Lillene

Enjoy!

Serenity didn’t expect to succeed on the first try. That was part of the reason he’d collected so much World Core crystal, after all; he expected to destroy some of it or at least render it useless for anchoring a nexus. That was simply how it worked when you pushed spellcraft into new areas, and this was new to Serenity. He was taking reasonable precautions to protect himself and everyone nearby, but so far they hadn’t been needed.

He hadn’t managed to get any kind of a reaction at all from the World Core crystal.

He’d tried simply planting a piece of crystal near a ley line to see if it would attract it. He hadn’t expected much from that test, but it was still worth trying. 

Similarly, he planted one quite a ways farther down the ley line. The second one was inside the ley line, but only barely. He wanted to see if the ley line would recenter itself on the crystal; if it did, he’d have everything he needed to slowly shift the course and probably direction of a ley line. There were a couple of possible ways to use it if it worked; one was easy but unlikely, while the other would be a pain to plan but was definitely the most likely option that was also easy magically. That test would probably take quite a bit of time, so he’d have to check on it later, but Serenity was hopeful. It might well work.

His third test was really a range of tests. He moved to another ley line for this test, since he didn’t want to affect the earlier tests, but it started similarly to the first one: he planted a World Core crystal in the ground. Unlike the first test, however, he didn’t just leave it there. He had thirty different spellforms to try to get the ley line to move and connect to the crystal. Most of them were based on the spellform created by a ritual that was powered by raw magic or directly by ley lines, since those already interacted with the magic in a ley line, but he had a few others that he thought might be more theoretically appropriate for moving a ley line.

None of them worked. Oh, the vast majority pulled in power from the ley line and moved it along the spellform for as long as he held the spell, but none of them moved the ley line itself. None of them had any real interaction with the World Core crystal, either.

Gaia wasn’t able to provide much guidance and what she did provide wasn’t as useful as Serenity hoped. He could feel the mana flows the way she suggested and even shape them to a very limited extent, but the moment he stopped pushing the mana around, it stopped following his instructions and returned to its natural pattern. 

Gaia wasn’t surprised by this; she said that it could take years for a dungeon to actually alter the preferred mana flows at a nexus. Mostly, dungeons cleaned and stabilized raw mana instead of altering its flow. They could compensate up to a point, but if the outside flows changed too much, they were helpless. 

Serenity suspected that was what had happened to Aki. She couldn’t force the ley line to continue to run through her old dungeon when it moved with time. Serenity doubted he’d be able to prevent that movement, but if he mastered this maybe he’d be able to keep dungeons like Aki alive without moving them.

On the other hand, Aki was doing splendidly these days. As difficult as a move was, where the dungeon had to essentially start over from nothing, moving a dungeon was probably a better option than trying to keep it alive on life support from a shifted or fragmented ley line. That was definitely something to keep in mind unless there was some reason the dungeon couldn’t move. 

Not that any of that helped with his current problems. He had to solve the ley line redirection issue first; that seemed like the simpler of the two situations, after all. His spells just weren’t cutting it, but maybe the first two tests would turn something up overnight.

When Serenity hopped into the SUV with Janice, she had even more bad news for him. “We have a request from one of the local news channels for comments from you about Rissa’s insider trading.”

“She doesn’t have any insiders. She’s done nothing wrong.” Serenity growled the words out. 

The problem was simple, in a way: Rissa traded based on her foresight. That meant she knew when the stock price of a particular stock she was familiar enough with would go up or down. The problem was that the most reliable foresights were the natural reactions to things that had already happened, rather than predictions of both what would happen and what the results would be. 

Naturally, that meant that Rissa could make stock trades in the time between when something happened and when the news got out to the public, which looked a lot like insider trading even though it wasn’t. That was suspicious enough under normal circumstances. It wasn’t even remotely illegal, but it could definitely raise some eyebrows. 

Historically, this wasn’t too big of a problem for Rissa. She focused best on things she knew a lot about, so she did a lot of research on any company she wanted to invest in; she couldn’t know which penny stocks were worth buying without doing more work than they were worth. They often moved quickly but without knowledge she wouldn’t know which direction they’d go.

Instead, Rissa had to focus on a longer term investment strategy, one that planned for weeks or months rather than days. She researched a company in great detail, which normally took her at least a week and could take more than a month. After that, she kept an eye on both its stock price and any news about it. That was enough to let her foresight work. 

Some of her visions came with a lot of detail while others were very sparse. She’d research the vision and see if she could confirm it; in many cases, that meant she was too late and the market was already moving, but there were also many times when she could find confirmation or at least an indication that something had happened, but the market hadn’t reacted yet. In those cases, Rissa would trade based on what she’d learned. Even when the market moved first, Rissa could sometimes tell that there was still significant room for change or that the market had moved too far; that was useful information that could make her money.

None of those cases were problems. She had the information she needed to make the trades she had, and it was all public domain information. Yes, she’d been pointed to it by a vision, but there was nothing illegal about that.

No, the problem came from the cases where Rissa knew something she couldn’t confirm. Most of the time, she chose not to act on it; it was simply too nebulous. Sometimes, however, it was simply too tempting. Whether that was because of potential financial rewards, because she had opinions on the company itself, or simply because the incident struck her funny bone, there were times she put some money into companies without a good reason for it.

As it turned out, that was now biting her in the butt - or at least in the wallet. She hadn’t known why, but Aide was able to figure it out; arrests were public, after all. An insider trading ring had just been brought down, where people high up in the management chain of several mid-sized companies traded information to profit personally based on the stock movements of each others’ companies. They’d apparently been friends for years, though no one outside the circle knew if that was simply for financial reasons or if they’d started as friends and had slid into conspiracy.

Rissa had invested in every single one of the companies involved and her timing on some of her purchases and sales was very similar to the conspirators’. Admittedly, it had to be in order to profit from her choices, but that didn’t really help when she didn’t have a good reason for all of her choices. She’d probably be able to justify some of them with information she’d found as confirmation, but she was not confident she’d be able to justify them all.

Her primary trading accounts were frozen and it looked likely that she’d have to fight it in court. Even if she won, there would be consequences; the defense wouldn’t be cheap, if nothing else. At this point, that much was true even if it never went to trial.

The one good thing was that she didn’t know any of the people involved. To really prove insider trading, the prosecutor would have to show not just that she had some suspicious trades but that she had a way to get illicit information. The fact that she was an exceedingly successful trader with a wide portfolio ought to help; she didn’t need insider information. Unfortunately, that wasn’t even close to proof.

Well, there was one other good thing about the situation, even if it was a bit ironic. Despite the frozen assets, Rissa and Serenity could afford some very good lawyers and those lawyers were convinced that Serenity’s assets were safe, no matter what happened with the case against Rissa. They weren’t legally married in the eyes of the US Government, after all, and he’d never gotten significant amounts of money from his girlfriend. 

The lawyers weren’t willing to give as firm an answer about Rissa’s assets, but they were still quite upbeat about the situation. Their primary concern was whether or not the investigation would expand to Rissa’s other trades; if it did, it could consume several million dollars even if she won. She could afford it, once her assets were unfrozen, but it would hamper her ability to trade even if she won and wasn’t barred from the stock market.

The possible consequences to Rissa from other peoples’ misdoing aggravated Serenity. At this point, they didn’t really need the income; all of their expenses other than the lawyers were easily covered by Etherium sales. Serenity suspected that that might eventually become an issue as well, since he sold a lot of Etherium, but for now it wasn’t a big deal.

Having a reporter ask him how he felt about Rissa doing something she didn’t do positively pissed him off.

“I know,” Janice said soothingly. “That’s how the reporter phrased the question. I’ve already given a reply of no comment from you for now, but we’re going to want to put out a statement soon; you’re still too high profile to avoid saying anything. I think we can turn this into something good-”

“Why do I need to say anything?” Serenity interrupted. “I don’t need to be obvious anymore. I’m not trying to get people to do anything now.”

Serenity’s words seemed to shock Janice. She took a moment to think about them as she drove. They were pulling into the underground garage that served the Adventurer’s Guild as well as Serenity and Rissa by the time she had a good answer. “Right now you want to convince people that Rissa is innocent. I doubt you want to say that she was targeted, but instead that she was unlucky. You want her to be accepted after this is all over, not to live under a cloud of ‘well, it wasn’t proven.’ One statement won’t do that, but not saying anything won’t either. I’m looking at a general statement along the lines that you have faith in the justice system to find the truth.”

“It doesn’t always. It’s not the best system. The incentives aren’t lined up well with getting the right result.” Serenity wasn’t certain what the best system was, but it seemed likely that something that used truth spells would probably be better. Of course, that would all come down to massaging the truth, wouldn’t it? If you could write the questions, you could control the narrative and that could be just as bad.

“Now you’re just evading making a decision.” Janice said it with a smile that took the sting out of her words.

Serenity sighed. “Fine. Write it up and let me see it before you put it out.”

Lillene

I’d say “I’m having to deal with lawyers because my stock trading accounts are frozen due to suspected insider trading I didn’t do” is worth “angry face money angry face.” If anything, I’m sure most people would be even more upset - but Rissa probably knew this was going to happen at some point even if she didn’t know when.