Serenity laid the scooter on its side in the grass at the other end of the parking lot in front of the warehouse. They hadn’t followed the trail all the way in, but he wasn’t about to pretend he didn’t know where it led. “I can’t see this as a coincidence. How much did you search the facility when you were here?”

Rissa dropped her scooter next to Serenity’s and shook her head. “Only enough to find the stolen stuff, searching a warehouse like this in detail would take weeks. It didn’t really take that much searching; it was all together and you got Frank to say where. We just had to make sure we got it all and sneak it out safely.”

Serenity nodded; that’s what he remembered, as well. “I know I asked Frank about other stolen magical stuff and he said he didn’t have any, that he’d already sold it all. Maybe this wasn’t stolen?”

“Didn’t he say that anything magical should be sold quickly, that there was someone new who would buy anything for an unusually high price?” Rissa frowned as she spoke. “We never followed up on that since all he had was a phone number, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”

Serenity stared at the warehouse as though he could find its secrets just by looking at it. “I can’t see this being related, but it feels like it’s more complicated than that. Why would it have come directly from here if it was sold to some new collector? Wouldn’t he have taken it somewhere first? We followed the trail; he did go inside places, but nowhere to spend the night. So it left here and went directly to the park but with a lot of detours?”

“Maybe it didn’t come from here? We’re following the person, not the box,” Rissa offered.

Serenity sighed; he hadn’t thought of that. “Good point. It could have come from anywhere along the way. We have no way to know. I still don’t think this is a coincidence.”

Rissa sighed. “Neither do I. We can’t ask Frank more questions, can we?”

Serenity shook his head without turning to look at her. “Not easily. He’s in jail for murder, I don’t think we’d exactly be on the approved list of visitors. No real point in trying, anyway; I don’t think we can trust him to tell the truth even if he knows it.”

Rissa nodded. “Then I guess we should follow the trail farther. Maybe there’s somewhere else we can catch up to him. Do you think you can find where he approached the warehouse?”

It was what they’d done in the past when the being they were looking for entered a building - walked a little farther until Serenity found the other end of the trail. They weren’t certain exactly what they were looking for, but the warehouse certainly seemed like it was a good bet for being important. The question was if they could find anything else important before the tracking spell failed.

Rissa clearly didn’t think the exact location in the warehouse was as important as maybe finding the being or other places of interest; Serenity wasn’t sure he agreed, but he also wasn’t sure he disagreed. Knowing where the being went in the warehouse might tell them something, but only if there was still something interesting in there. If it’d been emptied, they wouldn’t discover anything.

On the other hand, Rissa was an Oracle, and so was her mother. It was probably easier to find something once you had an idea where to look, so looking for starting points made sense. That was a good backup plan for how to find things in the warehouse.

“I’ll try.” Serenity picked the scooter back up, then turned his attention back to the spellform. It was starting to look a bit flimsier than he liked as the trapped magical signature continued to degrade. He set off around the outside of the parking lot with Rissa riding next to him; she’d make sure he didn’t ride into anything.

They didn’t even make it to the first turn before he stopped sensing the trace. It was there, faint but clear, then it wasn’t. As Serenity turned his attention back to the spellform from the trace, he saw that there was no magic left in the trap. It had all escaped.

Serenity immediately started shutting down the spell; there was no reason to leave it up and every reason not to. He didn’t make it in time; the spell tried to search for nothing and came up with too many results, which cracked the spell structure. It was a fairly classical spell failure, but once it started it was essentially impossible to stop.

Which was why Serenity had protections built into the wrapper for any spell he built. He could see them trigger as the spell continued to collapse. All he could do was attempt to protect himself, but he’d really already done everything he could.

The spell collapsed and spilled SpaceTime Affinity mana (and a little essence) out around Serenity. His vision whited out for a moment as the secondary effects boomeranged back at him.

Serenity knew the protections had worked; he was still conscious. A minor spell backlash could knock a person out temporarily, and that one wasn’t minor (at least, not for his Tier). Unfortunately, it clearly hadn’t stopped everything; he had a headache. In fact, not only did his head ache, his entire body ached. The headache wasn’t as bad as Serenity had expected, given how the spell failed, but the body aches were unexpected.

Serenity stumbled off the scooter and laid it on the grass before sitting next to it. There was a tree behind him. It wasn’t much of a tree, but it was something. He felt drained and exhausted. Some level of that was normal for backlash, but maybe not this much.

“What’s wrong?” Rissa was kneeling next to him with her hand on his shoulder. When had she stopped?

Probably when he did. Serenity tried to clear his mind. “Spell backlash. I was wrong about how far I could get before the mana finished escaping, and the spell didn’t handle it well. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.”

Normally, that would have been a lie, but he was already feeling better. It was going away far faster than backlash usually did; even a minor backlash usually had consequences for hours. It was one of the reasons many mages didn’t choose to experiment with their spells; backlash was unpleasant. Serenity had taken the opposite approach: he learned how to reduce its effects.

It looked like backlash wasn’t quite the same for him now, just like using all of his mana. Serenity checked his mana level and winced; that explained how tired he felt. It was very low.

Some of that was from the backlash, but he knew most of it was from the protections; they had to be cheap to implement or it wasn’t worth putting them on all of his spells, but he paid for them in mana whenever they prevented backlash from injuring him. He’d known that, but hadn’t made the connection to what it would do to the new him. The side effects of mana starvation he was suffering from were much less than those of the backlash he’d avoided, and they were resolving much more quickly; that made it still worthwhile.

Rissa sat down next to Serenity and put her arm around him. He leaned against her for the five or so minutes it took for the backlash to mostly pass and for some of his mana to regenerate, raising him above the critical point.

Serenity took a moment to examine his body with his magic. The aches were subsiding; as best he could tell, everything except the headache was due to mana being forcefully pulled out of him to feed the spell protections. He’d want to change that if he could. The headache was from the small amount of backlash he’d still suffered; it was already easing, but he could tell that was because it was healing. He could see the slight amounts of swelling being soothed by his healing, even though he didn’t understand how.

Good enough.

Serenity opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and turned to Rissa. “I’m good now. Looks like the protections I built into the spell worked.”

“Shouldn’t you be unhurt if you have protections for stuff?” Rissa didn’t sound convinced.

Serenity shrugged. “A seat belt doesn’t prevent bruises, it keeps you from being put through the windshield. Same idea, reduce the harm to something manageable. A few minutes of headache and some mana drain is less than I was expecting. We should figure out what we’re doing next.”

Rissa didn’t seem convinced, but let it go. “Fine. You can tell me about spell backlash later.”

She took a deep breath, then closed her eyes as she let it out. “You worried me.”

“I’m fine.” Serenity watched Rissa, concerned. She did believe him, didn’t she?

Rissa nodded. Her eyes were still closed, but she didn’t push. “Since we can’t look any farther, is it worth checking out the warehouse? You can look for magical traces that he might have left behind. Maybe even enough for another tracking spell?”

Serenity blinked. That wasn’t the plan he’d expected. “I thought you’d go in and look for something that might be important or lead us where we need to go?”

Rissa shook her head. “That isn’t how the gift works. If I even still have it; I’m not sure I do. It’s different, ever since…” She stopped and tried again. “If we have something we know is related, whether it’s physical or a symbol, I can use it as a key to trigger a vision. There are a few different ways to look, but that’s the most reliable. I can also check possible futures, but I haven’t dared go back to the timestreams since the Tutorial. I told you about that vision, I don’t want to see the woman with a sword again. I think I pissed her off by living.”

Rissa’s mouth quirked. She seemed amused. “I’m happy about that, I’d like to keep ticking her off by living through whatever she wants. Her and whoever told her I should be dead.” Her face lost the bright expression as she continued. “There’s a third way. The way Mother usually starts. The thing is, I suspect it’s even less safe for me than walking the timestream. You reach outside yourself and ask for guidance. It’s a different way to get a starting point, but I don’t know if that woman could see it or not.”

Serenity frowned. Answering requests for guidance sounded far too much like what a “godsgift” of oracular wisdom might do, and he knew that the one he’d pulled out of Jacob was poisoned with a curse.

“Even without that danger, I don’t like depending on someone I don’t know to get me started. Their thoughts on what’s best might not be the same as mine. That’s one of the reasons I always do the research before I invest; it gives me a way to direct my visions myself.” By the end of her statement, Rissa’s hand was clenched tighter than was comfortable on Serenity’s shoulder.

She clearly hadn’t thought of that, or she’d have mentioned it. Serenity wanted to not bother her with it, but that seemed likely to backfire. “Worse than that, what if it’s asking the curse? That would probably be the easiest way to connect to something outside yourself.”

Rissa’s hand gripped even tighter, then released Serenity’s shoulder. “We need to find a way to free Mom from the curse.”

Serenity shook his head. “No. We need to find a way to break the entire curse on everyone. I still don’t know who warned me not to do it one at a time, but it seems like a valid concern. Maybe if we got everyone together?”

Rissa shook her head. “I don’t know how to find them all. Time magic is good for some things, but not everything. Maybe Ita can somehow?”

“Maybe,” Serenity agreed. It was the best idea he’d heard yet. “Back to the warehouse, though. If going inside won’t help you, I can go in in Sovereign form, that way the cameras won’t catch anything important?”