“Well, Vane. Have anything you feel like telling me?” Marcus broke the silence we’d shared for the past few minutes, but I cut him off before his question got too pointed. He’d get his answers, but on my terms.

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that. Someone broke into my house earlier and-”

“Wait, excuse me?” Marcus’ head snapped towards me, fighting to subdue the confusion he visibly felt. “You’re not actually serious, right?”

“No, I am. I woke up when I heard…” I thought of how best to phrase what I wanted to say, since mentioning the Every-Thing seemed like it could be considered not good. “something downstairs. When I went down to look, whoever it was had left, and they’d left the place a disaster.”

“Who would-”

“Not a clue, Mark.”

“Then why would… Ah, of course.” It didn’t take him long to pause, probably coming to the same paranoid conclusion I had hardly half an hour earlier.

“Yeah, someone else knows too, unless that was you.” I eyed him critically, trying to see of he was, in fact, hiding something. If he was, he’d gotten far better at controlling his expressions than I remember him being, all he was showing was confusion and a hint of worry, not the guilty sort, either.

“Oh, by the way, do you have any idea what this is?” I asked, handing over the grey stick to Marcus. He tentatively grabbed it, looking it over as he turned it in his hands, but he couldn’t discern anything more than I could. That is, until he grabbed the skinny end, at which point the tip of the other end hissed, and then burst into a shower of angry white sparks, sparks that did just about nothing as they fell down, aside from leaving small stains on clothing and upholstery alike.

“What the hell?” After a moment of confusion and shock, Mark tossed it, throwing it forward where it smacked the back of the driver’s seat and fell by our feet. The embers that were being tossed out stopped almost immediately after the thing left his hand, and all that remained after it became lost beneath the seats was a faint, lingering stench of heated metal.

“Vane, what was that? Was that the thing you conjured while we talked on the phone? I couldn’t feel any higher energy in it, how’d you get it to light like that? One second, I’m going to find it.” His concern slowly bled away, getting replaced by a childish curiosity as he unbuckled the outdated seatbelt and wormed out of his seat, hunting for the stick.

I arched an eyebrow at this behavior, and out of the corner of my eye I could see the driver doing the same in the rearview mirror, but Mark seemed unfazed as he hopped back up into the seat, new toy in hand. I had to admit, I was also a bit curious at the thing, I’d call it a wand in any other circumstances, but it only took a moment to realize it was just some combustion reaction that had no need for constraints like fuel or waste, instead just spewing out mostly harmless sparks for the remainder of our ten minute drive.

I’d tried to get him to continue our conversation, but he’d gotten more and more engrossed, and by the time our valet had stopped in front of the Bank, even shaking him wasn’t enough to break him out of his fugue. Fed up, I reached out and snapped the stick out of his hands, idly noting that it immediately went silent once more, and then looked at Mark as he stared dumbly at his hands.

“Hmm? Oh, Vane, could you hand that back, I was just about to figure something out?” The sheer innocence in his voice made me grow concerned, so I shook my head. Before he could push any further, I decided to do at least try dispelling it. Flexing my will, I decided to take hold of the Energy I made it with before I sent more Energy out, and I also decided to just call it Ether for now to keep it separate from the other energies in my head. At first, I just tried to manipulate it directly, but it was painfully obvious that despite being summoned, created, conjured, or whatever else by Ether, it wasn’t made of it anymore.

And so I was about to pump more Ether into it once I realized that it, and probably anything else that I created, was much more real than any other energy construct I’d heard of, before it struck me how bad an idea it would be to make the unpredictable sparkle-stick more unpredictable in hopes that it goes away. Instead, I bent the thing in half, and it had to be surprisingly brittle since it snapped in half almost immediately. I looked at Mark, and for a second I thought that the grown man sitting across from me was about to burst into tears.

Instead, he physically recoiled, looking almost ill for a tense moment before gulping down a breath of air and shaking his head. He looked me in the eye, more confused than anything else, and spoke, a single word summing up not only mine and his thoughts, but the driver holding open the door.

“What?” That seemed to be enough to defuse the eerie tension in the air, and I slipped out of the door a moment later, followed shortly after by my cousin. Then, I looked up at the towering structure before me.

I took in the Bank before me, in reality it was more like a small section of the Dome sequestered away exclusively for the Bank. It wasn’t so much a building as it was a castle, so aggressively boisterous that it overshadowed even the luxury of the park surrounding it. It may have only been dozens of stories tall, a limitation from the glasstisteel Dome, but it was probably at least half as wide.

The squat building was practically humming with power, but unusually, only of the technological sort. The Bank was one of a small list of major powers in either system that relied nearly exclusively on either higher energies or technology alone, usually there was some overlap even if magitech was still a faraway dream, but not for the Bank. Instead, each of their buildings, from the smallest leaf on a random asteroid to the true terran ‘trunk’ back on Earth was a veritable fortress defended exclusively by the marvels of machinery.

And clearly, this branch was no different. The squat building was likely that way partially thanks to the armaments and fortifications that were no doubt wired into every possible point, intent on making sure their property stays theirs, their people, secure, and most importantly, staying a neutral party through sheer brute force. But even more important than that, was the truly monumental server rooms I was sure each division had to have.

After all, handling the accounts of the trillions of humans in the Twin Systems would already be hard enough even if they didn’t need to make sure that every single limb, no matter how small and inconsequential, was completely and totally in-sync. As we strode towards the doors, I kept thinking of how mind-bogglingly powerful they need their servers to be, and how exactly they kept everything so… perfect. It was quantum computing brought as close to its logical conclusion as we could get it, and it was truly a marvel.

The inside of the structure was, in a word, art. In spite of the nearly warlike exterior, the sheer presence that it had being enough to warn off all but the strongest, or the most foolish, the interior was nothing like that. Everything seemed carved straight out of marble or nature itself, meshing artificially grown grass and trees seamlessly with the chiseled white room, a pond in the center carved out. And what a room it was, a ceiling so high above my head it seemed to be half the building’s height, and it seemed to be entirely one room, though there were a few offices dotted around, carved out of the trees, the walls, and for some, even the ceiling.

No doubt, those rooms weren’t just to discuss marks, they were also to discuss the few things that money could even buy anymore. Things like property, luxury, and inter-planetary travel were never going to be free of course, but food and medicine were available to just about everyone in all forms but the most high-end. But these weren’t what the Bank dealt in, what the marks they hoarded were meant to be spent on. They were a Bank, of wealth true, but also a bank of knowledge and power, and for the right price, that could be anyone’s.

But I wasn’t there for that, not now. I turned towards one of the nearby empty offices, hoping a floor-level teller was all I needed to change my ‘address.’ I waved Marcus along, leaving the diligent driver waiting for us by the doors. We were on the way to the room when I noticed someone I wasn’t really expecting to see. Donny, at least, I think his name was Donny, hand in hand with a woman I’d never seen before, and he seemed to take the look of recognition I gave him as an invitation to bound over, almost dragging along the petite girl. They were too close to ignore in the open-air plan of the Bank, and I begrudgingly stopped and turned towards them, idly noting both of their appearances.

Donny was about as tall as I was, a bit shorter, dressed like he’d just gotten out of some office job which was entirely possible. His partner seemed a bit more casual, but in that frustrating, high-end, refined casual that Mark and I were dressed as, too. Her image was slightly ruined, however, by the fact that one of her arms was very clearly recently injured, not only was she carrying it gingerly, the skin-wrap covering most of her forearm wasn’t quite the right skin tone to not be visible, apparently a rush-job. I suppose it was possible it could have also been a birthmark, but most birthmarks weren’t perfect rectangles of skin that didn’t seem to even have pores.

I did my best not to stare, but apparently, I was caught anyway if her glare was any indication. So I cleared my throat, and tried not to sound too reluctant as I introduced him to the clearly expectant Marcus.

“Mark, this is Donny, I met him the other day. Donny, Marcus, my cousin.” The two shared a nod, and he motioned towards the grumpy girl beside him.

“Well, this is my wife, Cass.” She waved and said a curt hello, and I could tell Donny wanted to continue the talk, but I simply didn’t, not right then, at least.

“Anyways, I’m sorry Donny, but I really can’t talk right now. I have an appointment here, and then I need to meet up with the rest of my family.” I tried to at least sound remorseful, and he seemed a bit reluctant but made a point to mention that he understood, and he’d like to at least try to meet up down the line.

I played along with it, vaguely humoring the idea as we finally got to the teller’s office. Donny seemed rather pushy, but he didn’t seem malicious about it. I didn’t exactly get why he seemed so intent on worming his way into my schedule, though. And then he spoke again.

“I’m serious now Vane, we gotta get together one of these days!” He might have been about to say more, but that sentence alone was enough to have me slam my fist to the wall beside me. The wall rippled in response to the blow, and what was an inviting entrance in the marble smoothly slid shut, leaving me alone in the room with a confused Marcus and a bewildered teller.