The surprise is total enough when the glare hits my eyes that I forget I can turn it down for a full second. I stare, stupefied, at the incandescent sun that is Lady Lillit Sheid in the view of my Visor, and then it winks out as my mind catches up to what I’m doing.

“Cycles of eternity,” I breathe. “Purge my air and melt my bones, what was that?”

“Conjure Visor, my lord. It’s a Skill.”

My head turns, slowly, to level my absolute best death glare at Amber. It’s not a very good one, because I’m already snickering long before she cracks a smirk at me, despite the pain I’m now noticing. “Yeah, yeah. Very funny. Can you help with the headache?”

“With pleasure.” She reaches out to stroke my head, running her hand across my forehead lightly. My eyes close and I hear myself make a humming sound in pleasure, and I can feel the familiar ripple in the world that is her Healing Touch, but for once, when I open my eyes again, I still hurt.

“No dice. Shit.”

“Well.” My eyes snap back over to Lily as she drawls the word out, we-e-e-ell. “Ain’t that interesting.”

“You look like someone who knows something.”

“I do, at that, little Magelord; I know what you did wrong, and why the Paladin can’t help.” Her smirk sets off something in the back of my mind, like a danger sense. “Maybe we could deal.”

“I’ve pre-committed to not making any deals with someone who can supernaturally manipulate my emotional state.” I keep my voice level and my smile genuine. It takes some doing. “I’d say sorry, but I’m not.”

“Now that’s hardly fair. I’m not doing anything of the like now, am I?” She spreads her hands wide, smirking wider. “I might be insulted if you accuse me of not being worth dealing with, when I’m being so hands-off.”

I’m about to unproductively point out that she manipulates my emotional state just by existing in my vicinity when a totally unexpected voice cuts in. “Sir.” My head turns to Sara, sharp enough that I feel a semi-pleasant, semi-unpleasant crackle in my neck as I do. “You took an overload through your Skill, effectively micro-backlashing your soul where your Skill integrates into your perception.” She pauses for a moment, as a look of concentration crosses her face. After a couple of seconds, she shrugs. “I do not have a way to describe it other than by saying that it is bruised.”

“Thank you, Sara.” I’m grinning at her, despite the pain. “Bruised my soul, huh.”

“Adam, don’t—”

“[Conjure Visor],” I say unnecessarily, and I laugh in sheer joy.

It takes a heartbeat for the visor to form. It’s different, very different, from how the skill used to be. Instead of two long spikes of something like glass meeting at my nose, like a wildly stylized W whose center stroke was barely there relative to the outer ones, now it’s a profusion of hexagons in a prolate half-spheroidal lattice. It’s not any more supported by actual matter, but while the previous version just sort of sat on my face, like it was balanced on my nose somehow, this one projects out of the earpiece I’d forgotten I’m wearing, which explains a lot.

It takes the merest act of will to stop the Visor Mark Two from relaying any information, and I slowly let things populate. Not actual visualizations; I leave it transparent and let that be all that I’m getting for seeing things generally, but I don’t need a visual layer of mana density to be able to reason about mana, or about anything, really. I can do that with numbers; I can do that with math.

Well, math and software. Mostly software.

The hardware of the Mark Two is amazing. The hexagons should by all rights have mostly shitty angles and text that’s largely unreadable because of it, but wherever my eyes move, the Visor ripples and expands to present that part of the interface readably. And not just readably; there’s always more space wherever I look, a sort of visual trick made concrete.

On that unbounded amount of translucent green screen space, a huge amount of information is writing itself out. It’s an entire topography, I’m pretty sure it’s a topography and not a topology, I keep getting those two confused, of mana flows and densities. It’s photons of every wavelength, it’s sound and heat, there’s more information there than I can take in or make sense of. I glance at Amber, frowning. There’s a whole world of junk going on there, all tangled up with itself, and much the same with Zidanya, a wild profusion of emanations and tendrils both transient and enduring, ranging from self-contained to reaching out and entangling themselves with tendrils coming from other people. There’s something obviously different between them and Sara, when I glance back behind my shoulder to record her as well, something more in the tendrils than in anything else, and I file that away for future analysis.

I can’t see anything of the sort around Lily, but then again, you can’t see thrusters against a nearby star.

“Lady Sheid.” I use the formality of my words to build some emotional distance, a trick that doesn’t always work. “Would you please demonstrate your ability for the record?”

There’s a long moment where she just sits there, looking at me without an expression on her face. Around when I start to get worried that I’ve given offense, given offense to someone around whom the mana circulation and sheer ambient power levels are high enough that it’s being displayed in magnitudes instead of longform, she smiles at me, and everything is fine.

Part of me is still being properly analytical. She’s got nearly perfect posture, body leaning just a little bit forwards and just a little bit to the side; I can see that, I can acknowledge that and her smile and the way it shapes her face. That part is all intellectual, and it’s still present. Emotionally, though, she’s an onslaught that sweeps me away, a distillation of an idea into an ideal. She adjusts, moment by moment, and my heart pounds in my chest as her body language and whatever metaphysical effect she’s using get just that much more targeted and refined.

“Magelord,” she says, and I twitch for more reasons than one. Her voice is completely different, quiet and somewhere in the middle ranges; I’m not great at intonation and inferring meaning, but there’s maybe a little bit of shyness and a lot of vulnerability in it. “Would you… have me continue, Magelord?”

“Can you do the one with the low voice? From back when you tested me.” I can feel myself blushing, can hear myself talking, but most of my conscious mind is taken up with what I recognize as enthrallment. The amazing thing is that there isn’t any mana headed my way, no metaphysical tendrils visible to the Visor; as far as I can tell, this is purely Lily using… body language, I guess, and tone of voice.

That and, well, her body.

“This one?”

“Yeah.” I barely get the word out from between my lips, mouth gone suddenly dry. “Yeah, that one.”

She holds the pose for just a moment, but a moment is long enough to record everything; the languid tension of it, the mana flows, the angle of her head and the expression on her face. It’s enough to record the smooth curve of her languor, and the smooth curves of her body; it’s even enough to record the way there’s just the slightest detectable - even against her incomprehensible baseline - flow of mana from her chest all the way up through her lips as she speaks.

The moment ends, and she breathes out, shaking her head. “Not as easy as it sometimes is, not as hard. Never did figure out why. Hope you got what you were looking for.”

“I... think?” It’s work to get the words out, and I’m distracted by Amber handing me a water flask. The flask part of that is literal; it looks like it was a scientific tool, stoppered with an odd, flexible metal-like cap, but it holds water just the same and the water clears my throat and mouth just the same. It breaks the moment, and I smile more normally at Lily, nodding my thanks to Amber as I hand the flask back. “I think so. The mana flare before you spoke, that was a Skill?”

“Is that what you saw?”

“I saw a lot.” That, accident as it is, gets me a raised eyebrow and sets my face to flushing red. “I mean, I saw a lot of things, and that’s one of them.”

“Good. Then it was an equitable exchange.”

“Was it?” It’s an act of will to dismiss the Visor, and there’s a tangible feeling of air moving as it tucks itself back away in my earpiece.

“You have quite the artifact. Fifth tier, I’d call it.” Lily smiles at me, just a normal smile, inasmuch as any smile from her is ever going to be normal. “Attend to me in four hours. Tell me something interesting you figured out.”

I blink once, twice, and she just quirks an eyebrow. Amber and Zidanya are standing and I’m on my feet before I realize I’m moving.

“Thank you for your time and forbearance, Lady Sheid.” Amber’s voice is formal, but warm for all its formality. “We will be honored to attend you as you ask.”

“Dame Ashborn.” Lily inclines her head fractionally.

The door on the non-stadium side of the room is open, and there’s a man standing there, or someone male-coded with long, swept-back horns and a three-forked tail, at least. We walk, and then I pause as Zidanya stops, looking back over her shoulder.

She doesn’t say anything, but her body language changes in some way I can’t track, and then we’re stepping through the door into the bustle and noise.