Agatha calmly had breakfast with her mother in the garden. At first, it had been weird, not just because it had been two years since she had had breakfast with her mother, but because – in a very convoluted way – she was now her maid. Of course, Esmeralda had never acted like that in front of her, yet she was professional enough to be the one who made and brought the breakfast outside, even if it had been the opposite when they lived together.

  “I can’t believe you made these scones, Mom. They are delicious.” The dirty-blond girl licked her fingers as she spoke.

  “Excuse me? What’s that supposed to mean?” The brass-blond woman frowned.

  “Well, for starters, you didn’t cook much…”

  “Because I was working to fill both of our bellies! Thank you very much.”

  Agatha was, indeed, grateful for her mother, but they both knew that wasn’t the whole truth. After all, she had also constantly helped with sewing, so she was aware that most of the seamstress’s time was spent on her private creations rather than her work. Agatha was a daughter of her mother, so sewing for themselves was wholly different than doing it for work, entertainment instead of duty.

  “I mean, if we talk about working…” As soon as Agatha started talking, a powerful noise interrupted her.

  Boom!

  Mother and daughter looked at each other, their guards suddenly up. Perhaps it was because she now knew her mother’s past, but it became pretty clear that she used to be a soldier.

  “What was that?” The daughter inquired.

  “I don’t know,” the mother answered as she stood up. “But I’m getting the feeling that it was pretty potent even if it wasn’t that loud. It came from there, stay here.”

  “No, I won’t!” She stood up.

  “Agatha, this could be dangerous!”

  “Sactly why I should be there!” Agatha recalled her necklace sapphire – alongside the ones in her pockets – and summoned it on her hand. It would have hurt her from the sudden weight if it wasn’t because of the Control command she gave it. “I’m a Fourth Stratum lithorist and basically a soldier. I’m more than capable of facing anything.”

  “Basically a soldier?” Esmeralda scoffed. “Maybe I should teach you how a soldier…”

  Agatha threw her sapphire on the ground and it morphed inorganically into a rectangular platform, levitating a handful of centimeters off the ground.

  “Are you coming?” She smiled at her mother.

  The former soldier looked at her with annoyance, but she finally sighed and gave in, stepping onto the platform and circling the petite girl’s waist with her arms. This isn’t the first time she has ridden a flying platform as a passenger, Agatha realized as she felt her mother’s confidence. What’s her highest Strata?

  “Are you going or not?” Esmeralda poked her.

  “At once,” Agatha responded. Now’s not the time for that.

  Even if the load of two people was a lot for maximum velocity – though still far faster than carriage pace – for the normal Speed Control Anchor series, now she had one more command slot under her belt. And there was always one command that always made things better.

  The duo shot into the skies at the speed of a very fast sprinting person with the Amplify Speed Control Anchor series. It was likely that there was a combination of commands out there that might be even faster, but for the time being, this would have to do. A very fast sprint was a colossal speed when you could just move constantly in a straight line above the terrain.

  “There!” Her mother pointed at the clearing where Hasel taught Agatha from time to time, only for her to see spikes of rock all around.

  “What has happe…” Agatha’s voice as she saw her girlfriend’s agate combined with the rock spikes. “Christie!” She shouted with all of her might.

  Completely forgetting about her mother, the single-agate lithorist recalled her platform, landed brutally on the ground while still moving, and sprinted on foot to the epicenter of the quake. It was a crown of rock spikes with a pedestal of agate with a ten-meter radius in the middle. So huge were the spikes that even one of them had a whole uprooted tree hanging free in it, most of the roots now let out in the open for everyone to see. Agatha’s steps clanked and echoed on the agate as she practically threw herself to the ground where the redhead was lying.

  “Christie! Christie!” She shouted, grabbing her girlfriend by the shoulders, yet the redhead failed to react.

  “Depths, Agatha!” Esmeralda shouted behind her. “Hasn’t anyone taught you that you can’t shake unconscious people around? They could have a concussion!”

  “You…!” Agatha almost raised her voice, but just barely managed to contain herself. “Sorry, you’re right.” Carefully, she placed the unconscious Christie back on the ground, then she stepped away in shame. “I… I don’t know what took over me…”

  “Don’t worry, I understand,” her mother said, placing a hand on her shoulder and kneeling next to the redhead. “For starters, this doesn’t look bad.”

  The seamstress-in-training arched a brow and scowled audibly, the message quartz clear.

  “I know, I know, loud noise and big rock formations around us, but it really isn’t as bad as it seems, so relax, little sapphire.” Agatha did, if only because her mother used her nickname. That lulled her into security. “Judging from said formations and the fact that Christie’s pale but with a heart beating decently fast, this is a lapiloquia coma and not a lithorica one.”

  “What… what does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know if it’s good or bad that you have seen either of the Agatecraft commas,” Esmeralda sighed. “When performing either of the disciplines, there’s the possibility of…”

  Crash!

  “What has happened?” A very angry Hasel loudly exclaimed as he landed even more loudly on the massive pedestal of agate next to them.

  Agatha recoiled at the noise and the shout, but her mother remained collected. How fast has he flown for me to hear the crash at the same time as his flight?

  “Lapiloquia comma,” the maid explained calmly.

  “And you allowed this to happen?” The patriarch shouted at Esmeralda.

  “I just arrived here, Hasel!” Her mother frowned and shouted back. “Your daughter was alone! You have no right to shout at me!”

  “I…” The former miner pinched the bridge of his nose. “Right. That was unbecoming of me.” Then he knelt alongside them. “How bad is it, Esmeralda?”

  “Not too bad, but I wasn’t exactly a field nurse.”

  “You were literally the unit surgeon, Esmeralda.” He recriminated.

  “You were a surgeon, Mom?” Agatha raised a brow.

  “Not quite, little sapphire,” she chuckled. “We were forced to have a designated medic, and I was put in the infirmary division many times during my training. But that’s a story for later. What matters now is that Christina isn’t in any danger.”

  “Okay…” The petite girl accepted her mother’s claim, as she apparently had been a physician of sorts. “But will someone finally explain to me what an Agatecraft coma is?”

  “Right, right. A bumbling buffoon interrupted us before I could explain it.” Hasel raised a brow at the maid’s words, but he decided not to say anything beyond letting out an annoyed snort. “When someone overextends their capabilities, whether physically or mentally, their body or mind gives up, respectively. The thing is, the two are interconnected whether we want that or not.”

  “So Christie pushed herself too much?”

  “Basically,” her mother nodded. “From the drenched blouse, I can imagine that she was already taxed, and then she forced herself even further when she unlocked lapiloquia. Her body couldn’t sustain itself any longer, so she passed out.”

  “Is this… safe?”

  “Safe? Yes. Healthy? Not that much.” It was Hasel who spoke now. “Maybe once is fine, but we cannot allow this to happen again. My dearest daughter is already physically weak; another coma may cripple her health permanently.”

  “Your daughter is not as weak as you think, Hasel.” The seamstress hounded. “Not by a long shot.”

  “Not now, Esmeralda.” The patriarch frowned and casually grabbed his daughter, even though she was quite heavy due to her innate height. “Let us go back to the mansion, there is no need for Christina to be lying on a hard rock when we have beds.”

  Agatha stood up and summoned her sapphire, ready to fly back to the estate, yet space twisted before she could do so. A massive bubble of distorted light appeared before them, one three meters in diameter that showed the innards of Christie’s room. The sight left the girl even more confused than the concussion she received in this year’s tourney.

  It was the Gate command; she was very aware of that, but the casual display left her speechless. Not only was the mansion a solid quarter of a kilometer away, but Gates also needed to be perfectly spherical, and there needed to be two of them; that was why the only Gates she had seen – all of them being from René Dago – were rather small, just the necessary height. The surface of a sphere scaled quadratically with the radius, so it even scared Agatha to ask how extensive both Gates had to be.

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  She wasn’t allowed to be amazed as Hasel casually stepped through the Gate with Christie in his arms in a princess carry, and her mother nonchalantly followed behind. Not the first time she’s crossed a Gate either, Agatha mused to herself as she stepped from a convex surface and left through a concave surface.

  A seamless and instantaneous travel. It could only be called jarring because her mind knew that there was a non-negligible distance between her origin and destination point, yet otherwise, her body didn’t feel anything odd. It was as casual as walking. No feedback whatsoever.

  It was almost earthshattering how Hasel was able to weightlessly carry and place her daughter on the bed when the girl was as tall as him already. Especially so when the man was as lithe as any of the women present. He grabbed a pillow and put it under the redhead’s head and patted her on the head.

  “I am going to tell Diorite what happened and make her bring anything of assistance. You two stay here.” He then walked out of the room, the Gate vanishing a moment later.

  “So,” Agatha exhaled, still a bit shaken from everything, “this coma isn’t anything problematic?”

  “I know you are worried about your girlfriend, little sapphire,” the daughter couldn’t help but blush at those words. Depths, it feels weird when Mom says it. “But I said what I said. This isn’t anything uncommon at all, hence my surprise at the fact that you didn’t know about it. This isn’t that different from a food coma.”

  “A food coma doesn’t make you black out.”

  Esmeralda snorted. “That’s because you haven’t seen yourself when you were a baby.”

  Agatha both pouted, frowned, scowled, and blushed simultaneously. “You cannot compare a full-grown woman to a baby.”

  “I’m not so sure about full-grown…” Her mother mused as she looked at the redhead from the corner of her eye. “And no, there’s not much of a problem here. Maybe it’s because you were taught better in the Skyscraper Academy, but when I was young, this was commonplace in the barracks. When you push yourself too hard, your mind or body just gives out.”

  “This was her body giving out after being tired from unlocking lapiloquia, right?” She inquired, and the former soldier nodded. “So what happens with lithorica?”

  “Oh, with lithorica it’s way spookier. Because it’s your mind that gives out, you kinda just become a… ghoul?”

  “The living dead from fairy tales and bedtime stories?” Agatha crossed her arms and raised a brow.

  “You wouldn’t be so skeptical if you saw it with your own eyes,” Esmeralda sighed. “Basically, the brain completely shuts down until it gets its presence of mind back, and the person just stands… there. Unblinking. And agape most of the time. It’s really problematic because you have to pull their eyelids down; otherwise, they might turn blind by the time they awake.”

  “Does… it last long?”

  “Lithorica commas? No, those are quite quick. Less than half a day. I don’t know if, clinically speaking, it can even be classified as a coma, but basically everyone refers to them as such, just like with agates. The brain is the strongest part of the body, and it shows. But lapiloquia comas can last way longer.”

  “I don’t like how that sounds…”

  Esmeralda chuckled. “Don’t fret, little sapphire. At most, they last a week, and even the worst of the worst I’ve seen only lasted three days. And those happened to people who had lost a lot of blood and body parts beyond their stamina. But worry not, Christina will surely be up before supper.”

  The way her mother casually spoke about lost body parts made Agatha realize that the surgeon claim wasn’t as surface-level as she made it sound. How disillusioned had the woman in front of her become with war and death that she forwent a lucrative profession like a surgeon for a seamstress in a village where every woman knew how to sew?

  A knock was heard on the door and Miss Diorite made her way inside with a basin, towels, fruits, and beverages.

  “Well,” Esmeralda stretched her arms and let out an unapologetic groan. “We have lost the whole morning, and I still have all my duties to take care of, so I will be taking my leave now. What are you going to do, my daughter? Are you going to stay?”

  “Y-yes. I would like to do so,” her eyes were lost on Christie’s unconscious body. Her girlfriend was pale and ill, yet she couldn’t help but think how beautiful she was. Oh, depths. I’m a horrible person, she thought to herself. “I, er, think that I should be there when she wakes up.”

  ***

  Her mother’s prediction came true and Christie did, in fact, wake up around supper. Perhaps a bit too late because it was already dark outside, but Agatha didn’t dwell on it. Her preoccupations lay elsewhere.

  “Christie? Christie!” She raised her voice enthusiastically upon seeing her girlfriend opening her eyes.

  “Muh-mock sapphire?” The redhead mumbled with drowsiness.

  “Yes, it is me! The mockiest of sapphires!” Agatha replied with an elated chuckle. Even though she had been told several times this was a common occurrence, this was the first time she had seen her girlfriend afflicted to such degree, so of course she worried.

  “That is not a word, silly,” Christie giggled and tried to stand up, but her body seemed to fail her as she collapsed back on the fluffy bed.

  “Are you okay?” The dirty-blond girl exclaimed and rushed to tend to her girlfriend.

  “Mm, yeah,” the prone girl groaned. “Tired. Very tired at that. And parched. Ugh, how long have I been sleeping?”

  “Not that long, only half a day,” Agatha spoke as she grabbed a cup of water from the nightstand. It was cold due to her keeping a Chill agate nearby. Well, a Control Chill agate as the petite girl had yet to learn to control the potency of her commands, and using Chill outright would have turned the water into ice.

  “Mmm~” Her girlfriend moaned in delight as she drank the cold water. “Ah, much, much better. And also, I do not know in what world you live in, but half a day is certainly a long time.”

  “According to Mom, nope. She said you might even sleep for a couple of days more.”

  “A couple of days?” Christie raised her voice, partially horrified, though mostly confused. “What happened?”

  “You do not know?” Now it was Agatha’s turn to be confused.

  “I… am not sure,” the redhead grasped her head. “I was finished with my daily run and… I think I had some revelation of sorts, but I am not able to recall which. Then… then I woke up here.”

  “Well,” Agatha giggled, trying to put humor in such a dreadful and stale situation, “whatever that revelation was, it certainly worked as it allowed you to unlock lapiloquia.”

  “I know I can be a ‘dummy doll’ some of the time, but do not take me for a fool, Agatha,” Christie barked in offense.

  “What?” The seamstress-in-training recoiled at the sudden aggressiveness.

  “You should not play such jokes on an ill person,” the nouveau riche added.

  “Oh,” the villager grunted in realization. “Now it makes sense.”

  “You certainly are not,” Christie sighed. That made Agatha giggle.

  “I know it might sound shocking to you, Christie, but you really did unlock lapiloquia. That is the reason why you passed out.”

  “Agatha…” The redhead scowled – ever-so-slightly softer – as she didn’t believe her.

  That made Agatha sigh, but she didn’t blame her girlfriend. They did tease each other from time to time, and this wasn’t completely out of the left field for them. One wouldn’t expect to suddenly unlock a power that they had been chasing for a full year when they woke up. But truth be told, if Agatha’s experience of lithorica was to be interpolated, that was basically the first thing one should expect. Barring the Fourth Stratum, all of her increases in Strata had been sudden and unexpected. A better word yet would be: anticlimactic.

  One talking with a stone turtle, another talking with a woman who literally had earth in her name, and the last one after being hit by the ground. I’m kinda noticing a pattern here… Agatha mused to herself, but dropped the subject. What was pressing now was her untrusting and confused girlfriend.

  “Christie?” She raised her voice.

  “Yes?” The redhead let out with a tired sigh.

  “I love you,” said Agatha.

  “Ah…” Christie let out a drowned yelp and started blushing. Even if both of them knew that fact, they didn’t usually say it aloud, as if they could erode it. As if the word had a limited usage. Then the redhead pouted. “Now you are going to make me look like the bad one if I do not trust you…”

  Agatha stood up from her stool and lurched forward to kiss Christie on the forehead. In a way, it was an accomplishment as their disparate heights only allowed her to kiss the underside of the redhead’s face, not the upper one.

  “Do not fret, I know a way to satisfy us both,” the petite girl whispered as she straightened her back, which made the prone girl blush for some reason.

  She then walked toward the window and opened it, only to chuck her agate outside. Normally, she wouldn’t have needed to do so, as now on the Fourth Stratum she could summon her agate four meters away from her – a skill she had seldom used as she just had no need for it so far – but either way, when her agate returned, she needed the window to be open, so she just accelerated things.

  It was dark outside, but with her Watch Control Anchor Light series, she was able to navigate it easily through the night, and the fact that she no longer had a line of sight with her sapphire. Not that it mattered, for her agate was now the line of sight.

  Anchor Light was also a curious synergy, not because it was able to create ghostly lights in the air or something like that, but because it allowed her to set in stone a value of luminosity. It wasn’t as good as Control Light, as she now couldn’t change the Light’s power without recalling the agate, but it still allowed her to use the Light command without blinding anyone. And to her, that was a plus.

  She then switched out the Watch command momentarily – leaving her blind for the duration – for Speed as she directed her agate on the ground, allowing her to dislodge a sizeable rock the size of her head. She recovered the Watch command for a moment, before changing it to Shape to give her sapphire a more carriable form, and then recovered her lithic sight one last time to retrieve that rock and carry it into the room through the window.

  All in that happened in just a handful of seconds, but all the rapid command changing made Agatha feel like it had been way longer than that. Two active commands in a four-command series really does tax a lot, even in short bursts. Especially if one of those is Watch. I need even more training… She recriminated herself as she picked up the head-sized rock and handed it to Christie.

  “What is this?” Her girlfriend inquired.

  “A rock,” the dizzy lithorist responded.

  Christie frowned. “Oh, thanks, I thought I was cabbage.”

  “A cabbage? Really?” Agatha squinted.

  “It was the first thing that came to my mind…” The redhead blushed a bit, ashamed of her subpar speechcraft.

  “Someone is hungry,” the petite girl giggled. “But no, this is not a cabbage, but how I will prove that you have a lapiloquist. So come on, do your magic.”

  “I… guess I will have to try,” the tall girl sighed yet again and grasped the rock with both of her hands. “Here goes nothing…”

  Her girlfriend closed her eyes and Agatha instantly knew that look. She was recreating the steps in René Dago’s classes on how to unlock lapiloquia. At that moment, Agatha recalled another lesson. Not of their teacher’s, but Terráquea’s. Will this rock be too small? The military engineer preached about macrokinesis, and Christie had certainly shown a megalithic display with her skills, so perhaps this rock was too small for even her skills to manifest.

  Alas, Agatha’s fear proved to be unfounded as the rock started to tremble, spreading dust on the bed. Ah, I should’ve thought about that, the dirty-blond girl lamented the mess.

  “Ah,” Christie softly yelped as she opened her eyes to see that the rock had been changed as if commanded by Shape. Not that commands in the lithorica sense could be given to rock, of course. “It would appear that… that I am a lapiloquist.”

  “Yes, you are!” Agatha smiled radiantly and hugged her. And how could she not? She was proud of her girlfriend, after all. “And not just a lapiloquist, but the best lapiloquist of our grade!”

  “I love when you compliment and sweeten me up, mock sapphire, but I think it is a bit of an uncalled-for superlative….” The redhead murmured as she looked at the crumbling rock. Apparently, stones that had been shot at didn’t appreciate having their fundamental structure altered.

  This, of course, made even more of a mess as the rock turned into dust.

  “I do not say that for this stone alone, dummy doll!” The dirty-blond girl giggled. “You need to check out the spot where you passed out. You made a crown of stone the size of your sea of stones!”

  “That sounds… interesting. Alas,” her girlfriend looked outside, “I think it is a bit late for that today. But as big as my sea of stones, huh?”

  “Has that shed a bit of light over your forgotten revelation?”

  “I think that it might have… But I still have to ruminate over it. Perhaps over sleep.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Agatha smiled at her. She just couldn’t stop smiling. At that moment, she knew that she wouldn’t have been smiling as much if it had been her the one who unlocked lapiloquia. Christie just made her that happy. So if her girlfriend progressed – regardless of who was first – that made Agatha happy too.

  “But I have a small note with the claim you have made,” Christie said.

  “Which one?” The petite tilted her head.

  “You have called me the best lapiloquist of our grade, but you should not ignore your achievements, either. For you are the best lithorist of our grade.”

  Christie had just stated a fact, yet it made Agatha blush.

  Because it had been her girlfriend who had said it.

  “Best lithorist and lapiloquist,” Agatha affirmed, accepting the claim, though specifically because that claim combined them together into a unit. A linguist might interpret it in such a way that they were only the best because they were together.

  “Lithorist and lapiloquist…” Christie followed in a more dreamingly manner as she smiled at her.

  How can you be this beautiful? Agatha smiled at her back, gifting her girlfriend the radiance she enjoyed so much.

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