“Do we have to go?” whined Kai. “I want to know how this thing works and what it can do!”

“Sorry Kai, I scheduled an equal amount of time for each department, and we’re already eating into the runic researchers’,” replied Iori with an apologetic frown.

“Oh come on, it’s not like they’re going to use all of that time!” exclaimed Astor, inserting himself into the conversation. “They’re not even allowed to show off their research to anyone without clearance.”

“Fine,” grumbled the alchemist. “I’ll give you a couple of minutes to show off, but then we have to get going.”

“Sweet! So Astor, how does this thing work?” asked the teen with wide eyes.

“Glad you asked!” replied the mechanical engineer. He pitched his voice a scale lower as he gave it a velvety touch. “The Mark 1 power armor is the latest advancement in TOAL’s military technology. Featuring multiple layers of defenses to counteract different types of threats, there’s almost nothing this mobile tank can’t take on.”

Kai listened intently to the description, letting himself be carried away by the smooth words.

“At its innermost core, we have a layer of environmental protective fabric and shock dampeners, with magical enchantments that reduce any physical blows that manage to make it through. In addition, it keeps track of the current temperature and works to balance it at a comfortable 69 degrees fahrenheit.”

“Nice,” said Kai.

“Nice,” added Iori.

“Above that we have the main metal body, broken into several separate layers. The first of which is the computational layer. It’s a simple electro-magical frame that holds the bulk of the enchantments, as well as the magical circuitry that’s used to make up our more miscellaneous tech, such as comms and radar. But the most impressive part is the magical neural interface. It uses a limited form of mind magic to intercept the electrical signals sent from the brain to the wearer’s muscles, and performs those movements on the suit instead! So the armor’s practically a second body for whoever is inside.”

“So this thing can read your mind and move itself?!” exclaimed Kai.

“Of course! How else would a normal soldier carry around three tons?” asked Astor rhetorically. The suaveness in his voice dropped to take on a more excited note. “And the best part is that they move faster than normal with this thing on! Like, they could run up behind you from 100 feet away and snap your neck in the time it takes you to blink!”

“You sound like Squad Romeo,” replied the teen.

“That’s who I got that line from. Who do you think is going to be wearing this thing?”

Kai nodded in understanding. Who else would wear something as insane as this? A bunch of nutjobs, that was who.

“On top of that is the synthetic muscle layer, which is mostly just a chain of object animation magic on a tough and stretchy fabric. A lot of newbie wizards like to animate swords to fight for them or to even ride on top of, but it’s more or less just for show. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that a fireball or summoned mount is more useful in comparison, so those kinds of spells get ditched early on. The thing is, nobody seems to understand what they’re capable of, and we simply supercharged them to their logical extreme.”

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” said the teen. “So this thing is like a giant puppet and the wearer is the puppetmaster?”

“Exactly! Anyway, on top of that is the main metal layer. Made of a composite armor, it has different sub-coats to deal with crushing, piercing, and even elemental attacks. It’s also got a good number of enchantments to help with that. The standard non-newtonian fluid enchants on the quicksteel fabric layer to deal with blunt force trauma and general durability ones on the mithril plates to protect against slashing, for example.”

“Sounds like there’s a lot of magic poured into this thing,” replied Kai with a frown. “I saw a golem taken down with some kind of magical EMP yesterday, so why can’t someone do the same thing to this?”

“I can’t believe you’d even suggest we wouldn’t account for such a glaring weakness in our designs!” exclaimed Astor, feigning indignation. “But the final layer on top of that handles everything. We’ve got strips of beryllium bronze, a natural magic dampener, running through a newly discovered magical conductor that we have to thank our offworld metallurgist Ingrid for discovering.”

“Hey, I’ve met her!” exclaimed Kai.

“Oof, sorry about that,” replied Astor. “That chick is scary.”

“Yeah, but we got along pretty well.”

“Shit, did you have levels in Diplomat or something?”

“Nope, she was pretty cool with me.”

“Good for you then,” shrugged the engineer. “If you join us, we might make you our liaison in that case.”

“I’d rather work on this,” replied the teen, pointing at the suit of armor.

“I don’t blame you. Everyone here does, so we’d let you take turns with them.”

“Alright, I think we’ve spent enough time ogling the suit of armor,” said Iori in a huff. “We need to at least give the rune guys a chance to pitch themselves to Kai, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

“Well, I think I’ve done a good enough job of selling the mechanical engineering department to our guest here, so go ahead,” nodded Astor. “If you do want to join us, we’ll even get you into a nice college for free!”

“Yeah, I already know that,” replied Kai. “Iori here offered to write me a letter of recommendation and find me a tutor for my chemistry and alchemy classes.”

“Wait, she did? We’ll do the same, but give you two tutors!”

“Three tutors,” casually retorted the alchemist.

“Back off,” growled the mechanical engineer.

Kai continued to stare at the armor as the two researchers bickered behind him. As he was finally ready to get going, the teen’s eyes widened. “Hey, if the outer layer is the anti-magic one, then what’s stopping someone from just breaking that off and then throwing an EMP?”

The two scientists stopped talking and stared at the young man. Astor turned back to Iori and looked at her silently for several seconds as a wry smile began to form on her face.

“Shit!” the mechanical engineer whispered to himself between clenched teeth, as he turned around and began to walk away. “Which idiot put the anti-magic layer on the top?!”

“You, sir,” said another researcher from the back of the room, eliciting a frustrated scream from Astor.

“Looks like it’s time for the next part of the tour,” exclaimed Iori. “Come on, Kai!”

After saying their goodbyes, one more friendlier than the other, the two made their way to the next door. Unlike the others, this one had no built-in window.

“So as you can see, the runeheads back there are pretty secretive,” said Iori with a sigh. “They have to be, since rune magic is pretty classified.”

“Yeah, Ms. Neal said I can’t learn it until after I graduate and choose to become one of them full time,” lamented Kai.

“Which is why I’m not bothering to give them the same benefit I did to Astor. There’s not much these guys can show you anyway that’ll sway you into joining them.”

“So then how do they get new members? I can’t imagine many people wanting to join when there are even cooler choices right next door.”

“I appreciate the compliment, but it doesn’t really mean much when you’re comparing us to them,” Kai’s tour guide chuckled. “But for the most part, it’s usually people who’ve already had a chance to learn about and study rune magic wherever they were summoned. So from what I’ve heard about you, and how you got rescued almost immediately, those guys never stood a chance.”

The alchemist tried to turn the door handle, but the metal shaft didn’t budge, despite numerous attempts at applying her full weight onto it.

“Damn thing must be locked, as usual. They should know they’ve got a guest, so what gives?” Iori pulled out a keycard, featuring a picture of her smiling in a lab coat. She swiped the rectangular piece of plastic across a black receptacle, and tried the handle again. And once more, it remained stationary.

“What the hell?” she asked herself in an audible whisper. “Stupid security protocols must’ve broken this thing again. Let’s try this…”

The woman pulled out a second keycard, this one with a holographic gold background featuring an image of her in formal attire showcasing a more somber expression. “Being part of the executive council has its perks,” she said to Kai as she swiped the card through the same slit.

This time, they were met with a soft chime, and the door no longer gave any resistance to her attempts at gaining entry. As the two made their way inside, they were greeted by a large crowd of researchers gathered around an image projected onto the wall. That wasn’t to say that the crowd greeted them, as they were utterly engrossed by the image being displayed on the far wall via an old-school overhead projector.

“Hey, who are you?!” shouted one of the researchers, prompting the horde of scientists to turn around with wide eyes. “How’d you get in here?!”

“This,” began Iori with a frown. “Is Kai Freeman. He’s scheduled for a tour of the labs, including yours. So tell me, why exactly was your door locked?”

“Because we’re in the middle of a breakthrough on the tier 5 runes! Runic researchers only!” frantically shouted the same man.

Whoever was managing the overhead projector scrambled to cover the image with their hands, as if it were some kind of grave and embarrassing secret that could never see the light of day.

But it was too late, someone unintentionally had seen it. Kai stared at the single symbol as the machine was turned off. It glowed a deep blue despite being written on a normal sheet of aged parchment with equally mundane black ink. As the projector went dark, the glow of the symbol remained on the wall where the teen was looking at it. When he closed his eyes, the symbol remained behind his eyelids. Panic began to set inside him, but Kai soon relaxed as the shape began to fade, leaving only a memory. A strangely solid memory that felt like it was physically etched into the teen’s brain.

“Whoops…” replied Iori, a look of surprise on her face that soon shifted to embarrassment. It quickly changed to a pout as more of the researchers began to stare at her. “But if you act like your research is more important than potential new recruits, you’re never going to get any.”

“We’re not going to get any researchers from the fresh arrivals,” replied another one of the scientists. “That’s why we weren’t even going to bother with the kid, he’s got way more interesting choices than us.”

“Not a kid,” replied the teen with a look of frustration. “And I want to keep my options open. So what’s so great about rune magic anyway? Besides being used for portals?”

Iori looked at her ward with a hurt look, but let him ask his question unabated.

“That’s about it, really,” said the researcher. “Runes don’t work like regular magic, and generally only deal with space-time. Like opening portals, making the space between two points shorter than they actually are, things like that.”

“You know, that’s pretty cool!” replied Kai with an interested smile. “You could probably get faster than light travel with them.”

“We’ve already got the specs written down for a theoretical Alcubierre warp drive, but we’ve got no reason to start working on it.”

“Holy shit, for real? An actual warp drive?!”

“I mean, it’s all theoretical, and I doubt we’ll get a greenlight to start working on it. Don’t want another post-carnicula incident to happen again.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Oh, you haven’t learned about that yet, have you?”

“Nope, nobody wants to talk about it. Apparently it was really bad.”

“It sure was, but that’s not the part that freaks the rest of us researchers out,” he said with a shiver. “But you’re a student and you need to learn this stuff some time or another. I’m going to talk to your teacher and see what I can do about that.”

“Really?” asked Kai with wide eyes. “That’s probably the biggest thing any of you scientists here have done for me.”

“Kai!” exclaimed Iori with a pained look and a hand to her heart.

“Sorry, but I don’t even know if I want to become a researcher yet,” replied the teen with an apologetic shrug. “But you do make it very tempting.”

“Fine,” said the alchemist with an eye roll. “But the offer for tutors and that letter of recommendation are still open.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem, but it’s going to come with the caveat that nobody else, especially Gus, learns about this little ‘incident’. That goes the same for you runeheads!”

“Don’t worry, our lips are sealed,” replied the researcher. “Gus would have our collective heads if he found out we almost had a leak! You didn’t actually see anything, right Kai?”

“Uh, nope. Didn’t see a thing,” replied the teen with shifty eyes.

“Good enough, this never happened. But if you are interested in joining up with us, we can spare someone to tutor you in physics.”

“Yeah, I think I’m good. I wasn’t planning on taking that anyway, since I’m almost finished with chemistry and that’s all I need to graduate. But thanks, though!”

Iori reacted with a silent fist pump. “So that’s about it for the tour. See you runeheads later, and I hope to see you Kai after you graduate! Working in in the alchemistry lab, that is.”

Dinner was a comparatively peaceful affair. Kai and his newfound friend Kazuma discussed anime while eating their gourmet food. The teen happily feasted on the Apex Unagi Char that was recommended to him earlier that day while the Japanese man enjoyed a vegetable wrap. Losing weight would help him in survival training, and more importantly, with winning the next DDR tournament.

Their days had been hectic enough that they preferred to keep their conversation mundane. And that meant talking about what shows Kai should check out from the library.

Once they were finished, each headed back to their rooms, ready to relax in solitude before slipping off into the warm embrace of sleep. Of course for Kai, relaxation meant getting a foot over his schoolwork. In the form of picking out the most interesting story in his assigned reading list and skimming through the first chapter.

As the teen began to doze off at the trite introduction, he absentmindedly began to trace a shape onto the page with a finger. As he did, he began to see what looked like a glow. A dark blue one. When he closed his eyes, it was still there. In that same exact shape from…

Kai’s eyes snapped open and he jolted over to the end table. He fished out a notepad and pen, and began to draw. Three black lines made their way onto the paper in the shape of a tilted F. The teen stared at his work and could see the glow emanating from the sheet.

“Fehu,” he whispered to himself, as if the symbol had told him its name.

Immediately, the paper began to cumple at the center of the rune, pulling itself into the letter. No, that wasn’t quite right. The parchment was entirely uncrumpled, but the space it took up was collecting together in the center of the symbol.

Kai let go of the paper as it coalesced into a single point, before it turned into a small, silvery sphere and fell to the ground. It landed on the soft carpet with a thud, leaving a curious teen to look over it very carefully. Eventually, his curiosity got the better of him, and Kai picked the strange object up. He studied its smooth, reflective surface with tender eyes, taking note of the same symbol, ᚠ, etched into its side in his handwriting.

“Woah,” the teen whispered to himself, weighing the sphere in his palm. “Is this rune magic?”

The object was significantly lighter than the original notepad, and took up much less size.

“Fehu,” he whispered again. The sphere seemingly popped out of existence and was replaced with the notebook, the symbol still written onto it but without the strange blue glow surrounding it.

Kai, now utterly gripped by curiosity, walked over to the end table and wrote the same rune onto its surface.

“Fehu,” he said again as the piece of furniture transformed into a sphere the same size as the previous one. This one weighed the same as well.

“Now what if I…” began the teen as he threw the sphere at the front door.

Just as it was about to leave his hand, he whispered the rune’s name once more. The end table reappeared and continued on its original trajectory, maintaining the same velocity of the sphere and slamming into the door with enough force to make it ring.

“Holy shit!” the teen said to himself as he covered his ears.

“Hey, what was that?” came a muffled voice from outside the room.

“Sorry about that!” shouted Kai. “I, uh… tripped!”

The half-cocked excuse seemed to placate his neighbor, and the teen settled down onto his bed, giggling to himself.

“Well, the next time I run into an angry dwarf, I’m going to actually put up a fight!”