As bold a statement as Vex had started with, there wasn't yet much for him to go on — the idea that magic drew from a physical place, even, was something that was new to him. Vex had told Derivan he wanted a bit of time to mull on it, which seemed like a better plan than Derivan's own thought of "push as hard as possible in Shift and try to take them to this new place".

They needed to stay here, and they needed to avoid breaking things in the bonus room for as long as possible. Derivan did need to experiment with Shift, but the goal with that was to give them a means to access and interact with their own world while keeping the benefit of stretched time.

For now, Vex was back at the array of glyphs he'd scattered across the field, and isolating a set he thought would be useful.

"I mean, don't get me wrong, I think all of them are useful," the lizardkin rambled as he worked, waving a hand about animatedly; Derivan watched in fond amusement as mana followed his movement, and a few of the glyphs he'd drawn crumbled to dust. "But we need a smaller set to focus on first, or we're going to end up with a broad set of spells that don't work very well together."

"You sound as if you may have had experience with such a thing," Derivan observed.

Vex laughed, a touch of embarrassment coloring his tone. "In my early days I just wanted to learn every spell I could get my hands on," he said. "And don't get me wrong; having a lot of options is a strength all on its own. But that's more Misa's wheelhouse, you know? I just want to understand."

He stared out at the glyphs he'd picked for a moment, and then his voice acquired a touch of ruefulness. "Narrowing your area of study helps you understand it more," he said. "Magic as a whole is broad enough as it is. I'd almost say it's too broad for any one person to understand, except that would invalidate my life goal, and I'm going to be stubborn about that for a little while longer, I think."

"Hardly one person," Derivan said, his tone just a touch chastizing. Vex glanced over at him and seemed to hesitate for a second before coming to a conclusion.

"Are you sure you actually want to help me with this, though?" he asked. "I mean, is all this what you actually want to do?"

Derivan paused to consider the question, though the immediate response was on the tip of his metaphorical tongue; Vex was looking at him in earnest, and the answer to this seemed important to him. So he measured his words before he spoke, and made sure they were clear.

"It is both," he said. "You taught me about the beauty of magic, and so I have a vested interest in understanding it. But it would be a lie to say that your happiness does not factor into it. Both things bring me joy."

"Oh," Vex said softly, and then he looked away, but not before Derivan caught the shy smile that stole over his face. "Um. Thanks."

"You are welcome."

"But you know if you were interested in anything, I'd happily help you with it." Vex acquired an oddly fierce look.

"Of course," Derivan chuckled. The answer seemed important to Vex, though; the lizardkin visibly relaxed, and that same smile stole across his face again.

"Good," he said. Satisfied with that line of conversation, Vex turned his attention back to the glyphs he'd laid out in front of him. "I'm going to see if we can't come up with a magical solution for your hand."

"I feel as though I could generate a replacement, with enough training in Slime," Derivan offered. His generative abilities weren't quite so advanced just yet — he'd already tried, some time the night before. He could generate a small tendril that in no way matched the proportions of the rest of his body.

"Would that work?" Vex asked. "Is it the same?"

"It is not the same, exactly," Derivan admitted. "It is a part of me, but it feels... different. I do not have the words for it. I do not think the difference is bad, but it is slower, and I suspect I would not be as effective in combat."

"So we still need another solution," Vex said, nodding to himself. Derivan stole a glance at the glyphs he'd chosen for this experiment.

There was the glyph for Earth, which he supposed made sense; something to represent metal, as a product that came from the earth. There was Derivan's own Sign in there, which he hadn't tried casting on its own just yet. Then there were the glyphs for Communication, Relay, and Research...

"Why is your own Sign there?" Derivan asked. Vex was staring at the array of glyphs he'd chosen, deeply contemplative. He jumped when Derivan spoke.

"Uh," he said, and then stared at the glyphs again. "I'm coming at it from a more organic perspective, I guess. Normally you have to do a certain amount of rehabilitation to be able to use a limb effectively again. I don't have a glyph of Learning, or I would've used that instead; Research is tied a lot more closely to me..."

Vex paused, looking embarrassed. "I can take it out, if you prefer. In case it gives me a link to your arm or something."

"I do not mind," Derivan said, chuckling. "I was only curious."

The lizardkin nodded, but still seemed a little red, at least under the light of the sun; Derivan watched him fondly. Vex stuck a tongue out of his mouth and began to scribbling down small sketches of theretical glyph combinations in his notebook. With each sketch he paused and stared intently, waiting to see if it drew the attention of the surrounding mana. If it did, he erased it with a small pulse of magic, and if it didn't, he kept the sketch there, presumably as a reminder of what didn't work.

There were a half-dozen failed sketches in there that didn't seem to pull in mana at all. Derivan didn't quite understand why — they seemed like they should have been perfectly valid glyph combinations — but he did see a pattern beginning to emerge as Vex worked on his sketches.

The glyphs that worked were always glyphs that contained a message and meaning of their own. Derivan felt a distinct impression when looking at them. There was Earth and Communication, for example, intertwined with one another as not-letters circling a globe; it felt like Connection. Other sketches where the looping letters were made of stone gave no such impression, nor was the mana drawn to it.

Derivan wondered if this was in some way a result of the Magic stat. He'd neglected it for some time, but now it was singing to him as he stared at Vex's sketches, at the various glyphs that were still scattered about.

His own Sign called to him. He still hadn't tested it.

"I am going to attempt a spell as well," he said out loud, though his own voice felt a little distant to him. He felt his mind sinking further into the Magic stat; now that he was thinking about it, he could do it with deliberation, letting the strange other-sense suffuse his being.

The world seemed a little different like this. He no longer saw the transparent panes in the sky, each reflecting a small section of the land. Instead, the sky was an impressionistic painting that gave him impressions of openness, freedom; of possibility and travel. The grass was a splash of life on the dirt-brown soil, which itself gave him thoughts of solidity and of being grounded.

Each of Vex's glyphs shone with a brilliant light, though none of them were blinding. They just shone with purpose, singing a clear signal that correlated directly with the impressions he'd gotten before. Connection, a glyph that represented a means of staying linked, no matter the distance. Earth, a glyph that embodied everything he saw when he stared at the soil beneath his sabatons.

And Vex himself was, in a word, beautiful.

The lights in Derivan's helmet blinked off as he shut off that new sense of sight, giving himself a moment to process everything he was seeing. It was different — maybe something closer to how the mana itself saw the world. He'd caught glimpses of Sev and Misa, too. The former was painted in gentle streaks of kindness and hope and just a little too much self-sacrifice; the latter was anger bound by restraint, determination, and a clever mind.

Both striking in their own right, and yet neither of them gave him quite the same feeling. Vex was rendered in the bright yellow colors of curiosity streaked through with his fierce intellect. The edges of his form were more uncertain, tempered by his own anxieties and fears and self-doubt, but the core was nevertheless firm. There was a fire in him that was both his passion for learning and his own brand of kindness, and it lit him up from within, lending a sort of vibrancy to him that he hadn't seen before...

...Derivan realized with some embarrassment that for the short time he'd possessed this variant of mana-sight, he'd spent most of it focused on Vex.

"Weren't you going to cast a spell?" Vex asked. He peered at him — Derivan felt it more than he saw it. "Are you okay?"

"I am fine," Derivan said, though to him his voice perhaps sounded a little dazed. He opened his eyes and gave the lizardkin the best smile he could, and wondered — perhaps for the first time — what it was that Vex saw in him.

He let that idle curiosity go for now, though. Instead, he turned his gaze inward. Vex had managed to figure out what his Sign was, extrapolating backward from his understanding of Derivan and from the combined Sign he had created. Now he aimed to do the same, in his own style.

His gauntlet moved, tracing a shape in the air.

A Sign was an individual's signature. It was an answer to a question, a representation of who a person was. Vex had had an answer for that before Derivan himself had truly figured it out — his understanding of himself had always relative to others. It seemed only natural to him. His base self was a suit of armor; he existed to protect.

And yet he'd grown to be more than that, in no small part thanks to the friends he'd made.

It didn't change who he was in some fundamental way; it made no difference to who he wanted to be. But there was an ache where his arm had once been that reminded him that now there was context where there had been none before — the answer might not have changed, but now there was another question.

Who did he want to protect?

The answer wasn't just 'his friends', because they were more than just bodies to protect. They had their own beliefs that he, too, felt was worth fighting for. The loss of his arm was a good reminder of that; that being who he needed to be to protect them wasn't enough.

The people at the top of the Guild had built an organization aimed at protecting not only themselves, but anyone weak, anywhere they needed help. Sometimes people needed a little bit of help to become truly strong. Sometimes protecting others involved being something more than a shield.

Sometimes Signs changed.

Derivan stared at the Sign he'd drawn. Mana was already flowing towards it, aspected towards a type he'd never seen before; he couldn't put a name to it if he tried.

The Sign in the air was still very obviously a piece of armor — a cuirass shaped not unlike his own, though it differed wildly in detail. It was a series of interlocking plates, weak individually but built to lock together when sustaining an impact, becoming something stronger as a whole. A small detail etched into the design was the names of his friends, inscribed along the shoulders, and Vex's name right over the center of the plate, where his heart would have been if he had one.

Behind the armor, etched as silhouettes in the light, was his best rendition of life — every race he had met in his journey so far, designated as a monster by the system or not, and even a few placeholders for the people he hadn't met.

It was altogether too complicated for a Sign. It had gone somewhere beyond that, he realized; Derivan looked at the sky and saw that it was dark, now, and realized he'd spent something like hours lost in the process of creating this. This was no Sign. It was a creation of his own.

And as he watched, the mana seemed to take it like it was an offering. His painting — for that was what it was, really — simplified, turning into abstract, representative shapes of others behind a piece of armor. But he felt the original piece still within it, sitting within the mana.

"I think you just created a new glyph," Vex said quietly. He'd stopped his own experimentation long ago, apparently, abandoning it to watch as Derivan worked. Derivan noticed, for the first time, that they were surrounded by shadows.

They had an audience. The town had gathered to watch.

"Oh," Derivan said.