[LMS] Loosely Lawful | 20

They arrived back at Dr. Crev’s house to find one of the graduate students hurling her guts out in the bathroom. Raw fish didn’t agree with her, apparently. Kali greeted them in the hallway by the bathroom, her pursed lips the only sign of her distress at the situation.

“Oh, excellent,” she said, eyes dropping immediately to the coffees Avon and Kyle had insisted they buy after their failed excursion. Kali snapped up a cup and drained it in one long, upsettingly continuous gulp. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sniffed. “Sera, remind me how far you got into law school?”

“Er, most of the way through year two, why?”

“Caro is indisposed, as you’ve no doubt seen. And smelled. I’m loathe to add any more outside parties to the translation team at this point, so you are my backup. Your law knowledge may prove useful.”

Kyle danced along the edge of the hall, looking uncomfortable. “Is there another toilet somewhere? I gotta piss.”

Pointing him in the right direction, Kali took Sera by the arm. “We’re almost ready, actually, so allow me to brief you before we throw you to the proverbial arcane wolves.”

“Do I get any say in this?”

Kali rolled her eyes. “Actually, I don’t know why I didn’t think of including you sooner. Deep Oceanic A and B, from what we know of them, have very little legal terminology, which means there’s a possibility that some of the words we’re struggling over are some kind of naturalized or oddly translated version of legal terms that existed in whatever version of Survivor Common that people spoke when they crossed the sea.” She pulled Sera through the winding halls of Dr. Crev’s house, diving into things Sera didn’t understand like phonemes and graphemes and… other eemes.

And then they arrived in the work room.

Papers littered every surface. Every wall was made of book cases and supply cabinets, which even hutched over the one permanent desk installed in the far corner. A mismatched collection of foldout desks sat scattered around the space, each one piled with open books, material spell components, and the remnants of a few explosions. The only area that looked vaguely calm was a cleared out magic circle drawn in chalk on the floor, in a space that clearly had chalkboard paint slathered onto it.

Light filtered down through a single clerestory window in the center of each wall, and Sera grimaced when she realized they’d all been spelled to have adjustable time-of-day lighting, probably to augment spellwork. This was ridiculous. Wizards were so ridiculous.

“Seraphina is back!” Kali announced. “We have our ninth. We can begin the translation spell now.”

One of the grad students whooped. Dr. Crev smiled with all her sharp, dragonesque teeth. The already frantic energy in the room grew even more frantic as people collected up their papers and dashed to various positions on the magic circle.

“Ah, Gregor,” Kali called, pushing Sera to one of three spots closer to the center of the circle, “since we’re adding in Sera, we might as well pool magic via contract and see if her goddess deigns to assist. If you could move to position five instead?”

“But I’m in position five!” someone wailed.

“Go to nine, then!” Kali fired back.

“But my research”-

“Nine!” Kali shouted.

The offending grad student slumped to a different spot on the outer edge of the circle, and in short order, everyone had gathered.

As a practitioner of divine rather than arcane magic, Sera found the entire setup baffling. The crisscrossing lines between various points of the circle made no sense. And was there any rhyme or reason to the positions each scholar was stationed at?

Someone dropped one of the round flasks they’d bought at Azuria’s into her hands, and she sniffed its contents. There was seaweed in there for sure. And ink. And… fish, probably. It was pungent. Then someone else tied a hooded cloak around her shoulders.

She sent Kali a panicked look as the other girl set down stacks of paper in the true center of the circle and then stepped into her spot, but there was no answer. Dr. Crev rounded out their trio, and then everyone else settled around the circumference, and with absolutely no explanation, they all looked directly at her.

Oh. Right. The magic pool.

“Um.” Sera cleared her throat and adjusted her grip on the flask. Librata save her, her hands were sweaty. “I’ll just get started then?”

No one objected, at least. They just kept staring at her.

The words for magic-pooling came easily; she’d just done it a few days ago with Benvolius, and the conditions were still fresh in her mind. Her voice, on the other hand, did not come easy. This wasn’t life or death. This was a group of whackadoodle academics all watching her in a mixture of fascination and judgement as she tripped over her own tongue. Still though, she managed to get through the contract, and her magic leapt out of her to bridge between everyone, running like an electric current as the rest of the ritual began.

Kali tilted her head, magic-sight glasses perched on her nose, and spoke aloud in her mothertongue. The clicking, tongue-popping language was soon joined by Dr. Crev’s hissing through what Sera figured was some ancient dragonesque language. She heard Old Common from somewhere behind her, and then several more languages she couldn’t recognize at all. Feeling uneducated–Sera spoke only the common tongue–she glanced down at the pungent flask in her hands.

Someone had written in awkward cursive, “May my mind join this meeting and build bridges fleeting.” Was she supposed to say that? Sera listened more closely to the voice speaking Old Common and tried to parse it out. They were definitely all repeating something over and over again.

Ugh. If no one would bother to explain, then it wasn’t her fault if she messed this up! Sera started quietly, repeating the line on her flask over and over.

She couldn’t tell if it was real, or the ritual playing tricks on her, but as Sera continued to mutter “may my mind join this meeting” over, and over, and over again, the room grew dark. Every candle in the circle became a blazing pinprick of light. The nose-twisting smell from the flasks ebbed and flowed like the tide, playing havoc on her tearducts and snaking down onto her tongue. Her magic thrummed through it all, pulsing like a heartbeat, and she felt it as every disparate language and voice condensed, matching cadence. Her breathing matched Kali and Dr. Crev’s. Her heart fell into perfect sync.

The candles whooshed out, suddenly. Sera felt the prick of something foreign at the edge of her brain.

And then she blacked out.