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"Akakios," Ophiuchus filled in for the woman. "And if it's alright with you, Headmistress, I'd like to prepare something for Lin to take back with her, if you don't mind waiting around for an hour or so."

Ophiuchus beamed. "Excellent! Would you like to wait here with Lin, or wait in my classroom?" He had a few ideas on what to put into a small 'care package', he thought people called them nowadays, for Lin while she was visiting Bai Ching. And, he wondered if it was a bad idea, but perhaps he could find something of Dymetri's to pass on to Lin.

Ophiuchus just flicked his eyebrows up briefly, a small twitch that was something along the lines of a combination between rolling one's eyes and raising their eyebrows, but without any antagonism. It was an affirmative gesture.

"Well then, here we are." Somewhere between blinking and breathing, he and Arielle were transported to Ophi's now-empty classroom. He had no class this hour. "Take a seat anywhere, or feel free to make your own." He was informal, but not rude.

"I think I have something that will keep Lin's mind off of everything that happened lately."

"Here, here, and here..." Ophiuchus set to mumbling to himself as he rummaged through the books and folders kept on his desk. "What Lin loves best is learning," he stated unnecessarily. "She learns about three to four times as fast as most of my other students. So... Aha!"

He pulled out a dark blue folder with gilded letters on it. It was the notebook that he had all his lesson plans in. "She'll like this. And these..." He packed up several herbs and potion ingredients for her, ones that weren't so easily found, but essentially to some of the activities outline in the plans.

Ophiuchus, from underneath his desk, pulled out a tube, about a foot long and several inches around. It was a fat scrollcase. "This is what we were going to start on next, I hope she enjoys it." In past classes, Ophiuchus had shown Lin some of the ancient spells he knew. The old parchment scroll was essentially a dictionary of many of the runes, phrases, and symbols that appeared throughout ancient spells. The scroll was in Greek, but that would be easy enough for a student of Lin's caliber to translate. Some of the runes were also 'ingredients' to two or three potions noted in the very back of the lesson plan booklet.

"That should be enough to keep her sated for, oh, two weeks? One?" I should have more by then, if she chooses to stay longer. It's almost exciting, the thought of a long-distance class..."

{{Awww! biggrin }}

Lin's mind was fighting with her weak body. She wanted to wake up! This was no time to be asleep. But her body was just too weak to start working at full capacity as it did when she's awake.

There was a soft sigh that came from her mouth as she laid on the futon. But that was it. No other movement or sound.

Utilizing the multitude of pillars and pathways in the courtyard, Riser was hard at work spreading some sort of black powder all around in extremely intricate patterns.
When he was done, his son happened upon him while strolling the grounds calmly enjoying a reefer. "What," he exhaled a puff of tangy smoke. "in the hell is this?"

Riser continued with whatever it was he was planning, simply muttering "It doesn't concern you. Oh, and don't ******** with anything or you're dead."

"Is this supposed to be some half-assed attempt to get your power back? Really, what the hell is this? It looks like old Syrian alchemy."

"That's exactly what it is," he stopped and finally looked towards Alexander. "but why would you know that?"

"No reason."

Riser stared at him for a moment longer, probing around inside the boy's mind, searching for an answer to his question that surely must be lurking somewhere in there. He turned back to the circles; with the last of the powder placed, he walked towards the outermost ring.
"You're either going to love or hate what comes next."

"What comes-"

Before he could ask, Riser gripped his right bicep and, with a decent amount of force, ripped his arm clear off leaving a blood-spewing stump behind. With one powerful leap, he landed atop one of the pillars and began splaying the blood from the severed arm across the array in impossibly complex streaks. Satisfied at last, he dropped to the center and placed the arm at his feet.
He threw his left arm up and slammed his palm into a pile of the powder, leaving a large hand print as he pressed down. The array sparked into a viciously bright light, reflecting across the clouds and the sky itself, lighting the entire campus in an eerie red-purple. The rings began to spin beginning with the outermost; each would spin until certain markings lined up properly, the ring would then collapse into the next one in, which would then begin to spin the opposite direction, somewhat like the inner workings of a giant lock. When all that remained was one thick glowing ring, the combined materials of each other massive ring condensed into an 8 foot wide by 5 foot thick vaguely ringlike shape, two projections of the material shot in and latched to Riser's feet. As he stood locked in place, the remaining glowing material flooded inwards, flooding his body with energy as far as Alex could judge.

On hand and knees he sat in the center of the courtyard, his right arm gone. Energy was visibly flowing from the upper left side of his body, distorting the white hoodie he wore with ever-changing splotches of black. His hood was drawn up, and his right eye could be seen glowing dimly once more. The belt he wore bore a large stylized skull buckle, while the right half of the hoodie showed a similar, albeit larger, skull along with several lines and strange patterns across his torso and shoulder. Rather than the amorphous, flowing blobs of energy exuding from his left shoulder, the energy near his right was much more controlled and manifested itself in the form of a massive, ethereal arm to replace the one he had removed.

He walked towards Alex, his pressure having more than doubled; but it didn't matter, Alex could tell immediately that he was still severely drained of power. As he passed his son, Alex caught a glimpse of something disturbing. He could have sworn that as Riser passed him, he could just barely make out a quarter of his face covered by a mask.

It was there on the roof of the school, several minutes after Riser's alchemical ritual, that Seven approached Ialo. Her master was sitting on the edge of the roof, his knees pulled up to his chin and hugging himself.

He had been staring out over the canopy of the forest, past the lake and the mountain. They were still snow-capped, and come April, the winter's snow would slough off and melt into the rivers and lakes. The fresh water would create magnificent seasonal waterfalls and springs, and Ialo knew from experience that the Lucern Lake would turn a beautiful shade of blue - actual blue, not gray or green or brown.

"Sir..." Seven stepped lightly, and stood next to her Master. "There's an issue with the remnants of the headquarter building." Her eyes glowed as she raised her hands, and a holographic display appeared, surrounding her and Ialo in a veil of light that was neither purely electronic nor purely magic. Codes ran across in tenths of a second, larger ones flashing by longer. One area of the display was flashing red.

Ialo looked up at the display around him, analyzing the words and numbers that flew by slow enough for him to read. To others, they were jibberish. To Ialo, they were like his mother tongue. It was part of his father's legacy - a computing language created from scratch. Ialo had learned it, and the two men were still testing the boundaries of what it could do. It was his mother's idea to incorporate magic into the code, and it was Ialo who was successfully able to fuse the two. That was what made Enlil Corp. technology so superior. It was programmed with a proprietary code, and only three people outside of the immediate Enlil family had ever cracked it. It was both magic and machine, and it was Ialo's art.

He stood up, unfrightened by the drastic drop between the edge of the roof and the ground below. Ialo reached out and brushed his fingers across the flashing red display. It expanded to cover the entire holographic display, and the codes slowed down to an appropriate reading speed.

"NO!" Ialo screamed furiously, and swiped at the holographic display. It was actually a purposeful movement, and different dialogues title "Status" began to fill the display. A diagram of a large machine appeared. The core of it was highlighted in red, and was flashing impatiently. Ialo tapped on it, and another dialogue appeared. It was a bar graph, and it was nearing the the edge of the graph as the bars changed color from green, to yellow, to orange. It was not quite red, but it would be soon.

Ialo whirled around to face Seven. All around them, he could see, were emergency protocol codes. "Shut it down, Seven!" he commanded. One of the many lines of code was telling him that the mainframe Zero was damaged.

"I can't!" she said apologetically. She could not afford to allow her emotional programming to activate in emergency situations like this.

Ialo growled, and with another flick of his hands, brought up a display within the display. It consisted of a simple four by four array of squares. He tapped the first full row, and they glowed blue. "Zero, cede control of all level three and greater processes to One, Two, and Three."

"Yes... Sir..." A fractured synthesized voice responded, crackling and fading in and out. "Control ceded."

Ialo watched Kai through the holographic screen. "It is for now," he said bitterly. He raised his eyebrows slightly, belatedly realized that Kai's voice sounded different. There was an echo in there that sounded rather feminine. He shook his head, and went back to glaring the status reports on the screen.

"Rooftop view is nice, but I preferred the old penthouse..." It was impossible to tell if he was being sincere or sarcastic. Ialo highlighted some of the dialogues, and pushed lightly on the hologram. It responded by changing position, rotating towards Kai so he could read it as well.

"That," Ialo said in a grave voice, "is actually part of the generator system. It's an over-sized converter for the systems in the Enlil Corporation tower. And it's overheating."