"Go ahead dear, I know you said it uses multiple abilities so just start with the simplest part and we'll work our way up while I calibrate the equipment."

Talia had put a loose collar around my neck - it didn't lock, thankfully - and made me hold some strange rods in my hand. She was perched precariously on a stool nearby and had arranged several trays of materials and components in front of her, and currently was examining a thing that reminded me a lot of an old video I'd watched online about a pinwheel calculator - it was a few connected drums made up of a hundred or more gears.

"This is more for... calibration," she'd said, "but there's a similar device for combat. You turn the gears to the right configuration to cast a spell and send some mana through it, then twist them again to change it to the next spell you need. Very difficult to learn, of course, and very prone to syntax errors."

I meditated, but didn't turn on divination quite yet which meant I was just standing in my memory palace. I could hear, distantly, the gear segments clicking as Talia rotated them. After maybe fifteen minutes she had me do the next part, so I turned on divination and watched while she did her work. Seeing her adjust the gears - including swapping some out entirely - was impressive even without knowing what precisely she was up to. If I understood things correctly it seemed like she was probably trying to write a program of sorts on the fly, and was using the collar and bars on me to somehow have a... vibe, or something... to compare it to.

I walked around some, examining the room. It was mostly empty, just a little workshop used by students to do experiments and things. I made my body pace around in case it made a difference, but the only thing Talia commented on was when I popped my head through a wall to peek into the next room.

"Did you just do something different, dear?"

"Not fundamentally different, but more... mana intensive."

"Good, good, wait a moment and then do it again when I tell you. One more moment... just have to... okay, go for it."

I popped into the next room once more - it was an empty classroom - and then stepped back.

"Good, good, that's fine then. As you said, same thing but more drain on your reserves. Don't do it again in case this takes long enough to run out of mana, but I've accounted for it."

After another fifteen minutes she announced she was almost certain she had it figured out, and had me remove the collar and place the bars down on the workbench.

"Come here dear, place your hand on this and we'll lock it in place. This will replicate the effect I've plotted out, and if it works then I can build the device for real. The finished product will work more efficiently because I'll make it out of alchemical materials, and of course it will be more portable - you wouldn't want to cart this whole rig around, would you?"

I could feel it right away. Using divination was still draining mana, but it was a noticeable reduction - I'd be able to keep it up for a very long time, assuming I didn't poke through walls. Speaking of, I ducked out of the room for just a moment and confirmed that that, too, was cheaper although not by as much. "Talia this is amazing, it's exactly what I needed."

"Good, good! If I'm reading this right, you're... spying on yourself?"

"That's about it, yeah. Look, you keep telling me not to worry about it when I ask about the price but... I have lots of money coming, eventually, it's just I don't have much on hand."

"Oh, of course! Well you know, I'm talented enough that I don't work on anything that doesn't catch my fancy - thus the device you so cleverly named Mister Creepy, which while useful isn't the sort of thing you make for mass consumption."

"Yeah, I guess the safe bet is just cranking out a bunch of... I don't know, healing devices or water heaters or something."

"Quite! But as I've mentioned, this particular device is well below my skill level. So do you know why I've offered to make it for you?"

I thought about it. She liked me, I was pretty sure that was because I'd made it clear I loved the Mister Creepy device. But there had to be something else. "Oh! Uh, is it because you're hoping to get more time with Errod's glove?"

"It is! Good job. I do also enjoy your company, dear. Genuinely. But while you work to scrounge up the money to pay for this device I'd love if you can bring your friend - or at the very least his hand, though ideally they shouldn't be too far apart for long - down to see me. I was too busy to do more than glance while getting him set up, but it's a true work of art and I would love to get some actual quality time with it."

"I can't promise, but I'll see what I can do. He's been... pretty closed-lipped about it."

In fact, Errod was still avoiding talking about the details of how it worked. It clearly had a mind of its own to some extent, and seemed... if not benign then at least not hostile. Errod appeared to still be himself, and the hand wearing the glove had only done things on its own at appropriate moments so far as I was aware. But something was bothering him, something he didn't really want to discuss with us.

"Just a few more adjustments, dear. Here, try again."

It was the same as far as I could tell, as were the next two. Finally one was different but worse, and then it was back to the same basic thing. Clearly Talia was doing something, but it had to be some very granular adjustments. She clicked one more gear, and I stepped back into my divination - then nearly fell over. I was seeing double, with one of the visions seemingly where I'd been about forty minutes prior - walking towards the building with this workspace in it. I snapped back to my body and shook my head, which was suddenly ringing.

"Oh, man. That one... uh... something bad. I don't know."

Talia looked confused. "Sorry, dear. I don't know what would have caused that. It should have just been a minor adjustment, if anything there would have only been a slight variation in your mana usage."

I excused myself and headed outside, bumping into a few people as I hurried past with my head down. "Sorry," I murmured, "head exploding."

When I got into the fresh air I felt a little better, and so I tried my divination again to see if it was fixed - once again there was the double vision, and I could see myself putting on the collar and picking up the rods. It was like there was some sort of delay. I stepped out into the memory palace and stared - everything was shaking.

The furniture was only vibrating, but the smaller items were bouncing all around and then abruptly they stopped as a crack appeared in the air. It was just a hairline fracture, but it was like when a mirror was damaged and the two parts of the reflection no longer lined up properly - my vision of the room was skewed just a bit. Worse, I realized that on one side there were minor differences. The television was gone, there was an extra door in the wall, some notes pinned up like a conspiracy theorist's board complete with red thread. I could only see it in bits and pieces as I looked around the crack - no, cracks. It was spreading.

I popped back to the real world, though it felt like I could still reach out and touch the memory palace if I tried. Had Talia deliberately done something to me? No, if that had been her goal she could have just killed me. I put on that collar easily enough, it's not like she would have had to tell me if that had been some arcane device made to... I don't know, pop my head clean off. It could have been an accident, but she had seemed so confused - and from the admittedly little bit I understood about magic item creation a little tweak to some variable shouldn't mess me up like this. Even if it had, why would it still be going?

There was one easy troubleshooting step I could take, of course. I turned on my fate vision and sure enough, those were trippy as well. The threads were vibrating, and a few of them were actually branched off somehow which should be impossible. That seemed to imply it wasn't Talia's item, since I already knew artificers couldn't tamper with fate threads using runes. There would have had to be a wild mage involved, which... well, could it be her? I didn't think she was nearby, but it was possible she'd been able to do something through our connection.

I tried the divination again, and it was still giving me double vision - I was testing with Talia and standing outside the building. Was it still just delayed by forty minutes or so? It was hard to say, because everything was a little fuzzy. Did I look different, somehow? Was I wearing different clothes? That didn't make any sense. The other possibility would seem to be that I wasn't really looking at divination at all, and was instead... what, dreaming? It was giving me a headache, and I was starting to think that nothing was actually wrong. It was entirely possible that I was just losing my mind.

Back to the memory palace, with its spiderweb cracks everywhere. Then... were my memories damaged too? It seemed likely, since everything else was. I stepped into the hallway, pushing past some sort of resistance, and sure enough. The doors were crooked, there was some sort of red thread running along the floor to god knew where, and I could hear voices echoing indistinctly in the distance. I opened a door at random and stepped through, and it was a perfectly normal memory from when I was working at the hardware store. No cracks, nothing out of place.

I leaned against the shelf of garden hoses and tried to think through what was happening. It didn't feel like an attack, really. It was like a dream version of the memory palace had merged with the real one and... well, okay, even the 'real' one was essentially a figment of my imagination. But it had been static. Consistent. Maybe it was a side effect of having three Dumines, or just some passing thing because I hadn't been sleeping well. But even when I'd slept in the memory palace all the strange shit had been outside the windows, so something must have actually changed to cause this phenomenon.

The memory was stable. That was a place to start. I could poke around, try some different memories, and see if any of them looked funny. First things first, something recent - I concentrated on finding a memory from the day before, and walked through another door. I was standing on a cliffside, overlooking an incredible crumbling city with perfect white spires reaching into the sky. What the fuck. There was something tickling at the back of my memory, something that should be in a city with pointy white towers. I saw it. At one end of the city there was the jagged broken shell of a crystal sphere - like an enormous snow globe. It was the focus point of the magic that kept the ancient city of Trallanar running. Trallanar, from the Jake Ross novels. This had to be Brynnklar.

Well I sure as hell hadn't been there yesterday.

Tempting as it was to stay, I still needed to try and figure out what was happening to me. I tried another door at random and saw what looked like a street in Phoenix but... grayscale. Everything was gray, and slightly fuzzy-looking as if it was made out of ash. I could see myself in the memory, the only thing in color, tromping along leaving little puffs of dust with each step. I watched for a moment but the silent landscape was freaking me out. This one had to be my imagination, which meant the one of Brynnklar was probably just made up too - though I hadn't thought I was that creative.

Next I tried three different specific memories, and they all worked fine. So the doors were only doing something odd when I left it vague. I wasn't sure what else to try that could teach me anything. I'd looked at recent memories, both specific and general, random doors, memories from right after I arrived in this world, memories from Earth. The last thing seemed to be trying one of the memories that had been tampered with.

The best way to do that seemed like it would be to go to the last real memory I had before the tampering started, since that way I could see if things got blurry like normal at the end or turned into... I don't know, me on the moon or something equally ridiculous. I found it no problem, and there I was just like last time I'd viewed this memory. Barely sixteen, handcuffed to a chair. I was sighing, and squirming. Finally a cop walked up to me - wait, had this been in the memory before?

"Miss Smith," he said, "I'm getting kicked to voicemail boxes at CPS. If you can't remember the name of your group home or case manager it's going to be a bit, the emergency Child Protective Services lady is a bit overbooked tonight."

I hesitated, then sighed. "I don't know if he'll... I have a number, he's not my case manager anymore but maybe he knows someone?" And I rattled off Bill's number. He'd put his personal cell number on the back of his card and at some point I'd memorized it, because he had seemed like the only halfway decent adult out there. The cop nodded and walked off, and then... it felt like the memory skipped a bit. Like I was fast-forwarding.

"Hey, kid. Trespassing, vandalism, shoplifting, or general nuisance?" Bill was smiling when he walked in, because Bill always smiled. It was really my main complaint about him. Bill was always in a good mood, he was handsome in a very stereotypical and non-sexy way, and was enough of a boy scout to make Errod uncomfortable. Of course he had come down to the police station rather than just telling the cops who to call.

He did make a phone call, though, which sounded from the teeny snippets I could catch like it was maybe with Child Protective Services. Then he talked to some police officers in a huddle for a bit, and finally came back over to me and crossed his arms in his standard "I'm being stern but I'm still your buddy" guidance counselor pose.

"Okay, they're letting you off with a warning. Um. So I hear you're at Sunrise Peak, down by the river."

"Right! Yeah, that was the name. I wasn't there long, they... did not make a good impression."

"Yeah. Well I had a few kids there, they didn't make a good impression on me either. I... really don't want to take you back there, kid. I talked to them and the guy on duty sounds like he wants to make you regret running off. You know you could always call me if he lays a hand on you, but there's a lot he could do that wouldn't really get him in trouble."

"Yeah. It's fine. I'll figure it out."

Bill looked nervous, for the first time I could remember. The smile slipped a little. "Do you know what 'kinship care' is?"

"Kin is, like, your family? I just have an uncle, and I don't think he'll take me back or he would've when mom disowned me."

"Kinship care is partly for family, yeah, but it's actually defined pretty loosely. It's just foster care but you don't get paid, and practically anyone that has any prior relationship with the kid can do it. Teachers, sometimes, or parents of friends."

"Nope, none of those either."

"... former case workers?"

Well that couldn't be right. That had to be a fake memory, there was just no way Bill would stroll in and invite me to live at his house just because I had been picked up for trespassing again. Right? Nobody spontaneously took on a foster kid, especially one they knew for a fact was a troubled piece of shit that ran away constantly and lit a kid's hair on fire. I had to stop for a moment in surprise - I'd somehow forgotten about burning Kara's braid off her head. The scene around me shifted to that day, and I quickly ran back into the hotel hallway before I had to see what I'd done. There were a lot of things I didn't like thinking about from back then.

I didn't have enough mana to do actual divination to confirm the memory since looking at anything from Earth wiped me out, and anyway with divination acting funny I wasn't sure it would mean anything. Still, if whatever was going on actually was showing me things that had been blurred out before it seemed like I should give it a shot. I tried to find that memory I'd viewed before of me and Bill in his car, but I ended up with something a little different. It was still me and Bill, but we were walking down some stairs from a little apartment over a garage - not a normal sight in Phoenix, though I'd seen them a lot when I lived in New Jersey. It was dark, but still warm out - the heat that had been absorbed by the concrete all day would take all night to radiate back out in the summer.

Memory-me sneered. "I know you're a robot that isn't programmed to hate, but fuck do I hate Greg."

"Language," Bill said, "but yeah, that's okay. He's not a very nice guy. Greg had a really rough life, and he's always worried something bad is going to happen. You remind him of being a kid, I think, and that reminds him of what that was like which was - as I mentioned - not very good. And I can't say more than that, but just know it's not personal. And I won't make you go up there unless it's an emergency."

I nodded, but hesitated rather than going through the side door into Bill's house. He had opened the door, but he noticed I was standing there and raised an eyebrow at me. I was still quiet, but I know myself well enough to recognize the face I made when I was trying to decide if it was worth making some comment.

Finally I cracked. "Bill? Why did you stop being a case worker, really? What was Greg talking about?"

Bill put a plate and cup he'd been holding inside on a counter, and then let the door swing shut without actually going inside. He turned and walked over to the car and hopped onto the hood so he could lay against the windshield, then patted the spot next to him and memory-me climbed up. The stars were bright, and the air smelled like freshly mowed lawn. There were crickets chirping everywhere, and I had the sudden odd feeling like that car was a raft drifting down a calm, wide river - though when I looked around the memory hadn't changed.

"You joked, a few times, about me being too perfect. Well there's something Greg and I have in common. I had a... bad childhood too, and my step mom and I fought a lot, and some stuff kinda stuck with me. And now, sometimes, things come back up that remind me of worse times and I maybe overreact. I've moved more than you'd expect, and I've quit a lot of jobs. I don't run away the way that you do, and not for the same reasons, but we're both chronic offenders. And probably Greg is right, that... I shouldn't get you into a position where you could be hurt by that pattern of behavior."

Memory-me nodded, then grinned a little. "Well, if it's any consolation, without you I probably would have died a month ago from choking on asbestos and falling off an abandoned building into a dumpster filled with used needles."

"No bears?"

"The bears would come later, to scavenge my poor ruined corpse."

I could see why the wrong memory had popped up - both involved Bill and the car, and both had a mention of bears and this Greg person. Yet again, it felt too detailed to just be made up on the fly but I wasn't sure why I would be seeing my original memories suddenly. Something was going on, clearly, but I just couldn't figure out what. I headed back to the memory palace which was still all fractured and strange, and just kind of paced around. I didn't really want to pull Katrin or Errod in while it was looking like that in case it did something to them, but I wanted some kind of second opinion. In a pinch I was hopeful that burning out my Dumine and starting all over might fix it, but that was something like plan Z. If I couldn't learn anything, plan A would have to be to just wait and hope it went back on its own.

I was just about to leave when I saw something moving - it was only partially visible, bits and pieces coming into view past the cracks as it walked towards me. Finally the face appeared, and for a moment I assumed it was the wild mage but I quickly saw the differences - no scars, more put together, and most importantly she was smiling at me - but her eyes were shining, like she was holding back tears. I held a hand towards her and for just a moment felt our fingers entwine before she vanished and the room was back to normal - cracks gone, other door gone, everything as it was. She had been opening her mouth in that last second as if she wanted to tell me something - had it been something breaking into my mind past my defenses? It hadn't felt hostile. It had felt familiar.

And while some of the memories I'd found were nonsense, there was someone that looked just like me but had been to Brynnklar. The last time I'd seen her had been a vision in my head as she died, and I knew ghosts and magic and all sorts of other things were real in this world so it seemed possible I'd somehow just seen Connie again. I just wasn't sure what that meant.