"Go away! I'm fine!"

That might be the stupidest thing anyone's ever said, but she's stuck with it now. Ugh. What would a fine person say?

"I was...taking a walk! But now I'm heading back! So everything's fine!" Wait she has to explain why she's lying down. "I'm just enjoying the breeze! It's refreshing!"

Maybe a tree will fall on her and she'll die. She can hope.

Sophie is still pretty wired from the bear thing, but yelling didn't help there and it won't help here either. She breathes in deeply, for control, and hopes she doesn't get a hailstone stuck in her nose.

No comically timed hailstones, this time.

Emily doesn't look fine; she looks mad and scared. You can't argue mad scared people into doing things your way. Sophie tried that all the time when she was a kid, and it never worked.

Not a lot of things did work.

What if she...

What if she...

...what if she just honestly said what was on her mind? It would have the advantage of surprise, at least.

"Listen, Emily, Kyle isn't dead! I'm going to see him again! I don't know how I know that, I can't explain it but you don't have to be sad!"

...

Finally someone with some sense!

Emily knew about the whole secret-dating thing. Kyle swore her to secrecy, and it was one the most romantic things she'd ever seen in real life, but then he died disappeared and she REALLY wanted to talk to Sophie about it even though they didn't talk much before but she COULDN'T because Sophie wasn't even SAD, like she never cared about him at all even though he LOVED her. He never exactly said that, but Emily could tell.

Maybe they have some kind of bond, or psychic link, so that Sophie always knows when he's in trouble! If things like that can happen, they'd definitely happen to her brother, that just makes sense.

This is honestly SUCH a relief. "You think so too!? That's so good, I wanted to talk to you but I couldn't think of what to say, and I -"

There's a bright flash of lightning, and moments later a crash of thunder, astonishingly loud. The storm is clearly almost on top of them.

Oh, right. "Uh. Help me up? I kinda fell a little." She reaches out a hand in Sophie's direction.

Well that went concerningly smoothly. Either Sophie and Emily are friends for life now, or she's just created some huge problems for herself later.

Sophie picks her way carefully down the slope, grabs Emily's hand, and hauls her to her feet. She still knows her way back to the school, she's pretty sure, and when she's not sure it's usually right to just go downhill.

One problem solved. Now there's just the storm and the bear. The storm isn't that big a problem while they're under the trees, and in the school it won't matter at all. And the bear isn't a problem because it's scared of her, because...she doesn't know why because. It is just is. Which means she shouldn't rely on it, but she's going to, because she can't figure out what else to do. Two problems, both solvable, kinda.

Three problems, actually, if Emily's hurt. How bad off is she? Can she walk?

It's really more of a hobble; she twisted her ankle going down the slope.  With a hand on Sophie's shoulder she can pretty much manage a walking pace.  She'd be better off if the wind didn't keep catching at her, or if they didn't have to push through so many bushes, but she can deal.

And when Emily thinks back to what Sophie said about her brother, with that totally confident cool-older-sister vibe she has, she feels like she can float back to school with no trouble at all.

Elsewhere, across New Hampshire.

As all you saw in Samuel Lane's basement, many kinds of occult phenomena create a temperature gradient: when Nico did his invocation, two thermometers on opposite ends of a table started showing different temperatures even though they'd been the same a few minutes earlier. This is a pretty common magical side effect; it's why cold spots and unexplained drafts are so diagnostic of occult activity.

So when Nico did one of the biggest occult workings ever, across twenty miles of New England instead of just one table, he got a much larger temperature gradient, running west to east over the whole area of the ritual. What happens then?

When the cold air on the west side meets the warm air on the east side, the warm air is forced upward (because it's less dense; recall that warm gases expand). As it rises, it cools again, and the water vapor condenses into clouds. Meanwhile, the continuous air movement creates a complicated system of rotating and outflow winds, blowing mostly east at first but getting more chaotic as the storm gathers energy. The bigger the difference in temperatures, the faster this happens. Usually this would stabilize after a while as the temperatures evened out, but here Nico's ritual keeps stealing energy from the west and leaking it out to the east, creating a continuous cloud and wind factory on the north-south axis where the cold and warm air meet.

And where you have lots of clouds and air movement, you have lightning! The strong winds create pairs of positively and negatively charged water droplets and ice crystals through frequent collisions, and then the updrafts will carry the positively-charged particles to the tops of the cloud, while negatively-charged particles gather at the bottom. This difference in charges is what makes lightning bolts. At first they'll just stay inside the clouds, but as the storm gets more energetic they'll start to reach the ground, too!

This is a little bit like how a hurricane forms. There the energy for the storm comes from the steady evaporation of warm ocean water, which is why they mostly can't form on land. Here the storm feeds on the temperature contrast directly, creating a more linear system called a derecho. If that sounds like good news for the people of Raymond, it really shouldn't (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2012_North_American_derecho). With luck, emergency relief efforts are already underway, but probably the NWS is still checking for sensor failure.

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Nico, the lightning flashes are coming closer together now, ten or fifteen seconds apart.

Good.  Sudden illumination and transformation is exactly the energy Nico wants.  Also, Nico has some personal theories that connect lightning to angels, and if they're showing up to watch him here, now, then he's probably right.  But there's no reason to get distracted thinking about it; in a few minutes he'll know much more.

He's looking out over the cards he made, taking in the whole story with his eyes unfocused, not resting on any particular one.  He didn't prepare any ritual words.  He knew he'd have to find them in the moment, and he knew he'd be able to, and here they are:

"Alchemy is refinement.  We make corrupt things pure, broken things whole, and fallen things sacred.

Thus it is said that an alchemist can turn lead into gold.  To many people that's all alchemy is.  To them, purification means creating valuable things, and refining the material world means finding ways to live comfortably within it.

But why stop there?

Alchemy is power.  Simon Magus, it's said, flew on a chariot pulled by demons.  John Dee turned back an invasion for his queen.  People hear about that power and they imagine what they'd do with it.  To them, knowledge is a means of exerting control, and the material world is the only possible object of that control.

But why stop there?

Alchemy is duality.  We see upright cards and reversed, wisdom and folly, men and women, matter and spirit.  But we understand that each side of the divide is touched by the other, and that the pieces, to be refined, must be brought together.  What is pure must be created from what is impure, and what is worthless must be thrown away.

To some this represents the triumph of spirit over matter.  The world is fallen, we are told, and spirit must rule over matter as the top point of the pentacle rules over the bottom four.  To refine ourselves is to bring this change about within ourselves.  This, in their hubris, our learned ancestors called the Great Work.  

And yet, The World depicts a hemaphrodite, not a woman or a man.  Wisdom is created only out of folly. And so I ask you, Archetypes, Dwellers Without, Shadows of the Long Dark: why stop there?

There is nothing of matter without spirit.  There is nothing of spirit without matter.  

Let what was lost be restored.  Let what was hidden away be revealed.  Let this fallen world be elevated."

Nico draws his sticks-and-twine pentagram from his pocket and lays it on the table, upward point facing the Hanged Man.  He grabs the air and water points, upper right and upper left, and slowly pull on them until they form a line.  Then he'll fold them in until all the sticks overlap...and finally break them in half, bringing the points together.

"Let the gate be opened!"

All through your ritual the attention builds, tightening down from every placement you made until the whole Adam deck is focused on you alone. Your view of the world around you distorts and flattens, and you realize that everything around you is just one thin slice of a long tube, a serpent that gyrates endlessly through some boundless space. You're seeing it from two directions, you suddenly realize, and that parallax view is just clear enough to make out a faraway, ominous shape: a spear, piercing the serpent through the belly, a fixed axis that it can thrash around but not escape.

The power is drawing inward, as you hoped it would, forming a spout perpendicular to the ground. Two more perspectives join the two you had, one in the sky looking down on your bodies, and one in the earth, watching the power approach.

As you break the sticks of your collapsed pentagram, the pace of the thunderclaps suddenly quickens. The lightning is strobing, burning away the darkness of the cloud cover and flickering the world on and off like a faulty lamp.

As you say the word "be", in the very last line, a sudden gust of wind grabs the walls of your tent, and the ritual table and then you, flinging everything backward. The table strikes you flat on and then skews sideways, spinning away into the flickering darkness.

Moments after that, a huge tree at the edge of the clearing tilts and falls, slapping the earth where you and your tent used to be. It bounces once, spraying you with loose dirt, then settles.

"...opened!" Nico will rasp it if he has to, he'll whisper it if he has to, but he'll finish what he started. Then he'll lie back, waiting; he's done what he came here to do, and he's clearly not running this show anymore.

Although, one question: is Kyle's body dying? Does he have to bail out and finish this in his original form?

You're on the ground, now, staring at the sky. Those other perspectives have faded, and the world around you just looks like the world, lit only by lightning and fire. You're just barely back in your body enough to know that breathing hurts. You don't feel like you're dying, though.

The clouds above are solid gray, but not quite uniform, and you suddenly realize that they form a face, with huge empty eyes and a frowning mouth. The mouth opens, just slightly, and suddenly a great wind rushes straight upward. The lightning stops, and all around you little fluttering lights rush up to join the great face. They're the cards of the Adam deck, glowing. For just a moment the face seems to have a dozen eyes, swirling upward, shining against the dark clouds. Then there's another lightning flash, wilder and vaster than the others, and when your vision clears the cards and the face behind them are gone.

But there's something left behind, a wire of energy and focus running from the sky, through you, down into the deep earth.

Nico take a deep breath, for calm, letting the pain flow through him without impediment.

Did his painstakingly drawn cards just get blown up by angels? Did that happen?

No, you can still feel the threads of their attention: a tapestry of seventy-eight threads, or a mansion with seventy-eight windows. Or a human, give or take, with seventy-eight eyes. But they're flying away from you, in every direction, even the ones you had in that box.

The thunder and lightning have started again, every few seconds, and there's a smell of burnt rubber in the air to go with the woodsmoke and ozone. The hail is falling faster now.

Okay. Okay.

There comes a time in every alchemist's life when he has to look around the shattered remnants of his workshop and ask himself, did that work? And if it didn't, what happened instead?

That time comes after you get a little distance from the accident site.

Step one: get off this forest-y hill, so he doesn't get crushed by trees or struck by lightning. Step two: collect the cards. Step three: figure out what happened, and do some experiments with that wire to find out what exactly it's connected to.

One thing at a time. How is the car looking?

There's a scorch mark on the roof, two of the tires are flat, and one of the windows has a long crack running through it. Not quite how you left it!

So the car probably isn't driveable or safe. Time for a new anti-lightning plan.

Nico isn't any sort of woodsman, but lightning bolts go for tall things and metal things, right? And water. So he needs to go away from the river, downslope, and near trees -- but only the shorter trees.

Seems achievable.

He'll pick a direction and start walking. Or crawling, if it's the best he can do.

You can walk pretty well. There's something painfully wrong with your left hip, and that shin is bleeding too, but it seems like your only real injury is the rib that's making it hard to breathe.

Just as you reach the treeline, the hail dissolves into pouring rain. The late-spring leaf cover protects you a little, but you're lucky Kyle's jacket is so long and waterproof.

By the time the rain starts, Nico is already rewriting his mental checklist. Getting off the hill is going to take a little while, and once he does he's just going to wind up hiding in someone's garage or something until the storm finally fades. Collecting the cards is going to take even longer; he can find the cards through their connection to him but he still has to chase them down. He's going to wind up driving all over New Hampshire again. It could take days.

But: experimenting with the wire, and finding out whether the ritual worked -- that he could start right away. And if he got an interesting result, maybe he could use it to speed up the other steps.

This is motivated reasoning; Nico has no trouble seeing that. But sometimes a motivated reason is still correct, and as Nico walks he gradually comes around to the idea that a few quick experiments make sense. As soon as he comes to a group of four trees that form a square or rectangle around a bush or interesting rock, he'll stop and try something. It's a nice thick forest, so with luck that won't take too long?

It doesn't. There are so many trees that finding four in a square isn't any challenge, and there's always some undergrowth between them.