World Gi-385. A land where tyranny and suffering held the populace in its wretched, iron grip. Greedy kings fought over scraps of land, letting their citizens suffer as the price they were all too willing to pay to stroke their own egos. Such a World would have been left very much alone, the strife its people created for themselves regarded as nothing but their sole responsibility.

But one day, a pair of monarchs changed their fate when they found something new to exploit. Something that wasn’t theirs, something that was never theirs to begin with. When one plays with fire, they get burned. When one steals away children, the police come knocking.

And knock, they did.

Situated on a mountainside clearing, a two acre space of flat land was cleared of vegetation and cordoned off with a chain link fence and barbed wire, a series of imposing gray concrete towers erected along its perimeter. Binocular-wielding guards and dedicated snipers manned each elevated platform, keeping constant vigil of the surrounding lands. Under their watchful aegis were a series of tents that housed the bulk of TOAL’s agents who had come here to rescue several of their own.

In the second largest of the tents, several men and women paced around the roughly paved floor, somehow managing to kick up dirt in their frantic movements that stained their black boots a dark shade of brown.

“Alright, people!” shouted Abhi, dressed in a pair of military fatigues like the others around him despite his lack of any actual combat experience, albeit in a paler shade of camouflage green. He was just the resident runic researcher, after all. “Final checklist before we start the scanner!”

“Base is clear of any possible magical interference,” replied a bespectacled woman with black hair tied in twin braids. She wore a similar set of fatigues and held both a clipboard and walkie-talkie in her hands. “And our snipers say the surrounding landscape is clear as well.”

“Good. Arla, any local forms of magic we might’ve missed?”

“No, sir!” replied the newcomer with a salute. Rather than the standardized set of camo, she wore flowing blue robes with a small placard on her left breast that clarified her identity as TOAL’s guest. “I’ve accounted for all known forms of magic used by the Valenloft Kingdom and their enemy. None of them should interfere with rune magic, according to my research!”

“And Skills?” asked Abhi. “Do their magical signatures create any interference?”

“Skills have magical signatures?” she asked in surprise.

“Where do you think they come from?” asked the other woman with a disapproving look. “Thin air?”

“…Yes?”

The two scientists let out a sigh, causing their local arcane consultant to blush and try to hide the lower half of her face behind her hood.

Abhi quickly recovered to console her, however. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve never seen a Skill that interfered with rune magic before. It just seems to transcend Systems like that.”

Arla nodded in response, content that her mistake didn’t make her look too bad in front of her brand new employers. After defecting from King Reginald III and leaving his services as the Valenloft Kingdom’s court mage, Arla began assisting the scientists of the Terran Otherworldly Advocacy League in their quest to find the other group of Earthers who had been summoned by King Reginald’s current enemy.

“So, Abhi,” said Arla with a curious smile, shuffling up to the Indian man who was now busy fiddling with a series of dials on a large machine. “What is this thing? And how will it help find your lost soldiers?”

“Magical scanner,” tersely replied Abhi. “And we’re looking for kids, not soldiers.”

“Right, sorry,” said Arla with another apologetic nod. “How does it work? Divination magic? And how did you take into account the interference from pre-existing divinations?”

“That’s right,” replied the researcher, not bothering to look up from his work. “Because of existing divinations from our enemies metaphorically clogging up the airwaves, we’ve reduced the complexity of the actual spell drastically. So we’ll be limiting the base range and complexity of the query to a few square yards and 20 milli-tingles.”

“Milli-what?” she asked, honestly perplexed. “And how are you going to search the entire continent with a spell like that?!” Was she being taken for a fool? “Just what are you playing at?” she asked angrily.

Abhi mostly ignored the outburst and completed a final set of dial tuning before pressing a big, red button and finally turning around to regard his guest as the machine whirred to life. “You know the basics of divination magic, right?”

“Of course!” she huffed. “You pose a question, offer multiple choices, and you get an answer for each choice from the Ether based on how well you cast the spell and how much magic you poured into it. A better spell means you can ask more choices and get easier to read answers!”

“Pretty simple way of putting it,” he replied nonchalantly. “And the ‘answer’ you get is a kind of tingling sensation, right?”

“That sensation has a name, the Reginalds. Since King Reginald is always correct, the correctness of a choice dictated by the spell is named after him.”

“Pfft,” laughed the researcher. “That sounds stupid! We just call them the tinglies. Well, I call them that. Our official name is just tingles. And a single tingle is essentially a light, full body sensation. So 20 milli-tingles is about 2% of that, a bare pulse on a couple of nerves.”

“2%?!” Arla exclaimed. “No human being can make sense of that! How will you get anything from such a spell?!”

“That’s why a human being isn’t going to be feeling it,” corrected Abhi, waving his right index finger in the air. “You are aware of automatic spellcasting, correct? Especially with divination magic?”

“Of course,” she huffed again. “I designed my very own automatic divination spell to allow for the easy searching of scrolls and tomes based on the patron’s request in the Valenloft royal library! They don’t even have to be a magic user in their own right to make use of it! I made sure the outputted Reginalds… I mean tingles, where high enough for anyone to make sense of.”

“Have you ever considered passing the output of the spell to something other than another person?”

“What would be the point of that? An object can’t feel, and even then, it can't tell anyone how successful a choice is. That is, if it even could discern between choices at that.”

“Well then,” smiled the researcher. “What if I told you that this device, this object, could do all of the above?”

“H-how?” Arla stuttered, eyes wide. “And all of them?”

“It’s simple! First, we cultured some nerve cells and stuck it to an electrode to measure electrical activity.”

“Cells? Electrical? You mean like lightning…”

“Pretty much, but at a microscopic scale. Maybe I’ll get you a biology textbook later for you to read up on cells, but they’re pretty much the smallest unit of life that make up plants and animals and such.”

The sorceress nodded along. “So you took part of a person and found a way to measure how it feels? What happens to the person it’s made out of? Do they survive the procedure so you can get more?”

“What? Nah, we just take a skin sample, they’re perfectly fine afterwards,” replied the Indian man, not really catching what Arla was implying. “But everything else you said pretty much sums it up.”

“Alright, so how do you deal with the other issues?”

“So the electrode can pick up on incredibly small tingles, so 20 milli isn’t that hard to detect. After that, we just pass in a single choice at a time, so there’s no need to have the nerves go ‘looking’. We tell it what to look at!”

“Interesting…” she replied, nodding her head. “And the range? You’ll be limited to only a few yards around this device to query if you use such a weak spell. How will you search an entire continent?”

“Right,” the researcher nodded back. “Rune magic has more uses than ripping a hole across Worlds. They can also rip holes across space in a single World, and if the hole is small and temporary enough, it doesn’t even cost that many resources!”

“The archives mentioned something about that, but most of my focus was on understanding the summoning spell first and foremost, so I didn’t have time to look into alternative uses,” replied the blue-robed woman with a melancholic sigh.

“No problem, luckily we have a pretty good grasp on the subject, so we don’t need you for that.”

Arla raised her eyebrows at his reply. Perhaps they were even more intelligent and powerful than she had originally thought?

“Anyway, we just open a large number of those tiny holes all over the continent and cast the weakest divination spell we can manage for that duration, getting a relatively accurate answer for each check! So anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours, we should have an answer as to where the kids are.”

“Wow. Then what kind of question are you asking? Do you have enough details about these children to narrow it down enough to make the spell more easily castable?”

“Regrettably, no,” frowned Abhi. “So instead, we’ll look for traces of the rune magic that summoned them in the first place. It won’t linger on any of the ritual’s casters, but it has a tendency to stick onto anyone who was summoned. And that’ll be our ticket.” He turned back to the rest of the tent and addressed them in a half-shout. “Alright, everyone! The machine’s running, and once it’s done, let’s save some lives!”

The rest of the tent cheered along with him. Arla raised an uneasy fist into the air along with several of the more confident others.

The twin-braided scientist gave her a look at the halfhearted response. “Something wrong?” she asked, eyeing their guest. “I bet our motivations are a stretch from Reggie’s.”

“They are,” she replied hesitantly. “But that’s not what has me worried. King Reginald is not one to take an insult sitting down, and everything you’ve done since you arrived has been nothing but an insult to him.”

“We have enough soldiers and resources of our own to rout an army even if he does try to visit,” replied the female researcher with a confident smile. “And someone as hot headed as Reggie would’ve launched an attack by now.”

“That’s what I’m scared of,” sighed Arla. “When he’s really upset, he doesn’t rush into things. His fury turns cold and focused. If he isn’t attacking us now, then he’s planning something terrible. I can’t dare to even imagine what he has in store for us…”

“Whatever it is, we have contingencies in place,” replied the other woman with a reassuring smile. “And besides, we have our ways to keep him distracted.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Arla with fearful eyes. “By Allivaine’s grace, I hope you’re right.”

“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be alright,” replied Abhi with a comforting smile. “Why don’t you head back to your tent to rest for a bit, or use the restroom? We’ll need you later when the machine actually finds something.”

“You’re too kind, sir, I’ll be making my leave,” said Arla with a shallow curtsy. She swung her flowing robes to her side as she turned around and made her way out of the command center.

“She seems nice,” said Abhi as the sorceress was finally out of earshot.

The other researcher simply stared at him with an incredulous look before shaking her head and moving her attention back to the machine.

Arla laid down in her bed with a knowing smile. She exhaled a tightly held breath and let out a silent giggle. “I hope I didn’t ham it up too much, back there.”

Out of all of the career moves she’d made in her life, this was probably one of the best. She didn’t feel any particular remorse for her decision to leave king Reginald’s side, just like she didn’t feel any for squeezing every drop of knowledge she could out of her newfound employers either!

It was her love of magic that allowed her to rise through the ranks and become second to none in the Valenloft Kingdom, but her position of court mage wasn’t for any particular love of her sovereign. It was just the easiest way to gain access to the kingdom’s archives and arcane secrets to further her own growth.

“Bigger brains in town means bigger people to benefit from,” the woman whispered to herself in glee. “And that Abhi, he’s the biggest and leakiest of them all!”

While the imagery that the phrase summoned made Arla grimace, she quickly shook the feeling away and focused on its actual meaning. From her experiences so far, the arcane researcher was a total softie underneath his aloof exterior and was willing to share his secrets when the sorceress played the part of a cowed native, in complete contrast to her old employer’s soldiers. She was quite surprised to see such a character in someone so high-ranking, but Arla chose not to look her gift horse in the mouth. Not until she’d learned everything it had to teach her.

“And just when I got everything… Reggie had for me! That kid doesn’t even realize he’s inadvertently grooming the woman who will become the greatest mage to ever live! Haha!” The blue-robed woman let out a cackle as the foldable bed frame underneath her began to creak. “Wow, I really am hamming it up. Better watch out for that.”