Agatha had to contain herself harshly from not slapping the shit out of her girlfriend the moment she saw her opening her eyes.

  “Could you stop collapsing?” The dirty-blond girl said, half-jokingly, half-seriously. She knew better than to admonish someone who had recently passed out.

  “I will try,” the moronic redhead giggled and rose from the mattress, pushing away the blanket. “Though it was not as if I did it on purpose.”

  “If you tried to collapse on purpose, we would be having a much different conversation, dummy doll,” Agatha flicked a finger on her girlfriend’s forehead.

  “Ouch,” Christie rubbed the spot. “I guess I deserve that much. Having said so, where are we?”

  “In the infirmary,” the petite girl grabbed the hand of the bedridden one, interweaving her fingers with her long and thin ones. “You collapsed in Military Engineering class. No one told me anything beyond the fact that you were here. I guess that for the rest of the academy, I am only your roommate, and a very good friend at best,” she snorted.

  “Yeah, I guess as much,” her girlfriend snorted a bit more dorkily. “I am sorry for that.”

  “I mean, it is not like you did it on purpose…” Agatha let the sentence hang a bit.

  “I did not,” the lapiloquist reiterated. Perhaps a bit too seriously.

  “I wanted to make sure,” the lithorist smiled warmly and put a bit of pressure on the handhold. “I just want to know what happened for you to collapse. I need no apologies. Did you overuse lapiloquia again?”

  “No,” Christie swayed her head. “I am not quite sure what caused my collapse, if anything, I would dare to say that I abused lithorica and not lapiloquia.”

  “Lithorica?” Agatha arched a brow in an inquisitive manner.

  “They told you nothing at all?”

  “Nothing at all,” she shrugged.

  “Alright, so Sandra, my Military Engineering teacher, was showing us how to get more information out of the ground. Not just its presence but also its shape, composition, structure, and whatnot.”

  “And this has to do with lithorica because…?”

  “Because it is not a binary process. We have been training to be able to do this for several weeks. And…” Her girlfriend’s eyes lost a bit of their luster, but she smiled wryly to recover herself. That didn’t inspire much confidence in Agatha. “…well, because I am not able to use two simultaneous commands, I was forced to use a lot of agates to produce the same result, but… it would appear that I have overdone it.”

  “Not much of a laughing matter, Christie,” Agatha admonished her.

  “Better to laugh at the past than cry about it.” And yet again, the redhead’s smile was a wry one.

  That made the dirty-blond girl sigh. “Are you alright? That is the only thing that matters.”

  “Yes, completely fine,” she nodded. “I cannot ascertain why I collapsed in the first place. Well… which of the reasons why.”

  “There are several?” Agatha raised her voice in outcry as she frowned.

  “I suppose?” That noncommittal answer only enraged the petite girl even more. “Alright, alright, there is no need for violence! I can see you clenching your fists, mock sapphire!”

  “You are not standing on much of a foundation to be using nicknames, dummy doll. Furthermore, you should be thankful that I am clenching my fist and not my agate.”

  “That is… a correct assessment, yes,” Christie laughed nervously. “I would not look forward to being assaulted by your agate. But…”

  “Do not try tease me,” Agatha interjected.

  “You know me too well…” The redhead sulked.

  “Or rather, you are too predictable,” she sighed. “What command has even caused this to happen?”

  “Listen,” her girlfriend replied taciturnly.

  “Listen, huh… Give me a minute.”

  While Agatha had never used the Listen command beyond being aware of its existence – which was already half the process, truth be told – she doubted it wouldn’t be difficult to perform. The lithorist popped her agate out of its necklace socket and made it float around with. She didn’t even need to give it a command thanks to the already placed Control Compact. Then she added a new Control command and Listen next to it.

  Perhaps it was paranoia, but she would rather not get deafened because her compacted sapphire decided to use a Listen command at max potency. However, that might even work for her aide.

  It took but an instant for Agatha to hear clearer than she ever had. There was a bit of dissonance at the start as she heard duplicate and displaced breathings, barely milliseconds after one another, but after a handful of seconds her sense of hearing corrected itself, and she heard normally, if a little better and clearer than before.

  “Well, this is not as bad as Watch, that I can say,” she said aloud. “Huh, how queer.”

  “What? Is something wrong?” Christie asked, her eyes darting between looking at Agatha and the flying agate.

  “Nothing at all,” the lithorist reassured her. “It is only that I can hear myself.”

  “You can always hear yourself, mock sapphire.”

  “True, but there is a bit of… disassociation? Is that the word?”

  “If you mean in the sense of not being able to recognize your voice, then yes, that is the word.”

  “So that,” Agatha nodded. “I can tell it is my voice, but it feels foreign. Barring that, I cannot say I am experiencing anything weird. Only a heightened mental load for what should be only a single command, but the same happens with similar commands like Watch. Perhaps that is what you experienced, Christie. This is a taxing command mental-wise, and you said you applied to lots of agates…”

  “I would say that the issue originates from the product of the command rather than its innate mental load.”

  “Er… in simpler terms?”

  “The extra auditory feedback is what afflicted me, not the command itself.”

  “Oh, okay,” Agatha nodded, but she wasn’t quite satisfied. “It does not match, though. Like…”

  She removed all commands from her lone agate, which made it plummet to the ground, but instead of dropping a hefty two-kilogram weight that might hurt someone, what reached the ground was a rain of sixteen lithic pellets. Perhaps she had used four Duplicate commands, but that meant she had a free slot for each of those sixteen agates, so Agatha gave them Listen.

  The load was quite intensive as it was sixteen Listen commands plus… Four Duplicates, wait not one agate with four Duplicates then three with… ugh… Twenty-nine Duplicate commands! She came out with the answer almost a full minute later. Wait, that number sounds wrong… Is it even correct?

  “What are you doing, mock sapphire?” Christie looked at the skittering marbles on the ground in confusion.

  “Not now, dummy doll. I am thinking, give me another minute.”

  Agatha found herself doubting her mathematical capabilities, and it certainly didn’t help that the mental load she was calculating was being a load while she was wasting time. If I assume my calculations are correct, those are forty-five total commands, and a good fraction are hyper-active commands, even if another fraction are hyper-passive ones.

  And yet, Agatha found herself with only a slight headache. Yes, she was well aware that it was going to brew into something far bigger if she waited longer, but the important factor here was that it took time.

  “Christie,” she called for her girlfriend’s attention. “Did you collapse instantly?”

  “Instantly?” The redhead put a hand on her jaw as she reminisced. “No, not quite.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Not quite? Can you be a bit more specific?” Agatha inquired inquisitively and with a bit of a raised tone as the myriad of Listen commands was making her irascible.

  The mental load was significant, but she could still hear perfectly. If anything, she was irascible because she could hear perfectly all over the room as her agates had been spread all over the place. The small lag between each repeated sound now grew slightly larger. Not much, but now it was noticeable. And deeply annoying. Especially with this much breathing all around the place.

  “Well, the auditory overload made me deaf, and after perhaps a minute – maybe even less – I started hearing the world.”

  “The world?” Agatha squinted at her girlfriend.

  “Alright, I know it sounds weird, but that is what our teacher wanted us to do. Or… maybe I think that was the intention?” The squinting intensified. “What? It is not like I had the chance to check. But yes, it was not instantaneous. Maybe that is why I collapsed, I should have recalled my agates beforehand.”

  “Yes, you should.” At the same time, the petite lithorist recalled her own and let out a sigh of relief as she felt a load off her mind. “Considering you did not enter into a coma – whether a lithorica or lapiloquia one – it must be out of stress and exhaustion rather than pushing yourself over the edge with the discipline like when you unlocked lapiloquia.”

  “Quite the diagnosis, mock sapphire. Do you fancy yourself a physician now?”

  “Well, the physician could tell us,” she shrugged.

  “Why do you not go to get him then?” The redhead smiled smugly, expecting the diagnosis to be wrong.

  “He is already here, dummy doll,” the dirty-blond girl snorted.

  “Damn right I am,” the academy nurse chuckled loudly and popped out of a contiguous room.

  “How long has he been here?” Christie squealed in a panic.

  “Only for about a minute or two now,” Agatha replied.

  The man grinned. “How did you know I was here, girl?”

  “I was trying several Listen commands to check if several of them could overload the mind as I thought, then I happened to hear a third set of breathing.”

  “Figures,” the soldier shrugged and walked next to the bed where Christie was resting. “I have gotten the gist of it based on what I have heard, and whilst I cannot give a definitive diagnosis as I am an amateur lapiloquist – I know nothing about hearing the world or alike – I would guess your classmate is correct. You probably just had a lapse after forcing your mind a bit too much and fell into a microsleep, which might then have turned into an actual one, as no one woke you up. But that is just me guessing. You look healthy, and I have found nothing wrong, so you are free to go if you find yourself alright.”

  “Yes, I think I do,” Christie said and hung her legs over the side of the bed. “I will talk it out with my teacher once I see her again.”

  “Good idea,” the nurse nodded. “And how about that dizziness from summoning agates that you came for a couple of years ago? Is it still there?”

  “Yes, but I am doing far better; I no longer require medicine for my nausea.”

  Agatha had almost forgotten that during the first year, Christie had to go each week to the infirmary to pick up a pot of medicine to avoid puking in class, as her body was nowhere near the level she was currently at. In many senses of the word. Sacred be the earth, I love her body.

  “Glad to hear that,” the man nodded with veritable warmth.

  As Christie stood up, Agatha lent her a hand, and they walked back to their room to rest for the day.

  ***

  Agatha was worried about her girlfriend even after a handful of days. Perhaps this hadn’t been a coma, but her mother and Hasel had stressed that Agatecraft comas weren’t healthy in the slightest, so the similarity between the two cases still worried her.

  Each time she brought that up, Christie would drown her in kisses until she stopped talking. A bit manipulative, but Agatha admitted she was at fault there. There was a fine line between being concerned and being tiresome. Having said so, it wasn’t like she was against the kisses.

  And as worrying as the whole ordeal had been, she couldn’t deny it had been a positive after it brought her an insight into lithorica. As of late, she had been stressed as she was unable to progress as fast as she wanted, no matter how many people told her she was progressing super fast. Her brain kept telling her she was sluggish and that annoyed her, and stressed her, and kept her making her feel worse and worse. It was also true that the stress was compounded by the natural stress of having to study all day long – the Skyscraper Academy was still an elite academy so she couldn’t slack, wasn’t allowed to – and being unable to unlock lapiloquia.

  Was she wasting time trying to awaken a discipline that she wasn’t even guaranteed to be proficient at? Yes, totally. But she hated not having access to it, even if half of her classmates were also in that group as of this moment.

  So that brought her back to lithorica. Christie’s momentarily lapse had shown – or rather, remembered her – that certain commands were way more taxing to one’s mind.

  Which brought her to make a non-exhaustive list of command expenditures in her command textbook.

  Hyper-passive commands: Summon. Recall. Duplicate (kind of cheating, considering it is sustained and can rack up quite fast). Sleep (apparently, never used it. Christie says that it does not even have a load in the first place). Compact (same as Duplicate).

  Passive commands: Light (most of the time). Protect. Range. Anchor. Amplify (most of the time). Target (most of the time). Invert (most of the time). Embed. Float.

  Agatha regretted not thinking beforehand about the structure of the list because she kept writing the same words. Some commands, when applied to certain series, either turned increased or decreased in tax, though most of the time, it was just an increase in mental effort. Modifier commands like Amplify, Invert, and Protect were normally passive, but some series or just command-on-command applications were so intensive that they could be considered active. Ugh, I haven’t put Protect in that category… She now realized after rereading her writings. Bah! Can’t be arsed to fix it.

  Active commands: Control. Shape. Speed. Heat. Chill. Combust. Spin. Sound.

  Hyper-active commands: Watch. Listen. Gate (apparently, I have not tested it yet; I should).

  Control and Shape did cheat a bit as they could be hyper-active ones depending on the amount of leeway you gave them. And Control could just become a passive one too if it were only used as a modifier command instead of an active one. This was to say that this list had no weight whatsoever in the grand scheme of lithorica, but it did help her organize her thoughts, and that was what notes were all about. Personal guidance, not empirical truth.

  “So what do you think?” Agatha shoved her textbook on Shayla’s face.

  They were waiting for their teacher, Sergi, as the Agatecrafting class had yet to start. Though she had to say that she had no idea where the students from the fourth year were. The only people present at the workshop were the two third years.

  “For starters,” the dark-skinned girl smacked her lips, “you should not add that many commentaries. Especially temporal ones. You are diluting your notes.”

  “Bah!” The dirty-blond girl groaned. “What does it even matter? I already have all of this in my mind; if I ever need to make it clean, I will do so. And it is not like I have added every command ever here.”

  “Makes sense,” Shayla nodded. “But why have you bothered to show it to me?”

  “I wanted a second opinion,” Agatha shrugged. “Any criticism is valid.”

  Instead of insulting her, which Agatha had expected and was waiting for, Shayla rubbed her chin and pondered the contents for a moment.

  “I would remove all non-modifier commands from passive and into active,” she said while pointing at commands like Light and Embed. “Especially Float. It is not passive in the slightest. Why did you even put it there?”

  “It feels passive to me. I do not have to give it directions all the time, and it does not strain me.”

  “I…” Shayla looked at her in utter confusion, if not outright revulsion. “I believe we have different opinions on what a passive and active command is.”

  “Might be the case, I have been told several times that I interact with lithorica slightly differently than most.”

  “Alright, let us make a thought experiment. What would you consider the Merge command?”

  “Uh… I cannot say?” Agatha uttered in dumbfound.

  “How come?” The muscular girl tilted her head to the side to profess reciprocal confusion.

  “Well, how would I even use it?” The azure-eyed girl rubbed the sapphire hanging on her necklace.

  “Oh!” Shayla’s eyes sparkled in realization. “I am not going to lie, I have seen you use several agates for a while now, and I forgot you only had one. But it is not much of a problem, just duplicate your agates and then merge them together.”

  “Is that not kind of… redundant?” She held herself from saying fucking useless.

  “Oh, definitely,” the citrine-eyed girl smiled. “But as I said, thought experiment. Amuse me~”

  The melody with which Shayla pronounced the words sent shivers down Agatha’s spine. It didn’t help in the slightest that the girl had a beautiful smile with shining whites that contrasted perfectly with her darker-than-average skin. Control yourself, Agatha of Malachite! The petite lithorist almost slapped herself to regain control.

  Agatha took a deep breath and, ignoring the moronic thoughts of her fractured body, plopped her agate out of its socket. She didn’t bother removing the Control Compact series and straight up gave it the Duplicate command. The sapphire divided into two and then Agatha gave it the Merge command.

  She had never used it before but had seen it in use several times – like how when Hasel made the flying contraption or any Gate – so it was easy to imagine it and execute it.

  And her duplicated agates mixed to create her unduplicated agate.

  Yeah, I don’t know what I expected, she sighed at the anticlimactic mixture.

  “There it is, a Duplicate Merge series,” Agatha pointed at her flying sapphire with a pout. “Just thinking about it is making me angry. Those are two completely wasted command slots.”

  “Yes, yes, it is useless. We knew that beforehand. Stop whining and tell me what category you would apply this command to.”

  “Hmm,” the dirty-blond girl scratched the back of her head. “I need a bit more time; I cannot give it a category just yet. I guess I would put it alongside Duplicate for now?” She added at the end as Shayla looked at her with unhidden aggression.

  “Alright then, tell me abo-“

  “Sorry for the delay, ladies!” Their golemancy teacher barged into the workshop with his flying wheelchair.

  What would be the opposite of a tautology? Agatha pondered. Because it’s not a wheelchair as it doesn’t have any wheels, but everyone would identify it as a wheelchair, needlessly adding that property… Man, linguistics is sooo weird. Minds even more so. Agatha wasn’t high or suffering from a concussion; she just had the daily philosophical question that assaulted a teenager with a hyperactive mind.

  “I take credit in the shape of free scores,” Shayla shamelessly said.

  “There are no exams in this elective, Miss Belkadi,” Sergi squinted as he parked his chair in front of them.

  “But there are still scores, are there not?” The Intaksolfani grinned.

  The greying man scoffed amusedly. “I will think about it. But for now, I think it is time for you both to finally start with some golemancy practice.”

  “Oh!” Agatha’s eyes shone as if commanded by Light. “Which one of them? Inert? Animated?”

  She recalled both of them from the first class. These last weeks, Sergi had only taught them the theory of Agatecrafting – or what would be inert golemancy – and its history. Perhaps a bit tedious and boring, but Agatha felt it was the necessary background to even start. Like starting with addition before going to multiplication.

  Even though she had chosen this elective due to inert golemancy and its possibilities, what interested her the most now was animated golemancy and that succulent yet apparently dangerous Autonomy command.

  The sheer implications made her mouth water with wild thoughts.

  Sergi snickered at Agatha’s questions and said something that made her very happy. “How about both?”

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