After Three and his two brothers had settled down, Alius approached them. Three laughed and slapped his brothers across the back before turning to Alius.

“Alius! If you wanted to know, we just won a very important bet.” Three gave an excited shiver. “I’ll be able to hold this over my sisters’ heads for years.”

“Well…” Alius had been caught off-guard by the somewhat childish behavior of Three and his brothers, but considering he was also a child, he cut Three some slack. “Congratulations? And by the way, about those rocks I asked you about, do you have any?”

Three furrowed his brows. “Rocks?” He snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Oh! Spirit crystals!” He turned his head away, looking a bit sheepish. “Sorry, I used all of them.”

Alius threw him a blank stare, making Three shuffle nervously.

“Maybe Two has some?”

Three stared at Alius, who stared back.

“Seriously, I don’t have any.”

With a huff, Alius walked over to Three’s shack, now tattered and in ruins. He swung his foot at a side wall, only needing to barely bump it for the entire wall to crumble into pieces. Alius pointed accusingly to the thousands of shiny stone spirit crystal things, scattered over the floor like all the other scraps of trash in the room.

“Okay Mr. Poor, then what’s this?”

Looking as if he was about to throw up, Three finally sighed, “How did you manage to find those?”

Alius crossed his arms, rolling his eyes at Three. “More like how would I not find these? Your whole house is littered with them. You even use these-” Alius bent down and grabbed a gleaming crystal shaped into a cube, “-as paperweights! Those-” Alius pointed to another pile. “-were hanging from the ceiling as lighting! And the ones I want were being used as a doorstop. You can spare a few crystals.”

Alius was about to scoop up a handful when Three snapped his fingers, causing the crystals to slip out of Alius’s hands and join the rest as a faintly glowing river snaked towards Three, coming to rest in neat stacks by his feet. Alius glared accusingly at him.

“Sorry Alius. We’re surprisingly close for having met ten minutes ago, but you can’t have these.”

“Why?”

‘Because if I give them to you, Ditus will whip my ass.’

“Because, um-” Three delicately picked up the stack of spirit crystals. “Bye!”

Three turned into a blur of movement, disappearing instantly, leaving a faint blue trail behind him.

“Huh.” Alius put his hand into his pockets, which were getting seriously full. “I guess he didn’t notice me taking any.”

“I guess that means…I’m done?”

____

Alius decided to go back to where he met Yani, inside the red-green temple. After Three ran off, his two brothers gave Alius a hasty goodbye and left, probably going off to continue their celebration. Ditus still hadn’t shown up to congratulate him on his own victory, though the occasional trembling of the ground told Alius that he and Two were still out there somewhere.

The streets back to the temple were eerily empty, lacking the former seas of people. Now that they were gone, Alius could appreciate the breadth of the pathways, lined with glistening green buildings.

The stairs leading up to the doors hit Alius just as hard as they had the first time. Upon reaching the top, Alius sighed and jumped up to the door handles, swinging back and forth before he built up enough momentum to barely pull the door open and squeeze in.

“Yani?”

Circling to the back of the reception desk, Alius saw it was empty, but still had the ring of fluffy chairs and a stepladder off to the side.

After poking all the chairs and peeking under the desk, Alius turned away and walked down the hall. He took some time to admire the massive pillars inside, each towering column stuck into the ceiling giving off a sense of beauty.

Very quickly, Alius wandered off of his route, deciding to check out the little alcoves in the walls before heading to the second floor.

Nested in the walls were little cubbies with a desk, a chair, and a plain door. Many little items were scattered across the desk. Pencils, scraps of metal, bits of paper. But there was a neat little circle around a hexagonal plate laid into the table. The plate was the same deep green that showed up so often, but bobbing peacefully above it was an eight-sided crystal. Or an octohedron. Alius didn’t pay too much attention to that bit in class. Unlike the pyramids and cubes he had seen lying around Three’s shack, which were a plain, if very glowy, blue-green, this stone had crystalline veins streaking all over its surface.

Naturally, Alius had to touch it.

Unfortunately, a blue sphere popped up around the crystal as soon as he approached it. Touching that shocked his hand.

The next desk had marbles of an array of different colors. Curiously enough, the floating crystal had veins tinted a pale red. When Alius reached out to touch it, the barrier formed with a splutter, releasing a few tiny sparks. The bottom fizzled in and out, occasionally flicking out an arc of flame that melted any marbles it touched, fusing them to the table.

Alius decided not to touch it.

The next workplace had a clear desk, save for one fluffy pillow in the corner. The crystal had clear veins again, so Alius reached his hand towards it. Strangely, the sphere that had stopped him the first two times didn’t form, so Alius strained to finally touch the floating crystal.

When his fingers failed to get closer, Alius went back to the front of the massive hall and dragged a chair back to the desk, cursing his height. Standing on the chair put him massively closer to the crystal, but still a little out of reach. Alius didn’t want to hop in, but he was already dangling a good portion of his body inside the room, so he strained up, using the chair to balance himself as Alius pulled himself onto the desk.

The chair was not a very good balance.

It tipped over, causing Alius to wobble on the edge of the desk. But he managed to throw himself forward and just barely make it up onto the desk, but off-balance, Alius tipped forward, right into the floating crystals bouncing ominously above its hexagonal home, already beginning to crackle with waves of energy.