Plastic cables snake through our tower from bottom to top, pulsing with inner magic that thrums and reverberates like the distant sound of drums. I scratch my neck and scowl down at one of them that blocks off most of a step, carefully maneuvering around it without falling off, then hurry the rest of the way to the top where Clutter’s waiting for me.

  I poke my head up into the viewing area as Clutter giddily zips from cable to cable. He turns to me with a smile when I pull myself up and over a pair of cables that have put themselves in awkward positions, then spreads his hands wide and does a little twirl.

  “Isn’t it awesome?” He half-asks, half-states. “All this magic, and it’s all surging into our tower! There’s no way we can’t run everything at the same time now!”

  Pearl ignores him and frowns down at a hole where a cable intrudes through the tower wall. It’s completely flush with the rest of the wall–unlike the ones in the lighthouse that had some clearance around them. I open my mouth to ask what’s caught her attention, but before I can speak, it hits me.

  “We were outside. And the radiation didn't even hurt us.”

  She nods. “That's exactly what I was thinking. Then there’s the fact that the mass of plastic should’ve been powering everything else around it, not drawing power from it. We should be seeing way less magic to work with, not more of it.”

  Clutter’s eyebrows shoot to his forehead. “What? No!”

  “Technically, yes. You’re right. But I can’t figure out why.” Pearl presses a finger to her lip in thought as she furrows her brow. “Maybe… these lighthouses are somehow converting the radiation into magic for us. That gives us way more magic to work with, and also a place outside of the walls that’s safe enough to walk on.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good reward to me.”

  I step past Clutter and glance down at the anchor. It thrums right along with the cables, and my awareness informs me that there’s a lot of magic flowing into it. I pull out my Class Card to check, and sure enough, the tower’s available supply just reads ‘overflowing’. And now that we’ve got a moment to relax, I might as well check what that random notification down there was.

  With a few swipes, I’m reminded that most of my Class Card is greyed out. I roll my eyes at myself for forgetting and go to send it away. Right before it disappears from my fingers, something catches my eye. My stats. The ones that definitely shouldn't have changed since I upped them to the max I could with the stat coins I had.

  7B/8M/10S/7F

  I have one more Mind now. But the notification said something about… the next fifteen hours. A little over an hour and a half has passed since the construct went haywire. Does that mean I’m going to get another fourteen Mind in less than a day from now? That’s just… it’s… more than double what I started out with.

  “Shelby.” Pearl whispers and pats my cheek. “You’re staring off into space again.”

  “Right. Sorry.” I smile awkwardly and send my Class Card away. “There’s enough magic here to power everything and still be abundant. Looks like it’s time to see what the workshop can do.”

  Clutter squeals in delight and barrels down the stairs. My smile turns genuine as I follow him down the stairs–dodging the cables as I go–until we reach the bottom. The door to the room with doors opens before I get down, and by the time I round the corner, he’s already opened a door through the ground and into the workshop below. I squeeze through before it closes behind him just in time to watch him put one of the anchor tubes under the faucet.

  To his credit, he does look over his shoulder to make sure I’m there before he does anything else. I give him a thumbs-up as a go-ahead and he nearly slams the tap with his palm. Magic swirls through the air like a cool breeze. Grey gently drips out of the faucet in a steady trickle that fills the anchor tube to the top in a matter of seconds. Clutter’s hands shake with excitement as he pushes the tap shut, carefully brings the anchor filled with liquid magic out of the sink, and stares straight at me.

  “What do I do now?”

  I tilt my head to the side. “We mix up something to put in the anchor. Obviously.”

  “But…” Clutter trails off as he looks at the ceiling. “We have more than enough magic up there. Why do we need to do this?”

  Well he went from excited to disappointed in a heartbeat. I pull out my Class Card to see if he’s right, but when I go to adjust the tower’s specs, they won’t go any further than before.

  “Look; there’s your reason right here.” I turn my card so he can see and tap the specs. “We’ve got all the power we can use, but we don't have the infrastructure to use it. Those anchor tubes probably boost our infrastructure.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Don’t get too excited; we still can’t deactivate the magic from the construct heads.” Pearl reminds us before we get too distracted. “But there has to be something we can do with just the grey magic. Want to try putting it in the anchor slot?”

  Clutter nods. Just as quickly as he scurried down, he jumps atop the table and opens a door to the tower. He clambers through, tube in one hand, and looks down at me through the hole. I jump up after him, we make our way back to the top of the tower, and he replaces the empty anchor tube with our new one.

  After a few minutes of waiting, it’s obvious nothing’s going to happen. He’s pretty visibly dejected, but there’s not really anything we can do about it. I make the executive decision to call it a night–a damn well deserved night might I add–after the doozy of these last couple dozen hours. It takes a few minutes to convince him to actually take it easy when he isn’t completely exhausted, but once I get him calmed down, we all settle in for some rest.

  In the morning more blind searching awaits us. Just with so many more questions fueling our quest.

  Two days’ worth of time flies in a blur of exertion and frustration.

  I sigh and lean back against the inside of the walls surrounding our tower and stare up at the sky that’s just plain wrong. The last two days have been nothing short of useless–especially compared to everything that seemed to happen in a cascade after we got here. Expanding even further outwards gave us two more district names, a handful of fights with twisted paindne that Clutter used for training, and a reinforced sense that we’re strangely alone here.

  Pearl pats my cheek from her spot on my shoulder. “Just a little longer and we’ll get Illumisia here with us. She’ll help us find something useful.”

  “Yeah.” I blink slowly as the discomfort from a pill-fueled workout echoes in my legs. “At least we’re not completely screwed; not until the quest announces that enough people have gathered in one spot, at least.”

  “Look at it this way; it just means the horizonguard's struggling to find people too.”

  I mean, I guess. But I’m almost at the point of wanting something to happen just for the sake of something happening. We’re potentially stuck in a country-sized–or maybe even bigger–city with absolutely nothing to give us a sense of progress. Unless we got insanely lucky with our first day, I have a feeling all the other groups are feeling the same unease we are.

  “One big deluge of progress, then a complete drought.” I push off the wall and start towards the tower. “I don’t know what the quest’s thinking, but if there’s no reason for this, then I’ll eat my shoes. It’s gotta be doing this on purpose.”

  Pearl silently nods in agreement. The towers, the sub-quests, all the progress that came to a grinding halt for no apparent reason; it just feels manufactured. Sure, we could've rushed through what was supposed to take us a few days. But for us to find no more heretic body parts, or secret alcoves, or even another tower anywhere on the horizon; it all feels like a standstill without a reason.

  “We need to just pick a direction and keep going until we find someone.”

  Clutter and Pearl shoot me looks like I just stated the painfully obvious.

  “Of course we have to. I mean, what else can we do?” Clutter laughs humorlessly as he fiddles with some of the workshop equipment. “Apparently we don’t have anything we need to actually make progress with the quest, and the only way to get those things is to make progress with the quest. Whoever designed this deserves to step in really sticky glue with their favorite socks on.”

  Pearl giggles and shakes her head. “I wouldn’t go that far, but I wouldn't mind if they stopped thinking forever. If I was the one in charge here, I’d put all the people in districts no further than one away from each other. That way they could actually… you know… make progress on the quest I made.”

  Clutter blinks. “Wait, do you want to kill the quest?”

  I ignore that because Pearl’s answer is obvious. “We still don’t know how far apart we all are, but as long as we’re stuck in the walls, we won’t be able to check for the most obvious sign of life; the towers. Even just pulling back on the radiation would make this ten times easier to search.”

  “Yup.” Pearl sighs. “Either this quest is really designed poorly, or it’s designed to last for way, way longer than we thought it was.”

  “Or both.” Clutter grumbles.

  I nod in agreement. “Sitting around here checking instruments for the tenth time isn’t going to do anything about it. Clutter, you ready to go back to the coins?”

  He pushes the device away, smooths out his shirt, and nods. I lower my hand to the table so Pearl can run up my arm, then roll my shoulder as I latch onto the pair of single hexes I left at our furthest reached point. Relocation flares, and the scenery barely shifts to yet more hallway tunnels. Clutter stifles a sigh of disappointment and jogs ahead.

  Can’t blame him, honestly. Even with fifteen more Mind than I came to this place with, it feels like we barely have anything tangible to show for a few days’ work. Him even less than me. I fall in stride with him, and through the power of bullshit conversation, we speed up to a sprint that we manage to keep up for a good few hours. Some twisted paindne show up again. Clutter deals with them.

  We keep running. By hour seven I just want anything to happen. Ambush us, traumatize me with more of that tapping that I still haven’t gotten used to. Just… for the love of god, do something!

  My foot taps down on a tile just like any other tile. No magic echoes out from underneath it. But the twin chimes of my and Clutter’s Class Cards simultaneously getting a notification scrapes the boredom from my face to let hope bloom. I shoot Clutter a mixed look that he returns, and we both summon our Class Cards.

  The necessary number of people have gathered in the Yunrov district.

  Initializing revitalization process.