It's nighttime when you and Darcy return to Carter Hall. The two of you drove through Taco Bell—Darcy's favorite, surprisingly—and hurried back to meet Manish, who's finished his artifact. Darcy picked the room where the department performs placement testing to try the memory pattern. No one will disturb the three of you there, and its patterned tapestries will protect the building if anything goes wrong.
They won't do much to protect you, though.
Manish is waiting inside for you and Darcy. He falls in step with you two as you head for the basement.
"You look super nervous," Darcy tells Manish.
"Maybe because I am?" Manish says. "Mind magic's tricky at the best of times. I don't really want to do this."
"It's easier to give in to Darcy than to try to stop her," you say.
"This is going to be legendary," Darcy says.
"I have my concerns," Manish says as you exit the stairs into the low-ceilinged basement hall.
"No other students have tried this before. Linking two people by a memory pattern is hard enough. But three? It's epic. They'll talk about us in Theta meetings for years."
"Just what I've always wanted," Manish says. "The respect of a bunch of practitioners from a fraternity none of us belong to."
Darcy's reply fades out. A headache knifes through you. The basement hall disappears, replaced by the quad around you. The memory pattern is disjointed, this close to its creation.
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