"That did it. And something else, too, it might be the sense-sharing, do you want me to see if I can figure out how it works?"

(He crouches to check out the book situation, and pauses; does the power stay if he's not actively pursuing her goal but intends to after this distraction?)

It does! It seems to be the intention that matters: it is Raafi's internal mental state that the runes seem to be triggered by, rather than anything objective.

Scyelen gives him a nod, shyly excited at their success. "Yeah. Um..."

She pokes the mental door herself, but that alone doesn't seem to be enough to 'open' it.

He pokes at his door, too.

"The other thing we'll want to test is what makes it end - last time it ended when I put the knife away but there might be other things that do it, and that'd be bad to be surprised by."

"Yeah. Um..."

They proceed to experiment further.

They learn that the threshold for keeping the runes active is much lower than for activating them in the first place. As long as he is touching the weapon at all, he can keep the runes active even while doing nothing at all. The only things that seem to take the runes' power from him before he lets it go on purpose are: ceasing completely to touch a weapon (there is a few seconds' grace period if he throws a weapon at a target), and physically acting on the intent to defy or subvert Scyelen's goals.

When Raafi tries less weapon-ish objects, it becomes more difficult to activate the runes, but not unduly so. Intending to use an object in its capacity as a weapon is enough.

They discover that the trick to the mental door is that it opens for individual senses, not everything at once. They figure out how to look through each other's eyes, but it takes concentration that would make it impractical in many circumstances. Sight seems to be easier than the other senses, even hearing.

Overall, very cool. He winds up sprawled on her bed, looking at the ceiling - "I'm not coming up with anything else, I think that's all the important stuff."

Scyelen flops opposite him.

"Me too?"

She fidgets into a more comfortable position.

"...do you think the headmaster was right, back when he said, um, that we're... destined for some big conflict?"

...y'know what, yeah. Snuggle.

"I guess it wouldn't surprise me."

Snuggle squirm shiver.

"...yeah."

"It won't necessarily be soon. - I don't know if you've been worrying about my age, but clerics my tier live to be very old, usually."

"Oh. That's, good. I haven't really thought about that. But I... I can actually graduate from the academy, now. My mother's a Wind mage, no one will even look twice."

"Mmhmm. Have you thought about what you want to do after you graduate at all?"

"I have no idea," Scyelen admits. "I guess I was hoping my betrothed would, um, decide to do something okay with me? I don't know."

He nods. "Well, I'm still going to want to travel, maybe you can come with me sometimes."

"That seems... daunting? But. I don't, um, have any better ideas."

She shifts around a little.

"...I might be kind of... spoiled? Not having a soft bed in a private room with running water and, and gourmet food served to me as a matter of course..." Shudder. "I know most people have less comfortable lives, I just... I think most of my, um, peers justify the disparity with arrogance, but. Even they're probably less afraid."

He nods. "That would be scary to give up, if you've never done anything else. You could start slow, though - my teleportation makes that easy, you don't actually have to spend the night away from home if you don't want to, I can just bring you back and forth. It's more fun not to, to see what it's really like to live in a new place, I think, but you can try that when you're ready for it."

Scyelen nods, hesitant.

"Life would be a lot easier if there was a way to just... skip over your first time doing something. Skip straight to the second time, or something. That doesn't even make sense..."

Squeeze. "No, I get it. You know how it goes, the second time."

Scyelen nods, but doesn't have anything more to say.

Raafi will just hold her for a minute, then.

"That was sweet how you saved me from Kirche, earlier, by the way."

That gets a tiny little slightly-confused giggle.

"I just... she was the first one to call me, 'Zero', you know? She, um, she stopped, when it started to catch on. I don't think she intended... but I just had to, because I could."

He huffs out a little laugh of his own. "Good."

Lunch was canceled on account of Fouquet, but dinnertime arrives before long.

He unsnuggles a while before that, taking his leave to go talk to Miss Vaux again.

Miss Vaux does not appear to be anywhere in the tower.

If Raafi asks around, some of the instructors will tell him that they have heard that Miss Vaux was sent into town by the Headmaster to search for rumors about Fouquet's activities.

Is that so. Well, he wasn't actually under the impression that the headmaster had half a copper's worth of sense.

He'll poke around a little, in case anyone else is up to anything very interesting. And he can spare a Fly to get into the vault, if not, and have a look around, assuming the hole is still there.