I checked my phone for the first time since I'd gotten down here, having forgotten about it in the shock and awe. My boss texted about my cat plans, but I ignored him. There wasn't much more I could do about it at the moment. Scrolling down further, I noticed a few texts and calls from Ember sent throughout the afternoon.
how'd things go w ur boss?
U still w Ani?
Hello?
U mad at me?
U ok?
???
Missed phone call
Missed phone call
I stopped walking, my shoes scuffing against the stone. Guiltily, I dialed her back, readying myself for the upcoming lecture about paying better attention to my phone.
Noticing I wasn't following, Cove asked, "Is everything okay?"
Pressing my pointer finger to my lips, I hushed him and put my phone up to my ear in the universal motion of shut up I'm on the phone.
"Ah," he said as he moved a polite distance away, pulling his own phone out and tapping on the screen.
She picked up after a few dials. "Hayden?! Are you okay?! Were you mugged again? Do you need me to–"
"I'm fine. I just got caught up in something."
She paused for a second, and the phone speaker cracked as she sighed. "Thank's for worrying me, dumbass. I almost called Mom and Dad."
I cringed. "Sorry."
"You're only a few years older than me. How are you not living on your phone?"
I targeted the two things she spent the most time on. Like any good brother. "Because social media is cancer? And web novels are trash?"
"Okay, but–"
"Listen, I have to go. I'll talk to you later, alright?"
"Wait I–"
Having given sufficient warning, I hung up.
"...Is everything okay?" Cove asked a few seconds later.
Running a frustrated hand through my hair, I answered, "Yeah. My sister's just mad I ignored her."
Cove looked like he didn't know if he should feel empathetic or amused, switching back and forth before settling on amused. "You have a sister?"
I narrowed my eyes at him. "Yeah."
Catching my look, he panicked, raising his hands in the sign of woah. "Just curious, I swear."
I didn't fully believe him, but I let it go. That train of thought wasn't going to go anywhere anyway. "She's my younger sister. Her name's Ember. And she already has a boyfriend."
Wistfully, Cove said, "Must be nice."
"You don't have any siblings?"
He scuffed his leather shoe on the floor, looking at the ground. When he spoke, his voice was bitter. "No cousins either…just my father." His tone was heavy, weighted. A particular emphasis was on the final word, 'father."
"Oh." He cast a lost and lonely shadow beneath the lamplight. His shoulders were slumped, his face exhausted. How lonely must his life have been? He'd presented himself as this cool, friendly person everyone knew, but now I wondered how many people actually knew him. Wondered if his father spent more time making up for his mistakes than his own son. Wondered if everyone treated him differently because of his father.
I wanted to reach out, to erase the loneliness from his figure, but I didn't know how. Because I was lonely too. I had been for a long time until I'd become friends with Sera, Helia, Sky, Aeolus, and Azure.
My phone vibrated in my hand, shattering the moment. It was a text from my sister.
Omw
Moment broken, I shoved my phone into my pocket. "How do I get back to Chicago?"
Cove perked up at my question.
"So, there's two ways back. The elevators, which we took to get down here, and the portals. They're one of the few services we have that aren't regulated in their own district. Elevators are for bringing new people or large loads, the portals are much faster. A few of them are in each district, and they're all linked up with each other."
He started walking again, and we fell into pace, side-by-side. "The closest portal is a few blocks ahead. We made the buildings pretty easy to spot." He pointed ahead to a small building with a sign containing a circle hanging overhead. "See?"
"The one with the circle?"
"Yup." He said, popping the p like my sister. "We have paper maps in each building if you need to grab one, or I can send you a digital copy. I don't open new portals often, but it's the first place I update when I do."
"The digital one sounds good. You make the portals?"
Cove pulled out his phone, unlocked it, and handed over an opened address book. I input my contact information, and he sent me an introductory text as he answered. "I have to. The witch used to, but it requires specialization in dimensional magic and some ability in physical magic."
Every answer, it seemed, brought up more questions. By now, I felt like I had enough to fill an entire ocean. "So I could make a portal too?"
Cove side-eyed me as he answered, "Theoretically, yes, but no. You'd have to get tied into some pretty special magic to do so here, and you currently have too little power to set up a permanent portal outside of our magical city."
I made sure to file that information away for reference and knew I'd be looking into the theory and practice behind it for later use. "Are you the only person setting up portals? If so, is it because of status or abilities?"
"Yup, I'm the only one." He tilted his head, and chewed on his lips, thinking before answering the second question, "A little bit of both? Spaciotemporal magic in and of itself isn't rare, but the ability to traverse dimensions is. Add that to the job requirements of portal creation, and I'm the only one left."
He went on to explain further, accurately predicting my following questions as a temperate breeze rustled by. "There's a lot of factors that go into what types of magic you can or cannot use: your magic affinities, your specialization, your magic level, and your training. You'll have more in-depth lessons later, but the gist is that each magic type has a few special branches of magic or sub-categories that we call specialization. Spatiotemporal, for example, has dimensional travel, future sight, and teleportation. Your affinity and specialization will tell you what types of magic you find easy to learn. Generally speaking, it means that for you, dimensional travel requires far less training and power than it would for anyone else. But anyone with enough power in a magic type can learn that ability, regardless of their affinity or specialization.
"Take, for example, you and Ani. You both have an affinity for spacetime magic, but while you specialize in future sight, Ani specializes in teleportation. Because of this, you'll have more difficulty learning teleportation than Ani, but Ani will find it more difficult to tell the future. As both of those are spacetime magic, however, you'll still find it easier than my father, but with enough power and time, he could learn to do either."
I added that information to the library of information I was compiling in my mind. "Makes sense."
Cove laughed a little at that. "There's a bit more nuance to it than that, but I've already cast a ton of information on you today." He smiled wickedly. It faltered when I didn't react to his statement. Truly, his jokes were terrible.