Don't leave your things lying around

Spirits in the etheric dimension could influence and be influenced by the physical dimension only when they crossed or were on the boundary. That was why sometimes it looked like spirits appeared out of thin air, and why they could move things even though they appeared incorporeal.

So Hale volunteered to get the medium. Not that they had an alternative. With the shackles sealing mana and having a slight soporific effect, the children were left helpless.

While it worked in theory, Hale had little practical experience so buckets of metaphoric sweat poured out of the small, golden soul trying to move a stick. He was lucky enough to find the pale chalk in the staff lounge. One of the captives must be a magic user. It was a cheap implement favored for some useful functions: the color could be tweaked with a small dial, the chalk never ran out as long as it had charge, it was neither greasy nor stinky and was erasable by mana. Perfect for drawing magic circles on any surface, at any time.

Just what they needed! Hale thanked the Creators for the thick plot armor.

It was like having double vision; the etheric dimension roughly overlapped the physical and it seemed deceptively simple to reach out for physical objects but space was never easy to traverse.

But it was the Homecoming Festival. The day that spirits returned to the domain of the living. The boundary was blurred and instead of an ocean, only a sea had to be crossed. And that made all the difference. Hale drew in the ether around him and moved the chalk. Maybe someday he could move an object with greater weight even when the boundary was at its thickest, but that day he concentrated hard just to move in the blind spots of the cameras and dodge the captors.

And when he returned to the cage after a perilous journey, it was missing from the cage. It wasn’t in the room either. His body.

But Hale took things in stride. Leaving his body had always been a calculated risk. He couldn’t always expect it to be in the same condition he left it in.

The real problem was that the kids were a lot more injured than they should be. The most serious of them was Katharin, with burns all over. Even Nikolai had moved from his spot and was doing what he could to treat the kids. What happened?! Hale wobbled unsteadily in the air. Did he take too long? If only he had better control of ether. If only he had the memory of this event, he could have prevented it from the root!

Plop!

The chalk fell softly, rolling away and Hale hurried after it belatedly. So he missed Katharin’s eyes lighting up. Dark clouds were swept away by a gust of wind, and the dazzling brilliance came to the surface. She sat up a little straighter and her sharp aura like a hedgehog’s spikes receded.

“Thanks Nikolai. I don’t think there’s much to be done without medicine now. I’m going to rest first.” She strolled over to the chalk, blocking it from the others. If some of her movements weren’t jerky, you wouldn’t be able to tell she was so heavily injured.

Hale forced himself to calm down and carefully manipulated the chalk as inconspicuous as he could. He wanted to search for an appropriate open coordinate and send an SOS message through a smart device in the lounge but was thwarted. It seemed that they had a jammer or an equivalent somewhere.

So he wrote the closest coordinates he knew—the vehicle parking area by the city entrance—and other details Katharin needed. For example, the estimated area for the spell to work on, which included this room and the connecting medical bay because some adult captives were in the recovery pods there.

Katharin followed his movements and he hoped reading the illegible was part of a main character’s repertoire. Because this really looked worse than the chicken scratches he made when he first used a fountain pen. Thank the Creators they had ballpoints here.

Then he ended the writing with a crooked “NOW”. One look at her face and it was clear she understood what he meant. But whether she would follow through was yet to be known.