You've come to a flat section, but it's still all dense forest. There aren't any roads or schools in your line of sight, but between the trees, bushes, rain, and steam, your "line of sight" is about fifteen feet.

Huh.

She's sure she didn't go all the way over the ridge, or she'd've come to the river, so, what, maybe she's a lot further north than she thought? Her sense of direction is just OK but she can remember what the map looks like, and the flat area around the school is basically just the parking lot. Unless there's a bit she's misremembering? She doesn't think so, but...

She's wrong about something, here, but she's not sure what. How can she check?

Hey, wait, why is she worried about getting lost in the forest? She can just climb a tree and look around! She wasn't great at climbing even as a kid, and the trees they have here are much too tall to be safe, but, again, superpowers. She'll set Kyle down at the base of a short one, for lightning safety, then look around for something tall for herself.

I'm going to have to make this a habit, she thinks, while she's looking around trying to decide which tree is tallest. When I'm in random normal situations having random normal problems, I need to remember to stop and ask myself, hey, would superpowers help with this somehow? Knowing she has them is one thing, getting used to them the way she's used to her arms and legs is going to be something else.

It's hard to judge which trees are tallest from down here, but finding a tall one is easy.

Well, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, here. She'll pick a reasonable one and hoist herself up it. How is she at climbing trees now?

The actual climbing is trivial; you can lift your whole body with one hand without straining at all. You're not much more flexible than you used to be, but these trees have lots of branches so you don't ever need to contort yourself to reach the next one. The bark isn't even painful under your palms; you can feel the roughness of it as keenly as ever, but in some new, unthreatening way.

The first tree you pick isn't quite tall enough to get above the crown of the forest, but it would be easy to jump over to a taller one.

It certainly is high up here!

The Oak Tree Incident actually turned out fine for her, she reminds herself. If she falls, she'll just hit a few branches and then catch one, no harm done. Normal people have to worry about stuff like that; Sophie doesn't, anymore. There's no logical reason not to jump for it.

She doesn't jump for it.

Does her Friend have anything she'd like to contribute?

REACH THE PINNACLE

STRIVE, STRIVE, AND OVERCOME

Exactly, makes sense, thank you.

She jumps.

There's a scary moment where it looks like you overshot your chosen tree, and your momentum swings you around the trunk as you grab for it, but in the end it works out. You climb to the top of the tallest tree and look around.

It should be midmorning, but the sky is still black with clouds, lit only by flickers of lightning. Here above the crown the rain is pouring down even harder than on the forest floor. As in the school parking lot it all steams away before it touches you, but there's a sense of...compression, or maybe even oppression. A sense that the burning energy pouring out of you is being forced back, bit by bit, until it finds a tighter new equilibrium.

Sophie notes the way her rain shield is behaving in the back of her mind, but mostly she's focused on the lightning. There was a good reason not to come up here, wasn't there? She remembered that Kyle could be hurt by lightning, but somehow she forgot that she could (probably?!).

She's already up here so she'll look around quickly and see if she can find the school. It's a broad, flat space with one broad, flat building where everything else is just narrow roads through trees, so maybe she can spot it even through the rain and steam?

You think it's over there, a good distance away, so far to the left of where you were heading that it's basically behind you. There's a loop of roads and backyards almost dead ahead, much closer.

Loop of roads, huh? Must be Glen Ridge Road and Poplar -- or maybe Donna, either way. Good enough. They can go knock on doors, and eventually someone will let them in.

That is, so long as she actually finds the road, and doesn't go off at a weird angle accidentally. Again.

Where are the road with respect to her sense of the Juice Man? Is he holding still enough that she could use him to navigate, or has he been moving around?

He's been over there, a little to the right of where you want to go, very consistently this whole time.

It's settled, then. Sophie will shimmy back down the tree, scoop up Kyle, and head a little to the left of where her Enemy Sense is telling her to go. All she wants in life is a backyard, or a fence, or any sign of human habitation.

Well, that certainly took a minute but it seems like it'll probably turn out well.

Nico, what have you been up to?

He's been doing EXPERIMENTS, of course!

Well, before that he's going to explain the situation to his faithful henchman. That is: the ritual mostly worked but was disrupted by the storm, some things happened that he doesn't understand yet, the cards got blown to the four corners of hopefully just the city and not all New Hampshire but we'll see, he has an interesting new magic relationship he's going to explore, an enemy alchemist came out of nowhere at Nico the way Nico usually does to other people, he's going to try one more thing to win that fight and then they get to drive around New Hampshire some more picking cards out of bushes.

Just the basics, in other words.

Adam grimaces a little at the idea doing any driving today, even if the lightning does seem to be slowing down, but he doesn't complain. Nico has a pretty relaxed approach to lab safety -- he's remarked more than once that the published mercury toxicity thresholds were made up by cowards for cowards -- but he's been incredibly rigorous about making sure that he and Chris never get a glimpse of these cards. He worked on them in a special locked room that they never had a key to. He made a special warning light linked up to his computer, that lit up whenever it was running, so that if the door somehow wasn't locked Chris and Adam would still know it wasn't safe to come in. He made Adam wear a blindfold while they were taping cards to trees yesterday; Adam's probably spent a whole literal hour out of the last twenty-four holding ladders while blindfolded. It was crazy and extreme in a completely different way than Nico is usually crazy and extreme, and if the point was to get them to respect the cards it definitely worked. And now those cards are just sitting out there? The locked-door-warning-light-blindfold cards? Those? Yeah, let's get in the fucking car already.

Still, he might as well put the squeeze on while he can. "You'll owe us," is all he says to Nico out loud.

Nico nods. Yes, he owes them and will owe them. He pays them well, but what they give him he can't buy or conjure. Just for a moment he relaxes a little, enjoying that warm safe connection.

Then it's time to work.

Speculative Assassination Plan Failure Point Number Two*: can Nico dismiss a Knowledgeable Soul, after he's summoned one?

^{_{*The points are numbered by their chronological appearance in the plan, rather than by their chronological appearance in his preparations.}}

In retrospect, Nico feels pretty bad about what he did to that first spirit up on the hill. He sent out a greeting, guided something into the world of matter in a wholly new way, and then when it reached for him he ran away and hid behind a magical barrier. He was in a hurry, yes, but it was rude and disrespectful, and if the spirits can somehow gossip with each other then it'll be much harder to summon another one.

He doesn't know enough yet to properly coerce or bargain with the things he's summoning, so for now all he can really do is set clearer expectations in the summoning ritual. He'll try a few variations, just trying to feel things out:

• He'll try inviting a guest for a short visit, to end when his hostly hospitality runs out.
• He'll try commanding a servant, to be released when his tyrannical will is satisfied.
• He'll try inviting a spirit up for just one minute, and see if they can keep time.

While he's at it, he'll call up his inner wizard and try out summoning them into different sorts of objects: a quarter, a sketched human face, the bathroom mirror, and the drawer -- just the drawer! -- of the bedside cabinet. And let's try a sketched animal face too; free associating, Nico lands on a raven, like one of the birds he saw in Lane's basement.

He'll do just five experiments, instead of filling out all the combinations with fifteen. If the two halves of the experiment interfere with each other, then he's wasting his time anyway. And he can't help but think, with well-controlled anxiety, that the longer he spends at this, the more likely it is that the other parts of the plan will fail.

That's certainly a whole range of experiments! Which ritual would you like to use with which vessel?

A worthy question! He'll put the timekeeping ritual in just the quarter. That one's most likely to fail, and if it does he wants to be able to take the bound spirit away with him, and not crush it accidentally. Just one tyrannical command, too, in case the spirit resents it; put that one in the sketched human face. The others will be friendly invitations.

He'll keep the ritual attitude short and simple, as he did the first time. Nico thinks he has one more big emotive effort in him today, and this is not the place to spend it.