"I don't know. The ritual was checked three times before being cast. It wasn't... it wasn't supposed to just go."

"Time—time passes differently—it could be days, it could be years—" She shudders. "We need to reopen this portal right now."

"Okay, but a portal making ritual is just too big to remember correctly... Do you have a way to get retroactive eidetic memory?"

"If it's possible no one's had enough mana for it—" She tries. "It's probably impossible."

"Okay..." Felix says a bit shaken while he evaluates their options, "sorcery schools work by tagging things with a magic marker. You can probably reverse engineer a school from that and we can construct something from that."

"M—magic marker? How does that work?"

She hugs him and clings to him.

Felix clings back.

"I don't know the details, but the school-making rituals are supposed to be a magical effect that 'tells to the world' what an action or object or something is supposed to do when powered by lifeforce. And since sorcery was sort of contagious to you, maybe it actually means that it is just a contagious effect... We should check if ritual sorcery works normally here."

"Okay. Okay." She nods. "Do you have a small ritual or something to test?"

"Yes, hold on." Felix takes the instructions and materials from his backpack and superspeeds to set it up. "Just something to control the temperature around. You should superspeed analyze it."

Felix starts casting the ritual. It's meant to be used indoors where it can be more useful, but they aren't aiming for the practical uses of the spell here.

It works.

"Even at superspeed, this is like... looking at a finished building and having to rederive the blueprints for it, and after that rederive the physical principles behind the building choices."

"Does this mean you can't do it at all or that it's going to take a long time?"

"I can most definitely do it. It will most definitely take a long time."

Nod nod. Felix would like a hug now.

Yes. Yes so would she, this is very much a hugging time. "It could be the other way around, though," she says, trying to sound reassuring. "It could be years here and only seconds there, they might not even miss us..." Pause. "Oh my gods, Sadde—"

"Fuuuck."

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck... Okay, okay. Let's think about this. Whatever happened to our portal might not have happened to the one to his world. Or maybe he managed to get back in time. Or... or..." Felix feels suddenly out of breath, he didn't realize he wasn't breathing in. "They have Milliways, there ought to be some way for them to find us from there."

"Right. Right, Milliways. It—door. We need a door." She squints at the ground, points at it, and a door emerges from it fully formed. Thank Sadde for the fuckton of lifeforce she can convert into mana.

Felix speeds over and opens it... nothing, he opens it again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again, again...

...okay that's a good idea yes she'll make another door and do that, too.

While still opening and closing the door. "We... maybe should consider what to do in the near future."

"...learn sorcery and reconstruct that ritual from scratch?" she suggests.

"I was thinking more in terms of where we are going to stay and what about the delegation that is coming our way?"

"—oh. I, I don't know. The delegation—we could wait here, and explain—show sorcery to prove we weren't lying—but without the portal to back us up they might just as well decide to try to subdue us or declare us heathens—and I do have enough mana now to stop them—"

"What does being called heathens entail exactly?"

"Death sentence, usually."

"Ouch. If we try stopping them... then what? Would we be on the run?"