Serenity wasn’t certain whether he should watch Rube or the vase, so his attention moved back and forth. Rube almost seemed to be fighting himself; he was tense and seemed to want to get the vase out of the box and put it back in all at the same time. At one point, it almost seemed like he was going to hit the vase in frustration; Serenity started to move to intervene, since breaking an artifact could be a very bad thing, but stopped when he saw that Rube had his frustration back under control.

After struggling to reach inside the box and pull the vase out, Rube tipped the box on its side using his fleshy tentacle-hand, then tipped it a little farther and the vase slid out. Serenity’s eyes were on the stopper, but Rube caught the top of the vase with his right hand and the stopper stayed put.

Once the vase was out of the box, Rube tipped it back upright.

Once again, Serenity felt the vase’s hatred. Or was that his disgust for what the vase represented?

Serenity was suddenly unsure which it was. His disgust would make sense of the fact that Rissa hadn’t been able to feel the presence of another mind when he felt the hatred in the university building.

Serenity stared at the vase with his magical senses. There was both mana and essence there, and they were both wrong. Serenity could see them moving back and forth, mana becoming essence and essence becoming mana; without being able to see both, he would have thought the mana was going nowhere and coming from nowhere.

It was wrong in a way Serenity didn’t have words for.

“There’s a mind there,” Rissa warned them. “It wants and it feels but it doesn’t really think. I think it’s dreaming?”

“That’s what it is. I knew I recognized it from the description!” Russ hit the ground in front of him as he stared at the vase. “I thought we’d collected all of them.”

Serenity turned towards Russ. “What are you talking about?”

“History,” Russ said. “Old history. Prehistory, really; legend says the problem dates back to a time when magic was far more common.”

Serenity blinked. He knew that that much was true; there had once been a time when magic was more common on Earth. Serenity suspected that the time Russ was referring to was before the World Core was damaged and tinged with death; it seemed very unlikely that much survived the previous time, when the World Core gave up its power for some reason and shrank to a small fraction of its previous size. That must have been truly catastrophic; the second time, which included sinking a small continent, was probably bad enough.

“We don’t know how the djinn came to be here; as far as the legends go, they’ve always wandered the world.That vase looks like it’s probably from the Middle East, from the symbols, but there are similar legends from many different places. They vary from something much like the wish-granting genie of the lamp to playful tricksters and horrible monsters. That vase doesn’t say which type it is, but the fact that it was once completely sealed and it’s covered in all sorts of protective sigils tells me it wasn’t one of the friendlier types. Not that any of them are really friendly.”

Russ turned his attention from the vase to Rube. “I really thought we had them all locked away safely; I certainly didn’t know there were any with cracked seals. Heh. One of the few good things to come out of the second World War; Hitler gathered up all sorts of artifacts. Many of them were powerless, but others were things we didn’t even know existed. He had a huge collection of sealed containers; we kept them that way when we hid them away.”

Serenity turned his attention back to the vase and took a good look at the cracks in the seal. It was impossible to tell how old they were, at least for Serenity, but they seemed slightly lighter in color than the rest of the vase. “You probably need to check on them. I have a bad feeling that the rising magic levels may mean more are cracked or cracking.”

Russ paled and tightened his lips. “I hope you’re wrong.”

Serenity shrugged. “Magic and physics have a lot in common; that vase is designed to stop magic. Which means the opening’s the only place magic can get through. If you have a high enough pressure differential … stuff breaks. The seal’s obviously the weak point.”

“How do you know it’s designed to stop magic? I thought that was the box?” Rube held the vase up and stared at it.

“The sigil on the stopper, for one; it’s a very famous control rune. More importantly, though, the symbols on the vase are -” Serenity stopped. What was the English word for cueraith? He couldn’t think of a direct translation, so he’d do the best he could. “Protection and barrier runes. They … don’t exactly block magic so much as they convince it there’s nothing there to travel through. They’re very useful for all sorts of things; in this case, I bet they were used for containment. There are a few other runes that look like part of a material-strengthening array, but I doubt that would work well with magic this low. Huh, that is odd.”

“What?” Rube lowered the vase to stare at Serenity.

“If they were made in a higher-magic environment, which would make sense with runes like that on the vase, runes built to work on ambient magic, why would it be cracking as the magic level rises? Wouldn’t it have cracked when the magic level fell?” Serenity tried to think through the way the materials would respond. He’d dealt with varying magic levels a number of times; it was something you had to account for whenever you moved between worlds, after all. It was why you didn’t carry around enclosed containers into a different magic level unless you knew how they’d respond; as little as a paper box could do strange things if the differential was high enough.

Serenity frowned at the vase and concentrated on its magic instead of the magic leaking from the stopper. It was all passive runes; anything active would long since be destroyed, but whoever made the vase clearly made it with the long term in mind. All of the runes Serenity could see were still active. “Can you turn the vase? I need to see if there’s - ah, there it is. Yes, that makes sense. The strengthening array is designed to interleave with the stopper once it’s added; this was clearly created with its final use in mind. The problem is that at low external magic levels, the array is barely active. I bet the internal magic had been pushing against it for centuries but nothing moved because the material was aligned to support the magic differential. Once that started to change, it was no longer properly aligned and the array didn’t have enough power to fix it.”

Serenity turned his attention back to Rube. “Did you find the vase before or after the Earth increased in Tier?”

Rube just looked puzzled, so Serenity had to explain what he meant. “The day the entire world shook and nothing moved? If you were awake, you should have noticed, and I’m pretty sure it was on the news too?”

“Oh! That. Before, definitely. Now that you mention it, that’s about when the infections picked up, it was patchy before that.”

Serenity frowned. “Then I doubt the cracks are from that. It was probably cracked by whoever put it there.”

“I’ll still have the ones in storage checked, but that’s not good news. There shouldn’t be any way for something like that to get into the hands of someone who knows what it is, much less someone who would … I’m not sure, try to release it randomly? Why would someone do that?” Russ looked even more worried.

Serenity shrugged. “People do strange things.”

Serenity turned to Rube as something he’d noticed but not paid that much attention to clicked in his mind as being “strange". "Speaking of which, why don’t you want me to touch the vase?”

“What do you mean?” Rube stared at Serenity as if he had no idea what Serenity was referring to.

“When you were getting the vase out of the box, you said not to touch it. Why?” It wasn’t so much the not touching part that struck Serenity as odd but how fervent Rube seemed about it. It was Rube’s, after all; Serenity wasn’t about to do anything to it that Rube didn’t want.

At least, not if he could avoid it. There were a number of reasons Serenity might have to do something to it either to save Rube or to save others. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he wasn’t going to do anything to it without Rube’s permission unless there was a good reason.

Serenity knew he was a hypocrite at times, but he’d at least try to get Rube’s permission first if possible.

Rube looked down at the vase and started to put it down, then set it on his lap instead. “To keep you safe from it?” He didn’t sound confident.

Serenity didn’t have any protective spells up - they were simply impossible to maintain for decent periods of time at his Tier - but he could put one up if he needed to. It might only last a few minutes, less time than it took to cast, but he could. More importantly, his resistances were high enough that there were very few things that could affect him magically. He was fairly confident he was easier to damage with physical trauma than magic at this point. “I can defend myself. Are you sure that’s why?”

Rube just shook his head.

It was something to keep in mind; Rube might be more affected than just his arms.

“Well then, you don’t mind if I look at it in detail, do you?” That seemed relatively safe.

Rube shook his head again. “No, that’s fine.”

Serenity debated putting up a protective shield since he’d just been thinking about it, but decided against it. Simply looking was unlikely to trigger anything, and a shield would essentially drain his mana. He’d probably be looking at it for longer than he could keep a shield active in any case. He’d have to think about it later if he wanted to touch the vase or its leakage, but for now the better option was to simply look passively.

Serenity turned his attention back to the vase, but this time he paid attention to the magical fumes coming out of the top instead of the enchantments on the sides. At first, it looked like they filled an area, but a few minutes’ examination told Serenity that the area they filled was defined not by distance from the vase or gravity as he’d expected but by where Rube was.

Rube was paying attention to the others; they were talking, though Serenity wasn’t paying attention. While they talked, Rube absently ran his damaged hands over the vase. It looked like a nervous habit, but each time either hand passed over the stopper, some of the magic seemed to disappear. Even stranger, the cloud seemed to fill the space around Rube; wherever he was, it was, but only at the front near the vase.

It was time for an experiment. “Rube? Would you hold your right hand out to the side? You don’t have to keep it in the air, just set it away from you on the blanket.”

Serenity watched as the cloud of disgustingly tainted magic moved to fill in the space between Rube’s arm and the vase, moving farther than it had before.

It was confirmation, in a sense. The changes to Rube’s arms weren’t just residue; there was something active about them.