There weren't any clocks that hung on any of the walls in Howard's office. In more ordinary times, I wouldn't even be batting an eye at such a less-than-peculiar choice of wall decor but considering prior experiences with those ticking round circles, I couldn't help but keep that detail in mind…

He drawled on and on, and since time-telling could only be done through phone on-ing, I flickered open my own and saw that a full hour's worth of progress had just been wasted on a literal standstill - like for real, three of us just standing, listening… I don't know where we got the patience.

Hearing him talk, hearing all that remorse and self-pity grew in prominence with every new sentence after the other was pure torture to the ears, and it wasn't as if it was worth the time or the pain either, cause by the half-hour mark we already knew everything that he had to offer.

That he was kind of a hack, that he stole money, that Asteria wasn't even his own thing to begin with, that plagiarism wasn't all bad so long as you change a few things here and there… and that he clearly, most definitively, had at all nothing to do with anything at all.

Anything after that point was just essentially just tidbits here and there he deemed needed changing. Unnecessary stuff.

The blank canvas of mystery had already been painted with all the colorful answers, all Howard was doing was adding the finishing touches here and there - we didn't need the finishing touches, we just wanted to know who painted the damn thing.

So yeah, hate to say it, hate to see it… but Howard Philips was cleared of all charges, at least, for the supernatural kind. Though in our reality's reality, legally he still was very much in hot water. After all, embezzlement wasn't anything to scoff at.

And besides, if the slowdown in topic was anything to go off of, I get the sense that our little brief time together in this office was slowly coming to an anticlimactic end.

Asteria's chronicling ended with the shrug of shoulders and a deep weary sigh.

"That's it," Howard lamely proclaimed. "That's the whole story."

Honestly, the whole story could do with some trimming - at least fifty percent of it were either pointless padding, irrelevant details, or just plain ol' boring. If it were me, I'd stop as soon as I realized that he was clueless as we were, but I suppose being thorough had its perks, otherwise, Irene wouldn't have been the one most attentive here out of us three.

"Okay," She said, stepping back from his desk, speaking so casual-like as if someone just told how shitty the weather was today.

Howard obviously found the lack of any noteworthy reaction quite peculiar. "Just like that?"

"Well, if one thing, I wished you didn't love hearing yourself talk," Irene said. "You could have saved us a lot of time if had just stuck to quick and simple."

Howard looked a little affronted. "You asked for everything, I just did what you told me to do."

"Yes. My mistake."

"So... what happens now?"

Clearly, he was quite anxious to know the answer to that question - now that the discussion had run dry, and that he had nothing else left to offer, I suppose he was hoping he could come out of all this with just a light slap on the wrist.

Howard looked at the detective, his judge, jury, and executioner, and started to sweat again. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Irene's stare was as bored and aloof as ever.

"Why a sequel, Howard?" She asked all of a sudden. "From what you've been told us, you've already milked the list dry, haven't you? You got nothing to steal from anymore."

A little sigh of relief. "Oh… why do you wanna know?"

"Just curious."

"Cause it's only logical. Everyone's asking for, management gave the green light, our budget is bigger than ever… so why not a sequel?"

"So no emails this time, no mysterious story pitches?"

"No," Howard said, sounding slightly offended. "The sequel is going to be a hundred percent original. My concepts, my stories, okay? I can do it on my own."

That bold claim there was worth a bit of doubt, and clearly, I wasn't the only one that thought so - Irene rolled her eyes, and Ash had a little dubious gaze going on.

"If you say so…" Irene muttered her breath, before speaking out a little louder. "By the way, be honest, have you seen any of your staff carrying around a suspicious-looking book lately?"

Book? Where the heck did a book come from? How did that become a question that needed asking? You'd think maybe Irene would have run by me anything on the need-to-know basis instead of having me fumble around in my head trying to figure things out like I was now.

But no, apparently not. Guess I'm just left to my own devices on this.

I looked to Ash, and she didn't seem to find that question as unorthodox as I did, meaning to say that once again, this conversation was clearly leaning more onto the fantasy side of the discussion. Great.

Heck, the only one that actually shared in my confusion was Howard himself, cocking his head back in disbelief. "A book. What book?"

"Small book, leather book, maybe an old book too," Irene went on. "Something that obviously doesn't look a document or a file or some other thing you'd usually find in a studio. Seen anything like that lying around?"

Luckily, I already had a phone in hand, and that Google was my friend. Common sense and logical thinking soon had me loading back into the deep expansive depths of Asteria's wiki page.

The search bar, so compact and blank, beckon eagerly for my request of the day. With quick surreptitious thumbs, and a few misspells here and there, the website was soon sent forth deep into its seemingly infinite archives in order to retrieve me all there was to know about the term 'Ancient Magus'.

As I let the wiki page do its work, in the meantime, I glanced myself back up to the conversation at hand, only to find Howard shaking his head exasperatedly.

"I have almost eighty employees in this studio alone," He said. "You can't expect me to take notice of every little thing my team brings along with them when they punch in for work."

Irene didn't like excuses. "If it isn't you we are looking for, then we have to go down the list of suspects - your employees… have any of them been acting strange as of late?"

I stepped out of the discussion at that point, and darted my eyes back to the long lines of words that now filled my phone screen, reading, skimming, doing my best to catch myself up to speed.

>

So that's where the book comes in… that's why Irene was asking… that's what she was searching his desk and bookshelf for when we first arrived. But why? I read on.

>

That sounded like a cheat to me. Skip the process and go right onto the magic? Abandon the need for focus, determination, and intent?

It was a thought, alright... and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted by it at that point in time.

A faint, fleeting vision of me in a grubby old cloak, carrying an even more grubby book in hand whilst I stood before the Blightfall that paved over the city streets. I'd be confidently smirking, flapping the book wide open, and almost effortlessly cleansing the Blight to the boisterous applause and cheers of the many grateful citizens that surrounded me.

It's a thought...

Then I read on just a little bit more, and the thought and vision of it were all but dead to me.

>

Finally, I understood. This book. The gravity of it, the significant between its ruffled pages. That was Irene's plan here, wasn't it? I'm guessing Ash was on the same line of thinking too.

Destroy the book. Destroy the Blight.

The only problem now was -

"Forget it," Irene said, abruptly cutting Howard off mid-sentence. "We'll look for this guy ourselves."

Who the hell is this Magus?