Agatha loved Christie with all her might; she truly did, but whenever she got this aggressive… fear overcame her. Fear of her girlfriend becoming that occasional aggressiveness and not the girl she first fell in love with. She loved that Christie too, make no mistake, but the dirty-blond girl didn’t want to see that original version of the redhead for the last time. She wanted that doll to remain, even if she didn’t know how, or if it was even possible.

  She didn’t want to be mad at Christie either, but she had pushed her around too much today, so she just wanted to vent alone. Or at least, not around her girlfriend. So Agatha did the first thing that came to her mind and went to Terráquea’s laboratory. She opened the door and found the military engineer slurping a bowl of soup.

  “Mm?” Terráquea grunted and gave her a nasty look before putting the bowl down. “Have you heard about the concept of knocking?”

  “Considering you usually don’t hear said knocks, I guess I forgot about that.”

  “Okay, fair,” the lanky woman shrugged. “So, what brings you here? It has been a while.”

  “It has been a while because today is the first day of the academic year. You know that, right?” Agatha asked with her palms pressed against her hips.

  “Eh…” That non-committal answer was more than enough of an answer.

  “Well, regardless of your lack of… calendaric skills,” she tried really hard to think if that word existed in the first place, but as she couldn’t tell if it existed or not, she just went for it, “you look well, Terráquea.”

  “Thanks, that is what eating does to a girl.” Agatha raised a brow upon hearing the woman calling herself ‘girl’, but decided not to comment on it as Terráquea hadn’t done so with her invented word. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t… A quid pro quo. That’s the expression, right? “But I wish I could say the same thing about you. Girl, you look like shit.”

  “I am aware,” the student sighed and took this opportunity to pick up a stool and sit down. “I just had a lapiloquia class and I am just drenched.”

  “Oh, lapiloquia, huh. Have you moved any stones?”

  “First day of class, remember?”

  “Right, right.” Terráquea scratched her scalp. “Well, if it motivates you, I do believe you will have an easy time with lapiloquia. At least learning it. Being proficient with it? I cannot say that much.”

  “That sounds like the opposite of motivation, Terráquea.”

  “What?” The no-longer-emaciated woman scoffed. “It is true that no one can know one’s aptitude for lapiloquia until it is actually used, but knowing how athletic you are, the knowledge should, at the very minimum, come intuitively to you.”

  “So that is everything I can do now? Stare at the ground as if I want to murder it and sweat like crazy?”

  “Basically,” the military engineer stood up and started looking into a drawer. “Lapiloquia is like a sport, you might get it instantly and be good at it, and if that is not the case… well, you have a lot of time to get hurt, eat the ground, and heal from your bruises.”

  “Have you done any sport?” Agatha asked accusingly.

  “Swordsmanship, once,” Terráquea actually answered.

  “Swordsmanship?” The villager arched her brow. “Is that not a man’s sport?”

  “If you are over three hundred years old, perhaps,” the maybe-noble replied. Agatha still wasn’t sure about her actual status. “Swords stopped being a weapon of death a long time ago. If you have those preconceptions, it is because you only hear and are fed garbage wherever you were raised.”

  “Sounds about right,” she chuckled. No love was lost between her and Malachite.

  “So that is that. A sword is just a tool. It is not uncommon to practice swordsmanship as a woman, especially since it became popular to use gold swords instead of wooden ones as they said that way it was more like the bronze swords of yore. Shiny and whatever. They fail to realize, however, that gold is far heavier than bronze. It does have a positive, though. Gold is ductile and does not hold an edge, at least for long, so it is actually kind of nice for a practice weapon.”

  “Huh…” Agatha hummed as she listened with interest. “You are actually… knowledgeable about this stuff.”

  “Actually?” Terráquea harrumphed and threw something at her.

  The flying object spooked Agatha, but her already sharp reflexes had been sharpened even more thanks to the lithorica lessons with Hasel, so she was able to catch it in midair. It hurt a bit to catch as it was hefty and pointy.

  “What is… this?” The student looked at the object in her hands. A rock. A pretty one with dark-green and blue hints and occasional white and black dots. Metallic, overall. It kind of reminded Agatha of the chunks of silicon the children would find in Malachite’s mine whenever they felt intrepid enough for a dive.

  “Peridotite,” the scholarite informed her. “Well, a type of peridotite, at least. There are a lot of them, like chalcedony. But I will not bore you with details; it is just a type that is really rich in osmium.”

  “Osmium? Like the big coins?”

  “Yes, like the big coins,” Terráquea sighed. “This means that this exemplar is rather expensive as it contains at least a dozen to a hundred grams of osmium.”

  Agatha started trembling at that thought. Osmium coins were the highest denomination of currency, and coins tended to be rather light on the spectrum, certainly way less than a tenth of a kilogram. Crown in the heavens! I’m holding several osmium coins in my hand.

  “Relax a bit, will you?” The military engineer scoffed.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “How can I? Like, I, er… why do you even have this?” It was hard to think, let alone talk, when she held that much wealth in her hands. This unprocessed rock alone could likely buy Malachite in its entirety several times over.

  “Researcher, remember?” The sassiness and sarcasm with which she said those words calmed Agatha; her hesitation transformed into annoyance.

  “And why are you giving it to me?”

  “Do not tell this to anyone, but osmium helps make first contact with your latent lapiloquia. Peridotite is just the best way to do so because it is a rock, but still rich enough in osmium to present an advantage.”

  “And why do nobles not use it to awaken the skills of their descendants?”

  “Oh, they totally do. It is just that the Skyscraper Academy is really elitist in that sense. In other academies for the rich folk, they use trinkets and osmium-rich rocks to do so, but here they are hard-focused on doing it the ‘old way’. Which is really funny considering the actual old way is closely related to contact with osmium, as it used to be even more common. Some old mummies from caravanseraineers that have been found contained vivianite formations with osmium in them, which let me tell you, osmium is not typically found in human bodies.”

  Agatha could only blink repeatedly and agape as she struggled to understand what the still-malnourished woman had said. “You sounded like a scholarite there.”

  “Did I…?” Terráquea fell silent. “Fuck. I really did,” she slightly pulled from her head. “I blame The Preserver. Once you start researching and have been lectured on their doctrine… it is just difficult not to have these outbursts of… passion? Not quite. Hyperfixation? Not either…” The woman grunted. “Ugh, it does not matter. Girl, do not let yourself hear a single word of the gospel.”

  “I do not intend to. Trust me,” Agatha chuckled.

  Mateo had tried to spread The Preserver’s word here and there, but Shayla was always quick to shut the boy up. Mostly because she had her own beliefs, but the Intaksolfani also just found scholarites annoying. Most people did.

  “Well, that is that,” the scholarite dusted her hands. “This is not instantaneous unlock of lapiloquia by any means, but it should accelerate things. Try talking to it.”

  “Like… actually talking?”

  “What? No,” the woman frowned at the girl. “Like they have taught you in class. Just focus on the mineral and try to command it as if it were one of your agates.”

  “I am kind of… beaten. I have not eaten or taken a shower. Can we do this later?” The student suggested.

  “Knowing your visit schedule, you will take at least two months to come back here, so at least let me see that you got the foundations right.”

  “I… okay,” Agatha sighed.

  Today was the first day she had performed any lapiloquia, so she couldn’t say she had any idea of what she was doing. Teacher Dago had been straightforward with his lecture: the whole principle revolved around commanding stones instead of agates.

  “Anyone can perform lapiloquia,” the man had said barely a few hours ago. “But unlike lithorica that drains the mind, not that many people can even get started in lapiloquia because it drains the body. Soon you will understand that all of those sessions of stamina-building were not just for show.”

  Truth be told, there was no need for advanced teaching as lapiloquia – at least the first step – was simple. Agatha had gotten her lone sapphire a handful of years ago, but that time was enough for her to forget that she had once never had an agate. Humans were creatures of routine, and after having had her agate for more than six years, it was as if she had always had it.

  But if she squeezed her brain, she could recall those moments she didn’t. Agates weren’t a sixth sense, but a fifth extremity. Even if she hadn’t been born knowing commands much like she hadn’t been born knowing how to snap her finger, she still knew how to move her hands and, by extension, her agates. Intuition was performing crude movements; mastery was landing a haymaker in someone’s face.

  And depths was she good with haymakers.

  Agatha started sweating terribly when she extended that phantom extremity to the piece of peridotite in her hand. She didn’t hear a call. She didn’t have any feedback. The stone didn’t respond to her like her sapphire did, but she was sweating. That alone was enough proof that something was happening.

  “I recommend against straining your eyes like you are taking the fattest shit in your life,” Terráquea nonchalantly said.

  The dirty-blond girl blushed and relaxed her posture. “It feels… like a slap whenever you open your mouth. Like, I do not expect such a fractured vocabulary out of someone like you.”

  The lithe woman shrugged. “I always had issues holding myself. But disregarding my imperious need to curse – which could be way worse, truth be told – you seem to be doing a good job.”

  “Is feeling like shit a good job?”

  “Yes,” Terráquea nodded. “Lapiloquia is taxing. Very taxing. And it does not help at all that you are only trying to command a small mineral.”

  “How come? Should it not be easier?” Agatha raised her palm and tapped on the rock with her other hand. It slightly rocked as its base wasn’t quite flat.

  “Not at all. Lapiloquia is what we might call… macrokinesis. Yes, let us go with that.”

  “And what does that mean?” She had read many books as of late, but that word was definitely not in her lexicon.

  “It is Grwcian. It means movement on a large scale. With this, I mean to say that lapiloquia works better when commanding big things. More efficient.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “A lot of things work better or only on a macro scale, girl. That is how nature works.”

  “Like what?” Agatha crossed her arms.

  Terráquea arched a brow. “Do you really want me to start listing examples?”

  “Now that I think about it… No. I do not want you to.”

  “Attagirl,” the woman chuckled. “But as I was saying, the smaller your scope is, the less efficient lapiloquia will be.”

  “And why am I not trying to command agate veins instead if size is what matters?”

  “Because you do not have the skill to command that much stone,” Agatha squinted at the military engineer’s words. “Yeah, I know how it sounds. You need to command a lot of stones to get skill, but you need skill to command a lot of stones. Bummer. But now that I have mentioned macrokinesis, I want to drop the concept of microkinesis.”

  “Let me guess,” the seamstress-in-training raised a finger and pointed it at the scholarite. “It is related to lithorica.”

  “Technically speaking, yes. But that kind of proof by association would not be accepted in a paper. Microkinesis is movement on a small scale.”

  “Small like the agates that we command.” Terráquea nodded at her words.

  “Lithorica works best when dealing with small and precise movements, almost surgical in nature. Whilst lapiloquia is more about broad strokes, loud shouts, and big movements. That is not to say that you need to be uneducated or crass to perform that branch of Agatecraft, but that direction is not as important as resilience.”

  Small against big, huh? That gave Agatha an idea.

  “And tell me, if someone were to have too many agates. Like too many, no longer on a micro scale, but a macro one. Would it be then appropriate to switch to perform lapiloquia instead of lithorica?”

  Terráquea smiled at her, but she didn’t give an answer outright. “I do know where you are coming from and going to, but that is something I cannot answer. That is something that you need to explore yourself.”

  Agatha squinted. “I do not know, it sounds to me like you could give a straightforward answer considering your knowledge in the subject.”

  “I have my reasons, girl,” the woman raised her hands in the air, her palms wide open. “That is enough discussion for today. You have all the tools necessary now to progress with lapiloquia in a respectable manner, let alone faster than your peers. Keep practicing and keep that peridotite safe. I want it back, you hear me?”

  “I do, I do,” the girl stood up and reiterated casually. It annoyed her a bit not getting the answer to that question straight out of her mouth, but Terráquea had done a lot for her already today.

  “Also, take a fucking shower. You smell even worse than I.”

  Agatha snorted and pinched her nose. “I smell like roses, not like a fractured corpse like you, hag.”

  Terráquea stood up with a choleric jump, but Agatha was out of the laboratory before the underfed scholarite could take a step forward.

  She couldn’t deny that being foul-mouthed once in a while was relaxing.

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