Weeks pass, and he doesn't catch a single card.
When cards become active, he goes looking. They just disappear before he gets there.
He's getting worried, and he's not sure he's satisfied with Kero's explanations.
He tries to focus on school.
Weeks pass, and he doesn't catch a single card.
When cards become active, he goes looking. They just disappear before he gets there.
He's getting worried, and he's not sure he's satisfied with Kero's explanations.
He tries to focus on school.
"No, he's right. It's not a priority. We'd just be satisfying our curiosity, and we can do that after we work on magic."
"I mean, if his precog was any good—or if he was, in fact, a me—then some branches of his plans would take our actions into consideration regardless. Working on magic sounds like good in general, but figuring out whether I am his reincarnation would inform us, at least partially, about his actual goals. It of course depends on how path-dependent people are but I expect this kind of thing not to be."
"Unless his plans were derailed because his sight was less complete than the rumors say, which seems more likely than perfect precognition."
"That's where the 'being me' part comes in, even with absolute lack of precognition I am very, very good at plans and at dealing with unknown unknowns and getting around them. If the guy was me, he'll have taken dozens of precautions and created a lot of different possible ways to achieve his win condition, he won't have had a single plan that could've gotten derailed by less than, I don't know, a hundred different things going wrong—that part depends on what resources he had available, I'm guessing."
"Not one card, but a group of them. You can tell the future by using many cards, like the Tarot, except real."
"I have Storm, Sword, and Jump. Sadde has Change. Which ones do you have?"
Sadde offers his card.
"Do we want to do anything in particular or just take a look at the future?"
"They can answer simple questions... There are spreads, the largest one needs at least thirty cards, but the smallest one starts working with ten, and each card has a meaning that needs to be magically interpreted."
"So I could ask, what's the best way for us to learn magic? Is Sadde the reincarnation of Clow Reed? Will we find the other guardian beast?"
"Yes-or-no questions will have more complicated answers, and more complicated questions will have vague answers... For example," he says, and gestures at the Through, which floats towards him. "The Through represents the improvement of an unexpected situation, in general. This may be either yes or no, or something else, depending on what you ask."
"You can do the single-card spread, or the three-card spread. The single-card you ask a simple question, and it gives you some answer you have to interpret. The three-card spread divides the answer in three parts, and it depends on the sort of question you ask. If you don't ask it any question then it tells you things about the past, the present, and the future."