“Skill fade,” August grunted.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what that means,” Melon said, glancing up from her work. “Skill fade?”

“It’s when you do something a bunch of times in a row, you become really, really good at it, but if you take a break, the next time you try to do the thing, you’re actually a fair bit worse than when you left off,” August said, closing off the skill. “Last night, I got to the point where my hand was super steady—I had the whole whittling nails down to a fine art; now I can’t draw a line without it coming out shaky.”

“I’ve experienced that phenomenon, but I don’t recall it ever being named,” Melon admitted, “Despite the shakiness, that’s well within the range for it to work, although there will be some degree of lost efficiency—it doesn’t particularly matter with that specific rune, because it has such a binary function.”

“What runes would it affect?” August asked.

August’s second attempt was much better, but it was still pretty rough overall.

“A poorly engraved storage rune would have a smaller capacity or perhaps leak some of its contents over time; a connector would experience the same problems while also being capable of channelling less energy per second,” Melon said, “Given you’re doing this by hand, I think the lack of accuracy is pretty much assured, no matter how much you practice.”

Melon finished out her outlines a moment later, straightening up a bit and looking oddly energised.

“Can’t match machine precision, I guess,” August agreed before tapping the spot next to his second attempt. “What about this one?”

“It’s certainly a rune,” Melon offered, clapping her bottom two hands together in a sort of congratulations. “Yes?”

“Wow, okay,” August said, laughing out loud. “Maybe just tell me it sucks next time.”

“I wouldn’t,” Melon protested.

“You should, because it clearly does,” August said. “Alright, attempt one of the activation rune.”

August leant down towards the first plank, carefully resting his wrist against the wood to help steady his hand, took a deep breath, and then went to work—either he’d overcome some of the skill fade, or his affected hyperfocus had helped bridge the gap because the third attempt was about as good as he ever could have managed.

“One down, six to go, huh?” August said, reaching down to run a finger across the finished rune. “Not too bad—”

There was a spark of light, and then the pattern began wavering slightly, almost as if he was peering at it through a haze.

“Only the Children of Gaia can activate a rune like that,” Melon said, a leading note in her voice. “They remain entirely inert to our kind.”

Melon reached down, tracing a finger across it without fear and to absolutely no effect—before her eyes flickered back down to his face.

“It’s active now, but without a connection to anything, all it is doing is searching for a nearby rune to interface with.” Melon said, “With basic systems like these, it searches via proximity and usually on the object by which it is engraved—it’s possible to make a remote connection, but it’s far, far more advanced.”

August heard what she was saying, but his mind was stuck on her previous comment—only the Children of Gaia could activate a rune on touch, and he’d just done so. Runes hadn’t existed back on Earth; they couldn’t have, not if it was as simple as drawing such a simple symbol and then accidentally touching it—somebody would have noticed. Was this a result of unlocking [We’re The Same], the Runcrafting skill that allowed him to interact with runes directly? Or were Humans far closer to Gaian than even the shared appearance could account for?

“I’ve touched other runes before—like the ones on the [Efkini Core], that metal ring when I climbed out of the hole I woke up in, or the summoning runes in the pit,” August said, “Nothing like that has ever happened.”

“I haven’t seen the core you’re talking about, but it’s most likely a closed system, and it would have been activated when the constructors in the Automaton Array first built it,” Melon said, eyes still locked on the wavering rune. “So it probably doesn’t even include an activation rune in the design at all.”

Melon seemed to shake her head at the idea.

“In the case of the summoning, the process of creating a new body at your specific location requires a remote connection to the full system; the level of complexity increases even further when a system is required to detect and reference an individual soul, which is what you must be doing to have picked me out of all of the possible Voithos,” Melon said, “The Automaton Array is one of the few places I know of that has access to the systems to actually perform such a task—although some of the private corporations are supposed to have built their own reference system at some point, but after three hundred years, I suppose my knowledge is quite outdated.”

August lacked most of the context and expert knowledge needed to understand all of the implications of what she was saying—but the surface level seemed pretty easy enough to figure out. He envisioned the summoning pit, with the thousands of tiny runes covering the walls and floor, and found himself stumped.

“You’re saying that all of the runes that appear every time I summon one of you—” August said, furrowing his brow. “That’s not even the whole thing?”

“Of course not; there were a few thousand runes in that pattern at most,” Melon said, a bit startled at the idea. “The number of variables that go into creating something as complicated a body would be made up of tens of thousands of interlinked systems, all of which could hold thousands of runes each.”

August couldn’t quite imagine how you could even engrave that many symbols on anything without running out of space—the wavering effect vanished without visible cause.

“I’m way outside of my depth here,” August said, shaking his head. “Let’s just—go back to the simple stuff; did that just run out of power?”

“Yes, it needs a small source of power to maintain its activation,” Melon admitted, “It would have shut off the system had it been connected to anything.”

“And you can’t turn something like this on?” August prompted.

“I’m afraid it’s impossible without some kind of prepared tool,” Melon said, shaking her head. “It’s also forbidden for us to even use such a tool unless we’ve been given express permission.”

Rittan had once told him that the Voithos had access to a limited-function PDI, hadn’t he? One that opened doors, turned on lights, and allowed some access to runic systems? August lowered his finger to the next spot, carefully carving the [Ambient Mana] rune into the wood as he tried to work his way through the problem.

“If you had your old PDI on you,” August asked once he’d finished. “Could you have activated this one?”

“No, this is an open system without any kind of authorisation,” Melon said, “My PDI would have pinged it for a signature, and when the system failed to provide one, it would have reported the activity as suspicious—that was exactly the kind of inappropriate access the signature was there to prevent.”

August moved onto the [Continuous] rune, turning her words over in his mind—the obvious answer was to figure out how to make an activation thingy for open systems.

“What does an activation system even look like?” August wondered, “It’s not just an activation rune tacked onto the end of an energy storage system, is it?”

“That—is exactly what it is,” Melon said, puzzled. “How did you figure that out so quickly?”

“You said the activation rune searches for nearby systems to turn on as soon as it’s turned on—I was guessing that all it really needed was contact between the activation rune and whatever you were trying to turn on,” August said, explaining his rationale. “You can’t turn it on yourself, so it needs to be on originally and then stay on indefinitely, so it needs a mana storage system to keep it powered.”

Not being able to activate runes was a pretty big disadvantage when the ruling class could do it with a touch, but it seemed like the only thing standing between the Voithos and the keys to the metaphorical kingdom was something a complete novice could work out with a bit of direction—well, that and the whole fact that the PDI they were all forced to carry around apparently reported everyone who tried to do it.