Don put in a solid effort to stay with her while she was working, but was still gone before the hour was up.

It probably hadn’t helped that she kept asking him the math questions that came up while she worked, either. They weren’t the only time she talked, but they did tend to come up in the middle of a sentence, whether his or her own, and she automatically asked it out loud before thinking about it.

Deyana hadn’t realized that Geria had been answering them, before. And there had been less talking, too.

Still, she couldn’t exactly put it down, either.

First on her list had been a few of the tests for |Merge|.

Duplication had been a hard one to test at first, and her first test of two [Create]s, one {Hemiellipsoid} and the other a {Triangular Prism} and both linked to {Domiati} hadn’t seemed to do anything, at first. Only the strange shape of the resulting cheese and high-seeming cost had led her to test out merging [Burst] with itself as well.

And she was glad she did. [Cluster Burst] was a rune that existed, but as one of the known legendaries, it wasn’t a particularly accessible one. The issue, it seemed, with using |Merge| to have a similar effect was that it chose which of the two to use as the primary burst at the moment of usage, not creation.

It may not have been harmful, exactly, but she was still glad she’d used {Visualize} instead of the cheese for that. Especially when the second usage blew up in her hand.

Luckily, that also partially answered the distinct control question­– control was applied to the effect of the rune it would usually apply to. However, that control would essentially be suspended until that effect was in play.

Attempting to sequence the |Merge| activation after one of its component runes just resulted in failure, the entire sequence lighting up and just not going off until it was all powered, and the same applied when she tried merging two runes and only activating one.

She would have left it at that, but in the process of setting up the three-rune linkage, another thought occurred to her.

[Bolt] and [Burst], sequenced to activate first, then another [Burst]. Even on the paper she was using for the tests, the area around |Merge| was starting to get a little crowded, and that was before she added the necessary minor runes for control, power, and materials. It was probably possible to get four working, but it would mostly need to be things where all the components needed the same minor runes and it would still be significantly less mana-efficient than most similar arrays.

Still, it was worth trying.

The ones that would activate first were {Air}, the third was {Visualize}.

The bolt fired, hitting the wall with a thump, and several balls of dark-purple light shot out, blowing up as they made contact with the floor.

That, she wrote down. Order control was possible… but it didn’t work unless |Merge| was active from the start, which meant that it required at least three runes. Which also seemed to decrease the efficiency of the whole combination. Or at least, she hoped that forty mana for such a minor effect was an efficiency problem, not some sort of flat cost.

And, after stating all of her discoveries out loud, the box still didn’t appear.

At least one more, then.

Deyana was completely out of ideas, reverting to staring at the table in front of her for several minutes before she finally sighed, drawing |Merge| on its own and powering it.

No effect.

She added a single [Attract Specific] and {Air}.

No effect–

Rune Quest |Merge|

Phase 7/20: Limit Testing

Complete!

Phase 8/20: Breakthrough

With your increased understanding, create at least one more grouping using |Merge| and see it used by a player or party making significant contribution to a World Boss Event.

No effect, but, apparently, an assumption nonetheless.

And then, a worst-case scenario.

World bosses weren’t exactly difficult to contribute to– gigantic mobilizations of players and NPCs were involved, and all one had to do to participate was show up to one. Making a significant contribution, though—there were only three ways to do that, and only two that were practical.

One: shepherd about two percent of the outside-town NPCs in the path of the boss during evacuation.

Two: with thousands of players involved, somehow deal a full percentage point of the boss’s health.

Or, three: stop or redirect the boss when it would otherwise make cityfall.

It had been almost six months since a world boss had made cityfall.

That left two options, neither of which seemed particularly doable.

Deyana resolved to bring it up to Ell when they met up.

More important, in the meantime, were upgrading her own gear and that of her allies.

Still, on some fronts, there wasn’t much to be done. [Poise] was interesting, as were [Repeat State], [Rotate], and the {Storage: Bleeding Light}. Opposite that, {Material: Domiati} had required her to look it up, {Shape: Pentagonal Pyramid} was just another shape, and {Language: Gujarati} was interesting, just not practically useful.

[Poise] in particular got her attention in a major way. Specifically, it was the rune that referred to an animate target’s ability to stay balanced, even unnaturally– and could also be reversed to [Daunt].

Still, the priority was on [Poise}. It wasn’t the highest priority for most people, but she’d always found its semipassive nature far more useful for strange feats of physicality than almost any other.

Deyana bought a shin guard, the idea coalescing.

[Poise] |Merge|d with [Impart Durability], then, with {Target: Contact}. Because it was a continuous effect, it couldn’t be used by any multieffects, and any additional minor runes would have just been excessive or even made it less effective. Placed on the inside of the shin guard, it would consistently provide her with the bonus.

Equipping it and activating the bonus was fairly small, but Deyana felt the correction almost immediately, bouncing on her feet for a second before dashing across the room, the rune letting her ignore her balance as she made several sharp turns in a row without so much as a stumble.

An impossible backwards lean well-past where her center of balance should have failed her and a running front flip she was certain would have killed her in real life (if only because she intentionally didn’t do it properly) only served to cement the impression.

Durable [Poise] felt even more significant than the rune had been on her previous character, and it hadn’t been minor there, anyways.

She did end up making a second copy for LJay, but she had no idea if he would end up using it or not.

After that, a few experiments failed– [Create] and [Bolt] didn’t mesh well, even adding in an [Impart Energy]. The energy was applied to whatever the bolt hit (or the air when it hit nothing) instead of the created object, and trying to sequence it differently resulted in either a bolt that came out of a moving object, a bolt that exploded then summoned an object into existence, or a creation that then imparted energy on whatever it was touching.

[Edge] and [Grow} seemed to build in a downside, dulling the edge so quickly as it grew that it rapidly became more of a bat than anything useful. She could see a theoretically useful application in doing that with an energy-element, but it was so much mana for so little of an effect that she didn’t bother to keep testing with it.

The combination of two [Rotate]s and a [Wall] that came afterwards was, Deyana had to admit even to herself, more of an expression of frustration than something that she was expecting to actually be useful.

And with those failures primarily in her mind, the time she was supposed to meet with Ell came up much more quickly than she had really thought that it would.

She went to the front, marked out the extra time she would be taking once they got there, and went out to meet them at the teleport circle.

It was a conscious effort to change the way she stood, putting away Novsha’s lazy lean for something a little bit more controlled. Not a necessary one, probably, but Alex felt that changing her habits so intentionally would help her stay beneath notice.

Especially when, on the teleport point that she was expecting Ell to come from, Cadire showed up.

Did they sell me out? Was her first thought. Followed by annoying coincidence, then This had better not be intentional, Ell.

And, finally, as they turned to her, nodded, and started walking towards her with a smirk on their face, Oh.

“Hey there. We should get out of the sun?”

Swallowing past the lump in her throat took a moment. “Yeah. I’m… not quite finished for this session.”

The look of surprise across their face was only there for a moment, but catching it was still just enough to trigger the surge of anger that overtook Alex in that moment– already in the process of turning, luckily, so she didn’t think they saw it.

You know better than anyone I’m a fuckup!

She wanted to scream at them. Maybe throw something–

But that wasn’t true.

She wanted them to yell at her.

It would make more sense.

And then she could be mad. It would make sense.

But they didn’t.

They just quietly followed along after her, entering the runecrafting room with barely a comment on her messy workspace, papers flung about haphazardly with her continuing failures to make anything useful.

“So, how’s your crafting been going?”

Alex had absolutely no idea how to respond to that. ‘Terribly’? ‘Awful’? ‘Everything after the first thing I tried doesn’t fucking work’? ‘Nothing makes sense anymore’? ‘Why the hell are you here’?

‘Why the hell are you talking to me?’

‘Haven’t I ruined your life enough?’

Instead, she reached out, placing her hand on the most recent abomination, and feeding it mana.

The dark-purple of her mana floated up out of it for a moment, coalesced into a wall… then started rapidly spinning on three different axes at different speeds, slamming the visualization through both Deyana and Cadire, looking more like the physics engine was glitching than anything effective.

She couldn’t even look at them and had to fight every instinct she had to keep her voice steady. “That’s at least a decent distraction. Probably the most effective new thing I’ve made this session.”

They made a humming sound, walking over to pick up the paper she’d been fueling, staring at the runes on it. They also grabbed something else, but she couldn’t tell what. “Damn, this really does look like it would explode. But like, it’s doing exactly what you would expect it to, right?”

She finally whirled around, her braid smacking the side of her neck just hard enough that she felt the tiny numbness in pain compensation that the game provided. “Of course it does! This and a solid half of the others!” Deyana grabbed one of the edge papers, folding it along the crease, and powered it to form that blunted metal edge again, then slapping into another paper to prover her point with its utter failure to cut anything. “Not this one, though! Or the other one I was working on!”

The tears were threatening to slip out again, and Alex cut that off by grabbing a new paper and the runic stylus again, throwing several other test papers off onto the ground as she slammed the new one down on the table.

Poorly.

The stylus hit as well, breaking, and wasting several hundred credits for absolutely no reason.

And her anger failed her. Alex laughed, manically, trying to fall backwards and utterly failing at even that until she remembered to turn the damn shin guard off. Then the tears finally came.

Cadire took a moment to look at whatever the hell was in their hand before they put it down, sitting next to her. “Are you okay?”

“Why are you here?” Alex demanded. “I haven’t seen you or spoken to you since FD broke up and you cussed me out. Why the fuck are you here?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Novi, maybe because I’m trying to pay back a debt?”

“Take your debt and shove it. You don’t owe me shit.”

They shook their head. “Maybe you see it that way. Did you even listen to me?”

She hadn’t, really. She’d been too much of a failure to care. “Did I need to? Everyone was pissed, and I couldn’t do anything.”

Deyana couldn’t see their face, too absorbed with staring at the ceiling, and the slow-blinking yellow light in the right-hand side of her vision that said she was under AI psych watch, to care. She almost missed what they said next– growled in a low, dangerous voice that she’d never heard out of her former guildmate in years of knowing them, or even out of Ell. “Make sure you’re dressed IRL. We need to have a talk.”