The light curtain could have shown the same image a hundred times.
It still would not have been this.
"Jinx" in the light curtain was a projection. A possibility. A figure behind glass moving at a distance of years and decisions and everything that had led there, untouchable, already past, existing only in the dimension of warning.
The girl standing in the basement of The Last Drop was present.
The long blue hair reached her heels. The face had the same underlying geometry it had always had, but the time inside the ability had done what time does: sharpened some things, settled others. Taller than Vi now, by half a head. Older by something that was not purely physical. The only absence was the cloud-pattern tattoos, which apparently hadn't made it through the metaphysics of the ability's interior.
She punched the air twice. Quick, compact, the muscle-memory of years of watching and imitating a specific person's fighting style.
"I won't hold you back now," she said.
Vi looked at her sister's face. She said nothing for a long moment.
"Powder," she said. "What kind of ability is this."
Powder held out her hands and a small light formed between them, the aura gathering into the shape of something specific: a monkey doll, palm-sized, with a counter mechanism in its belly and a small gong on its arm. The timer ran. As they watched it hit one minute, the gong struck.
"You can go in," Powder said. "One minute out here is one year in there. You go in with a purpose and the purpose is all you have while you're inside. You practice, and you come out." She looked at her own hands, still slightly surprised by them. "The body catches up to the time inside."
Ekko rolled up his sleeve. "I want to—"
Vi grabbed him by the collar without looking.
She looked at Powder.
"Can you change back?" she said.
Powder blinked. "Why would I want to change back?"
"Because you're twelve."
"That's why I went in."
Vi pressed her mouth shut. She looked at Powder and Powder looked back at her with the calm of someone who had spent ten years inside a purpose and had come out on the other side of it and was not presently available for second-guessing.
Caitlyn reached toward Vi's shoulder, stopped, and then put her hand down.
"From Vi's perspective," Shizuku said, to the room rather than to anyone specifically, "Powder sacrificed ten years of her life because she didn't want to be a burden. That's not the same thing as good news."
Powder took Vi's face in both hands.
Her hands were bigger than they used to be. She was taller now. The positions were reversed in a way they had never been reversed before.
"I'm happy," Powder said. "That's real. I came out and I'm very happy. I can help you now."
Vi grabbed her wrists. She held them. She didn't say anything.
The mechanics of the ability emerged over the next half hour through a combination of Powder explaining, Liam observing, and Claggor asking the systematic questions that nobody else thought to ask.
One minute of timer equaled one year inside the space. Ten minutes had passed outside: ten years had passed inside. The person inside lost that time from their lifespan.
"For Powder using it herself," Liam said, "the math appears to be direct. Ten minutes outside, ten years off." He watched her. "I think with her natural talent it might be less efficient than that in practice. Possibly twenty years total for what she experienced."
He could see the aura she had accumulated: over one hundred thousand. Not from ten years of ordinary practice. The focus-state she had described, entering with a purpose and existing only as that purpose, had compressed thirty or more effective practice years into the ten actual ones.
"And if she uses it on other people," Caitlyn said.
"Other people lose their time too. And so does she. Anyone who enters her space costs time from Powder as well as from themselves."
The room processed this.
"So it's a gift that comes from her own body every time she gives it," Vander said, from behind the bar. He had been listening since the top of the stairs. He puffed his pipe twice.
"Yes," Liam said.
Vi looked at Powder.
"Promise me," she said, "you won't use it on anyone else."
Powder thought about arguing. You could see her think about it. Then she looked at Vi's face.
"Okay," she said.
Vander stood up. He pulled on his metal knuckles with the deliberate attention of someone preparing for something that requires the right preparation. He looked at Powder, measured the distance, and threw a punch at her chest.
The punch was fast. The weight behind it was the weight of a large man who had spent his whole life making sure that large men were what he was, applied through a solid iron surface. It was the kind of punch that had its own weather system.
Powder raised one finger.
The punch stopped.
Vander's arm pressed forward. Powder's finger did not move. The contact point between iron knuckle and extended finger held with the improbability of a structural fact.
"There," Vander said. He was smiling, which was not the face you usually made after a punch failed. "That's what I wanted to see."
Ekko stared. Mylo stared. Even Claggor, who had been keeping his reactions minimal, made a quiet noise.
Powder looked at her hand.
"Oh," she said.
"So you don't have to be worried about that part anymore," Vander said, and looked at Vi.
Vi looked at Powder's extended finger. At the dent in Vander's iron knuckle. At Powder's expression, which was the expression of someone discovering a room in themselves they had not known was there.
She didn't say anything. She put her arm around Powder, which now had different geometry than it had always had, and pulled her close.
"The path to extending what you have," Liam said, to the room, "runs through this world's magic. There are practitioners in this world who have been alive for centuries. Whatever they found, the natural system may be part of how to access it." He paused. "So the time already spent is not necessarily the full accounting. That's what I'd suggest you keep in mind."
Vander laughed. He sounded like someone who had been given, two days ago, something he had not previously had a category for, and was still adjusting.
In the main hall of the tavern, Jayce was building something.
The materials from the Philos family crates were spread across three tables. He had arranged them with the systematic care of someone working from a design they have been carrying in their head for years and have finally been given the materials to test against reality. Crystals here. Rune housing there. The connection nodes in order of assembly.
Liam sat in his usual chair and watched. Shizuku arrived and sat beside him, both of them watching Jayce's hands work through the stages of the prototype.
At some point, without Shizuku appearing to decide to do it, she tilted her head and rested it on Liam's shoulder.
They kept watching.
The hex gate prototype took shape on the experimental platform. Small, roughly the size of a large appliance, but the geometry of the rune arrays on its upper surface were visibly doing what the full-scale version did in the curtain: organizing, connecting, preparing to translate the spatial relationship between two points into a single passable moment.
Jayce slotted the final crystal into its housing. The runes activated. They began to move, cycling faster, the blue deepening from the edges inward, and then:
A flash.
Liam and Shizuku were standing in front of a wall.
The wall was in a part of the lower city that neither of them had visited today, in a cleared area where the buildings stepped back from a surface that had been made flat by intent rather than accident. On the wall: a mural, large, slightly faded, the figure of a long-haired woman with a staff and a wind around her, painted in colors that had once been vivid and were now the vivid of memory.
The hex gate had sent them where the natural energy in the lower city was densest.
"A person who knows no Nen at all," Shizuku said, looking back in the direction they had come from, "and he built something that moved us here."
She thought about this.
"Could Nen do this? Not the technique — the principle. Something that holds the energy and makes it usable without a practitioner."
"A spirit stone," Liam said. "That's the word for it in a different kind of story. A material that concentrates life energy and holds it stable. You build a formation and the stone powers it. The mage's hands are optional."
"There's no such material in the HxH world."
"No." He held out his hand, palm up. Natural energy gathered in it, not dramatically but purposefully, drawn in and organized into a specific structure. The shape that formed was polyhedral, small, dense, the same basic geometry as the crystal in Camille's chest.
Same shape. Very different provenance.
"The question is the source," Liam said. "Hextech works because this planet's natural energy can be crystallized. It can be stored in a solid matrix and accessed without a practitioner. The natural energy in our world is thinner and won't hold a solid form." He looked at the sphere. "So what would change that."
He scattered it.
"You still seem to have doubts, Wind Messenger."
The voice came in the wind's movement around the mural, in the specific quality of air that has decided to carry something.
Liam looked at the mural.
"Janna," he said. "How different do you think I am from the woman whose heart I saw today? Compared to the one beside me."