Chapter 201 - Part 19: Interlude - Arnie Miller and the Owl of Xibalba - Part 1

These messengers were the owls—Arrow Owl, One Leg Owl, Macaw Owl, and Skull Owl—for so the messengers of Xibalba were called.

- Popol Vuh, trans. Allen J. Christenson

Arnie was trying not to stare. He was losing that battle.

He was not the only one watching. The converted warehouse held a little gathering, not large enough to be a congregation and too solemn to be a crowd. Two hunters sat on the bench to Arnie's left, their coats patched with three different kinds of fur. A woman with soot ground permanently into the cracks of her hands stood near the wall, though the skin under the soot looked too smooth for the work those hands had done. A man with a young face and an old man's posture stood beside her, leaning on no cane at all. There was a girl of maybe twelve holding a bowl of white grain, and three others Arnie had not figured out how to classify beyond solemn, restored, and intensely interested.

That was another thing about Tesla City now. Everyone looked healthy. Not comfortable. Not relaxed. Not happy, exactly. Not used to it. But healthy in a way that made the patched coats, careful movements, and hollow old habits feel stranger rather than less strange. Some of them moved like people twice their apparent age. One hunter kept flexing his left hand as if still surprised all the fingers were there. The man with the young face stood like his joints remembered a lifetime his skin no longer admitted to.

Calling them cultists seemed rude. They were absolutely the kind of people a documentary would call cultists if things went wrong, but Arnie was trying to be better about judging new religions by documentary standards.

In his defense, the dove Nero cradled had seven eyes, and only three of them looked like they belonged to a bird. One looked more suited to a snake. Another was flat and wet and fishlike. The sixth had the faceted glitter of an insect. The seventh he was only guessing was an eye because it looked eye-ish. It might also have been a tiny gelatinous cube with four or five pupils floating inside it.

The dove's feathers were whitish in the same way bone was whitish. All in all, it was very hard not to stare.

By the measure of the things that came from the forest around Irem, it was also almost mundane. Since the Gates had opened toward Irem, the hunters of Tesla City had been given a choice between the eldritch primordial forest and the frozen tundra. One of those had much more game to hunt. The fact that some of that game tasted peculiar was apparently a tolerable problem.

Arnie was getting used to lavender. Not the plant. The color. It was not a bad color to taste, once he thought about it.

The others did not stare at the bird. That was unfair.

Nero murmured something over the dove, one hand steady beneath its body and the other resting lightly over its wings. His head was covered, a fold of white cloth drawn over his hair and shoulders. It made him look less like the half-dressed theatrical emperor Arnie had first met in Tesla City and more like someone who had stepped out of a history documentary that had received unusual funding and no adult supervision.

The dove blinked all seven eyes. Arnie immediately looked at the floor, because apparently he did have limits.

The floor was easier. Mostly. It was stained concrete, scrubbed clean but not clean enough to erase what the building had been before Nero got it. There were still darker patches where old crates had stood, and the air beneath the incense carried a stubborn memory of fish, salt, and cold metal.

He shifted on the bench. Then shifted again.

The bench was hard because it was improvised. The whole... church? No. Temple. Definitely temple. The whole temple was improvised. Nero would probably be offended by the word church. Or perhaps delighted by it. Arnie was not confident enough to guess which, and guessing wrong around Nero felt like the kind of mistake that would become educational.

The temple had been a warehouse until recently. It still smelled faintly of old fish beneath the incense, but Nero had been lucky to get even that. Space was at a premium in Tesla City. A room large enough to hold a ritual, a bench, a seven-eyed dove, and Nero's sense of drama was practically luxury housing. The only reason it had been available, as far as Arnie understood, was that no one else wanted to sleep near the old fish smell.

Nero had apparently considered that a solvable problem. Or possibly a symbolic one. Arnie had learned not to assume those were different categories. The incense helped. Mostly.

Before him, on a low table covered in clean cloth, lay Rin's musket. That was the part Arnie kept trying to understand.

As far as he knew, blessings were supposed to move in one direction. A priest asked God to bless something. That made sense. Or at least it made the kind of sense Arnie had picked up from awkward holiday services, horror movies, and people on the internet arguing about holy water.

This was different. Nero was a priest. Rin was, apparently, God. The musket belonged to Rin. And Nero was blessing Rin's weapon because Rin had asked him to.

That felt less like religion and more like a manager approving his own paperwork through an employee, except everyone involved was taking it much too seriously for Arnie to dismiss it as bureaucracy.

Nero lowered his covered head and kissed the dove just above the beak. It was gentle. That made what came next worse.

The knife was small, curved, and so bright it caught the lamplight like a sliver of winter sun. Nero's hand moved with no hesitation. One moment the dove was alive and blinking too many eyes. The next, the knife had passed beneath its head, and dark blood was running into the shallow bowl of wine held by the soot-handed woman.

Arnie jerked, which was a mistake, because the bench was hard, and he was already sitting more carefully than he wanted to admit.

It was not like he did not know where meat came from. He knew. Technically. He had come from a small rural place, or at least rural enough that people in bigger towns made jokes about it. But it had been a generation or two since his family kept livestock. Chickens came from the same place they came from for city people: the store. Neat packages. Plastic wrap. No eyes. No blood in wine. No priest kissing them first.

No one else jerked. The girl with the grain lowered her eyes. One of the hunters bowed his head. The man with the young face and old posture touched two fingers to his mouth, then to the air in front of him, as if sending the gesture toward the table.

Arnie tried to copy the stillness, if not the gesture.

Nero spoke again. The words were measured, formal, and absolutely not for Arnie's benefit. The soot-handed woman lifted the bowl. Nero dipped two fingers into the blood-dark wine and drew a red line along the musket's barrel, then another over the stock, where Rin's hand would grip it.

The metal did not hiss. It did not glow. It did not do anything reassuringly obvious. That made Arnie more nervous, not less.

The girl came forward and scattered the white grains over the cloth, the musket, and the wet red marks. The grains stuck where the blood-wine had touched metal. Another witness, one of the hunters, received the dove from Nero and wrapped it in a smaller cloth with the same careful attention Arnie had seen people use for tools, babies, and things that might explode.

He should have been paying closer attention. He really should have.

A week had passed since Arnie had participated in an impromptu, all-too-real Rocky Horror Picture Show reenactment.

Technically, the body created had been female. Arnie did not think that made the comparison less upsetting. If anything, it made parts of the comparison worse, because GLaDOS had been involved, and GLaDOS had opinions about the betrayal of cartilage, the tactical misuse of mammaries, and the general design failures of biology.

Arnie had been trying not to think about that either. He had spent the week learning instead. That sounded better than it felt.

Every morning, or what counted as morning when part of your life now ran through a survival city under an artificial sky, and part of it through a restaurant that had become an educational institution with opinions, Arnie practiced opening his magical circuits.

Opening was the word Rin used. GLaDOS called it "controlled access to poorly documented organic routing infrastructure." Arnie privately thought of it as finding the hot wires in his soul and trying not to flinch.

He could not cast spells. Not yet.

Mostly he could breathe, focus, feel pressure gather somewhere under his skin, panic a little, lose it, and start again. Sometimes he could move the pressure from one place to another before it scattered. Sometimes he could make the Command Seals on his hand warm without immediately wondering whether he was doing something wrong.

According to Rin, that was progress. According to GLaDOS, it was "less catastrophic than projected," which Arnie had learned was almost praise.

His mundane education had been stranger. Math had become understandable. That was suspicious.

Not because Arnie had been bad at math. In high school, he had been good at it, good enough that college had seemed like something he was allowed to try, even if the version he could reach was community college and a schedule built around work. Then college had happened.

At the time, all of that had sounded like excuses. Bad college, bad health, bad schedule, no money. Very sad. Very convenient. A complete starter set of reasons for failing at the thing he had allegedly been good at.

Because if he had been good enough, he would have managed. Obviously. Closing shifts did not care about homework, and homework did not care that he had spent eight hours explaining combo prices to people who considered sauce packets a civil right, but that was supposed to be beside the point. One missed unit should not have become three missed lectures. One half-understood assignment should not have turned into a class where every new topic arrived carrying the things he had failed to learn last week. Skill problem. Discipline problem. Arnie problem.

GLaDOS disagreed. Loudly. According to her, this was not an Arnie problem. It was an educational-environment problem, a resource-allocation problem, a sleep-deprivation problem, a nutritional problem, and a predictable consequence of letting human beings design his community college's support system without proper adult supervision.

That explanation had not felt real at first. It still did not feel entirely real. It did, annoyingly, feel realer every day.

The Aperture Aptitude Board, officially abbreviated AB because the first A was apparently considered legally redundant, insisted the damage could be corrected with proper remediation, nutritional correction, and "aggressively optimized disappointment." Arnie did not trust any educational philosophy that sounded like it had filed paperwork against him. But pieces that used to slide away from him now stayed where he put them. Matrices stopped looking like organized threats. Linear algebra had rules. Algorithms had shape. Programming started sounding less like a foreign language and more like a native one he had been speaking with the wrong accent.

And that was before GLaDOS introduced him to the way Aperture did things. After that, everything he had learned before looked like rubbing two sticks together and calling the smoke a computer.

She described the recent improvement as proof that she had isolated deficiencies in his prior educational environment and corrected them with efficient instructional pressure. Arnie suspected that meant his teachers had been bad, his sleep had been worse, and GLaDOS considered threats delivered in a soothing voice to be a valid learning aid.

The worst part was that it worked. The even worse part was that he felt better. Arnie breathed in the scent of incense and old fish and tried to focus.

He had entered a Victorian frozen hellscape through a supernatural crisis involving vampires, soul contracts, impossible doors, and a homicidal artificial intelligence with employee-retention strategies. Somehow, his meals were regular, his back hurt less, his skin was clearer, and people noticed when he stopped answering questions.

Apparently, the secret to wellness was being recruited into a metaphysical emergency in a city where frostbite was a scheduling problem. That seemed like something a pamphlet should warn against.

Arnie shifted again on the bench. Carefully.

The bench was hard. That was the problem. Obviously. It was a temporary bench in a converted warehouse-temple made by people who believed comfort was a luxury to be negotiated after survival, and Arnie had been sitting on it through enough incense, wine, silence, Latin, and seven-eyed bird handling that any reasonable person would squirm.

The fact that he was squirming very carefully was unrelated. Mostly unrelated.

He had tried one. Once. For clarity.

The discipline booths had been there, and GLaDOS had very pointedly not explained them, which was almost the same as an invitation if someone was already tired, curious, overstimulated, better fed than usual, and making poor decisions under the influence of improved blood sugar.

Now his curiosity was satisfied. Completely. Permanently. He had collected the relevant data, drawn the appropriate conclusions, and would not be repeating the experiment.

Especially not before dinner. Arnie corrected that thought immediately. Not after dinner either.

Nero's voice changed. Arnie snapped his attention back so quickly he almost sat properly, which was a mistake.

The incense had thinned. The musket lay wrapped now, dark metal half-hidden beneath clean cloth and a scatter of white grains. The smaller cloth bundle that had held the dove was gone too.

Arnie was not going to ask where. Nero was looking at him. Worse, Nero was looking at him as if Arnie had been included in the ritual for several minutes.

"You heard?" Nero asked.

Arnie had not.

"Yes," Arnie said, because magical education had apparently not cured him of giving authority figures the answer he thought they wanted before checking whether it was true.

Nero smiled as if Arnie's lie had arrived wearing a name tag.

"No," he said warmly. "But you were present, and presence is not nothing."

That was somehow worse than being scolded. Nero lifted the wrapped musket with both hands.

"You will carry it anyway."

Arnie accepted the musket with both hands. As he had been trained, he tried to see what had changed.

Nothing he could name. The wrapped musket had the same feel under his palms, the same weight, the same awkward certainty of a weapon that belonged to someone else and mattered more than he understood. If the ritual had added some sort of metaphysical weight to it, it was not one he could measure.

Not yet.

If Arnie had been the sort of person who belonged in a comic book or a movie, he would have said something. I will carry it with pride. I accept this charge. Some sentence designed for a straight back, a steady voice, and no awareness of how words sounded once they came out of his own mouth. Since every version made him want to step into the nearest snowbank, Arnie nodded, tucked the musket carefully against his chest, and left before his brain invented worse ones.

Outside, the first thing that hit him was heat.

Not summer heat. Tesla City did not do summer. This was the close, dry breath of one of Tesla's inductors standing in the street, a piece of modern art made of metal and lightning, much newer than the rest of the street. Then blinding electricity crawled over him, white-blue lines running down the sleeves of his coat, over the bare backs of his hands, between his fingers, and onto the bundle in his arms. The first time Arnie had walked past one of Tesla's inductors, he had thought he was about to die. The second time, once his nervous system had caught up with the fact that he was not dead, it had been terrifyingly cool. By now, it had settled into mildly annoying.

Because in Arnie's experience, when a machine sparked and spat electricity everywhere, it was about to break, kill someone, or become a lawsuit. Tesla had apparently looked at that same behavior and called it pretty.

The lightning was harmless. Mostly. It did not even tingle anymore. It only lifted every hair on his head until his reflection in the polished metal of the inductor looked as if he had lost a fight with a balloon.

Or like a puffed-up cat pretending this had been the plan all along.

Awkwardly, Arnie shifted the musket into the crook of one arm and used his free hand to press his hair down. It helped technically, which was a phrase doing a lot of work. He wished he had remembered a comb. If Tesla kept adding inductors to every street, a comb was going to become emergency equipment.

He was starting to miss the steam heaters, which was ridiculous, because he had known them for about a week. They had been loud, clunky, damp, and probably illegal in several OSHA categories that had not been invented here yet. But dry heat was not automatically better, and the inductors were not silent. Instead of hissing and clanking, they hummed low and steady, more in his teeth than his ears. It was not an improvement so much as a different complaint.

Once he had made himself a little closer to presentable, Arnie stepped away from the inductor before it could undo the work. Then he shifted the musket carefully and took out his smartphone.

It had not been fried. He had expected that, mostly, but cheap electronics had taught him to check anyway. The battery indicator had actually gone up by two percent.

That was new. Or new-ish. His phone had been modified to survive Tesla City, GLaDOS, and whatever category of workplace hazard covered being recruited by a god. In theory, it could be made to drink from the same resonant field that powered the inductors and half the other electrical devices in the city. In practice, the charger was a twisted nest of wire and parts about the size of a toolbox, because resonance apparently cared about shape more than pockets.

So the field charger stayed at home.

He was still using his old smartphone. Modified, yes. Replaced, no. Aperture had offered him an Aperture mobile, and Arnie had declined because Aperture treated mobile as a design requirement. He did not want his communication device to have legs, even robotic ones. He had enough anxiety about leaving his phone somewhere without giving it the ability to leave somewhere too.

An Aperture smartphone would probably be worse. In Aperture, smart probably meant the phone could do science.

Probably to him.

"Skip notifications. Map," Arnie said aloud.

The Aperture layer obeyed. He was still getting used to software that preferred spoken commands over poking the glass, but apparently that was a legacy of Aperture's home timeline. Something about Apple locking down the mouse-and-icon approach behind patents instead of selling the technology the way it had in Arnie's timeline. Or maybe refusing to license it. Arnie had not had time to go through the history properly.

Not that it was boring. It sounded like a comic book that had failed a drug test: Aperture-sponsored superheroes, cannibalistic shape-shifting lizard men, Nazis on the Moon. The problem was that there was a lot to absorb in a week, and most of his attention had gone toward not freezing, not dying, and not disappointing people who could apparently assign homework across dimensions. So he mostly picked up Aperture history by accident, the way people picked up workplace policies after breaking one.

"Plot the path to the nearest portal to the Garden," Arnie continued.

Some people made fun of others for using mapping software to get anywhere. Arnie had to admit he had once been one of them. That had been in a different city. A city where streets obeyed Euclidean geometry, and changing them involved construction crews, permits, orange cones, and weeks, if not months or years. Not something that could happen between eye blinks.

Calling Tesla City non-Euclidean felt like both overstating and understating the problem. It did not just break the fifth postulate. It gleefully broke the previous four too, the way teenagers broke drinking laws.

That was a joke Arnie actually understood now. Thank you, improved math comprehension.

And that was not even the worst part. In a normal city, a one-way street meant you were not supposed to go the wrong way because of fines, honking, and being hit by a car. In Tesla City, a one-way street meant you could not go the wrong way. Every attempt to take the wrong direction somehow became the right direction before you finished doing it.

Human navigation in Tesla City was therefore an exercise in frustration, humility, and discovering new places by accident. Fortunately, Aperture's mapping software was better than human navigation. It also had an advantage most navigation apps lacked: the map updates came directly from the entity making the changes.

The city itself.

Walking to the portal had been a balancing act: one eye on the map, the other on the road, one hand on the phone, and the other wrapped around the musket. Arnie would have joked that he needed more eyes or more arms, but what if Rin overheard him and decided to help? He did not want more eyes or more arms.

From the Garden side, tentacles poked through the portal and curled around its edges, somehow keeping it open. Arnie was not sure how. Presumably that was something he would learn in an advanced portal course, once he had taken the prerequisite electives he was not currently enrolled in. His track was programming. Less physics-breaking. More killer robots.

The Garden's full name was something like the Shadow Reflection of Aegon's Garden, but Arnie just called it the Garden and marked it that way on his phone. He was not entirely sure what a shadow reflection was. He was even less sure who Aegon was. Picking up one alternate world's history was more than enough. If he had planned to learn several, he would have chosen that as his major at ASEND instead of programming.

"A good day to you," Arnie said to the tentacles as he passed through the portal.

If they were sentient enough to dine and date, they were sentient enough to be greeted, at least in his opinion. There was no verbal reply. There was some pressure against his mind, but he could not turn it into words. He was still not much for telepathy. Some of the tentacles waved back, though, which counted.

Arnie decided it counted and continued toward the wizard's tower.

A sudden gust of cold wind made him shiver. He glanced toward one of the other portals, the one opening into a snow-covered room, and remembered it was still active. One of Shirou's rescue portals. It had stayed open after the rescued people were gone, because empty did not mean useless.

Shirou would go out into the frostlands beyond Tesla City, because of course he would. When he found people, he opened a way back and brought them through. The people came first. That part was not negotiable. Arnie had helped once or twice: warm blankets, Vril-laced chocolate, and a lot of careful distraction while people tried not to notice the tentacles and the Garden before they could be moved somewhere less disturbing. Assuming Tesla City had less disturbing parts. Arnie was not prepared to defend that claim in court.

After that, scavenging became the next priority. If the place on the other side still had coal, tools, preserved food, spare cloth, wire, books, or anything that might become useful after five minutes in an Aperture workshop, someone went back for it. The portal closed when the living were safe and the useful things were gone, in that order.

It was still a miracle every time. Someone would bite into the chocolate, and the golden glow would run through them, erasing frostbite, hollow cheeks, starvation, and even the wrinkles age had carved into their faces. A miracle made mundane by repetition, which did not make it less of a miracle. Just harder to figure out where to file it in his head.

Arnie shook himself and kept walking. Maybe, with enough time and training, he could be heroic like Shirou. Maybe one day he would be the one braving danger to save people. For now, if Arnie bravely marched into danger, that mostly meant someone else would have to bravely march in after him.

The wizard's tower did not look like much from outside, which Arnie distrusted on principle, especially considering its surroundings. He crossed the familiar front room carefully and started down the stairs.

The stairs gave him just enough time to check, which was good, because checking was better than thinking. First, the musket. Still in his hands. Still wrapped. Still comfortable, in the deeply strange sense that a blessed gun owned by God could become comfortable if one carried it long enough.

Second, Irem. Like everyone else in Tesla City now, he had done today's daily pilgrimage before coming here, and he had even made his assigned time slot. That mattered. Letting an entire city decide individually when to file through a portal into blessed eldritch architecture was how one got crowding, arguments, and probably a memo from GLaDOS. Pilgrimage sounded dramatic. In practice, it meant walking through the great pillar-city long enough that his legs knew he had done it, while trying not to stare at the towers, the trees taller than towers, and the citizens who treated impossible afterlife architecture as a normal neighborhood. Only the inhabited parts, though. The abandoned districts looked as if they had been empty longer than America had existed. The continent, not the country. Arnie avoided them with the firm, reasonable caution of a man who did not want to become a cautionary example. No one had said they were dangerous. Some people had even said the opposite. That did not make the streets feel less like something was waiting just out of sight. Almost as bad as the forest. The walk still counted. Irem was blessed land. Or something close enough to blessed that Rin had put out a literal testing table about it.

A literal testing table. Arnie had stopped to read it, because of course he had. There were columns for actions successfully tested after the day's walk through Irem, actions with designed tests waiting for volunteers, and actions still in planning, with a box for suggested tests. The current claim was that, afterward, every endeavor had a five percent higher chance of success. Five percent sounded small until one remembered that people had died for worse odds, and that Rin's people were apparently willing to put holiness through quality assurance.

Third, the badge. Arnie touched the simple metal card hanging from the lanyard at his chest. It read ARNOLD MILLER in neat letters, with RIN'S APPRENTICE below it, which still made part of his brain try to crawl under furniture. The badge itself was never renewed. Apparently that was important. The old badge went back every morning, and he took a new one that looked almost exactly the same, because the title anchored in it faded with the day.

Fourth, his hand. The Command Seals were quiet. His circuits did not ache. No pain, no pressure, no warning heat. Relevant data, he reminded himself. Not bravery. Not failure. Data.

By the time he reached the familiar metal-clad door at the bottom, Arnie had proved he had not forgotten anything obvious. That did not mean he was ready. It only meant that if something went wrong now, it would probably be a new and educational kind of wrong.

This was not the first time Arnie had entered Rin's workshop. It was not the second, either, or the third. That did not stop every visit from being an experience. To avoid being overwhelmed, he took one big breath as soon as he stepped inside, let it out, took another, let that one out too, and focused not on everything, because everything was how a person lost the next ten minutes of his life, but on what had changed.

The first thing that had changed was Shirou. He was here too, which was not usual. Rin's lessons were usually one-on-one, at least in the sense that only one person was expected to be confused at a time.

The second thing was the plane. Or what looked like a plane, half-disassembled in the workshop. It was all brass ribs, canvas panels, copper tubing, and steel joints, the kind of thing that belonged in a museum and a steampunk convention at the same time. Arnie was not sure whether it was meant to fly, had flown, or was being punished for trying.

The third thing was the circles. The floor around the plane was covered in small magic circles, each one about a foot across, each one blooming with power around a gemstone set in its center. The letters in them had changed too, if they were letters. Before, they had looked like something between math class and a horoscope. Now they were sharp, angular things that looked like they belonged on a heavy metal album cover. That should have made the circles ugly. It did not. They were more beautiful than before, the kind of expensive modern art that belonged in a gallery with a small white card beside it and a price that made normal people breathe carefully. Most of the gems were red or black. Rubies and obsidian, maybe, though Arnie was not going to swear to mineral identification from across the room while some of the stones were glowing.

Rin walked between the circles, staff in one hand, with the air of a man inspecting thermometers, not summoning disasters. He paused at one, watched it for a moment, plucked the gem from its center, and tossed it into the cauldron. The cauldron accepted it with a thick wet sound, like he was making some kind of strange soup. A very expensive, very magical soup.

Shirou held out another gemstone. Arnie had missed whatever he had been doing with it, because the plane and the glowing floor had been taking unfair advantage of his attention span. Rin took the gem from him, moved to the circle he had just emptied, and set it into the center. It caught the same glow at once.

At first Arnie thought it was only another glow in a room that already had too many. Then he noticed the pulse. Not starting. Already there. The new gem brightened and dimmed with the others, all of them beating in time with the furnace-caged head of Rin's staff. A second later, the Command Seals on Arnie's hand answered, pulsing under his skin in the same rhythm.

Rin turned toward him. Shirou came with him. Arnie tightened his hands around the wrapped musket and straightened before he decided to, then immediately felt heat climb into his cheeks. Rin was not someone who demanded a salute. Not in words, and not in deeds. Definitely not. He was just someone people saluted anyway.

As they neared, Arnie saw that Rin was smiling. Somehow it was mischievous, gentle, and joyful all at once. Mischievous, like there was a joke and Arnie had been let in on it, not made the punchline. Gentle, as if Rin were dealing with something fragile as glass. Joyful, as though he were actually happy to see him. Arnie did not know how he managed it. If Arnie tried to put three intentions on his face at once, he would probably look like he was trying to entertain a baby.

Still, the smile made his stomach tingle, and his blush got worse. It also tempted him, for one ugly second, to think about using his Command Seals for one well-worded command, for deeply unwholesome reasons. No. Absolutely not, because that was what Creep Arnie would do, and Creep Arnie was permanently banished from existence. Also, he did not want to get between Shirou and Rin. Well. That was a filthy, filthy lie. In his wildest dreams, Arnie most definitely wanted to get between them. If he ever ended up spit-roasted by both of them, he would be the happiest little piglet in existence.

But he did not dare ask, because they might say no. They might say yes, and it might be a one-time thing, and then he would have to live after knowing exactly what he could not have. They might say yes, and it might be repeatable, and he would still always be third. Between them, but third. Maybe that was needy. Maybe that was greedy. Arnie wanted someone for himself, the way Rin was for Archer and Archer was for Rin. GLaDOS had promised matchmaking. Arnie was still trying to decide whether he feared what she would come up with, or hoped she would come up with something.

"I brought it," Arnie blurted, because he had to say something, and offered the musket.

Rin only waved a hand. "You can keep it for now. You will be taking it somewhere else later. But before we start today's lessons, I think refreshments are in order. Aren't they, my love?" he added, turning to Shirou.

Arnie pulled the wrapped musket back against his chest. Apparently keeping it for now meant continuing to hold it, which felt like a small but important detail no one had included in the job description.

Shirou looked from Rin to Arnie. "You should explain it to him first, Master. You don't want to invite the wrong symbolic representation."

Master. Arnie's blush, which had apparently been waiting for reinforcements, got worse. It was a technical term. It was supposed to be only a technical term for their mystical relationship. Except Arnie definitely knew it was not only that. Technically, Arnie was Rin's Master, because the Command Seals said so and apparently mystical paperwork outranked personal comfort. Technically, because Rin was teaching him magecraft, Rin was Arnie's master too, in the old teacher sense. And Rin was Shirou's Master in the same way Arnie was Rin's Master, except Rin was also Shirou's master in the other way. The way Arnie was not thinking about. The way he had now thought about. Arnie had used master too many times in his own head and completely lost the thread.

"Well, I certainly would not like to be like the Serpent of Eden," Rin said blithely. "Terrible character, even without taking his Nazi fetish into account."

That, Arnie thought, sounded like the Serpent of Eden was a real person, one Rin was apparently acquainted with well enough to know about his Nazi fetish. The possibility was much less ridiculous than Arnie would have liked.

"Do I want to know?" Arnie asked.

"You decide," Rin replied, waving a hand distractedly. "It is in your optional reading material about alternate-world history, under Moon Nazi assault. Still, before we digress, yes, I need to explain exactly what we are doing. Otherwise I would be tricking you, which would put us in the realm of literal biblical interpretation instead of reinterpretation."

"Heresy," Shirou added with a smirk.

"Well, I would not go that far," Rin countered.

"The Office of the Holy Question certainly would."

"I do not think they survived in this world. And if anything like them did, I do not think they had a Burial Agency and murder nuns like some other worlds."

Arnie quietly filed murder nuns under Subjects For Never and focused back on Rin, because in his experience, Rin was about to actually get to the meat of the problem.

"The original story," Rin said, "the Eden one with the fruit everyone insists on calling an apple, is mostly about the purity of innocence, the perils of disobedience, and the danger of knowledge. Those are all terrible lessons. So naturally, I fixed it."

Wasn't the Bible supposed to be the Word of God? Who dared fix that? Who would even try? Arnie's old pastor would probably have given a very specific answer involving pitchforks and hooves.

"Perverted," Shirou added, his smirk growing a touch sharper.

Arnie could not find it in himself to completely disagree. He also could not stop listening, because this was like a car crash. Terrible, probably bad for everyone involved, and impossible to look away from.

"The problem lies in the fruit," Rin said, raising one hand in the pose Arnie was already beginning to associate with lectures. "Most people shorten it to the Tree of Knowledge. That is not quite what the text says, but it still matters. The written text matters because the people who know it treat it as authority. The shortened version matters because many more people know that instead."

He tapped the end of his staff against the floor.

"Magecraft does not build Foundations only out of correct scholarship. It builds them out of use. Scripture, sermons, paintings, children's Bibles, bad jokes, half-remembered Sunday school, all the little repetitions that teach the world what a symbol is supposed to mean. So we examine both. The popular version first, because it is the broad one. The textual version second, because it is the sharper one."

Arnie had the uncomfortable feeling that he was about to hear someone take apart a Sunday school lesson with the same tone GLaDOS used for defective machinery.

"If it is the Tree of Knowledge," Rin continued, "then the first demonstrated result is frankly pathetic. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened, and the knowledge they immediately act upon is that being naked is shameful. Not toolmaking. Not weaving. Not medicine. Not fire. Not even how to make better clothing than tied leaves. Nakedness. Shame. Hiding. That is not enlightenment. That is a theology of social anxiety."

Shirou's mouth twitched, then tightened, as if he had decided laughing would only encourage Rin.

"And if we use the fuller wording, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it becomes worse. If the fruit teaches moral discernment, why is nakedness the first evil they notice? Why not the broken command? Why not the bad advice? Why not the fact that they have done the one thing they were told not to do?"

Arnie opened his mouth, then closed it again, leaning back slightly. That seemed like a question with a trapdoor under it.

Rin let the silence last just long enough to prove Arnie had chosen wisely, then continued. "Then comes the other problem. How do you judge someone for a moral crime committed before they possess the knowledge required for moral judgment? Humans have historically put animals on trial, because humans are frequently ridiculous. A god should aspire to higher procedural standards."

"Rin," Shirou said, shaking his head, though the corner of his mouth twitched.

"What? I am right."

"That is not the same as helping," Shirou said, still fighting the smile.

"It is if I am explaining why the old interpretation is bad ritual engineering." Rin looked back to Arnie, bright-eyed and pleased in a way that made Arnie nervous. "Change only what the fruit means, and the entire story becomes much more reasonable."

"You mean," Arnie said, trying to make sense of it anyway, "what if the fruit was not finished? Not broken, exactly. More like it still had bugs. God was not saying never eat this because it is forbidden to humans. He was saying do not eat it right now because I need to patch the moral classifier, and then He forgot to mention that last part."

Arnie swallowed hard. Now that the words were out of his mouth, the theory sounded entirely ridiculous.

Rin tilted his head, and the worst part was that he actually looked intrigued. "A knowledge of good and evil with bugs in it. A flawed classifier. Bad categories." He smiled. "That would explain a lot of history. Bravo. Not an interpretation useful for the current working, but a very interesting way of thinking."

"Ah," Shirou said, his smirk coming back full force as he looked at Rin. "You corrupted him."

"Educated," Rin corrected.

"You say that like those are different things," Shirou replied, crossing his arms.

"They are the same process. The label depends mostly on whether one approves of the result." Rin turned the staff in his hand, letting the end settle against the floor with a soft click. "But we have digressed. Let us return to the other meaning. What if the Tree is not about knowledge as a thing handed over, but about the ability to acquire knowledge? Not a box of facts, but the beginning of change."

Arnie frowned, because that sounded like one of those sentences that was going to become important after it was too late to ask for simpler words.

"Adam is perfect in Eden," Rin continued. "Perfect things do not learn. They do not need to. They are complete, which is another way of saying they are finished. Immutable. Safe. Beautiful. Also useless, if the working you want requires motion. Once Adam and Eve eat, they become capable of learning, and the first lesson they learn is stupid. They are naked, therefore they should invent pants. That is not a fall from divine grace. That is a first draft."

Shirou made a small sound that might have been agreement and might have been him deciding not to argue with a man who had just reduced Genesis to pants.

"So Eden stops being the place that belongs to them," Rin said. "When you are small, a cradle is mercy. When you have grown, you can leave it, or you can build a very strange life around staying there. I have no objection to consenting adults and their private arrangements with furniture, but as a complete philosophy of existence, it has limits. The bite is initiation. The expulsion is what follows: the first step out of the cradle. From a distance, the difference between a bird leaving the nest and a bird being thrown from it may look small. It matters a great deal to the bird."

"So in this version, the snake is not a bad guy?" Arnie asked, his brow furrowing as he tried to map the new logic. He definitely did not want to go into what private arrangements with furniture might mean, even though the phrase clung to him like old grease in a fryer no one had cleaned properly.

"Oh, no, he is absolutely the bad guy," Rin said. "He tricked her. He did not explain properly. He did not offer a meaningful choice. His motives are debatable, but not in a way that improves him."

"Right," Arnie said, because apparently even corrected biblical symbolism still had villains.

"Which returns us to this." Rin rested both hands on the staff. "I have explained what this working means. With that explanation, we return to the corrected story. Are you ready to be changed? Are you willing to take that first step? Are you willing to bite the apple?" He paused, then added, "Well. Apple pie. Which is better, because Shirou made it."

"I thought you said it was not an apple," Arnie said.

"Enough people believe it was an apple to make the symbol useful," Rin said. "And pie is better with apples than with unnamed fruit."

"I am not sure how you make a pie out of unnamed fruit."

Rin glanced back at Shirou with open affection. "Well, he is an excellent cook. I am sure he will manage."

Then he turned and began leading Arnie away, presumably toward the pie.

That turned out to be the understatement of the century. The smell reached Arnie before the pie did and hit him like a truck. Butter, sugar, hot apple, and something warm and sharp he could not name filled the air so completely that his mouth watered. For one whole moment, he forgot to be nervous about the ritual.

Arnie's anxiety returned when they reached the table.

There was one plate. One fork. One knife. One small apple pie, just large enough to be insulting if called a slice and optimistic if called dinner. It looked like a pie built for exactly one person.

Arnie approached the pie cautiously, which felt silly, because it was a pie. Then he noticed Rin watching it with unconcealed hunger.

"Do you want a piece?" Arnie asked, because manners still existed, even in rituals.

Rin sighed. "Unfortunately, it is all for you. Ritual consistency."

"But sacrifice would make it stronger," Shirou said.

"Sacrifice?" Arnie said, thoughts drifting briefly back to the unfortunate bird with too many eyes. "Doesn't that usually involve more blood?"

"Sacrifice is giving up something of value," Rin said, mournfully gazing at the pie, "and value is subjective. Gold is precious and air is worthless until air becomes scarce, at which point its value suddenly climbs upward. In the same spirit, missing Shirou's pie would be a greater sacrifice than ripping the heart out of some poor fool." Arnie decided not to ask if Rin was speaking from personal experience. "And what if I do not eat it?" he asked instead.

"Then you do not eat it," Rin said. "It is a choice. This part of the working fails. I would not say you remain unchanged, because time does not ask permission. But you would not receive the small increase in plasticity and receptivity that would make the lesson easier. This lesson, and the ones after it."

"Right."

"If you refused entirely, however, I would have to eat the pie myself," Rin added. "It would be a pity for it to go to waste."

Shirou leveled a flat, thoroughly unimpressed stare at him.

Arnie did not know how to parse it, except that it made Rin correct course immediately.

"What?" Rin said, immediately defensive. "I am sure you would be disappointed. You made it for him."

"You made it?" Arnie asked Shirou.

Shirou nodded.

For some reason, that surprised Arnie. After the lecture, he had assumed the pie was Rin's design.

"Shirou is better at this kind of tuning-through-cooking than I am," Rin said. "I helped with the concept."

"He helped," Shirou said.

"I did," Rin said. "The first proposal involved salmon."

"Salmon," Arnie repeated.

"Good fish," Rin said. "Wrong symbol. The Salmon of Wisdom is excellent for acquiring knowledge, or for making a young man suck his thumb whenever he wants an answer, which has precedent but would be terrible pedagogy. Too much acquired knowledge, not enough ability to learn. The recipe needed apple, warmth, threshold, and enough comfort that your body would stop treating the ritual like an oncoming vehicle. The execution is all Shirou."

"You make my work sound very impressive for the work of a third-rate magus," Shirou said mildly.

"For someone who insists he is a third-rate magus," Rin replied, "you are doing terrible damage to several Clock Tower grading systems."

After a brief, careful look around for objections, Arnie laid the wrapped musket along the far edge of the table, as far from the pie as the table allowed. Then he took the knife and fork, sat, and looked at the pie.

It was not like he really had a choice. No. No, that was wrong. Rin had taught him better than that, which was unfair, because now the lesson was being used against him. When people told someone else they had no choice, it was usually because they wanted to make the choice smaller. When people told themselves the same thing, it was usually for the same reason, because looking at the other choices was uncomfortable. Sometimes that was useful. If the room was on fire, a person did not need a complete moral inventory before using the door. But this was not that kind of time.

He tried telling himself it was not a choice that mattered. Eat the pie. Do not eat the pie. Either way, the world would keep going. Then the other part of the lesson arrived, because Rin apparently installed them in pairs. Big life-changing choices were good for stories, whether the story was on a stage, on a screen, or in a book. In real life, big choices were usually made of smaller ones that had been practiced until they were easy. Humans matched patterns. They met a familiar shape and reached for the answer they had used last time. Choice became habit. Habit informed character. Little choice to big choice, which was a terrible thing to remember while staring at dessert.

Of course, Rin had also taught him that revising every choice forever was how one ended up paralyzed in front of a pie, which was, unfortunately, exactly what Arnie was doing. Before he could throw himself into another loop, he braced himself, cut off a bite, and ate it.

Once he started, stopping was no longer one of the available choices. It tasted good. It tasted so good that calling it good felt like insulting the pie. Apple, butter, sugar, pastry, and something warm and clean and impossible; none of the words described it. They were only what his mouth could identify while the rest of him surrendered. Arnie would have liked to say that he did not lick the plate like an overeager puppy. Unfortunately, there were witnesses, and Rin had taught him that if one needed to lie, one should make sure one could not be easily caught in it.

"Good meal?" Rin asked, his tone gently teasing.

"Well. Yes," Arnie said, trying very hard not to look at the plate. "Yes. Thank you, Shirou. It was a very good meal." Then, because honesty had apparently survived dessert, he added, "But I do not really feel any different. More full, yes. But I do not feel like I am better at learning."

"How would you feel better at learning?" Rin asked.

Arnie opened his mouth, then paused.

"What would that feel like?" Rin pressed.

"I do not know."

"Then how do you know that you are not feeling it?"

"Stop trying to tangle his mind into knots," Shirou cut in.

"But how will he learn to untie knots if I do not provide them constantly?" Rin countered.

"Cut them," Shirou said.

"Ah. Alexander's solution." Rin nodded as if considering it. "Efficient, direct, and very hard on the rope. Considering that, in this metaphor, the rope is his mind, it is not a solution I would recommend."

Rin turned his attention back to Arnie.

Arnie straightened before he thought about it. There was no decision. His spine simply received the information that Rin was looking at him and made its own arrangements.

"Today's lesson is more a series of gifts," Rin said. "One from me, one from Shirou, and one from both of us. Three, because three is a potent number. Not merely because people believe it is, although that helps, but because it appears in so many myths that it would be a shame not to use it. I say gifts, but gifts should come free, and these have a bit of a price."

Arnie thought about that for a moment, and then the answer became obvious.

"Because they are going to change me," he said. "This is all about changing me."

Rin smiled.

It was the sort of smile people claimed could launch a thousand ships, except Arnie understood those people now, which was not a comforting development. He wanted to melt into a puddle of goo. Rin did not need something as crude as gold stars or good grades to motivate students. His approval was enough. Enough to make Arnie want to push past things he had been very sure were limits.

"Yes," Rin said. "Each is a tool. Each is therefore a lesson, and each is also a foundation for further lessons. Each will change you and set further changes in motion. But let us move to the practicals." He glanced at Shirou. "You first."

"I would not call it a new gift," Shirou said, extending an open hand toward Arnie, palm up. "Merely complimentary maintenance on a gift I have already given."

His palm cracked.

It did not reveal anything grisly. No flesh. No blood. No bones. Instead, burning heat rolled out of the split, carrying air that smelled of smoke and molten metal.

Arnie could barely glimpse what lay inside, but it was similar to what he had seen in the cracked street a week ago, when he had received the dagger. A smoke-choked sky. The suggestion of enormous gears turning somewhere too deep to look at directly. Then something black and sharp pushed through the opening, blade first.

The dagger emerged from Shirou's palm.

The same dagger. Or a similar dagger. Arnie was not sure whether magic cared about that distinction. It looked like the one he had returned to Shirou because Shirou had asked for it.

When half the blade was out, Shirou took it with his other hand, gripping the blade itself without flinching, and pulled it free like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. If the hat was his own hand. And the rabbit was a knife.

The crack in his palm closed behind it. No blood. No wound. No scar. Nothing to show that a moment ago there had been a break in reality in his hand.

Shirou offered the blade hilt-first to Arnie.

"Well," Shirou said. "I fixed it for you. It is less powerful, but more stable. More suitable to you as you are now."

Before reaching for it, Arnie examined the dagger, trying to see what had changed.

It was still blacker than black, like shadow hammered into steel and sharpened. But there were subtle differences he only noticed once he forced himself to look longer. Lines ran along the blade. Not bright lines. That would have been too easy. These were black on black, symbols or letters or maybe both, so hard to see that his eyes kept trying to slide away from them.

It also felt more solid.

That was not the right word. The dagger had been solid before. It had cut air and blurred shadows and existed in his hand without asking physics for permission. But the first version had felt like a miracle pretending to be a knife. This one felt more like a knife that happened to know a few miracles.

Then he noticed the thing he had almost missed. Where the hilt met the blade, a small dark gem had been set into the weapon. It was black too, or maybe shadow-colored, which was not a color Arnie would have admitted existed a week ago. He was fairly sure it had not been there before.

"Since I had already entangled it with your own memories to give you a proper claim, I leaned into that," Shirou said. "It is less Carnwennan now, and more your blade. An inherited blade. That gives it age and continuity, which makes it more stable. But years also wear Mystery down. That is part of why it is weaker."

Entangled with his memories? What did that mean? Did it have something to do with why the first dagger had reminded him, so inexplicably at the time, of the switchblade Father had given him when he turned fourteen? It felt like a good guess, but it was still a guess.

"Just a minor modification," Shirou added. "I also reworked it into an Azoth blade, since you are walking the path of a magus. Or, more precisely, I added the fact that it had already been reworked into an Azoth blade."

Shirou looked at Arnie. "Rin has taught you about Azoth blades, hasn't he?"

Arnie blinked at the surprise exam. Surprise exams were the worst exams, but this one was not too far from the lesson, and the lesson had involved knives, magical batteries, capacitors, and Rin correcting the word battery several times, so it had stuck.

"A blade-shaped Mystic Code," Arnie said carefully. "Not really a knife first. More like a battery, capacitor, and regulator for magical energy. It stores power, smooths the output, and helps shape it into a spell. Named after the computer sword from the thermometer guy."

Rin made a small sound, half amusement and half academic injury. "Paracelsus von Hohenheim, founder of modern alchemy. Not the thermometer guy. If you mean Celsius as a measure, that is Anders Celsius. Celsus, without the i, is the Roman medical writer Paracelsus named himself to surpass. The computer sword part is close enough, and your battery-capacitor-regulator summary is acceptable."

"You got to the part that actually matters," Shirou said, still holding the dagger out to him. "Good."

Arnie still did not reach for it. There was something in Shirou's posture, a sudden, statue-like stillness in the way he held the hilt, that made accepting it feel like stepping over a line before the line had been explained.

"But before you accept it, if you choose to accept it, there are a few warnings," Shirou said. "A few things you should know."

Huh. Even magical daggers came with disclaimers.

"To strengthen your connection to the blade, I had to do more than weld it to your memories," Shirou said. "I had to alloy its history with them. The blade's history and the memories I used as anchors are no longer cleanly separate."

Arnie tried to visualize that. Welding memories was already bad enough. Alloying meant different metals going into the same melting pot and coming out as something that was no longer either one, except the metals were memories, and one of them belonged to a magic knife. His brain returned an immediate does not compute.

"If you accept it, that alloy becomes part of you as well," Shirou continued. "It should begin with dreams. Then, sometimes, misremembering. First around the memories I used as anchors, then more lightly through memories associated with them. The blade's history will press false shape into the real memories at the edges. It is a small effect, but still one you should think about twice."

Small. Right. Fake memories overwriting real ones, but only at the edges. That sounded familiar in the worst way. Hadn't Rin taught him about something like that? Mental interference, maybe? There had been a bit about hypnotism, and a bit about meditation, and how the first defense was learning to notice when a thought did not enter by the front door. Did the blade come with new practical homework?

"There is also another, very minor matter," Shirou said. "Inheritance. The blade is less Carnwennan now, but it is still built over that shadow." He paused, his expression perfectly level. "Some magical tests might falsely conclude that you are descended from the Pendragon line."

Arnie was not entirely sure what Pendragon meant, except that it sounded like the kind of old, important name people did not file under Very Minor Matter.

"You are unlikely to find yourself in a situation where that matters," Shirou added.

Once again, Arnie was faced with a choice. The warnings did not help. Or rather, they helped in the wrong direction. Without them, his mind would have invented entire categories of catastrophe and then built little furnished rooms inside each one. Now the danger had a shape, and because it had a shape, it did not seem as bad as whatever his imagination could produce when left unsupervised.

Strange dreams? Nothing new. Misremembering things? A familiar problem, although usually not because a magic dagger had opinions about his personal history. Being falsely recognized as part of some old, important bloodline he did not understand? Apparently unlikely, which was the sort of word that deserved suspicion, but still.

And in the end, it was a dagger Shirou had made for him. Not found for him. Not assigned to him. Made for him, repaired for him, changed for him. Arnie could not remember anyone doing that before. Making something for him personally. The price seemed so small, and that was probably dangerous by itself, but his hand moved anyway.

He took the blade.

It fit into his hand like it had always been there.

That was also a problem, because now Arnie was holding a magic dagger that fit into his hand like it had always been there, and he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do with it. He stood there awkwardly, blade in hand, fighting the sudden urge to shove it into his jeans pocket.

Shirou looked at him. "Ah. Of course."

He raised his hand again. His palm split once more, heat and smoke breathing out through the crack, and this time he drew out a narrow belt with a plain sheath hanging from it. No impossible blackness. No shadow hammered into steel. Just leather, buckles, and the most blessedly ordinary object Arnie had seen in several minutes.

"This is not magical," Shirou said, offering it to him. "It is not Avalon. It will keep the dagger where you put it, and it will keep you from cutting your pockets open."

With Shirou's help, Arnie put the belt on. That should have been simple. It was not simple, because Shirou had to stand close enough to adjust the strap, and his strong arms brushed against Arnie more than once, and Arnie's face kept heating in a way that was both completely predictable and deeply inconvenient.

When Shirou stepped back, Arnie found himself glancing around the workshop before he could stop himself. There had to be something reflective in here. A mirror. Polished metal. Very still soup. Anything.

"Well," Rin said, "you look quite dashing."

Arnie froze.

"See for yourself." Rin snapped his fingers, and a disc of liquid metal unfolded in the air, bright and smooth enough to serve as an improvised mirror.

Arnie looked. Rin was not lying. The belt sat well on him. The dagger changed the line of his body, not enough to make him look like someone else, but enough to make him look sharper. A little dangerous. A little attractive, which was a thought his brain immediately tried to file under Somebody Else's Problem.

He liked it. That was the dangerous part. It did not quite look like him. Or maybe it did, and he was the one who had not caught up yet.

"Shirou has given you the past," Rin declared.

He struck the butt of his staff against the floor. The clang rang through the workshop, followed by a sharp hiss as steam poured from the metal, and he lifted his free hand toward the ceiling.

"Now I am going to give you the future."

He delivered it with the presence of a Broadway star and the solemnity of a priest. The only thing breaking the picture was the small, self-satisfied curve of his mouth, which made Arnie suspect Rin knew exactly how dramatic he sounded and was enjoying the performance, the joke, and himself for making it all work. With all of that, Arnie almost missed the mirror evaporating back into the air.

Space tore open above Rin's hand, and from it poked a black, slick pseudopod. It dipped, curled open just enough to drop a single ring into Rin's open palm, then pulled back, closing the tear in space behind it.

That sounded more impressive than it appeared. Or rather, Arnie would have been more impressed if he had not already seen Rin use the same sort of thing for fetching things, storing things, and putting things down temporarily, like a shelf, a table, a cup holder, and, on one memorable occasion, a pair of chairs. Rin had sat in one and offered the other to Arnie.

Despite looking like something from a Japanese H-game, the chair had felt completely normal. Very comfortable, actually. A little like sitting on a waterbed. Though it had looked slimy, it had actually been smooth and soft. It had not done anything else either. It had not even tried to molest him.

Arnie had definitely not been disappointed by that.

The first thing Arnie noticed about the actual ring was the metal. The metal dodged every name he had for color. Silver was wrong. Gold was worse. Purple came closest, except purple was the wrong color for metal. Unless someone had dropped dye into the furnace. Would that even work?

In any case, it looked like no metal Arnie had ever seen.

The gem in the center, on the other hand, was instantly recognizable. Not because Arnie had become an expert in gems, although, considering how often gems appeared in Rin's magic, that might be something he would have to become in the future. Apparently the weirdos who were into crystals had a point. Who would have guessed?

No, the gem was recognizable because it was the most recognizable gem ever. A diamond. Clear as glass, set in the shape diamonds were supposed to have in commercials, jewelry stores, and engagement rings in movies. In truth, it could have been glass or some other clear gem, but knowing Rin, it was probably a diamond.

Together, the ring was beautiful. It was something a person could call precious without being ironic. It looked like it belonged in one of those stores where just walking past the window got security to check whether you were thinking about robbing them. The kind of jewelry where, if you had to ask the price, the answer was already no.

Just looking at it made Arnie feel self-conscious. And yet there was an almost itching desire to take it. That was surprising. Arnie had never cared much about wearing jewelry, but this one looked like something that should be his. Or not should. That sounded too strong. Something he wanted to have.

"This isn't going to turn me into a Ringwraith, is it?" Arnie blurted.

Shirou snorted, then seemed to turn the laugh into a cough, which did not help.

"I have watched the movies," Arnie said defensively. He had also read the books, but admitting that felt like the sort of thing that could go wrong in the wrong company. Not that this was the wrong company. Rin would probably appreciate proper sources, which meant it was probably only a habit he needed to break, assuming he survived long enough to have opinions about his habits.

"He is laughing at me, not you," Rin said, his tone tired but fond. "And he is getting a spanking for it later."

Arnie's breath hitched. His face heated yet again. At this rate, his cheeks were generating enough heat to brew coffee.

He definitely did not want to imagine that. He definitely did not want to imagine tall, muscular Shirou bent across slender Rin's lap. That was not an image he wanted intruding into his thoughts. It intruded anyway, because his brain had apparently joined the enemy.

"As for the ring," Rin continued, mercifully or not mercifully returning to the subject, "no. It will not do that automatically. I suppose it could be used as a proper anchor for such a working, but you would have to do the work yourself. I do have the requisite reference material to suggest for such research, but I would not recommend it. If you are interested in becoming undead, there are certainly better options."

Before Arnie could properly visualize himself as a Ringwraith, tall and dark and draped in flowing black robes, Rin blithely continued, "I mean, Ringwraiths do rank rather high for survivability, but quite low for quality of life. Never mind. What I wanted to explain is how this ring gives you the future." Rin turned the ring between two fingers. "It is a prototype. A new version of the Magic Crest, created after over a decade of research."

Arnie straightened a little. The words sounded capitalized.

"A mature Magic Crest is inheritance made into an organ," Rin continued. "Generations of research, spells, habits, mistakes, and magical circuits preserved in the body and passed from magus to heir. A library, a battery, a spell engine, and a family curse, all pretending to be the same thing. New Crests can be made, of course, or split from an older one, but those are still usually grown in bodies and paid for in pain, compatibility, and time."

That sounded exactly like the sort of invention magi would consider normal and everyone else would consider evidence that they were a little too into pain. From both sides.

"This is not that," Rin said. "Not exactly. The diamond contains crystallized Crest material, blank and receptive rather than inherited. The ring is the binding and the interface, which I modernized so you are not stuck using a medieval framework. Instead of cutting open your body and placing a Crest inside it, I made something modular and easier to use: a Crest that remains outside you while still learning your circuits. It gives your own future work somewhere to gather, stabilize, and grow."

Rin's fingers closed lightly around the ring. "That is what I mean by future. A foundation for you as a magus, and a foundation for every ring that follows."

For a few moments, there was silence.

Arnie waited a little longer, in case Rin had more to say. When he did not, Arnie almost reached for the ring. Then he remembered something.

"What is the price?" he asked. "What is the cost?"

From the small quirk of Rin's approving smile, Arnie understood at once that Rin had not forgotten to mention it. This was the test. Rin was checking whether he had properly internalized the lesson.

Rin's smile softened, but only a little. Then he planted the butt of his staff against the floor and lifted the ring on his open palm, high enough that the diamond caught the workshop light. Arnie recognized the pose. It was one of Rin's lecture poses, modified for one staff, one ring, and the fact that apparently even warnings needed stagecraft.

"The price is not something you pay to gain it," Rin said. "It is simply the consequence of its original nature and of the improvements I made."

That was not comforting.

"This remains a Magic Crest. A kinder interface, yes. A more modular one. But still a Crest. If you accept it, it will entangle with your Magic Circuits. A portion of the circuits that manifest through your body will migrate into the crystal. While the ring is on you, those circuits will remain yours and usable, but a touch more static. More like carved channels than living muscle. That is both the price and the advantage. As you train a spell, the ring can crystallize the circuit-pattern you build for it. Later, instead of assembling the entire working from the beginning, you can run Od through those specialized circuits and let the Crest execute the shape for you."

Arnie looked at the ring again. It seemed much heavier now.

"Once that happens, separation will matter. Taking it off for a moment will not cripple you, but giving it up will hurt. Losing it will hurt more. If you are parted from it for long, you will feel the absence. A pull. A hollow place. Your body insisting that something belonging to it has been left behind."

Rin held the ring very still. "Like any Crest, it can be passed on. If you choose to abandon this path after walking it as far as you can, you may choose to give it to another. To a successor. But removal is not undoing. It would leave a hollow where the work had grown into you, and one day you might find yourself turning back to reclaim it."

He paused, and the pause did not help. Arnie became suddenly aware of his own pulse.

"The external design avoids the usual surgery and reduces the compatibility problem. It also creates a different weakness. A Crest inside the body is difficult to steal. A ring is not. People value power, and valuable things are taken from those who cannot protect them."

Arnie's fingers twitched and did not reach.

"If the ring passed into someone else's hands and stayed there long enough, the process would begin with them as well. Their circuits would be drawn into the structure. Their soul would leave traces. If you later reclaimed it, you might recover more power than you lost, but not cleanly. You would be taking back a thing that had learned someone else's shape. Pollution is the old word. Contamination is the less dramatic one. Both are accurate."

Rin's expression sharpened. "So yes, it could be lent. It could be taken. It could be returned, reclaimed, and made stronger through exchange and loss. I do not recommend that path. The pain would be significant, although not a persuasive argument to any proper magus. The contamination is the more serious problem. It would make every later working more complicated. It would still be less crude than transplanting Magic Circuits from one living body into another, but that is a very low standard."

He gave Arnie a look that was almost severe. "But it would be your path. If you ever choose to test it, document everything. I would be very disappointed if you invented an entire branch of Crest practice and left no useful records."

Rin lowered his hand a little, bringing the ring back within easy reach. "The simple version is this. The ring gives you a future by becoming part of you. Attachment is the price. Not sentiment. Structure."

"Is that everything?" Arnie asked, because he had to.

"Almost," Rin said. "There is one other minor matter. Putting part of your soul outside your body, even into a prepared object, leaves it a touch more vulnerable. The body is not merely meat. It is a vessel and a wall."

Arnie decided he did not like the phrase merely meat.

"I have mitigated that as much as possible. The jewel-smiths of Eregion did not have access to Aperture cybersecurity practices, or that history would have gone very differently."

Eregion sounded familiar, in the vague way names from the appendices sounded familiar. Arnie might have chased that thought if he were not busy imagining his soul peeking outside his body like he had walked out of a public bathroom without properly tucking himself back in. Metaphorically. He hoped.

"Still, mitigation is not elimination. The ring will make you a little more legible to things that know how to read souls through symbols, sympathy, and possession. It will also make you a little more receptive. More open to the world." Rin's mouth curved slightly. "An open mind. An open soul. A trading post grows rich because roads bring goods and strangers. Those same roads can bring thieves, armies, and pestilence."

Arnie looked at the ring again. It was still beautiful.

That was almost unfair. Dangerous things should have the decency to look dangerous. The dagger looked dangerous. The ring looked like something someone gave you because they wanted you to have a future, and somehow that was worse.

If he accepted it, he would own something valuable. Something precious. Something that could be taken. Arnie had not dared to attach himself to many things for a long time, because attachment was how the world found handles. The hollow place Rin described did not scare him because he could not imagine it. It scared him because he could. The world did not need magic rings to hollow someone out. It had bills, sickness, closing shifts, bad luck, and a thousand small machines for grinding down whatever a person wanted until it came out bitter and burnt, like the world's worst coffee.

But he had promised himself that he would be different. Or at least that he would try to be a different kind of Arnie. Not fearless. That seemed unrealistic and probably unhealthy. Just different enough not to let every old hollow place decide every new choice for him.

This was a risk. It was also a tool. A way to change, even if changing meant owning something that could be taken from him.

So Arnie reached out and took the ring.

For a moment, he held it between his fingers, feeling the cool weight of the metal and the hard point of the diamond. Then, before his brain could assemble a committee to argue against him, he put it on.

It fit, because of course it fit.

Arnie let his hand fall slightly, staring at the ring as if it might explain what he had just done. It did not.

"You do not need to wear it openly at all times," Rin said. "Skin contact improves synchronization, but being on your body is enough for ordinary stability. A chain under your shirt would be better. Keeping it in a pocket would function, but I would call that risky."

"I do not feel any different," Arnie said, looking at the ring.

"Well, unlike surgery, the process takes time," Rin answered. "And a few lessons before you can use it properly. It is not very instinctive, being an object rather than an organ."

"You look as if you need refreshments before we move to the third part," Shirou said.

Arnie turned toward him.

Shirou was holding a tray with three ceramic cups. He could have conjured them. That was now a Reasonable Category of Explanation, which said worrying things about Arnie's life. The more likely explanation was that Shirou had left to get them and returned without Arnie noticing. After all, Rin was, as usual, very distracting. Saying that Rin attracted attention was like saying that a black hole had a gravitational pull. Technically correct, but woefully insufficient to describe the sheer scale of the problem.

"You're right," Arnie said. "Yes. I do need it."

He accepted one of the cups, the ceramic refreshingly cold in his hands.

"I barely moved," he admitted. "Why do I feel like I have been running?"

"You have been thinking," Rin said. "The human brain is only about two percent of body mass and consumes roughly twenty percent of resting energy, while additional cognitive load--"

"Save it for trivia night," Shirou said.

Rin sighed. "Fine. Also, the ring stores Od. It has begun drawing from you, very gently, but still drawing. Your body is compensating. Until the initial reservoir is full, you will probably be a little hungrier than usual."

Arnie looked down at the cup. "That explains the refreshments."

"It explains the refreshments," Shirou agreed.

The drink inside was pale and cloudy, almost milk-white, with tiny dark flecks suspended through it. Arnie took a cautious sip. It was sour, but not badly sour. Bright sour. Clean sour. Like noon sunlight without shadows, which made no sense because sunlight was not a flavor, except apparently when Shirou was involved. Then the sweetness followed, softer and golden, with little bitter touches of chocolate hiding inside it.

If Arnie had been poetically inclined, he might have managed to write something impressive about it. Since he was not, he said, "Wow. This is stupidly good. What is it?"

Then his body noticed the sweetness properly. Arnie was used to soda that promised sweetness without calories, which now seemed less like a drink and more like a legal loophole wearing carbonation. This had calories. This had substance. His stomach accepted it with the startled enthusiasm of an office worker finding out the free pizza was real.

"An experiment," Shirou said. "I have been studying Maya recipes. This is based on pozol. Not exactly pozol, but close enough in principle: prepared maize dough dissolved in water to make something portable, nourishing, and quick to prepare."

That was more explanation than Arnie had expected from Shirou, who was usually concise, as if each word came with a set price. Apparently Rin had been rubbing off on him.

Stupid brain heard rubbing off and immediately tried to make it about Rin and Shirou rubbing against each other. Arnie took another drink and hoped the cup contained enough sunlight to disinfect his thoughts.

"I used ground, lightly fermented elf-corn and grated Vril-laced chocolate," Shirou continued. "The chocolate restores and heals, but by itself it is not ideal for sustained work. It can translate the body toward an optimal condition, and the sugar gives immediate energy, but it does not create long-term reserves. Once the correction is spent, the body still needs something to live on. The maize gives it weight. Sustenance. Something slower to burn, for scouts, scavengers, and rescue teams working outside without a full kitchen."

"Elf-corn?" Arnie asked.

"Yes," Shirou said.

Rin opened his mouth.

Shirou lightly cuffed him on the shoulder without looking.

"Right," Arnie said. That was apparently a category of corn now. Then the other half of the sentence caught up with him. "Wait. Vril-laced chocolate?"

He looked back down at the cup. That explained why the golden-light taste had felt familiar.

"In small amounts," Shirou said. "Enough to help. Not enough to replace proper food, sleep, or common sense."

Rin made a small sound.

Shirou did not look at him. "Especially not common sense."

Rin drew himself up with feigned offense. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."

He said it in a voice that somehow put quotation marks around the sentence. Arnie had not known people could do that with tone alone until he met Rin. It was definitely a quote. Or a spell pretending to be one.

Shirou looked at him over the cups and smirked. "That is something people with no common sense say."

"You have upgraded your spanking to the belt," Rin said, perfectly deadpan.

"Well," Shirou said, "if I put in some effort, I am sure I can go up to the whip."

With those words, Arnie knew what to expect, and his brain did not disappoint him. Which was the problem. The image arrived immediately and unmistakably. Whip. Bare-chested Shirou. Rin dressed in a leather harness. By now, Arnie was beginning to suspect Rin was either trying to kill him with small doses of shame, like some twisted shame-based version of death by a thousand cuts, or slowly training him to abandon shame altogether. That was, in a way, scarier.

Arnie took another sip, mostly so his mouth would be busy doing something that was not making a sound.

Unfortunately, that brought him to the bottom of the cup.

He set it aside and noticed that Rin and Shirou had done the same.

"Now," Rin said. "The final gift. This one requires a short walk. Follow me."