"Hi, can you connect me to the main office for the Halnya Times? Yes, the main one is Jewel City."

…

"Hi, I'm trying to reach Sky Mishram. I realize it's late, but is there any chance he's in?"

…

"My name's Myrabella Prua-Kent. No, he's not expecting me."

…

"Hello?" It was a deep, handsome voice. "This is Sky Mishram."

"Hi! Sorry for calling out of the blue. My name's Myrabelle—I'm a classmate of Aurora Ferara's."

"Aurora? Is she all right?"

"Yes, sorry, my call is about business. She referred me to you. I'm actually calling about recent news events."

"I see. Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for information about the death of Emmett Massiel."

A long sigh carried over the phone. "You learned about it from Aurora," he deduced.

"Y-yeah. I was hoping you could tell me more information about it."

"I'm not sure why you're asking, but I'm afraid we don't provide information except through our publications."

Myra had expected this, but she had a plan.

"I understand your policy," Myra said carefully. "But what if we exchanged? I have some information that I think your publication would be very interested in. If I could exchange that for whatever you know…"

Sky Mishram was silent for a while. Myra faintly heard what might have been the clicking of a tongue.

"This is something we can discuss," He finally said. "To be upfront, I should say I don't know if the information I have will be particularly satisfying to you. But if you have an interesting lead, I will share what I know."

"Thanks." Myra plowed ahead before he could change his mind. "The lead is this: On December 3, there's going to be a peace meeting between the Imperial Prince and the King of Unkmire in Ralkenon. Ralkenon University will be hosting."

More silence.

"That's quite a tip."

"Do you believe me?"

"It checks out with some of what I know. There has been speculation around recent travel arrangements they have made—how do you know this?"

"That's really complicated. I… I can't tell you. But I can tell you most of the individuals who will be there. The prince; the princess; six imperial sages, Hazel Ornobis, Marcus Bora, Elwyn—"

"Wait, wait, wait—sorry, I need to get my quill ready. Okay."

"Prince Humperton, Princess Malazhonerra, Hazel Ornobis, Marcus Bora, Elwyn Senserenasia, Linda Zeawak, Aiko Ueno, Theodore Kettle, and an arbiter, Judge Philium Krasus."

"Philium… Krasus…" Myra heard muttering over the phone. "Okay."

"And I don't know anything on the Unkmire side, other than the king."

"Hrm. All right, I need to poke around about this to see if I can confirm some of it. But I'll answer your question now as a sign of good faith. If your information checks out, I'll continue to keep you updated."

"Thanks."

"I suppose you know the basics. Emmett Massiel went to sleep around 9 and died at around 1 A.M. by a laser—"

"Hold on, could you give me the exact time?"

"It was 1:09."

"Do you have it to the exact second?"

"You… want his time of death to the exact second?"

"Yeah, sorry, it's fine if you don't have the information."

"I could get it. I need to go check the report."

It took Sky about five minutes to come back with the report.

"It's 1:09:23." Well, the reset was at 22 seconds. Close enough. "So, the laser appeared near the ceiling of his bedroom, and it was focused directly downwards, into his chest. He died instantly. That's well outside his personal domain, assuming his domain wasn't more than a meter off his chest. The detective on scene noted this as significant because it means that the beam could have been created by another mage. However, the manor's security system records that the spell was cast by Emmett Massiel himself."

"How does the security system determine this? Anything or anyone trying to sense something like that would just be blocked by the man's domain defense. It shouldn't be possible to detect him casting anything."

"… Sorry, this isn't an area I know anything about. I understand the security system was designed by Massiel himself."

"All right… thanks. Is that all you have?"

"There is something else interesting. From 1:20 to 2:30, his telephone rang six times. This was also recorded by the system. The sixth time, it was picked up by the detective, who had just arrived. The detective informed the caller that Massiel had died, but the caller hung up without identifying himself."

"Huh."

"That really is all the information I have."

"You don't know where the call came from?"

"No, there's no way of tracing that information."

"Damn it, okay. Oh, one more thing—do you know about the crater that occurred in Ralkenon this morning?"

"I heard of it. We discussed whether to make space for it in the evening edition. Why? Do you think it's related?"

"It's just a hunch. But the crater occurred very close to the hotel where the princess is staying…"

"That's very interesting. If all of this is connected, it sounds like something very big could be going on." Oh, you have no idea.

◆

Iz was in the library (the normal book library, not the one in Abstract Space), absorbed as usual in some text that had caught her eye. This one was a book on game game theory, about a legendary hunter who had beaten the Elusive Elk in a game of nim. Funnily enough, Myra hadn't yet seen her read the same thing twice, even across loops, though it wasn't like Myra tracked everything she read. Myra wasn't sure how Iz chose what to read at a given time, but it was apparently subject to the small perturbations that Myra injected into her life.

Maybe I should go play more board games and see what happens. I wonder, if I played a board game with Tazhin at the very beginning of the loop, would he make the same moves each time…? What if someone other than me played him? (Of her friend group, Tazhin was the one she was least close to since she mostly knew him through Nathan. They had started spending some time together through a board game they both liked, but neither of them were talkative when they concentrated, and it had been an extremely low priority since the looping started. She hadn't played any games with him since the first month.)

Anyway. She was here for Iz.

"Izzzz, I need your help."

"Hey, Myra, what is it?" she said softly.

Myra took a deep breath. "Okay, so there's this project I'm trying to do. The idea is you have a small bubble of space that's cut off and isolated, so no aura can get in or out. Once it's reconnected, I want to measure the elemental composition of the aura in the room's atmosphere in order to guess what was cast inside the room while it was isolated. The room's small, so casting inside the room should deplete the usable aura density by a measurable degree, I think. As far as I can tell, there's no reason this shouldn't work, and a few people I talked to all say it's definitely doable, but I don't think anybody's actually done this, so there are no instructions for it."

Iz put a bookmark in her textbook and closed her book to indicate her attention. "It sounds like a fairly narrow application. What's this for?"

"It's a, uh, personal project."

Iz narrowed her eyes. "Okay. Well, do you have a certain room in mind?"

"Something the size of say… the event hall."

"You're trying to figure out what they're doing in the event hall while it's cut off?"

"No, that was just an example!"

"Come on, Myra." She crossed her arms and tapped her foot. "Do you want my help or not?"

"S-sorry." I'm being evasive again, aren't I? "Yeah, I wanna know what's going on in the event hall."

"Is everything okay? You've been acting odd, dragging me into that self-defense class, making that outburst at lunch, and now this.

"I, uh… it's hard to explain. You wouldn't believe me."

"Try me."

I'm in a time loop, Myra imagined herself saying.

Oh, you were right, I don't believe you.

"It's-It'll be easier to explain later in the month. If you help me out then I'll show you what it's about when the room opens up."

She sighed and stood up, taking her book with her. She contemplated it for a moment, then pulled out her bookmark.

"Don't like your book?"

"Too much animal cruelty. The Elusive Elk was just trying to protect her children." She went to put the book back, and Myra followed. "About your project, did you measure the elemental composition of the interior before it closed up?"

"No, I don't even know how." I figured after getting your help, I could do all this next loop.

"Do you know what time it closed? When the interior was spatially severed, I mean."

"Yeah. It was around 8:45 P.M." 8:44:52 to be exact. Thanks, Shera.

"The aura density inside the building should be the same as in the ambient atmosphere inside it. We'll measure the atmosphere outside the building at the same time tonight. We'll need to correct for the changing phase of the moon, but that shouldn't be too hard."

Well, it sounded hard to Myra. The phase of the moon determined the strength of the lunar channel, so naturally, the aura composition in the atmosphere today wouldn't be the same as it had been yesterday. Theoretically, they just needed to figure out the right amount to offset, but Myra didn't even know where to begin looking up the relevant information.

Luckily, Iz did. She also knew how to measure the atmospheric aura density, which could be done with a strange staff with a large diamond at the end that seemed to shine a different color every time Myra looked at it.

The value they needed to measure, the aura density, could be measured in different ways, but the most common was as a value of a very high-dimensional tensor, the product of many lower-dimensional spaces that each represented one of the elements. It was an extremely large amount of information, which they would be storing in Abstract Space so they could retrieve it later.

The actual process was uneventful, though. They went to the appropriate place at the appropriate time, activated the staff and that was pretty much it.

"So… now we just wait until it opens, measure it again, subtract, and that'll be it?"

"Oh, no." Iz shook her head. "We have an enormous amount of math to do before then."

◆

Though Aurora had agreed to help them analyze the event hall's security, she preferred to wait a few days. When the night finally came (for she wanted to do it in the middle of the night) she showed up dressed entirely in dark clothes and a ski mask.

"You all really just want to go like that?" she asked them.

Myra and Shera, of course, had just dressed like they usually did.

"Dressing like a thief is just going to make us look more suspicious," Myra said. "It's much easier to play it off as innocent curiosity if we look normal."

"Be that as it may, I have a rule: I don't expose my face doing something illegal. I've followed this my entire life, and I won't stop now."

Truthfully, Myra wasn't that worried about getting caught. Part of that was the time loop, certainly, but also, the stakes just weren't that high yet. The university hadn't yet announced the actual event, so the students weren't expected to know how seriously they needed to take the event. If they were caught, playing it off as curiosity would be pretty easy. If Aurora wanted to keep her face hidden… well, that could be explained away too.

Besides, they weren't planning to break into the building anyway. They were just going to look at the security panel Iwasaki used from the outside.

They approached the building, ready to study it. There was no doubt that the security system was enabled: They could sense, geometrically, topologically, and algebraically that the inside of the building was gone. Myra never had any doubt about this. She had never sensed anything other than total spatial detachment, not before Iwasaki opened the whole thing up.

"How d-do we get to the c-c-control panel?"

"I think it's… in this wall?" Myra walked to one of the side walls. It was just a normal stone wall. "Oh, here." There was a latch. It opened up so they were looking at a metal panel. "It's locked."

"H-how are we going to open it?"

"First, we need to check if it's rigged up to some alarm." Aurora closed her eyes, presumably sensing around the inside. Myra did the same. On the inside, she could sense a bunch of switches and a giant orb. She couldn't sense anything attached to the door, though.

"Yeah, there's nothing. I'm gonna pick it."

Aurora picked it. When they got the panel open, she saw the control panel she had previously felt.

"That orb thing is definitely rigged," Aurora said. "Don't touch it. Don't even psychically reach out to it or anything."

They looked at the panel for a while.

"All right, never mind, we need to learn what this thing does if we're going to get anywhere." Aurora went silent again, psychically reaching out in direct defiance of her original instructions. "Yeah. This thing is the tether."

"It connects the inside to the outside?" Myra asked.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Yes. And it needs a cryptographic code to enter through it."

"Is there any way to get in other than the orb?"

"No way. Zilch."

"You can't teleport?"

"The space inside isn't connected to the outside except through the tether. How else would you teleport inside? You can't teleport through nothing."

"Is it possible to subvert the orb?"

"Not without the code. Or being the greatest mathematician alive, I guess."

"What if there was a secret second tether? Is there a way to confirm there isn't one?"

"Why would there be another tether?"

"Just humor me."

"Well… if there was one, we wouldn't be tell from out here, unless we found the anchor point. But it could be anywhere, technically. Of course, any tether needs an orb on the inside as well, so the easiest way to check would be to search inside—if we had a way in, I mean."

Myra knew that there was, in fact, an orb on the inside near the door. Presumably, it was the main one that was supposed to be there, though it would probably be worth confirming that at some point… As for the possibility of a second orb, she'd just have to keep an eye out for the trace of one during her searches.

"Sh-should we figure out what other functionality is here?" Shera asked. "I think there are rune sheets behind the panel."

"Yeah, there's another lock to get back there," Aurora said. This one is rigged to the alarm. Myra, you're our rune expert, why don't you just sense around the inscriptions and see what's there?"

"I don't think I can do that…" She tried anyway. "I can never read runes with the extrasenses. They're carved in the silver, so I need to feel the silver and then kind of understand the negative space in the material—"

"Don't sense the silver then? Just sense the air."

Myra blinked. "Huh, oh. I've never tried that." She switched from feeling the silver to the air around it. Now rather than feeling the indents in the silver, she could feel the outdents of the air in the same place. "It's a little better…"

"Here." Aurora plunged her knife into the back door of the panel that led to the silver rune sheets.

"Wait—"

She thought Aurora was about to pry the door off, but she did no such thing. Instead, she pried the door just enough to open a little gap, then pushed air into the tight gap. Myra sensed the pressure increase immediately, and it made her task easier. "Woah! This really works!"

"What do you see?" Shera asked.

"Give me a minute to look this over…"

It took more than a minute. Even able to glance over the dense rune sheets semi-quickly, it wasn't exactly easy to interpret a rune script written in an unfamiliar style.

"Okay… there's a bunch of alarms. Most of them come from the orb. I can't verify what they actually do, since the signal comes from inside the building, but they have messages associated with them—There's a sound detector, a motion detector, domain detector, spatial anomaly detector, structural integrity failure detector…"

"Those all sound standard," Aurora said.

"Even the d-domain d-detector? How is that even p-p-possible? You can't sense someone's domain."

"There are some tricks," Aurora explained. "Since a person's domain prevents the sensors from detecting anything inside it, you can build a sensor to detect the spaces that are undetectable. But, they're fallible. If someone knows what they're doing, they can fool that one."

Eugh, this doesn't really matter. Iwasaki should have checked the room was empty before closing it. I already have a plan to see if anybody's hiding in the armor statues. The fact is that nobody can get in or out in the first place, so it doesn't matter if they would be detected once they got inside. And after the event starts, the sensors won't be able to distinguish between the people who are supposed to be there and those who aren't…

"Okay," Myra said. "I'm going to move on to the parts that rely on definitions in the Common Library."

It was easy to find what she was looking for. Rune scripts that relied on the Common Library were easy to identify because of the diagrams they used to identify the relevant mathematical objects. Myra quickly found a major component that relied on the Common Library, and it even seemed to be active, based on the way air was heating up near it.

"There's a huge component that is doing some kinda spatial distortion stuff."

That's probably to keep the severed spatial bubble in place. Don't want it drifting off and going kaput."

"What would happen if this failed? Would it be unsafe to keep the thing running?"

"Unsafe is one way to put it. It would be unspeakably dangerous. You'd need to reattach the bubble immediately."

Huh, so it sounds like Shera was right about me being right: Iwasaki really did have no choice but to reattach the bubble after the Common Library failed. It's good to get that question checked off, at the very least.

"If the thing's designed right," Aurora went on. "I'd expect there to be a failsafe that initiates the process automatically. Probably an alarm on the inside, too, informing people to evacuate."

Wait, no that doesn't make sense! After the Common Library failed, Iwasaki had to manually reattach the bubble! Or at least, that's what he said he was doing…

I guess I have to un-check this after all.

Maybe this failsafe… also relies on the Common Library…?

Myra looked at Shera, but the girl didn't seem confused. Of course, Shera was probably missing all the context regarding the subtleties of Iwasaki's behavior. Myra kept forgetting that she didn't remember everything they'd seen in the last loop.

"Okay, I'm going to look at this failsafe," Myra announced. It wasn't hard to find—it was right below the stabilization module.

"D-does it look fine?"

"I mean guess so. It's pretty straightforward. The stabilizer sends its status to the failsafe. If the failsafe detects anything unusual it sends a signal to the shutdown module. The status line also forks off like there's supposed to be some other input."

"Like an override line?" Aurora asked. "That's really dangerous—"

"No, I mean, it just goes off into nothing. I guess it could be used that way, but it shouldn't have any effect."

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