Terry is, somewhat whimsically, sitting in the crook of a well known easily climbable tree, meditating. He drops out of it when the mote of light that is Sadde gets close.

"Huh, you weren't kidding that your own magic is almost as good as Change."

"I wasn't! But I still prefer Change for completeness sake," she says. "Am I correct in presuming you're more okay with kissing me in public when I'm thus shaped?"

"Yes. Though - using the stupid immature baseball metaphor - let's stay on first in public."

"Of course. We wouldn't want to traumatize anyone."

And: kissing!

Kissing!

Which goes on for a while!

But eventually: "Were you meditating up there?"

"Actually, yeah. I'm still not sure how to get 'better at it' but it's getting a little easier to think while meditating and not immediately drop out."

"That's really cool. And it was kinda hot to see you dropping from up there."

He raises an eyebrow. "It's just like seven feet. Oh, and no cards seem to have woken up yet. Though I would have told you if one had, just for crystal clarification."

"It's hot because it's such a boyish thing to do and it's cute. Not to mention the brief peek under your shirt I got," she says, grinning. "Anyway, yeah, I'd expected you would've. You know, for a catastrophe of terrible proportions I was expecting more urgency."

"Shh, don't ask for trouble. Lack of trouble is great!"

"...Yeah, I get it though. It's like, waiting for the other shoe to drop"

"A bit. Or waiting for us to have access to a lot of magical power with which to take over the world."

"Who wants to take over the entire world? That seems like a lot of hassle. Maybe just take over Microsoft and General Electric and a dozen other big companies, they own like half the interesting things in the world and are in a decent position to improve it anyway."

"I totally want to take over the entire world. I have serious objections to how it's being run."

"I have no objection to taking over, like, the Congo and stopping the constant civil war, but democracy is kind of an important idea?"

"Well I don't want to rule the world, that'd be very hard work. I... don't actually know what I'd do, did I have the world, but I'd probably try to use that power to at least prevent obvious evils like that. I'd... try to do that by creating very strong positive incentives in the direction of progress and social welfare, instead of negative ones in the opposite direction."

"That is a good attitude for a prospective ruler of the world to have. As long as you make sure to keep those good intentions, think carefully and don't stop listening to other people you're probably better than the alternative at minimum."

"Yes, I at least won't fall into the obvious trap of thinking what I think is good is in fact good for everyone, and unless the magic also gives me infinite computational resources I'll go with a rule utilitarianism moral framework instead of trying to directly maximize social welfare."

"You may have to explain these words, I haven't actually studied philosophy and ethics as much as computer science."

She plants a peck on his lips. "Utilitarianism frames morality as the maximization of some numerical quantity that represents social welfare. Each individual is thought of as having an utility function, which maps world-states to numbers and which has higher numbers for preferred world-states, and how to combine individual utilities into a social welfare function is up in the air. Lacking the ability to actually calculate this directly, rule utilitarianism says you should create rules that, if enforced and followed by most people, would approximate something that maximizes social welfare."

"Hm, is there a kind of rule utilitarianism that accounts for imperfect power? As in, the fact that if you make these rules they might not be entirely enforceable? Or does that just mean you need to rethink your rules and enforcement strategy?"

"Yeah, pretty much that. You're supposed to think up rules and enforcement strategies that complement each other. If you don't have any political power it reduces to regular rules of good behavior."

"I'm thinking of all sorts of conundrums with this strict interpretation but I'm not sure how to order or express them. Like, if a hundred million civilians would sleep slightly better at night when one innocent man was imprisioned as a scapegoat, is it just? Though I'm not exactly about to offer an alternative that doesn't have potentially objectionable implications."

"That's the part that falls under 'how to combine individual utilities into a social welfare function,' I have no idea how to answer that question and as far as I know there is no consensus."

"Maybe it'd be better to stick to... Fuzzy logic, I guess I'd call it? Make what seems like a decent guess, predict whether it will improve things, if yes try it out, verify that it improved things and study knockback effects and revert it if they're a net loss, repeat."

"But you're just begging the question of what 'improving things' means. Like, the example you just gave me, of imprisoning an innocent to make a hundred million people sleep slightly better, is that situation better than the present one? For most practical purposes you don't need such guidelines, but human intuition when it comes to morality isn't super consistent, stable, or even desirable upon reflection, and if I take over the world I'll definitely try to make choices as principled as possible."

"...Yeah this is hard. I guess that's why we have a constitution."

"You can think of the constitution and the laws as an approximation of rule utilitarianism, it's pretty much what they're meant to do, even if they're not... the best possible attempts at it."

"And being more than two hundred years out of date can't possibly help."

"It's pretty unlikely to, yeah," she nods.

"I really don't think we're going to get a chance to revise the constitution. Maybe if we become extremely magic we can colonize the moon or something. I think I'm making progress with the meditation, it's just, there's nothing to engineer at yet."

"Ooh! We should colonize Mars, though, it's bigger."

"I'm going to need to study geology and orbital mechanics and biology and so on too aren't I? Though we could presumably find experts in all those things, that's what specialization is good for."

"I mean, I wouldn't object to learning all that, learning's fun, but yeah hiring someone's probably the better idea."

"Bit premature for now to be honest, though."

"Well, I personally have fun imagining what I'll do when I inevitably take over the world."

"Oh sure, power fantasy is something else entirely from actual planning, got it."

"Sure but I want my power fantasies to be realistic. You know, in case I actually take over the world."

"Realistic is a... Stretchy word, the way some people use it."

"Verisimilar?"

"I suppose. Sorry if I don't feel very chatty today." He waves his hands, frustrated, then says, "It's Tuesday."

"...are Tuesdays bad? Should I be comforting you? Should I be comforting you in my place?"

"Tuesdays are before Wednesdays have a lot of homework due. So I probably ought to keep my breaks short and go back to working on it sooner or later. Not that the last thing doesn't sound appealing."

"Aww, and it's the first day since you've met me that I'm actually a girl, too. Homework's terrible."

"It'd be new things to try, yeah. Homework is kind of badly designed. The kind of people who want to learn are frustrated by it and the kind of people who don't want to learn cheat at it. Though again I don't have a better solution in my back pocket."

"Let the kind of people who want to learn learn, the kind of people who don't not, everyone's happy! I'm pretty sure we don't need ninety percent of what we learn at school to function in society and the stuff we do need we can learn by ourselves."

"But then you'd have people who are unfairly disadvantaged in trying to learn! Public libraries only help so much if their parents are keeping them in a closet like Mr. Potter, or they have to work twelve hours a day to help their mum. Not that I necessarily agree with all aspects of the current system - but having a so-called devil's advocate makes for more interesting discussions."

"Hmm... Well I'm not sure there's a good blanket solution for cases of abusive parents."

"I wonder if having a child services system that drops the ball a decent fraction of the time is better than not having one at all."

"It could hardly be worse, could it?"

"You'll get people complaining about what their tax dollars go to, or what it enables, moralistic arguments about freeloaders. I agree with you on that at least."

Shrug. "If helping abused children is enabling freeloaders then yeah I'm cool with it. And even in general, using my money to help people is not something I'm opposed to in principle."

"Wouldn't you know it, most governments involve other people. I suppose if we become immortal sorcerers and start a Mars colony we won't run into the traditional monarchy problem of the good king dying and the idiot son taking over."

"Yup! Benevolent dictatorship for everyone!"

"I, personally, will stick to benevolent magic engineer."

"You're too cute," she declares.

Blush.

"Say, did you get around to writing pseudo-code like we talked about?"

"Yeah! That was way more fun than homework."

"Cool, can I see it?"

"Uh, I didn't actually bring it with me."

"Oh well. I can invite you over to my house again tomorrow probably, if you bring it then I'll even have dibs on the computer."

"Sounds good!"

He nods cheerfully, then sighs. "Time to go do some calculus. If only it were interesting, useful calculus."

"What kind of calculus is it instead?"

"The kind where you practice integrating a bunch of arbitrary functions through convoluted processes. I suppose they could be useful in mechanical engineering, maybe."

"I kinda like that, to be frank. Well, I guess not repeating it a lot of times, but I like it when it's not obvious what I have to do."

"The repeating so many times is the part I have a problem with."

Shrug. "And you have to hand it in?"

"It'll be trouble if I don't, and keep not doing it. I've already bargained them down from after school college prep classes."

She shakes her head. "That sounds annoying."

"Not as annoying as, oh, Carlos scored 31 on the ACT, Carlos got into Yale, you should apply for the Stanford pre-admission program, time's running out!"

"...wow. Want a hug?"

Hug. "I feel like I've complained about this before. And I do think they love me. And it can't be as bad as some people have it, I'm sure."

"I mean, you've mentioned it, but... I guess I hadn't realized it ate at you as much maybe? And... Yeah. I mean, them loving you doesn't really excuse that kind of thing. Do you want to go to Standford?"

"I want it to be okay if I don't go to Stanford or Harvard or MIT or Yale or Georgia Tech. Haven't actually decided about any of it, still a junior. And thinking that it probably will be okay isn't the same as knowing it."

"Oh, Terry..." She hugs him again. "It's okay if you don't go to Stanford or Harvard or MIT or Yale or Georgia Tech."

"Thanks. Didn't mean to get all... Ranty."

"It's okay, feel free to get all ranty whenever, and I'll provide hugs as needed."

Chuckle. "Oh, hugs, is that what a - friend is for? Gossip has steered me wrong."

She raises an eyebrow. "It's one of the things, yes, what did you expect instead?"

"No, no I was joking. Though it did make me think about the words 'girlfriend' and 'boyfriend' and whatever possible relation to us they might have."

"Ah, well. What relation do you think they have?"

"I don't know what your opinion on the matter is, or mine for that matter, that's why I asked."

"Hmm, my opinion on the matter is that it's a nice, warm, fuzzy word that'd make me feel good, but I care more about the expectations that would come with adopting or not adopting such a word."

"My expectations would be... Mostly that it means we like each other enough to declare it. More of the same, possibly with actual date-like activities instead of hanging out in the park or one of our rooms, because card-hunting sounds like an adventure but not necessarily a nice time. If you're a girl at the time. I don't want to open that can of worms."

"To whom is it a can of worms?" she wonders.

"Me more than anyone else. It'd be... Stressful."

"Wait, I'm confused, what would?"

"Having a boyfriend emphasis on boy."

"Um. Why?"

"Because I struggle with the external pressures of society telling me that it's vaguely immoral even when I see that, logically, it's not. I know, I know, I know, anyone can wordfriend whoever they want but that doesn't put me all the way to properly feeling that way."

"Oh. Um. Uh. Does that mean that if I'm your girlfriend I... won't be when I'm a boy? Won't be your boyfriend, that is."

"Not in so many words. I will want to not act like you are in public. I know, I'm terrible."

"I... can deal with not being boyfriendly in public, in general, but it sounds very... uncomfortable. For you, I mean. I'm not sure 'caring about external social pressures' is a setting I even have, but. Um. Is there anything I can do to help?"

"Help me figure out how to magic properly once we have some more cards. Nobody cares if the king-queen of Mars's sorcerer-in-chief is bi."

She giggles. "You're terribly cute. But I was planning on doing that anyway, I meant in addition to it." She shrugs. "Well I'm a girl today and I'm gonna seize the day. ...well kinda, you said you have to go home do homework and I shouldn't be holding you up."

"Yeaah. Homework is annoying when I actually have things I really want to do for once. But musts must be met."

She sighs. "...can we make out a little bit before you go, then? I kinda do want to seize the day at least a little bit."

Smile-lean-kiss. And no teasing short pecks today.

Eeeee! No teasing short pecks: she approves.

Not for too long, though. "Sorry, I should go now. See you tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Bye now," she sighs, and plants a goodbye peck on his lips then saunters off.

Terry starts walking home.

And look, there's Sadde again, coming from the direction he's going! Hi, Sadde!

"Uh."

"-the Loop!" He opens his backpack and gets out a notebook. He remembers 'look for the crossing point' but what else did they strategize?

They mostly didn't! One had to break the Loop's crossing point but that was pretty hard to do without magic and they didn't exactly have loads of it.

"How inconvenient," Sadde airs, looking a bit annoyed.

"It's like it was waiting for us to need to be somewhere. I wouldn't put it past the cards from what I've seen so far. Anyway, crossing point. I know this park, I'm going to run around the loop a few times, try to figure out which section of it we're stuck in."

"Should I go after you or the other way around?"

"Uh. Probably follow. Easier to tell each other something that might be it if we're next to each other."

"Okay, then."

So he starts prowling around, not in straight lines, not trying to find the way out yet, just trying to get a mental map of the looped area.

It's... not obvious. Either the Loop chose particularly similar-looking spots in the park or it has some sort of subtle space alteration that makes the edges look similar. Whatever the case, Terry will find that they cannot leave the park, and they'll soon be back to the spot where they started.

Well, since he was trying to map what parts of the park he can visit and start applying spatial reasoning, that's okay.

He sketches out a map showing the places they are 'allowed' to go and shows it to Sadde to see if their impressions of the space agree.

"That looks about right."

"So we know roughly where the edges might be. That line of bushes to that tree, maybe fifty feet either way... That bench to the pond... Let's get searchin'."

"Do you know the usual layout of the park?" she asks, going after him. "It all looks the same to me."

"Yeah, I hang out here a lot. And I have a good memory for - layouts and arrangements of things."

"Cool. You'll have to point me at stuff. It'll probably not be obvious."

"I wonder if meditating would help. Probably not."

"You could try? ...is Kero around?"

"Kero is not around or he probably would have rambled out a lot of advice on finding the edge already." He starts walking again, indicated an area to check for the crossover line.

Sadde follows and squints!

There is nowhere obviously crossovery without closer inspection.

Well, they'll just have to do the closer inspection themselves.

Do his notes-from-quizzing-Kero contain an answer as to whether the 'crossing line' wraps around the whole looped area or just part of it?

Whole. It's impossible to escape a looped area without actually getting the Loop to make it stop.

"...So I think if we can be confident we're walking in a straight line we have to find it sooner or later. Have you got a ball of string or something?"

"Um. Nnnoo? We could try leaving stuff behind, though, Hansel and Gretel style."

"I have some computer cable, but it's not nearly long enough. Hansel and Gretel style it is. I'll happily sacrifice the remains of my lunch for this."

"We could leave leaves and sticks, too?"

"Yeah, whatever works as long as it makes a straight-ish line." For example, a handful of the distinctive rocks used as a border for the pond. He starts laying them down.

She helps! "I don't think they strictly need to be touching each other, there can be some distance between them as long as they form a reasonable line, yeah?"

"Yyyep." His chosen spacing is about two feet apart.

She'll do the same.

And eventually they find their line again.

He connects it up. "Alright, so now we just go very carefully along the line, looking for a red band, the cross point."

"Does it necessarily look like a red band?"

He taps the notebook. "Kero said it does, during our quiz-fest the other day."

"Oh. Should be easy enough, then, unless it's like super hidden somehow?"

"I'm not sure how hidden-or-not it is, just be on the lookout for red. Maybe on the floor, maybe in the air, maybe sneaking around a tree."

"Alright." Look look look. It's really not obviously anywhere.

Tedious methodical checking. Terry wishes he thought to ask whether the line could move, or was unnaturally attention-aversive, or anything like that.

Sufficiently methodical checking eventually reveals a thin, almost translucent red line on the ground, stretching apparently indefinitely in both directions.

"Oh, look at this... This isn't the card's 'True Form' though so I don't think trying to seal it right now would work. And I'm not sure how to force it out."

"What cards do we have? There's Change, Windy..."

"And float. Change one of these sticks into a weapon?"

"Yeah could try that," she says, grabbing a stick and offering it to him, then she glows—

—and is holding the card. "Wanna do it or should I?"

"You go ahead. I'm going to get-" Toss "-Windy! If Loop appears keep it from going anywhere."

She appears, and nods assent.

Sadde turns the stick into a blade. "Ready?"

"Ready."

So Sadde attempts to cut the red band with the blade.

It doesn't work. "Well that's disappointing."

"...I wonder if I can do a generic magic blast. I'm supposed to have my own magic aside from the cards, maybe. Or I could try sealing it as-is, which also probably won't work."

"How would you do that?" Sadde unchanges the stick and crouches close to the ground to peer at the connection.

"Meditation and willpower? Meditation is supposed to help, and I've gotten way better at, hm, not-quite-meditating."

"Makes sense, I suppose," she says. "This card's good at what it does, the bits at either side are really similar."

So he sits down and meditates and tries to reach-without-reaching at the edges of the Loop's affected area.

The Loop's magic is very very subtle, he probably wouldn't have noticed it if he weren't right there in front of the edge. Now that he does notice it, however, it seems to stretch in all directions, subtly altering space itself to conform to the closed loop it wants that park to be.

Any detectable weaknesses, holes, avenues of attack?

Nothing obvious. The loop seems to be pretty deeply embedded into the fabric of space, very thoroughly linking different parts of the world, so perhaps targeting that could do something.

"Hum. There's nothing physical about it anymore, so of course the sword didn't work. Can Change change other cards? Time and space? Well, probably not time."

"I... haven't actually ever tried anything like that? What would I even target?"

"The place where the line is."

"Alright, let's try that." Sadde raises Change in front of his face and intones, "Turn the place where Loop folds space to metal, Change!"

The card glows and a patch of ground at the intersection starts glowing, as well, and is transmuted into metal, connecting both sides through the red line. The space around them starts to shimmer as if underwater, and suddenly the fold breaks, fading into the actual continuation of the park. And floating there, mid-air, is a red Möbius strip, twirling.

Even though it doesn't seem to be trying to escape, quickstep, tap, "I command you to return to your power confined, Loop!"

Unearthly wind, glowing lightshow, the strip dissolves into a card at the tip of the staff—

—and floats over to Sadde's hand. "Um."

"-Because you flushed it out, I am assuming. I'll ask Kero."

"Yeah. Um." Sadde offers it to Terry.

Terry attempts to take it, half-suspecting it'll just go right back to Sadde.

It does not, in fact, go right back to Sadde. It acts just like an oversized not-quite-cardboard card would, i.e. it does not do anything at all.

Sadde uses this time to turn back into a girl.

"Right then. That was interesting but it's high time I went and did some homework. I'll email you what Kero says about the card going to you."

"Okay. Have fun with homework? I hope your parents don't give you too much of a hard time?"

"Oh I'll be fine up until the moment when I actually fail to get a B or better. Tomorrow I should be more free, see you then?"

"Well, it could be worse, then, I suppose. And yeah, tomorrow!"

And he walks home and tells Kero about their little adventure and the card's confusing behavior and emails the analysis to Sadde and does homework, adequately, and programs a bit to distract himself and sleeps and goes to school and goes to find Sadde in the same park.

Kero explains that the card goes to whoever compelled it to show itself and/or did the most active work towards bringing it to a state where it can be captured, but other than that doesn't really express any preferences for people.

And Sadde's there again the next day!

"Hi again! So I emailed you yesterday after asking Kero, phrased it like a game we're inventing, did you see it...?"

"Yeah! It's fine if you plain word it on my end, only person likely to see it is my mother or perhaps the NSA, mom's in on it and the NSA deals with crazies daily."

"All else being equal I'd rather the NSA and equivalents not think I'm crazy. Anyway," kiss.

Kiss! "So, how was homework, and the day after that, and today?"

"Homework was boring but quick-ish. I worked on my game some, but it's best to take that in small chunks. We actually did something interesting in math class today, a number puzzle that actually taught something, I'm as surprised as anyone. How about you?"

"Day was boring, had English and Geography and free period and Gym. And, game?"

"Oh, I'm programming a game. It's..." Not fun. "Not done."

"You don't sound super excited about it."

"Well, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be, and I don't have anyone do to art or music or anything."

"I wonder if we could magic it. The Voice card could help with the music maybe."

"...Ooh, great idea. I kinda want to see if Change can work on digital images as well as it does on other things. If we copy the new one before Changing it back it could save a lot of art time, yeah?"

"Yeah! Maybe Illusion could help with something, and even Create."

"Well, the game is about ship battle tactics - I was going to keep it simple and only see your own ship and a map. All about being in the right place to hit the enemy without wasting too much fuel, ammo, or whatever. I even made a board game out of it first to test if it could be interesting. I wasn't sure whether to give it a space theme or what so I've been holding off on art and music and just programming."

"Why are you making it?"

"...Well before I found magic 'Terry Miller, Game Developer' sounded really cool. 'Terry Miller, Sorcerer' is better obviously. And it seemed fun, programming something I want instead of just what the classes told me to."

"Well, 'Terry Miller, Cardcaptor' now, we don't actually know any non-card-based magic yet."

"Point."

"'Terry Miller, Sorcerous Game Developer' sounds nice, too, though."

"Makes it sound like I'm making a fantasy game. At that point I may just add whatever titles I feel like without regards to the overall aesthetic. What titles are you gonna shoot for?"

"Queen of the world, remember?"

"But we're going for as many titles as possible, not just the best individual title. Or no?"

"Oh, well, in that case, ummm. Supreme sorcerous magical shapeshifting benevolent empress of the world?"

He laughs. "We'll get there sooner or later. For now, gathering and practicing with cards, meditating, occasionally trying to find another sorcerer."

"Kinda annoys me that the only magic we have is this bunch of cards with very specific and somewhat inflexible powers."

"I get the impression form Kero that they're actually hugely powerful compared to most everything else. Pros and cons."

"Well sure but when your power is breaking the laws of thermodynamics to make flowers appear it kinda defeats the point a little."

"I mean maybe it's drawing mass off a black hole somewhere and conservation of energy is preserved."

"Then it's breaking locality, which is even worse."

"When I said that it was a shorthand for 'we don't have enough information about these thnigs', I don't literally mean that it's- breaking locality or conservation of energy or the second law of thermodynamics or not. And doesn't the current understanding of quantum mechanics possibly violate locality anyway?"

"Not as far as I know, but anyway, I was mostly joking, I know what you meant. What I meant was just that, yes, the cards are incredibly powerful, but they're still, as a group, incredibly silly. Not that I wouldn't be able to abuse even the silliest of them, but still."

"I, uh, rescind my annoyance. Though if slash when we take over Mars NASA's going to have an absolute fit, I bet."

"...would it be bad of us to stick cameras in there so we can watch their reactions in real time?"

"Probably we can have just as much fun giving them a phone call and listening them splutter at the explanation of 'magic!'"

"Can you call NASA, just like that?"

"Probably not? But if we leave an email address on a sign in front of Pathfinder and tell them to arrange it I bet it'll happen in a week tops. The Phoenix lander might be there by then too, but I think Vikings 1 and 2 are broken by now."

"Well, 'then' can be a substantial time in the future, we don't know what we're gonna do or when, or how."

"It's slated to launch in 2007, so. Anyway, I don't have homework hanging over my head today! We should do something with this freedom."

"Ooh, freedom. Do you have anything in mind?"

"Your program you wanted to try writing, or ice cream on me. Both are worthy courses of action. Possibly magic practice but I feel a bit saturated on that having experimented a lot until yesterday. "

"We could do both, ice cream first then program."

"Then let us go find cold deliciousness."

And she makes use of the fact that she's a girl today to plant a peck on his lips and then take his hand.

That gets a surprised happy sound, and they walk off toward the edge of the park. "What's your first-try-at-a-program supposed to do?"

"Basic binary operations from text input."

"Solid start, interesting and slightly finicky and not ridiculously overreaching, good choice."

"I didn't really deal with most cases where the user could input something bad, though."

"That's a due diligence sort of thing - good practice but not essential. A generic check if it's a number in the right range and EEENH! Try again! If they did it wrong is good enough, or at least an error handler, try-catch and all that... Did I explain try-catch?"

"You did not!"

So he starts explaining proper error handling practice and its myriad benefits, even sketching out code on his notebook.

They're at the ice cream place well before he's done. Terry orders mint chocolate chip.

She gets strawberry! And listens to his explanation, enraptured. She's a very good listener, and asks questions sometimes that indicate she understands what's being said.

He leeeans on sketching things out. He's a visual sort of teacher and learner, apparently. "...So if you do it that way instead of just crashing the whole thing when the number's too big, it tries to change the variable type, and if that doesn't work it can just go back to the first part and say 'oops' and let you try again."

Lick, lick the ice cream. Ice cream is delicious.

"That makes it sound like eighty percent of code is error handling."

"Nnnnot necessarily inaccurate if you're really really thorough about it? But it depends on what you're coding. You need error handling the most when dealing with users. Someone told me, always assume the user is an idiot. And getting lazy with your error handling isn't instant doom, it's just frustrating to deal with if something breaks later."

She giggles at 'always assume the user is an idiot.'

"Yeah, I can see that."

"Anyway, ice cream."

He thinks of something and almost blushes just considering it, but he decides that Sadde probably would find it delightful. "I want to try the strawberry, d'you mind?"

"Sure." She offers him her ice cream, but the blush gives her a hint that may not be exactly what he's going for here.

She is...... Correct. Kiss!

Kiss! Cold ice cream kiss! Those are among her favorites!

It's a novel sensation to Terry, like pretty much every kind of kiss.

He does really like the double taste of Sadde and strawberry, though. "Mmm."

She pulls away and giggles. "You're too adorable."

"I'd say I try, but I'm not actually specifically trying for that! Two days ago I might have thought of that and not done it though, so you're either having a good or bad influence on me."

"How could it possibly be a bad influence when it leads to kisses?"

"Inadvisable kisses are, in fact a thing. I admit I have not experienced any examples personally though."

"When it leads to consensual kisses," she amends.

Nod, nod. Nom, nom. He starts discussing ideas for using Loop, especially in conjunction with cards they already have. Infinite electricity from looped water turbine, anyone?

She has such a good boyfriend. Infinite energy is the obvious application—are there any nonobvious ones?

Prison/safe haven/isolating a fight from innocents. Weapons testing zone. Really interesting mazes if you do it right, look at this sketch...

"Let's try to make the need for weapons obsolete in our martian empire, yes?"

"Stupidly powerful magic of any description might as well be a weapon but I agree on wanting to not develop anything specifically to hurt."

"Yeah. I mean, way I see it 'magic' is no more a weapon than 'the strong force.' The fact that you can in fact cause a whole lot of destruction when you play with it is more about intent than a feature of the thing."

"There's an old sci-fi novel I read... Can't remember the title. Some aliens are planning an invasion of human space for whatever reason. So, they send a scout to make reports. The scout says 'the humans don't realize that they are not alone in the universe. None of their ships even have weapons. It will be an effortless victory.' So, they invade. And are very very surprised when their ships start dying to ship propulsion systems hastily remounted on moons, mining lasers, and so on. The point of that story is that anything can be improvised as a weapon. But I get yours too."

"Exactly. But on the other hand, guns are, pretty much, exclusively weapons. Like, maybe you could find some other good use for them but it's still very much the case that they were made to hurt things. So we may not be able to do much about people who might want to use magic or whatever else as weapons, but at least those..."

"I think we really need to talk to a real sorcerer to get rolling on this, once we get some more cards anyway."

"I'm not sure how we'd go about it, though. 'Hello, so, we have magical artifacts that can do much more than you can, but that's okay, we won't misuse them, we just want to take over Mars with them.'"

"'We just want some introductory magic lessons, we'll pay you for your time.' And give more details or offer something else as needed."

"That sounds very sensible. A part of me wants to rework magic from scratch, but that would probably take a long time."

"Caveman wall paintings are only a worse starting point for calculus than nothing at all if you waste too much time trying to use them."

She giggles. "We'd still need to find sorcerers."

"And there's no 'The Search'. If we go public would they find us?"

"They might find us to try to snuff us. There must be some reason why they're not public. Something like Chesterton's Fence."

"I don't know that idiom."

"It's the idea that you shouldn't make a reform if you don't understand why the current way things are is what it is. In our case it's more, like, we maybe shouldn't go public with magic until we know why no one else has."

"Compromise by assigning a certain weight to not knowing why nobody else went public and once the benefits look like they'll outweigh the nebulous uncertain drawback bring it up again?"

"Yeah, pretty much. We should probably be, um, more powerful in general, before. And very covertly look for other sorcerers if we can."

"Premature planning, eh. Catch more cards and come what may. Doesn't quite sit well but that's what's gonna happen."

"Eeehhh. Kinda still wanna try to figure some magic out on our on, there must be some clue from the cards themselves, they were made by sorcery, right...?"

"Yes, made in a grand ritual at the height of Clow's power that Kero doesn't know all that much about. I'm hoping meditating in the right directions will give me clues eventually."

"Right, I get that, what I mean is, maybe there's some knowledge we could get from them about how sorcery works. Like the drawing behind cards, stuff written on them, the book, stuff they maybe know that Kero doesn't..."

"Good idea. We can try it after coding out your program? Since we already said that's on the agenda."

"I thought you were tired of doing magical tests for today?"

"New perspectives are interesting, though."

She giggles. "You're adorable, and I'm gonna kiss you again." And she proceeds to do just that!

Delicious kisses. "You're pretty great too you know. Let's not get, ahem, too distracted, though."

"Mmhmmm, someday I'm gonna manage to seduce you into too much distraction."

"Oh I'm not necessarily opposed but we have intellectually interesting things to do first, is all."

"Fair enough, intellectually interesting things are fun. I'm really happy I met you, you know?"

"...Thanks. Yeah. Life is better when spent with the right people. I am also really happy I met you. This week has been a hell of a ride and it's not over and it's the most fun I've had in years with 95% confidence."

She grins, and finishes her ice cream. "Here's to hoping it's just the start."

He nods, scrambles to eat the last few bites, and follows her out, grinning like a loon.

Handholding?

Yes. And leaning towards her affectionately as they walk.

Awwww! He's so cute.

Eventually they reach Sadde's apartment building.

Terry follows her up, still hand-holding.

"Mom's at work," she says, making her way to her bedroom.

"And I still don't have a laptop computer so producing C++ code from your pseudocode might be iffy but I can try."

"Well, do you need to? Do the particulars of a language matter much?"

She starts rummaging around her stuff to find the pseudocode.

"Which language you're using can make a big difference. A lot of them handle a lot of things differently, or don't have abstraction, or handle memory differently. C++ is... Almost 'expert mode' I would say? It's easier to make mistakes, but better at producing really really fast and efficient code for high end stuff. But Java is a lot easier to program in depending on who you ask, and unlike C++ it mostly doesn't randomly break sometimes depending on which computer you run it on."

"C++ breaks randomly depending on which computer you run it on? Why?"

"Um... Different computers have slightly different processors or memory arrangements. Java uses a 'java virtual machine' that can do the same stuff no matter what processor it's running on, but other processors are sometimes structured differently. I think the example I heard explained is a 'register error' where processors have a micro-memory called register, and processor B handles it differently than processor A so the instructions meant for A mean B can add two plus two and get two."

"Hmm. Can't you translate the instructions from one machine to the other?"

"That's what compilers are for." He explains compilers, briefly. "But they're not always perfect."

She once again drinks it up. "This is really cool."

At some point during the explanation she's found the notebook with the pseudocode, so she hands him it.

And he starts commentating on syntax and structure as he decomposes parts of it into C++ code.

"So at this point the sensible thing is to code up the first part - user input, let's say, then test it, then code up the second part... The first two operations, and test that, and so on."

"We could use the computer to test it. It's old and slow, though."

"I'll have to install some tools on it anyway. I can do that while we try to figure out the cards if you have internet access."

"Also slow, but yeah," she says, and leads the way to a room adjacent to her mother's where a computer awaits. She turns it on.

While it boots Terry opens to a new page and starts going over what Kero knew about how the cards were made with Sadde.

There was a ritual. It was big and long and used Western and Eastern magic. It involved the symbol behind the cards somehow but Kero was fuzzy on how, exactly. There were drawings and symbols and written words in English and in Chinese. That's the extent of Kero's knowledge.

The obvious next step is to look at the backs of the cards they have. Is the symbol the same on each one? Draw it out nice and big. Is any of it also present on the staff, or its key version?

The symbol is the same on each one, yes, but flattened and somewhat lacking in enough resolution for everything that's written on it to be made out. Both key and staff are completely clear of markings.

"The sun and moon are obviously important imagery. Think we can make out enough of these symbols to see if they mean anything in Chinese, maybe Japanese or Korean or something? This," Point, "Looks like the roman alphabet but I definitely can't read it." 

He starts downloading free versions of C++ compilers and other tools.

"Yeah. They might be elements? There's four of them and we know the four elements are cards."

"Library later, then! I don't trust my google-fu enough to find a chinese to english dictionary online."

"Typing 'chinese to english dictionary' on Google wouldn't do it?"

"We can try but I don't expect to actually find one. At least not free."

"If you say so. Maybe if you try just 'Chinese elements' or 'Japanese elements' or whatever it'll find you a page with something like that?"

"Chinese elements" produces the list of earth, water, fire, wood, and metal. "Chinese elements characters" produce their original depictions. None of which seem to match to Terry's eyes.

"Okay, not elements then, uh... Korean, maybe? Kero did mention it was Chinese, though,maybe we'll need to hit the library after all..."

"Going through every word in a dictionary could work but it's better to find someone who knows chinese."

"Yeah. I mean, maybe the symbols are very obvious to someone who knows even a smattering of it and the fact that we do not know even that much is all that's stopping us."

"If language were an ordered search space, this would be a good chance to explain binary search."

"Come again?"

"If we had a sorted Chinese dictionary. Alphabetic. And knew how to pronounce these characters. Binary search is the fastest way for computers to look for a certain value in an arbitrary list of numbers."

"Well, do you need to have one of those to teach me that? It sounds interesting and I like learning things and you look incredibly attractive when you're teaching me things."

He blushes, stammers a bit, then kisses her again.

Then launches into an explanation of binary search. He writes out a list of numbers from one to sixteen. "So, I want to find the variable in this list labelled '10'. Instead of going 'first thing in the list, is it what I'm looking for? No? Second thing in the list...' All the way through, we say 'how long is the list, divide that by two, start there.'" He circles 8. "Is what I'm looking for greater than 8? Then now we take a smaller list, the top half, and search through that." He circles twelve. "Ten is less than twelve, so the next sub-list is from eight to twelve, and oh, halfway between that is what we're looking for, ten. We found it in six steps instead of ten. The beauty of this is that you divide the list by half each time, so doubling the size of the list only makes it take slightly longer."

"Ooh, so it grows logarithmically with the size of the input, that's clever."

"Logarithmic growth of processing time is the holy grail of algorithm design. The best sorting algorithms are all O of N-log-N. Which means they take N times the logarithm of N time to do where N is the size of the list being sorted."

"'O'?"

"Some mathematical operator, not sure what it actually stands for but..." He writes O(n). "It means 'in the worst case the growth of processing time is this' as far as I can tell."

"So if you get an unsorted list and you want to find an item in it you'd sort it and then do binary search and it'd take O of N log N plus log N?"

"It'd still count as O of N log N in that case... It's for dealing with really really big numbers. Adding two things of the same 'size' or multiplying them by anything other than another N doesn't affect their 'O' valuing. It'd be faster to just do a piece by piece search if you only expected to need to find one thing in that list ever, that's O of N instead of O of N log N. But usually you're not going to look for one thing and throw the list away, so it's faster to sort it and then do whatever you wanted to do to the sorted version."

"Oh, yeah, that makes sense."

"Computer science: A lot of smart people have been working very hard for a long time on it!"

She giggles. "I wonder if magic's the same."

"It's harder to find online tutorials, at any rate. Back to the diagram, these symbols are like clock numbers, and they seem even less Chinese than the other ones. Any ideas?"

"Well... I dunno, nothing concrete, just, 'this magic system seems to rely a lot on symbology.' The symbol is very mystical-looking, in a way that I wouldn't naively expect real-world magic to look, if you know what I mean?"

"...Long shot, but what if we try to meditate on the symbols? We can ask Windy if she knows anything in a minute."

"Oh, that's not a bad idea. I don't have an easy time meditating, though."

"Kero says the staff helps me work with cards and meditate but will make me slower at anything else. You can poke the IDE - developer environment - I just installed, read the tutorials, while I meditate for a little bit?"

"Sure. Have fun?" she half-asks, unsure about how much fun this kind of thing is to him, then starts poking around the IDE.

Meditating isn't fun so much as relaxing.

Either way, he fixes the symbols in his mind, sits cross-legged on the bed, and meditates.

Can he discover any hidden meaning this way?

Nope. The symbols don't seem to reveal their secrets to him even in this post-conscious state.

It was a long shot.

He takes a deep breath and exits the meditation and peers at Sadde and her computer screen.

Sadde's having fun figuring out how to read user input and turn it into something her potential program can understand.

"I didn't get anything from meditating on the symbols. I wanna try quizzing Windy again, do you mind?"

"Nope, go ahead."

Windy is summoned.

Does windy know anything about these symbols? Which ones are most important, what they mean, he can play twenty questions to get specific translations if so.

The Windy does seem to indicate that two of those symbols are more related to her than the others. The top one more strongly than the bottom one, specifically.

Terry thanks Windy and quizzes the other cards on their affinities. Well, quizzes Change at least, asking Sadde to detransform for a moment if she doesn't mind. Loop and Float probably can't talk.

Sadde detransforms and hands Terry the card.

The non-Windy cards aren't very helpful, and aren't directly related to any of the four characters or the twelve symbols like Windy is.

He hands Change back to Sadde after. "I guess we still have to visit the library later, then. How's your program coming along?"

She Changes again. "I was trying to do input processing but I decided to do that later, so I'm doing the actual-processing-the-operations part," she says, and gestures at the if-else structures she's using.

"Ooh, let's see..."

She seems to get it pretty well. Deeper and deeper layers of if-then structures aren't generally a good idea, though- let's explain how to write subroutines and functions!

Oooh! Those sound really useful. She can copy them to other programs that do the same thing at some point and just call them there, yeah?

It's slightly more complicated than that. You have to make sure to include the file the functions are listed in whenever you try to use them in a new program. There are also lots of pre-written functions for common things on the internet, if you're stuck or want to skip some of the tedious busywork.

That sounds useful for most practical purposes, but while she's learning stuff she thinks she'll try to write the functions herself.

That is sensible and smart!

And, okay, they've been kissing occasionally all day but now Terry would kind of like to do more of it. Once she reaches a stopping point and saves her work.

(Click here to skip the explicit content.)

She saves her work, and is more than happy to indulge in more kissing. Especially because, well, she's kinda been holding back all day.

This is going to be fun, then. He's going to have to repeat his experiments on good places for hands.

Ooh, yes, he will, won't he? She's perfectly willing to help with these experiments. And perhaps they could be conducted in Sadde's room again?

Right, that's the obvious place to do it.

He's not actually much less nervous about the whole thing than last time. On the one hand, it's not so new. On the other hand, it's still new in other ways.

But Sadde is still delicious and delightful either way and he tells her so.

She finds him delicious and delightful as well! And super adorable. And she comments that she's been holding back all day because whenever he started on an explanation spree she wanted to eat him up.

"Well. I should make sure to stockpile more explanations, then." Kiss! Is it just Terry, or could Sadde's shoulders possibly be served better by not being covered in shirt?

Sadde concurs. Off with the shirt!

...she also believes there's still one too many shirts here.

That is more than fine.

He is briefly distracted by wondering why there's such a huge difference in how shirtlessness is treated between boys and girls. Then he's distracted by something else. Two somethings else.

Rreeeally. Might he like to have more access to these somethings else?

Yes definitely.

But oh my she might need his help with that, she can't quite reach the straps behind her back...

Nnnnkiss. He attempts to look cool by kissing her at the same time as undoing it.

...This does not work. He ends up needing to actually look at the straps to undo them.

She giggles and nibbles on his neck while he does that.

This makes it take longer! "Oh my god how is making out with you so good and why didn't anyone tell me sooner."