girl in front of me showed her agreement by repeatedly nodding her head. "However, once I stood back up, I realized that I fell right next to the Abyssal Lord who kidnapped my friend! And he even opened a gate to the Abyss, and Fauns were streaming out of it one after the other! There were at least a hundred of them!"

"A hundred!? No way!"

"Yes way! There was no end to them! For a moment I thought we were doomed, but then, all of a sudden, the arch-mage Lord Amadeus Endymonion appeared at the scene!"

"He did?!"/"I did?!" the two people in the room beside me echoed the same sentiment, and I responded with a huge nod and my smile slowly growing even wider, even against my best efforts to keep it in check.

"Indeed! He arrived wearing his combat-robes and his large magical staff, and he even had one of those really stylish, wide-brimmed pointy hats too!"

"No waaay! No way no way no waaay!" the girl in front of me repeated over and over while shaking her head, probably doing her best to hide her laughter.

"But wait! There's more!" I declared while holding up a finger. "He didn't come alone! He led a full contingent of homunculi! They were each about as tall as a Faun, and somehow even more muscular, and while they could not cast any magic, each one of them could bench-press a small car!"

"Next! What happened next?!"

"A battle of epic proportions!" I proclaimed. "The arch-mage dueled the dreadful Lord of the Abyss, while I, my friends, and the homunculi fought against the Faun! In the end, Lord Endymonion channeled a mighty spell, its beam splitting the darkness and forcing the Abyssal Lord into the gate! After that, the leaderless Faun were all routed in short order, with most of them running back into the gate, and only a few of them escaping into the night. True story."

"Wow. Just wow." There was a couple of seconds long beat after that, then, "Your story is very different from the one that I've heard."

It was at this point that I took out my most affable smile and told her, "Naturally. The 'official' explanation is always a lot drier than reality, but such is how these things tend to work. I figured that I could tell you what really happened. I mean, you are related to the arch-mage, aren't you, Sahi?"

"Yes, I totally am!" the robed girl declared with maybe a bit too much gusto.

"Sahi, my dear," Lord Grandpa called out to us, and it sounded like he had to squeeze each word through his clenched teeth one by one. "Is it not about time you visited your grandmother upstairs? We have some business to conduct with the young mister Dunning, and I fear it may terribly bore you."

"Aw shucks," she grumbled aloud, all the while gesturing like it took a ton of effort to convince her. "Fine, I go."

She didn't need any more prodding, and she immediately turned on her heel and walked up to the door. It opened automatically when she got closer, no doubt thanks to Lord Grandpa's intervention, but instead of going through, she turned around one last time and addressed me again.

"Thanks for the story, Leonard! It was, like, totally radical and stuff! Next time we meet, let me treat you to a drink!"

I gave her a shrug that could be interpreted in many ways, and hers was apparently really amusing, as she let out one last giggle before she turned around and finally left for good. As the double doors quietly swung shut behind her, I couldn't help but let out an exhausted groan.

"Hey, old man?" I addressed the man still sitting behind his desk while ignoring the daggers he was staring at me. "Are all of the arch-mages scheming, annoying nuisances, or only the two of you?"

"What do you—?" he began, only to halt his words when mine finally registered with him, and then he instead stated, "You knew."

"You mean that she was actually arch-mage Saahira, the leader of the Assembly investigators and your sitcom arch-nemesis? Because if that's what you mean, then all I can say is duh."

My completely innocent expression only made him look even worse as he let out a lung-rattling groan.

"But if you knew, then why did you tell her that tall tale?"

"What? Are you saying that I should have told her that you tried to make a deal with an Abyssal, got screwed over, they opened a portal on your home turf just to flex, and that you were so late to react that a hodgepodge group of teenagers had to come to the rescue and chase him home? Or that your way of thanks for services rendered was to create a silly conspiracy involving a mad scientist, a crazy monster huntress, and an undead Chimera? Or about how your defenses were so easy to circumvent that said mad scientist could waltz in and possibly take your precious Grimoire Key?"

"I understand your point, there is no need to belabor it," the old coot cut in while holding his head with one hand, his elbow resting against his desk.

"What, and let you live it down? You must be dreaming," I scoffed, but since the conversation wasn't going anything like this, I decided to let him off the hook (for now) and asked, "More importantly, does the requisition form check out?"

"It certainly is not more important, but yes, it is unquestionably accurate. I will see to it that the listed items would be delivered to the specified location by tomorrow evening."

"I'm glad to hear that. I'll contact you if I need anything else. Goodbye."

I flashed the man a toothy smile and was about to leave as well, but I was stopped by a new question.

"How did you know it was Saahira?" He looked like he wanted to say more, so gestured for him to continue, at which point Lord Grandpa stated, "No one, not even the other senior members of the Assembly knew that she succeeded with her experiments and transferred her consciousness to a new body. What gave her identity away?"

I gave the old man a long, vigilant look, but since he seemed entirely serious, I could no longer help but let out the hearty chuckle that has been tickling my throat for a while.

"What do you mean 'transferred her consciousness'? She is just remote-controlling a body from upstairs!"

"She… she is?"

"Yeah. Obviously."

"And how do you know that?"

"I have my ways."

I shrugged with a mocking smirk on my lips, which he mostly ignored in favor of asking one of those really clichéd stock questions.

"Leonard Dunning… Just who exactly are you?"

Luckily enough, since this was a question I have expected to pop up sometime in the future, I have prepared several fitting, snappy one-liners for the occasion. I just had to pick the right one… which proved to be harder than expected.

"I'm… just your friendly neighborhood information-broker?"

That… wasn't nearly as impressive as I hoped it would be, so in a last-ditch effort, I also added, "Oh, and also an alleged master-illusionist. Can't forget that."

And with that, I hastily snapped my finger and immediately Phased out of the room. Now, I admit that doing this was pretty much my default exit strategy at this point, but as they say, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

…

Note to self: come up with better one-liners. Preferably before everyone gets used to my disappearing act.