"Ready to go, lil bro?"

Ariana asked this with the specific energy of someone who had already decided they were going to enjoy themselves immensely today, and wanted to make sure everyone around them knew it from the very first sentence.

Aaron stood up, fixed his jacket, and aimed his coldest, most withering gaze directly at his sister.

Unfortunately, he was wearing sunglasses.

The sunglasses, which he wore to hide his distinctly non-human eyes, had the unfortunate side effect of making his cold, withering gaze look significantly less cold and withering than intended. Behind dark lenses, "I will end you" and "I am mildly squinting" look remarkably similar.

"Don’t call me lil bro," he said.

The effect he was going for was flat and authoritative. The effect he achieved was somewhat undercut by the sunglasses situation, but he committed to it anyway.

Ariana responded the way you might expect a person to respond upon seeing an extremely small kitten do something it clearly believed was threatening.

"Aww!" she squealed.

It was a fully committed squeal. High-pitched. Delighted. The kind of sound that belongs in videos with ten million views and captions like "he thinks he’s people."

"So cute! You do not like being called lil bro??"

"I don’t." Flat. Final. Completely ineffective.

"But but," Ariana pressed forward with the relentless energy of someone who had identified a weakness and intended to live there permanently, "you’re my little brother. What’s little brother in short?"

Aaron stared at her. Or did his best approximation of staring through the sunglasses.

"Little brother in short," he said slowly, as if explaining something to someone who was being deliberately and exhaustingly obtuse, "is little brother."

"Heh."

That was it. That was her entire response. Just "heh," delivered with a gaze that somehow communicated volumes — specifically, all the volumes of a library dedicated to the subject of I win this one — before she slid her sunglasses back up onto her nose.

And then something remarkable happened.

The sunglasses went on, and Ariana simply... changed.

The teasing smile evaporated. The loose, almost performatively casual posture snapped into something alert and precise. The playful light behind her eyes — not that Aaron could see her eyes now — was replaced by the kind of professional blankness that high-functioning, terrifyingly competent people use as their default public setting.

She looked like a completely different person.

If Aaron hadn’t been watching it happen in real time, standing less than two meters away, he would have questioned whether this was an identical twin situation. A secret sibling. An impostor. Anything that made more logical sense than one human being having this level of control over their own personality, switching it off and on like a light fixture.

He filed that observation away quietly.

Ariana worked at the Oscar’s House of Science. A place that most people could not get into, would not get into, and spent considerable portions of their lives dreaming wistfully about getting into. She hadn’t gotten that position by being charming at dinner parties. She had tricks. She had layers. She had depths he probably hadn’t even glimpsed yet.

That thought was, if anything, slightly more unsettling than the blackmail.

With Alyssa settled into his jacket pocket — still presumably sulking about being relocated from a considerably warmer and softer location — and a backpack over his shoulder, Aaron walked out of the inn.

He wasn’t sure when he would be back. He tried not to think about that part too hard.

Ariana moved ahead of him at a pace that was technically walkable but suspiciously efficient. She wasn’t running. She wasn’t rushing. She was simply covering ground at the speed of someone who had places to be and found the concept of dawdling genuinely offensive. Aaron kept up without difficulty, but he got the impression that for anyone else, keeping up would involve a light jog and wounded pride.

The silence settled around them.

This was the problem with silence when you were walking into an uncertain and vaguely threatening situation that you had been coerced into by your sister. Silence gave your thoughts room to stretch out, wander around, and start asking questions you didn’t have good answers to.

Aaron suppressed them. He was getting practiced at that.

Five minutes passed.

They walked deeper into the ruins. The destruction thinned out here — fewer collapsed walls, fewer scorch marks, fewer reminders of whatever catastrophe had turned this place into what it currently was. The quiet was almost comfortable, in the way that a dentist’s waiting room is almost comfortable. Technically fine. Quietly ominous.

"Did you not bring a car or something?" Aaron asked, because the question had been sitting in his mouth for several minutes and silence had officially run out its welcome.

"Portalling a car is too expensive and using anything other than a portal is a mere waste of time," Ariana replied, with the brevity of someone issuing a memo. "You wouldn’t understand."

Aaron’s brow furrowed.

"What do you mean I wouldn’t understand?"

Ariana slowed. She turned to look at him, and Aaron saw his own reflection staring back at him from her lenses — two small, sunglasses-wearing versions of himself, looking approximately as confused as he felt.

"Do not be so on edge, brother," she said. And the smile she offered was the strangest one yet — not teasing, not warm, not professional, not fake. It just was. Like a smile that existed in the space between categories.

"I wasn’t taunting you. I simply meant you wouldn’t understand the value of time since you didn’t get a taste of urgency yet." A brief pause. "And well... only we of meagre life spans care too much about efficiency."

The word we landed with quiet weight.

She said it the way you refer to a club that someone else doesn’t belong to. Not cruelly. Not pointedly. Just as a statement of fact, the way you might say "we Europeans" to someone who is not European — matter-of-fact, slightly distancing, entirely unconscious about it.

Except Aaron was fairly certain it was not unconscious at all.

She knew. Or suspected. Or was testing. He wasn’t sure which was worse.

He was still turning this over when Ariana said "Ah, here we are," and the conversational thread snapped.

Aaron looked around.

He saw ruins. Broken buildings, some leaning at structurally ambitious angles. A few small stalls that had survived by sheer stubbornness. Distant monsters moving in ways that suggested they were looking for something to ruin. Standard landscape, in other words. Nothing unusual. Nothing that suggested we have arrived.

He dropped his gaze.

There, embedded into the stone floor like it had always been there and simply waited for someone to notice, was a circle. An inscription, precisely carved, geometric in the way that implied someone had spent a very long time getting it exactly right. It glowed faint orange — the color of embers that haven’t decided whether to go out or catch properly.

It looked, if he was being honest, like it might explode at any given moment.

Ariana walked straight into the center of it without hesitation.

Aaron assessed the situation. The options were: stand outside the possibly-explosive magic circle alone in the middle of monster territory, or step into the possibly-explosive magic circle next to his sister who had already blackmailed him once today and would almost certainly do it again.

He stepped into the circle.

"Liam, take me to my lab, will you, sweetheart?" Ariana said pleasantly, addressing the air.

Nothing about her tone suggested she found this unusual. She spoke to the inscribed stone circle the way you might speak to a particularly reliable elevator — with casual appreciation and zero existential concern.

Then the mana moved.

Aaron felt it before he saw it properly — a shift in the air, a gathering of something invisible that pressed against his senses the way pressure changes before a storm. Then the orange glyphs began to brighten, and the mana started swirling. Not randomly. Precisely. Every movement matched the patterns on the inscriptions beneath his feet, like the air itself was reading instructions and following them to the letter.

He watched it with wide eyes, unable to entirely keep the fascination off his face.

Ariana, from the corner of her vision, watched him watch it. Said nothing. But thought something that sat behind her expression like a cat behind a curtain.

I was right. His aptitude for magic is quite high. Heh. Curious.

The mana spun faster. And faster. And then —

A flicker of discomfort, there and gone before he could properly name it. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

And then everything was different.

The ruins were gone. The broken stalls and wandering monsters and orange-glowing sky were entirely gone, replaced by walls — enormous walls, metal walls, the kind of walls that implied serious budget allocation and a complete lack of interest in making guests feel comfortable. Machines hummed from somewhere beyond sight, a layered industrial sound that filled the space the way background music fills a restaurant, pervasive and inescapable.

This was clearly a place where serious things happened.

Ariana spun on her heel the moment they arrived, spreading her arms wide with the pride of a person revealing something they were deeply, personally invested in.

"Welcome to the great Oscar’s House of Science!" She gestured broadly at the metal walls and the machine sounds and the general atmosphere of we conduct research here and we mean it. "Most of the latest technology you see around yourself has been developed and brainstormed at this very place."

She was beaming. Genuinely, fully, enthusiastically beaming, in a way that was distinct from every other expression she had deployed today because this one appeared to be completely real.

"I am so, so, so excited to begin my research on you!"

Aaron looked at the walls. He was exercising his constitutional right to not respond to things, which he found himself needing to exercise more frequently around Ariana than around most people.

She didn’t require his participation. She was already looking at him with a smile wide enough to be mildly concerning, the kind of smile that exists at the intersection of professional excitement and something that a reasonable person might describe as unhinged enthusiasm.

"So for starters," she said, leaning in slightly, the smile not dimming even a fraction, "can you tell me the name of your species, dear brother?"

Aaron stared at her.

Somewhere in his jacket pocket, Alyssa shifted.

Even she seemed to understand that this was going to be a very long stay.