They say that idle hands are the devil’s playthings. I wondered what that made an idle devil’s hands. I had quite a bit of time to myself and not much to fill it.

After I got back to my room, most of my sources of amusement were shut out. When I tried to message Kiyo, I received a message saying that non-essential communications had been temporarily suspended to prevent the spread of inaccurate information. It was the same with our discussion boards and external social sites. All I could access were online texts from the school library. It looked like Rose’s guess was completely right.

I made a note to myself to look into how that was done. If the school or the League could shut off our electronics like that, Maggie and I could almost certainly do the same. Kiyo had mentioned to me that everything one did online had a digital footprint, so I decided not to risk it being known that Soren Marlowe was searching anything questionable during a lockdown.

I needed to distract myself somehow, though. I couldn’t drink myself silly to block out the images of dead and dying demons, like I had back home. I also couldn’t focus well enough to tackle my homework just yet. I decided my room could use a good tidying.

While getting my laundry ready to go down the chute, I found my abused clothes from my fight with Haru. They still smelled of ash, but I had expected that. I wondered if I was better off destroying them, rather than raising questions about their sorry state. I decided I might as well; my rewards from the Headmaster could buy some new civilian clothes.

While fussing with the pants, I found something hard in the front pocket. My lingering terrors vanished as I realized I finally had a toy worth playing with. “Well, well, Maggie. You were so intent on chasing me out that you forgot your disguise fabricata!”

The long, wooden wand was notched with intricately carved runes. I focused my magic through the device and Junko Kazushi appeared in my bathroom mirror. I hadn’t ever had the chance to experiment with the magic when I wasn’t on a dangerous mission. Human disguise magic seemed to be one area where they were definitely ahead of us back home. We could pretty easily scramble our features, but the sort of picture perfect recreations that the Holy Brotherhood regularly employed were beyond us. What was their trick?

First, I had to check the limits of the disguise. My mind immediately went into the gutter.

“Hm, Maggie was right,” I said in a melodic voice as my hands passed through the illusion. “They are just light projections. What a shame; she has a nice pair.”

I couldn’t even get a good look at ‘my’ body, since the disguise kept me clothed, even when I removed my uniform underneath. I had feared as much, after the way that Maggie’s illusory hat had stayed in place in high wind. The disguise was not useful for anything prurient, unless I could get Kiyo alone and have her roleplay as the older nurse.

That thought made me feel a little dirty when I grabbed the scarf she’d knitted me as a gift. It also vanished into the disguise. Evening tying it around my face like a bandana didn’t change the image in front of me, though my voice was muffled.

“It seems I can only look like an on-duty nurse. That’s a letdown.”

Speaking of my voice, I heard a different voice in my ears, but was that an illusion, or was the wand truly warping my words? There was only one way to find out. It took me a few tries, but I found a voice recording app on my smartphone. My people’s tech level was far worse than in the human realms, but I’d finally become somewhat competent with the device.

“One, two, three, four.” I discarded that. For once, I didn’t have any feathers to ruffle. I decided I might as well have some fun. “Are you ready for your exam, Mr. Marlowe? Or, would you prefer to examine me first?”

The voice that played back over my phone was definitely female, and a good approximation of the banter of the ladies of the evening from back home. I deactivated the spell, since that voice was only sexy when attached to somebody besides me. If I didn’t think that Kiyo would be horribly offended and question the source of the wand, I might have tried to use it to spice up our next bit of alone time.

My tests had shown a few key details. Somehow, these runes contained not only an exact duplicate of Junko Kazushi, but also her voice. How in the world did they accomplish that? Many of the more complex human fabricta I had encountered looked like printed circuit boards, with minute runic patterns. This was a simple, hand carved device. The wood was an excellent conductor of magical energy, and easy to carve, but there simply didn’t seem to be enough runes to contain the totality of the woman’s appearance.

It took me a while, but I recorded the hundreds of carved runes onto a sheet of paper. It was easy enough to see how the stanzas were grouped. Determining their function took longer. I couldn’t think of the last time I’d been so devoted to my actual schoolwork.

After a few hours of effort, I had decoded most of the stanzas. I wouldn’t have been able to create a spell that complex on my own, but I could get the gist of what they meant to accomplish. Some defined how far the projected energy would extend from the user’s body. Others worked to render any parts that extended past the disguise invisible. I recorded those for later, since if properly applied, they could give me an invisibility fabricata. I wondered if the humans had realized that. If they hadn’t, that was just another feather in my cap.

What I didn’t see any hint of was how the disguise was actually encoded. I turned the wand over and over, looking for the missing magical code. I wasn’t sure what I was after, since if I had missed the coded magic, they were absolutely microscopic. I hadn’t ever thought of how to express a human face and voice in runes before, but it would have required thousands of characters.

I was about to give up when I discovered a small notch towards the base of the wand. I pulled down on it and a small spring ejected a piece of wood the size of my thumbnail. “There we are!”

The outer edge was the same white oak as the rest of the wand, but covered in minute, runic circuitry. The wooden piece protected a piece of plastic that reminded me of the game cards in Kiyo’s GoSato. In fact, if I didn’t miss my guess…

Kiyo and I had cashed in some of the reward points the day before to get me my own GoSato and a small collection of games. I popped out the puzzle game I’d wasted much of the previous evening on and inserted the memory card. It was a perfect fit, but the game console told me the card was invalid.

I checked my phone, but it didn’t have any openings in it except the charging port. I struck paydirt on my school PC, though. I got a popup message asking me what I wanted to do with the files. I couldn’t begin to make an informed choice, so I selected the prompt to use the defaults. The computer opened up a music app and some 3D imaging software I had never touched before.

“A. E. I. O. U. Ka. Ki. Ku…” It sounded different coming out of the computer’s tinny speakers than from my own mouth, but that was definitely Nurse Kazushi’s voice. I closed the player, since the Japanese sounds were gibberish to me, and the school’s translator fabricata didn’t see a way to localize them for me.

The 3D software was more interesting. I was presented with a perfect model of the nurse that I could rotate any way I liked. If I opened up the folder representing my new memory card, it was full of normal pictures of the nurse, taken from different angles. Somehow the software must have taken those disparate images and knitted them together.

I felt a sense of triumph at having solved the puzzle. It was a shame the Horde would never be able to replicate it, since we didn’t have computers, much less the right type of storage cards.

I, however, did have a computer. I didn’t quite understand what I was looking at in the folder, and I’d have to fiddle with the formatting, but I had the tools I needed to make my own disguise. Maggie hadn’t asked after the wand yet, and with any luck, she wouldn’t.

I almost cried out with joy. I’d found something I’d needed since landing in the human realms: a way to disappear. It didn’t solve my issues with transportation or money, but if I could get into one of the nearby cities, I could lay low indefinitely. I could even prepare more memory cards to give me more disguises.

I chuckled at the irony. Being locked down had set me free. It’s a strange world we live in.