The room, wide and brightly-lit, choked with the smell of smoke and filled with grey soot billowing everywhere. Metal plates and sheets lined the floor, bars of iron and planks of wood lying stacked in the corners. And the two continued on with the ginormous black cylindrical structure a dozen times their size; the small slit in the side of the wall allowing for eyes to peer through at their progress.

“Are you done yet?!” She shouted, tonally dismissive and a permanent frown on her face. On her hands Shirin still carried the massive steel pipe.

“Calm down, ang moh, cannot just make things happen mah!” Wei hollered, his hands fixed on a lever.

“Fuck off! Tell me when you’re ready!”

“Alright! 3…”

“2…”

“1…”

“Nngh!” He exclaimed, slamming the lever down with a ringing noise and jumping back on the ground. Shirin dropped the pipe, the sound of its descent whirring through the air before at her behest it stalled mid-way; jamming into a small circular hole with grooves in the massive stone structure next to them. Sparks flew out, the crackling noise of metal scraping against metal screeching through the air.

Wei wiped off the sweat raining down his face and raised a thumbs-up to Shirin, who still hovered at the ceiling of the room. She herself slowly but surely came down upon the dirty, messy floor.

“Right, that’s done. Told you my method works.”

“Still could have been easier if we just built scaffolding up.”

“Like I said, get that thinking out of your head. No point in building scaffolding if you got magic to work with.”

“I don’t have magic!”

“Sucks for you.” She smirked, the gentle sound of her feet reaching the ground once again soft and practically inaudible. Just like Wei her skin was similarly pale, and she most certainly was rather gaunt, but the rings on her eyes might as well have been an elaborate joke. Her movements remained stout and sharp.

Wei, on the other hand, was blankly looking at a blueprint, narrowed eyes surrounded by a great dark ring. The parched, scratchy paper tore off at bits and cut at its rather blunt and uneven edges, and the diagram was seemingly wrong.

“Oy, is there something wrong with this?”

“Upside down, old man.”

He squinted. “Ah… wait, I’m 26.”

“Bullshit, I’m 26. You’ve got to be older. Nobody talks to a commander and asks for conditions unless they’re crazy or they’re real old.” Shirin muttered, grabbing the sheet from him.

“What’re you talking about? I’m not doing that again. I swear to god that I’m not doing it again ah...” Wei groaned, subtly shaking. “That woman is fucking terrifying.”

Even with the torrent of sweat running down his skin, a slight increase in the droplets coming down could be noticed.

“Huh.” She uttered, not even looking at him. “What was that word for…”

She stopped. She then motioned to him, flicking her hands outwards repeatedly from a single point.

“Ah.” Taking the pen from Shirin, he slowly wrote on the parchment with the ink slowly blotting out behind it; it fell halfway through.

“Hate this pen…” He muttered, before continuing the very much English wording which read ‘explosion’.

“There you go. Thassit.”

“Good. Good…” She grinned, her teeth showing in the widest and most gleeful expression. Wei retained a somewhat agape mouth, his eyes still half-closed; for his youth he may as well have been wrinkled. “Pass me that, will ya?”

“By the way, how do you even hold that shit? The container is fucking massive ah! Ultimate kiasu creator I tell you...”

“You gotta use magic. Can you actually not use it?”

“Of fucking course not! Not even with this gigantic… I think it’s a magnet?” He muttered, pointing at the orb in his chest. “Fucking hurts.” He unbuttoned his shirt right around the glowing ball, holding onto fabric stitched back together with some very different string; revealing a shadowed but definitively bulging red-blue veins emerging from the orb.

“Don’t even think about touching it, you fucking goondu.”

“Are you switching languages intentionally to trick the translation method or are you actually switching between two languages - no, it’s the former. You’re just that stupid. Does it happen to change colours every once in a while?”

Sitting on the soot-covered stone block with metal sheets and rocks at his feet, he was still intently staring at the blueprints laid out on the wooden table. Tools to his left, tools to his right, and between it all little bits of rock littered everywhere.

“Oi.”

He sulked. “What…”

“Does the orb happen to change colours every once in a while?”

“Uhh… blue-ish, to red to blue…?”

“That settles it; it’s not a verdansk sokov, it’s a verdask nikov. Slight differences but the colour change is a giveaway.”

“Okay, the main thing is, this thing is in here and it really fucking hurts.”

“No, the main thing is, you’ll get powers real soon. Nikovs are the cheap stuff they make - they pepper the actual stuff with a load of luminescent bullshit so people don’t realise. The actual core eventually breaks through and turns it into a sub-standard sokov and then people slowly get the ability to use magic.”

Wei rolled his eyes. The jargon had taken a long string through his ear and out another; and he went back to attempting to write, taking the lopsided-sized pen from the corner of the table where Shirin had left it.

“You’re not listening. Of course.”

“Does it matter?”

She snickered. “Yes it does, for starters, because the only way to use that pen is to have magic.”

“Oh, that explains a fucking lot! You people use this kind of shit like that a lot is it?”

“Used to. This model’s been outdated for a few years now, you poor fuckin’ sod.” She proceeded to laugh away in the background. “But here.”

She picked up the pen and wrote on the parchment, ‘Here’s my plan to escape’ in English.

“So that’s why you asked to learn…”

Under the dim lights of the lanterns in the corners of the large room, switched over from the previous one used; Shirin began slowly writing. Her g’s were blotchy and resembled an 8, her h’s resembled an n, but Wei could read it.

“By the way, fragile is spelled…” He uttered softly, taking over the pen and correcting it.

“Ah. Thanks.”

‘The cave’s real fragile. It’s a new base.’ She wrote. ‘Can you blow this up?’

‘No, and if I did, the force of the explosion would take down the entire structure, especially if it’s in a mountain.’

Shirin grimaced. “What’s this one say?” She asked, noticeably quieter, pointing at one of the words.

“Force.”

She remained practically silent. “Ah, right. Definitely knew that…”

‘We can get out. C’mon, you know as well as I do that they’ll instantly kill you or they’ll put you through the wringer until you suck up their way.’

“I have a plan too.”

“Yeah, but mine’s better.”

“Go on…”

‘We get them to inspect the thing, and then we blow it. Pretty sure just the bottom is enough.’

Wei stared at her with narrowed eyes. His mouth remained just slightly ajar as per usual, his eyelids seemingly glazing over like a dead fish.

“Don’t give me that look, you got any better ideas?”

“One.”

She sneered. “Go ahead, it’ll suck.”

“They want me to build a gun. They will test the gun.” He stopped, snatching over the pen from Shirin, and shakily wrote, ‘They will literally give me anything I need to build this. I say we convince them to get us saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal, make gunpowder with a powder mill, fill the gun with gunpowder, and when they inevitably test it because they clearly don’t trust me to use it, we rig it to blow up and instantly kill the user, disorient everyone, and then we can grab a spear or sword or something.’

“Sound good?” He shrugged.

“How do you know all this?” There was a kind of uncertainty in her voice, a brazen resentment.

He sighed.

“17 years of education before getting kicked out and forced off to the army.”

Her eyes widened.

“Bullshit. Not that exact. Nobody could remember anything that perfectly.”

“You’re right. That is, until you meet someone with perfect memory...” He muttered, tapping on his forehead.

“You kiddin’ me?”

She stopped, and scratched her head for a moment.

“...fine, then. Let’s… let’s go with your way.” Sitting down on one of the wooden planks, she stretched out her arms and yawned, looking around blankly. She remained silent, tapping her fingers on her soot-covered legs and glancing towards nothing.

Wei continued to look at the blueprints, bending over like a hunchback over the parchment, holding it close to his eyes, squinting. His vision blurred, and his chest acted like some kind of a petulant child continually stabbing a toothpick into him. Slowly his head came to rest on the table itself, and his eyes slowly closed.

Behind, Shirin stood up and touched her head. Her hair was coming back; a thick layer of short yellow hairs emerging past her hairline. Her entire face was pocked with black spots and tiny little cuts, none of which seemed to bother her. She stood up, and walked over to the small opening in the wall to the right.

“Rie.” She mentioned. She stared over into the comparatively dark room, with only a small fire in the corner for light as compared to the lantern inside the furnace room; her sister sitting right in front of the fire, curled into a ball, not even looking at her. Tooru was sleeping in the other corner.

Shirin sighed. She walked up to Rie, muttering, “Should get them to install a Kirie here as well, huh? Too damn dark.”

She patted her sister’s back, kneeling down.

“Rie.” She smiled, a sincereness to it.

Rie turned her head ever so slowly to look at her big sister. Her white irises moved up, moved down, and then looked elsewhere; but didn’t look at Shirin directly in the eyes. Her lips trembled.

“What’s wrong?” Shirin asked quietly, sitting down next to her sister. “Glasses rack pestering you again?”

Rie’s eyes darted left, darted right, staring anywhere. The marks on her legs, on her elbows, perhaps, not her older sister.

Then she slowly spoke, “...no.” Her voice was practically silent.

“What is it then? C’mon. I’ll… I’ll hear ya out.” She put her arm over Rie’s shoulder, her voice a radical, far more soothing change from the tone she’d used with others.

A quiet feeling touched against Shirin’s right shoulder. Rie leaned in on her sister.

Shirin lightly chuckled. “I’ll wait, but I don’t think the Avisen outside will.”

“I…” Her soft, quiet voice stopped.

“I’m… scared.”

Shirin scratched her head, glancing away.

“Yeah. Me too, Rie. Me too.” Rie immediately turned over to look at her sister with wide eyes as Shirin winked, smiling.

“No… no…”

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared… I’m scared I’ll get you killed.”

Silence.

Shirin looked down on the ground, her eyes wide, her mouth agape. She scarcely even looked at her younger sister, quietly staring at the stone making up the floor.

She trembled.

“...big sis?” Rie asked, looking at her.

“It’s nothing. It’s nothing.” Shirin muttered. Then, she placed her hands on Rie’s shoulders.

“Don’t you dare be scared now. Okay? I’ll do it. I’ll keep you safe. Promise. Reason we’re in here? My fault. I wasn’t strong enough. But I’ll be that soon. Okay? Promise?” She said, forcefully tugging on Rie’s collar.

“...okay.”

Rie smiled, and embraced her big sister readily. Shirin patted her on the back; although the expression on her face remained… unsure.