Neither of them knew what an Auspex was, but they decided it might as well be human. Despite the complete lack of “human” in Rissa’s Status, she looked far more human than Serenity did. She had scales similar to his on her chest and back, but they didn’t extend onto her limbs at all. She also had a tiny pair of four-inch wings. She couldn’t see the wings, but the scales were the same colors as Serenity’s.

Those were the only ways she didn’t appear human, and if she was careful with the wings, she could hide it all under clothing.

Serenity thought the wings and scales only made her more attractive.

Rissa wouldn’t tell Serenity what she thought, but his appreciation of the change didn’t seem to upset her at all.

That wasn’t why they were there, though, so once Rissa changed into clothes that hadn’t been destroyed, they tried again. This time, it was easier for Serenity; his mana was actually recovering now, even if it wasn’t as fast as it should have been.

Even with Mana Sight, Rissa couldn’t duplicate the small spell pattern for a Glow spell. Her mana control simply wasn’t fine enough. It was something they’d have to work on, but with Serenity’s mana recovery functioning again they had more options. He could maintain the actual tracking spell; if he built it properly, he could keep the drain at about the level of his current mana recovery.

What he couldn’t do was cast the spell to figure out which residue belonged to that magic item; he’d never seen the item, and didn’t know where to start. He tried to guide her through the beginning of the spellform he wanted to use, and it simply didn’t work. He’d have to alter it to deal with her poor mana control, and that would make it far larger and she simply didn’t have the mana capacity for it. Serenity wasn’t sure he did, and his capacity was far higher than hers.

“Rissa? I think I have an idea. If we link as tightly as we can, I think I can draw the spellform and you can use it. I know how to do joint casting; you don’t, but the link should let us do it even without the experience.” Serenity looked at Rissa hopefully. He was tired of the repeated failures, and wanted to get started on actually tracing the stolen … whatever it was.

Rissa sighed. “Sure, why not. Can’t be worse than this has been.” She sounded almost defeated.

“It’s not that bad. I can see the improvement already; it’s just a matter of practice.” Well, he’d been able to see the improvement until the last couple tries; they’d been terrible. He’d probably kept her trying too long.

Rissa put an arm around him, running it across his back just below his wings. “I’m ready. Let’s get this over with.”

Serenity nodded and reached out to her, making sure to share everything he could with her. He was about to start on the spellform when Rissa winced. “What’s that noise?”

“Noise?” Serenity wasn’t hearing anything new.

“Yeah, sounds like static. Coming from everywhere, but louder in some directions than others. I just can’t figure out what it’s from.” Rissa looked around the room, seeming to search for something that could be making the noise.

Her description sounded almost exactly like the noise he heard from technology. Serenity cut off the sharing over the link and Rissa relaxed. “Is it gone now?”

“Yeah. Along with - wait, was that something you hear normally?” Rissa looked Serenity in the eyes.

Serenity nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re hearing the noise from the neural interface. I don’t understand why that would be happening, it’s not a form of sight.”

Serenity was still thinking about why it would be considered “sight” when Rissa asked incredulously. “Neural interface? What are you talking about?”

Serenity had a sinking feeling as he thought about the past few days. He hadn’t really realized it, but he hadn’t yet told her more than a very brief sketch of what happened after the Tutorial. He’d told his parents more (even if he had skipped a few things).

One very long explanation later, Rissa seemed to be more amused than upset by his actions on Tek’s space station. She told him he “probably got what he deserved” for trying out experimental technology. Serenity knew he was going to need to go over everything that happened on Tzintkra in the same level of detail soon, but the excuse of needing to get moving worked, for now.

Serenity reached out to link with Rissa again, only to realize that the link was still active; he’d cut off the sharing, but not the link. It didn’t seem to cost him anything, as long as he wasn’t trying to use her vision.

Serenity had assumed it would drop when he wasn’t using it, but that was fine. He shared everything he could again; he felt the double-vision take hold and realized that he’d also turned on Time’s Eye for both of them; Rissa didn’t seem surprised by it, but then she probably had something similar herself.

With the link fully active, Serenity knew Rissa could see the fine details, because he could see them through her eyes. He slowly sketched the spellform, carefully not imbuing it with Intent.

“Okay, it’s ready for you. Feed your mana in here,” Serenity touched a claw to a spot on the diagram, “and concentrate on the item you want to find. If you can, also try to think of when you put it up here; that should be a pretty easy combination, and it will make use of your Time affinity. This won’t show us anything physical, but it should bring back your memory, which will be enough.”

All Serenity needed to know was which mana residue to track, after all.

Serenity expected Rissa to bobble the handoff, at least a little; even experienced people would, and this was Rissa’s first spell handoff. She didn’t; indeed, it felt almost like he was still doing the spellcasting, even though it used Rissa’s mana.

He could almost see the memory. No, he could see from the memory. It was like he was Rissa.

She came in the door, muttering about how awkward it was, and set the bubble-wrapped parcel down against the wall, out of the way, to keep it safe as she moved stuff out of the way. She wouldn’t need this any time soon, so putting it in a hard-to-reach spot only made sense. She had to move a couple boxes out of the way to reach the closet. As she was in the middle of moving them, she heard something from another room. Rissa hurried out of the room.

“It never made it to the closet. You got home and we got to talking, had dinner, and then I forgot to move it. It wasn’t in the way, so it just stayed there.” Rissa shook her head. “I’d have sworn it was in the closet, but it wasn’t.”

“Did you ever actually see it?” All Serenity had seen in the memory was an approximately cylindrical package that was clearly paper taped over bubble wrap. It was surprisingly heavy for its size, but even in the wrapping, it was only two to two and a half feet in diameter and a foot and a half tall. As far as he could remember, Rissa had never unwrapped it.

Rissa nodded. “Yeah, it was on display when I bought it - an estate sale. They had it hung as a stained-glass window piece, but since it didn’t really look like anything, no one else bid. It was one of the cheapest pieces I’ve ever found, I think it only cost me $20.”

“What did it look like?” Serenity headed over to the spot on the wall; he’d need to start there to make the spell to track the whatever-it-was.

Rissa followed him. “An abstract pattern, based around a hexagon. There were six rectangular holes; set towards the center but between them was a circle of six … cups, I guess? They were glass made in a half-sphere, in six different colors. There were lines through each of the cups; those were in deep purple, I think. Other than that, it was a sort of an angular pattern. I’m not sure if it repeated or not. I didn’t spend much time looking at it; it sort of hurt to look at. That’s usually a sign of something that needs to be taken out of circulation, so I bought it and didn’t think much more of it.”

Serenity nodded. The more she said about it, the worse he felt about that particular artifact being in the hands of someone who knew what it was. Symbols based around the hexagon were often used for summoning or binding.

Serenity knew enough magical theory to know that while that was a good rule of thumb, it wasn’t necessarily because there was something innate about the hexagon that made it good at those things; instead, it was better because it was common practice. Knowing a six-sided figure (some places used stars instead of hexagons) was used for summoning or binding meant that it was easy for a less skilled spellcaster to shape his Intent towards that.

Of course, Intent shaped magic, which could shape reality. It was entirely possible that six-sided shapes really were better now, even if they hadn’t always been.

Serenity wasn’t a summoner, but he knew the basics of the theory. There were two competing theories, really; mages liked to debate if what you summoned was real before you summoned it or if it was created by the act of summoning it. Both sides had some good points, and neither had ever come up with a way to refute the other.

Serenity had his doubts about whether or not most spells were summoning something real; if they were, they were awfully cheap for that sort of distance. On top of that, you could summon both completely mundane things or creatures (which never seemed to turn up missing) or things which didn’t seem to have any basis in reality.

On the other hand, summoning was also awfully cheap for creating something from nothing, even if you did have to keep feeding it mana to keep it around. Many summoned creatures also seemed to have distinct personalities, even when the same summoning ritual was used, unless it was used specifically with the Intent to summon exactly the same one as before. When “the same one” was summoned, it always acted as though that time period had passed, and sometimes the spell didn’t work.

Additionally, some summons seemed to be able to escape their summoners and live in the real world indefinitely. Most would simply evaporate when the spell ended, but some wouldn’t.

Serenity suspected that the true answer was somewhere in between; why should all summoning spells do exactly the same thing? Maybe the spells of mages who believed they were pulling from elsewhere pulled from somewhere and the spells of mages who believed they were creating a temporary mana construct did just that.

Serenity knew he didn’t want to use a spell that actually pulled something from elsewhere, but a spell that made a mana construct wouldn’t bother him at all - whether it was temporary or permanent.

In many ways, it didn’t matter if whatever was to be summoned using the incomplete artifact was “real” or not; it would act as though it were. Hearing that it hurt to look at made Serenity think of the Void and its madness-inducing effects; there was a subschool of summoning magic that was known as Void Summoning, and its practitioners had a bad reputation for being powerful but insane. Serenity remembered some Void Summoners from Blackthorn Academy, and they were people he really didn’t want on Earth.

Lillene

If you're wondering what he's thinking when he thinks of "Void Summoners", well ... let's just say that there may have been some inspiration from the Cthulu mythos...