Blinking in surprise, Emily builds up a bundle of machina, imbuing it with a greeting before releasing it as an electromagnetic wave that echoes out into the surrounding tunnels. She feels several of her robots receive the message and send out return pings, quickly beginning to fill her in on the expansion of resource collection while she was away, and, after a few moments, a matching wave of machina from Pod, only just strong enough to reach her without dissolving, alerts her to his approach.

She quietly processes the flow of information from her drones, tapping a metal finger against her thigh as more and more discrepancies in their data arise.

"Hey!" Pod calls out a few minutes later, stepping out from one of the distant tunnels beside a flowing waterfall and clipping a gadget onto one of the suspended metal cables, shooting towards them with the whirr of a motor. "You're finally back."

"Hey," Emily greets him with a hint of tension and excitement in her usually empty tone. "How long have we been gone for?"

"Yesterday marked six months," Pod responds easily, tilting his head in confusion. "Why? Lost track of time in your research?"

"Six months," she mutters, not paying his questions any attention as the pieces click together in her mind. "The Clock says six hours have passed… It makes sense. Both time and space can be manipulated. I know this on a fundamental level from my own experience in time-travel, but it's odd to see it like this… Time is relative."

Emily activates The Clock, focusing on the feeling of the world distorting around her as she slips through the cracks of time once more, deepening her understanding of its weavings by a fractional margin. As the shift settles, she finds herself walking through a dim tunnel with Pod, Mensacus, Silica, and Ivor again, both twenty-four hours and over six months in the past.

She repeats her interaction with The One Who Watches, attempting to change the terms of their deals and adding to her notes when the mysterious entity instinctively seems to know she's trying to cheat them. By the time she comes face-to-face with her apprentice once more, she has an entire page dedicated to the oddities of time and the faint whisperings of an understanding of the element she can detect somewhere in the deep Abyss below.

"You're finally back!"

"Yes," Emily responds with a nod, looking around at the web of cables Pod's hanging from. "Looks like you've been busy in my absence."

"Yeah, well, we had to get around somehow after your bridges broke… I had to take a trip to the surface about four months ago to deal with a material shortage in the New Denntimo site, so I mapped the path I took and brought in a bit of extra muscle. We've been systematically stripping the cave system of all the resources we could ever need and loading Elisime up. She should be close to full at this point."

She nods in satisfaction, already running through the reports of her metal workforce corroborating his claims.

"Good work." She pats him on the shoulder, extending the layer of wind beneath her feet to let him detach from his cable system. "Find anything fun?"

"Nothing we haven't seen before. We did come across a large vein of metal crystals, though. I've never seen so many greater crystals in one place." Pod replies, pointing Emily towards the tunnel he came from. "Oh, and we've found some metal that reacts to those scanners you distributed."

"The radiation counters?"

"Yeah, the annoying beeping ones."

"Good. I've been waiting to experiment with fission."

"Right, well, enough about our digging," the young apprentice shrugs dismissively. "What about you? What did you find in the death pit?"

"Unsurprisingly, not a whole lot. I caught a few glimpses of the species living down there, but we didn't see a single notable landmark. The second we entered the water, it was like we fell into an endless, empty expanse. No cave walls, and no bottom, even after hours of sinking. In fact, I don't think we stopped sinking the entire time."

"Sinking for six months straight?" he questions with disbelief.

"It was only a few hours for us," Emily corrects. "A couple of hours before we met The One Who Watches, the disembodied consciousness of The Abyss, then a few hours of receiving its blessing before we returned. Clearly, time and space are a little distorted down there."

"Crazy," Pod mutters before narrowing his eyes at her playfully. "Also, not a lot? A disembodied consciousness sounds like something to me!"

"Well, we didn't find it," Emily remarks with an amused quirk of her lips. "If the feeling of being watched was anything to go by, it was very much the other way around."

"Right. Anything else you didn't find?"

"Well, there were haunting whispers and distant ghost lights forming into eyes… but no, not much to write home about."

Pod shoots her an aghast look before shaking his head with a smirk and turning his gaze back to the path ahead as a light in the distance shines around the bend of the tunnel.

"Horrors beyond my comprehension, got it. Sounds like Mensacus will have been right at home."

His teasing comment falls flat when the mechanical chimaera in question doesn't respond, quietly walking along in step with his mother.

'Are you alright?' Emily asks in her mind, brushing her hand against his shoulder and scanning him with a stream of machina, not finding anything out of the ordinary other than a slightly raised resistance to her intrusion.

'I'm fine,' he whispers back, leaning into her touch. 'The Watcher gave me a gift too, and I'm just taking a moment to adjust. It feels… wrong for someone other than you to reach inside me like that, even if part of me came from them.'

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She reassuringly traces circles across his cold metal flesh, drawing Pod's attention away by asking about the light in the distance.

"That your base of operations?"

"Yeah. We needed somewhere for Ivor to do his experiments," the young man explains before scratching at the back of his neck with a sheepish expression. "And sleep. I kind of forget normal people do that after following your work schedule."

Emily rolls her eyes as they step around the corner into a chamber buzzing with activity. Ivor is standing in the middle, drifting between stone worktops covered in crystals and beast pieces. There are several electromagnetic transmitters lined up against the cave's wall for managing the work inside the cave system, with droids filing in and out of the chamber through connecting tunnels, some carrying excavating tools and some heavy loads of harvested materials, with a few dragging in the corpse of a particularly large centipede that catches the alchemist's attention immediately.

"Enjoying the fresh samples?" Emily calls out before Ivor can begin cutting away segments of the bullet-riddled insect.

He turns to face her with shock that quickly makes way for a smile.

"You're back!" he signs, dropping his tools and heading over to greet her. "You took longer than expected. Did it go well?"

"Well enough," Emily signs back, noticing Pod's eyes following their hands comfortably. "We didn't get any materials out of it, but I spoke to The Abyss' avatar and received its blessing. I'm still yet to work out exactly what that means for me, but it gave me a hefty physical and magical boost at the very least, along with deepening my affinity for several elements."

"Incredible. Do you think it's possible for others to receive these blessings?"

"Not unless they can survive sinking down there themselves," Emily replies, glancing at her recovering son. "The pressure was intense. I'm not sure I would have survived at third circle, and that's saying a lot."

Ivor nods with a shiver, guiding Emily towards a few stone seats carved into the walls beside several crystal-fired steam generators and pulling out a parchment to take notes.

"What was down there? Any new plants?"

***

A little while later, after recounting her experience in The Abyss, Emily begins sending out commands to clean up their operation. She gathers her dispersed droids and their equipment, leading a long procession through the dark to an underwater channel connected to the upper layer. Luckily, her careful waterproofing proves effective as none of her robots are affected, and they make it up to lighter tunnels to continue marching out.

Emily teleports herself and the others directly to Elisime the moment they leave the depths, taking time to settle back in as they wait for her army to make their own way out. She finds Silica waiting for her on the ship, having retreated there after growing bored of exploring The Crystal Water's tunnels under armed guard, and settles in her workshop to write out a report of The Abyss whilst Ivor works around her, continuing his alchemical experiments.

A day later, with the last of her troops riding elevators up to deposit their burdens in Elisime's stores, Emily sets the ship's course back towards the capital. They carve through the dense clouds hanging above the forest, ignoring the rain falling around them and dispersing any birds that try to cause problems with a few choice gunshots.

"What are you working on?" Pod asks as he carries in a chunk of metal for his tinkering.

"A paper," Emily replies without looking up from the parchment in front of her, her enchanted pen dancing across the page. "I'm writing up a report on The Watcher and using it to consolidate my research on magic-born consciousness. I've been looking for a valid natural example that wasn't too closely linked to my kids for a while. I'd rather not reveal the exact details of their births, but I need something as proof of my claims."

Pod nods along in understanding, only half paying attention as he busies his hands, having already listened to Emily talking about her children enough to write half the paper himself. Ivor raps his knuckles against the workbench to draw Emily's attention.

"Do you plan on submitting this paper?" he signs with a curious tilt to his head.

"Yes, Arthur requested it." She nods, her friend not batting an eye at her casual form of address for the king. "I'll be supplying copies to the crown and The Covenant."

"Are you…" Ivor continues, pausing to consider his words. "Interested in authoring more magical papers? I know personally I'm benefitting hugely from your knowledge."

He lifts the notebook she penned for him before first leaving The Dome, flashing one of the pages covered in her neat writing with his own messy annotations in the margins.

"I'm considering it," Emily ponders, half expecting a system quest to appear telling her to get started. "I have a lot to say about the gaps in Modo's magical knowledge, but I'm not sure I want to focus on putting that down on paper. Maybe in between my other projects."

"You could always pass it on through word of mouth," Ivor suggests, accepting a ramekin full of metal filings from Pod without looking, adding a sprinkle to the minerals he's grinding together. "I'm sure people would be willing to sign up if you offered lectures in The Dome. With your technology and magic, you could surely teach without needing to be physically present, too."

"Maybe," Emily mutters noncommittally, turning the page to begin describing The Abyss' deathly whispers.

***

When the ship reaches Chroni, Emily and Ivor both step out, climbing aboard a platform of crackling sparks and riding towards the centre of the city.

"Are you sure you don't want a lift?" Emily asks as she carries them low over rooftops, spotting a few mages doing the same, propelling themselves around with spells, drawing admiring gasps from the ground below.

"Yes, thank you." Ivor nods confidently in response. "I have some business to finish up in The Dome before I pay J's family a visit again."

"I see. Well, good luck then," Emily says, splitting their convoy in half as they approach the two most distinct buildings in the city.

"To you, too. See you soon, Emily."

"See you," Emily signs back before sending him down to his destination.

She touches down at the top of the palace steps herself, nodding to the third circle guards wearing the royal colours on either side of the door before striding in without anyone moving to stop her. She feels the watchful eyes of the king's shadows settle upon her the second she steps through the open doors, but Emily doesn't flinch, heading straight for the passageway down to the royal library as if she belongs.

The shadows don't interfere, and Emily soon finds herself walking between the low stacks, following the faint sounds of frustration hiding far from the stairwell.

"Having trouble?" she calls out as she turns down the final row of books, startling Jenny out of the book she was complaining at.

"Emily? What are you doing here?" the woman asks, closing the cover of the tome she was reading and setting it down in a pile with several others before rising from the ground and brushing herself off. "I… wasn't expecting your help."

"I wasn't here to offer it explicitly, but what's up?"

"Oh," Jenny says, sagging in relief. "Don't worry about it, I'm just struggling to identify something his majesty asked me to look into. I worried for a second there he'd grown tired of my incompetence and sent my replacement."

"No, just here to give you my paper on The Abyss to file away," Emily says, pulling the finished sheets of parchment from her belt and waving them, watching Jenny's eyes widen in interest.

"You're done already? What have you found?" the woman asks, stepping closer and waving her hand to conjure a powerful gust to return her gathered reading supplies to their rightful places.

Emily holds the stack of parchment out to Jenny, and leaves her to leaf through it, as she pulls a set of blank parchment from her belt and casts a spell. An entwined blend of light and dark reaches out, brushing over the words in Jenny's hands and inscribing a perfect copy to submit to The Covenant.

"What was that?" Jenny questions, surprised by the tendrils playing tricks on her eyes for a few moments before vanishing.

"A simple utility spell I call Copy," Emily replies, flashing her the completed duplicate before happily slipping into an explanation on how she designed the dual-element spell and a few of her ideas for an elementless alternative.

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