Stella held out her hand and concentrated. This time she would try the full incantation – no short cuts. “Powers of the universe, hear my prayer: grant me access to the laws of nature and summon dancing lights.”

  Nothing happened. She took a deep breath and lay back on the hotel room bed, wondering how Adam was doing at the front desk with trying to arrange a second room.

  Atria looked over at her from the table. Her pistol was in pieces, and she cleaned a spring with an oily rag. She wore one of the new outfits Kaguyama and Mitsubi had bought for her, a light blue cotton shirt and black jeans. “No luck?” she said in accented English.

  “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” Stella said in Japanese. “My powers faded away four years ago. There wouldn’t be anything left now.” She grabbed a pillow and dropped it on her head. “I’m useless.”

  Atria shifted to cleaning the barrel. “You’re not,” she said. “Also, please say that in English. I need to practice my pronunciation.”

  Stella moaned. “I want to be able to practice my Japanese too, you know. Give me a turn.”

  “Your Japanese is painful to my ears,” Atria said.

  “How did you do that, anyway?” Stella demanded. “Learn this much English this fast? It took us a year to learn the Japanese we speak.”

  “I told you, I stayed up late last night watching English dubs with Japanese subtitles on that tablet Adam loaned me. And, I downloaded a Japanese/English dictionary and used it for reference.”

  “That’s insane,” Stella said in Japanese.

  Atria chuckled. “That, at least, you pronounced properly.”

  “No, really, what’s your secret?”

  Atria put the clean and oiled barrel back on the table. “All officers of the Hyperborean Army are required to take mandatory intelligence training and learn at least three additional languages to speaking fluency prior to promotion to Captain. I think Kaguyama used English as a basis for East Dakkian. They’re very similar in grammar, and a lot of the words have similar roots. So, it was more like learning a new dialect than a new language.” She picked up the firing pin and began cleaning it. “I also took codebreaking as my intelligence course elective, so I have a bit of an extra advantage.”

  “The ‘e’ between the ‘d’ and ‘b’ in ‘codebreaking’ is silent,” Stella said.

  Atria nodded. “Ah, thank you.”

  Stella sighed. “At least I can help with pronunciation. Not much else I can do. What am I supposed to do in a fight, scream at them?”

  “There’s plenty of roles in combat that don’t involve dropping explosive spells on people’s heads,” Atria stated. “Sometimes just having another set of eyeballs doing overwatch makes all the difference.” Atria looked Stella in the eyes. “You are not useless. Stop saying that you are.”

  The door opened and Adam stepped in. “No luck with the extra room,” he reported in Japanese. “The hotel is booked solid for the convention.”

  “That’s no problem,” Atria said in English. “I’ve spent enough time in barracks that sharing a hotel room won’t be a problem. I’ll just take the floor and you two take the bed. Also, please speak in English, I’m practicing pronunciation.”

  “You’re more of a prodigy than my fiancee,” Adam said.

  Atria smiled. Then winced.

  “Right, if you two need alone time, just let me know and I’ll make myself scarce for a while,” Atria said. “I’ll go spend time with Mitsubi. She really wants to sketch me.” She blinked. “That’s going to be weird, actually. I’d be modelling myself for things in my own future.”

  “So, do you have a plan yet?” Adam asked.

  Atria sighed. “No. I’ve got a mission goal, but that’s not a plan. We have to find the thief who stole the orb and destroyed my mech, recover it from him, and then I have to take it back to my world...which we don’t know how to reach. And we don’t know his weaknesses. And they’ve probably replaced the orb by now anyway, rendering this entire exercise futile in the first place. You want to talk about useless, look at me. At least you two have a life here. I’m just passing time.”

  “What happens if he keeps that power source?” Stella asked.

  “Probably very bad things for somebody,” Atria said. “Setting aside the fact that the thief wouldn’t have stolen it unless he could use it, if it’s damaged and loses containment...let’s just say that there’s a reason those generators are around five miles outside of the capital. Still, what the hell am I doing?” She shook her head and reassembled her gun, checking the chamber once it was complete before re-holstering it.

  “Why did you do that?” Adam asked. “Checking if it’s loaded right after putting it back together.”

  “It’s just gun safety,” Atria replied. “You always check the chamber to see if it’s loaded whenever you pick up or put down a gun. No exceptions.”

  “Seems a bit excessive.”

  Atria held up one of the magazines. “These are explosive rounds. If one of these is fired accidentally, it would put a hole the size of your fist through the wall. You don’t want to know what it would do to a person.” She put down the gun and picked up her belt. “You said you lost your powers. That’s magic, though – would it affect technology like my anti-gravity belt?”

  “Depends,” Stella said. “If the technology doesn’t violate the physics of this world, it should be fine. If it does, then theoretically its effects would fade too.”

  “Right,” Atria said. “We’ll assume that the antigrav is only good for another twelve weeks then. Bullets shouldn’t be affected.”

  Stella looked at Adam, who stared at them with a wistful look. Then he looked away. “Are you okay, sweetie?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, don’t worry about it. Just wondering if Kaguyama and Mitsubi are out of their meeting yet.”

  “Just let me know if you need something.”

  Atria chuckled. “He’s feeling left out.”

  Stella blinked. “Oh?”

  “We’re creations, and he’s not,” Atria said. “He’ll never really understand what we’ve gone through.” She turned to look at Adam. “And that’s fine. I don’t care if you don’t understand what I’ve gone through, you’re still my friend. Right now I’m more worried about not having a plan.”

  “I can try looking through the fantasy animes some more to see if we can find this guy,” Adam said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and identify him. It will be a big job, though – they do a lot of genre blending in anime, so I might need to look at some of the sci-fi as well.”

  “Assuming he’s not from a book or manga,” Stella said. “That’s a lot of content to sift through.”

  Stella’s phone whistled. She picked it up and checked the messages. “It’s a text from Mitsubi,” she said. “She and Kaguyama have finished their meeting, and they’re wondering if we want to meet them for dinner tonight.”

  “I’m just driving myself crazy here so yeah, let’s go out,” Atria said. “I’m in.”

  Stella looked at Adam. He nodded. “Don’t have anything better to do. Besides, maybe we’ll cover enough over dinner that we can finish up early tomorrow and get to the convention after all.”

  “I’ll text her back and say yes, then,” Stella said, tapping at her phone.

  “We’ll need help from Kaguyama and Mitsubi anyway,” Adam said. “Maybe if we describe him, Mitsubi can do a sketch.” Adam suddenly inhaled. “We need to find that orb.”

  “They’ve probably already replaced it,” Atria stated. “The capital is safe. There’s no urgency here, outside of my wanting to go home and needing something to do.”

  Adam shook his head. “I just realized: the technology fades away if it breaks the laws of physics, right?”

  “Probably,” Stella said.

  “So what part of the orb breaks the laws of physics more, the containment system or what it’s containing?”

  Atria went pale. “It’s a 30 kiloton time bomb.”

  Stella took a deep breath. “And there’s no telling where or when it could go off.”

  NEXT: “Crisis”

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