"What did Ben's note say, in its entirety?" Iz asked. They were all congregated in the hotel room: Myra, Lukai, and Nathan, together with Iz and Shera, whom they had tracked down later.

"I… don't remember it very well," Myra admitted. "At the time, I was just thinking, 'why are you bitching me out about Mirkas-Ballam now?'… He also said that Mirkas-Ballam was barely able to complete their objective last time this happened… and he said the consequences would be disastrous if they fail—and at this point, I don't see how they could possibly get back on track—"

"Let's not jump to conclusions based on what Ben wrote," Iz said. "We don't know what his motives were."

"I just don't see how they can possibly finish before the end of the loop," Myra said. "It's always down to the wire. They can't afford any slack, and right now, their laboratory's being stripped down for parts!"

"Okay, but they were still able to finish last time—"

"We don't know what happened last time! Everything was different—I got arrested almost immediately, for one. It was also a few days later in the month, if that matters… It's possible the empire simply didn't hit Mirkas-Ballam as hard!"

"Whatever the case, we just have to hope that what's disastrous for Ben isn't disastrous for us," Iz insisted. Nathan turned away, and Iz seemed to regret her choice of words immediately.

Myra got up and sat down next to him and let him bury his head in her shoulder. Everyone was quiet for a while.

"Why hasn't he shown up? I want to—I want to ask him to his face what the fuck he's doing—"

"I know." It seemed that, for whatever reason, Ben had decided this would be a fuck-my-brother loop where he disappears without even attempting to reassure Nathan that he's fine. Maybe that was because Myra had got to Nathan first this loop, but it still seemed unlikely that Ben even knew that, so…

In conclusion, Ben was just a dick. QED.

"We need to decide what we're going to do for the remainder of the loop," Iz said, matter-of-factly and back to business. "Are you still going to try to break into the lab?"

Still holding Nathan's shoulder, she looked over to Lukai. "I think it's still a good idea," he said. "The company is in disarray. There might be opportunities this loop that wouldn't exist otherwise."

"R-right," Shera said. "Maybe we can find an alchemist who will t-tell us what's going on now that their big project is cancelled. Maybe we can find V-Vikram at th-that bar."

"Yeah…" A vague, hopeful blob of a plan started to form in Myra's head. Just talking to the alchemists as curious students had always been a mixed bag. But what if…

"What do you think, Iz?"

She thought for a moment. "Before anything else, I want to see this red vine for myself."

"Great," Myra said. She'd been hoping she'd say just that. "Let's head up to the capital and rip that thing out of Massiel's wall."

◆

And so it was another overnight haul to Jewel City.

It was just four of them: Myra herself, Shera, Iz, and Lukai. Nathan wanted to stay in hopes that Ben would actually show up. Myra didn't really know if waiting around with nothing else to do was what he needed, and a part of her worried that they had actually missed Ben trying to find Nathan while they were all in Unkmire. But there was a chance, if a small one, that he might show up, so there was logic in having Nathan stay. At the very least, she asked Cynthia to look after him, which she of course agreed to do.

They arrived in Jewel City early in the morning, as the city was waking up. It would have been a nice day in the capital, if not for the brick wall they hit almost immediately.

Of course, there was no chance they could just waltz into the late sage's manor like usual. The property was fucking crawling with police creeps, no doubt suspecting that whoever took the late sage's journal might return for some reason or other (which, of course, they did). It was a rude obstacle to be faced with coming straight off the train ride like that.

Why didn't she just take the damn vine before? That was kind of a stupid thing to think—there hadn't been any way to know it would be useful or that this would happen, and it probably wasn't reasonable to just take anything remotely interesting she ever saw just in case—but she at least should have shown it to Lukai the first time around. Maybe he would have suggested taking it.

Lukai, of course, was the expert in breaking into places, so they all turned to him. Myra thought it would be cake, like getting past the police perimeter in Ralkenon, but Lukai pointed out that ripping out the walls would be substantially more difficult to do undetected, and also that the police had likely spent days locking the place down. He refused to even go near the property until nightfall (so they'd taken the overnight train for basically no reason).

At around 11 P.M., they staked out on the roof of a diagonally adjacent building that seemed to be unoccupied. From there, they were able to identify three imperial police guards standing around the exterior of the manor, but they were all well-hidden, so there were likely more, and then there were likely even more inside as well.

"What do you think, Lukai?"

He ran a hand through his long hair, which he was wearing in a ponytail today. "I'm thinking. It would help to know if they're guarding the vine specifically, or if they're just guarding the house. Do they even know the vine is there?"

"I have no idea," Myra said. "But… when we came here with Hazel Ornobis, she didn't seem to know or care much about the security system. Someone had sent her to pick up that watch in the glass case, but we never saw any evidence anyone cared about the vines in his walls."

"Unfortunately, it's impossible to be sure. What we really need to know is where all the guards are. I assume we can access the red vine from any exterior-facing wall?"

"I think so. I'm not positive, but I think it goes all the way around the house."

"So our best bet would be teleporting directly into a closet or bathroom or something." He still seemed hesitant.

"Can we scout out th-the locations of the officers inside?" Shera asked.

"No. The best we could do is look for their thermal signatures in infrared. This is easy to block, though, and imperial officers usually do when they go dark."

"Usually?"

"They might be deliberately inconsistent to throw us off—I'll just check, give me a sec."

He grabbed his glasses like he was going to adjust them, but he held his hand there, and they glowed a soft orange. "Okay. There are three officers downstairs, one upstairs in the room on this corner—"

"That's the office."

"—And one in the basement. And there are six outside, besides the three we saw earlier, there's a man on the roof, and two hiding in the shrubbery." He sighed. "And I'm sorry, but if they're going to all this effort, I'm sure they have just as many blokes hidden from this trick. It's a very strong team."

"There's absolutely no way to detect them?"

Lukai shook his head. "None at all. On the whole, the principle is actually advantageous for us, since we're planning to get in and out without being noticed. But it also means we're going to have to take a risk with our entry."

"Seems like a lot of effort just to guard this place on the off chance the person they're looking for would show up at the dead guy's house."

"I don't think it's unreasonable," Myra said. "They probably guessed we might have got the book from his house to begin with. And, then—Oh, shit."

"What?"

"Scratch that. They know someone broke into his house. Because of that damn security system, it recorded us entering."

Hmm…

"All right," Lukai said. "I think we should try the closet adjacent to the main bedroom." He pointed to a corner of the house.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Wh-what makes you think it'll be empty?"

"I don't. But tactically, it'd be unusual. They have no reason to suspect anyone would teleport right into that closet."

"They've got people hiding in the shrubs."

"I said it's a risk," Lukai said. "For obvious reasons, Myra will need to sit this out. I'll go, but I think it's a two-person job."

"I-I'll go," Shera volunteered.

"Wait," Myra said. "I think we can do this without taking a risk."

◆

"Tell me everything you know about how this 'security system' works."

"One: it detects everything that happens in that house. It detects people, it detects spells, no matter if they're protected by their domains or not. It will know just how many guards are in the house, and where exactly they are."

"How can it possibly detect that? No known magic today can get past a person's domain defense."

"I don't know. We didn't believe it at first, either, but that's how it works."

"Fine, go on."

"Two: you can ask pretty much any question you want, if you can figure out how to interact with it in Abstract Space. I don't think there's any reason we couldn't activate it from outside."

"That's ridiculous. What kind of security system would it be if you could turn it off from outside?"

"You can't turn it off, I think. But you can still make your queries to it. The problem is reading off its responses. They're all written down on the desk inside his office."

"So we'd need to get inside. But I already told you there's a guard inside the office."

"Are you sure we can't ask it to wr-write the answer down outside the house? I h-have a qu-quill here—"

"No. The problem is—Three: The responses are magically directed by the ink itself. The ink is distilled from some kind of vine extract through a bizarre faucet gadget built into the wall. No ink, no answers. And all the ink's in the office."

"But w-what if we had a way to read off something written down inside the office? With a p-pair of binoculars, we could read something off the desk."

"That's no good, there's a guard in the office."

"Is there a hidden place we could use?"

"If we used a hidden place, then we wouldn't be able to read it."

"We could use our extra-senses."

"To read ink off a piece of parchment? That's virtually impossible. Actually, no, it's completely impossible. The ink has its own domain defenses because it comes from an organic plant. So we can't detect it at all with our extra-senses."

"We could s-sense the quill moving as it writes."

"Huh. That's…"

"That's theoretically possible," Iz said, "if any of us were trained to translate the sensations of a moving quill into text. Are any of us?"

They looked at Lukai. "That's not a skill anyone teaches," he said. "It's no use for spywork because any human holding a quill would certainly have a large enough domain to entirely contain the quill."

"This seems like a dead-end," Iz said.

"N-no," Shera said. "Let's at least see if we can get a look into the office window. Maybe we'll see a blind spot."

Getting to where they could see into the office window was a puzzle of its own, but once they got it into their line of sight, they were in for a bit of a surprise.

There was, indeed, a 'blind' spot: the blinds on the window were closed. That wasn't usually true—so that meant the guards had probably closed the blinds as a matter of operational security. If they had been planning to spy a piece of paper off the desk, it would have ruined everything. As it was, it was perfect. All they needed to do was get a sheet of paper together with a quill and slide them up behind the blinds. It was dark enough that nobody would notice from the outside unless they were looking for it.

That was still easier said than done. There was still a guard in the office. Lukai could watch him via thermal radiation, though, waiting for a moment when he turned his back.

The wait was upwards of half an hour, and it was punctuated only by Lukai giving her a go-ahead. "Do it. Now." Myra didn't know if the guard had turned around, left to go to the bathroom, or what, but that wasn't her job. She was the only one who actually knew the layout of the room, so she was on telekinesis duty. She quickly pulled the quill and a thin stack of parchment off the desk, to the floor, and underneath it. At this point, they were basically home-free. She pulled it up the back behind the desk, and then up to the window, behind the blinds.

Shera—since she had figured it out last time—was assigned to figure out how to query the security system through Abstract Space. Iz cast a deafening spell at the window so nobody would hear the quill scratching. (She looked a little disappointed by this job.) Stuck behind the blinds, the quill was writing almost parallel to the piece of paper, so the 'handwriting,' or whatever you called it, was dreadful, but it was readable.

In addition to the guards Lukai had counted earlier, there were three more outside: two men hiding in the trees and one woman up against the side of the house wearing stone-wall camouflage. Inside, there were likewise three more they hadn't accounted for. One in the basement, one in the first-floor bathroom…

… and one in the second-floor closet, exactly where Lukai had originally suggested.

◆◆◆◆◆

The group had ultimately decided on the second-floor bathroom as their destination. Lukai was taking care of the disruption field and everything they would need to obfuscate their arrival. All Shera had to do was teleport into the opening Lukai was making for her.

Part of Lukai's arsenal would include a deafening spell much like the one Isadora had used earlier, so they would be able to speak freely, but they didn't really need to, having discussed their plan in advance. Lukai would focus on their security and on communicating with Myrabelle and Isadora on the outside in case anything new came up on the security log.

Shera's job was to tear down the wall and cut out as much of the vine as she judged was feasible. All the while, she had to make sure that their domains fully covered the damage to the wall at all times, or else it would be too easy to sense by the imperial watchmen. Part of this involved directing Lukai where he needed to stand. Armed with a utility knife and horticultural shears, she got to work silently and efficiently.

It went smoothly, cutting and collecting the mysterious red vine that did the impossible. To intrude in a personal domain with purely magical means was an absolute impossibility, the number one rule of magic. What the hell was this thing? And what was Mirkas-Ballam doing with it? It went smoothly, packing the specimen up into the sack they had planned. It went smoothly, up until it was time to get away.

"Uh, Lukai, I th-think there's a problem."

"What's that?"

"The vine has its own domain."

"Right—"

"I can't bring it along while I teleport."

"That—That shouldn't be true. Some plants have domains, but they aren't like human domains. Ours should overpower it."

"W-well, it is t-true. I can't affect it at all."

Lukai swore, then closed his eyes in concentration, probably contacting Myrabelle through their ad hoc telekinetic system.

When he opened his eyes again, he told her to leave the vine with him and go.

◆◆◆◆◆

Lukai waited long enough for his new allies to get to safety. They were free to teleport, so they wouldn't need long.

He spent that small slice of time preparing. The bathroom had a small hand mirror in the cabinet—if not for that, he would have had to take apart the larger wall mirror. Most people didn't realize that the thin silver coating on a mirror was usually a highly suitable runic medium. He carved something random that would emit a signal in auraspace—something inscrutable but recognizable, which he would be able to find later. Then he etched in another slapdash enchantment to harden the mirror so it wouldn't break. He wrapped the mirror in a hand towel to insulate it from the vine's domain, and finally, he put it in the sack with the vine.

Lukai still fully intended to teleport. The only question was how the vine was getting out. The plan had come to him primarily as a mashup of some of Myrabelle's stories. Her invasion of the vault. The culprit's invasion of the trebuchet. He needed one more aura construct to do it—

There was sudden movement among the guards. In his haste, he had clearly tripped one of their sensors. It didn't matter much which one. Putting his in-progress construct on pause, he clapped his hands to unleash a burst of energy through a six-way beam—up, down, forward, back, left, right. When going out hot, there was little reason to hold back; that was one of the first things he had learned in the murk bogs. He intended to hit at least one officer with each beam—he hit four and missed two.

Unfortunately, one of those misses was behind him. He put up his barrier fast, then went up through the hole he'd made in the roof (despite originally planning to go out front). He quickly resumed his construction. It didn't have to be good. It just needed to be able to sling the sack off into the air. Any direction would do.

Lukai shot a guard on the roof, while someone else shot his barrier and cracked it to pieces. Another shot grazed his shoulder as he worked to get the barrier up.

He didn't have any time left—he had been trying to construct a telekinetic slingshot, but it wasn't there yet. He shot someone but missed, and then several shots hit his barrier at once. At this point, it would be better to spin it around like a centrifuge—

◆◆◆◆◆

Myra and the others were waiting at an obscure monument that was identifiable but very remote. It was a good meeting place, but it was a nerve-wracking wait.

"I-I should have tried harder to ov-ov-overpower it," Shera said.

"There's nothing you could have done, Shera. It was a domain."

"I don't understand how it could overpower our domains," Iz said. "How the hell does that security system work?"

Shera just tapped her foot nervously.

"If he's bringing the vine, he has to come by foot," Myra reminded her. Truthfully, she didn't have a clue in hell what Lukai's plan was, but she was at least pretty sure of that much. Still, she tried to be cognizant of Shera's perspective.

That's not to imply she wasn't worried herself, of course.

When the outline of a lanky, long-haired man, carrying a sack over his shoulder finally appeared in the distance, Shera flew off her seat like a released spring and flung her arms around the guy. "You m-made it!"

"I got the—the vine," he stammered out. Hesitantly, he returned the hug, which somehow seemed to surprise Shera enough that she squeaked.

Sheesh, these idiots. Myra walked up to them at a normal walking pace and hugged the both of them, then she made Iz come and join them, too.

◆

The red vine looked just about the way she remembered. It was about as thick as her arm, adorned with thorns and leaves with oddly-shaped veins running throughout.

"So, that's it, huh?" Iz asked.

"This is it. Hope it's not some unrelated red vine!" She laughed nervously while Iz looked closely. "It'd be kinda awkward if we did all that to just get any old vine."

"Mm." Iz didn't seem that worried. She reached out and touched it gently with the tip of her finger. She shivered and pulled back immediately.

"Whatd'ya think, Miss Miirunian horticulture expert?"

"It is probably from Miirun," she said.

"Oh." Myra blinked. "Why do you say that?"

"The leaves, it feels like… look, you should recognize it."

Confused, Myra looked closely at the odd textures of the vine. Something about its grainy texture did look a bit familiar. "Huh. I kinda do. It's like a…"

"Camera-leaf," Iz said.

"Yeah. What's that mean? They're… related, somehow? The camera-leaves grow on this thing?"

"To be clear, I've never heard of or seen any kind of vine like this. I'm just saying, it looks related to a camera-leaf. You could easily mistake these leaves for camera-leaves. But camera-leaves don't grow on vines like this."

"What do you think it means?"

"I haven't the faintest idea." She looked at the other two. Lukai and Shera had nothing to say.

"Well, let's pack it up and get back to Ralkenon," Myra said. See what we can't get out of Mirkas-Ballam with this thing.

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