Old Man Rinsetti took his time looking over the sketch. When he looked up, he was already smiling. “Did you draw this?”

Serenity nodded. “I thought it would be useful; it sounds like no one else has noticed it. Jemma had me draw one at the beginning of her test, too.”

“Test?” Rinsetti raised his eyebrows for a moment, then lowered them. “Oh, of course. Journeyman? How long did it take?”

“Four days,” Serenity answered half-ruefully. He hadn’t planned to take anywhere near that long on it. “Well, I did start after lunch on the first day so maybe more like three and a half?”

Old Man Rinsetti chuckled. “Jemma must have really wanted to turn you down. That test only takes two days, even if you’re slow, unless she adds things. Which she will; she doesn’t approve of youngsters trying to learn runes. Thinks you shouldn’t start before Tier Four or even Six, that runes are just too expensive below that. What Tier are you, anyway? Higher than most, by the way you’re hiding your aura.”

“Eight,” Serenity admitted. “It’s not polite to spill aura, especially not around people who are weaker. So I don’t.”

The old man laughed from the belly at that. “Hope I’ll be there when Jemma finds out. Explains why you could pass her test; why’d you take it, anyway? I doubt you’re planning to settle down here and sell runework and that’s about all it’s good for. No way that’s worth more here than what else you could do at Tier Eight, and it won’t be safer either. Not with those flyers. Whatever people think, it’s not going to just stop. It’ll get worse before it gets better, always does.”

Serenity nodded agreement; the only way to stop whoever was attacking from escalating was to actually stop them. Ignoring them was just giving them room.

“That diagram on the flyer is the reason. I was told no one would talk to me about runes without a Guild card, even about the flyer.” Serenity was sure that if he held an official position, it would be different; unfortunately, he didn’t.

Old Man Rinsetti chuckled again. “Must’ve been one of the store owners. I suppose that makes sense; they won’t talk about anything without a Guild card protecting them, and how else will you find anyone to talk runes with? At least Jemma sent you to me, she knows I studied some of the foreign runesets for my Masterwork.”

Jemma had also sent Serenity to a half-dozen other Masters from the Runework Guild. Maybe she had a reason for each of them or maybe it was to get Serenity out of her hair; he didn’t know. For once, he decided to be smart and just not mention the list. “Does that mean you recognize the script? It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”

Old Man Rinsetti shook his head. “I wouldn’t expect to. My Mastery was in runic synthesis, not pure Runemastery. I’m no scholar to know them all, but I do have resources we can check. Let’s head into the study; you can help me search.” He turned towards Rissa with a concerned expression on his face. “As for you, young lady, are you also following the path of runes? Will you be helping us?”

Rissa’s lips twisted. “I’m not sure I can,” she admitted. “I’ve studied a few runes, but only one style, one ... runeset, you called it? I’m still working on linking them together, I can’t reliably manage more than two.”

“Apprentice level, then. No reason for you not to help; it may not advance your knowledge much, but you have eyes. You may learn more than you expect, if you can come to recognize the fine details that separate runesets. Come on then; I saw you both eat, we’ve got time to look.” The old man levered himself out of his chair, using its arms to help him stand. Once he was vertical, he didn’t seem to have any issues walking, but the way he had to push himself to stand worried Serenity a little.

The page blurred in front of Rissa’s eyes again. Two days of comparing different possibilities had her bored and frustrated, though neither Serenity nor Old Man Rinsetti seemed to feel that way. As far as she could tell, the differences in the different runesets were like different fonts, styles around a central truth that you had to understand to translate from one runeset to another.

Serenity said that wasn’t quite true, but it was a good place to start.

She’d thought that would help her figure out which one matched, but she’d since found out that the problem was as bad as fonts: there were hundreds of these things, and some were different in only minor ways. It was like trying to tell one “handwriting” font from another; you could tell that they were both “handwriting” fonts easily, but identifying which was which took careful attention to detail.

Old Man Rinsetti was concentrating on some runesets from a long way away, while Serenity was studying his books about ancient runesets. Rissa had taken the methodical approach of looking at each runeset, one by one, and marking them off on a list. It was working; she was pretty confident she hadn’t marked off any that were a match. If she questioned a particular one, she took it to Serenity. He’d immediately identify something that didn’t match for her and explain it, which helped.

Really, it reminded her of researching companies before buying their stock, only even more boring. At least with companies, they did something different; each runeset was just a different way of doing the same things! Sure, Serenity said some were better than others at certain things because of … something about the way they went together … but she hadn’t completely understood that explanation.

It didn’t matter with the low numbers of runes she was able to use together; it only mattered once you had dozens. It would probably make sense once she’d studied runes for a few more years. Or decades; Rissa knew Serenity had spent literal centuries studying and working with runes, so decades might be a better time estimate for when she’d actually understand runes well enough to put together runescripts.

Well, apparently the runeset used could matter at four or five sometimes, but Serenity called those runesets “badly designed” and Old Man Rinsetti didn’t argue with him. Instead, he made jokes about how badly designed the runeset he’d put together was.

It seemed that anyone who learned enough about runes tried to put together a runeset at some point, which only made the problem worse. That was even before Serenity mentioned “special purpose runesets,” which were apparently designed to create their effects more simply but not be as flexible as a proper runeset.

The symbol on the plane wasn’t a “special purpose runeset”. She’d asked. Rissa didn’t know how they could tell, but she thought it was something to do with the complexity; apparently, there were too many basic, understandable runes there. Rissa didn’t see it, but she didn’t really expect to. Not at her level of knowledge.

Rissa set the sheet of paper with the sketch down on top of the book and rubbed her eyes. They were still going to be here for days, weren’t they?

There were far too many books to search through and checking each language took time. It would probably only be days if they were lucky; a more realistic guess was probably weeks.

Rissa didn’t count on luck. She never had. For all that she now knew much of her “bad luck” was probably the curse working against her, she still didn’t trust luck.

It was time to cheat. If she could have, she’d have started there, but seeing the future worked better if she had a starting point. Fortunately, she should have enough baseline information to get something now. Even better, she didn’t have to start in the Timestream; this was far more limited than anything that would require going there.

There were many possible ways to see the future; several of them would work for this situation, where she was trying to find information they’d find eventually. Being thorough was hugely helpful; it opened up several methods that only worked on things that would be found with current efforts.

Come to think of it, those methods alone should have told her that Foresight could change the future. They implied it; they worked by changing the future in a small way. She’d simply never been able to think about them that way.

Rissa grumbled to herself but knew she had to focus on the future, not the past. She’d done the best she could then; the fact that she’d made mistakes she couldn’t avoid wasn’t something she could change.

She set her palm on the paper, then made sure that she covered the entire glyph. Her pinky ran off the page and onto the book; that was fine. She wanted to see the last book this paper would be set against; that was a good goal.

The way to get there was by seeing them all. It would take far less time than actually searching all of the books; more importantly, it would be less boring. She’d have to concentrate on holding the vision, and that was rarely boring even when the topic she was looking into was.

Serenity stretched his shoulders, grateful Rissa had insisted on human form instead of the chimera he’d wanted. His chimera form would have stood out a bit more, but not enough to be a problem in a city with large populations of both humans and draykin and small populations of several other species. He really didn’t think that looking like a half-dragon would be as much of an issue as Rissa seemed to think it would be. On the other hand, wing cramps were awful and there absolutely was not enough room in Old Man Rinsetti’s study to stretch wings.

Serenity glanced over at Rissa. She was in the same position as the last time he’d looked. Had she fallen asleep? If she had, it was only reasonable. While this was an interesting refresher with the occasional new idea for Serenity and comfortable for the books’ owner, Rissa was here simply to help.

No, she couldn’t be asleep. Her eyes were open.

That meant she was probably having a vision. Serenity knew Rissa tried to be less obvious about them, so looking down at the book was probably her pretending to be asleep. He quickly moved his magesight into its active form and confirmed that Time magic swirled around her; that was enough to make his guess seem solid.

Serenity hoped the vision she had was related to the current problem and not a new one; they usually were, but when Rissa saw something that she wasn’t already looking for, it was generally important. She hadn’t had a vision like that since the invasion portals on Earth were closed, and he was grateful for it.

He kept part of his attention on her while he continued to search through the books in Old Man Rinsetti’s library. It slowed him down, but it was worth it; Serenity noticed immediately when Rissa swayed in her seat and managed to catch her well before there was any risk of her landing on the floor. He was less lucky with the book; he barely tapped it, but that was enough to send it into the stack of books he’d finished with but not yet put away. They crashed to the ground; somehow, they managed to knock over both of Rissa’s stacks as well. He had no idea which of those she’d looked through and which she hadn’t.

He could only hope that her vision meant they wouldn’t have to sort them out.