“Nope,” Professor Zaldia said as she leaned back in her chair on the final day of the class trip. “It’s either all of them or none of them.”

After leaving the king crab in the dust Juniper and Faro had legged it to the main camp just in case it decided it really wanted its pearl back. After that, with less than two days left in the trip, Juniper decided there wasn’t any point going after the crystal–they’d be lucky if they could make it there and back again within the time limit, let alone explore another potentially hostile confluence.

“But what am I supposed to do with them?” Juniper blurted out. She was sure Zaldia would at least trade for the lily and the pearl. Juniper and Faro hadn’t been able to discover if the pearl did anything aside from glowing, but the lily was clearly valuable.

The professor gave Juniper a light shrug. “That’s your problem to deal with.” As Juniper turned to leave, Zaldia added, “You can check with the exchange back at the academy–they’d probably be happy to take them off your hands.”

Juniper mouthed a word of thanks, and left to meet with Faro at the bottom of the hill where the class had assembled to wait for the teleportation.

“No luck?” he asked. The expression of dejection on Juniper’s face must have given away the answer, because he didn’t wait, continuing, “That’s Zaldia for you.”

The return home was as uneventful as the last time. Ghost’s messages had reverted to static, so right now she had nothing new she might chase.

For the final week the iteration Juniper spent her time in the company of Skystrall’s legacy, in which she was progressing more and more quickly, occasionally coming out of her shell to chat with Faro.

She traded the lily for some Soul treasures–you could never have enough–but kept the pearl in hopes of figuring out what it did. The exchange clerk had been unable to identify it, and despite studying it for a few hours over the rest of the week, neither was Juniper.

Juniper had noticed the young man was increasingly antsy as the prophesied apocalypse approached, still on the fence about whether to believe her or not. On the final day, Juniper and Faro descended into the city, sitting on a bench as they waited for the world to end.

As the seconds ticked down, Faro suddenly stood up from the bench, declaring, “Why are we even here?” He began to pace back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back.. “This is stupid, nothing is going to happen.” Despite his words, his voice betrayed his nervousness.

Before Juniper could open her mouth to reply, she noticed the stars growing more prominent in the twilight sky. “Faro,” she said softly, gesturing with her head to the sky when he turned to her. “Look.”

He did, and Juniper saw his face go slack, as he mutedly stared at the streaks of light beginning to stretch from the stars. “That’s not…” he said after a pregnant pause. “That’s not possible.” The look of dawning horror on his face mirrored Juniper’s own.

She’d avoided being outside for the event in all the past iterations–it hadn’t been a conscious decision, but one that Juniper now realized had been born by the most animalistic parts of her mind.

As the pervasive sense of wrongness threatened to engulf her, she now understood why her subconscious had been so adamant not to experience the event a second time. Even so, like a moth drawn to a flame, she couldn’t avert her eyes anymore.

The world shattered, and Juniper returned to class.

Her stomach tied itself into knots, and she gripped her desk as if holding on for dear life as she tried to keep herself from hurling. She ignored a buzzing itch at the back of her throat as she tried to maintain her composure. The nausea lost some of its intensity after a few moments, and Juniper raised her hand, drawing the professor’s attention. “May I… be excused?” she stammered weakly.

She saw the professor nod, and her chair screeched as she pushed herself up, taking off for the restroom.

It took ten minutes for Juniper to calm herself–it was only a small comfort that it took less than last time.

Idiot, she thought to herself.

She didn’t know why she’d thought she could withstand the event the second time. Perhaps the passing of time had dulled the edge of its memory, or perhaps it was advancement-induced bravado. Whatever the reasoning, Juniper had been wrong. The event was as viscerally disturbing as the first time.

She returned to class after, and checked Ghost’s note just in case–Ghost had been mostly quiet after declining to give Juniper any more aid, reverting to the simple dotted notes that seemed to be the baseline, so Juniper didn’t expect much.

You should really avoid doing that, it makes for an unpleasant show.

Juniper’s face went blank. Had she truly lost all semblance of privacy?

Cosmic voyeurs, she thought darkly.

***

After much deliberation, Juniper decided she’d spend the current iteration at the academy.

She’d had quite a few options arrayed before her: for one, she could steal Leon’s key and go for his treasure. This idea was the first Juniper scratched off her list–the time and effort required, as well as the rewards were unknown. She figured something with an assured reward would be a better use of her time.

Another option was trying her hand at Zaldia’s quest again. Unless the final item was better hidden than the previous two, she’d probably be able to finish it on the second attempt. Juniper had memorized the map through the maze, and had written it down as soon as she’d had a moment to herself just so she wouldn’t forget.

Given what she’d seen in the first two confluences, Juniper thought she’d be able to turn that probably into a certainly if only she could improve her mastery of Gravitation. For one, she could shave hours inside the distorted time confluence if only she didn’t have to climb up to the plateau the hard way.

Hence the third option, practice.

The idea that she’d had the previous iteration, that she might be able to practice on the trip, was flawed, built on top of assumptions that had been proven to be wrong.

The biggest one was combat. Advancing had given Juniper a good bump in her raw power, yes. But as it turned out, raw power was useless if your application of it was deficient. Advancing hadn’t turned Juniper into a skilled combatant overnight.

Even if she’d managed to find a few combat applications of Gravitation, they were rough around the edges–inflexible and costly. Not to mention she could barely maintain the battle trance in a real fight.

There was also the matter of flying. Juniper hadn’t really considered how she’d go about learning how to fly. Perhaps driven by her post-advancement euphoria, she’d just thought it would come to her naturally.

In reality, she didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin, and after smashing so many monsters into ceilings, the thought that she might accidentally do that to herself scared her, so she hadn’t even tried.

The academy was well-equipped for students learning how to fly, so she had everything she needed to practice.

Then, once she’d finally gotten these two aspects to what Juniper saw as an acceptable level, she would finally return to the forest and clear it of its riches.

She wasn’t sure if this was the best plan, but Ghost hadn’t snarked at her over it, so Juniper could only assume Ghost didn’t disapprove.

She still wasn’t sure what Ghost’s game was. The mysterious watcher had tipped her off about Skystrall’s book after the first iteration, which Juniper was deeply grateful for, but since then she felt like all of Ghost’s messages had been making fun of her.

It made Juniper wonder what Ghost even wanted from her. Was she just a passing amusement for some practitioner from a higher realm? If there were others trying to fix the loop–people of actual power, anyway–Juniper wouldn’t have been surprised if they staved off boredom by messing with lesser practitioners.

She’d seen Lord Graeme, after all. He’d killed Juniper and the rest of the thieves so casually he might have been just stepping on ants. She’d seen the look in his eye–he hadn’t seen them as people.

No, Juniper couldn’t count on practitioners from the higher realms to be predictable.

She shook her head, willing her mind away from this train of thought. Trying to understand Ghost could only be a waste of time.

And she had better things to do.

***

The dedicated flying gym was smaller than Juniper had expected.

That wasn’t to say it was small–at fifteen meters a side, the cube-shaped gym had more than enough space to practice taking off, landing, and general maneuvers. Juniper had just expected it to be longer. There wasn’t enough space to soar.

Though, soaring was putting the carts before the horses. Juniper had the fundamentals to get right first before she could even think of flying with any speed.

Poles of metal wrapped in rope jutted out of the walls at random heights and angles, creating a fake canopy students could stand on or grab onto. Aside from a small walking space on the sides, the floor had been removed entirely, a net hanging between the gym and the basement.

The gym did not see much traffic during this time of the year–the second years who might want to learn how to fly would not have reached Path Inscription yet, and most of the third years were likely to be done with it already. Those who hadn’t were kept busy by the midterms, so Juniper was blessedly alone for her first foray.

She donned the protective equipment–the helmet was mandatory, but the rest of the equipment, like arm and leg guards, were at the students’ discretion. There was a hook in the center of the ceiling to which a student could attach a safety line, but Juniper thought that was overkill.

She didn’t even consider the amulets–sure, they might save her from a nasty fall, but they were single use, which meant you had to pay for them.

Juniper chose a pair of wrist guards on top of the helmet, then took a deep breath. Her plan was simple–she would start by negating the effect of gravity on her body, then she’d walk off the edge and over the sagging net. That would let her essentially hover a few centimeters above something safe.

The plan went wrong as soon as she took the first step, and Juniper came to learn that when humans walked, the forces they were exerting were not exclusively horizontal.

They were, in fact, mostly vertical. Juniper barely pushed against the ground before achieving lift-off.

She gained about one meter of height before the panic set in and she dropped the spell. Juniper fell face-first onto the net, and it bounced a few times until she slid to the bottom.

She sat there for a few moments, bouncing on the net as her mind went back and analyzed everything that had gone wrong.

This was going to be more difficult than Juniper had expected.

***

It took Juniper a whole day of trying before she could hover successfully.

She’d had to entirely throw out the idea of walking off a straight surface with zero gravity–the forces her body was exerting against the ground were adding too much complexity to the problem, and she needed something slower.

Her solution was similar to the way she’d accidentally launched her book into the air the first time she’d tried to levitate something: a combination of two effects working together, essentially breaking the problem into two smaller problems..

Juniper canceled the effect of the planet’s gravity on herself, then added another gravity source that pulled her laterally over the net. The sensation was beyond strange–it was as if she was falling, but the direction of falling did not agree at all with the layout of the room.

Once she picked up a bit of speed, she canceled the second effect, momentum taking her nearly to the center of the room before stopping. She was left to hover in peace, with no torque or other variables to ruin her experiment. Juniper did a little fist pump in celebration.

She regretted that almost immediately, as the movement was enough to send her into a slow, barely-there spin.

And with the spinning came a slow but steadily intensifying wave of nausea.

She tried to ignore it for a minute, but the longer she kept spinning, the worse the sensation became. She twisted in the air, trying to cancel out the movement, but only managed to add another axis to the spin.

Juniper dropped the spell as she dry heaved, once again falling onto the net. She turned until she was lying on her back and pushed back her helmet to wipe away the sweat on her brow, staring at the ceiling in blank confusion.

Juniper wasn’t the kind to get motion sickness easily–she recalled a game from her childhood, where a seeker would be given a blindfold, made to spin until they lost all sense of direction before they set off to search for the other players. Some kids did not take well to being the seeker, but Juniper hadn’t been one of them.

Spinning in zero gravity, though, set her off like nothing before.

Well, aside from the event, Juniper thought. And I just got that one out of the way.

It was a bit of a damper on her plans–practicing new magic was difficult enough when you were in tip-top shape.

Juniper climbed out of the safety net, her arms still trembling from the discomfort. She sat on the edge for a few moments, catching her breath, before rising. She reached for the calm of the battle trance–made ever so slightly more difficult now, by the added distraction–and began to work her spells again.

***

By the end of the first week, Juniper was able to gain something resembling a sliver of control over her ‘flying.’

Thinking of it in terms of controlled falling, as opposed to true flight, had helped–since falling was what she was doing in truth. Figuring out the extent and limitations of her abilities had smoothed out the rest.

Canceling gravity, unsurprisingly, came naturally to her. It was the fundamental negation of her Path, and negations were supposed to come easily. She’d only done it selectively until now, but some experimentation had shown she could use it on multiple targets at once, as well as in a small field, too, without draining her Soul excessively.

Gravitational anchors, in contrast, were much more complex. Juniper could only have one active at any given time, and each target it affected raised the energy expenditure significantly. She could relocate it at will, but between the target’s momentum and the new anchor point, but the resulting trajectory wasn’t always straightforward to calculate.

As a result, Juniper could now fall in roughly the direction she wanted to, as long as she didn’t have to swerve more than minute course corrections–and as long as her stomach was empty and she didn’t need to be presentable for the next ten minutes.

By Juniper’s reckoning, the week was a complete disaster.

Juniper had thought several days of practice would be enough for her body to acclimatize with the strange forces she was subjecting herself to, but she’d had no such luck. It was less intense than when she’d started, but not enough to make a difference.

Ghost must have taken pity on her, though, as on Monday morning her bathroom cabinet note awaited with a single line written on it–’For the sickness’, it said, along with a library entry. From the coordinates, it seemed to be close to one of Skystrall’s legacy components.

Juniper marched to the library in a hurry–if Ghost had a solution for her, she wasn’t going to waste any more time.

The book, though, only left her standing puzzled in the middle of the library’s medical section. On the Therapeutic Usage of Ground Frog Legs was not what she’d expected–she wasn’t even sure why the book was still in the library, as Juniper was pretty sure it was disproven science.

As she stood there frowning at the book, wondering if perhaps there was some secret hidden inside it, she didn’t notice the person approaching her until she heard her name.

“Juniper?” someone asked, startling Juniper out of her wits. “Hey there.” She turned to find Varis, an easy smile on his face.