"You have to understand, it's been getting harder and harder to make new glyphs," Clyde explained.

It had taken a while to get everyone calmed down. Clyde himself had to start herding people back to town, though many of them insisted on staying and seeing what the effect of the new glyph was. There his wife Belle had taken charge, insisting that testing a new glyph surrounded by civilians was a terrible idea.

In fairness, Derivan's Sign was unlikely to cause harm to anyone — but he was grateful to Belle nonetheless. The stares and whispers were challenging for him to deal with; he found he much preferred the smaller, intimate company of just his party. Fame and attention was not for him.

Now they found themselves back inside Clyde's inn, gathered around a huge table that Clyde had taken out of storage just for this occasion; the standard ones did not fit all seven of them.

"Harder my ass," Elliot snorted. Clyde glanced at him, and Elliot ignored the grin that stole across his husband's face. "It's been impossible for a few generations now. At least five."

"No one created any new glyphs — how long is a generation?" Vex asked.

"I just use it to mean a hundred years." Elliot shrugged. "So we haven't had any new spells for something like five hundred years. We haven't needed any new spells, since you can create just about any effect working with what we already have, but..."

Here Elliot smiled a small, rueful smile. "We used to have these festivals every time a new glyph was created," he said. "An expansion to the Great Record, we called it. A new piece of art acknowledged, a new addition to the history of the world."

"The Expansion festivals... I almost forgot about those." A wistful look stole across Belle's face.

"It was one of the few things that got you out of your lab back then," Clyde said, his voice teasing. "It was where you met us, remember?"

"I do, in fact," Belle said, patting her hands primly on her dress, brushing off some imaginary dust. "My memory isn't that bad."

"Do you think you'll hold another one?" Vex piped up again.

"Maybe." Clyde glanced around. "There's a lot of preparation we'd need to make to be able to hold a festival like that. Can't have our town looking so dreary."

"Isn't your town supposed to be a template?" Sev raised an eyebrow.

"We can make changes sometimes," Clyde said, waving a hand. He sighed. "Honestly, it might be good for us. We've been living a routine for five hundred years. It hasn't always been like this; there used to be a lot more life..."

His voice trailed off, and he glanced meaningfully at the door. "We used to be a lot more than just this," he said, glancing at Belle and Elliot both. Derivan saw the small sadness that hid within their eyes, though it was banished just as quickly. He said nothing, but he wondered how different the town would really have looked, if things had not deteriorated quickly.

Perhaps the story of their town was not the whole truth. But if that was the case, then they did not seem ready to speak of it yet, and he did not see the need to press them on it.

"Who decides whether or not you have a festival?" Misa asked. It was the first time she'd spoken in a while; Derivan noticed that she was spending more time deep in thought, and would check the system every so often, as though afraid she would lose contact with the outside world.

...she was the only one amongst them with a family, now that he thought about it. Vex had his, but except for his little brother, they were largely estranged. Misa had only just gotten her family back, and she'd had to head out again almost immediately. For all that her skill gave her the ability to spend time with her family at any time, anywhere, if they were to lose access to the system while in here...

He couldn't blame her for her worry.

"The mayor," Clyde said, gesturing vaguely. "He'll probably want to talk to Derivan sometime tomorrow, once he's figured out what he wants to do."

"Ah," Derivan said. "Perhaps I should prepare for his visit?"

"Nah, he's pretty chill," Elliot said. "Doesn't really do his job, even, but there's not much mayoring to do here, so... he does his best."

"Does he know?" Vex asked. "That this place is an echo."

"You can tell him." Belle looked closely at Vex. "But he'll be as ambivalent about it as the rest of us."

"It doesn't feel right not to," Vex admitted.

"Fair enough." She smiled at him. "I think he'll probably want to hold a festival. It'd be an opportunity to gather the template towns again."

"Oh gods," Clyde groaned. "Do we have to?"

"We can't not invite them to an Expansion Festival, Clyde," Belle said, turning an amused gaze onto her husband. He glared back at her and folded his arms, looking for all the world like a petulant child.

For all of five seconds, anyway. He glanced back at them, and any trace of that playfulness vanished; he turned serious once more.

"Will you four be okay if we host one?" he asked. He glanced at Derivan's missing arm, though he didn't comment on it. "I might be prying a bit too much, here, but you seem like you might need time to yourselves to recover. A festival might be just what you need, but only if you're in the right place for it."

There was a bit of a prolonged silence, at that; no one seemed ready to answer. Misa was, surprisingly, first.

"You said it'd take some time to prepare, right?" she said.

"A week at least," Clyde nodded. "If Oliver decides it's a good idea to hold a festival at all."

"I think I can be in the right place in a week," Misa said, breathing out. "Gives me somethin' to work towards."

"You are taking the loss hard," Derivan observed, though he felt a bit useless for pointing out something so obvious. His tone was sympathetic, though, and Misa didn't seem to take offense.

"I talked a bit about it already, but it's not easy to just accept until I can fuckin' do something about it." Misa, too, glanced at his missing arm, and Derivan shifted uncomfortably; he wasn't sure he liked all the looks, as much as he understood them. As soon as she saw him move, Misa glanced back at him, her gaze faintly apologetic.

He didn't know if she was apologizing for staring at it, or if she was apologizing for not protecting him in the first place. A little bit of both, he suspected.

"You still want to train?" Sev asked.

"A few hours ago I would've said 'not until we have a way to repair the anchor'," Misa said. She glanced at a system screen and sighed; a tension seemed to bleed out of her shoulders, and she seemed to finally allow herself a small smile. "But whatever you did, Derivan, it repaired the shit out of the anchor. So I think I'm good to train at least a little bit."

She paused. "It'd be nice if we had a way to repair it consistently, though," she added.

"What?" Vex bounced up on his feet. "Why didn't you say anything earlier! That's amazing. That means acts of creation — wait, shouldn't you have gotten reality shards for that? Did you get any reality shards for that, Deri?"

"Not that I am aware of," Derivan said, patting his armor. There was nothing there, and he didn't remember seeing anything where he'd drawn the glyph.

"Are you talking about mana slivers?" Clyde asked curiously. Belle was leaning forward, interested.

"The system calls them reality shards," Vex said.

"You haven't really explained this system thing to us," Belle said, chuckling. "I can make some guesses based on what you've already said, but it'd help if you told us a little bit more."

Vex blinked, embarrassed. "Right," he said. "Um. It's a bit complicated. It's... we think it's how reality is maintained, I guess."

Very quickly, the lizardkin gave — or attempted to give — the three shadow elementals a crash course on the nature of the system as it impacted their world; Clyde and Elliot were both interested, and Belle mostly seemed incredulous.

"It's efficient, I guess?" she muttered. "But it just seems so arbitrary. Why the dungeons and the monsters? Why stats and skills and levels?"

"We think the dungeons have something to do with maintaining reality anchors," Vex said, and then he took a breath as he seemed to realize something. "Looking at the name of the anchor, and the fact that Fendal and Teque had a very similar designation... every dungeon seems to stabilize a zone around it. That's probably what the label is. So X-51 stands for the area around the Guild town we were in. And the Prime Kingdoms each have a large dungeon that stabilizes or connects the entire region..."

Vex paused. "That last part is a guess, though," he added. "We don't really know much about the difference between a regular dungeon and a Prime Kingdom dungeon."

"Fair enough," Belle said again, though this time her tone was a bit doubtful. She shook her head. "Reality shards, though. If your system calls our mana slivers reality shards, that would explain a lot about what they do. It gels with echo theory."

"The shards allow magic to create echoes like the system does?" Vex guessed, and Belle nodded.

"Make a big enough change in reality," she said, "and that's what magic is — and you create waves. Lots of tiny echoes that ebb out from that single change. The mana coalesces and solidifies that echo as a crystal, and you get a little crystal of pure potential. A pocket universe, almost."

"...And Teque was using that as a currency?" Sev said, scandalized.

"Most towns do," Clyde said dryly. "In fairness, we might know echo theory, but we never figured out what the slivers are. They're opaque to us. We know they allow magic to do things it shouldn't be able to do, and that's about it."

"Your friend is right, though," Belle said, frowning. "Your act of creation should have created a small fortune in slivers. I don't think I saw a single one at the field you were practicing in."

"Maybe it went towards repairing the anchor," Misa said without thinking, and then when everyone stopped and stared at her, she paused. "What?"

"I think you got it," Vex said. A sudden energy leapt into his eyes and he bounced on his feet, thinking. "That's probably exactly what happened, and if you're right, then we just need to figure out how to do it, um... on purpose." He glanced at Clyde. "You wouldn't happen to have any slivers you'd be willing to share, would you?"

Clyde laughed. "I normally don't have any customers asking me for money," he said, teasing, and Vex ducked his head in embarrassment. "But yeah, I've got some. I don't mind helping you guys out. Just give me a second."

He disappeared into the back. Belle stared after him.

"He has got to stop just giving our stuff away," Belle said, though she didn't seem all that bothered by it, judging by the amusement in her eyes.

"Eh," Elliot said. "You know him. We couldn't stop him if we tried."