Isaac knocked on the door to Walter's apartment. A: "Who is it?!" was the reply he got from inside.

"Isaac and Lenna." Isaac called back.

"Black out the door on your way in!" Walter yelled out to them and they heard the door unlock even though his voice very obviously came from much farther inside the room.

Isaac and Lenna looked at each other and then shrugged. Isaac covered the doorway in black shadows and pushed open the door as he stepped through the doorway. Lenna followed immediately behind and almost bumped into him as Isaac had stopped barely a full step inside the room. Lenna looked over his shoulder and quickly realized why he had stopped.

Walter had his entire arm, the whole way up to his shoulder, inside of Gypsy's mouth and was looking up and away as he tried to imagine everything that his hand was touching. Knowing what kind of bite force Gypsy had made Isaac swallow and sweat just thinking about her chomping down on Walter's extended arm. What made it even worse was the fact that Gypsy was not her usual furry self but a sleek metallic fox-like predator. Her eyes were smoky white crystal, her teeth sharpened adamantine, and her body reflected vibrant blues and purples, like heat oxidized steel, as she wiggled slightly. As she moved, her metallic body bent with ease as if the metal was not only flexible but elastic too and her tail swayed so naturally that the movement seemed to contradict its metallic form entirely.

A bump from Lenna brought Isaac back to his senses and they walked further inside and closed the door behind them. "Hey." Walter grunted in greeting. Gypsy squirmed a little again and Walter's eyes met hers in a scowl. "Stop squirming or I'll start unplugging things." He threatened even though his arm was the entire way inside of her bone dusting jaws.

"Well, uh, you said that she was made out of metal, but this was not quite what I was expecting." Isaac commented as he took another few steps deeper into the hotel room with Lenna right beside him.

"I cannot even begin to understand how what I am looking at can even exist." Lenna added in awe. Gypsy really was something beyond the realm of common logic, magical engineering, and nature itself. Her title as the 'False-Vixen' now made even more sense than simply knowing that she wasn't flesh and blood ever could.

"Yeah, she," Walter cut himself off as he gripped Gypsy's bottom jaw with his free hand to hold her still so he could finish whatever he was doing inside of her. "Gyps, let me finish this damnit."

To her credit, Gypsy held still for him to finish. He shifted and messed with something for another few seconds before an audible but muffled click could be heard from inside of her.

"Got it, now, lemme lock it in place." Walter told her and pulled his arm back out. He grabbed a stack of nine small bar magnets and pulled two off of the stack. He held one in his fist and the other was pinched between his thumb and forefinger. Gypsy had closed her mouth as soon as he had withdrawn his hand. Walter gave her a flat look. "C'mon Gyps, just let me finish this. My ass hurts from sitting on the floor for so long. You know this's important." Gypsy sagged slightly in resignation and opened her mouth again for him. "Good girl." Walter praised her and stuffed his arm all the way into her mouth again. It only took a moment for two more clicks to be heard before he got two more magnets and did it again. As he worked he glanced back at Isaac and Lenna. "Where was I… oh, yeah, she's really something, isn't she?" He asked Lenna rhetorically.

"Part of me is curious about how she works but the rest of me realizes that I probably won't ever understand it." Lenna told him as Isaac just stared and tried to sense her mana flow.

"She's blocking perception somehow, isn't she?" Isaac asked. "I still can't feel any mana movement around her. It's like she is a part of the environment even when she is like this."

Walter nodded as he clicked magnets seven and eight into place. "Yes. She's got protection from divination and mana signature camouflage built in." He confirmed as he went back in with the last magnet. "And if you want to see my reference papers to her circuit board, they're on my other side."

Isaac raised an eyebrow in question and walked around his side to see a small stack of half see-through papers with triangles and notes written on them. It only took Isaac a moment to realize something strange. "Her core is an icosahedron." He commented. "I thought magic only worked up to nine? Isn't that why there are only nine levels of spells and nine colors of mana?"

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Walter had finished placing the last magnet and flipped some kind of switch in Gypsy's throat on his way back out that made an even louder clunk. He started scratching her head and under her chin. "You did good." He praised her. "I know it took a while but it is finally done," Gypsy's ears went from flat back against her skull to straight upwards and outwards. "for now, I'll add the actual mechanism later." He finished and her ears drooped. "You need to be able to shoot at things." He reminded her. "It would've been really nice if you could've shot that cat as it ripped me off of Copper." Walter finished and then finally turned to regard Isaac. "Okay, where do I start, your understanding of magic and its colors is… incomplete."

Isaac looked at him questioningly. "How so?" He wondered. "And why has the 'colors of mana theory' been revolutionary to half of the wizards I've met but it seems mundane to you?"

Walter's face wrinkled in deep thought before he held out a hand so Isaac could help him to his feet. Isaac did so without even thinking about it and then the group moved to the nearby table to sit while they talked. "Magic is a language." Walter began. "Runes, chants, intent, and ratios are all a part of it." He took a short moment to think and then continued: "Just like how when we speak in Standard, how we say the words matters almost as much as the words themselves do. Spoken Standard and written standard as well as hand-signed Standard could all be their own languages if you learned them all separately. That is how Free Casting, Warding, and Enchanting are. They are all separate and have their own rules even though they all deal with the same medium, mana. Do you follow me so far?"

Isaac and Lenna both nodded slowly as they took in Walter's words. They still weren't quite sure how that pertained to the nine levels of spells and nine colors of mana in relation to Gypsy's twenty sided core, but they hoped that Walter would get there before he managed to lose them.

"If I cast Fireball, the chant, movement of mana inside of me, intent, and imagined rune, are all just the spoken word for 'Fireball' in the language of magic." Walter went on. "A ward with the rune for Fireball, the distance and triggering conditions, as well as the power array necessary to power it, are all just the written word for 'Fireball'. In the same vein, the enchantment for adding it to a spell casting device, as well as the attunement scripts and casting conditions, are all just the hand-signed version of it." Walter stopped to take a breath. "Still following me?"

Isaac and Lenna nodded again. "Yes." Isaac replied. "But I'm still not seeing the relevance to the colors of mana."

"I have trouble free casting a lot of spells." Walter seemed to have entirely changed topics but it somehow felt as if he hadn't and had merely changed the direction that he was coming at it from to help build a proper three dimensional picture. "That's because I learned how to 'hand-sign' magic before I learned how to 'speak' it. The same rules just simply don't apply. Sure, it is the same language, technically, but the methods are so entirely different that constraints like the colors of mana just don't always make sense to me. When I am making an enchantment I don't have to worry about putting an 'x', 'z', and 'q' sound directly next to each other. I can do things like 'sign' one hundred and five point negative nine into the brown mana."

Isaac recoiled as Walter said so many things that contradicted themselves in rapid succession that it made his head hurt. "Huh?" Was all he could get out before Walter continued.

"Brown mana doesn't technically exist but it does at the same time because it is just blue, red, and yellow in equilibrium. The percentage being over one hundred percent just means that there is more of that complex color of mana in use than the spell level typically permits, which is actually just how an upcasted version of a spell is 'signed'. The negative means that after the initial power draw it is lowered by that amount to maintain stability in the actual enacting of the magic." Walter explained and then had to take another breather. "'There are only nine colors of mana' is correct at face value but when complex colors are brought into it, there are almost too many to count." Walter finished shattering Isaac's preconceptions of magic while simultaneously building an entire foundation for further understanding on top of it. "Enchantments are void of intent though, so some things can only be done with a means of translation, this is usually seen through attunement which can allow the passage of intent by converting it into raw data points for the spell. That would be almost like mouthing words while you are signing them."

"I really didn't know very much about mana, did I?" Isaac asked rhetorically.

"But what about the ninth level limit and Gypsy's core?" Lenna questioned.

"The ninth level limit is divinely imposed and only loosely at that." Walter told them. "I take it neither of you have met Catastrophe?" Isaac and Lenna both shook their heads. "She makes a habit of turning normal attack spells into tenth level ones that rattle the world itself when she casts them. Imagine Ember Storm but Disintegrates instead tiny glowing embers, or Control Weather but it rains acid, hails Ice Arrows, and the lightning bolts impart physical force equivalent to their energy magnitude."

Isaac rocked back in his chair as Lenna was frozen just trying to contemplate the scale of such destruction. "That's insane." Isaac commented.

"As for Gypsy and her core, the twenty sides are just for the amount of power her core is able to give off. It has nothing to do with the colors of mana or anything like that at all." Walter told them which brought the entire previous conversation into question. "Her core is able to give off twenty one spell levels of power per hour, because she was an actual giant red spirit fox, so I made her core have twenty sides. I also needed it to be big enough to house some of her access regeneration to allow for the occasional cast of something stronger than what she can sustain permanently."

Isaac rubbed his temples. "So, and don't get me wrong, this has all been very enlightening, why did you go into magic theory so deeply?" Isaac wondered.

"Oh, because you mentioned there are only nine colors of mana." Walter told him simply. "It was all just context to correct that misunderstanding."

Isaac rubbed his head as he processed, organized, and filed away their conversation. "Okay, with all of that settled," Isaac said and took a deep breath to allow him to refocus on why they had arrived in the first place. "Can you take us to see the Fatebreaker? I feel exhausted from the day already and it is barely the afternoon."

Walter's eyebrows raised. "Oh, shit, yeah. Let's go." He told them and quickly got to his feet. "Don't want you to be late for that."

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