The Army Ship and the Jade Staff were both good gets, though the staff was particularly annoying to Mizuki, since its drawbacks seemed really counter to her circumstances. It warped space, allowing you to both see long distances and step through, but the distance limit was fifty miles shy of what she would need to get to Rayedhcraft, and it was incredibly nauseating and difficult to aim when using it at a distance. It had a small notch in the bottom of it that allowed it to be planted in a specific place if you had a friendly woodworker to make you a stand for it. Even better, a friendly woodworker could make a vise that it could sit in that would allow fine control. This would have been great so that it didn’t need to be constantly repositioned to get from one place to another, except the house was moving, which meant that Mizuki had to do ‘recalibration’ every morning. Recalibration was a sickening affair, mostly due to the fact that you controlled the staff’s destination through the angle of the staff. At its greatest distance, a shift of a hairsbreadth could mean miles away, and a few times Mizuki had simply resigned herself to walking.

She could have kept using the entad that Alfric’s mom was loaning her, but she really didn’t want to. Maybe it was all the self-sufficiency talk that Alfric kept going on about, but the staff was Mizuki’s — or at least belonged to the party — and she wanted to use it, rather than something that was given to her. The vise that Alfric made had helped, and she found a place to put a different vise in her advisor’s office in Rayedhcraft, and one that was at a thankfully-stationary midway point, but the moving house meant constant fiddling, and sometimes it was hard to find the house, even with directions from Alfric over the party channel. It was all making her a bit grumpy.

Then one morning Mizuki finished making breakfast and went to use the jade staff, only to find that it had already been set to the proper location.

“I just wanted to take some of the load,” Alfric explained.

“Thanks,” said Mizuki. She was surprised by just how much relief she’d felt at not having to set up the stupid thing, which was weird, because if she’d really wanted to, she could just have used the entad from Alfric’s mom. “Like, really, thanks.”

“No problem,” said Alfric. “You were complaining about it, and I thought ‘I can do something about that’.”

“I don’t remember complaining about it,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit.

Alfric winced. “Might have been an undone day.”

“Aw, well it’s still very sweet of you to think of me,” said Mizuki.

“There was something I wanted to talk about, and if you’ve got a spare five or ten minutes not needing to set up, maybe it would be a good time?”

“Er, sure,” said Mizuki. “I owe you at least one favor.”

“We’re a bit asymmetric right now,” said Alfric, rubbing his head. “That is, I’ve been having an undone day almost every single day, partly because I find moving the house to be a bit unstimulating, and partly because I’ve been trying to do a rapid skill-up on sailing.”

“I know all this,” said Mizuki. “You’ve been good about disclosure.”

Alfric had been taking the boat — apparently it was a ‘boat’ and not a ‘ship’ because of the number of masts or sails or something, but Mizuki knew that was a distinction she wasn’t going to remember and continued to use them interchangeably — out to various lakes to get in practice with it. It was totally unnecessary, but he’d said that when they went together, they’d had a good time. It was on their to-do list, something that they wanted to do together ‘for real’, but Rayedhcraft was getting in the way.

“Disclosure isn’t everything,” said Alfric. “There are things said, and then there are things done.”

“And we … did things?” asked Mizuki. She grinned at him.

“No, no, nothing like that,” said Alfric. He still got flustered by it, and she hoped that he would never stop. “I’m just saying that it’s different to say ‘hey, we spent a pleasant day on the boat, having a picnic, joking around while fishing’, and to actually spend twelve hours experiencing that. That’s where the asymmetry comes in, it’s a hazard. So I just wanted to kind of, I guess, point out that it was there, that I’m spending a lot of time with you that you’re not spending with me.”

“Great,” said Mizuki. “I’m not getting boring?”

“Nope,” said Alfric. “I’d go out on my own if you were. It’s been nice, really. I think I’m getting good at teaching you how to sail, not that it’s wholly necessary with the boat as it is.”

Alfric always gave her the cliff notes, and it always sounded like it was a good time. He was also pretty good about not letting any of it bleed into their friendship, which he’d said was always a risk. If she was repeating a story he’d heard before, he was kind and patient about it, though she was starting to get to know the particular look he would get when she was repeating herself. Of course, they’d known each other long enough that sometimes she ended up repeating herself even when undone days weren’t involved, but that was just a part of being close friends.

“I’ll try to keep it in mind,” said Mizuki. “Maybe we should schedule some kind of, I don’t know, time together? Next time we don’t have something going on, when I have a break from school, we could have a proper day together. Something we’d both experience.” The more she spoke, the more it felt like she was describing a date.

“That sounds nice,” said Alfric. “I won’t hold you to it though.”

“I need to get going if I don’t want to be late again,” said Mizuki. “Who is on dinner tonight?”

“Hannah,” said Alfric. “Meat pies.”

“I got invited to a party,” said Mizuki. “There’s a chance that I will miss dinner and either come home late or not at all.”

“No big deal,” said Alfric with a shrug.

Mizuki kind of wanted it to be a big deal, to have him say ‘can’t you stay home just this once, haven’t you been spending a bunch of time with your wizard friends?’ and then she would have been a little thankful to make her excuses and stay home. He had just said that there was some asymmetry between them, and maybe that explained why he didn’t think he could meet her saying she’d be out with a shrug, but to her it felt like they were barely seeing each other, especially since she’d been putting in extra hours at Rayedhcraft with her research and investigation team.

“Smell you later,” said Mizuki as she stepped up to where the staff was waiting.

“You know I hate when you sniff me,” Alfric replied.

Mizuki grinned at him and stepped through the jade staff’s portal, letting him have the last word.

The staff brought her to a general store, or at least the storeroom thereof. Normally Mizuki did the calibration so that she was close enough, somewhere in the town of Knottomak, which then necessitated a short walk to the store. Here, Alfric had taken the time and gotten a precise bead on the actual storeroom itself, so that Mizuki only had to carefully slide the staff into the vise, tighten it, and then step right into the heart of Rayedhcraft, a courtyard that she’d favored ever since her first visit there.

“Mizuki!” called a girl’s voice, and Mizuki turned at once.

“Becks!” said Mizuki. “Were you waiting for me?”

“You know it,” said Becks.

Becks was a girl from Mizuki’s beginner’s class, the first person to actually succeed in rock petting, and she saw Mizuki as something between a big sister and a cool mom. Mizuki had taken up the ‘cool mom’ role with good grace and much aplomb, and had started packing her large bag with the kinds of things it seemed like a mom should have, like handkerchiefs, snacks, sewing equipment, and water. It was almost like preparing for a dungeon, and Alfric had fun gaming it out with her.

Becks was short and slender, so short that she made Mizuki feel tall, and while Becks was still hoping to grow some, she was sixteen and probably past her final growth spurt. She had blonde hair that was almost always in a different braid from the day before, usually elaborate and artistic. For someone young, she could be very intense, and had worked herself to the bone to be first across the starting line to become a wizard, but she was also sweet and friendly, especially toward Mizuki.

“Did your baker make you anything today?” asked Becks.

“No, I wasn’t blessed by Garos today,” said Mizuki.

“Good,” said Becks. She reached into her own bag, which was somewhat similar to Mizuki’s and had only appeared in the last week. “I got you this.” From her own bag she extracted a thin piece of fabric, which turned out to be wrapped around a pastry.

“Thanks!” said Mizuki. She started eating it almost immediately.

“It’s cinnamon, they had them in the dorm today,” said Becks.

“Good,” Mizuki said around her food.

“Last night I was wishing that I had some kind of thing like you do, a house of my own, or something like it,” said Becks.

“Yeah?” asked Mizuki, who was still eating. They had started to walk to their class, which was yet another lecture. Rayedhcraft loved lectures. “Too noisy or what?”

“Just the worst,” nodded Becks. “The common room is too close to the bedrooms, and people just get insanely loud when there’s a party going on, and I think because of how the schedules lined up a lot of people didn’t have classes in the morning. Or they’re just tired all day, or taking naps, or … I don’t know.”

“I’d probably have died if I wasn’t borrowing my friend’s entad,” said Mizuki. “An extra hour of napping every day, for free? Criminally underrated.”

“You’re so lucky,” said Becks with a sigh. “I should go do some dungeons.”

“I absolutely will not allow that,” said Mizuki. “Do you know how many times I’ve almost died?”

“Um,” said Becks. “You’ve never really talked about the dungeons.”

“It’s been a lot,” said Mizuki. “Now personally, I can handle it, but going into dungeons because you want some nice piece of kit is probably the wrong thing to do.”

They found their seats in the classroom, and Becks got serious, which she always did in class. Mizuki had a few friends among the newbies, and knew quite a few more. They all had their own approaches to study, particularly the lectures. There were tests to make sure that everyone was keeping up, but these were relatively few and far between, and at least some of the students had come to the conclusion that their time and efforts were better spent elsewhere. Some didn’t even come to class, which Mizuki couldn’t really fathom, but she supposed that a lot of people washed out, unable to shape the mana. But if they were waiting to apply themselves until they knew whether they had the knack, Mizuki had no idea what they would do once they proved capable. Maybe it was Alfric’s influence, but it felt to Mizuki like it was pointless not to push yourself just on the off chance it ended up being worth nothing.

Mizuki kept loose notes, which ended up with more drawings than she’d thought she would have, little diagrams, circled words pointing to other words, and sometimes entirely pictorial representations of whatever the lecture was about. This wouldn’t necessarily have sunk her, but as backup, she paid a premium to a different student who was a wortier and made complete transcripts, with copies, for each lecture. These were done in a precise hand, the ink laid precisely on the pages, and they were a godsend. Mizuki would have paid for them at five times the price.

The lecture this time on was on pipes, one of the fundamental units of magical constructs, and while Mizuki couldn’t make anything with the stones, she more or less understood how they fit in with the other stuff. They were pipes: they moved things. A lot of the lecture was about all the ways in which the pipes were different from pipes, and there were, no joke, a dozen different principles that were apparently important principles to keep in mind. The ‘pipes’ carried magic, but didn’t really ‘carry’ magic and were a bit more like portals with a fixed width and physical space than they were pipes.

Toward the end of the lecture, the professor let them actually see one of these pipes, in the form of a construct that moved mana between two wells at a set interval. For Mizuki, actually seeing it was a bit of a problem, since there was an enormous second construct around it in order to make the construct visible to the naked eye, but she thought she got the gist of it, at least, and it was the sort of thing that would only become helpful once she was actually underway. She was happy to have the complete notes mostly because she thought she might need to refer to them later, when she was actually in the thick of it.

Once the lecture was finished, Becks brightened right back up.

“Lunch is something special today,” said Becks. “You’ll sit with me, right?”

“If you’ll have me,” said Mizuki. “You were in the cafeteria, did you see the lunch posting?”

“Roots and fruits,” said Becks, making a face. “It’s a meal without meat or dairy, since it’s a minor holy day for Kesbin.”

“Is it?” asked Mizuki. “It’s … Handol Day?”

“Yup, that’s the one,” said Becks. “You know, I think the cafeteria people get bored, that’s why it’s always such weird stuff for dinner. Or … like they were put under a curse to make great food, but only if it was a different meal every day.”

“That’s not how I cook at all,” said Mizuki. “Plus it’s hard to get good at cooking if you don’t make the same thing a few times and make notes. Everything I’ve seen about wizardry says that it’s basically the same. You make the constructs, you screw it up, you make them again, and you do it enough times that the third time is the first that’s actually good.”

“I’m not looking forward to that,” said Becks.

They went to the cafeteria, filled their plates, got drinks, and found their seats, where some of their other friends were sitting. Mizuki did think of them as ‘their’ friends, but many of them living in the dormitories with Becks, or were otherwise connected to a larger social network that Mizuki just didn’t have time for. Mizuki also didn’t have a full catalog of their names, in part because proper introductions seemed to be a bit of a rarity. It didn’t really matter if you didn’t know someone’s name, so long as you could sit down to have a good conversation with them.

Becks’ friends were, to a one, young girls, all in their mid teens, with Mizuki being the only standout among them. She stood out in other ways too, but she had long hair and fine robes, and fit in well enough, at least most of the time.

“Time manipulation is possible through wizardry,” one of the girls was saying as Mizuki began picking at her food.

It really was just ‘roots and fruits’, though it had been prepared just about as well as it could be, for being traditional food. When the gods had been separated from each other — or rather, when worship of gods was regional — certain traditional foods had been developed that carried into the present day. Kesbin food was, in theory, simple fare that celebrated minimal preparation of high quality ingredients, but in practice was usually under seasoned and lacking. Here, the chefs had bent the rules of Kesbinite cuisine a little bit by making more than a dozen different options, which meant that Mizuki’s plate was filled to the brim with different dishes in such startling variety that she thought Kesbin would probably get mad about it. It was all as good of Kesbin food as she’d had.

“That’s weasel words,” said another girl, this one Parram, a girl from Tarbin who Mizuki at least in passing. She had a thick accent, which felt much lower class than Isra’s in a way that was hard to define, maybe the roughness of the vowels. “When people say time manipulation they can mean all kinds of things. The flow of time is always forward, at least for wizards, whether that means looking into the past, pushing the present into the future, or slowing things down.”

“What’s the topic of discussion?” asked Becks. “Time?”

Mizuki didn’t tend to like the technical discussions, but they happened at lunch often enough, especially with these girls. It sort of made sense that they would talk about things they’d been learning in class, but Mizuki would much rather talk about boys, extracurriculars, the food, or something else.

“Time travel,” said Parram. She took another bite of beets. “Which isn’t possible, with one exception.”

“In theory,” said one of the other girls.

“But not in practice, you think?” asked Becks.

“Seems more likely that it would be the opposite, right?” asked Mizuki. “Impossible in practice, possible in theory? Also what’s the one exception?”

“Chrononauts,” said Carlan, leaning forward slightly. She was a pretty girl with freckles and blonde hair, and an enviable bust. Mizuki had mentioned the enviable bust to Alfric, and he’d raised an eyebrow, but she’d said that it wasn’t like he was going to meet her anyway, so it wasn’t a rude observation to make.

“The conversation,” said Mel, an imperious girl who was way too skinny, “Was whether wizardry could ever replicate what a chrononaut could do, or whether it could come close to replicating it.”

“Mel has been very interested in replication,” Becks explained. The two girls lived next to each other, sharing a wall.

“It is interesting,” said Mel. “There are lots of things — entads, prayers, other magic, what have you — that wizardry can replicate, even if you never would replicate any of it because it would either be too complicated or take horrendous amounts of power. Wizards can’t replace clerics, obviously, but they can come in sideways for a few clerical functions.”

“But probably not chrononauts,” said Carlan.

“All the better,” said Becks. “They kind of creep me out.”

“Why?” asked Mizuki, trying to sound curious rather than defensive. They got enough time for lunch that they could be pretty leisurely about it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Becks. “The idea that someone could do all kinds of things to you, learn all kinds of things, and then just,” she snapped her fingers, “and you’d have no idea that it had even happened, wouldn’t even necessarily ever have met a chrononaut.”

“Better not to think about it,” said Carlan. “They’re super rare.”

“They’re not that rare,” said Parram. “A thousand or so, right?”

“No, see, it’s weird though,” said Mel. “Because why should this one thing be unique?”

“Might not be unique,” said Carlan. She speared a tender chunk of sweet potato with her fork. “That is, if you model it as being a form of precognition rather than time weirdness —”

“Precognition is time weirdness,” said Mel.

“Kind of,” said Carlan, wiggling a hand. “But I guess it’s rare enough and bad enough that it can’t compete with the chronos.”

“The chronos really aren’t that bad,” Mizuki said to Becks, trying to keep her voice low. This really wasn’t effective though, given that it was a poorly timed comment that came at a lull in conversation.

“I know they’re good overall,” said Becks. “I mean, they help us to avoid disasters, cheat death, that kind of thing, I know that, I just wish that it wasn’t something that was attached to people, and I think that it’s probably right to be creeped out.”

“You’re not a chrononaut, are you Mizuki?” asked Mel with a laugh.

“Well, no,” said Mizuki. “But I know a few of them.”

“Wait, you do?” asked Mel. “How?”

“There’s one in my party,” said Mizuki. She felt somewhat sheepish saying it. Alfric had made clear that he’d rather people not know unless there were direct questions that needed to be answered, maybe because he’d been burned one too many times. “He’s a great guy though.”

“Are you serious right now?” asked Pallma. “There are so few.”

“I mean, seven hundred,” said Mizuki. “There are fewer Chosen, and I have one of those in my party.”

This got some looks from the girls.

“I swear I mentioned this before,” said Mizuki. “Not the chrononaut thing, but — one of my party members is a Chosen of Xuphin?”

“But then what are you doing here?” asked Mel.

“Wait,” said Becks, leaning forward. “The guy who’s a chrononaut, it’s Alfric? He’s the chrononaut?”

“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “And he’s super sweet, really. I don’t think there’s a person that I would trust more.”

“But you’re not worried about it?” asked Becks. “I mean, he’s got to have had undone days with you, even if there wasn’t anything weird about them, does he just … tell you what happened? Not mention it?”

“He tells me,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit. “It’s really not that big of a deal, if it’s important, he tells me, if it’s not important, he leaves it out. He can’t repeat every conversation we have verbatim, and I wouldn’t want him to.”

“But he’s the one who decides what’s important and what’s not, right?” asked Becks.

“You’ve got it twisted,” said Mizuki. “He’s a great guy.”

“Eh,” said Mel. She had finished her food, leaving a small pile of orange melon to the side, as it had apparently not met with her favor. “I think I would feel uncomfortable, like Becks. He’s your friend, you’ve known him a long time, but if he makes a mistake or a bad impression he can just undo it. That is a bit creepy, even if you fully trust someone.”

“He’s really not a bad guy,” said Mizuki. “And I mean, I’ve met his family, and some other chrononauts, I actually had to bash one of them in the head —”

“What?” asked Becks as her eyebrows shot up. “You fought a chrononaut? How does that even work? Don’t they see it coming?”

“Oh,” said Mizuki. “No, that’s why you have to do it from behind, and then make it so they can’t reset the day. Anyway, that was months ago, the only time I had a problem with any of it really, aside from —” She stopped herself. She wasn’t sure whether they knew about the dragon thing, but she’d found that she didn’t really like the attention that it had brought her. “Well, Alfric has been lovely, couldn’t ask for a better friend.”

“Okay, but if you have an argument —” began Becks, but then the bell rang, and it was time to start heading to the bane of Mizuki’s existence, rock petting.

Becks was there, and took a seat next to Mizuki, but Becks never talked during class unless it was something involving the subject at hand.

Her words, however, kept going through Mizuki’s mind.

There was absolutely no way that Alfric would have ever done anything untoward, and if he had, she was sure that he would confess it immediately, and if he didn’t, then she would know somehow. Alfric was a terrible liar, and it had taken a long time to figure that out, because Alfric would only tell a lie if there was some urgent need for it. They had played a game where lying was required, and he’d been just awful at it, visibly uncomfortable even before the lie had left his lips.

Still.

Mizuki lied easily, though they were always frivolous lies, sometimes just jokes, ways for her to contribute to the conversation or relate to someone, passing her lips before she even really knew what was happening. It wasn’t that she meant to lie, or even really like she was lying in order to get credit for things she hadn’t done, she was just going with the flow, and sometimes that meant saying things that weren’t true, or were only true from a certain point of view. Some of the worst lies she’d ever told, at least so far as outcomes were concerned, were the lies that followed a question like ‘Do you want to go on a date with me?’ It always felt so much like resistance or confrontation to say ‘Not really, no’ to that, so she’d say ‘yes’ and then just end up dating someone for a bit because she was going along with it. There were a number of meals she’d said were great when they really weren’t, and things she’d said she enjoyed when she actually didn’t. It was a bad habit, and she at least recognized now that’s what it was, though it was a hard habit to break.

It was possible that Alfric was lying like that, going with the flow, not mentioning things because it would be horribly awkward. That didn’t feel like something Alfric would do, because he was so painfully aware of the conflicts and potential conflicts and appearance of conflicts, but it was possible, sure. He would say something if she had kissed him in an undone day, and he would definitely say something if he’d kissed her, or he’d just not undo the day. But if they were laying on the sailing boat as it doggy-paddled through a lake with the stars in the sky over their heads, her head in the crook of his shoulder, making appreciative noises as they cuddled together … she could understand if he thought it was easier to not mention that. She could believe that he wouldn’t mention it, especially if it was something like that, romantic but with some deniability, where saying any of it would necessarily mean talking about his own emotions and what he imagined her emotions to be.

None of that made her feel uncomfortable though. It made her heart beat a little faster, and it also made her feel a little sad, because it was the kind of thing that Alfric might undo. The scenario was entirely imagined, and it was odd to Mizuki that she could feel so simultaneously thrilled and heartbroken by something that had probably never happened, something that she’d invented within her own mind.

It wasn’t a productive day of rock petting.

Once class was finished and all the exercises had been done with no discernible progress, Mizuki had one final stop at the university before the house party: the researchers.