Chapter 60: Chapter 39: The Mian Mystery Box

“So how was practice?” Harley asked.

“Still kind of awkward,” Leanne admitted. “Elijah and his buds are just trying to stick it out until the end of the year, but everyone is still side-eyeing them constantly.”

Even though they’d played their last game, the Ballball team still had a few more practice sessions -very awkward ones, at that. In the aftermath of the power couple’s breakup, most of the team had quite predictably sided with the one who hadn’t done the lying -and who had carried them through a four-year undefeated streak. Leanne, for her part, endured her ex-boyfriends presence with begrudging silence. It made for a very interesting reversal of circumstance, considering she now spoke to the loopers openly.

“You ever throw a ball at him just because you can?”

“I’ve been tempted, but no,” Leanne said.

“Good on you,” Vell said.

“Year’s not over yet, Harlan, I still have a few chances to give into temptation.”

The pleasant breakfast chatter came to an end as Lee whipped around the corner, holding her purse tight to her chest. She sat down, brushed her long hair behind her ears, and folded her hands on the table.

“Good morning everyone. You all do recall our old friend Lijia Mian, yes?”

“She threatened to stab us with a sword, so yes, I remember,” Leanne said.

“Quite. Well, as she and I studied in roughly the same field of magic, I have been asking around with old professors and searching old academic records,” Lee said. “And it seems as though Lijia Mian may have left something behind when she vanished without a trace.”

“Well then it’s not very ‘without a trace’, is it?” Harley scoffed. “Elaborate.”

“Lijia was brilliant for her time, and also had a lasting suspicion that her research would be stolen,” Lee said.

“Probably because she was, you know, stealing other people’s research all the time, apparently,” Vell said. Lee nodded. Many horrible peoples worst fear was that someone would do to them what they were doing to others.

“But apparently she took the time to hide her notes and research in a secure location,” Lee said. “A sort of hidden repository of her knowledge. Since a vast majority of her research material was never recovered, it is believed that she had her notes in hiding at the time of her disappearance.”

“Which means that, theoretically, they’re somewhere on this campus waiting to be found, right?” Harley concluded.

“Indeed. A great deal of effort was put into finding those notes, but as far as I can tell they were never located,” Lee said. “In spite of several clues and a handful of discoveries, the ‘hidden treasure’ was left mostly forgotten over time. But I have retrieved several of the early records of the searches.”

“Well damn, I’m down for a scavenger hunt if you guys are,” Harley said. She looked to Leanne specifically. Vell was usually down for anything that was asked of him, so Harley didn’t really bother to check with him. Unfortunate, in this instance, because Vell’s mind was currently going on a tangent.

“It sounds interesting,” Leanne said. “Though I don’t know how much luck we’ll have finding a fifty-year-old buried treasure.”

“Time will surely stymie us, but it may also provide advantages,” Lee said. “We have new magic and new technology-”

“Hold on,” Vell said. He held up a hand to halt the conversation and then pointed at Leanne. “Can you come with me for a bit?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Leanne said. Vell stood up, and she followed. “What’s up?”

“He’s got his thinking face on, just let him do his thing,” Harley advised. Lee and Harley, despite not being specifically requested, followed along with Vell in turn, mostly because they lacked anything better to do. He led them all to the outskirts of the Ballball field, and then grabbed Leanne by the arm.

“Sorry, uh, can you stand...right here,” he instructed. He did some mental calculus and guided her to the right spot, or so he thought. After taking a look at his surroundings he realized they were in the wrong place, and he danced back and forth with Leanne to find the exact spot he was looking for.

“Alright, I was there, and you were there, and then the pen fell over here, and then we went like this,” Vell said. He moved back and forth, plodding across the area near the field. “Time thingy happened, and then, she was, uh, right...about…”

As his voice trailed off, Vell knelt down, took a look at the grass, and then jammed his hand into the soil, scooping out handfuls of dirt. Everyone stared at him for a moment as he continued digging with his bare hands.

“Vell, darling, what are you doing?” Lee asked.

In answer, Vell shoved his hands into the dirt one last time and pulled out a time-worn metal container about the size of a shoebox. Harley squinted at it.

“What the fuck?”

“When we traveled back in time and met Lijia, she had dirt on her hands,” Vell said. “Once Lee started talking about hidden stuff, I figured, you know, what if she was burying this?”

“Very impressive deductions, Vell,” Lee said, trying to hide her disappointment. She had been hoping for a treasure hunt.

Vell handed his easily-won trove over to Leanne, who pried open the locked box with her bare hands and removed the contents. Several notebooks, their pages slightly yellowed by time but otherwise in perfect condition, were carefully handed to Lee for examination. She flipped through the pages and scanned their contents.

“What do they say?”

“I have no idea, they’re written in Cantonese,” Lee said. The language translation spell that surrounded the school only applied to spoken word, not to text. “But, I believe I know where to go to get a translation. It will be a while, however.”

“That works,” Vell said. “I’m going to ask Professor Nguyen what she was working on that Lijia was trying to steal. Maybe it’ll give us some clues, to, well, what Lijia was thinking.”

“Good idea,” Lee said. The two shared a nod and walked off in separate directions. Harley looked up at Leanne.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m going to class,” she said.

“Yeah, I guess,” Leanne shrugged. “I was kind of hoping for that scavenger hunt, actually.”

“Ugh, same,” Harley said. “Stupid Vell and his stupid...smartness.”

Harley walked off in a huff.

----------------------------------------

The school’s faculty ostensibly had an open-door policy, but Professor Nguyen projected a very closed-door energy. Closed, locked, welded shut, and guarded by several rabid dogs, more specifically. It took Vell the entire walk to the faculty building to psych himself up for a single knock on the door.

“You may enter,” Nguyen said flatly. Vell opened the door and stepped inside. His expectations for Professor Nguyen’s office and the reality were effectively identical: her office was almost purely utilitarian, filled with stacked bookshelves and filing cabinets and little else. The one touch of humanity in the entire space was a tiny elephant, crudely formed out of clay and painted in haphazard splashes of color by the carefree, chaotic hand of a child. Vell tried not to stare at the elephant in the room.

“Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said. She made eye contact as she spoke this time, Vell having caught her on one of the few occasions where she didn’t have her nose buried in paperwork. The eye contact unnerved Vell.

“Professor Nguyen. I, uh, had a question.”

Nguyen gestured to one of the seats opposite her desk. Vell took a seat, and guessed from the very thin layer of dust on the seat that Nguyen didn’t get a lot of guests in her office.

“I, uh, well, I was just personally curious, about something,” Vell said. “Do you remember that plagiarism thing, with Dr. Akua-”

“Former Doctor,” Nguyen corrected. “She has been stripped of the honorific, if you recall. And yes. I remember.”

“Right, well, I just, happened to have the thought the other day, that your specialty is runes now, but we didn’t figure runes out until the Eighties, and you went to school in the Seventies, so,” Vell stumbled. “What were you studying that they were trying to steal?”

“At the time, I was studying a field that eventually led to runes,” Nguyen said. “The movement of ley energy through stone. If my memory serves me correctly, Lijia Mian’s interest lied in a study I had done on how to trace historical movements of mana through stone with geological surveys.”

Vell folded his hands together and thought about it for a moment.

“So, putting together that area of expertise, and yours, she might have been looking for where a large concentration of mana might have been gathered in the past,” Vell said.

“A reasonable assumption, though still just an assumption,” Nguyen said. She leaned back in her chair, sparing Vell from the full intensity of her gaze. “This renewed interest is not without a spark, isn’t it?”

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

“Uh, well, yes, I mean, no, I mean- there is a spark, yes,” Vell said. “Did you ever hear about Lijia Mian’s missing notes?”

“Several of my classmates spent years searching for them, yes,” Nguyen said. “I take it from the fact your question involves the subject matter of Lijia’s research rather than her physical whereabouts or habits means that you have already located these lost notes.”

“Yes, actually, that’s, uh, exactly right,” Vell said. Thinking about it, he was not the least bit surprised Nguyen had figured that out. “Do you...want to see them?”

“No. I imagine they will be quite useless,” Professor Nguyen said flatly. “Lijia Mian was a brilliant woman, but she was a brilliant woman in 1973. If our technological advancements have not outstripped her research in the intervening decades, I will be quite surprised.”

“Good point. I’ll keep looking into them, and I’ll just, uh, let you know if there’s anything interesting,” Vell said. He stood up and moved to leave.

“Mr. Harlan.”

Vell froze in place.

“As you insistently entangle yourself in yet another inexplicable non-sequitur, I would remind you,” Nguyen said. “Your final exam makes up fifteen percent of your final grade. Don’t forget to study.”

“Oh. Will do,” Vell said. He popped out of the office for a second, then stuck his head back in. “Is Dr. Bauman’s hypothetical treatise on medical treatments via micro-scale runes going to be on the test?”

“No.”

“Dang, I already memorized it,” Vell said. “Okay thanks, bye!”

Vell shut the door behind him. Nguyen glanced to one of her bookshelves. Dr. Bauman’s collected research filled a fairly sizable medical journal. Professor Nguyen recalled Vell’s claim to have memorized it and raised a single eyebrow.

----------------------------------------

Vell punched in the code to Lee’s dorm and let himself in. Everyone else had already gathered by the time he arrived. He explained Professor Nguyen’s info, and his own theory about the location of a large mana deposit, to the gathered looper’s.

“That would make sense,” Lee said. “People are constantly looking for new sources of mana to harvest.”

“What about you, did you get the notes translated?”

“I did indeed,” Lee said. She held up a sheaf of paper covered in transcribed notes. “Though it seems your professor’s intuition was correct. Most of these theories, while innovative for the time, have long since been rendered obsolete. However…”

As she spoke, Lee pushed aside the bulk of the papers to reveal a much smaller section of notes she had set aside.

“This is a segment of her research I haven’t quite been able to figure out,” Lee said. “It has to do with a phenomenon called ‘mana flaring’. Essentially, every time a new mana-detecting implement is turned on, it experiences a brief surge of activity that causes it to react as if it’s detecting a massive concentration of mana. Then, the flare ceases, and the readings normalize.”

“Sounds like an acclimation problem,” Harley said. “Just takes a second for the machine to faze out ambient ‘noise’ and level out it’s baseline. Was she working on a way to prevent it, or what?”

“No, rather, she seemed to be investigating if there were some external factor causing it,” Lee said. “She took readings in different locations, at different times of day, et cetera, and recorded minute variations in mana flaring. I’m not sure what her conclusions were, however, from that point on she’s using some kind of notation that I can’t quite figure out.”

Lee flipped through the pages to find the equations that had stymied her. Harley and Leanne were equally befuddled, but Vell had some familiarity with the symbols.

“Aren’t those art school stuff?”

“What?”

“I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen those before,” Vell said. His investigations into magical art had only run the course of a single semester, and not led him any closer to solving the mystery of his rune, but he still remembered the symbology. “It’s an art thingy. It means, I don’t know, something like a different kind of mana.”

“Do you know anything more specific?”

“It was more rune-focused,” Vell said. He did have some vague memory of those symbols, but he couldn’t quite place them. Lee had already started looking through her phone.

“Your friend Adele, she’s an art major, yes?” Lee asked. Vell nodded. “Do you think she’d mind if I called her? She did give me her number the other day, for some reason.”

Leanne looked up at Vell, who looked at Harley in turn. The three shared a conspiratorial nod and decided not to say anything. Harley got them back on track.

“You know, I don’t think she’d mind at all,” Harley said. “Oh, but, be sure to mention that we’re here too.”

“Of course,” Lee said. She pressed a button and held the phone to her ear. It rang once while Vell stared at her.

“Uh, Lee?”

Lee pulled the phone away from her ear and looked in Vell’s direction. The phone rang one more time.

“Adele is deaf.”

Lee slammed her finger down on the “hang up” button so hard the screen nearly cracked. After burying her nose in her phone to avoid Harley’s bemused stare, Lee started to message Adele.

Lee:

sorrrry

Sorr.*

Sorry.*

I tried to call you by mistake.

adelentruly:

LOL I saw.

It’s cool.

What’s up, Lee?

Lee:

I was just wondering if you’d like to help me with some research.

I am in need of someone with a more artistic skill set.

adelentruly:

I’d love to!

Do you want to meet in the dining hall?

Lee:

Oh you can just come to my dorm.

Adelentruly:

!!!

Are you sure?

Lee:

Of course.

Vell and the others are already here.

adelentruly:

oh okay

cool

yeah

I’ll be right there.

Lee:

See you soon!

Lee put her phone down and continued to ignore Harley’s stares. She stalwartly dodged Harley’s gaze until Adele knocked on her door. Their newest research partner signed a polite hello to everyone and then took a seat at the table. Lee got her up to speed on their magical mystery.

“We’re hoping you can tell us what a few of these symbols mean,” Lee said. “Any chance you’re familiar?”

“Yep,” Adele signed. “It’s some old school notation. Nowadays we know that all mana is effectively identical, but back in the day people thought there was a full ‘spectrum’ of mana made up of a bunch of different types, that all had different uses and their own unique identifying symbols. Nowadays those symbols mostly just get used in art, to represent specific concepts.”

Adele stopped signing briefly to point out a few of the symbols on Lijia’s notes.

“That one refers to ‘aetherial’ mana, like you’d get from sunlight or the wind. The second one means dynamic or ‘earthly’ mana, like you get from seismic or tidal movement. This third one is primal mana, that comes from simple living things like plants and animals.”

Finally, Adele pointed to the most intricate symbol, tapping it twice for emphasis.

“And this is ‘higher’ mana. It refers exclusively to the mana generated by humans.”

“What about this one?” Leanne said, pointing to a symbol further down the page. It looked like the higher mana symbol, with the notable addition of two matched dots hovering above the symbol.

“Oh, didn’t notice that one,” Adele signed. “Looks like just a modified version of the human symbol, though. Maybe the person who wrote this down made it up to refer to something else.”

Leanne nodded, and Adele looked to Lee with a sparkle in her eyes, seeking approval.

“Does that help?”

“It was informative, at the very least,” Lee said. “It’s up to me to make something useful out of it.”

While Adele sighed, Lee grabbed the notes she had made earlier and carried on with her earlier work. Vell gave Adele a sympathetic pat on the shoulder as Lee ignored her in favor of complex calculus.

“Oh dear,” Lee said. Everyone at the table jumped to attention, but Lee immediately returned to her paperwork. Lee continued to mumble to herself. “If that’s what she meant...then…”

With an emphatic jab of her pen, Lee finished up her calculation and set the paper aside.

“I think this may have been a waste of time,” Lee said.

“What makes you say that?”

“This scenario Lijia is describing is frankly impossible,” Lee said. “Her explanation for mana flaring is that it isn’t some acclimation error, it’s that there’s a massive source of mana in the world that’s being actively hidden from us.”

“Why’s that so impossible?” Vell asked.

“Because her conclusion is that the source of mana is hiding itself,” Lee said. “Lijia ruled out any natural gathering point of mana and reasoned that the source of the mana flaring had to be a conscious entity, capable of disguising itself in reaction to any new instrument capable of detecting it.”

“And, uh, again, why’s that so impossible?” Vell repeated.

“Because mana flaring has overloaded every human instrument ever made,” Lee said. She seemed almost aggravated by the information she was processing. “Even the Solar Astrolabe, and that was built to measure the amount of mana produced by the sun.”

Lee held up her hands in an expression of frustration and contempt.

“For something to produce that much magical energy, it would have to be- It would be like-”

“It’d be a God,” Adele signed. “A real, capital-’G’ God.”

In spite of her deafness, Adele could still tell when the table fell deathly silent. But only for a moment.

“That...that can’t possibly be the case,” Lee said, with a dismissive shake of her head.

“Why not?” Adele asked. “There were Gods once. Still are, sort of. Zeus, Loki, Tlaloc…”

“That’s exactly my point, Adele, they’re all faded,” Lee said. “Deific power is unsustainable. To be a god, you have to perform a divine role, to perform a divine roll, you have to be known, and to be known is to be worshiped. And being worshiped drains power.”

As opposed to an oft-used fictional model of divinity, worship actually drained gods of their power, rather than increasing it. Hopeful worshipers prayed to the gods for everything they might need, subtly draining them of mana with every request. The only Gods that existed nowadays were ones that had never been well-worshiped in the first place, or those that had found a way to balance their divine roles with mundane continuity. All the others had been prayed into nonexistence long ago.

“I guess,” Adele signed. “But there’s always something we don’t know.”

“Quite so,” Lee said. “Which is why this anomaly could be any number of things. It could just as easily be some new energy source, or a simple technical error, as we originally suspected. Lijia was not exactly the most rational individual. She may have jumped to conclusions.”

“I guess,” Adele said. “Who’s Lijia?”

“Oh. Uh, dear, that’s a very long story,” Lee said.

“I’d still love to hear it sometime,” Adele signed, looking at Lee with a smitten gaze that very much implied she’d listen intently to Lee reading a phone book. Lee glanced at her friends, who silently but very insistently shook their heads no. The story of Lijia Mian involved several instances of timeline manipulation, death threats, academic fraud, and a cult to David Bowie. Nobody knew how to condense it in a way that would make sense to someone out of the loop.

“Maybe some other time,” Lee said. “For now, I think it’s better that we discuss some of these details privately.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Adele let out a defeated sigh and shouldered her purse, preparing to leave. Vell gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder before she headed out. She’d find a way to get her feelings through to Lee some time. Probably not this year, given how little time they had left and how dense Lee was being about romance, but eventually. Oblivious as always, Lee got right back to business after Adele left.

“Then I suppose there is the matter of what to do with Lijia’s notes,” Lee said.

“I think we got everything we’re going to get out of them,” Harley said. “I say burn them.”

“You just want to burn things,” Leanne sniped.

“I mean, yes, but this is a rare instance where it’s actually helpful,” Harley said.

“Maybe we should give them to Goodwell,” Vell suggested. “Having something to remember Lijia by might make him chill out.”

“Or make him even crazier,” Leanne said.

“Yeah...probably that,” Vell sighed.

“On that note, I think burning them may be a good idea,” Lee said. “Goodwell, Kraid, my father...there are many people who might do harm by possessing these notes, and none who’d do good.”

“True that. Harley, light them up,” Leanne commanded.

With a vaguely menacing, low volume chuckle (which always enhances the experience of setting things on fire), Harley used a laser attached to Botley’s frame to ignite the notes. Vell watched the dried yellow paper spark and burn, and found himself feeling a sting of regret for not taking a second look. In spite of Lee’s insistence that most of the data was long obsolete, Vell couldn’t shake the feeling he’d missed something.

He was correct, of course. The symbol Lijia had used as a stand-in for her mysterious entity had a small detail none of them had noticed. The two dots she used to mark it as a higher entity were ever so slightly different colors, like a pair of subtly heterochromic eyes. Those mismatched eyes stared out from the paper with a blank gaze before the consuming fire blinked them shut -for now.