Vex felt like his words were caught in his throat. He'd spoken to Noram not long ago at all; it had been a little over a day in Teque, and with the time differential between the two places, only about an hour in Fendal.

Noram couldn't have changed this much in that time; if it happened this quickly, it would have been too obvious. Fendal would've sent for help from the Guild sooner. The Patchers didn't even move this fast! And they'd been beaten. Shoved back.

As far as he knew, a treacherous voice whispered, and Vex tried his hardest to shut that voice up.

"We already talked about teaching you magic," Vex said, his words coming out stumbling and awkward; his heart felt like it was sitting in his throat. Some small part of him almost felt like he was just watching himself talk from a distance, and for a single absurd moment he wondered if this was what it was like for all those who had their personhood stripped away by the system — if they were forced to watch themselves follow some unseen script, designed to create an illusion of life.

"We did?" Noram frowned, cocking his head; he seemed to give the idea barely a moment of thought before smiling enthusiastically. "Did you agree? I'd love to learn some magic! I want to become an adventurer."

"He's been like this for a while," Charise said. There was a certain heaviness in her voice that brought home exactly how she felt about all this. "We just brought him back here. He seems... more comfortable." She hesitated before saying the last words, as if holding back something else she wanted to say.

"It's where I'm supposed to be," Noram said, oblivious to the tone of the conversation, and smiled blithely in a way that made Vex's heart drop further.

"This is pretty fucked up," Volaro said. He wore a scowl along with a graying beard, and his arms were crossed over his chest; Vex saw the faint lines of tension in his shoulders. He was acting angry, but a small part of him was scared.

Understandably, of course.

"We haven't gotten much in the way of updates. You know what's going on here?"

They did, of course. And they explained, a little haltingly, and mostly without Vex's help; the lizardkin tried once or twice, but his gaze kept sliding back to Noram and the way the younger wizard didn't say a word to even acknowledge the conversation they were having, and that was...

That stung.

The explanation helped, but only a little. Charise nodded as if she was expecting something like this to be the case all along, but both Volaro and Juni grew more tense; they looked around like they were expecting to be attacked by the Patchers at any moment. It took a rap on the table from Charise to calm them both down, and even then it was clear that Volaro was pissed, and Juni was scared.

"We're safe," Charise said. "We're not really here. Everyone else, though..."

Charise glanced rather significantly at Misa, and then at the rest of the party. Derivan shook his head and stepped in.

"I will sense the Patchers should they arrive," he said. "It should not be a significant risk... though given the difficulty we had fighting them, I do not know if we want to engage in a second fight before we understand more."

"How fast did it happen?" Vex asked quietly. He glanced again at Noram, and watched as the lizardkin just smiled back at him. Part of him hadn't completely accepted what had happened yet. He didn't know Noram well, but he'd resonated with him; they were alike in so many ways...

...He still had that sketch in his notebook to give him.

It was eerie, too, how easy it would have been to pretend that there was nothing wrong. He wondered how many people in Fendal was doing exactly that — maybe some of them had noticed, and simply chose not to acknowledge it. He wondered if that was Helg's plan, to ignore what was obviously wrong in favor of security and safety.

"It happened fast." Charise glanced over at Noram and sighed. "I thought something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what, and we didn't have anything that could stop it. I think the feeling lasted about five minutes, and then he was just..."

Her voice trailed off; she didn't know how to continue. Vex fidgeted slightly in the ensuing silence, and then made a decision.

"Hey, Noram?" he said. The other lizardkin looked up at him, offering a bright smile, and Vex tried not to let his voice shake. A part of him — a small part, he told himself — was reminded of his little brother, and it made everything about this worse.

But he would do whatever he could, no matter how small that act was. And so he took out the majority of the mana slivers that he'd only just created, as well as the notebook he had on the runic circles in those ruins; he'd promised those to Noram anyway. His concerns about the little drawings he'd left in the margins of the book seemed so far away, now.

He kept one sliver for himself — a promise, a reminder, and something he could do research on. The rest he placed on top of the notebook, and handed it over to Noram.

Anton had said something about mana slivers helping him recover his self, over time. He didn't know how many slivers that took, or how long that process took, but... maybe this would be enough.

And if it wasn't? It wasn't like they were giving up.

"Here," Vex said, and gently pushed the notebook and the small pile of slivers over to Noram. "You wanted to learn magic, right? Here are the notes I promised."

"You promised me notes?" Noram blinked once at Vex. "Well, sure! Thank you. Let me get you a reward—"

"—Please don't," Vex interrupted, shaking his head. The last thing he wanted was a reward for this.

"But I gotta," Noram told him, and something about the way he said it made Vex look up cautiously.

He wasn't awake. Not exactly. But something here seemed to be important, and whatever it was he was picking up on, Charise seemed to pick up on it as well; the woman frowned a little bit and then nodded quietly to Vex, as if encouraging him to take whatever the reward was.

"...Okay then," Vex said, a little reluctantly, and Noram reached into his pocket and withdrew something he definitely should not have had.

This was a quest reward. Not the kind of quest reward that was obtained from the Guild, when a quest there was completed; it was the kind of quest reward that was obtained from completing sub-objectives in a bonus room. It was not an item but an Item, recognized by the system.

Part of him was almost angry that even the simple act of helping someone else had become something transactional.

The other part of him paid attention to exactly what it was he was being given, and that pushed him over into a genuine anger. Not at Noram, and maybe not even at the system, but at the cruelty of turning something like this into a quest reward.

[Spelldisk] [Grade: Rare]

A sentimental item that belonged to a young would-be adventurer. He crafted this in the dead of the night, where his parents would not be able to see, each day pressing a new rune into the circuit along the edges.

On the surface, it casts a simple Light spell. But Light exists to cast away the shadow, and so this item may hold a deeper personal secret, as well.

"Are you sure you want to give me this?" Vex asked Noram. He didn't know why he bothered; he knew what the answer would be, and yet it felt wrong not to ask.

"Of course!" Noram said, as Vex knew he would, but then he leaned forward and nodded as well.

How much of Noram was still in there, exactly?

Maybe there was something here that could help.

"...Okay," Vex said, and took the spelldisk from Noram. "Thank you."

"Thank you," Noram told him; he smiled yet again, taking the slivers and the notebook and vanishing them into his pocket. Vex didn't know what to say, so he only swallowed and nodded, and glanced back to the others for support.

Each of them had equally grim expressions on their faces.

"I don't like the idea of leaving like this," Misa said. One hand gripped at the mace at her side, and she gave the weapon an almost absent-minded twirl that made several other patrons of the bar flinch. "If we know what we need to find is in Elyra, then that's one thing, but this feels too much like just abandoning them to this shit."

"I'm not okay with leaving like this either," Sev said, shaking his head. "We've got Anton to help out on the inside... what about Charise and Volaro and Juni?"

"We can stay, but it'll mean that Misa can't summon us again in Elyra if we're needed, or we'll need to be dismissed here before that can happen." Charise considered this for a moment. "As long as this isn't a permanent cost in some way, I think we should stay. We can help coordinate things if you end up being forced to leave."

"Good fucking luck forcing us to leave," Misa muttered, but Vex noticed that she looked worried. There was very much a possibility that there was nothing further here to find, but —

Before Vex could follow that train of thought any further, there was a flare of magic.

Vex startled. Derivan did, too, the prickle of intensity making him look up towards the Road where Teque lay; even Noram, with most of his self stripped away, glanced towards the direction of Teque almost instinctively.

A massive barrier of pure mana rose up from the underground city, traveling through the Road at speed; it did nothing as it touched Fendal, passing through the buildings and people that lived there like it wasn't even there. But there was no reason to cast a magic like this save for one —

"Misa," Vex said quickly. She was already on it; her mace glowed in front of her, but the glow flickered and died, and she shook her head in frustration.

"It's not an attack," she said.

Not an attack. But it was a wave of solid mana that was approaching them at speed — it certainly looked like an attack, and Vex worked fast to try to interpret exactly what the magic did; the problem here was that there was no runic circle for him to decode, and no glyph for him to even try to look at.

"It is shifting everything," Derivan said. He was concentrating on the magic as well. "Not a lot. But just slightly, to be out of tune with everything else. I do not think—"

And they were out of time; the barrier struck them.

Like Misa said, it wasn't an attack.

It pushed them backwards, though; them and everything they owned, catching on the edge of the bubble of mana like foreign objects in a magical filter. The strangest part was when they were pushed through the walls of the inn, no longer quite on the same wavelength as everything else.

There was a moment of vertigo, before they were all dumped — rather unceremoniously — outside of Fendal.

The good news was that their caravan had been pushed out, too; whatever spell that was, Helg had at least been considerate enough to include everything that belonged to them. Charise and Volaro and Juni all stayed in, presumably because they were a product of the skill instead of being anything 'real'.

The bad news was that this barrier was solid. That act of reality-shifting was only a small element of it, the element needed to push them out without harm. Now that it was in place, it was a solid chunk of pure mana with no flaws Vex could see, even with his advanced version of mana sight.

Misa looked quite understandably pissed. "That fucker," she cursed.