He sure was!  It identifies him as Samuel Lane, age 43, picture and description consistent with the guy you just killed.  It gives his address, a street in Raymond, New Hampshire.  He's got some keys, too, do you want those?

Nico's never heard of Raymond; the GPS says it's about an hour and a half away.  Sure, let's give that a shot.  If it doesn't work out, he'll just find a nice graveyard and do his declaration there.

He'll scoop up the license and the keys, plus any random cash, and start driving south.

There's not much traffic in this direction, in the afternoon on Easter Saturday.  In not much time at all, you're pulling into your enemy's driveway.

It turns out that the heart of your enemy's power is a little one-story house, painted yellow with a sunken garage.  The windows are arranged in groups of two, all across the front facing.  The blinds are all drawn.  There's only one obvious door, facing the street.

(twos, stable strength, growth out of fertile soil, the joining of opposed forces to a common purpose, dominion...)

Nico probably shouldn't bring more of his magical tools across this threshold than he has to; then again, there are some things he can't bear to leave behind.  He'll fill his shoulder bag with just the three Tarot decks, two high-precision thermometers, a lighter, a candle, and a half-full water bottle.  The rest of his tools can wait in the car.

He'll pull in his aura all the way, just so none of the neighbors pay him any attention, and breathe through a few breaths to make sure he's got it stable.  Then he'll get out of the car, walk over to the one door (one, ace, first force, fixed point, pure unshaped potential...) and try out his new ring of keys.  Do any of them fit the dead wizard's lock?

The keys are a little clumsy in your fingers, but the third one works.  The door opens onto a picture-perfect American living room: big comfortable couch and recliner chairs, oriented around a huge TV.  There's a bookcase over the couch; at a glance the titles are all classics and pop sociology.  Through a hallway to the left a kitchen is just barely visible, gleaming white.

He's had this body for three weeks how are the fingers still a problem?!

But OK, fine, this setup is less wizard-y than expected but on reflection it makes sense.  This is a small town in New England; Nico doesn't have to meet the neighbors to know that they're curious as cats, behind their bland Yankee exteriors, and they wouldn't be put off by something as simple as a set of closed blinds.  The more occult stuff, the real heart of the house, won't be out in public view.

He'll shut the door and walk around the living room a little bit, trying to read the traces of the old owner's attention.  He should be able to do that much, even through this crappy body.

Sure.  But in this room there's not much to find: a few traces of attention on the TV, a little more on one of the recliners.  Nothing on the bookshelf.

The kitchen is a little better.  Everything's painted a sterile white but he does use it, especially the big four-burner stove.  The dishwasher is about half-full of dirty dishes, mostly glasses and little bowls.

But the bulk of his attention was focused on something under your feet somewhere; you can feel it even through the floor.

Oh really now.  Okay, let's look around for the basement stairs.

It turns out that they're in the pantry.  The door isn't hidden, exactly, just sort of not obvious in the shadow past the shelves of dry goods.  It's locked, but one of your new keys unlocks it.

Yeah, let's see the wizard's lair.  He opens the door and walks through, all senses on alert.  There probably aren't any traps -- it's hard to set a magical trap that will outlive you, and dangerous to set a mundane one in your own home -- but there are any, they'll be right here.

No traps, just a warm, earthy smell, like an old forest on a warm spring day.  Narrow stone steps with a clearly home-made wooden handrail lead down, weirdly far down, into a wide unfinished basement stuffed with rough wooden shelves and tables, covered with books and papers and bags.  It's lit with a dozen rock-crystal lamps, not arranged to any plan you can see, powered with a sprawling octopus of power strips and extension cords.  As your eyes adjust you realize that while there are lots of shelves and work surfaces, there's only one chair, a cheap little folding job in front of an animal cage.

There are a lot of animal cages, actually, strewn throughout the space, and they're all occupied.  All local animals, it looks like: just at first glance you see squirrels, magpies, a goose, and two small housecats sharing a bigger cage near the stairs.

All of them are watching you, unblinking.

Okay that's wildly impressive.  Nico isn't an animal expert but he's pretty sure that if you put this many animals in a basement, it doesn't smell like an old forest on a warm spring day.  And it's still working!  Crazy.  Unless they're constructs instead of real animals, he guesses, which would be wildly impressive for a totally different reason.

Nico will wander around a little bit, peering at any books or papers that happen to be visible, checking on the animals-or-constructs-or-whatever-they-are.  Do they have food and water?  Is there more around for them?  Does everybody have enough?  Are any of them thirsty?  And, ah, what of the inevitable consequences of feeding and watering your animals?  Or is there a magical solution to that?

All the animals have water, but some of their food dishes are empty.  Some of the bags turn out to be animal food, just standard pet store fare.  Wandering around you find even more animals: a sparrow, a fox, and a family of rabbits, too, kept in another large cage with a sort of hamster-maze construct to hop around in.  But again, they're all just watching you.

The books are mostly in Latin, with a little Hebrew thrown in for spice.  Lots of diagrams: some anatomical sketches of the brain from various angles, a few of the top bit of the sephirot, some totally obscure.  Almost everything is in the same handwriting.

There is no magical solution to animal poop, or at least this particular practitioner didn't have one.  There's a plumbing hookup in one corner of the basement, with a big industrial sink, that seems to be the basic plan.

Nico's Qabalah sucks; there's no way he's going to understand this in any depth.  If he had a week to translate everything, and check his own sources, and read the experiment logs (this guy obviously kept experiment logs, measuring the exact amount of divine light shone onto each brain area, or whatever Qabalistic magicians do), then, honestly, probably he still wouldn't get it.  On the traditional wizard-to-psychic scale Nico is mostly a psychic, whereas this guy was obviously pure wizard.

Traditionally this is one of the big drawbacks of killing a fellow practitioner: they'll never get a chance to explain all the cool stuff they were working on.  If Nico's plan works...but it's too early to think hard about that.  Stay with the checklist, focus on what's in front of you.

The wizard/psychic divide is deeply false, as you well know.

Well, yes, but it's shallowly true.  Nico has ever written an experiment log, when he absolutely couldn't escape it, but in the back of his mind he still wonders what he lost by making it.  He's not worried that knowledge will get away from him if he doesn't write it down, he's worried about chopping off all the parts he doesn't know how to frame in human words.

A true alchemist, of course, would just fuse the two halves of the binary and do both.

Speaking of that, Nico will go around refilling the different food bowls, if he can figure out which foods go where.  And he'll clean the cages too, he guesses, if any of them are in really bad shape.  Then he'll address his audience:

"Okay, everybody, here's the deal.  I need you to witness a ritual.  It should take about ten minutes, unless something strange, ah, unless a different strange thing than I expect happens."  Something about this is taking him way back, to class presentations in school, total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding.  "All I want from you is your attention, just like you're giving me now.  After that, I'll make sure you're taken care of."

Any reaction from his audience?

"Total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding" sums it up pretty well, actually.

Good enough.  Nico will clear a space on a table, somewhere close to the middle of the room, and start laying things out.

First the two startlingly expensive thermometers, on either side of the workspace. They take a little fumbling, before he figures out how to turn them on, but they have to go first to give them time to calibrate. Second the water bottle, set on the far side of the table, in plain view. Third the candle; Nico thinks a minute, then clears all the books and papers off of his chosen table, instead of just shoving them to the side.

Last, at least for this step: one absolutely worthless Tarot deck, as a control.

The deck is cartoon animal themed. According to the packaging, it's suitable for children five and up. Nico cuts the deck, and gives it a few slow riffle shuffles. The cards are awkwardly big, maybe so the intended audience can't choke on them, but this body should be good at handling cards, even if it's still clumsy with keys (after three weeks).

He lights the candle, shuffles the deck overhand while the smoke curls up to the ceiling, then deals himself three cards, face up.

UUUUUUUGH. Why does the raccoon look like it's floating upward? Why a fishing pole? Why is everything apparently happening in a hurricane? Why a crown of fishbones? FISH LIVE IN WATER, THEIR BONES INVERT THE WHOLE MEANING OF THE CARD!

Tarot cards can be dangerous. Even a glance at a card from a powerful Tarot deck can damage a person's psyche, if they're vulnerable in the right ways. Apparently exceptionally weak cards can have the same effect! What a great thing to know.

But really, it's good that Nico feels this way. Each card is supposed to represent an Archetype, one of the big, simplistic mental entities that make up the human psyche -- or were created by the human psyche, no one really knows -- and that exist outside this layer of reality. They pay attention to things that resemble themselves, is the key. If you make a good symbolic representation of the Thing humans call The Fool, then that Thing will start to focus on it, and Foolish things will happen. Put several such representations together, and they'll interact, often in ways humans find hard to predict. But that's still the best way to use them, because the Archetypes by themselves are usually more trouble than they're worth. The Fool walks along the edge of a cliff -- unguided he inevitably falls. The Ace of Wands pours out power -- but doesn't try to channel or control it. The Eight of Cups walks away from a nourishing situation, just before it collapses or dries up -- but you can't spend your whole life doing that.

Anyway, the key point here is that there's no way in the world that any of these cards are drawing any attention on their own. The only way that could happen, he thinks, glancing nervously at the candle smoke, at the water bottle, at the thermometers, is if some of the Archetypes are already paying attention to him personally. If that's the case, then the fact that he spread the cards tonight, cards bought with the oldest and purest money there is, ought to provoke a reaction.

There are simple things that happen, when that attention begins to gather. Water that doesn't quite sit level. Candle smoke that puddles in the center of the table. Unexplained chills and drafts.

Well?

The water is flat in its bottle, the candle smoke is curling upward, the two thermometers are reading a steady 74.2 degrees.

Okay.  Good.  Great.  Nico sweeps up the cards, hopefully forever, and puts them back in his bag.  On to the second test.

The second pack he pulls out is one he's used many times before, one of the first he ever painted himself, based on the classic Rider-Waite deck from the early 1900s.  These designs were the gold standard for decades; Carl Jung is supposed to have treated a depressive, once, by showing him a Ten of Cups from this deck at an appropriate moment.  But it's still an old deck, not powerful at all compared to the third one he's carrying, and he's seen the symbols too many times to be worried that they can push him around.  And just in case, he's wearing that borrowed body.

The first spread was just Nico scouting out the psychic landscape, doing a little dowsing.  This time it's real divination.  He alternates riffles and overhand shuffles, slows down his breathing and clears his mind of everything but his question.  Splits the cards into four even piles, a quarter at a time rather than three half cuts, and lays them out in a diamond, north-south-east-west.  He flips the top cards over, one at a time, and asks:

"Where shall I open the gate?"

The Northern card turns easily, almost pops off the pile into your hand:

The Southern card is slower, smoother, like it wants to flip but only along the exact trajectory it's already chosen:

The Eastern card is just heavy, turning in your hand like long, skinny lead brick:

The Western card doesn't fight you, but as you turn it you have a sudden sense of vertigo, as though the whole room is turning with you.  The water in the bottle sloshes sideways, so strongly that it wobbles, tips, and falls sideways.  As the card falls into place the sensation vanishes.  The water bottle jolts a little, and rolls onto the floor.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!

Nico can read a spread like this as easily as he reads English.  He's supposed to be outside during the day (the Sun in the south, a source of energy, doubled fire alignment), alone (stability from the two in the north reversed by the upside-down card, a warning against performative enjoyment, the Hermit to the east, connection and communication denied), near here (passivity of the four of cups, reflection rather than action), and at the intersection of all four elements (the alignment of the cards and compass points, the progressive dislocation of the spread).  It should be easy to find a spot tonight, with the GPS or just driving around, and then he'll call his two henchmen down from the lake and they can finish setting up.  The rest is going to be easy!

Nico takes a few deep breaths, tries to tamp his spreading elation down to something more reasonable.  The cards are dangerous; you want to approach them with a tranquil mind, always.  But he's so close!  He flips the four cards back over, piles them back together.

Oh, by the way, what were the thermometers doing?

73.2 degrees to the left, 75.7 degrees to the right.

Time for the third deck, then.

Conventional alchemical wisdom says there's only so good a Tarot deck can be.  Nobody thinks the Rider-Waite deck is the best possible representation of the core building blocks of the human mind, it's just that if you want better symbols a human has to paint them, staring at them for hours or days while picturing them perfectly.  Not a lot of people can improve on Rider-Waite; hardly anybody can paint 78 cards and still retain enough personality to remember why they're doing it.

Nico had to invent a whole new method, painting a dozen cards at once to keep any particular one from digging into his mind too deeply.  Even then, this last deck took him two years and almost half a million dollars of highly customized image-editing software, supplied by a confused team of freelance programmers from Poland.  The details could fill a book, if Nico ever had the patience to write one, but the gist is that he drew them all on a computer according to his own sense of what was right, printed and laminated them with his own customized equipment, and has never seen or precisely visualized a whole card from the deck.

They're big for playing cards, probably longer than your hand.  Between that and the lamination you'd think they'd be hard to shuffle, but they're not: they like to stick together.  Cutting them can be difficult.  Once, as an experiment, Nico peeled off the top card and tried to throw it away.  A stray breeze caught it, inside his sealed workshop, and dropped it right back on top of the deck.

He keeps them in a lead box when he's not using them.

He lays the deck face-up on the table, his palm over the top card, and smears them over the table, just the top-left corners showing.  Then, just like it says on his checklist, he declares his intention:

I will break in the doors of hell and smash the bolts; there will be confusion of people, those above with those from the lower depths. I shall bring up the dead to eat food like the living; and the hosts of dead will outnumber the living.

He wanted to learn it in Akkadian, the language the Epic of Gilgamesh was originally written in, four thousand years ago.  But no one knows it; the sounds scholars make when the speak Akkadian to each other are all lies, guesses to make it easier to talk about the language.  English will have to do.

A lot more people spoke it than ever spoke Akkadian, anyway.

The animals hated that!

The basement explodes with noise: cats snarling, geese hissing, and cages rattling,   The rabbits are screaming like you tried to kill them.  They're just making animal sounds but you imagine you can hear them saying, "Go!  Get out of here!  You don't belong in this town!"

This takes Nico back to his school days too, back before he learned to make his weirdness productive, to stand in front of crowds instead of just outside them.  He won't bother putting everything away properly, he'll just pinch out the candle, grab his bag and deck, and flee up the stairs.  Then he'll take a minute, leaning against the door, and run a little energy up and down his spine and vagus nerve until he has himself back together.

It's ok, he reminds himself, that he feels this way.  Alchemists can't have any buried trauma; to refine yourself you have to know yourself.  But unburied trauma is allowed, temporarily.

Gradually, as your nerves settle, you become aware that someone's knocking on the front door.

Now what.  There's only the one door (right?) but Nico could flee out a kitchen window...but no, his car is parked out front.

Ok.  Fine.  He'll put his deck away in its lead box, but he'll pull out the Tower first, and put it in his pocket.  Just in case.

Who's at the door?

The Raymond, New Hampshire police force is not in the habit of sending a car over every time Missus Emery thinks she saw a stranger.  Raymond is a small New England town, yes, but there are limits.  But usually she thinks she saw someone planning to break into the graveyard down the street and steal the bones, or do heathen rituals, or whatever bad people get up to in graveyards.  "A strange car is parked outside Mr. Lane's house" is actually pretty mundane, for her, which wraps around and makes it weird again.

And Mr. Lane himself is a bit of an enigma, in fact.  Bought his house for cash 12 years ago.  Allegedly had people out west in California, or maybe in Florida; rumors disagreed.  No close friends, no visible means of support.  Maybe a writer, maybe a retired stock broker; rumors disagreed about that, too.  Pays neighborhood kids to keep up his lawn, instead of doing it himself.  Nothing illegal about any of that, of course.  Just odd.

And there is that missing kid.  The Merrill boy, Ken, Keith, no, Kyle Merrill.  No reason to expect him to be here, or even alive at all, for all they'd talked around it with the boy's father.  Mysterious, though.  The last kid they lost was that poor girl who drowned herself, six years back now.  No mystery there; her parents moved away, afterwards, and good riddance.  But Kyle's folks were good people.

And now that Officer Radley is driving past, sure enough, there's a strange car in the driveway, an old blue Toyota with Massachusetts license plates.  Mr. Lane drove a Ford, Radley seems to recall, big enough that you could hardly miss it, but it's not here now.

Radley came out here without a partner, like they always do when they want to soothe Missus Emery down.  He's tempted to get on the radio, call for backup, do things right...but no.  His boss already razzes him for reading Stephen King; if he lets himself get spooked by a stray car he'll be hearing about it for months.

Better just to get it over with.  Radley parks his car, blocking in the Toyota, and walks up to the front door and knocks.  

The cops are here?!  They shouldn't even know the wizard's dead yet, how could they -- probably they don't.  Probably this is something else.

This is fine, he can talk his way through.  Nothing he's carrying is illegal, and any weird stuff in the house clearly isn't his responsibility.  He doesn't live here, he's just, let's think, the dead wizard's nephew, visiting from Ohio.  Nico was born in Ohio, he can sell that even if the cop was born in Youngstown, or something absurdly unlucky like that.  Worst case, the body he's wearing isn't even his.  Whatever he does here doesn't have to be foolproof, it just has to hold up for one more day.

He'll set down his bag by one of the recliners, then pull open the door.

"Oh, hi officer, how can I help you?"

The kid looks familiar.  Probably a local, though he can't place the name.  16, 17, somewhere in there.  Real composed.  Most kids are a little shy of the uniform at first, Radley finds, but not this one.  Odd, just odd.

"Afternoon, son," he hears himself say.  "You mind if I come inside?  This might take a minute."  There's no strategy behind this, just instinct: no matter what, it's always best to do things behind closed doors.

"Uh, sure, I guess.  Come on in."  Over the cop's shoulder, he'll check for a second one in the car, then step aside and wave him in.

"You want a glass of water or something?  I should tell you, if you came to talk to my uncle, he won't be back until later."

Uncle, huh?  Not a lot of family resemblence there, Sam Lane was a big blonde guy.  Damn it, why is he so familiar?

"That's funny, I didn't know Sam had any siblings.  I always thought he was an only child."

"He had a younger sister, at least.  She died when I was little, maybe he doesn't like talking about her?"

That doesn't quite scan, to Radley.  The kid's a little too eager to explain himself, a little too aware that his story might sound like bullshit.

"Well, it's good to meet you, Sam's nephew.  I'm officer Radley."

Ugh why hasn't he said what the problem is.

Nico can't remember the name on his stolen driver's license.  He's probably only looked at it once this whole time, and he's been busy.  "I'm Nick, uh, Nick Tempesta."  Okay, Nico's fake dad is Italian apparently.

Those "uh"s aren't doing it for Radley either.  Too controlled somehow, like hearing a dog say "woof" instead of barking.  He nods in a friendly way, walks around the kid a little like he's headed to the kitchen, and tries like hell to think who he reminds him of.

"And what brings you here to Raymond, if you don't mind my asking?"

No one ever says they mind; they think it sounds suspicious.

He absolutely minds but you're not supposed to say that, are you.  "I, uh," what's a story a small-town cop would find sympathetic, "I got in a fight with my stepmom.  Uncle" what was his name "Samuel said last time that if it happened again he'd put me up for the weekend and give everybody a chance to cool off, you know?  He even gave me a key, see?"  He roots it out of his pocket as evidence.  "I'm not running away, honest; I'm driving back tomorrow night."

Oh no, what if the cop wants to talk to his fake parents.  Is there a number he remembers that he's sure no one will pick up at...

It's the phrase "running away" that makes it click, for Radley. Dark hair, skinny, little hints of Chinese ancestry in the nose and chin. This kid looks like a teenage Abe Merrill, is what, and lately Abe is better known as "the missing kid's dad". Four out of four members of Raymond law enforcement agreed that poor Kyle was probably dead, but he could just have run away, and stayed away. "Nick Tempsta", Radley's hairy ass; this kid's name is Kyle. When Radley can get a minute he'll check the picture on his phone, just to be sure. Or no, not "just to be sure", he's already sure. Just because that's what you do.

Run away, stayed away, and then popped up at Sam Lane's place for some goddamn reason. Running from something? Hiding from something? He disappeared in Boston, so maybe drugs? How did Lane pay for this nice house, anyway? Radley is starting to get excited; clearly something's gone wrong, here, and for once he might be able to fix it before anything bad happened. Thank you Missus Emery, he thinks, for showing me this. I'll patrol that damn graveyard every day in your honor.

He circles back around. Takes another look at the kid, tries to casually put himself between him and the door. He looks tired, Radley thinks. Tired, and too skinny. But he doesn't act tired, does he. Mark down another point in the "drugs" column. And his accent is weird, you'd never guess he grew up here. Trying to hide? Should have dyed your hair, he thinks, but he's real glad he didn't. To think he almost missed this!

Radley thinks a second more, picks an angle. "That makes sense to me," he says easily. "My boys don't fight with my wife much, but they're just five and nine, and anyway she's their real mother. It makes a difference. Everyone says it gets bad when they're teenagers, and then it gets better. You're, what, seventeen? I remember seventeen. Everything big, everything urgent, world fulla disasters and opportunities. I did some dumb stuff, I don't mind telling you, but seventeen's a good age for that."

How is this landing?

Nick Tempesta can be seventeen, sure. Nico's not really giving the speech his full attention, he's too busy trying to figure out what could have drawn the cop here in the first place. It's belatedly occuring to Nico that Samuel the wizard might have had mundane henchmen, just like Nico does, and set them to guard his house while he was up at the lake. That would be pretty paranoid, Nico's almost sure his ambush was a total surprise, but what if Officer Friendly here is a delaying action, meant to hold him in place for a counterattack?

He has to think of a way to get rid of this guy, without drawing any more mundane attention. Would the basement be enough of a distraction?

So, not landing. Fine, let's get direct.

"Look. I know your name's not Nick. You're Kyle Merrill, Abe's kid, Beth and Barney's grandson. You had to know someone might recognize you, if you came back. You didn't even dye your hair, for Chrissake. I think deep down you wanted some help. I want to help you, Kyle. But you have to tell me what's going on."

...is his body's name Kyle? It might be! But, like. He grabbed this kid in Boston. Why would his hometown be in New Hampshire? Why would it be this exact tiny town? WHAT ARE THE ODDS?

That's an interesting point, actually, "random coincidences" in alchemy often aren't. But he can't think about it now. There's zero chance the cop will let him out of sight, not now that he's solved a kidnapping, or whatever he thinks happened to Nico's borrowed body. Can he invent a story so good that the cop will have to go charging after it immediately, and give Nico a chance to slip away?

Nothing's coming to mind. Nico doesn't have time for this; his checklist just has three more items but they're big, and now he's thinking he wants to have everything wrapped up on Sunday morning, before too many more things have a chance to go wrong. Let's get this done and clear out. He'll have to ditch the car just in case, but he knows where he can get another...

He looks down. "You're right. And it's kinda complicated, but if you look at this you'll mostly get it. Then I'll answer your questions if you want." He reaches into his pocket, slowly and carefully, and pulls out the Tower.

It's a little annoying how careful the kid's being.  What does he think, that Radley's going to shoot him?  But whatever.  Probably he's about to see a photograph, maybe of something too unpleasant to talk about.  He takes a step closer and leans in to get a good look at whatever Kyle's trying to show him.

The Tower card traditionally depicts an isolated tower, struck by lightning and decapitated.  To either side we see falling figures, jumping out of or being flung from what was once a place of safety.  Nico's depiction shows the tower slightly tilted, and not quite centered in the frame, hinting that the foundation is unstable and that the whole building, and everyone in it, will soon come tumbling down.

Drawn in a spread, the Tower represents sudden, destabilizing change.  At its most hopeful it can presage freedom from a confining or oppressive structure (prison, a bad marriage, or the like), but to those who are satisfied -- or think they are -- it's very threatening.  The Tower is made of safety proven false, lies revealed, material wealth made useless, and weak foundations overthrown.  Whoever wrote that "Anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be" was standing very close to the essence of the card.

Radley's mind absorbs that image, and the Entity behind it.

Radley is satisfied.  His wife adores him, his kids are doing great, he's got a steady job in his hometown.  What more could a man want?

Watching the other guys play basketball Mary with the white ribbons Worcester college Sleeping in on Sunday Hiding the candy he'd stolen

Why did Kyle show him that?  Is he the tower, the falling man, the lightning bolt?  Which is it?

He takes a step back, away from the card away from Kyle toward the couch.  He needs to lie down There's pressure all around him like falling in the pool like covering up that Penthouse he doesn't know what it's like yes he does he needs to get out he needs to get away but he can't forget all this he has to

"Kyle, you, I, don't"  He closes his eys but it doesn't help, he's still picturing it, he contains it it contains him you can't not think about things you can't pull yourself up I wish I could fly wish I was rich only losers wish for things sonny you've got to live in this world not up above it

He tries to push it away again, but you can't push without something solid to stand on.  He tries to organize his thoughts, but he can't find anything to organize them around.  And who is "he", anyway?  The kid who found a baby bird on the ground and broke its wing trying to put it back?  Who stole a whole bag of halloween candy off the ground, and blamed the fat kid no one liked? The guy who dreamed about fucking Mary Waller, but asked out her friend instead because it seemed like she'd say yes?  The kid who sat on the toilet for an hour trying to poop so he could do it right, and cried when he failed?  Who wants to drive to see Mount Rushmore and doesn't think he ever will? Who who who who who who who

Far away, outside himself somewhere, he hears a clap of thunder.  Dangerous.  A sliver of something he's forgotten the name of opens his eyes for him.  It's plain white above him, bright, and for a minute he can't tell if the brightness is him or not.  He tries to pull it closer, and suddenly there's movement.  A hand.  There's a difference between him and everything else, he realizes again, watching it.  It's his hand, not anyone else's.

That much, at least, he knows for sure.

That seems like it worked pretty well!

He puts the card back in his pocket, taking care not to look directly at it.  Nico's a lot more together psychologically than some small-town deputy could ever be, and he has Kyle(?)'s mind for a buffer just in case, but still.  He'll leave the cop where he's lying; watching him crack up he'd been thinking he'd lay a trail of clues toward to the basement but it hardly seems necessary, when the cop's friends show up they'll search the place just on principle, right?  Nico would.

And speaking of the cop's friends, now it's really really time to go; between them and that random bolt of lightning, he's spent as much time in this house as he cares to.  He'll peek out the window first, just in case, but if the coast is clear he'll just calmly walk to his car, get in, and drive over the grass around the cop car and away.  As soon as he's on the street he'll fish the cell phone out of the glove compartment: it's a pain in the ass to use out here where the cell reception is so bad, but his henchmen are still at Lake Winnipesaukee, and since he apparently can't show his face in this town he's going to need at least one of them here.  Where should he leave his real body in the meantime, so that it's still ready to hand for tomorrow?

Thinking furiously, he turns left on to route 27, and drives away.

The Following Morning

The Easter sunrise service at Good Hope Church is always well-attended.  People get out of the habit of coming to church through the year, get lost in their material lives, and then try to make up for it all at once by getting up before dawn on Easter morning.  That doesn't work, but it can be the start of something that does, so Pastor Reed never gives them a hard time.

It's not a day or a time for complicated messages.  He keeps it simple: Christ is risen, we live in the hope of the resurrection, the last enemy to be destroyed is death.  He puts the emphasis on "last" instead of "destroyed", this year, and lingers a little on the grief of the women before the tomb, and the fear of the disciples in the upper room.  He doesn't think people need to be reminded to be kind to the Merrills, or to support each other, but it will help to hear it anyway.  A lot of being a pastor is just helping people feel like being good is a normal thing to do.

This sermon isn't aimed at Sophie, particularly, but it kinda feels like it is. She and Kyle had been dating for almost four months when he disappeared, but no one knew except her and him. Mostly it was a secret from their dads, but the only way to keep a secret in Raymond is to tell nobody, literally not one single person, so they never did.

It would make sense if she were secretly grieving, but instead she's...not? She's not worried at all, actually? She's totally sure, in a way that she can't shake or explain, that she's going to see Kyle again.

She thought it was denial, at first. She's spent a bunch of time doing what she calls "standing outside herself", trying to walk around the feeling and get a look at it from different angles. It's so narrow and specific! Does she think he's going to come back and live in Raymond? She doesn't know. Does she think they're ever going to visit his treehouse again? No idea. Does she think she and Kyle are going to get married and have six kids? No, and she doesn't even want that with him, not now and maybe not ever. But is she going to see him again, and talk to him again? Yes, yes she is.

It doesn't feel painful, or frightening to think about. It feels like knowing a secret she can't figure out how to tell.

She wishes she could. His little sister Emily, especially, could really use some good news. Kyle would want Sophie to look out for her, since he can't right now, but every time she tries to imagine a conversation it goes so wrong. "Hi Emily, I know you a lot better than you know me because your brother talks about you all the time, and I just want you to know that he's not dead. No, I'm sure, I just can't explain why. How did I know him, given that he's a year older than me and not in any of my classes? Well, we were dating. It was a secret. We even had sex once! But it's not affecting my judgement here at all, promise!"

Ugh.

Sophie starts to feel bad about thinking about sex in church, but then she changes her mind. Thinking about talking about sex is different from thinking about sex, and anyway she was doing it to comfort the grieving, like the sermon said. And anyway she talked herself out of it.

The organist leads the congregation through the last hymn, then starts the outro.  Everybody clumps into little groups, mingling a little as they gather themselves to go out into the windy April morning and drive over to the school for the pancake breakfast.  The four Merrills, Sophie can see, are lingering by the outer door, talking with a friend of Mr. Merrill's.  Emily is, for the moment, off to the side and alone.

Sophie talks herself out of doing things a lot.  It's a bad habit, and she's trying to stop, except that stopping is really the opposite of what she wants to do, isn't it?  But you can't just "start", you have to start something specific.  Right now, with Emily, she should walk over and say...and say...

Mr. Merrill's conversation seems to be winding down.  Sophie's window is still open, but not for long!

If you can't come up with a good idea, just go with a bad one!

A test prep coach said that to Sophie's class last year, part of some advice about essay questions.  She meant it as a throwaway line, almost a joke, but Sophie's a little obsessed with it.  On tests she can apply it; in life it's harder.

She stands and watches the Merrills.

Emily might be watching back. She's got her hair down, dangling in front of her eyes, but she's facing the right way. What Sophie can see of her expression is stony.

Maybe she's mad at Sophie for some reason!

Shit, she thinks, and then oops, sorry God.

That's got to be projection. But still, she'll wait until the Merrills are safey out the door before she starts bugging her dad to leave. Her friends will be at the pancake breakfast; soon she can put this whole embarrasing incident behind her.

Aw, his daughter waited for him to be done talking to his friend Shiela before she asked to leave!

He raised a good kid.  He knew that already but it's still nice to see.  Sure, they can go get some breakfast.  He'll check his phone on his way out and see if his wife texted, but probably she's still asleep.  He'll have to see if he can make her up a to-go box, pancakes don't really work for that but maybe they'll have something...

She'll try and get her dad to let drive over to the school.  It's only ten minutes and there's no snow, so she feels like she's got a good shot.

Of course!  Sophie is very responsible and the weather is fine.

Honestly the weather is not "fine", the wind has picked up even more since sunrise and it's so gusty that Sophie and Frank have to walk a little carefully to avoid getting pushed around. But of course the car is stable.

Good enough!

The drive is uneventful, and kinda slow: there's only one good route from Good Hope Church to the school, so the Smiths wind up traveling in convoy with the rest of the congregation.  The front parking lot is already full -- Raymond Baptist's service ran a little shorter this year, it seems -- so Sophie has to drive around to the back and park facing the woods on Flint Hill.

The tree branches are swaying and the bushes are rustling, more than Sophie's ever seen them.  A stray gust almost blows Sophie's car door shut, the first time she tries to get out. But that only happens once, the second time she can force her way out.  As she's locking up the car, she suddenly realizes that there's a bear watching her, from behind several layers of bushes in the forest.

What?

No there's not, Raymond hardly had bears even during settler times, let alone now, and there aren't any zoos for it to have escaped from.  She's been in those woods, many times, and never seen anything bigger than a coyote.

Sophie peers into the forest, trying to figure out what she really saw.  But she'll keep the car door between her and the woods, just in case.

Well, it's definitely a bear's head, anyway; the rest of the bear, or whatever, is concealed by all that thick New England undergrowth.  But the morning is bright and the sky is clear, for all that the air is getting that electric pre-thunderstorm quality: there's no doubt in Sophie's mind about what she's seeing.

As soon as Sophie makes eye contact, the whatever-it-is with a bear's head startles, then falls backward into the underbrush.  A little behind the place where Sophie saw it a decent-size tree shudders, as though something heavy ran into it at high speed.

...huh.  That was weird.

As she's walking over to the school's back door with her dad, she decides not to tell him about whatever she just saw.  Sophie knows her dad loves her, but one of the things he loves about her is that she's his sensible girl, who makes good choices and doesn't panic or blow things out of proportion.  If she tells him she saw a bear in one of the least bear-y parts of New Hampshire on a Sunday morning where she's already kinda sleepy, he is not going to call the Fish and Game service, he's just going to frown at her in a disappointed way and ask her to think back and figure out what she really saw.

Because really, why would there be a bear loose, here, now?

Hey Nico, did you ever check out Sam Lane's yard, or any of the woods in his back lot?

No, why?

No reason!

Nico has not given a ton of thought to the dead wizard since he left his house.  He's been busy: picking the ritual site wasn't too hard once he stopped to review his map, but after that he had to place the cards around it in a 20-mile-wide ritual diagram.  Worse, he has to lay them down in the right order, a few at a time, so there's a lot of driving back and forth on New Hampshire's poky little highways, and a lot of pulling off into random fields and trekking into the woods to find the exact right tree.

Of the two henchmen he brought for the last stage of this scheme, he's decided to call down Christopher and leave Adam up at the lake.  Neither one will be any help in a direct confrontation -- part of the deal by which he poached them from their former employers was that he'd never ask them to hurt another human being -- but they're great for lugging ladders and plastic sheeting from a storage unit at 3am, and Christopher in particular isn't bothered by the supernatural side of the business.  He's not a smart man, exactly, but he has a calm curiosity that Nico respects: show him a bottle whose water doesn't sit level and he won't deny it or get scared by it: he'll start tilting it and shaking it, watching it resettle at various angles, and if you give him a few minutes he'll drink from it.

Reliable help is a rare treasure, to an alchemist, and Nico knows he's lucky to have one good assistant, let alone two.  Usually they don't take the alchemical parts seriously, and don't respect you -- or they do, and stop showing up for work after a while.  Or they try to kill you and steal your power; Nico's had a few of those, too.

First, the barrier.

It has to be wide.  The energies Nico's calling on need space to circulate safely, and it needs to comfortably encompass both the ritual site on Flint Hill and the setup around his real body, stashed near Pawtuckawy Lake eight miles north.  He's treating those two points, the two places where he's standing, as coequal poles (two, the organization of outpouring force, balanced opposition), and organizing the energy into a steady ellipsoid flow around them.  He wanted a figure-eight, an infinity, but didn't quite dare to try it; he doesn't see a way to guide the forces in and out again smoothly, not to mention what sorts of odd effects the crossing flows themselves might cause.  An ellipse will have to do.

The order matters too.  The Major Arcana encode a story, for those wise enough to read it: the Fool begins as pure innocent potential, meets with trials and shadows, is enlightened, and returns transformed and unified.  Nico's boundary tells a story too: the Nine of Pentacles (a constructed harmonious space, secure boundaries), the King of Pentacles (power and success within that space), Temperance (freedom from the constructed ego, what remains after the shattering transformation of Death), the High Priestess (the perspective required to peer into the veiled sanctuary), the Three of Cups (comingling, shared experiences drawing together).  He'll still reading them out of the corner of his eye, looking for them in the pack without ever taking any of them into himself completely.

For each card, Nico picks a spot off the road in the forest (there is always forest), then lashes the card to a likely-looking tree with duct tape and plastic sheeting.  The cards are laminated, and no rain was forecast anyway, but it would be annoying for the ritual to fail because some random bird decided to use the Nine of Pentacles as nesting material.

There's no need to search for them; the top card of the pack is always the card you want, every time. But they do have inertia, now; there's a real sense of effort in pulling each card away from its pack and fixing it to its tree.  Their attention is drawn like hot wire, crossing and recrossing rural New Hampshire.  It moves with you, now, whether you look at them or not, whether you keep them in your lead box or on your lap in the passenger's seat. But mostly they're watching each other, not you.  Mostly.

That sounds like the sort of thing that would happen just before a successful ritual!

He'll keep the cards (the Adam deck, his mind volunteers, even though he told himself he shouldn't call them that until after this worked) in their lead box anyway.  He hates to do it, but he'd hate it more if Christopher hit a pothole or something and the cards went flying all over the car.

Second, the power sources.  This was the first part he ever figured out, years ago, even before he'd made the Adam deck itself.  First, the four aces: Wands to the West, Cups to the East, Swords to the North, and Pentacles to the South.  This doesn't follow any of the usual associations between the suits and the directions, but that's OK.  Nico is setting himself against the natural order, today, and he wants power that's a little askew of its natural flow.  To fill in some gaps he adds the Three, Eight, and Queen of Wands, as well as the Queen of Cups.  All those cards have subtleties to them that won't be relevant today; all Nico needs is a connection to a steady outpouring of power, without being explicitly limitless or uncontrollable (looking at you, Four of Wands).

Nothing disrupts you in the second phase of your plan.  The sense of being watched is near-constant, now; you can't even tell anymore when Christopher turns to look at you, unless you happen to be looking at him.

By the time you've placed the last card it's almost four AM.  Your body is starting to flag for lack of food and sleep, but it's nothing you can't push through, you don't think.

He'll add Strength, Sun, and the Chariot around the actual ritual site, then, and send Christopher somewhere for takeout.  Can he get Burger King or something, at 4am on Easter Sunday?

Of course!

Thank you, America, for being what you are.

He'll try and set up the ritual tent on Flint Hill.  It's in about the right spot, and according to Maps' satellite view it's got a big open meadow with a stream running through it, but surrounded by trees with no nearby houses: isolated, aligned with all four elements, and open to the sun.  The closest building is a school, almost certainly deserted today, and even if it's not it's a quarter mile of hilly forest away.

Assuming there's no problem with that he'll set up the tent, eat his takeout with Christopher, and wait for the sun to peek over the trees.

No problems, per se, but it's a good thing you brought that tent: the wind is getting awfully gusty and it'll blow your french fries right over if you're not careful.

Argh, does it look like it's going to rain?

Nico will do it anyway if he has to, everything's already set up and the symbolism of calling up the souls of the dead on Easter Sunday is too strong to ignore.  But the Sun was in the South, the cards specifically told him to use daylight.  He's got gasoline and a lighter, maybe he can gather enough deadfall to make a bonfire, and get the fire influence that way?  Probably a bad idea, he should just wait for a break in the cloud cover.

Well, from your clearing you can only see the sky right overhead, but it's clear.  The very first bits of pre-dawn light are starting to blot out the night sky.

That...sounds fine.  And the cards led him here.  Nico stated his intentions, asked his question in good faith with a whole heart, and the cards led him here.  Probably this isn't going to be a problem, and Nico's literal years of preparation aren't about to be blown up by a meterological accident.  Probably.  Almost certainly.

Nico and Christopher will start clearing a space by the stream, and gathering firewood, and then throwing plastic sheeting over top of it to keep it dry.  Just in case.

Meanwhile, at breakfast

Joanna (not Jo) loves the pancake breakfast.  The recipe is a legit secret; the old church ladies just memorize it and pass it on by word of mouth, they never write it down.  Joanna's pretty sure it's some kind of sin, to know how to make pancakes this fluffy and not share it with the world, but the old church ladies have all been going to church for like sixty years, they probably figure they don't have to sweat little sins like that. 

And it doesn't stop with the pancakes: the adults in her life usually have restrictive ideas about "reasonable amounts of whipped cream", but on Pancake Breakfast Sunday no one gives a shit.  If they did this after church on Sunday she'd go every week, really she would.

She's only got two more of these, before she graduates high school, moves to Los Angeles, and becomes an actress.  Mostly she doesn't think about what she'll be leaving behind, but with things that come once a year it's tough, because you can count them, you know? It makes her feel sappy, and she hates feeling sappy.

Luckily for her, her friend Sophie's looking kinda down, so she can focus on that instead of her own problems!  And she's perfectly set up to do it, because Joanna legit needs advice, and Sophie loves giving advice.

"So, who wants to hear how I spent my Saturday?"

*vague interested noises through an enormous mouthful of pancakes*

"You were going to the lake with that kid from gymnastics camp, the one who said he had something special planned."  Carol does her best to waggle her eyebrows suggestively.  She's pretty sure she's doing it wrong but she and Joanna have been friends since they were babies, it'll come across.

It does!

"He did, but I told him no funny business and he was a perfect gentleman."  She smirks, then sighs theatrically.  "And on the drive over he was really sweet and funny.  But when we got there..."  She pauses, letting the dramatic tension build.

Playing along with Joanna when she's in this sort of mood is a lot more fun than brooding.  Sophie obligingly picks up her cue.  "When you got there, what?  What was his big secret date idea?"

"Fireworks"

Carol wrinkles her nose.  "I thought this was in the afternoon?  Where was there a fireworks show?"

"It waaaaaaas."  She puts her face in her hands, careful not to let her hair fall in the leftover whipped cream.  "There was no fireworks show.  Just us, and some bangers his older brother bought him.  That was his date idea, standing by the lake with our fingers in our ears, listening to things explode."

Carol finished her breakfast already; she'll grab Joanna's plate and pull it over on top of hers, so there's room for Joanna to slam her head onto the table if she wants.  It would be kinda dramatic even by Joanna's standards, but it sounds like she's earned it.

Carol is a true friend.

Joanna will not slam her head on the table, but she will delicately and gracefully allow it to rest on the table.  "Soph, what do I do?  This is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he is smart, he is sensitive, he is funny, he is completely obsessed with me and I want to be obsessed with him but I just - " She waggles her fingers a little, to gesture at flailing her arms in frustration without whacking anyone in the head.

Yeah, Sophie knew this was coming.

People ask her for advice all the time and she honestly doesn't know why.  All she ever says, just about, is "At the beginning you said you thought you knew what you should do, and you're right, you should do that", or "You should go to that other person and tell them what you told me", or sometimes "Wait a few days and see if this still seems like such a big deal".  Joanna's problem today obviously wants Solution #2, like most of her problems do.  She reaches over and pats Joanna's hand sympathetically.

"Did you tell him you didn't like the fireworks?  Does he know you had a bad time?"

Aw, look at that little smile!  Sophie can brood all day if you leave her alone, but Joanna fixed it in just five minutes!  She really is an amazing friend.  She leaves her head lying on the table.  "I mean I didn't tell him tell him but I think he knows, I wasn't trying that hard to hide it and the ride back was so awkward, I wanted to die.  He texted me this morning just saying he had a great time and I read it, it has a read receipt, I have to text him back."

Carol reaches over and pats Joanna's other hand.  "A rookie mistake."

"I knoooooow!  I was flustered!"

"It's ok, you can fix this.  Don't tell him you had a great time, because you didn't.  Just tell him that you like him," Sophie doesn't know why she bothers saying that, no one ever listens to her when she suggests it, which is weird because it worked out great when she tried it, "or if that's too much, just tell him you want to go on another date and suggest something you actually want to do.  Once you've been out a few times you can tell him you hate fireworks, and then it won't be a big deal because things are more settled, it'll just be a funny story the two of you have."  Let's see, does she know something Joanna would actually want to -- ah.  "There's this sushi place that opened in Epping, I think you'd like it.  I went there with my parents once."  That last sentence is so close to being true!

She looks up from the table, just a little.  "I've never had real sushi, just that takeout stuff they have by the Rite-Aid."

"That doesn't count.  You'll like the real thing, I promise."

"Okay then.  Plan decided.  Thanks, Soph, you're a lifesaver."  She pushes herself back up into a sitting position, and pulls out her phone.  "How...about...next...time...we...get...dinner?  My...friend...says...the...sushi...place...in...Epping...is...good...want...to...try...it?  Smilie face.  No!  Kissing face!  And send!"  She gets the "message not delivered" notification, but Raymond is like that; it'll get through eventually.

"And just like that, the heroine was saved from a lifetime of tinnitis."  Carol wants to do more than just throw in sarcastic remarks but it's early, sarcasm is all she's got.

Sophie laughs anyway.  What are friends for?

Meanwhile

Dawn has broken, but not for you, Nico!  There's a cloud front boiling up in the east just barely ahead of the sunrise, and the wind is still getting stronger.  If you want to chat with your henchman, you're going to have to shout.

But the power is still flowing.  It's a little choppy, and the ellipse you set up keeps trying to collapse into a circle, but your placements are good: the two focal points are holding.  Even from miles away you can feel it, and with it the attention of the cards you spent all night putting up.  It's spiraling through the clearing with you as the focus, never quite touching you.

This is the biggest thing Nico's ever done with the cards, maybe the biggest thing anybody's done with anything since John Dee sank the Spanish Armada.  Probably bigger than that.  No one knows what Dee did, exactly; if he had apprentices at all, their line didn't make it down to the present.  In those days, alchemists were respected...but there's no reason to brood.  Nico's about to fix it.

But where is the sun though, the cards specifically said there'd be sun No, no, it's still too early to panic.

Nico can take maybe an hour of not panicking. He'll keep one eye on the skies, one eye on the pile of firewood, and maybe put some more rocks on the plastic sheeting in case it seems like it'll blow away. He'll send Christopher back to the lake; he hates feeling watched when he's nervous or uncertain.

He'll get over that today, too, if he can just pass through this last gate.

How does it look after an hour?

Great, if you love thunderstorms. The cloud shelf is still building, a dark solid gray lit with the occasional ominous flicker. The pressure is dropping, too; you have to pop your ears a few times.

...

Nico is going to break one of his self-imposed rules, and ask the cards if they were sure about this ritual site.

Nico's Tarot spreads teach him more, faster, than any other alchemist he's ever heard of. The Powers have been good to Nico. Partially that's because he's studied them, and partially that's because he gets them on a level too deep to ever express in human words, but partially, he thinks, it's because he respects their time and attention. He doesn't ask them things he can figure out himself. He never commits the error of Saul; when he's given advice he understands, he always follows it. And he never, ever asks the same question twice.

But today is a day of exceptions and inversions, so maybe it fits.

He'll go back to his car, to get away from the wind, and pull out his old Rider-Waite deck. Where shall I open the gate?, he thinks, and flips the top three cards onto the passenger's seat, fast, before he can change his mind.

Eight of Swords: Loose ropes, a fence of swords with a clear path out. A prison with no jailers, which can be escaped at any time.

The Hermit: Solitude. Wisdom. A lamp illuminating the darkness. The seal of Solomon, bound and put to use.

Eight of Pentacles: Industry. The value of training and skill. A project almost, but not quite, completed. An apprentice too intent on his task to see the city behind him.

Taken together: Quit doubting yourself and hesitating, and do what you came here to do.

Okay then.

I'll interject briefly here to explain Nico's plan in ordinary language, since it doesn't look like Nico is ever going to.

Humans have three souls, which alchemists think of as the Animal soul, the Knowledgeable soul, and the Divine soul (except they usually use Latin or Hebrew or something, because alchemists). The Animal soul is mostly just about instincts; it doesn't persist after death, and alchemists don't usually pay that much attention to it (though admittedly Nico did do something pretty clever with it when he took over Kyle's body). The Divine soul is the part that gets reincarnated; when somebody says they were Cleopatra in a past life, what they mean is that they have same Divine soul she did. This is not as useful as you'd hope. You'll tend to have the same sorts of values and intuitions Cleopatra had, and you might get a few subconscious influences about things that were emotionally important to her, but even if you get in touch with your past lives you won't suddenly learn how to speak Demotic Egyptian.

Except that there's also the Knowledgeable soul, and it's a puzzle. Because, you see, if you do exactly the right things in exactly the right way at exactly the right time, you actually can learn to speak Demotic Egyptian from your past life. It's hard to do, and doesn't last very long, but you can, and lots of people have (at least by alchemy standards). So all that knowledge is clearly being stored somewhere: it doesn't dissipate the way the Animal soul does, and doesn't get passed from life to life the way the Divine soul does; some secret third thing happens instead.

(There's also a whole separate line of evidence involving ghosts, but it's complicated and not relevant to Nico's plan so we're mostly going to skip over it. tldr most ghosts sightings are fake but ghosts are real, and you don't necessarily have to die to make one).

Not everything in those last few paragraphs is true, but it's pretty close and Nico believes it so let's go with it for now.

Meanwhile, a sad fact about alchemical knowledge is that it gets lost a lot. One person figures something out, but then before they figure out how to tell people they blow themselves up trying an ill-considered reaction, or breathe too many mercury fumes and poison themselves, or just melt their brains trying to eff the ineffable. Or, to be fair, they reach a certain kind of enlightenment and conclude that everything is perfect as it is and there's no need to teach anyone anything -- but those people might as well be dead, from Nico's point of view. Not everything disappears that way; a lot of what we now call "chemistry" is alchemy that went mainstream. But the weird, hard-to-explain stuff gets reinvented over and over, mostly by people who are one insight away from catastrophe. Hardly anybody believes in the occult anymore, and this is a lot of why.

But all that knowledge isn't really going away. It's still Out There, and Nico figures he knows where. His plan, if you really boil it down and gloss the occult parts, is to open the gate that separates all those lost souls from the material world, reach in, and gorge himself until he knows every alchemical secret anyone ever learned. If a normal alchemist tried this they'd probably just ruin their Divine souls and then die, but Nico's been preparing himself for years. He might not be able to learn everything he wants to learn, but he'll live to try again. The stack of souls that calls itself Kyle Merrill is doomed, but Nico will be OK.

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Nico packs the lesser cards away, hopefully for the last time, and heads back to the pavilion he set up. How bad is the wind? If he ties the flaps shut, can he get away with laying the cards on the table?

As long as the tent stays up you'll be fine.

What an ominous way to phrase that answer!

But Nico isn't really bothered. The cards said not to be, and he's decided to trust in that. There's a time to carefully follow your checklist and a time to throw yourself wholeheartedly into the practice, and now, finally, it's time for some wholehearted self-throwing.

The first thing to do is start a fire.

Nico wants influence from all four elements, here at the heart of the ritual. The dominant force is clearly going to be air, but that's not so bad: air is the element of intellect, ephemeral and quick-moving. Looked at a certain way, it's good that it's so active. Earth influence is abundant from the forest, water he gets from the little river, but he lacks fire, and apparently it's not going to come from the sun.

It's still not raining, is it?

No, though a few hailstones are starting to fall, here and there.

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.

"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 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.

Yeah, that tracks. Nico didn't know much about New England forest going into all of this, but he's sure had a crash course these last 48 hours.

He'll draw a line in the dirt with his foot, connecting the four trees. As ritual barriers go it's pretty minimalist, but four is a stable number and squares are a stable arrangement. And, probably he won't even need it.

It's already more like mud than dirt, but you manage.

Now, let's see about this wire.

The main thing is to not break it. It felt like focus, before, like something is paying attention to him that wasn't before. Or, no, it goes in both directions. Like two things were paying attention to each other, and now he's standing between them.

You can't interact with human attention very much. You can track it, compel it a little, or deflect a little, but that's about it. These, though, clearly aren't (just?) human.

Can the energies of his own two souls interact with it, the way it does with his vagus nerve?

If that works, can he interact with the part that isn't running directly through him, toward the ground or the sky?

And if that works, can he nudge it aside just a little bit, so that it runs through that bush before it disappears into the earth? He's not going to try to shift the part that runs through him, just in case he can.

Yes, that all works. The wire is phenomenally responsive to your will. You have the strong impression that whatever's at either end of it is paying attention to you particularly; you aren't just standing in the way.

You're pretty sure that you could push it outside of yourself, if you made the effort, but it would snap right back into you as soon as you allowed it.

See that's the kind of thing you test in a workshop, under controlled conditions.

Let's try a different ambitious thing, instead.

Nico sits down in the mud, one hand on his chosen bush. Slowly, slowly, he lets his awareness of the rain and wind and thunder fade away, until his whole world is just that one thin strand of power.

Most things that people knew, through history, were not powerful alchemical secrets. Nico knew he was going to have to search through all the world's lost lore to get the things he really wanted, and right now he doesn't see any way to do that. He doesn't know, strictly speaking, that what he's connected to has anything to do with his objective at all. So he's not going to put any expectations into this fast, dirty little working. He's just going to issue an invitation. Just...meet the new neighbors. Be friendly. But he'll leave the bush between him and whatever he's inviting, just in case.

He composes himself into a spirit of hopeful welcome, and says, calmly, steadily, "Come up and say hello."

The wire seems to vibrate faintly, like a plucked harpstring. Almost at once a tiny eyeless face, really just a mouth and a suggestion of a chin, presses outward from the bark of one of the branches of the bush. The mouth is moving, but nothing's audible over the rain and wind.

This kind of thing never happens!! Nico leans closer.

"Siki gu-la nu-ub-da-an-ku₄ — geme₂-e ĝiš-gana₂-tug₂"

That was language!

But...not language he recognizes. Most people in history spoke languages Nico doesn't recognize that's probably wrong, the Long Dark was long but also sparsely populated. Still, as a way of gaining knowledge right now this isn't very promising. Inviting the spirit into himself might work better...but first he should, at the very least, figure out how to invite the specific spirits he wants. It will take some more study and ritual, and probably the whole Adam deck back together again, but there's a path.

And even if there's not, he's going to have conjured material assistants, like Simon Magus had! Lots of alchemists conjured spirits to learn from, but only old Simon got them to carry him around through the sky. Nico can probably do something at least that good. The two greatest alchemists ever are Simon Magus and Nicolas Anastos.

In that order, for now.

"Return to your home," he tells the spirit. "I'll call you again when I have need of you." He'll pull the wire back out of it, too.

"Uri₂ki ba-gul — ki-sikil er₂ im-ma-ši-in-de₂—"

It doesn't leave. If anything, it's getting more excited. The branches of the bush begin to wave against the gusting wind, and curl toward you. Now that the wire is out of it you can feel the pressure of its own attention, distinct from whatever lives in the ground and sky.

Hmmmm.

Nico will walk away a bit and step over his ritual barrier, such as it is. Does that do anything?

It stops trying to reach out to you, anyway. It settles in place, leaves drooping sadly. But it's still whispering to itself, something you can't catch over the storm.

That...will probably stop on its own, after a while. Though wouldn't it be interesting if it didn't? Nico will check on it later, after things have calmed down a little.

The next thing to do is to test it on something inorganic, like a rock no, there's no reason to think that test would turn out any better, as far as Nico's short-term goals are concerned. Later he can try it out with a rock Kyle's car a HELICOPTER probably better to start small but this is also a decision he can make later when he's out of the rain and had some sleep, and maybe thought a little harder about how to get rid of these things if they don't feel like leaving. For now, back to the original plan.

Nico walks away, downhill as best he can gauge it, and doesn't look back.

The first few rumbles of thunder didn't worry Sophie. She's been in thunderstorms before, it's not that big a deal. The darkness didn't bother her either; they both have cell phones, and even if they can't use them to call people they still make good flashlights.

But once the thunderclaps start coming every single second, once she can put away her phone flashlight because the lightning bolts are strobing fast enough to see by...she tries to hide it from Emily but she admits it to herself, she's shaken.

If I die out here, my dad is going to kill me spiral into depression and never recover.

Oops, that was supposed to be a sarcastic mood-lightening joke, and then it went wrong at the very end! Shit! She did ONE impulsive thing and it's already gone SO BAD.

Except, no, if she'd gone with her instincts then Emily would be out here alone, and that would be even worse.

The problem, she decides, looking at her rising panic from the outside, is that there isn't anything they can do better. They're already hobbling as fast as Emily can, in what they both think is the right direction. But they keep getting blown around, and they have to stay awkwardly close so that Emily can lean on her, and Sophie doesn't think she can carry Emily piggyback, not for any distance in this wind. All her nervous energy is just trapped, spiraling, not doing anything useful.

In the spaces between thunderclaps, Sophie and Emily hear a steady roaring from the leaves far above.  It's started to rain, and rain hard, and it splashes at them in vindictive little bursts as the spring leaves get overloaded.

Then there's a new sound, an explosive crack like a shot from an enormous rifle.  Sophie's vision cuts out, then fades back in through a glaring white afterimage.  Her legs are tingling, but she's still on her feet.

Emily's fallen over, bleeding from the head.  Sophie can't tell what struck her.  Her eyes are open but they don't look too focused.

That was a flash.  Of lightning.  Lightning must have struck one of the trees. Oh shit.

"Emily!"

Can she walk?  It's become really really important that she walk.

"don' worr'. wull way 'eer..." Her speech is slurred and uncertain. Her eyes, as they meet Sophie's, aren't quite focusing. She waves one hand a little but she isn't trying to get up.

Sure. Of course! Why wouldn't there be more?! She's going to have to try to carry Emily and she can't, she isn't strong, but maybe she can manage 100 feet and maybe that will be enough.

This isn't going to work.

No. Think it outright: this isn't going to work. She needs something better. There has to be something.

She needs...she needs...she has to...

There's one resource she hasn't tried to tap yet.

"HEY! PSYCHIC BEAR! THIS WHOLE WEIRD DAY IS PROBABLY YOUR FAULT, OR IF IT'S NOT YOU PROBABLY KNOW SOMETHING! SO GET OVER HERE AND TELL ME ABOUT IT! I PROMISE NOT TO KILL YOU WITH MY MIND, OR WHATEVER YOU WERE AFRAID OF BEFORE! I JUST WANT TO TALK!"

Did that do anything?

The thunder rages. No bear appears.

The bear wasn't giving off mastermind vibes anyway, was it.

"HEY, PSYCHIC BEAR'S BOSS! YEAH, I KNOW YOU EXIST! THERE CAN'T JUST BE A PSYCHIC BEAR! THERE'S A WHOLE THING HAPPENING, AND I PROMISE I DON'T CARE ABOUT IT, I JUST WANT TO HELP MY FRIEND! BUT I CAN'T! I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON! HELP ME AND I'LL PAY YOU BACK! I'LL FIND A WAY, I PROMISE!"

"I give good advice," she adds to herself, probably lost in the thunder. "You seem like maybe you could use it."

The thunder's getting a little quieter, though no less frequent; maybe the storm is moving?

Out of the corner of Sophie's eye there's a twinkle of red light, somehow distinct amid all the lightning flashes.

Is a faerie going to lead them to safety? Whatever it is, she'll take it.

It's moving fast, weaving and dipping erratically without ever quite hitting any of the trees. It doesn't seem like a faerie but it's so wide and agile that it might be a bird...but no, it's a piece of paper, sheathed in plastic, a little bigger than Sophie's hand. It seems like it's heading toward Sophie, but then another gust catches it and it flutters to the right.

She wants to try to catch it, but she can't leave Emily, can she? She'll reach toward it a little, that's as far as her instincts can take her.

As Sophie reaches out, the paper spins upward in mid-air, caught between several breezes.  Finally one of them wins: it swoops back toward Sophie, suddenly tilts up a bit, and slaps her full in the face.

She closes her eyes reflexively, but not quite in time.

Nico's interpretation of this card is similar to the Rider-Waite: five figures, struggling in a five-sided contest with heavy staves interlocking in no discernable pattern. But his background is more elaborate: the fight is happening at the rim of a caldera, with the open volcano still visible in the far distance. Reversed, the figures seem to plummet toward a sea of fire, still fighting one another as they fall.

Yes, that's right, isn't it.

Sophie wants to fight. She wants to see her rivals crushed. Everyone who's ever challenged her should lie broken at her feet, gazing upward with helpless and unwilling awe. Myra Stiles from kindergarten, that substitute teacher, Kyle's grandparents: all of them should face her now, so that she can grind into them the utter futility of keeping her from anything she chooses to take. Her whole mind is fire, cleansing and irresistible. Beneath it her will piles up like lava, building and building under terrible pressure, ready to erupt...

Although.

Wait.

Doesn't she usually think about this differently?

She does.

There's something Else in here with her, isn't there?

I want to be strong.

That time, the thought feels like hers. Sophie likes giving advice, and one thing she likes about it is that she doesn't have to do anything herself. Telling Joanna to talk to whats-his-name was easy; telling Kyle she liked him was hard. Rewarding -- she has a sudden, vivid memory of just how rewarding -- but hard. Standing up to go after Emily was hard. Helping her -- God! It's been the hardest thing she's ever done.

The storm is still out there, that thought vaguely reminds her, away from the fire that's kindling in her brain.

OVERWHELM IT

Yes. I want that.

If she keeps her mind on it, Sophie can remember that she doesn't have rivals she wants crushed, not really. But there are still things I want to overcome. That part of the strange thoughts that she and this other Thing had together, that part could have been pure Sophie.

What are you?

CONFLICT

This isn't like the bear. Those are all Sophie's thoughts, made in Sophie's brain, just...in a different key than usual. At a different angle. Something.

Sophie's eyes are closed, but she can still see the picture on the card: five people, genders not quite clear, falling to their deaths and still fighting anyway. She saw it for a fraction of a second and it left an afterimage in her brain, only it's not fading. She's never stopped thinking about it, this whole time.

That's where this is all coming from. It's all this new Thing, sustained in her own thoughts like a wave in a lake, just foreign enough that it doesn't, quite, feel like her. But that's a trick.

I'm making You right now, aren't I? Out of me. Out of pieces of me that I didn't know I had, or didn't know how to use. Out of pieces that are precious to me.

It isn't a different person. That's wrong on several levels, Sophie sees that now. But it might as well be: even if it's using Sophie's thoughts, it's using them very differently than she ever did. It's more like...a twin sister. Perfectly like her in some ways, profoundly different in others, and irrevocably part of her life.

Wait. Irrevocably? Could she stop thinking about it?

Would she want to, if she could?

Sophie has learned a lot, lately, about how to welcome another person into her life without being overwhelmed by them. It's part of growing up, she thinks, because you can't learn it from your parents, only from a peer.

Whatever this Thing is, it isn't a peer. Each one of those thoughts had a crushing weight to it, an unfathomable depth.

Yes, it's deep. But it's narrow, too. It's a Thing of few words. Of few concepts.

Maybe she can teach it more, in return for whatever it's trying to give her.

Yes. Stay. I have a place for you. We can work together. We're not going to do everything your way, but it won't be bad. You'll see.

And the fire roars upward.

Hey Nico, one of your cards just stopped moving. It's not paying as much attention to you as it was, but it's a lot more present than it was a minute ago.

That's...Nico doesn't know what that is. Good or bad, definitely one of those. We're in uncharted territory here, that was the whole point.

How close is it? Within easy walking distance? Better question, is it still under the trees, or would he have to play dodge-the-thunderbolt to get to it?

Probably not more than a mile? You've got a good sense of its direction but only a slight sense of distance. As for the rest, you don't know this area well.

True enough. It was a silly question, really; what was he going to do, not follow it?

When you come back to yourself you're lying down, a little distance from Emily. You feel fine. Better than fine, you feel ready to get up and run a dozen marathons. But as you get up, you notice that the clothes you had on before are missing. Instead you're wearing...it's sort of like a t-shirt, you guess, made of soft red fabric, but long enough to reach your knees. It's got a belt with a simple metal buckle. There are sandals on your feet, open in the toes but with leather wrapping all the way up the calf. It sounds cold but you're not: you feel like you're standing before a warm fire.

As you stand, you come to realize that there's something important, something your new Friend is paying close attention to, back behind you up the hill a ways. It's not a compulsion, just a steady draw, like a compass in your soul.

The rain doesn't touch you. About two feet away from your skin it starts to hiss like it's boiling, and it billows away from you in little wisps of steam. Just enough makes it through to warm the space around you a little, like being in a room where someone just took a hot shower. It's pleasant.

And one more thing: looking around you, seeing the trees and shrubs in the dark moments between lightning flashes, you realize that you're glowing a little.

Yes. This feels right. Later she'll examine that feeling; right now she wants to ride it as far as she can.

She feels powerful, but is she? She'll squat down and try to gently pick up Emily, taking care not to jostle her head or spine.

She'll grab on to the card, too, before it gets blown away.

It somehow got blown into a pocket on your tunic. How convenient!

Picking up Emily is as easy as thinking about it. You could pick up three more kids just like her. There's something slightly off about how it goes, though. Nothing bad, just not quite what your subconscious expected.

Not a lot of this has gone how her subconscious expected. Put it on the "to think about later" pile.

Emily smiles up at the beautiful stranger. "'r you'n angel?"

UM. She'd been assuming Emily would recognize her. She sure hopes that's magic and not a concussion!

"I'm going to keep you safe," she tries.

"Keep m' sist'r safe too."

Emily doesn't have a - OH!

That might also be a concussion, but still.

"I will."

Just as you straighten up, you hear yourself think, "I came as fast as I could, everything's crazy, I don't know what's happening, I don't know if I can carry you but I'll -- ooh! Pretty!"

Sophie turns around, carefully, still holding Emily. To the bear, because this is obviously the bear, she says, "You again!"

And then, because that seems ungrateful, "I'm glad you came. Can you walk with me? My friend is hurt, so I need to take her to the school, but I really want to talk to you."

Yep, it sure is the bear. Sophie hears herself think, "Wait, who are you?" Then, a beat later, "You're the girl who was looking for the other girl? You changed..."

It's staring at Sophie with open fascination, like she's the most complicatedly marvelous thing it's ever seen.

That is not a look Sophie gets much, and it touches her even though, you know, bear. "Yes, I'm still me, and my friend still needs help."

Uh, is Emily reacting to SUDDENLY BEAR at all?

Her head REALLY hurts, and most of her attention is on the angel glowing stranger no probably she was right the first time. The angel can have a bear servitor if she wants, that seems fair.

Where's Sophie?

Honestly it's all getting to be too much to pay close attention to. She closes her eyes.

Yeah it's time to get Emily indoors.

She'll start off walking, then experiment with moving faster: how quickly can she go and still be absolutely sure not to jostle Emily in any way, or hit her with branches, or anything like that? And does the bear follow her?

Under those constraints you can manage a sort of fast power walk. On your own, you're sure, you could go much faster.

The bear follows, but has a weirdly hard time keeping up. He only has two speeds: a casual amble that's too slow, and a sprint that's too fast. He alternates awkwardly between them, and doesn't complain.

She seems nice, he thinks, in thoughts that don't readily bend into human language, and Dad will want to know about her. When he gets back.

Sophie wants to go faster but she'll keep a leash on it. Some problems can't be bludgeoned into submission, she tells her new other self. Be patient for now.

Sophie hears herself think, "When did you start glowing like that?"

Sophie is guiltily aware that she's not paying the PSYCHIC TALKING BEAR THAT SHOWED UP IN A THUNDERSTORM TO HELP HER as much attention as she really should. Her brain is mostly focused on Emily (is she still conscious? Is she still breathing?) but she's already doing the best she can there, focusing more won't actually help things go better. She should talk to the nice(?) bear. If nothing else there are probably a bunch of magical secrets at her fingertips, free for the asking, but she's just having such a hard time mustering the interest.

She can at least muster politeness, right? "It was a little before you showed up, everything sorta happened at once."

And then, because she can't seem to help herself: "But, I'm sorry, could you stop talking in my head like that? It's jarring. Can you speak out loud, like I'm doing?"

Emily is still breathing. Her eyes are mostly shut but she's mumbling to herself, too quietly for anyone to make out the words.

That's weird, Dad never minded. But really, what does he know about what humans do and don't like? In his whole life he's met four, and one of them's been asleep this whole time.

He'll give the nice lady his best effort, and emits a rasping growl. It sorta sounds like "no", if you're a generous listener.

"Don't worry about it then, I'll get used to it." She's not so sure about that, it's REALLY annoying, but...magical secrets. Probably-nice bear. She casts about for a way to continue the conversation, something friendly that'll teach her something useful about this weird world she's suddenly found herself in.

What do you ask a talking bear, anyway? She wants to start with "Please explain everything about today," only it already said it didn't know.

Lacking clear direction from her brain, Sophie's mouth takes initiative: "So, have you always been a talking bear?"

Oh good, a question he knows the answer to.

"Not really? It was already starting to get cold for this year when I figured it out. But I've been living here a lot longer, with my dad, only..."

He trails off, as he suddenly remembers why he's not at home right now.

"Only?"

"...I think something bad happened. He left on an errand, day before yesterday. He said he'd be back yesterday but he wasn't, and a bunch of other people came, and they went down in his lab. He never lets anyone down in his lab. I was outside, so I don't think they saw me."

Up until then it was the worst thing he'd ever felt: watching, and knowing he should be doing something to help, but not knowing what.

The feeling right before his next question is worse, but he has to know. "He always said never to let anyone see me, that people would get scared. You're not scared, are you?"

He immediately decides that asking that question was a mistake. What if she says yes?

Only one possible answer there. Luckily for Sophie, it's true: "No, I'm not scared of you. You were scared of me before, weren't you? I'm sorry about that."

Was she scared of the surprise bear, three hours ago back when everything was normal? That wasn't the question, so there's no need to talk about it. Now all she wants to do is give it a hug, just...not badly enough to put down Emily or stop.

Uh, but come to think of it there's another way to get this wrong, isn't there. "Other people might be, though. Probably they would be. So, keep hiding for now. But I'll introduce you to some people, don't worry." Sophie said that without really thinking it through but she endorses it, other people will want to meet the psychic bear and it seems lonely. "Hey, what's your name, anyway?"

Does the glowing human...like him?!? It kinda seems like maybe! He does hear the other stuff about other people but it doesn't seem that important.

"It's Otso! Dad said it meant 'forest apple'. What's yours?"

"Sophie. It means 'wisdom'."

"Cool."

"Yeah. My mom picked it."

Which, wait, back up a second. "Your dad went on an errand, you said? Do you know what he was doing? What kinds of errands do psychic bear dads go on? And he had a lab?"

"Huh? Oh! I'm adopted, Dad's a human like you. Well, taller. I don't know what he was doing, he just said it was important."

Otso very rarely knew what his dad was doing, and up until this exact second he didn't see anything strange about that.

Right, Otso said other people. "Do you think your dad might have caused - " she jerks her head to take in the wind, the constant lightning, the roars of thunder " - all this?"

That's actually a little offensive.

"No way! Dad's good. He keeps everyone here safe! That's his job, and it's going to be my job when I'm older. If..."

If he's OK, which he might not be, right, time for a change of subject. Does she have anything at all in common with this bear, aside from magic weirdness that might have killed his dad and might still kill her friend.

"How do you like this part of Flint Hill? It's one of my favorites in town."

"Right now it's kinda scary? But normally I think it would be really nice!"

"You haven't seen it before? I figured you'd probably been all over town and I just never noticed you."

"Not really. My dad said I should hide most of the time, remember?"

"Sure, but even at night?"

"People sleep at night."

"Right, that's why it would be safe. Well, safer."

"I'm people."

He's got her there, doesn't he.

Around then you break through the trees into the school parking lot. Nobody's hanging around outside, of course, but the lights are on in the gym. What now, Sophie?

Hmm. Sophie doesn't, actually, want to show whatever's going on with her to all her friends and neighbors -- not until she understands it better, and maybe never. She doesn't know how to turn it off. Also, if she did turn it off her dad and teachers and everybody would probably make her stay inside where it's safe, rather than going off to find whatever that new extra sense she has is pointing her towards.

Leaving Emily in the rain in the parking lot obviously doesn't work. Neither does standing around dithering while her concussion gets worse, or whatever it is.

Emily's started muttering to herself, eyes still mostly closed. The gist seems to be that she doesn't like Christmas pageants.

That thing you can sense is slowly getting closer, by the way.

OK, no more thinking time. Emily didn't recognize her, maybe whoever's at the door won't either. And if they do she'll...figure it out then.

First, to Otso: "Stay here in the trees for a sec, I'll be right back once I drop off my friend."

She'll step out of the trees and into the rain, hunched forward to keep Emily out of the rain.

Your rain shield still covers Emily, even here in the open.

This is a pretty convenient set of superpowers!

Probably people are mostly in the gym, since that's where the pancakes were? She'll trot across the parking lot to the gym door and peer through. She's looking for a responsible adult to hand Emily off to, ideally one who doesn't know Sophie personally.

The adults have only just realized that Emily might be missing. People are searching the empty classrooms right now, just to be sure, before they send a much-riskier rescue party out into the storm.

They don't know about Sophie. She asked her friends to cover for her, and they said they would, and no one has directly asked them about her yet. They're having a furious, whispered argument in one corner of the gym, the kind where you both know the right answer but you want the other person to be responsible for saying it out loud. If Sophie were there, she'd just...but she's not.

And Pastor Reed is standing at the gym door, watching the lightning illuminate the world and praying for Emily's safe return.

They're not very coherent prayers, just variations on Both of them, Lord? Not that. Please not that. Please...

And then a face appears in the window!

This is fine, Pastor Reed only sees her once a week and she's just one person in a crowd.

Sophie doesn't want to take a hand off of Emily, so she'll kick the gym door a little, to get him to open it.

She'll also try to open the door with her mind powers, just in case she has mind powers.

No mind powers, sorry.

Reed yanks the door open so hard it bangs off the wall. His prayer cuts off in midword as he tries to understand what he's seeing. There's a strange woman framed in the doorway, tall and confident-looking, light shining faintly from her skin, dressed in a long red tunic (medieval, his unfinished history degree puts in, maybe 13th or 14th century). She's wreathed in mist, and heat pours off her like a campfire, but she's not burning, just staring at him intensely.

And she's holding Emily Merrill, what the

"Don't be scared!"

That helps. "Who - " no, wrong first question, "is she hurt?" Also idiotic, he can see the blood on her face, but maybe it's better than it looks?

So far so good. "She got hit in the head with a piece of flying wood, I think. She's awake but pretty out of it. I'm worried about her. Is - she needs a nurse. Or a doctor."

She almost just asked, "Is Ms. Blogett here?" Ms. Blogett is the school nurse. Ms. Blogett is not someone Sophie's mysterious alter ego should know about! Maybe this will get easier with practice.

Reed will reach for Emily, if the radiant, enigmatic stranger is offering her up.

Right, yes, she'll pass Emily over.

Emily stirs a little as she's handed across. "...don' put the bear in the gym today. Saf'r in the library..."

That doesn't sound good. "We'll see to her immediately. But she probably needs a hospital, and it isn't safe to travel in this storm." He takes a breath. "What's going on here, really? And when will it stop?"

Why would she know that. What possible explanation can she give. Her first thought is, "the psychic bear didn't know either"; what would a better second thought be?

People are looking your way, Sophie, from all across the gym, drawn by the sound of the banging door.

Or consider: when adults ask Sophie questions, she has to answer them. But right now she isn't Sophie, exactly, is she? Would her Friend stick around and answer impossible questions?

Right, of course not! That's the mindset she needs right now.

"I have to go," she says instead. No need to add anything dumb like "Please take good care of Emily", obviously they will. She turns and runs away.

"Wait!"

And, assuming that holds her: "Is anyone else hurt or missing? Please, at least tell me that!"

Nope! Didn't even hear it! Sophie's finally trying out her new powers at full strength, and if they work as advertised she's already across the parking lot.

They sure do! You cross the parking lot in seconds, and once you're under the trees you feel even faster.

Where are you going, exactly?

Toward that thing her new Friend is paying attention to, obviously. Sophie wants to know what the hell happened today, and it probably won't know all the answers but it's sure a place to start. She was going to talk to Otso some more, but probably this is faster, and if it's not she can talk to him later.

Otso picks up the new direction, and charges after her through the underbrush. He'll do his best to keep up, or failing that to follow Sophie's trail of broken branches.

No offense, Otso, but right now Sophie wants to leave you tracking branches.

Let's see what Super Sophie can do! FULL POWER!

You're faster than Otso even when he's sprinting all-out. One difficulty, though: you have super strength, but apparently not so super reflexes. After a minute of sprinting up hills and leaping over bushes, you misjudge a jump just slightly and clip your shoulder off a big oak tree, and suddenly you're spinning through the air, then bouncing through the underbrush. After a few confusing seconds you come to tooth-jarring stop at the base of another big tree.

Your shoulder hurts a little, like you ran into a door, but otherwise you're fine.

No scratches, no bitten tongue, nothing?

Not that you can see, and you sure did plow through that blackberry bush with your bare arms and legs.

The BEST superpowers. Sophie doesn't really know what she can do for her new Friend, but she's going to figure it out and do it SO HARD.

How close to her target did she get, before her little accident?

Quite close, it feels like. Up the hill a bit. Right over there.

Great. Sophie will climb the hill at a slightly more reasonable pace, keeping her eyes peeled for anything surprising.

You push through another set of bushes, and through the trees and rain you see...

Who, by all the Powers above and below, is that?

It's the card you were following, of course! It's also a tall, glowing woman you've never seen before, dressed in medieval tunic and sandals, totally untouched by the chaos and disasters of the morning.

"...Kyle?"

And it's addressing you by name, sort of!

Now that he's closer, can he tell which card it is?

There's fire energy pouring out all around her, that's easy enough to sense. If you were standing next to her you doubt you'd even need any special attunement, you could literally feel the heat. The way she's overwhelming the water influence of the rain around her is also a pretty big clue.

Wands, then, and probably a low number.

...did Nico somehow create bodies for the Archetypes? No, that doesn't fit, everything he did was aimed at the spirit world, the material world he pretty much left alone. Even if everything went as wrong as it possibly could, it ought to have gone wrong with spirits, not bodies.

Was she like that the whole time? Maybe she's carrying around the Moon, or something, and the fire aspecting is just a coincidence.

Did she get a wire too? Did everyone in this town get one? What happens if you invest a spirit of intellect in something that's already a near-flawless representation of a spiritual entity? That doesn't seem likely, the Adam deck was and is focused on him particularly, and yet...

She wants to sprint forward and fling herself into his arms, but she doesn't want a repeat of the Oak Tree Incident and she doesn't like how his reaction...isn't. She will slowly and calmly walk toward him, and channel her excess energy into crushing any plant life foolish enough to exist in her way.

This does not feel like a safe situation to Nico. This person is clearly very powerful, was lurking in the vicinity completely undetected, and popped up just in time to steal a piece of his power. Now she's smashing her way toward him with an intense, worried expression.

She recognized his body. Can he bluff his way out, pretend to be plain old Kyle just lost in the big scary storm? That could have worked on that cop -- did work, basically, even though he was trying to do the opposite.

Then again, the cop clearly didn't know anything about anything. This woman knew enough to find his card in the big scary storm. She knew enough to use it to find him; there's no chance at all this meeting is a coincidence, even if she clearly wasn't expecting him to look the way he does. She might believe he's Kyle, if he can skate over his lack of Kyle's memories somehow; she won't and shouldn't believe he's uninvolved. What kind of story puts him at the center of all this mess, without making him responsible for any of it?

And if he can't come up with one, what is his plan here?

Nico does not, as a rule, fight people. He prefers not to tangle with other practitioners at all, and when he does he studies their methods and tools, secretly subverts their defenses, and then kills them without any excitement or risk to himself. Make the checklist, follow the checklist: that's how Nico wins. Getting into random forest brawls with strangers is...not that. He has ever in his life done things that stupid, but if he makes a habit of it then eventually he's going to become another sad story of lost lore.

He kinda just wants to bail out, to let Kyle's body fall over and snap back to his original one for good. He can track her through the card, and set up an ambush later after he -- but wait, no, he thought about this already. He can track the card she stole but it points to him, too. If he goes back to the body he was born with she'll just follow him there, and then he'll be in real trouble. It's far safer to have this conflict here.

Kyle please just say something so I knows you're OK. She can't bring herself to say it out loud.

He looks OK, for some weird new definition of "OK". His jeans are torn and shin is bleeding, and he clearly needs some sleep, but he's standing there steadily in the rain, not seeming to notice or care as it runs in rivulets off his jacket and onto his shoes. He looks like he's the only real thing in the whole forest, like all the rain and thunder and trees and bushes are just cheap set dressing.

Yeah that's probably just Sophie's point of view. She keeps walking closer.

Can he pretend to be Kyle, but with ritual-induced amnesia? Nico doesn't think that's a thing, but he doesn't know it's not. Would she?

Whoever she is, there's no way she understands everything that's happening, not if even Nico doesn't. Or if she does, she's from some hidden order of double-secret super alchemists, and he's just doomed. So assume she's confused too. Think it through from her perspective: she found the card, and followed it back to its maker, so she probably thinks that he's powerful (true!), caused this (kinda!) and knows what's going on (not as such!). And if she thinks that, she's not going to want to mess with him, not right in the middle of his big mysterious working. Nico can use that; he might be able to scare her off.

On the other hand, if he can pretend to be Kyle, then he's set: she'll let her guard down, probably lead him to safety, and sooner or later he'll get a chance to retrieve his card. He might not even have to kill her!

Too bad he knows nothing about her, and has no way of guessing which plan is better.

She's getting close, Nico; you have to commit!

Split the difference, then. He'll take a moment to tweak poor Kyle's overworked nervous system, ratchet it a little further toward tension and suspicion, and say:

"Who are you supposed to be?"

Sophie stops. It's Kyle's mouth moving, but it's not his voice. Not his expression either, or his way of standing, she's realizing, now that she's getting over the shock of seeing him again. Grappling with that, it takes a moment for the actual meaning to penetrate, and then she's confused all over again as "of course he doesn't recognize me, it's not him" collides with "of course he doesn't recognize me, I'm not me" in her flailing brain.

Did Sophie's superpowers lead her to Kyle's secret twin brother from Ohio, or something?

"Who are you?"

Well that half of the plan lasted about four seconds. No big deal, that's why he made another. He starts smoothing away all that new tension, aiming for overwhelming and obnoxious confidence. "This morning, I'm the master of New Hampshire. Thanks for returning my property." He'll hold out a hand palm up, like he's expecting her to put something in it. That works far more often than it should, even on other alchemists.

Also, special bonus test: will she recognize the reference to the wizard Nico killed earlier?

It's not going to work on Sophie! Whoever this guy really is, screw him, he's not getting anything he wants.

"Why do you look like that?"

"Oh, this?" Nico will make a show of looking over the hand he held out to her, the one that she so rudely ignored. "I'm just borrowing it. A basic precaution, for a ritual like this."

Nico knows of exactly one other alchemist who ever did this body-stealing trick, and that was a century ago. This should be at least a little impressive.

It's not. "Give him back!"

Slowly, unevenly, Sophie's brain is starting to work again. Something stole Kyle's body? What could do that? She did just learn about a kind of thing that can rearrange your mind, didn't she. What would have happened, exactly, if she hadn't decided to welcome her new Friend and also couldn't get rid of her?

Except...it owns her Friend? Or, her card? It did a ritual?

She doesn't talk like a powerful alchemist, is the thing. His missing card is for sure right there?

It is, and more densely present than you've ever felt it.

Nothing Nico can think of even remotely explains what he's seeing. And why is she dressed like that, in the rain and morning chill? It's fine now that she has all that fire energy, but what about before? Was she already like that, somehow, and that's why the card went to her? It's so...overt. It shouldn't be possible.

In any case, he's certainly not going to just give up Kyle's body for nothing. "Not yet," he tries. "For now I still need him. Once I've retrieved all my lost property, I'll go, and then I'll happily return his body to you." Kyle's higher souls are probably in tangled shreds by now, but she doesn't seem to know that and it won't be Nico's problem once she can't track him anymore.

Could he make a deal with her? Trade Kyle's body for the cards? It's tricky. If she gives him each card as she finds it, she won't have any guarantee that he'll really give up Kyle's body at the end. If she keeps the cards herself until they're all together, he doesn't have any guarantee that she won't somehow form her own relationship with them like she apparently did with his Wand.

How's she taking it?

DESTROY HIM

DESTROY HIM

Just remember not to hurt Kyle too much.

She'll charge across the rest of the space between him, not quite as fast as she can, and try and knock him down and sit on him. Maybe she can slap him unconscious, and then find a priest to get him an exorcism, or something. She'll figure it out when she gets there.

Wait, was that just th - ack!

Nico goes right down; brawling isn't his specialty to begin with and he's still a little clumsy with Kyle's body. Or, no, be honest, neither of those things matter because she's so much stronger than he is. How?

This is why he prefers meticulously-planned ambushes!

Up close the heat coming off her skin is striking, even though your coat. This is clearly not just a normal woman.

Yeah, yeah, it's somehow the card too. He decides to try a different test. "Reveal yourself!" he commands, if he can get it out with the thief sitting on his chest. He's not talking to her.

It comes out in a whisper, but you can do it; she's not any heavier than a woman her height should be.

Somewhere nearby there's another lightning strike. Light and sound disappear for a moment, and as they return Nico sees five branches whip past overhead, locked together in a chaotic not-quite-pattern.

The Five of Wands. Elemental fire from the Wands, balance between power and restraint from the Five. Upright it's about healthy and nourishing competition: training spars, say, or the kind of debate where everyone learns something. Reversed it's much bloodier: serious conflicts, deadly fights, contests with real stakes. The Golden Dawn called it "Strife", and said it had "volcanic energy".

This went so wrong, so quickly. Is this how Lane felt, when he called to Lake Winnipesaukee and it didn't answer? What can he do with this? What's the angle?

Sophie, the lightning whited out your vision for a second but you feel fine. You're sitting on Kyle(?)'s chest, knees on his upper arms. He's looking terrified and enlightened, like he just figured out the exact make and model of a missile that's about to hit him.

Sophie LOVES THAT. Let's work with that.

"Go away! Get out of here! Give him back!"

Can you scare a ghost so badly that it gives up on possessing someone? Does it make sense that ghost did a ritual? Maybe it was lying? Does she have any way to tell? Sophie's thoughts aren't keeping up with the pace of events, she can feel that, but her instincts, old and new, tell her that she's winning.

"Never!"

Sometimes it just feels good to shout defiance.

If you had to beat up the Five of Wands, how would you do it? It's a question that misunderstands every concept of the Tarot, but, well, here Nico is.

Opposite elements, water smothering fire. But he walked away from the river, where can he find - it comes to him that he doesn't have to search.

He'll try another evocation, dividing primordium into water right over the strange woman's head, then try to break free.

Suddenly a bathtub full of water pours down from above, all over you, Sophie. For one sudden moment you feel cold and weak, and Kyle's body is bucking free underneath you. You fall sideways, then the water on your skin starts to steam. As Kyle climbs to his feet your strength is already returning.

As soon as she possibly can, she'll knock him right over again.

That was hugely more effective than the evocation earlier, and it seemed like it worked pretty - no!

He goes right back down. Right idea, it seems like, just not enough power. He'll do another evocation, just to see.

The water's weaker the second time: more of a dense cloud than a splash. It sizzles right off of her. You could probably evoke a lot of fire right now, if you wanted.

That doesn't sound helpful, no.

That was by far the best evocation he's ever even heard of, and it didn't help at all!

Can he do something with the wire? Even showing it to her, when she can apparently steal his cards, seems like a supremely bad idea.

Weirdly, the water helped; Sophie's thoughts feel a little more centered, a little better at keeping up with the fight she's in.

What even was that? Can this thing that's possessing Kyle just summon water whenever it wants? That first attack almost worked, and if it keeps messing around maybe it'll find something even better. She has to stop it from doing things until she can come up with a proper plan.

Sophie vaguely knows that you can't really knock people out by hitting them on the head like you can on TV. What about choking? Is that safer? A little uncertainly, she puts her hands around his neck and tightens them just slightly.

"Careful," Nico rasps, around her too-strong fingers. "I can survive without this body, but poor Kyle won't be so lucky."

Nico's been focusing too much on the occult aspects of this. She's somehow somewhat the Five of Wands but she's also a person. The way Nico's weekend is going, she's probably his mom. And also a powerful spiritualist or something. WHAT ARE THE ODDS later, that's an important question but he has to save it for later. Right now he has to somehow resolve this weird standoff. She doesn't want to hurt his body but she's so much stronger than him, she can just pick him up and carry him away to her lab, or dungeon, or basement if that's all she has.

He doesn't have any tools or weapons. How can he still win?

Sophie keeps kneeling on her possessed boyfriend, trying to think. This is not the kind of problem her Friend knows how to solve; this part is clearly her job.

People can live without oxygen for minutes, underwater, and not drown. If Kyle's still in there (please God let him still be in there), a little choking shouldn't hurt him too much.

Maybe the ghost-or-whatever will have to let him go once he's asleep, and that's why he looks so tired. Maybe she can research an exorcism online once he's unconscious. Maybe Pastor Reed can help.

She just has to try something.

She tightens her fingers around his neck, trying to cut off his breathing without crushing anything important.

Glrk.

He can't keep Kyle's body moving if it's unconscious. If he bails out she'll come for his real body. Only moments to decide. He needs to do something smart, fast, but he can't breathe. Air is the element of thought and he doesn't have any...

Elemental opposition. Water. He needs more water.

This stupid state is full of lakes, is the ironic thing. He's spent days driving around them, or over them. Ancient water systems, not exactly aware, certainly not smart, but powerful. Places Sam Lane knew well. If this woman were trying to kill Lane, the whole water table would rise up and...

Ah. Of course. What a stupid, brilliant idea.

He gathers himself, carefully attending to all the points where his two higher souls touch Kyle's lower one, and all at once relaxes, letting himself be pulled back north to his body at Pawtuckaway Lake.

Kyle's purpling face isn't quite unconscious when his expression suddenly shifts, from frightened-but-defiant to confused-and-desperate. You've never seen that look on his face before, but somehow it's made of familiar pieces in a way none of the others were. At the same time, your Friend's sense of him withers away; she's paying attention to something else, now, a long distance over there.

She'll let go of his neck immediately; if it's a trick she can just grab him again. She swallows. Thinks about her Friend, and gathers her courage.

"...Kyle?"

Kyle blinks, and there's a sense of effort to it, of weight. That's new no. He remembers this feeling. Once his whole life was like this. Before Boston. Before...

He was driving up the hill, over the bushes.

He drew a circle in the dirt with his foot.

He called to fire, and it answered.

He tied shut the door

He saw

He flinches away. That's too hard for now, forget about it.

There's a beautiful, shining woman leaning over him. She called him "Kyle". That's...right, he decides. He's using parts of himself that haven't needed to do any work in quite a while, and it's a strain, but...maybe not a bad one. He blinks again, savoring the weight of it.

Kyle. If he thinks about that word too much he'll lose himself again, but as long as he just focuses on each moment as it comes it's not so bad. Except as each moment lands, drip drip drip, he's starting to realize what might have happened.

"Am I - did I die?" His eyes focus on the glowing stranger's face. "Is this heaven?" Then he looks over her shoulder, at the trees lit from above by pulsing lightning. "Or...not?"

Can her Friend stop her from literally dying of anguished uncertainty? No, probably not; she has to do it herself. She does her absolute best to keep her voice level and gentle. "No, Kyle, you're still alive. I'm Sophie. I know I don't look like it but it's true. You - you got lost somehow, no one knew where you were, but you came back and I saved you. Or I'm working on it anyway."

She stops herself, before the strands of her self control get any more frayed. What does long-term water ghost possession do to a person? What does he even remember?

Sophie. That's another deep word; if he leans too far into it, he'll fall. He pulls himself away, puts his focus on the stranger's face. There's a wholeness in the duality of it, he realizes, the way the perfect pairs of eyes and ears and nostrils defy their two-ness and become one.

It's sparkling and pure.

But not familiar.

There was a person named Sophie. He can get a little closer to that thought now, without losing his place to stand. And, there is someone sitting on my chest. Is there any kind of unity that bridges the duality of those two facts? The branches overhead seem to bend inward toward her, at the edges of his vision, wreathing her head in a spiky language that he almost thinks he could read, if only

He's getting lost again. She...asked him something, or wanted something, and he's forgotten what it was.

"Sophie," he breathes. "I don't..."

"Yes, it's me. I saw the light in your treehouse and you let me in and we talked about your mom and we kept meeting there and then I kissed you and you kissed me and it wasn't perfect but it was great right up until you disappeared but I wasn't worried because I knew I'd see you again but this is it, I'm seeing you again, and I don't know what's going to happen now..."

Shit. She only just realized that as she was saying it, but it's true.