The keening noise of the warning siren hurt Sophia's ears enough that she could barely follow the conversation. After a moment, she gave up and dug in her pack for her old notes. She wasn't particularly good with sound, air, or vibration, but she could fake it well enough for this.

She was confident in that fact only because she'd done it before. Sound protection for an area was one of the spells her father had her figure out back when she was learning spellforms. It wasn't easy, and she was pretty certain it wasn't as good as the spellform her father would design for the same thing, but the final spellform ought to be in one of her notebooks.

It took some frantic flipping through the notebook followed by a few minutes of spellcasting using her aura to guide the mana before the spellform sat in front of her, ready to energize. She paused for a moment, then dropped a feather above the spellform and pushed mana into it as the feather drifted through the same space. It probably wouldn't matter, but she wanted to try anyway.

The noise level fell to a much more acceptable level, still audible but no longer actively painful, as the spell took effect. Sophia let out a deep breath; that felt a lot better.

Alley Sweetfire stopped speaking in the middle of a word. His head jerked up towards the center of the room. He stared at something Sophia could barely see up there for a long moment before he seemed to relax again. He turned towards Sophia, obviously aware of who caused the sudden reduced noise level. Sophia guessed the notebook and feather in front of her were probably big clues. "What did you just do? If you've muted the siren, people who need to hear it might not be able to."

Sophia shook her head. "It's a bubble around us, reduces the volume of incoming sounds. It damps all sorts of vibration, but it's the best at making sound less loud. The more it has to do, the sooner it'll burn out; my notes say I routed too many of the resistance lines through the comparison node, so it usually burns out before it runs out of mana."

She bit her lip and glanced down towards the spellform to see how well it was holding up against the siren. At that volume, uncomfortable and too loud for her to make out words but not immediately harmful, she ought to have a few minutes.

It wasn't there.

Sophia frowned as she realized that maybe her last minute improvisation had worked. She turned her gaze lower and found the feather. It glowed softly with mana, but it was the spellform wrapped around it that really caught her eye. It had warped slightly as it wrapped around the feather, but Sophia didn't see any changes to the actual components; only the linkages were bent. That was probably fine, since the weakness in this particular spellform was in a component. She leaned over and picked up the feather.

"Well, it's really a bubble around this feather. I think that means we can move it, but I haven't tried it with a feather before. It looks like it's in pretty good shape so far, so we should have a few minutes to talk. It might even last half an hour if we're lucky." That was the longest she'd ever gotten the spell to last, based on the notes on the page with the spellform. She didn't remember if that was only once or if that was fairly normal, any more than she remembered what stress it was under at the time. All she could say for certain was that the spellform around the feather still looked fine.

"You may, but I don't," Alley Sweetfire stated firmly. "I'll see you when I get back. While I'm gone, you can look around my experiments in the back room and see if there's anything you might want, but please don't touch anything. Most of it's safe enough, but there are a few things I haven't set up for others to touch yet and you don't want to get burnt."

With that, he got up and opened a door they hadn't been through yet. It had to lead to the "back room" he mentioned, because he left it open when he proceeded through another door into a stairwell and firmly shut the door behind himself.

Sophia wasn't certain what to do next. She hadn't actually expected him to just leave like that. Maybe they should look around the back room the way he suggested?

The noise from the siren increased, even through the sound-reducing spellform. Sophia turned towards where it seemed to come from and saw Dav standing in the open doorway that led to the street outside. She couldn't make out what he said until he repeated it over their mental link. "Hey guys, come over here. You really need to see this."

Sophia brought the feather with her when she headed over to join Dav looking out the door.

What she saw when she looked out was a scene out of a nightmare. It wasn't a bad nightmare, at least not yet, but it was definitely the beginning of one. A wall of magical energy raced towards them; it filled the sky in the direction of the Maze. Sophia couldn't see the Maze itself over the buildings, but she could see enough.

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For all that Alley Sweetfire called it a mazestorm, what was headed towards them did not look like a storm to Sophia. In fact, without her manasight, it would not have looked like much at all, merely a haze in the distance. That definitely explained why the warning sirens were needed.

The "storm" looked far more like a massive stale mana release, one that would cause wild fluctuations in everything that depended on mana, cause strange effects, and possibly even create monsters simply from its chaotic swirling. She didn't know how long it would take to pass over them; that depended on how big it was and how fast it was moving. In that sense it was kind of like a storm.

Also like a storm was the fact that you could also escape many of the effects by hiding behind mana-resistant materials, and if these storms were as common as Sweetfire indicated, the walls had to be mana-resistant or they wouldn't still be there. Some mana might seep in around doors and windows and air vents, but that would be far less than being caught out in it.

Okay, maybe comparing it to a storm wasn't that far off. Comparing it to a cloud might be even closer, but a cloud on the ground was just fog. This was worse than even the worst fog, unless that fog held more than water.

Sophia suspected that people would treat it like a monster assault; as long as you guarded the openings, chances were good you'd be fine. If only a small amount of mana seeped in, any monsters it created should be weak enough for anyone to kill if it created monsters at all. Random magical effects seemed more likely, but even those would be weak.

Maybe they also used the time to cover any known openings? That would make sense and would also be a good reason for the sirens. A few minutes' warning was far better than none, and Sophia was pretty sure that the actual warning they'd gotten was more than twenty minutes. It wasn't here yet.

Sophia wasn't the best at recognizing magical elements, probably because she knew all too well that they were fluid and what in one person's hands would be a simple Wood Affinity might be a powerful Growth Affinity in another's hands and Healing in the hands of a third person. That Healing wouldn't easily transition to Fire for most, but in the hands of a Phoenix, it could be Healing and Growth and Fire and even destruction. Mana wasn't static; it took intent from those who used it to create what they wanted.

Unfortunately, that left tiny pieces of that Intent behind when the mana wasn't completely used by whatever spell it was intended for. Sophia's Arcane Affinity was less likely to hold Intent for long than others, but she still left more stale mana behind than others with more skill. Despite that, she'd never actually seen a stale mana release like the one bearing down on them. They simply didn't happen back home. The world's mana system carefully avoided that; even stale mana pools were to be avoided when possible.

"Does the Broken Lands even have a World Core?" Sophia asked herself, horrified. Until that moment, she hadn't put the pieces together and realized that the most likely thing to break to turn a planet into a place called the Broken Lands was the World Core. She had a little excuse for that; she knew what breaking a World Core usually did to a planet: it turned it into an uninhabitable ball of rock, possibly with an atmosphere. If it did have an atmosphere, it wasn't one anyone would want to live on. In extreme cases, breaking a World Core could literally make the planet break into pieces and turn it into an asteroid belt.

That was what should have happened here if the World Core was broken, but instead it was like the top few miles of the planet were sliced off and set adrift in some strange realm that had a day/night cycle with something that sometimes looked like a sun and a moon and sometimes was simply a bright or dark sky. Seasons were equally both there and not there, almost like a poor imitation of the real thing. It was very much like the world itself was broken in more than one way.

It matched absolutely nothing Sophia knew, so she usually didn't think about it.

The mass of stale mana ahead of her roiled with many different Affinities, but she was fairly certain that they tended towards the more stable ones, things like earth and stone and metal, with a hint of stasis or stability and possibly a bit of time thrown in. The time mana might have been her imagination, though, because a moment after it flickered in front of her, it wasn't visible anymore. "With that sort of mana, I have a feeling this storm might be slow."

Jax huffed. "I hate the slow ones, but you're probably right. It's still a long ways off and that's not normal after the sirens go off." He shook his head. "I thought they were part of the buildings. Who would have thought they were new?"

"What do you mean that sort of mana?" Xin'ri asked, ignoring Jax.

Sophia waved at the mana cloud in the distance. "The stale mana in the mazestorm. It's got a lot of solidity, so it's not going to want to change. That could mean that it comes as a solid block at speed, but it almost looks like it's bubbling up from something, so it's probably going to spread out more like … uh, a volcano or something? Lava can move pretty fast, but I'm pretty sure it's always slower than water would be."

"That's not the best analogy. At least, I hope it isn't." Dav put an arm around Sophia. "I'd really rather not be on a mountainside looking up at an erupting volcano. Do you really think that's what this is?"

Sophia leaned into his warmth. "No, but also yes? I don't think we'll be buried in ash and rock, but I do think Alley was right. We need to be indoors for this, maybe even block off the doors and windows if we can figure out a way. We should also be ready for a fight if something gets in. I don't think it'll be big, at least not until we open the door, but I bet there will be monsters outside when it passes."

"There will be," Jax confirmed. "There always are. It's usually not that bad, but I don't think I've ever spent a mazestorm outside either the Registry area or the Arena. I know that's one of the common missions in the Registry after a mazestorm, killing monsters in the areas that have fewer Called."

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