Carol is a true friend.

Joanna will not slam her head on the table, but she will delicately and gracefully allow it to rest on the table.  "Soph, what do I do?  This is the most beautiful man I have ever seen in my life, and he is smart, he is sensitive, he is funny, he is completely obsessed with me and I want to be obsessed with him but I just - " She waggles her fingers a little, to gesture at flailing her arms in frustration without whacking anyone in the head.

Yeah, Sophie knew this was coming.

People ask her for advice all the time and she honestly doesn't know why.  All she ever says, just about, is "At the beginning you said you thought you knew what you should do, and you're right, you should do that", or "You should go to that other person and tell them what you told me", or sometimes "Wait a few days and see if this still seems like such a big deal".  Joanna's problem today obviously wants Solution #2, like most of her problems do.  She reaches over and pats Joanna's hand sympathetically.

"Did you tell him you didn't like the fireworks?  Does he know you had a bad time?"

Aw, look at that little smile!  Joanna is an amazing friend.  She leaves her head lying on the table.  "I mean I didn't tell him but I think he knows, I wasn't trying that hard to hide it and the ride back was so awkward, I wanted to die.  He texted me this morning just saying he had a great time and I read it, it has a read receipt, I have to text him back."

Carol reaches over and pats Joanna's other hand.  "A rookie mistake."

"I knoooooow!  I was flustered!"

"It's ok, you can fix this.  Don't tell him you had a great time, because you didn't.  Just tell him that you like him," Sophie doesn't know why she bothers saying that, no one ever listens to her when she suggests it, which is weird because it worked out great when she tried it, "or if that's too much, just tell him you want to go on another date and suggest something you actually want to do.  Once you've been out a few times you can tell him you hate fireworks, and then it won't be a big deal because things are more settled, it'll just be a funny story the two of you have."  Let's see, does she know something Joanna would actually want to -- ah.  "There's this sushi place that opened in Epping, I think you'd like it.  I went there with my parents once."  That last sentence is so close to being true!

She looks up from the table, just a little.  "I've never had real sushi, just that takeout stuff they have by the Rite-Aid."

"That doesn't count.  You'll like the real thing, I promise."

"Okay then.  Plan decided.  Thanks, Soph, you're a lifesaver."  She pushes herself back up into a sitting position, and pulls out her phone.  "How...about...next...time...we...get...dinner?  My...friend...says...the...sushi...place...in...Epping...is...good...want...to...try...it?  Smilie face.  No!  Kissing face!  And send!"  She gets the "message not delivered" notification, but Raymond is like that; it'll get through eventually.

"And just like that, the heroine was saved from a lifetime of tinnitis."  Carol wants to do more than just throw in sarcastic remarks but it's early, sarcasm is all she's got.

Sophie laughs anyway.  What are friends for?

Meanwhile

Dawn has broken, but not for you, Nico!  There's a cloud front boiling up in the east just barely ahead of the sunrise, and the wind is still getting stronger.  If you want to chat with your henchman, you're going to have to shout.

But the power is still flowing.  It's a little choppy, and the ellipse you set up keeps trying to collapse into a circle, but your placements are good: the two focal points are holding.  Even from miles away you can feel it, and with it the attention of the cards you spent all night putting up.  It's spiraling through the clearing with you as the focus, never quite touching you.

This is the biggest thing Nico's ever done with the cards, maybe the biggest thing anybody's done with anything since John Dee sank the Spanish Armada.  Probably bigger than that.  No one knows what Dee did, exactly; if he had apprentices at all, their line didn't make it down to the present.  In those days, alchemists were respected...but there's no reason to brood.  Nico's about to fix it.

But where is the sun though, the cards specifically said there'd be sun No, no, it's still too early to panic.

Nico can take maybe an hour of not panicking. He'll keep one eye on the skies, one eye on the pile of firewood, and maybe put some more rocks on the plastic sheeting in case it seems like it'll blow away. He'll send Christopher back to the lake; he hates feeling watched when he's nervous or uncertain.

He'll get over that today, too, if he can just pass through this last gate.

How does it look after an hour?

Great, if you love thunderstorms. The cloud shelf is still building, a dark solid gray lit with the occasional ominous flicker. The pressure is dropping, too; you have to pop your ears a few times.

...

Nico is going to break one of his self-imposed rules, and ask the cards if they were sure about this ritual site.

Nico's Tarot spreads teach him more, faster, than any other alchemist he's ever heard of. The Powers have been good to Nico. Partially that's because he's studied them, and partially that's because he gets them on a level too deep to ever express in human words, but partially, he thinks, it's because he respects their time and attention. He doesn't ask them things he can figure out himself. He never commits the error of Saul; when he's given advice he understands, he always follows it. And he never, ever asks the same question twice.

But today is a day of exceptions and inversions, so maybe it fits.

He'll go back to his car, to get away from the wind, and pull out his old Rider-Waite deck. Where shall I open the gate?, he thinks, and flips the top three cards onto the passenger's seat, fast, before he can change his mind.

Eight of Swords: Loose ropes, a fence of swords with a clear path out. A prison with no jailers, which can be escaped at any time.

The Hermit: Solitude. Wisdom. A lamp illuminating the darkness. The seal of Solomon, bound and put to use.

Eight of Pentacles: Industry. The value of training and skill. A project almost, but not quite, completed. An apprentice too intent on his task to see the city behind him.

Taken together: Quit doubting yourself and hesitating, and do what you came here to do.

Okay then.

I'll interject briefly here to explain Nico's plan in ordinary language, since it doesn't look like Nico is ever going to.

Humans have three souls, which alchemists think of as the Animal soul, the Knowledgeable soul, and the Divine soul (except they usually use Latin or Hebrew or something, because alchemists). The Animal soul is mostly just about instincts; it doesn't persist after death, and alchemists don't usually pay that much attention to it (though admittedly Nico did do something pretty clever with it when he took over Kyle's body). The Divine soul is the part that gets reincarnated; when somebody says they were Cleopatra in a past life, what they mean is that they have same Divine soul she did. This is not as useful as you'd hope. You'll tend to have the same sorts of values and intuitions Cleopatra had, and you might get a few subconscious influences about things that were emotionally important to her, but even if you get in touch with your past lives you won't suddenly learn how to speak Demotic Egyptian.

Except that there's also the Knowledgeable soul, and it's a puzzle. Because, you see, if you do exactly the right things in exactly the right way at exactly the right time, you actually can learn to speak Demotic Egyptian from your past life. It's hard to do, and doesn't last very long, but you can, and lots of people have (at least by alchemy standards). So all that knowledge is clearly being stored somewhere: it doesn't dissipate the way the Animal soul does, and doesn't get passed from life to life the way the Divine soul does; some secret third thing happens instead.

(There's also a whole separate line of evidence involving ghosts, but it's complicated and not relevant to Nico's plan so we're mostly going to skip over it. tldr most ghosts sightings are fake but ghosts are real, and you don't necessarily have to die to make one).

Not everything in those last few paragraphs is true, but it's pretty close and Nico believes it so let's go with it for now.

Meanwhile, a sad fact about alchemical knowledge is that it gets lost a lot. One person figures something out, but then before they figure out how to tell people they blow themselves up trying an ill-considered reaction, or breathe too many mercury fumes and poison themselves, or just melt their brains trying to eff the ineffable. Or, to be fair, they reach a certain kind of enlightenment and conclude that everything is perfect as it is and there's no need to teach anyone anything -- but those people might as well be dead, from Nico's point of view. Not everything disappears that way; a lot of what we now call "chemistry" is alchemy that went mainstream. But the weird, hard-to-explain stuff gets reinvented over and over, mostly by people who are one insight away from catastrophe. Hardly anybody believes in the occult anymore, and this is a lot of why.

But all that knowledge isn't really going away. It's still Out There, and Nico figures he knows where. His plan, if you really boil it down and gloss the occult parts, is to open the gate that separates all those lost souls from the material world, reach in, and gorge himself until he knows every alchemical secret anyone ever learned. If a normal alchemist tried this they'd probably just ruin their Divine souls and then die, but Nico's been preparing himself for years. He might not be able to learn everything he wants to learn, but he'll live to try again. The stack of souls that calls itself Kyle Merrill is doomed, but Nico will be OK.

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Nico packs the lesser cards away, hopefully for the last time, and heads back to the pavilion he set up. How bad is the wind? If he ties the flaps shut, can he get away with laying the cards on the table?

As long as the tent stays up you'll be fine.

What an ominous way to phrase that answer!

But Nico isn't really bothered. The cards said not to be, and he's decided to trust in that. There's a time to carefully follow your checklist and a time to throw yourself wholeheartedly into the practice, and now, finally, it's time for some wholehearted self-throwing.

The first thing to do is start a fire.

Nico wants influence from all four elements, here at the heart of the ritual. The dominant force is clearly going to be air, but that's not so bad: air is the element of intellect, ephemeral and quick-moving. Looked at a certain way, it's good that it's so active. Earth influence is abundant from the forest, water he gets from the little river, but he lacks fire, and apparently it's not going to come from the sun.

It's still not raining, is it?

No, though a few hailstones are starting to fall, here and there.