4.05: A New Theory

“You seem perfectly fine,” Malas said once he’d scanned us. “Your parasympathetic systems are quite active, if that’s informative.”

“Is that bad?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s just the system of responses that calms you down. It’s a normal response to all kinds of things. Being fatigued, or hungry, or well fed, or sedated, or just in a very relaxing situation. What happened, to bring you two in here?”

We both shrugged. We’d decided not to explain Max’s little experiment. We were still waiting for the other shoe to drop over Lydia’s death, and ‘oh yeah, the person who killed her at Duniyasar is regularly going back there to study the magical secrets of it tapestries’ probably wasn’t a great look.

“Just, you know. You’re always insistent on regular checkups,” I said, as if that was remotely believable.

“… Right. Well. You seem fine. Unusually so, in your case, Kayden. My scan usually stresses your system a little.”

Because it feels weird and gross, with Kylie’s magic in the way. Not currently a problem. (We should probably have waited for Kylie’s magic to recover before coming in. Oh well, hindsight and all that.)

We thanked Malas and headed back to our room. After inspecting the floor a bit, we concluded that the cracks were probably quite deep, although we couldn’t see much of them, and the chunks taken out of the floor were pretty obvious. After some discussion on just how we were supposed to explain this damage to anyone, we went and bought a rug to cover it instead. There, problem solved. So long as we started sweeping our own floor, the janitors would have no reason to move the rug, and nobody would see the damage. We were so smart.

“I think I need a nap,” Kylie remarked.

I nodded. A nap sounded like a pretty good idea.

In fact I was only dozing lightly when I was woken by Kylie sitting straight up in bed and exclaiming, “Holy shit!”

I knew what she meant. “We could have died!” I added.

“And we’d have had no idea why! Those runes causing the magic to bypass us instead of just pulling it right through us was pure luck! Nobody had any idea that would happen!”

“And the floor!” I got up and kicked the rug aside. “Look at the floor! This could’ve caused a cave-in!”

“Do we know it didn’t? That fissure might’ve collapsed something on someone!”

“No, I’m pretty sure that that would’ve triggered the evacuation alarm,” I said. “So like, we know it didn’t cause a cave in. But it could have.” I sat heavily on my bed, not confident that my knees would be able to support me much longer. “What the hell. We have to alert someone about this.”

“Why did you let him perform mad science experiments on you?”

“It’s never been a problem before! He just writes perfectly normal runes and channels perfectly normal magic through them! We had no reason to think that this would be any different! Are you okay? Any lingering effects of being, you know, depowered?” I could feel her magic back in my own body; faint, but present. So we hadn’t broken anything (except the floor). Good.

“Most people go through life without being born with magic in their face,” Kylie replied. “I’m sure my body can handle being unmagical for an hour or two without ‘lingering effects’.”

“That was weird though, right? Why does nothing normal ever happen to us?”

“To be fair, this was kind of self-inflicted. What with the mad science experimentation.”

“It wasn’t mad science.” I rubbed my face. “Hey, do you think you could kill a spell with this?”

“… what?”

“If Max figured out how to channel it directly from the mage, into these kinds of runes. Or, or even if a mage just uses another familiar; there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with any familiar, it doesn’t have to be me. Do you think you could destroy a spell by channelling it through these?”

“Um. I don’t think we need to worry about that? I mean, that pulled all the magic out of the Destiny, and it’s recovering fine.”

“Yeah,” I said, my heart sinking. “That’s true.” Damn a lack of easy answers. I’d already been constructing a scenario where to ‘prepare its heart in offering’ would just involve Max painting sigils over my heart, and we’d climb to wherever we’d set up a magical sink to absorb the power of the spell without bringing the caves down around us, and…

Ah, well. Back to the drawing board.

“So what do we do about this floor?” I asked. “Is our plan seriously to just… cover it up with this rug and hope that nobody asks any questions?”

“If you came up with a better plan while napping, I’d love to hear it.”

“What do we do when someone inevitably notices?”

Kylie shrugged. “Play it by ear? It’s not the first bedroom damaged by a Max mad science explosion.”

“Do you have to keep calling it mad science?”

“Yes, to annoy you.”

When Max returned some time later, he eyed our new rug, opened his mouth, closed it again, and seemed to just decide to ignore the entire issue. After apologising to us yet again, he shut himself behind his bedcurtains to study. I had no idea whether that was a good sign or not – it was his favourite thing to do in both really good and really bad moods.

I started listing the ingredients of the memory potions I wanted to try out, having decided that my vague whim of making and selling them to other students was now a definite career plan, because why not. After some mutual silence, Kylie piped up, “So anyone doing anything interesting for the holidays?”

“Wait, what?” I frowned. “When are the holidays? Didn’t we literally just have holidays?”

“We just had an emergency evacuation. The holidays are in a month.”

“… Oh.” My internal calendar had been completely thrown off. I was going to see my parents. I was going to have to talk to them about the scars on my chest; I couldn’t exactly avoid asking, not when they might actually be important. I was not ready for that conversation.

I rubbed my chin worriedly, feeling the bristle of patchy hairs that I hadn’t bothered to shave that morning, and for the first time felt not satisfaction, but panic. I was going to have to have thatconversation, too. They could hardly not notice. Was it too late to insist on staying at school on the pretense that I was worried about the familiarity link killing me?

Yeah, probably. Previous holidays hadn’t been a problem, and Kylie would be going to see her family. I was just going to have to have multiple awkward conversations. With people I was staying in a motel with. For two weeks.

Ugh.

Well, that was Future Kayden’s problem. Current Kayden had enough to worry about.

“How about you, Max?” I asked Max’s bedcurtains. “Are you coming with us again for the holidays?”

“Mm? No, I can’t. It’s my grandmother’s birthday, and it would be unthinkable for her heir not to attend. I have to stand around and smile and be passive-aggressively bragged about to other mage families.”

“Sounds like an absolutely riveting time. The most fun holiday ever.”

“Holidays should be shorter here.”

I wasn’t sure I’d go that far. Awkward conversations aside, I was looking forward to seeing my family. And Melissa and Chelsea, of course. Being able to secretly text them was much better than relying on snail mail, but I still wanted to see them.

My thoughts were interrupted by a thump from Max’s direction, followed by a quiet, “ow”.

“… Max?”

“It’s fine! I just punched my desk. It’s fine.”

“… Why did you punch your desk?”

“Because this book isn’t giving me the information I need and I refuse to punch a book, on principle.”

“I’ve never seen you punch anything.”

“Yeah, that’s probably why it hurt.”

I vaguely recalled Max being smug when I’d hurt my hand on di Fiore’s face, back when we were initiates. Could I pull off the same kind of smug lecture? Probably not. I didn’t really remember what he’d actually said.

“Lunch break?” Kylie suggested.

“You go,” Max said. “I’m not hungry.”

I was hungry. My mind was still reeling from the whole ‘blow a hole in the floor’ thing and the adrenaline had apparently eaten up a lot of energy. But I could eat later.

“Weird puzzle time, then,” I suggested. “What do you remember about this?”

Max came out from behind his curtains to look at the scars on my arm I was brandishing. “Um. Nothing? You got them in the Labyrinth of Dreams, right?”

“Yeah. Do you remember specifically where or how? You have basically a perfect memory, right?”

“I have the ability to memorise things well, if that’s what you mean. I’m not a camera, recording everything I see forever. And I’m afraid I don’t remember that specific injury, sorry. Why, is it giving you trouble? You said they didn’t hurt earlier… did the experiment make them hurt? Have you been to Malas about it?”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Nothing hurts. It just doesn’t make sense.” I explained the logical issues with the scars; how their position didn’t correlate to any way I was likely to scrape or cut them on the tooth slope like I’d assumed, and how and how they’d healed as if I’d used my healing potion on them, but the timeline made that impossible.”

“Hmm. That’s quite interesting.” Max turned my arm over, running his fingers over the scars.

“After the familiarity link, Kylie and I both fell unconscious, and you were conscious for awhile after that, right? I’m guessing that you performed first aid and eventually fell asleep waiting for us to wake up?”

“Yes. I don’t remember anything about this injury specifically, if that’s what you’re asking. You both had a lot of reasonably deep cuts that I didn’t want infected.”

“Is there any chance you used my potion on this one?”

“Absolutely not. I only bandaged the wounds. I wouldn’t use a potion against recommendations unless I had to; you both had too many cuts deeper than the skin for me to be messing with it.”

“So this doesn’t make any sense, then!”

“Well, it certainly opens up a fascinating potential area of research. I’m sure Alania would love to see this, unless you two are still fighting.”

“We were never fighting! Just because I picked a new surveyanto doesn’t mean we’re fighting.”

“You picked her arch-rival and he’s being extremely smug about it. He dropped by the lab yesterday to pretend to ask her about you. In a ‘does he normally act like this’ kind of way, not a creepy way, but he was actually just there to be smug.”

“Look, I know it looks like I just dropped her for no reason, but logically – ”

“No, I understand the political logic of the situation. It was a good call. He’s just very irritating. You could probably take this research to the Fiore, actually; it’s certainly in his wheelhouse. But then you’d have to explain the Labyrinth of Dreams, which would probably just complicate things.”

“Take what research to him? What are you talking about?”

Max looked at me in surprise. “The potion reactivation, of course.”

“What?”

Max sighed. “Okay. So, if I understand the situation: down in the Labyrinth, we all got a bit cut up and used your potion to treat our wounds about halfway through. Then we kept going, and at some point after your potion’s power wore off, you cut your left arm quite deeply, here.” He traced the scars with his fingertips. “After that, you didn’t apply the potion again, but it’s healed as if you did. So the two puzzles are: how did this injury occur, since the situation you first attributed it to couldn’t have caused it, due to the scars’ position. And: how did it heal with the aid of a potion you didn’t reapply.”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, the first one isn’t a mystery at all. Sure, you probably didn’t cut this part of your arm open on that slope of teeth, but shortly after that, Kylie broke a mirror and you walked through it. Glass can be sharp enough to cut relatively painlessly; you could’ve cut it open and not noticed. And after that, when we established the familiarity link, you collapsed and thrashed about quite a bit on a stone floor covered with all kinds of junk. There are any number of things that you could’ve torn your arm open on.”

“That’s… true. But the potion thing – ”

“Is fascinating! If you didn’t reapply the potion, then the most logical conclusion is that the potion still on your skin reactivated in response to the injury! That has some truly useful applications.”

“Can that… happen? I mean, yeah, I know there are some time-release or circumstantially triggered potions. I’ve made some of them. But the healing potion I used isn’t one of them. In fact, that’s an absurdly dangerous thing to put in a healing potion! This one is definitely activated on contact and short duration, and then it’s inert. I know my potions.”

“In general, I’m sure you do. But the recipe will only tell you what a potion can do in conditions under which it has been tested. There were three extremely unusual things about our situation.” Max held up a finger. “One: that room we were in was literally dripping with very magically dense empowered water. We could see the glow through the walls, and I watched you touch those walls. Can your potion reactivate if exposed to more power, in the form of adding strongly empowered water when on the wound?”

“That sounds like something they’d probably have tested when they invented the potion,” I pointed out.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, who knows how long ago the potion was invented?”

“Nearly two hundred and fifty years ago. But it still works the same as it did back then. It hasn’t changed.”

“The intended effects haven’t changed. I have no doubt that they verify the continued veracity of something as important as a healing potion quite regularly, but do you think they verify its reactions to things like reapplying empowered water? It’s not exactly relevant to the potion’s function.”

“I… don’t know.”

“Anyway, that’s the least interesting possible explanation.” Max held up a second finger. “We were in an extremely high magic environment for most of that journey. If you cut yourself on the mirror glass or something, and then walked back out into the tunnels with us… you remember how strong that magic was. It felt like being on speed or something. What you have in those scars is potential evidence of inert potions reactivating in an extremely high magical field, which is why it’d be sort of awkward to explain said evidence to researchers who don’t already know about our little journey under the school. But it’s a basis for exploration; it could be tried on other potions, investigated for common effects… this could spawn some extremely interesting magical theory, if it’s repeatable.”

“And the third weird thing that was happening?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Max raised a third finger, then tapped his fingers on my familiarity mark. “You had that potion on your skin, and we filled you up with Kylie’s magic. We’ve observed multiple cases of the magic in you behaving differently to a mage’s magic within themselves. This is the most likely explanation, I think, because otherwise myself and Kylie would probably also have scars like this. We were covered in healing potion and getting injured, too.” He scowled. “I hope this isn’t the reason, though, because it’s much more work to repeat.”

“What do you mean? I’m still a familiar. I can just use inert potions and see – ”

“If it was a question of just being a familiar, we’d know about these kinds of effects from when other familiars are given potions. It might be due to being human, but I doubt it; I can’t see any theoretical reason why your humanity would affect this. I suspect it’s a result of the sudden addition of the magic to your system, the creation of the familiarity link. Which means that to test it, we’d need to find a bunch of mages who wanted familiars and convince them to let us run our experiments while they made their links. Very difficult.”

“Uh-huh.” I traced my fingers over the scars. Dammit, Max’s suggestions made sense. I’d been paying attention to my mysterious scars because of the things that prophecies kept telling me about scars, but if the ones on my wrist weren’t mysterious, then that left only one set of ‘scars’ that were. The ones over my heart.

If I wanted to move forward, I had no choice but to confront my parents.

Fuck.