About an hour later, Seymour and Penny peered out from their hiding place in the jungle, between the crumbling wall of some long-forgotten ruin and the base of an enormous tree. An obsidian hornet the size of a small child buzzed angrily as it hunted the pair, probing the undergrowth and starting small fires among the ferns with each touch of its red-hot stinger. They had accidentally, albeit somewhat predictably, become prey for an exotic jungle monster.

  “I’m sorry,” Penny whispered. “This was a very stupid idea.”

  “It was,” Seymour quietly agreed. “And still is.” He was hugging her from behind, having just dragged her backwards into a fortuitous hiding spot. Whispering close to her ear, he added, “but at the moment I’m not really complaining.”

  She turned to punch him in the shoulder but the angle was poor and the glancing blow only hurt her wrist.

  “Damn.” She massaged the sore joint. “I can’t even throw a proper punch, what could I have been thinking coming out here to hunt monsters? I’ve probably gotten us both killed.”

  “You’re an Arcanum Collector now.” Seymour gave her a comforting squeeze. “It’s only natural you want to do some adventuring. Test out your kit and whatnot. The problem is, your kit is currently limited to a single minion who can’t actually interact with physical reality.”

  The Teacher’s Pet would be highly valuable in a confrontation with an enemy capable of using magic, but not so much against most of the more mundane creatures which called the jungle home. Its ability to absorb hostile spells was powerful on its own, and when combined with Penny’s Arcane Tutor class trait it would become even more so. The trait would enhance the familiar, allowing it to absorb adept-rank spells despite the fact Penny was still only a neophyte, and combining them into single-use scrolls usable by her only. Ultimately, this mechanic meant that the familiar would allow her to routinely use magic a rank above her own, too.

  What the two of them had initially set out to hunt was a common creature known as a flashbat. As the name implied, this was a bat-like animal, but with a translucent crystal sticking out of its forehead like the horn of a unicorn. Penny had selected it as their target for three reasons:

  One, as jungle creatures went, this one was relatively harmless. They ate insects, mostly, and the occasional small rodent.

  Two, its trademark flash would make it easy to track in the dark jungle.

  And three, its defense mechanism involved activating specialized, light-generating skin-cells and then using the crystals growing from their foreheads to amplify the light, in the process casting an adept-rank Blinding Flash spell. After blinding their target, the flashbats would immediately flee, as it was a completely defensive move on their part.

  The plan was simply to have Penny’s familiar suck up enough spells to create one of its special scrolls, so she could fully test out her new ability. The pair weren’t seeking out an actual fight, and at first everything was going well. Seymour and Penny stayed at the edge of the jungle, easily picking out the flashbats while the creatures worked in teams, strobing their crystals to stun and blind swarms of juicy, nutritious jungle insects. Twice, the pair managed to engage a bat which had ranged near enough, and both times the creature cast its Blinding Flash spell before making its escape by flapping off into the trees.

  The Teacher’s Pet had moved far faster than Seymour would ever have guessed it could. At the rank of adept, a Blinding Flash spell affected a large area and would have been difficult to resist, but the spectral book became a streak of sepia-colored light, moving to place itself between Penny and the bat before flinging itself wide open. The flashbat’s attempt to blind them was immediately suppressed, crushed down into a single speck of light like a tiny star, before being subsumed entirely into the open pages of her bookish familiar. The bat then flapped away in a frantic escape while both Penny and Seymour simply watched them go.

  Unfortunately, before a third flash could be absorbed by the Teacher’s Pet—the number required for it to combine them into a scroll which only Penny could use—something which Seymour’s Sanguine Sight identified as an Obsidian Hornet interrupted the hunt, and proved just how unprepared he and Penny were for actual combat.

  It came buzzing in from the wide open savannah behind them. They had both been so singularly focused on spotting flashbats in the darkened rainforest that the hornet’s ambush had gone undetected until it got right up on them. The Teacher’s Pet flew to meet the intruder but the hornet paid it no heed, some quirk of its insect-senses alerting it to the fact that the familiar couldn’t affect it. The dog-sized insect hummed straight through the ghostly book, intent on Penny and Seymour, stinger glowing a deep, dark red from the heat within.

  At that point, there became no option left but to run, and the only direction which the hornet couldn’t block was straight ahead – into the dark jungle. They crashed through the underbrush, Seymour impatiently shoving Penny along, urging her to run faster, and the Teacher’s Pet maintaining their pace easily as it floated above her head, passing through all obstacles the jungle could throw at it, same as the hornet had passed through it only moments before.

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  The pair quickly lost the moon as they fled further from the savannah and the jungle turned pitch black. They tumbled down a steep hill neither had sensed until it was too late and when Penny regained her feet and attempted to resume her escape she was suddenly grabbed from behind. Seymour pulled her into a thick stand of ferns as she struggled to get free.

  “Quiet,” he whispered right up by her ear, and she stopped fighting, recognizing Seymour’s voice and realizing he had pulled her into this spot in order to try and hide from the hornet.

  “I’m sorry,” Penny whispered. “This was a stupid idea.”

  While it was true that Penny was permitted to take most anything back to her workshop, ostensibly so that she could perform repairs, she wasn’t allowed to simply remove items from the magic shop entirely. Not without triggering the alarm, anyway, which would alert Dragon Dan even when he was away from the depot on his nightly hunt. Moving things around inside the building was all well and fine, but a single step outside its walls would break the rules.

  She and Seymour always had the option of simply buying whatever it was that they wanted, same as anyone else, but they both had only been at the shop for about a week, meaning they wouldn’t be paid still for a few more, and Penny had spent her entire savings on the Essence of Seeking which had produced her familiar and subsequent class emergence. Meaning as a team, Penny and Seymour were flat broke.

  Fortunately, Seymour had other means of acquiring basic combat gear for their impromptu expedition. Before the two of them had crept away from the shop, he left her in the showroom and briefly detoured upstairs on his own to pay a visit to Gordon’s bistro. But he wasn’t after food as he searched the dark kitchen. Instead, he took a moment to memorize a very basic schematic:

  He chose a mallet the cooks used to flatten meat. It had a cube-shaped head and the four striking surfaces were carved with different patterns of sharp ridges and spikes, each presumably designed to best tenderize a different cut of meat. Weighing it in his fist, Seymour reasoned such a mallet could effectively tenderize the meat of a living creature just as easily, if push came to shove. Most importantly, he opted for the mallet over a knife or cleaver because the hard wood material requirement would be far more plentiful out in the jungle, compared to the steel he’d need to replicate any sort of blade.

  Also factoring into his decision was the fact that as a non-magical item, the mundane schematic he would need to remember was as simple as they came. It would occupy negligible space in his object memory, and once replicated could be maintained for far longer than items imbued with even the most basic of standard neophyte rank effects. Seymour knew from prior testing that he could potentially arm himself and Penny with a hammer each for a maximum duration of about four hours.

  “Or I could pop out four of these tenderizers and we could both dual-wield for up to two hours,” he whispered in the dark kitchen.

  He was satisfied with the mallet schematic, but knew the idea of keeping them replicated for four hours—or even two—would be major overkill. Or rather, he knew that if he and Penny were forced into melee combat for such a long period of time, the odds of them coming out of it alive were next to none.

  He didn’t expect trouble. Even at night, the savannah seemed relatively safe to explore, and they didn’t intend to enter the jungle more than would be required to bait some flashbats into casting the blind spell on Penny’s familiar. Worst case, if by some terrible luck they were attacked by a boar or something, they might need to fight it off for at most Infringement’s fifteen minute default duration of a mundane item reproduction.

  That meant he easily had memory available to store several more schematics. What would be useful in an emergency? Seymour thought it over as he tread quietly back through the library, careful not to cause Adara or Eusebio any alarm.

  “Do you have a plan?” Penny asked in a whisper. The obsidian hornet continued to buzz nearby. It knew where she and Seymour were hiding but couldn’t quite reach them through the tangled undergrowth into which it turned out they had been fortunate to fall. It kept on hunting for them in the nearby ferns, igniting small fires as it probed about with its magma-filled stinger. The fires gave away its location in the darkness, which would have been more of a comfort if they weren’t also drawing nearer and nearer.

  “I have a couple plans.” Seymour elaborated, “but none of them are any good.”

  Penny’s familiar glowed faintly with a sepia-toned light, allowing she and Seymour to see one another once their eyes had adjusted, and to assess their immediate surroundings. They’d fallen off a stone ledge while running from the hornet. It wasn’t a naturally-occurring ledge, but rather a wall of masoned, white bricks, part of some structure which the jungle had long ago swallowed.

  They now hid in a narrow space between the crumbling wall and the trunk of an enormous tree. Seymour had maintained the presence of mind to grab Penny and pull her to safety in the hidden place. Her own instinct had been to continue their hopeless race against the hornet. He’d known that would never work. And he’d likely saved her life.

  She watched him with a new sense of awe as he examined the lowest branches of the tree. When he found what he was after, he snapped it off close to the trunk. He held the segment of branch in his right hand, and she recognized the strangely-ominous magical effluence which coincided with the activation of his Infringement power. In the next moment, he held what appeared to be some sort of weird, wooden hammer. It didn’t look quite hefty enough to be a proper bludgeon. And it certainly wouldn’t enable him to defeat the agile, elusive, flying, magma-filled death-bug which at present had them both trapped.

  “Hmm.” She leaned closer to examine the hammer. “And what, if I may be so bold as to ask, is Plan B?”

  Seymour laughed. He seemed surprisingly calm.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but I promise you I don’t intend to clobber that thing with this.” He waggled the mallet at her and grinned. “I’m not equipped for that kind of violence.”

  “Oh, that is a relief. For a moment there I thought you were really—”

  “So you’re going to.” He dropped the hammer in her lap.

  “What?” She shoved the weird mallet back at him. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I sure hope not. We’re definitely gonna die if I am.”

  Before Penny could retort, she watched Seymour produce a small scroll from his pocket, the size of one of her father’s cigars. As he unrolled it, she realized it was simply a blank piece of parchment. He held it firmly by the edges, brow creased by concentration.

  He’s going to use Infringement to transform that plain parchment into a useful spell scroll. That’s what he’s up to. He must have stopped off in the library while he was requisitioning the schematic for this silly mallet. He’s much sharper than many Riftborn, isn’t he? I wonder how many scrolls he has tucked away in his object memory right now? She was staring at him and she didn’t care if he noticed. And he’s sort of handsome, too. In an unorthodox way. Like you’d expect someone from another universe to be. This wouldn’t be a terrible time to try to kiss him again, Penelope. You heard the man: you could both die out here in the jungle—

  “Penny,” he whispered, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Yes, Seymour?”

  “Now hear me out completely before you answer. You’re not gonna like this but I think it could work.”