Best to hurry, then. They have gasoline, but just as he's opening the trunk to get it Nico thinks of another test, and walks back to draw a ritual circle around the pile of firewood. It's possible, sometimes, to divide a particular element out of chaos. It mostly doesn't work even if you're as good as Nico is, but today? It can't hurt to try.

Nico finishes his circle, stands with one foot on either side of the boundary, and calls for a reduction of primordium to fire.

A little flame catches the tinder, and in minutes the whole pile is burning brightly. The wind pushes the flames around a little, but it never strays out of the circle.

Beautiful. He'll double-check that the space around it is clear and un-flammable, just in case something breaks his circle, then grab his other ritual tools and head for the ritual tent.

He's not trying as hard to avoid looking at the cards, anymore. Soon he's going to have to let everything in, and it's time to start widening his side of the gate. One by one, he'll peel them off the top of the Adam deck, and stick them to the table with clear tape:

The Two of Swords, the Six of Swords, and the High Priestess to open the gate.

The Magician and the Devil to bind the souls as they pour out.

The Hanged Man for Nico himself, inverted, at angles to the world, but correctly oriented to the Devil's upside-down pentagram and able to pierce the illusion it implies.

Justice last, to control what follows.

Spontaneously, Nico decides to draw one more card. The World, he decides, is also necessary here. Is that what's on top?

Of course it is.

Of course it is.

Every spread tells a story. This, Nico decides, will be the story of the next few hours.

Everyone eats their fill, and then a little more just because, and the morning naturally evolves into small knots of friends talking to each other.  This is the town passtime, and over the centuries they've gotten pretty good at it.  The adults congregate in the school cafeteria; the kids, who spend way too much time in school as it is, are naturally drawn to the grassy fields around the parking lot.  The wind is still intense, but it's not cold; if anything the breeze is weirdly warm.  The clouds are starting to pile up in the northern sky, but nothing's actually hit yet; you just have to pop your ears from time to time.  A lot of the younger are running around yelling, as younger kids do.  Against that backdrop, it isn't immediately obvious that anything's wrong when Emily Merrill goes charging through the undergrowth into the forest that surrounds the school.  Sophie might be the only one who even notices her.

It takes Sophie a minute to realize that this is is an opportunity, and another minute to talk herself into doing anything with it. If you can't do something smart... she's on her feet before she really knows she's planning to move.  "Cover for me if my dad comes looking?  I just have something I have to do real quick."  She starts walking away before her friends can ask any awkward questions, like "Huh?", or "Where?", or "Why?"

Carol doesn't like the look of those clouds but obviously she'll support whatever this is.

Joanna would probably approve of this if she understood it, sure.

It should be calmer inside the dense New England forest than on the open field, but it's not; somehow the tree trunks just break up the gusts enough that they can hit Sophie from every possible angle.  There's no sign of Emily.  No birds or squirrels, either.  Everything sensible is under cover.

Well, that's what she signed up for, isn't it.

Her plan here isn't totally insane, she doesn't think. She may not know where Emily is but she bets she knows where she's going: back to her house, two doors down from Sophie's, cutting across Flint Hill instead instead of going around its three sides. Sophie's done that plenty of times. Teachers hate it when you do this but it's not like Flint Hill is dangerous: it's barely a mile across and half of that is hiking trails, so it's not like you can get lost, and aside from the river and a couple of little cliffs there aren't really any ways to hurt yourself. Her own dad thinks it's fine. It's fine.

Anyway, Sophie is also taller than Emily is, so the plan is to follow her same path, but faster, help her with whatever problem sent her out here, and then tell her her brother isn't dead hint that things might be better than they seem honestly describe her subjective sense as best she can she'll have to figure it out in the moment, apparently.

There aren't any trails on the west side of the hill but it's still not difficult, and Sophie can spend a few minutes jogging through the underbrush without any real problems. The wind does keep trying to blow her around, and it's pretty dark under the trees, but Sophie's done this hundreds of times.

Then, suddenly, there's a sharp crack of thunder, almost directly overhead, and a rattling sound in the leaves. A pea-sized hailstone smacks Sophie in the eye, blown up at her by another stray gust.

OW!

Okay, new simpler plan: just find Emily and get her back to the school. They can have their heart-to-heart someplace with a roof.

How nice, she has a little while longer to figure out what to say. In the meantime, she'll just keep following her route home, yelling "Emily! EMILY!"

The hail and wind get more and more intense; it's like shouting out of a moving car. Emily doesn't respond. After few iterations of this Sophie hears herself think, "She's off to the left a little more, under the big tree on the other side of that slope! Hurry, she might be hurt!"

Absolutely not. Sophie knows exactly what her mental voice sounds like, that definitely wasn't it. She doesn't have any kind of guess at all about what it was, but it wasn't that.

Rather than do what the mystery voice says she will stop, look around behind her, and try to figure out what she heard.

Behind her, about twenty feet away and mostly concealed behind a big pine tree, is a smallish black bear. Well, small for a bear; it probably weighs about three hundred pounds and it's taller than Sophie when it's standing on its hind legs, like it is right now. Its expression, if you trust your ability to read bear expressions, is pure panic. It begins to back away, still on its hind legs, forepaws waving frantically.

Sophie hears herself think, "That's not a dangerous kind of bear! There's no reason to worry about it! Just go help your friend!"

...does it, by any chance, look like a human wearing a bear suit?

All bears kinda look like humans wearing bear suits. This one no more than most, though.

Sophie should be scared right now, she guesses, but really she's just pissed. She already has a missing boyfriend, and a missing boyfriend's sister, and a crazy storm, and an eye that still kinda hurts! Why is there more? Why is the more a bear? Again, there aren't bears in southern New Hampshire!

She points at it like she's throwing a javelin. "YOU! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!"

The bear squeals, and backs up faster. It clips another big pine as it retreats, and falls sideways onto the forest floor with a heavy thud. But it doesn't seem hurt: it rolls to fall fours and bounds clumsily away.

NO! The psychic bear is not allowed to just leave! Her first impulse is to chase it down and threaten it until it explains what it is and how it got here.

...this new "do the dumb thing" philosophy of Sophie's probably should have some limits. She'll watch it for a bit in case it circles back, with one hand shading her eyes so the hail can't get her, and then switch back to her original plan.

She'll try taking its advice about where to find Emily, though. Just to see.

Circle back? No thank you! The bear runs straight away from Sophie by the shortest route available, sometimes trampling right over bushes or small saplings. Once it glances back over its shoulder, sees her watching it, and puts on another burst of speed.

Turning a little to the left, Sophie scrambles up the slope and peers down to find...

This is the worst day of Emily's whole life.

Just for a second she's happy to be rescued. She twisted her stupid ankle going down the hill, her balance was fine but the wind PUSHED her, and now she's not even sure she can get back to school, let alone get home like she planned. She can stand, and sort of hobble from tree to tree, but the wind KEEPS pushing at her and now it's hailing, too. She was worried she'd have to start yelling for help like a third grader, and then her dad would come find her, the same dad who's just GIVING UP on her brother, who wants to have a funeral even though they haven't seen a body.

Compared to that almost anything would be a relief, until she remembers she hates Sophie now, too.