The next afternoon, Jonathan, the kids, and Mr. Geiller all headed down the road to work on installing Mr. Geiller's detection array. Jonathan was laden down with one of Mr. Geiller's large black bags while Ethan lugged a pair of shovels that Jonathan had conjured the previous day on his shoulders. The rest of the kids ranged around the group as they walked.

About fifteen minutes later they'd reached the point where the road circled around the hill before joining the main thoroughfare toward Eldridge, and while Mr. Geiller began unpacking the two bags he and Jonathan had brought, Jonathan sent Kylus to check and make sure there weren't any Petty Baron groups descending on them at that very moment.

"Kylus says the road is lightly traveled at the moment," said Sandra a minute or two later.

"Good," replied Jonathan. "He can come back, but I would appreciate if one of you would check every so often while we're working."

Sandra nodded.

"As for the rest of you, I want you stay within either sight or hearing, alright? And stay out of those houses." Jonathan pointed to the nearest of the run-down buildings. "Those don't look safe at all, and I don't have any good way to heal you up if you break an arm or stab yourself or something."

The kids indicated their assent, and with the exception of Ethan—and Yanni, who was apparently interested in what Jonathan and Ethan were going to be doing—scattered to explore the area.

"What's the plan, Mr. Geiller?" asked Jonathan.

Mr. Geiller scowled up at him from where he was crouching unloading a bag. "I need to measure, but I think we're going to need to dig a ditch from about here where I am across the road and into that little bunch of trees. That will be where we'll hide the charge point."

"Alright. Should we start digging?"

"No, we have to verify the path. Set these pipes up in a line from me to the treeline." He gestured to indicate the thin metal pipes that he had been removing from the bag, each about as thick across as Jonathan's finger and a little longer than his arm. That must have been what made the bag so darn heavy. "And be gentle with them! We're going to need all of them to reach far enough."

"Come on, Ethan, let's do this." Jonathan picked four pipes, and started laying them roughly end to end starting near Mr. Geiller and pointing towards the trees on the other side of the road.

"Can I help?" asked Yanni.

"Sure, buddy, can you bring me pipes? Be careful with them, though, they're pretty big for you. How about you start with one at a time and see how it goes?"

"Okay!" Yanni beamed and scampered over to Mr. Geiller to grab one of the pipes.

Mr. Geiller scowled at the boy but didn't comment.

Soon enough, the three of them had laid all of the pipes out and Mr. Geiller had stopped unloading the bags to start fussing over their work.

"Sloppy," he muttered as he pushed one of the pipes maybe half an inch. "Bring me that bag of fittings, boy."

Jonathan rolled his eyes and fetched the canvas bag that Mr. Geiller had indicated. It was full of small circular pieces of metal that looked to be only slightly thicker than the pipes.

"Good. These join the ground line, see?" Mr. Geiller slipped one of the small tubes onto the end of a pipe, then gently maneuvered the next pipe down into the other half of it so that it held the two together. "I need you boys to attach all the pipes from here down the line. We need to make sure it runs perfectly straight."

While they did that, Mr. Geiller fussed around with the pipes closest to the trees.

Eventually, they had a continuous line of pipes stretching from within the small copse of trees across the road, and a fair bit into the open space on the other side. Mr. Geiller took one of the shovels and dragged its blade sideways along right next to the pipe for the entire length, making a guide line of sorts in most of the dirt although the harder packed portion of the road didn't show much change. At his direction, they rolled the connected pipes about a foot away from their original position before Mr. Geiller handed the shovel to Jonathan.

"Time to get digging. We want this maybe a hand-span down." He held up his own hand to demonstrate. "Doesn't need to be wide, but maybe do the width of the shovel at the top so we have some room to work with."

Jonathan looked to Ethan. "I'll start at this end, you start at that one?"

"Sounds good, Jonathan."

Digging the trench for the pipes, as relatively shallow as it was, turned out to be no fun at all. At Jonathan's end, the tree roots proved to be a massive problem, necessitating shifting the entire planned location of the trench over soon after he started digging. At Ethan's there was a constant supply of rocks that had to be pried out and tossed aside, a few of them large enough that he had to call Jonathan over to help provide leverage. And on both ends, the ground was so hard that just getting a decent shovel-worth of dirt was a struggle.

At long last, after a grueling couple hours worth of digging—including a break for snacks—Ethan and Jonathan finally finished the trench, threw their shovels aside, and collapsed to a seat where they stood. Jonathan didn't even care that he was sitting in a bunch of freshly turned dirt at this point, although he did shift when he sat down on a particularly pointy rock at first.

"You two are done?" asked Mr. Geiller, wandering out from the woods where he'd been doing who-knew-what in the shade. Probably napping. "About time. I thought we'd be here all night."

Jonathan and Ethan turned identical glares on the old man, but he ignored them in favor of starting to move the pipes into the trench, taking care to firmly re-connect them all.

About twenty minutes later, Mr. Geiller was happy with the placement of the pipes and he turned to the pair of still-exhausted shovelers. "Alright, this is looking good. Now fill it back in."

Jonathan didn't need to do any connecting with his inner demon to feel like murdering someone.

An hour later, the trench was filled in, the kids had helped scatter the majority of the rocks they'd pulled out by hurling them into the woods and the empty lot, and Mr. Geiller was done calibrating the control panel for the array, which was obscured out of sight partway behind a tree and within a bush.

"Alright, everybody, gather around!" hollered Mr. Geiller. "It's time to test this thing."

He pulled a bell a little bigger than fist out of his now deflated bags and attached it to a mount. It was a bit of a strange setup; the bell was held at an angle away from a metal plate that looked a lot like a tiny version of one of Mr. Geiller's arrays, but there was no striker either attached to the plate or inside of the bell itself.

Within a minute or two, the kids were all gathered and Mr. Geiller had everyone cross over the line where the trench had been dug to stand on the side of the road toward Eldridge.

"Everybody away from the line? Good. Now, I've set this to a fairly high sensitivity to start, so let's make sure it's working. You, boy, you walk across the line first." Mr. Geiller pointed with his free hand to Chris, who shrugged, and walked down the road. Shortly after he'd stepped over the line of freshly-dug dirt, the bell in Mr. Geiller's hand tolled once. It had a nice sound; loud, but not incredibly strident.

Mr. Geiller nodded. "Good, good. Everyone stay put a moment." He walked into the trees a little way and leaned over to fiddle with the control panel in the bush before returning to his original spot and picking the bell up off the ground where he'd left it. "Alright, boy, back to the others."

Chris walked over to the large group of kids, but the bell stayed silent.

"Now everyone walk across the line at a normal speed."

Jonathan and the kids did so, and after the last kid crossed the line, the bell tolled several times in quick succession.

Mr. Geiller grunted. "Good, that's just about right. I'll make it a little more sensitive, in case a smaller group comes along, but that's working nicely. Now come here, Abigail, you need to know how to charge this thing."

While Mr. Geiller walked Abigail through how to use the control panel for the array, Jonathan inspected the bell and its mounting apparatus. "How does this work, anyway?" he asked Mr. Geiller as the man finished up with Abigail. "There's no ringer."

"Magic," grunted Mr. Geiller.

Jonathan rolled his eyes. "Obviously, but what exactly is going on? What sort of effect is making the bell sound?"

"The array translates the sympathetic signal it receives from the control node into a spike of kinetic force launched at the bell. Don't stick your hand there. You're lucky none of the kids were running over the detector line."

Jonathan whisked his hand out from between the bell and the mounting plate.

" So like a bullet?"

Mr. Geiller looked confused.

"A small projectile."

"Oh, no. There's nothing physically firing at the bell, it's just kinetic force."

"Is that something I could learn how to do?"

"Maybe. This effect isn't reflexive, but you might be able to duplicate it with enough exposure. I wouldn't advise it, though. The range is quite short because the force tends to defray exponentially as it travels."

"Too bad." There went his ever-so-brief dreams of Force-pushing people around.

"Enough about that, though. I need you to come over here and magic this dirt up so it doesn't lead people straight to the control box." Mr. Geiller grabbed the bell out of Jonathan's hands and stuck it up against the foot of a tree.

"You sure you should leave that just sitting there where one of the kids can grab it?"

"Good point, I should probably turn the array off until we're done. No need to waste energy. Now, what we're going to try and do is compact this dirt a bit and grow some of this moss and small plant life that you can see elsewhere so that it isn't so obviously dug up and filled in…"