“Okay,” August said. “What kind of work did you do while assigned to Junil?”

Melon fiddled with the twine that made up her belt loops, her bottom two hands twisting the material around and testing out its rigidity.

“I did many different things to assist her during her day,” Melon murmured, “I prepared her meals, cleaned up the spaces she entered, moved objects at her discretion, organised her tools after she was finished using them, accompanied her during outings, retrieved purchases for her, and generally assisted with her daily workload as best I could.”

That sounded more like a live-in servant than a personal assistant, but it still fell pretty much in line with what he’d been expecting to hear.

“That sounds busy,” August said. “Same thing every day, or did you both mix it up a bit?”

“Junil was very quick to develop new interests, so the rigidity of her schedule was almost nonexistent,” Melon admitted, watching as he worked. “Some days she would work almost the entire day in something of a fugue, while others she would set off all across Hekaton looking for something specific or going to visit someone, and we wouldn’t get much of anything finished.”

“Sounds like an interesting woman,” August wondered. “Which days did you like more?”

“Which days?” Melon said, hesitant once more. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Did you really enjoy the days when you were helping her during her fugue of work?” August said, doing a final check of the roughly marked area. “Or was it more fun for you running around Hekaton with her looking for people?”

Melon was quiet for a little while, and he used the moment to open up his inventory, searching through it for the materials he’d need.

“I—I liked them both,” Melon managed, “But it could be stressful when we were outside, at times.”

“I was like that back home,” August said as he removed the first of the stones from his inventory. “Too many people in one place can get pretty rough—I generally prefered being inside, with the people I was close to.”

August felt a bit of a pang at his own words and wondered what those same people thought about his disappearance. Ten days was a long time for someone to be gone without any kind of reason—they would have checked his apartment pretty quickly. Alice and Eric both had a spare key, so they would have known he wasn’t there. The police would have checked his workplace and found that he hadn’t been coming in as well—Melon carefully dropped down onto her knees beside him, keeping a notable distance between them as she studied his hands.

“I can’t see the runic system you are interacting with to open that subspace,” Melon said, “May I ask how you are able to activate it?”

“Did the others tell you anything about what I can do?” August asked.

“Haiko said that you possess the ability to manipulate mana for a variety of functions; taming creatures, discovering information about objects, and rapidly learning how to create structures?” Melon said, making eye contact with him for just a moment. “She also said that you possess a visual augmentation of some kind that allows you to create a perfect three-dimensional model of a person’s body inside your mind.”

August winced a bit at the last one, but he had asked Haiko to warn the others about how the skill worked—and newcomers needed the same warning.

“Right,” August said, reaching up to touch his temple. “I can see a HUD—an interface that appears in my vision overlapping the world—all of the things I can do come from that.”

August shifted the rock into place at the corner of the rectangular he’d drawn, before moving another one out to sit beside it, slowly building an outer barrier.

“It has a bunch of menus that I can navigate through, like the pages of a book, and one of those menus is called an Inventory,” August said, “I can put things in there and remove them by tapping on the icons that show up—if that’s all part of some kind of runic system, then I don’t know where the thing is located.”

“That sounds like—you don’t have a PDI with you?” Melon asked for clarification. “For those without access to specialist tools, it functions as the standard way to interact with low-access systems.”

“I’m not even sure what they look like,” August said, “I don’t know the first thing about runes either—well, I know what a few of them do, but I only figured those out in the last couple of days.”

“How were you able to reference our individual souls or reconstruct our bodies if you don’t understand the runic language?” Melon said, “I’d assumed that—that—I don’t think Junil could have done that without funding, a team, and direct access to the Automaton Array—and she was a master of runes. ”

“Well, I’m not that,” August said, “Everything I can do is prepackaged in that HUD—so I guess whoever designed that already knew how to summon you back from Limbo?”

“Prepackaged,” Melon said, wringing her hands. “Is this HUD you’re talking about some new iteration of the PDI?”

August glanced up again at the words.

“I’m really not the person to ask about that,” August said, “I’ve never seen Hekaton, I’ve never seen a PDI, and I’ve never even seen a Gaian before—how could I know about their cutting-edge technological breakthroughs?”

“I’m sorry,” Melon said, flushing. “You’ve already said—I shouldn’t have expected you to have an answer.”

“You don’t need to apologise to me,” August said, shaking his head. “What is your thought process here anyway—that I have a PDI inside of me?”

“Interacting with runes isn’t something a person can do without first writing out a formula in the physical world; since you are not writing a new formula to perform any of these abilities, you must have a PDI or some kind of specialist tool on your person that is allowing you to interface with an existing runic system,” Melon said, shifting down a bit until she was sitting flat on the ground, her legs splayed out at her sides. “Visual augmentation, editing the runic system of experiments to make them friendly, reconstructing a body at a moment’s notice, referencing an individual’s soul—all of these would require a complicated formula, numerous tools and a deep understanding of the process to accomplish.”

Considering she was as close to an expert opinion on what runes could do as they could manage, it was the best confirmation they’d get that the Gaians had been involved in everything—he’d been pretty comfortable silently placing the blame at their feet after Boko had started mentioning the Efkini’s inability to swim and the possible presence of a Gaian base, but this felt more real somehow.

“So I do have some kind of Gaian technology jammed into my head,” August said, fingers studying the rock in his hand but not really seeing it. “They brought me here on purpose, put this stuff in my head, and then left me here—but why? What’s the point of all this?”

“I—don’t know,” Melon said, sounding a bit concerned by the direction the conversation had gone, “Do you happen to know the date?”

August glanced over at the date indicator in the corner of his vision for a moment.

“This HUD has a date listed, but Rittan said the format was wrong,” August said a bit distantly. “[Year 304 AC].”

“AC—and the day indicator is completely missing? Then yes, that is not the format we usually use,” Melon said, furrowing her brow. “Year three-hundred-and-four suggests that it’s actually a new age entirely.”