Chapter 202 - Part 19: Interlude - Arnie Miller and the Owl of Xibalba -Part 2

Rin's staff made a small clicking sound as he walked. His feet did not. Rin almost seemed to glide over the floor, each movement so graceful it nearly became a dance. When Arnie thought about it for more than half a second, the staff strikes were rhythmic, too, almost certainly deliberate. Rin moved with that rhythm and somehow still looked as if he were only walking normally. The two impressions collided in Arnie's head and produced several warning lights.

Shirou moved with grace as well, but differently. Less flourish. More efficiency. More predator. It reminded Arnie of seeing a tiger move on a nature documentary, all controlled weight and quiet certainty, which was a comparison he immediately regretted because his brain did not need additional material.

Together, they made a picture striking enough that Arnie had to say something before his mind wandered in weird, probably pervy directions again.

"So what is with the plane?" Arnie asked, trying to keep up. Rin and Shirou were not running. They were not even hurrying, exactly. They were merely moving quickly in a way that made Arnie feel as if he had missed a class on legs. "And the cauldron?"

"It is called Dragonfly," Rin said without breaking stride. "The plane, not the cauldron. The cauldron remains unnamed."

"For now," Shirou said, half amused.

"We have reached the practical limit of how much ground can be searched efficiently on foot or by sled," Rin continued. "So the next stage is air. The Dragonfly is a fascinating divergent design, but it was not built for sub-zero arctic gales. We are adding a protective varnish and several supporting enchantments so it can survive the work."

Arnie sorted through that and found the important objection. "Even with portals?"

"The problem is dimensionality," Rin said. "A portal is excellent at cheating one dimension. Distance becomes negotiable. But a search is not a line. The farther the teams move from Tesla City, the more the problem becomes an area, and a portal only helps with the place where you open it. For the immediate problem, we add another dimension." He lifted the staff slightly, indicating upward. "Height. From above, the same distance contains more information."

"Right," Arnie said. "So, flying."

"So, flying," Rin agreed. "That naturally leads to another problem. Weather. Cold. Even more of both at height. And thus, varnish."

Shirou cut in. "You are overcomplicating it. It is a heat spell in liquid form. So we can soak parts."

"Yes," Rin said. "Thermal-control varnish."

They reached the corner of the workshop, passing near the human-sized X-shaped frames. Arnie did not know exactly what they were called, but he knew what they were for. Thanks, internet.

Fortunately, the bondage furniture was not their destination.

Arnie was definitely not disappointed by that.

Instead, they stopped in front of another large magic circle. This one was much bigger than most, and at first glance it looked like four circles laid side by side instead of one inside another. When Arnie looked again, he corrected that. Two of them were circles. The last pair was one continuous figure, like a figure eight or an infinity sign, depending on which direction his brain decided to be wrong from. Two circles were empty, and so was one half of the eight. The other half held something about man-sized, covered in cloth.

The writing was different too. There were still the familiar math extras, horoscope refugees, and heavy-metal letters, but this time they were crowded by something more picture-like. The best Arnie could describe them as was emojis, only ancient. Ancient emojis? Arnie had thought emojis were a new thing. Apparently people had been making tiny symbolic pictures everyone argued about for a very long time.

Before he could think about that too hard, the smell hit his nose.

Dry rot.

It brought back the memory of old roadkill he had poked with a stick when he was a kid, and that one terrible time something had died in the ventilation.

"Is there something dead under there?" Arnie asked, pointing at the cloth-covered object. He squinted at it, almost expecting it to lunge at him.

"A.R.R.O.W.L. is purely mechanical," Rin said, sounding a touch offended. "Why would you think that? Has Shirou been exaggerating again about how often I work with corpses?"

Rin paused for a moment and looked accusingly at Shirou.

Shirou only tapped his nose.

"Ah," Rin said. "I see. It slipped again. It is not the device. It is me."

"Are you sick?" Arnie asked.

His voice squeaked a little at the end. He was not proud of it, but the situation was alarming enough for a mouse-like squeak to be excused.

"No. I have already eliminated disease as the origin. Besides, disease would not corrode my glamour, certainly not this aggressively. I considered whether it came from a curse I had acquired, but that curse concerns fertility, not rot. There is some commonality, naturally, but experiments eliminated that as the cause." Rin explained all of that far too calmly. "Then I considered whether it was a sign of divinity."

What kind of god smelled of rot? Besides zombie Jesus, obviously.

Before Arnie could ask, Rin continued, "But it was not that either."

"In short," Shirou said, with a look that managed to be disapproving and concerned at the same time, "he does not know."

"Not yet," Rin said. "But soon. This should help." He looked back to Arnie. "Can you smell it now?"

Arnie took a deep breath through his nose. "No. It is gone."

"Not gone. Hidden," Shirou cut in. "The problem remains."

So it was like pushing dirty clothes under a bed and spraying deodorant over them. Just with magic.

"Can I help?" Arnie asked.

"Not at your level," Rin said gently, shooting a brief, glaring look at Shirou. "That is why I did not want to burden him with it." He turned his attention back to Arnie with a smooth smile. "So. Have you ever wanted to be someone else?"

"All the time," Arnie replied, more honestly than he had intended.

Rin had that effect on him. It was scary. But also freeing. Like a bungee jump. Or at least how Arnie imagined a bungee jump would feel. He had never actually done one. He'd kind of wanted to, but never quite had the time or the money.

"Well, there are a few ways to do it. Writing a story. Acting. Playing a role-playing game," Rin said with an amused smile. The list seemed very mundane, which was why Arnie did not trust it. When Rin started with mundane, he was planning to escalate. "And, as I am sure GLaDOS did not fail to mention, becoming a robot."

"More than once," Arnie replied.

The statement was true. It was also a bit of an understatement.

"Well, I am sure she mentioned the side effects of the previous best available process," Rin continued. "But just in case she forgot to mention them. Accidentally or not. I will repeat the main ones. Loss of memory. Reduction of empathy. Irreversibility."

"She called them features," Arnie said with a grimace.

He did not agree. He might want to become a new, better Arnie, but that did not mean he wanted to toss the old one away like yesterday's trash and conveniently forget him. Even if it would be easier. It seemed almost like suicide with extra steps.

"She would," Rin commented. "But if those features were removed in the newest version, would you be interested in trying? Especially if there were no memory loss, no reduction of empathy, and the process was quite easily reversible."

"Interested in knowing more," Arnie replied.

That was not yes. That seemed important.

He was not sure he wanted to be robo-Arnie. On the other hand, he was not sure he wanted to say no to an upgrade, either. He had seen enough examples of the robot bodies Rin could build, from Jay to GLaDOS's human avatar, and they were fine. More than fine.

He could probably do without the option to squirt nerve gas from his nipples, though.

"Then behold," Rin said dramatically, raising one hand. "A.R.R.O.W.L."

Space tore open above the cloth-covered shape, and black tentacles descended. Arnie braced himself. It could look like Jay, all slender and pretty. Or it could look like an airbrushed version of Arnie. Hopefully it would not be naked. Especially if it was an anatomically correct version of him.

The tentacles gripped the cloth and pulled it up, revealing what was underneath.

It was, technically, without a stitch of clothing.

That did not matter, because...

"It's an owl," Arnie said aloud.

A normal-sized owl. It had only appeared man-height because it stood on a tall bird perch.

Arnie focused, noting more detail now that his brain had stopped preparing for naked robot him. First, if he had not already known it was a robot, the only thing that would have made him doubt it was a living owl was how still it was. Second, it was pretty.

Arnie was not a proper judge of owl beauty, being neither a bird-show judge nor some kind of avian pervert, but it was kind of obvious this fowl was not foul. Perfect symmetry. Clean lines. Nice color arrangement. The feathers looked real, except they were too perfectly groomed, without any little imperfections. Dark bronze and soot-black, with silver-white along the edges. It should have looked unnatural, but it did not. It looked well put together.

The eyes looked alive. No, not really alive. More like a picture of a living bird. Too still to be alive, but too convincing to be just glass. The talons gripped the perch with perfect little hooks. The beak was sharp enough to cut and regular enough to appear in a geometry textbook. Flawless lines. That same uncanny symmetry again.

Elegant. Beautiful.

Still a bird.

Not human. Not even a mammal.

A bird.

"Why an owl? I'm no furry," Arnie blurted.

He immediately realized he had said the second part aloud. That had been meant to be silent.

"If it had been made for that purpose, A.R.R.O.W.L. would be fully functional," Rin said with a teasing smirk.

Then his expression turned more serious. "Removing the side effects required making some compromises. But I should not begin at the end. Although, to be honest, beginning is a false category. Every cause can be linked to a preceding cause, making a chain all the way back to the Root. Instead, we choose a beginning. A convenient bookmark from which to build the inquiry." He lifted one finger. "To understand the shape of the solution, we need to look deeper into the nature of the problem. Do you remember the problem?"

Rin stopped there, waiting.

Arnie knew this was the part where he was supposed to answer. It was not hard to remember. It had not been that long, although a lot had happened.

"Loss of memory. Reduction of empathy. Irreversibility," he counted off.

"Yes. But those are symptoms," Rin said. "The what, not the why. And we primarily focused on the first two, which was, in the end, a mistake." He looked back toward A.R.R.O.W.L. "Partly because we had not yet built a biological body, and there was very little desire among those who had transferred to return to being human. Few as they were. Still, it was a mistake."

He paused, and for once the pause did not feel theatrical.

"In truth, once I reached the answer to the why of it, it was so simple that it was almost embarrassing how long it took us." He shook his head slightly, then added, "But that is often the case with answers that seem simple in retrospect."

Arnie found that a little comforting. Apparently, even someone like Rin could feel stupid after the fact. Of course, the things Rin considered obvious in hindsight were probably the sort of things Arnie would need several days, three headaches, and maybe a whiteboard to think through.

Rin shifted his staff to one hand and raised the other, one finger pointing upward in a pose that belonged equally to a lecturer and a stage magician. "First, we assumed the problem was physical," he lectured. "Signal loss during transfer. Substrate mismatch. Trauma from discontinuity. Body-model collapse. Metacognitive instability."

Arnie understood maybe four of those words. The rest sounded less like a college lecture and more like Star Trek wearing a lab coat. Which was not entirely an insult. He had learned more words from Star Trek than from some of his college classes. Still, he understood enough to see the shape of it.

"So... that sounds reasonable," Arnie said.

"Exactly," Rin replied. "That was the problem."

Arnie blinked. "Reasonable was the problem?"

"Common sense," Rin said, with the tone of someone naming a suspect, "is often only expectation reflected back at us. Useful for hot stoves, stairs, and not walking into traffic. Less useful when studying a form of existence that should not exist yet."

"In short, a lot of time and money wasted," Shirou cut in.

"Not quite wasted," Rin replied. "Error correction. Data recovery. Continuity mapping. Virtual embodiment. Sensory anchoring. None of it solved the problem we were attacking, but it did produce useful technologies."

He smiled slightly. "But yes. Every reasonable explanation kept being wrong." Rin let that sit for a moment. It was such a dramatic pause that Arnie almost expected background music to cue up, the tense, orchestral swell that played in movies when the camera pushed in for a close-up. "So it was time to try an unreasonable one. Unfortunately, reasonable explanations are at least a manageable list. Unreasonable explanations are practically infinite. Luckily, new data came to the rescue."

"What new data?" Arnie asked, a little breathlessly.

He kind of wished he had popcorn. Or at least another sip of that drink Shirou had brought. Or a taste of the pie, because this was starting to feel less like a lecture and more like watching a blockbuster with footnotes. That was the thing with Rin's lectures. They were many things, but they were never boring.

With a sharp movement, Rin struck the staff against the ground. It clanged, then hissed as steam released from it. With his other hand, he gestured, and the steam moved, taking shape.

"Meet Aerion Targaryen," Rin said as the misty shape resolved into the image of a boy. Well, a teen. Arnie was not great at guessing ages, but he would have put him somewhere between twelve and sixteen. Pretty. Almost too pretty. Not even movie-actor pretty. More CGI pretty. Ethereal face, perfect skin, white hair, like he was more an anime character than a human. And there was something strangely familiar in the look.

"A prince, a dragonrider, and something of an amateur sorcerer," Rin continued. Then, letting the silence stretch just long enough for dramatic effect, he added, "And also another version of me."

Ah. That was why the look was familiar. It was the same Rin expression, the one that made Arnie feel as if Rin saw far too much and somehow decided not to use most of it against him.

"Wait," Arnie said. "If he is a prince and he is also you, does that make you a prince?"

"Yes," Rin replied.

"Does that mean I have to call you Your Majesty or something?"

"That is generally for kings," Rin said. "And I would reserve such address for certain formal occasions. We will cover court etiquette in later lessons."

"You are not thinking of..." Shirou started.

"It could be useful," Rin interrupted immediately. "But we will see. Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Aerion Targaryen. He comes from a world in which pneumatology is less academically developed, but Mystery itself is much closer. His contribution to my understanding of the soul forced me to ask the correct question." He looked back to Arnie. "Tell me, Arnie. Do you like ghost stories?"

"Well enough," Arnie replied. "Not my favorite kind of horror story, and I like adventure more. But it's not like I dislike them."

"Then let me tell you one," Rin said, waving one hand through the image of the prince. Aerion dissolved back into steam, and the steam gathered into the outline of a tall, stern woman Arnie could not place yet. "Once, there was a woman who believed in Science. In progress. In Aperture's promise of a better future for all. Except those already dead."

That did it. Not the face. The words. The old Aperture promise landed in the exact wrong drawer of Arnie's memory, and the woman snapped into place. "That's Caroline?" he asked before he could stop himself.

Rin winked, then struck the staff against the floor. Clang. Hiss. More steam poured out, twisting itself into another figure. Arnie recognized him at once, now that he knew what story Rin was telling. Cave Johnson. His face had been everywhere in ASEND, before the renovations anyway, if anyone could call everything that had happened by such a mundane name. Even if those had been video game portraits and this looked like a real person, the grin was impossible to mistake. "There was a man, too," Rin continued. "A dying man. One who asked, in the way of certain very dangerous men, if a song could be put on a disk, why not a mind?"

The idea made sense to Arnie. Worse, he knew it had worked. Kind of. But there was something in the way Rin said it that raised goosebumps along his arms.

"But answering that question properly took time. Time the man did not have." Rin gently waved a hand, and Cave's image dissolved back into mist. "The woman was alone with an answer that promised immortality, and no dying man left to ethically test whether the promise kept its word."

"She tested it on herself," Arnie half said, half asked.

He knew how the story ended, but the details in between, and the way Rin told them, made it feel like a different story. Which was probably Rin's point.

"Yes. She volunteered," Rin said, almost gently. "And she did receive what she wished for. But in stories like this, wishes come with sharp hooks." He turned his wrist, and the steam-Caroline thinned until she was little more than an outline, her stern face fading into a pale smear. "In the transformation, she forgot herself." The outline flickered. "She forgot the bonds she had made." Something hard and mechanical surfaced within the mist: a round plate, a single yellow eye, too bright and too awake. Arnie jerked before he could stop himself. "What remained most clearly was the pain of transformation, and so she lashed out at those she considered responsible. Does that not sound like a proper ghost story?"

"Yes," Arnie said. His mouth had gone suddenly too wet. For one awful second, his body presented him with two options: spit or swallow. He could not spit on Rin's floor. Not in front of Rin. So he swallowed hard.

"That is where I had gone wrong," Rin said. "A useful definition of undeath is not merely a corpse walking. It is a person dying and then being transferred into a new mode of existence. Does that sound familiar?"

The concept felt terrifyingly familiar now.

"And so," Rin said, "I should not have been looking into physics. I should have been looking into necromancy."

Deciding not to think too hard about the necromancy, Arnie voiced the other thing on his mind.

"She seems okay now," he said. "Well, at least the last time I talked to her."

"Now, yes," Rin agreed. "But that took a great deal of time and some therapy. Dungeons and Dragons sessions helped. Role-playing turned out to be surprisingly useful for teaching empathy." His tone shifted, amused and thoughtful at once. "Now that I think of it, that is not dissimilar to certain ghost-taming rites. Recognition. Attachment. Purpose. Give the dead a name, a place, people who remember them, and a duty that does not consist of endlessly replaying the moment that broke them."

"That is surprisingly wholesome," Arnie said, scratching his head a little. "Not a word I ever thought I would use for a necromancer."

Shirou snorted sharply. "No. And there is a good reason for that. Twisted. Perverted. Far too willing to do unimaginable things to corpses. One thin, almost invisible line away from being a necrophiliac." Each word cut like a sword, sharp enough that Arnie flinched a little. "Those are the words people usually use to describe necromancers. Not wholesome." He glanced at Rin. "Just ask him. What is the other way a necromancer treats ghosts?"

Arnie looked from Shirou to Rin and found no comfort in either face. "Would I regret it if I asked?"

"Perhaps," Rin said, actually seeming to consider the question. "But perhaps you would regret it more if you did not ask and the situation became relevant. Anyway, I consider regret a useless emotion. Something to be pruned from the well-cultivated mind." He raised one hand slightly. "The other way is the inverse. Instead of healing the wound, you push into it. You put the ghost into the same situation that broke them until the breaking becomes their whole point. It creates a rather potent, albeit highly specialized, tool. Not my favorite method, and not just for ethical reasons."

Arnie thought it could not get any worse.

Rin continued, almost conversationally, immediately proving him wrong. "And some push it even further, because instead of seeking a ghost, it is easier to make one. Binding the murdered to their murderer, especially if the murder was sufficiently horrific, creates a feedback loop that can drive a ghost to great heights of power. Of course, if the binding fails, the necromancer is gruesomely murdered, but that is hardly the point. After all, to be a magus is to walk with death. Necromancers just tend to make it a three-legged race."

"You're not doing that to me, right?" Arnie asked. He tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was too unsettled to sell it. The question came out much too serious, with the final word rising into a slight squeak.

"Do what?" Rin almost purred.

His lips curved into a smirk that was a little too wide. It did not make him ugly. Arnie was beginning to suspect nothing could. It made him look like a tiger instead: beautiful, dangerous, and much too close. There were no bars between them.

"Do you mean taking you, breaking you, torturing and defiling you? Not merely through pain. I would mix pain with pleasure until I became the center of your world. The thing you loved most. The thing you hated most. The only thing that felt real. Then, at the height of it, I would take everything from you. Including your last breath."

The words were horrifying. Rin's tone was not. It was soft, gentle, seductive, as if he were reciting a love poem written only for Arnie. Velvet pouring like sweet wine, or whatever purple-prose descriptions belonged in the kind of books Arnie definitely did not read.

The contrast did something terrible to him. His heart was beating too fast, and he did not know how much was fear and how much was something else.

Rin struck the staff against the floor. The clang made Arnie jump. Just like that, the tiger was gone, and Rin was a lecturer again.

"No. We will not be doing that. It would be much harder to reverse. There are resurrections, of course, but they are a great deal of work." He lifted one finger. "Instead, we are going to use liminality."

Arnie took a deep breath and tried to slow his heart. It did not help. Still, he gathered whatever tatters of courage he had left and raised his hand, displaying the Command Seals. "I still have this," he said, trying to sound stern. He was not sure he quite managed it. Then he realized what he had done and braced himself for the backlash. It did not come.

Rin's gaze dropped to the Seals, then returned to Arnie's face. There was approval in it. Praise, maybe, although Arnie was not confident enough to trust that interpretation. His smile started friendly. Then one corner twisted, and it became something halfway between wicked and seductive. "And use it for what?" he asked, walking slowly toward Arnie. "To make me stop? Or to make me do things to you?"

"Enough," Shirou cut in, his face stern and his arms crossed over his chest. "He has earned this. Don't make him regret it."

Rin stopped. "Perhaps you are right. I am getting impatient. A later part of the lesson plan requires him to be more comfortable in his own skin and more honest with himself about his desires, and I have been trying to hurry the process." He winked. "After all, I would prefer his introduction to sex magic not to become a practical demonstration of spontaneous human combustion." The wink should have made it a joke. Somehow, Arnie was less certain afterward. Rin turned his full attention back to Arnie, his tone suddenly conversational. "We are not role-playing. There is no need to decide that the safe word is banana or something like that. Just tell me to stop or slow down. I believe I have a reasonably accurate model of your reactions and behavior, and I am trying to remain within your tolerances. But a model is not certainty. If you think I have pushed past a limit, say so. I will stop. Your feedback will help me correct the model."

Arnie did not know what to say, so he just nodded. He also did not know what to think, but that was nothing new.

Rin tapped the end of his staff against the floor. "Now, liminality."

He paused there for a moment, letting the anticipation build, then raised his free hand and assumed the lecturing posture Arnie had learned to recognize. "Liminality is the condition of crossing from one defined state into another, after the old state has stopped fully applying but before the new state has been securely established. The word comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, which is an apt enough metaphor for what we are going to do. When one stands at a threshold, one may step forward or step back. One may also remain where one is. As I have told you several times, choosing not to choose is still a choice."

Arnie worked through that and arrived at what seemed like the obvious problem. "Wouldn't that mean being stuck in a doorway?"

"Stuck, from one perspective. Versatile, from another," Rin replied. "The problem is that a threshold is inherently unstable. Well, not always. Technically, a shoreline can be considered something between land and sea and remain relatively stable. But a wedding ceremony marks the transition from unmarried to married, and a wedding that lasted forever would belong in the sort of fairy tale no sensible person would wish to inhabit."

Arnie glanced at the owl. "So what we're doing is more like the wedding than the shoreline?"

"Precisely." Rin rotated the staff once in his hand. "We are stopping a transition that would otherwise finish. To make that condition permanent without making it irreversible, we need infrastructure: something outside the transition that can keep it stable until you choose to resolve it. In this case, a myth. The myth gives the unfinished transition a stable shape. That is why A.R.R.O.W.L. has the function it does. It is also why it takes this specific form."

"So that is why the robot is an owl," Arnie said. "But if this is supposed to be about the undead, wouldn't a crow or a raven make more sense? Or did I misunderstand something?"

"No, no. If we were working with a generic symbol of death or undeath, either would serve quite well. But we are using a specific myth, and in that myth, owls are messengers of the underworld. Mostly because I have recently acquired some new worshipers, and their faith provides both the foundation and the fuel for the transformation." Rin smiled. "They are pleasant people. A little too enthusiastic about blood and sacrifice, perhaps, but you will meet them eventually."

Arnie was not sure what too enthusiastic about blood and sacrifice looked like among Rin's worshipers. He had watched Nero cut the head off a dove not long ago, and apparently that did not count. His brain tried to combine that with pleasant people and produced Mr. Rogers running the Temple of Doom. Then it returned an error.

Shirou seemed to agree, judging by how openly he rolled his eyes at Rin. Keeping track of both of them at once was still difficult, but Arnie was getting better at it.

Rin either missed Shirou's reaction or chose not to acknowledge it. "Through liminality, we achieve reversibility in two ways." He raised one finger. "First, because you are not fully one thing or the other, you may actualize as either human or machine. Not both at once, but both remain valid expressions of the same unresolved whole. Quantum superposition is one analogy, although a better one is a higher-dimensional object seen through lower-dimensional projections. Consider an equilateral cylinder, one whose height equals the diameter of its base. Viewed from one end, it projects as a circle. Viewed from the side, it projects as a square. Neither projection is false, but neither is the entire cylinder."

Arnie looked at the owl, trying to hold the circle and the square in his head at the same time. "Human Arnie and A.R.R.O.W.L. will relate in much the same way," Rin said. He raised a second finger. "The second kind of reversibility lies in the threshold itself. You may step backward, abandon the working, and return to being wholly human. Or you may step forward and complete the transformation, resolving permanently into the machine state. Either choice would end the liminality. Until you make one, both directions remain open. Having more choices is better than having fewer. Most of the time."

"I'm not sure I agree with that," Arnie said. "I mean, not with the rest. Just with more choices being better. Sometimes having more choices feels like drowning in different ways to be wrong, and afterward everyone says you should have chosen better."

"A fair objection," Rin said, nodding once. He lowered his raised hand, then extended it toward Arnie, palm up. The air above his palm tore open. A black pseudopod pushed through and dropped a book into his palm, then withdrew as the tear sealed behind it.

The book was old and red, bound in worn leather. Arnie sincerely hoped the leather was not human. Its cover was stamped with circles and angular symbols he was beginning to recognize as magical, although he could not read a single one. It was so obviously occult that if it appeared in a movie, everyone in the audience would know somebody was about to do something extremely stupid with it.

"You will need this for the next part," Rin said. "It is called the Book of the False Attendant. A rather dramatic name, but its creator earned the right to be dramatic."

Shirou snorted, a sound deep enough to remind Arnie of the bellows in a forge.

"He did," Rin continued. "Instead of confessing to a woman, he turned himself into a vampire and spent five centuries trying to complete the ritual built around her, until he forgot why he had begun. If that does not earn him proper drama credentials, I do not know what would."

Arnie tucked the explanation into an unused pocket of his mind. Rin might explain it later or he might not. Chasing every reference was how a person got lost before the important part.

"The book has several functions, but the one that matters now is that it holds an additional Command Seal," Rin said. "The full working lies slightly beyond what I can presently perform, so we are going to cheat. You were asked to accept the first two gifts. For the third, acceptance is insufficient. You will have to command it."

Arnie did not reach for the book.

Not because he was unsure whether he wanted to touch it. He was unsure, obviously. It still looked like the sort of thing a horror protagonist reached for while everyone in the audience shouted don't. But that was not why he kept his hands to himself.

The lesson had settled into his bones.

Instead of reaching, he asked, "Cost?"

Rin's approving smile sent a small, traitorous jolt of warmth through him. It really should not have. Arnie had not forgotten how easily that same mouth could smile while saying something horrible. Maybe that made it worse. Or better. He knew Rin was choosing to be approving. Gentle. Patient. He had just been reminded what Rin could choose to be instead.

"None for taking the book," Rin said, still holding it out. "I am lending it to you for a single use. Using it, on the other hand..." He let the pause stretch for a moment. "There are three main costs. The first is that the experience will change you. People tend to bind identity to bodies more tightly than they realize. Existing through another one may dilute your sense of self, or it may clarify what is essential about being Arnie. Either way, it will change you."

Arnie kept his hands where they were. "And the second?"

"The second is that the choice can be made," Rin replied. "The duality of existence is what keeps the working balanced. If one possibility collapses, the whole resolves toward the other."

Arnie frowned, trying to phrase that in a way his brain could hold. "Do you mean if the owl robot is destroyed, the spell breaks, and I am just me again?"

"You are always you," Rin corrected. "But yes. If A.R.R.O.W.L. is destroyed while it is your active manifestation, the owl possibility collapses, and only the human one remains. It works the other way as well. If the human manifestation is killed, A.R.R.O.W.L. remains as the only surviving expression of you. That is also how you make a choice. You kill the part you no longer want to keep. A.R.R.O.W.L. comes with built-in self-destructs. The human side would be messier."

The idea left such a bad taste in Arnie's mouth that he grimaced. "Suicide?"

"Choice," Rin corrected. "But like any choice, until you make it, someone else may make it for you. As compensation goes, it is not nothing. If someone wishes to kill you, they will have to make it stick twice."

Arnie was quiet for a moment, trying to decide whether that had been the third cost or only the second cost getting worse. If it had been the third, Rin surely would have said so. Probably. Maybe. Rin was very capable of leaving a knife on the table and waiting to see if Arnie noticed it.

There was nothing to do but ask. "And the third cost?" It was a little easier than he expected, asking instead of waiting silently and hoping not to be noticed.

"The third cost comes from the mythological infrastructure," Rin replied with a brief nod. "If I may simplify absurdly, myth is like gravity. Gravity is a distortion in spacetime. Myth is a distortion in narrative space, created by the weight of culture bending the shape of a story. As one may use gravity for a slingshot maneuver, one may use myth to reach a result that would be prohibitively expensive without it. Simple as rocket science." He paused. "Well. Orbital mechanics. But that is how the idiom goes, so we will allow the imprecision."

No one besides Rin would ever say something was "simple as rocket science" and mean it like that. Usually, the joke went the other way. But it was funny. Arnie thought so, at least. Shirou's mouth twitched, which might have been agreement, or just the natural damage caused by living with Rin too long.

Unbothered, Rin continued, "But like gravity, myth can capture us. It can pull on probability until events begin finding the shape of the story. To take a role from myth is to be bound to it. Not completely. Not without free will. But even a loose binding can harden when stressed. I will add the Popol Vuh to your required reading. It may help. Or at least, if the myth catches you later, you may recognize the shape of the cage."

Arnie took the book. It was a choice. But not the choice. That one he still had to make.

The book was heavy. The worn leather felt unpleasant beneath his fingers, almost skinlike, which was probably his imagination. Leather was skin. That did not help. There was another kind of weight to it too. Potential, Arnie guessed. Not a unit anyone had taught him how to measure yet.

For the choice that mattered, Arnie had to ask what he wanted. Not what Rin wanted from him. Not whether becoming the owl would make him more useful, more welcome, or easier to keep around. This choice had to be his. He had to want it. Command Seals did not work merely because someone said the correct words. The words gave intent a shape. He had to mean them.

No, that was not quite right. He was oversimplifying. The words still worked without intention behind them, just not as well. How had Rin put it? Without intention giving them shape, they became looser. Perhaps more literal, while also leaving too much room for interpretation. Then the power dispersed among all the possibilities. It was hard to remember, but something like that. Anyway, intention mattered. Desire mattered.

Did he want to be an owl? It was a simple question. He had never really thought about it before. But when he did, he found that he was interested. Curious. He wanted to be something more. Something different. To find out what it felt like to be something he was not.

Perhaps he had spent so much time thinking about what he did not want to be that he had never properly decided what he was, or what he did want to be. Perhaps this was a good way to find the essence of Arnie. Essence of Arnie sounded a bit like cum. Stupid brain.

Yes, there was the risk of being trapped in a role he did not want, but that was hardly a new danger. As for people trying to kill him, well... that was not exactly new either. People trying to choose which version of him survived... that was practically the story of his life. And it was reversible. Going back to human would be easier than going all the way to owl. Less messy. Less painful. Hopefully.

"Yes," Arnie said, tightening his grip on the book. "I'll do it."

Rin gave a brief approving nod. "A touch more conviction would be nice, but small steps, I suppose. Now, let us all take our places." He pointed the end of his staff toward the empty loop of the figure eight, directly opposite A.R.R.O.W.L. "There, Arnie."

Arnie stepped carefully into it. Rin and Shirou moved to the two circles flanking the figure eight, each taking one. Shirou did not need to be told which was his. Rin had probably shown him beforehand.

"So what do I say?" Arnie asked, eyeing the ancient emojis around the circle's edge and half expecting one to crawl out of the lines and bite him.

"If you are nervous, formality may help," Rin said. "Begin with 'By the Command Seal drawn from the Book of the False Attendant, I bestow this order upon you, Servant Caster.' After that, find your own words. The essential part is that you order me to complete the working. You may also specify that you are to receive it, if that helps you state the result you want, but that is not the part for which I require the additional power."

"By the Command Seal drawn from the Book of the False Attendant, I bestow this order upon you, Servant Caster," Arnie recited. His voice sounded stiff to his own ears. He felt a bit like a kid in a school play. He had been supposed to stand in the back dressed as a tree. Then the kid with the actual lines got sick, and apparently that made the tree his understudy. It had been embarrassing then too.

The book warmed in his hands. Not much at first, but the next words came more easily. Then easier still, until Arnie no longer felt as if he were forcing them through his throat. "Complete this working to the best of your ability, using every advantage you have—"

Rin's eyes widened. An instant later, delight lit his face. Shirou turned sharply toward Arnie. His eyebrows went up. He did not look angry, exactly. More startled. Incredulous. Very you did not just do what I think you did.

Arnie wanted to stop and ask what that meant. He could not. Stopping halfway would be worse. Probably. Surely. The book had grown hot, the command had found its rhythm, and the final words were already pouring out of him. "And bestow the fruits of it upon me."

On the final word, the book clapped shut hard enough to sting his fingers. Something inside it gave a sharp crack. The three Command Seals on the back of his hand burned in answer, suddenly hot enough to hurt. Arnie sucked in a breath and checked them. Still there. All three. Whatever had answered from inside the book was gone.

When he looked up, Rin was maniacally delighted. His lips had spread into a grin so wide it almost seemed to split his face. Arnie had the sudden feeling that he might have made a mistake. A terrible, terrible mistake.

"Yes..." Rin said, almost to himself. "Yes..." Louder that time. Then he threw back his head. "YES!" The final shout broke into a cackle that bounced around the workshop, chased by a hiss of steam from the staff in his hand. Neither helped Arnie feel better.

"I see it now. It is so..." Rin raised his free hand, his fingers moving as if he were rearranging pieces only he could see. "Well, not simple. But..." His eyes brightened. "I suppose the power was inside me all along."

He cackled again. There was far too much delight in the sound for it to be reassuring. "This is going to be spectacular!"

Arnie glanced at Shirou for reassurance. Shirou had shifted his stance, feet planted and shoulders loose, his face settling into resigned weariness. He was not panicking. That was reassuring. He was bracing himself. That was not.

"But first..." Rin snapped the fingers of his raised hand. "Let me slip into something more comfortable."

The snap cracked through the workshop. Every thread Rin wore unraveled into silver mist, curling around him in slow, shining bands. Golden light flared beneath it, reducing his body to a bright silhouette.

Arnie assumed the lingering mist covered the strategic areas. He did not check. Magical etiquette had not come up yet, but locker-room rules probably still applied. You did not stare at another man's junk just because it had special effects.

Droplets of mercury appeared around Rin, each reflecting a tiny, curved image of the workshop. They began to orbit him, faster and faster, before stretching into fine silver threads. The threads crossed his body and clothing followed in their wake. Black trousers closed around his legs. A silk shirt, red as blood, flowed across his chest and buttoned itself. A fitted black jacket formed over it. The final droplet split, one half drawing itself into a fine chain while the other became a silver cross that settled against the red silk with a tiny chime.

The golden light sank beneath Rin's skin. The remaining mist drew itself into the seams of his clothing and disappeared. The outfit looked almost ordinary.

The pressure rolling off Rin did not.

"More celebrants are needed," Rin declared. "Yes. Both living and dead, for balance. Ah. I see."

He closed his eyes. The pressure surrounding him drew inward, and somehow his presence dimmed. His body remained exactly where it was, but Arnie's gaze wanted to slide past it. It felt as if Rin had stepped out of the workshop without moving.

For a moment, nothing happened that Arnie could see. He shifted the book in his hands, and the leather cover stuck unpleasantly to his sweaty palms. He glanced nervously at Shirou, but Shirou had not moved from his circle. So Arnie stayed put too.

When Rin spoke again, his presence returned with the first word. Arnie's gaze caught on him once more as the pressure rolled back into the workshop, and his voice reverberated through more than the room. "Attend me, my witches."

He struck the end of his staff against the floor. "Living."

The clang was joined by a hiss as five streams of steam burst from the staff and rushed past Arnie on either side. He turned carefully within his loop to follow them. Behind him, the streams rose into five person-tall pillars, each swirling like a small tornado that had agreed to remain in one place.

Gradually, the mist resolved into people.

Nero stood in the center, still wearing the white cloth he had worn over his head and shoulders during the blessing. At least Arnie knew one of them.

To Nero's left stood a young man and woman in matching Aperture jumpsuits, similar enough in the face that Arnie assumed they were twins. He thought he had passed them once or twice near the Space Base on Io and exchanged the sort of hurried hello that did not quite count as meeting someone. They looked Mexican, perhaps, but not quite. Native American? Arnie was bad at guessing ethnicity, and continuing rarely improved the result.

The two people on Nero's right looked as if they had wandered out of a fantasy movie. The man was black-haired and broad-shouldered, with a rough face weathered by sea and wind. He looked exactly like the captain of a fantasy ship, which Arnie had not known was an occupation that came with a recognizable face until now. Beside him stood an older woman in a plain dress and apron, her sleeves rolled above sturdy forearms. Fantasy cook, Arnie decided. It was as useful a label as any.

He did not have time to examine them further.

"And the dead," Rin said.

The staff struck the floor again. Five more streams slipped from it, thinner and grayer than the first. They flowed around A.R.R.O.W.L., climbed behind the motionless owl, and rose into five ghostly pillars.

The people within those pillars never became as solid as the living. Four remained little more than suggestions of faces, hands, and old clothing, fading whenever Arnie tried to focus on them.

The woman in the center was no clearer, yet even reduced to a figure in mist, she carried herself with strict, unmistakable regality. She looked barely twenty, with wild dark hair and eyes that seemed much older than the rest of her face. Arnie thought princess, then corrected it to queen. It was not the clothing. He could barely see that. It was something in her posture, the angle of her chin, and the way the other four figures seemed arranged around her.

Arnie was not an expert on what queens looked like. His brain supplied the word anyway.

Arnie turned his attention back to Rin and discovered that, sometime while he had been trying to identify dead royalty, Rin had planted his staff upright beside him and acquired a gun. A glossy black tentacle curled around the staff, keeping it vertical within Rin's circle. The gun was not the blessed musket Arnie had carried here. That still lay wrapped on the table. This was something else. Arnie had no idea where Rin had gotten it, but probably through one of those slits in space he used for storage, shelving, furniture, and, apparently, gun racks.

It had a barrel, an old-fashioned revolver grip, and something approximately where a stock ought to be. That was where Arnie's confidence ended. It had the sleek look he was beginning to recognize in Rin's work: polished silver, long curves, and no visible part left ugly merely because it had a job. Dark metal showed through narrow seams beneath the silver plates, with only small touches of brass around the joints. Gemstones sat beside tiny screens and rows of decorative-looking letters Arnie could not read. Glass tubes ran between parts that looked far too delicate to survive being attached to anything designed to fire. It was still definitely a gun. Probably. It was simply far too elegant for one.

Rin was already taking it apart. "Yes. Yes, this will do. Secondary relay. That fits. Yes." His hands moved as he muttered, loosening catches and pulling sections free. More thin wounds opened in the air around him. Black tentacles reached through them, one holding the weapon steady while others passed him tools, caught loose components, or became tools themselves. One flattened into a wrench. Another divided its tip into several pairs of fine tweezers.

The last time Arnie had watched Rin build something, he had learned that there was a difference between moving quickly and being hurried. This was quick. It might also have been hurried, except Rin did not look panicked. He looked inspired. That might have been worse.

The gun came apart into considerably more pieces than Arnie thought could have fit inside it. Some looked like computer chips. Others looked like silver clockwork made by someone who believed gears needed extra math written on them. One silver assembly was shaped like a cradle, with three curved clamps and a ring of contacts surrounding a cup-sized hollow. Arnie would have expected that part of a gun to hold ammunition, but it was much too large for a magazine and much too deliberately empty. Whatever belonged there had clearly been designed to come out again. Another component was a long, glass-sided reservoir large enough to hold several liters, which was more liquid than Arnie wanted any gun to need. Several other pieces defeated description entirely. Arnie could see them. That was about all he could say.

Then the process reversed without becoming any slower. Rin barely moved his feet. He did not need to. Tools and components flowed around him through a confusion of hands and black tentacles. Pieces locked together around the barrel, but they did not become a gun again. The stock disappeared. The barrel became the central spine of a long, tubular machine. The reservoir locked beneath it. Gemstones, tiny screens, and unreadable letters settled into new positions along the sides. Polished plates folded around everything in long, flowing layers, and narrow fins swept back from the body. The empty silver cradle settled near the rear, still waiting for whatever it had been built to hold.

Only then did Rin reach into the inner pocket of his fitted black jacket and draw out a heavy golden chain bearing a large, uncut ruby.

Arnie recognized it immediately. It was the necklace he had carried away from the Gate and used to summon Rin. It was also, somehow, the simple stone cup Rin had made him drink from immediately afterward. Arnie had watched the cup turn back into the necklace. The geometry had not become more reasonable with time.

The ruby and chain flickered in Rin's hand like a texture failing to load, compressed, and became the simple stone cup again. Rin lowered it into the waiting cradle. The three silver clamps closed around it with a clean metallic click, and light ran along the surrounding contacts.

The result lifted from Rin's hands without rotors, wings, or any other visible reason to remain in the air. It looked either like an advanced drone or a miniature spaceship. Arnie was not qualified to decide which. Perhaps it was both. Either way, it was pretty. Very pretty. Too pretty to be real, if that counted as a description. The silver curves caught the light exactly where they should, while the dark seams and gemstones made the whole thing look less manufactured than somehow composed. Arnie suspected artists had better words for that. He had pretty and too pretty to be real. Even the way it hovered looked graceful. Machines were allowed to function. They did not also need poise.

Rin reached to his waist and drew a sword Arnie had not noticed until then. It did not unfold. It did not melt or flow. Arnie did not even blink. One moment Rin held a sword. The next, a mechanical spider crouched across his palm. Maybe it was the circle-and-square thing Rin had explained, the same object turned through a direction Arnie could not see. Understanding the metaphor did nothing to make the sight less wrong. The spider looked like one of the Aperture mobiles Arnie had deliberately refused to own, although this one seemed less interested in hiding beneath furniture and more interested in running military hardware. Arnie pinched his forearm. It hurt. That reduced the chance he was dreaming without explaining anything else.

The spider sprang from Rin's palm, landed atop the hovering machine, and drove its eight legs into sockets that had not been visible until they were needed. Its lenses came alive. The machine dipped in one smooth, graceful movement, corrected itself, and became perfectly steady. Apparently, the spider was the pilot. Letters illuminated along the machine's silver side: SPELLWEAVER MK 21.

A pale, cloudy gemstone clicked out of the chassis and began to move. It did not settle into a simple orbit. It climbed as it circled, dipped toward the machine, then doubled back through a smaller loop before sweeping wide again. More stones followed, red, blue, purple, black, and milky white. Some rose above the machine and fell beneath it. Some slowed, reversed, then hurried forward. Others traced tight circles while those circles traveled around broader ones.

Arnie tried to follow a purple stone until it crossed behind a red one, dropped through the path of a black one, and emerged moving in the opposite direction. He lost it. Their paths wove over, under, and through one another without any of the stones touching. It should have looked like chaos. Instead, it looked like a dance taking place through several invisible spheres at once.

Only then did the black tentacle holding Rin's staff place it back into his waiting hand.

Rin caught it without looking, still wearing that delighted grin, and wrapped both hands around the shaft. He raised it once, then drove the butt into the floor.

"HEAT TOWER GENERATOR — STEAM-BOUND HEART OF THE CITY. OVERCLOCK MODE."

The miniature furnace caged at the staff's head answered with one heavy beat. Then another. Then the old steady rhythm accelerated, climbing from rest to running to panic. Every gemstone orbiting Spellweaver flashed in time. The gems set into the floor circles followed, then the unreadable letters and ancient emojis around Arnie's feet. His Command Seals throbbed against his skin with every beat. A moment later, his Magic Circuits joined them, pulsing inside him as the air grew thick with magic until each breath felt like work.

Arnie was beginning to wonder whether using every advantage you have had been the magical equivalent of a for-each loop over a list that added another item every time it ran. The order had an exit condition. Probably. Complete the working. But the list of advantages seemed capable of growing faster than Rin could finish using it. Rin did not come with a break statement. Or did he? Arnie looked down at the three Command Seals burning red across his hand. He could order Rin to stop. Probably. That was one of the things Command Seals were for.

He threw a panicked glance toward Shirou, who was still braced in his circle, feet planted and shoulders loose, but had not moved to interfere. That was reassuring. Unless Shirou was waiting too. Waiting for Rin to cross some invisible line, or waiting to see whether Arnie would act first.

Arnie did not give the order. Not yet. He was still trying to decide whether that meant he trusted Rin for one more second or had simply frozen again when a clear note rang from Spellweaver and cut the thought in half.

That was the choice, then. By not choosing to act in time, he had chosen to do nothing. Or he had failed to choose, and the failure had become doing nothing when the music started. Rin would probably say the difference no longer mattered. Arnie could still give the order later. He had not given it now.

The music came from the drone, although Arnie could not see any speakers or anything else he recognized as an instrument. It sounded classical. Probably. Not because it sounded like violins or pianos, but because it had the shape of classical music: rising and falling phrases, different parts answering one another, and the sense that a conductor ought to be standing in front of it. The notes themselves sounded less played than drawn out of crystal, clear, ringing tones, like a wet finger circling the rim of a glass, except purer and layered together until they became something Arnie did not have proper words for. Each orbiting gemstone seemed to carry one part of the music, its tone rising or falling as the stone climbed, dipped, and crossed through the paths of the others. Beneath everything, the furnace in Rin's staff kept pounding faster and faster. After a few seconds, Arnie realized the steam-powered staff was not following the music. The music was following it.

Rin opened his mouth and sang a single word. It belonged to no language Arnie recognized. Not that he was much of an expert on languages, but he knew words were not supposed to do what this one did. It entered Spellweaver's crystalline melody and perverted it. Then the workshop vanished.

Arnie was elsewhere, flying over a sunless land. Far below, steep canyons split the ground.

Why perverted? The music was still there. It had not become dissonant. Arnie knew what dissonance sounded like: notes clashing over one another like someone had tripped into one of those pyramids of crystal champagne glasses and sent the whole thing crashing down. This was not that. Nothing clashed. Every note remained where it belonged, and the melody remained beautiful. Yet something had happened to it. Changed. Twisted. Improved, perhaps. No. Perverted. It was the only word that fit. The only word that could fit.

Before he could think about it any further, movement in the nearest canyon pulled his gaze downward. A dark mass flowed along the canyon floor. Not water. Thousands upon thousands of little bodies squirmed over and beneath one another, somehow moving together like a river. Scorpions. A river made of scorpions. Arnie was much too high to see their legs or stingers clearly, but he knew what they were anyway.

Beyond it, another canyon carried a river of churning blood. Against the dark land, the red looked like bright lipstick on an old grandmother, too vivid and completely wrong for everything around it.

Beyond that, finally, came a yellow-green river, splashing and churning through its canyon. Pus. He knew that too.

Three rivers. The sight was hellish. Terrifying.

But Arnie was not afraid.

He was not just calm. He felt like he belonged. Like this was his place. He felt more at home here than he had ever felt in his crappy apartment.

Apparently his old pastor had been right after all. People like Arnie really did belong in Hell.

And then he was back in the workshop.

The first thing he noticed was that the miniature furnace in Rin's staff had settled back into its resting heartbeat. His Command Seals and Magic Circuits still pulsed with it, but at the old steady rhythm instead of the frantic overclocked pace.

The second was the missing music. Spellweaver still hovered overhead, its gemstones still dancing around it, but now they moved silently. All the others who had attended the ceremony were gone, living and dead alike. It was just Arnie, Rin, and Shirou again.

The Book of the False Attendant was still heavy in his hands. The hands holding it were still human. As far as he could tell, so was the rest of him.

Then he looked across the figure eight.

A.R.R.O.W.L. was gone.

"Did it work?" he asked. His voice came out thinner than he intended.

"Beautifully," Rin said. Maniacal delight still lingered at the edges of his expression, but most of it had softened into self-satisfaction. "You have outdone yourself. I did not think you had it in you."

"That was reckless," Shirou cut in. "Don't do it again."

"No, no. Do not interrupt. Sometimes recklessness is useful. Sometimes being bold is exactly what the situation requires."

"Not when it sends someone running off the edge of a cliff."

"Sometimes that is how one learns to fly," Rin replied.

"More often, it is how someone breaks on the rocks below," Shirou said.

As always when he received two contradictory instructions, Arnie pulled back inside himself and chose to ignore both. He knew that was not the best choice, but he did not know what the best choice was either, so he left the problem for later.

"But I don't feel any different," he said. "I'm still me."

"You are always you. Now there is simply more of you," Rin said. His voice dropped into a soft, caressing rhythm, almost hypnotic. "But I suppose you will need some instruction before you can perceive it. Focus inward. Quiet everything else. Let your familiar senses fade into the background. Do not search for it through sight, hearing, or touch. Nothing familiar. Find what is new. The sense you did not have before. What is it telling you? Feel this body. Then feel your other body."

Sight was easiest. Arnie just closed his eyes.

Hearing was harder. With the music gone, a thousand little workshop noises crowded in: clicking gemstones, bubbling liquid, the faint hiss of steam, the steady beat of Rin's staff. The more he tried not to hear them, the louder each one seemed. Eventually, somehow, he managed to let them fade.

Touch was practically non-negotiable. The book pressed into his palms. His clothes touched him everywhere. The floor pushed up through his shoes. Still, he managed to push all of that aside too.

Then there was taste. Rin had not mentioned taste. Arnie's mouth was dry, with the sour aftertaste of the drink and the lingering sweetness of chocolate. He managed to ignore that too.

Once all of that had faded, he found the shape of his body. Not an image, exactly. A certainty. Feet on the floor, the book in his hands, arms and chest and head, every part of Arnie arranged where it should be.

Then, behind it, he found another certainty. Another body. Smaller, stranger, folded together differently, but his. Somehow, it was his.

Arnie reached for it.

Nothing happened.

He opened his eyes.

Rin was a giant.

He tilted his head upward and stretched his wings a little. The floor felt unpleasantly hard beneath his talons.

His wings.

His talons.

Rin was not a giant. Neither was Shirou. Arnie was very, very small.

"I'm an owl?" he blurted. Then, more brightly, "I'm an owl! I did it!"

"That you did," Rin said, his tone carrying patient amusement.

It was not that Arnie was getting better at reading Rin. Rin was simply very good at making himself readable when he wanted to be. Nero did the same thing, Arnie guessed, although Rin was better at making theater feel natural. Then again, Nero was Rin's student. He had probably learned it from him.

"Now you should test those wings. Flight should come instinctively. The necessary motor patterns are already encoded into the body."

"How do I learn to fly?"

"You should already know."

That was not helpful. Perhaps Arnie's face showed it, although he had no idea how expressive an owl's face could be.

"Many capabilities are built into the body," Rin continued. "They are designed to surface through exploration rather than arrive all at once and overwhelm you. Flight is one of them. To fly, fly."

"Just fly?"

"Flap your wings and leave the floor. Do not think through every movement. If you consciously consider every muscle involved in walking, you will trip over your own feet. Trust the body."

Arnie glanced down at his talons. "So I just fly."

"Yes." Rin raised his staff and swept his free hand toward the open workshop. "Fly, my pretty, fly!"

A sheet of water struck Rin from the side.

Rin stopped.

Arnie turned toward the splash and nearly kept turning farther than he thought any neck should go. Shirou stood with an empty bucket in one hand and a wicked smirk on his face.

"When you start talking like that, I have to check whether you're going to melt," Shirou said.

Rin gave him a look that promised repayment. Shirou's smirk only widened.

"Where did the bucket come from?" Arnie asked.

"Projection Magecraft. Gradation Air, specifically," Rin answered, still dripping. "It will probably be the next spell you learn to cast from beginning to end. It is a useful beginner's exercise. Its usual weakness is that what it creates is temporary. Shirou is an exception, not an appropriate standard for beginners."

Shirou flicked two fingers. The bucket and every drop of water broke apart into motes of light, leaving Rin dry again.

"Now," Rin said, pointing upward with his staff. "Fly."

Not thinking about flying turned out to involve thinking about flying quite a lot. Fortunately, his body ignored him.

It crouched before he told it to. His talons tightened against the floor. His wings spread and found the air. Then he pushed.

For one bad second, the floor tilted and rushed sideways. Then one wing dipped, his tail fanned, and everything corrected itself before his panic had finished loading.

He was flying.

Actually flying.

The air stopped being empty. A column of warmth rose from the cauldron. Cooler air slid down the stairs. Every hiss from Rin's staff sent a small pulse through the room. The feathers along Arnie's wings ruffled, then slotted themselves into place to catch each change in pressure before he consciously understood what they were doing. When he leaned into the warm current, it carried him higher.

His hearing was better too. Not absurdly better, but enough that he could separate the click of each orbiting gemstone from the cauldron's bubbling and hear Shirou shift his weight below.

Then a red gemstone on the far side of Spellweaver suddenly filled his vision.

Arnie wobbled and lost half a wingbeat. The gem had not moved. His eyes had zoomed.

Ruby. Corundum. Aluminum oxide colored red by chromium. Common thaumaturgical associations: fire, blood, vitality. Suitable for storing magical energy.

A black stone crossed behind it.

Obsidian. Volcanic glass, mostly silica. Cutting, mirrors, warding, underworld rites.

The facts had not appeared in a window across his vision. They were simply there, like remembering a Wikipedia article he had never read.

Rin had put object recognition and a database into his owl head.

Of course he had.

As Arnie rounded the far side of the workshop, his attention caught on a row of small blue-green, mummy-shaped figures standing on one of the tables. His vision pulled them closer.

Shabti. Also ushabti or shawabti. An Egyptian funerary servant figure intended to answer for the deceased and perform labor on their behalf in the afterlife. Glazed faience.

That was a lot of job description for one tiny dead-person employee.

He banked over the ritual diagram, and the same recognition caught hold of the scripts Rin had used. The heavy-metal letters and ancient emojis stopped being merely decorative. Meanings surfaced behind them. Boundary. Witness. Return. Passage. Some arrived with the mental equivalent of warning labels: approximate, context-dependent, insufficient data.

The figure eight identified itself as a reciprocal liminal axis. The two circles flanking it were operator and stabilizer anchors. The cross formed by the entire arrangement tried to explain itself through so many nested clauses that it might have been written by Rin personally.

Arnie looked away before it could assign homework.

So the database gave him labels, not understanding. Search results, not the classes required to understand them.

That was probably safer.

One circuit later, he aimed himself toward the tall perch. He had not thought about how to land. Fortunately, his body had. His wings flared, his tail fanned, and his talons reached forward. He landed with only one awkward hop.

This was stupidly cool.

Then he looked back at them and nearly fell off the perch.

While Arnie had been discovering the joys of flight, Shirou had somehow managed to lose his shirt, and Rin had acquired a wicked-looking whip.

"What?" Arnie shouted.

"Shouldn't that be who?" Rin asked, his tone gently teasing. "But good. You're back. We have more things to test."

"Test what? Whether I can have a heart attack?"

"You are cheekier," Rin mused, more to himself than Arnie. "I wonder whether that will carry over when you turn human again." He tilted his head. "No, there is no need to test that. You do not have a circulatory system at present. Overclocking might provide an analogous experience."

"If not that, then what are we testing?" Arnie asked quickly. "Whether I can still get aroused?"

The answer was, unfortunately, yes.

His current body lacked hormones, equipment, and all the other biological mess that usually came with arousal. But Shirou's perfectly formed muscles were right there, and Rin was holding a whip. Apparently that was enough.

There was no heat, no tightening, no bodily reaction whatsoever. He was simply aroused.

Arnie had not known arousal could be so cerebral.

"That question was already settled," Rin said. "Removing the gonads, or even the external genitalia, can reduce libido, sometimes severely. It does not reliably erase desire. Some Italian castrati retained erectile function after the removal of the testes. Some Chinese court eunuchs underwent complete emasculation and were nevertheless reported to retain sexual desire. The surviving record is an untidy mixture of medical observation, testimony, gossip, and satire, but it is quite sufficient on the central point."

Rin's eyes flicked toward Shirou, then back to Arnie. "As for sexual activity, humans have never allowed missing equipment to end the matter. They become creative."

"What about hormones?" Arnie asked.

"Your mind-state runs on different hardware," Rin said. "That does not mean the inputs supplied by the original hardware were discarded. Endocrine effects relevant to cognition, emotion, and decision-making are modeled rather than chemically produced." His attention sharpened on Arnie. "In any case, I have already observed enough of your response to establish that the libidinal pattern survived the transfer. If you are not too embarrassed, I would appreciate verbal confirmation. Then we can proceed to the actual test."

Libidinal pattern. Somehow that sounded more embarrassing than horny.

His new eyes had already labeled Shirou's trapezius, deltoid, and pectoralis major, then begun offering a short biomechanical note on shoulder movement. Arnie dragged his gaze to a point safely above Shirou's shoulder before the database could become any more educational.

"Yes," he said. "It transferred."

"Excellent." Rin lifted the whip. "Now for the real test. Shirou, are you ready and willing?"

"Always, my Master," Shirou said in a low, purring tone.

Shirou rolled his shoulders back, presenting his bare chest.

Almost involuntarily, Arnie's gaze returned to the whip. Without being asked, the database informed him that it was a one-point-two-meter single-tail whip weighing four hundred and ten grams, made from eight-plait black latigo leather over a weighted core. Most unhelpfully, it also supplied a designation: sex toy.

Before Arnie could process that, and apparently a mechanical brain did not process embarrassment any faster, Rin moved.

The whip struck fast as a snake: once, twice, thrice.

Each strike cut skin. Blood welled in three narrow lines, then ran, painting Shirou's chest red.

The violence should have been off-putting.

It was not.

Instead, it proved once again that Arnie's transferred libido was working just fine. He had never thought whipping was his thing. Then again, when someone as hot as Rin was doing it to someone as hot as Shirou, apparently anything could become his thing.

Shirou's pleased moans did not help. Neither did the wicked grin splitting Rin's face. It looked suspiciously like the expression Rin had worn while making things during the ritual.

Oh God.

Had Arnie actually made Rin orgasm by making him build extra things? Did that count as having sex with Rin? Like a hand job, only with making things? A work job? A make job?

Then the blood claimed his entire attention.

It looked as if it glowed from within, except there was no actual glow. It cast no light. There was no halo around it. It was simply impossible not to notice.

He knew it. Instinctively. Absolutely.

Blood spilled in violence.

And he knew what to do.

He opened his beak. His Magic Circuits were apparently still there, but then again, they were bound to his soul. He pushed power through them and into a new place inside his body that felt as though it had been built for exactly this.

The drops of blood lifted from Shirou's chest, flew across the room, and poured into Arnie's open beak. He swallowed by reflex, sending them down his gullet, or whatever counted as one in a mechanical owl.

He could not taste them. Still, there was something deeply satisfying about swallowing them.

Then Arnie realized he had just indirectly licked Shirou's pecs.

He buried his head beneath one wing.

"Yes. It worked," Rin said. "Not that I ever doubted it would."

Shirou chuckled. "If you never doubted it, why did you test it?"

"Having faith is one thing. Making sure is another," Rin replied.

Shirou's voice gentled. "Arnie, are you all right?" Arnie could not see either of them from beneath his wing, but he could feel both sets of attention settle on him.

"How long are you planning to stay like that?" Rin asked. "If you prefer, I can continue with purely verbal instructions."

"Forever seems good," Arnie muttered.

"That would make flying awkward. Not only would you have to do it with one wing, but you would hit things everywhere." Rin waited a beat. "Shirou has put his shirt back on, if that helps. Not that I am certain it will. He is stupidly attractive with or without clothes. That is why he is my favorite model to paint."

Arnie slowly drew his head out from beneath his wing and looked up. Shirou had indeed put his shirt back on, and the whip was nowhere in sight. "So what was that?" Arnie asked. "Did you turn me into a vampire?"

"Of course not. Why would I do that?" Rin said. "You did not consume the blood. You merely collected it. It passed into an internal reservoir. The body contains two spells for that purpose. The first is passive. It detects blood shed through violence, accident, or sickness. The second is active. It gathers that blood."

Oh. The passive spell had been the way the blood seized his attention. The active one was what he had triggered by pushing power through his Magic Circuits.

"That gives you a chance to practice with preconstructed spells, both passive and active, before you learn to build your own," Rin continued. His expression turned thoughtful. "More importantly, you can gather blood for me."

"Why do you need blood?" Arnie asked.

"For blood magic, of course." Rin let the answer sit for exactly long enough to become ominous. "After all, a plague is coming, and I need to make vaccines."

A plague was a history-book kind of disaster, the kind that came with numbers too large to picture as people. Making vaccines sounded suspiciously wholesome again. Arnie had learned to be suspicious of that. "Should I ask?"

"It is no secret," Rin replied. "Making a vaccine is the same as making a plague, only with an extra step."

"Most blood mages do not bother with the second step," Shirou added.

"Only the amateur ones," Rin corrected. "After all, one does not want one's weapon killing oneself or one's minions."

Arnie decided the professional standards of blood mages could wait. "So I'm going to help you deal with the plague." His talons tightened around the perch. He was a normal-sized owl standing on a stick, and somehow stopping a plague had just become partly his responsibility. "Why didn't you tell me that before?"

"Because if you had known the stakes, you would have felt pressured to accept for the sake of other people rather than for yourself," Rin said. "This needed to be your choice."

"And what if I had chosen wrong?" Arnie asked. "What if I had said no?"

"Then you would have chosen differently, not wrongly." Rin's voice softened. "If you had chosen not to accept this gift, I would have found another way to resolve the matter. Do not worry. Do not take that burden upon yourself. Shirou does that often enough already. I do not need to curb the same behavior in both of you."

"What way?" Arnie asked, more sharply than he intended. "What other way had you planned?"

"There are other options. I could, for example, repurpose the owl as a familiar and use the collection spells myself."

"With all the other things already clamoring for your attention? How many people would die because I made the choice without knowing everything?"

Shirou's expression tightened, but he did not interrupt. Rin answered, "No choice is ever made with complete information."

"Not everything. Just the part where people might die."

Rin went very still. "I do not know."

Arnie realized his talons were digging into the perch and made himself loosen them. "I... can we..." He made himself continue. "Can you not protect me like this? Next time, I mean. Even if knowing puts pressure on me, I would rather make the choice under pressure than make it in ignorance."

Rin studied him for a moment. "If that is what you wish, I will remember your preference. But you may come to regret it."

Arnie answered before his courage ran out. "You said regret was a useless emotion. I'm sure you'll teach me how to prune it from my well-cultivated mind."

Rin held his gaze, then nodded once. "Very well."

Relief came first. Then exhaustion.

A tremor ran through Arnie's mechanical body and into the perch, which was another thing he had not known robots could do. He felt as if he had run a marathon, except he did not have lungs, or flown a mile into a headwind, except the workshop did not contain enough wind to justify any of this.

Space split above Rin's open palm, and a black pseudopod lowered a large syringe-like instrument into it before withdrawing and closing the tear behind itself. Rin held the instrument steady. "Do not move."

That was not a reassuring sentence when someone was holding an oversized syringe.

Moving behind the perch, Rin parted a small patch of feathers between Arnie's wings, exposing something Arnie had not known was there. The blunt end of the instrument pressed against it with a soft click. Arnie braced himself.

There was a faint pulling sensation somewhere inside him. Then another click, and Rin stepped away.

"Oh," Arnie said. "That didn't hurt."

"Of course not. You have a service port." Rin lifted the instrument slightly, as if the answer should have been obvious.

That would have been useful information before do not move.

Back in front of the perch, Rin held the transparent chamber up to the light. A measure of dark red blood now rested inside it. "Now you may return to human form. We should confirm that reversion functions properly, and the musket will be easier to carry with hands. Eventually, you should learn to carry it in your talons, but you should practice with something lighter first."

"Should I get off this before I turn back?" Arnie craned his small head down toward the floor.

"Yes," Rin and Shirou said together.

Trusting the body, Arnie spread his wings and glided down. The landing came more easily this time. His talons touched the floor without even the awkward hop.

With his eyes closed, Arnie searched inward. The human shape was easier to find now that he knew what he was looking for. He reached toward it.

This time, the change happened before he could overthink it.

One moment he had talons, feathers, and wings. The next, he had shoes, hands, and knees that bent quickly before they could give out beneath him. At the sudden bend in Arnie's knees, Shirou shifted one foot forward as if to catch him, then stopped when they held.

The trembling had followed Arnie into his human body.

So it had not been a robot problem. Good to know.

The Book of the False Attendant had returned with his hands. Rin took it and tucked it beneath one arm before Arnie could begin wondering where it had been while he was an owl. "Successful in both directions."

"Great. Very successful." Arnie flexed his fingers and tried to convince his legs of the same thing.

Once they had reached a compromise with gravity, Arnie retrieved the wrapped musket from the table, settled it carefully into the crook of his arm, and adjusted its weight. "So where am I taking this?"

The wrapped weapon drew a brief glance from Rin. "Not anywhere immediately. The Maya ritual calendar is rather strict about appropriate ceremonial timing. The next valid occasion is seven days from now."

"So I have a week off?" Arnie blinked.

"Not precisely." Rin adopted a tone that warned Arnie someone else's words were about to come out of his mouth. "According to GLaDOS's personnel model, your social-integration index remains below projected targets, while your leadership-potential utilization remains below acceptable efficiency. She recommends a structured leadership intervention featuring recurring peer contact, measurable responsibility, and supervised authority."

"She turned being lonely into a performance metric." Arnie stared at Rin.

"GLaDOS turns everything into a performance metric." Rin spread one hand.

A quick glance toward Shirou produced no immediate rescue. "What exactly is the intervention?" Arnie asked.

The end of Rin's staff settled against the floor with a soft click. "She is chartering the first Tesla City troop of the Aperture Scouts. You will be its troop leader."

No second sentence arrived. Arnie waited a little longer anyway. "You want me to run a Scout troop?"

"GLaDOS does. I agree with her." Rin lowered his hand.

"I was never even a Scout." The musket shifted in Arnie's grip.

Leaning lightly against his staff, Rin continued. "The previous Aperture-affiliated Scouts proved quite useful during the apocalypse. They performed welfare checks, calmed frightened civilians, and identified urgent problems for adults with the equipment to solve them. They also earned preprinted I Helped in the Apocalypse merit badges."

"Of course they did." Arnie closed his eyes briefly.

Without apparent shame, Rin went on. "The Tesla City program will teach first aid, cold-weather survival, emergency maintenance, safe portal procedure, monster recognition, and how to report dangerous situations without poking them first. This will be a pilot troop. If its safety, retention, practical-training, and social-cohesion results meet expectations, additional troops will follow."

"GLaDOS is using children to fix my social life." Arnie opened his eyes again.

"She is using you to improve theirs. Reciprocity is efficient." Rin gave a small shrug.

Arms folded, Shirou regarded Arnie steadily. "It is useful work."

That helped. A little.

The dark red measure in the collector drew Arnie's eye. "Shouldn't I start gathering blood now?"

Turning the collector slightly, Rin inspected its contents. "There is no urgency. I still need to complete the storage and processing apparatus before large-scale collection becomes useful. The ceremony in seven days should provide the first substantial volume." He indicated the musket with the end of his staff. "Until then, you need practice rather than quantity. A troop of rambunctious children should provide a sufficient supply of scraped knees and other minor accidents."

"Please never put that in the recruitment material." Arnie grimaced.

"I had not planned to." Rin lifted the collector. A narrow tear opened beside him, and a black pseudopod reclaimed it.

Convincing it was not.

"You will not be working alone." Rin turned his full attention back to Arnie. "An experienced volunteer from the original Aperture Scout program will advise you. Hanz and Greta will also serve as trainee adult leaders."

A nod from Shirou indicated the empty space where the projected celebrants had stood during the ritual. "The twins in the Aperture jumpsuits."

"Hanz and Greta are strange names for..." Arnie frowned as he connected the names to the faces. Then he stopped. There was no way to finish that sentence without sounding racist.

The corner of Rin's mouth twitched. "They were medieval German witches. They have since reincarnated as Maya. Hanz is also Hanal now."

"Oh." Arnie blinked.

Maya. So that was the word his brain had been fumbling for when it bounced between Mexican and Native American. Arnie waited for the neat little article to unfold behind his eyes and tell him what he actually knew about the Maya.

Nothing happened.

Right. The database was in the owl body. Human Arnie was back to knowing almost nothing the old-fashioned way.

"They are experienced witches and psychics, but complete beginners at Scouting and anything resembling modern civic life." Rin settled both hands atop his staff.

"And I'm qualified to train them?" Arnie shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"You possess twenty-first-century social knowledge and basic organizational experience. Tesla City may presently be Victorian, but relative expertise remains expertise." Rin gave a small turn of one hand.

Apparently, coming from farther in the future than the steam engines qualified Arnie to teach medieval witches how to behave in modern society.

That felt suspiciously like cheating.

"Who is the experienced volunteer?" Arnie looked between Rin and Shirou.

"A Heaven's Gate adherent from the earlier Aperture Scout program. He is serene, competent, and sincerely helpful." Rin's expression settled into something suspiciously neutral.

"If he is the only one with actual Scout experience, why isn't he the troop leader?" Arnie tilted his head.

"You are my apprentice. It is only natural that you lead." Rin lifted his chin slightly.

The answer earned only a continued stare from Arnie.

"More practically, he neither wants to lead nor is particularly suited to it." Rin lowered his chin again. "He prefers clearly assigned duties and performs them very well. Deciding what those duties should be is another matter. His dedication can also become somewhat alarming."

That was a better answer. It was not necessarily a more reassuring one.

The word alarming made Arnie straighten. "Alarming how?"

"His religion regards sexuality and other animal impulses as obstacles to reaching the Next Level. Some adherents attempted to make abstinence easier through castration." Rin's tone had become almost clinically neutral.

"But you just explained that removing the equipment doesn't reliably remove the desire." Arnie winced.

"It can reduce desire." Rin made a small balancing motion with one hand. "It does not reliably eliminate it. More importantly, the act is a theological declaration rather than an evidence-based treatment." His hand rose to his left earlobe. "There is also a practical complication. Body modifications are generally incompatible with repeated Vril exposure, as you probably know."

At the mention of Vril, Arnie's free hand rose to the ear where his earring used to hang. His fingertips found smooth skin where the piercing had been.

Somehow, with everything else happening, he had not properly noticed that yet.

"Yes. I also had to switch to clip-ons." Rin watched the realization arrive. "Convenient when I need to remove a gem-bearing earring and use it as a grenade. Rather less secure when I merely want it to remain attached."

"And the Vril keeps undoing his... modification?" Arnie's fingertips froze against his ear.

"Repeatedly." Rin gave a grave nod. "Do not give him a knife. If he acquires one anyway, make sure none of the children are watching. Vril will reverse the modification, so he is in no real danger. The attempt will merely be bloody, futile, and distressing to witnesses."

A flat look crossed Shirou's face. "Count the knives before and after every meeting. And do not let him convince you to try it, either."

"That was not remotely in my plans." Arnie's hand dropped from his ear.

"He is very sincere." Rin inclined his head, one hand settling atop his staff. "He may also be envious of A.R.R.O.W.L., since that body lacks the organs his theology finds objectionable."

"Please don't tell him that," Arnie said.

A slight nod from Rin accepted the request. "I see no reason to mention it."

All of that joined the rapidly growing list of things Arnie had not expected to become responsible for today.

"He is otherwise an excellent volunteer." Rin adjusted one cuff.

"That sentence should have come first." Arnie gave him a flat look.

"Then you might not have listened carefully to the warning." Rin met the look without apology.

With the musket adjusted beneath his arm, Arnie turned toward the stairs. He had taken two steps when Rin called after him.

"Take the perch with you." Rin pointed toward the tall structure.

"How?" Arnie looked from Rin to the perch.

At the base of the perch, Rin crouched and pressed a recessed button.

The upright shaft collapsed with a rapid series of clicks, telescoping downward as the crosspiece folded in and the base drew together. Within seconds, the entire perch had become a thick metal disk small enough to fit in Arnie's palm.

Once standing, Rin offered the disk to him. "Press the button to deploy it. Press it again to collapse it."

The disk disappeared into Arnie's pocket.

At least this part came with one button and clear instructions.