I voted we try and get a study room. We couldn't risk going to the girls' dorms; if we went to our room Zeta and Oka might be there, and that'd mean there was no way we could talk to Jeans. Well, I didn't really want to talk to Jeans but we had to at least wrap this up or the day was completely pointless. Kalei wanted to go to the mall and discuss this over laser tag, which sounded fun but would be expensive and probably wouldn't result in a lot of actual discussion.

So we ended up back at that stupid snowy spot on the train tracks.

"Like, we seriously couldn't think of anything better than this?" Kalei asked. "Laser tag was right there! Come on!"

"Laser tag that costs $89.99 for a party of three, and more with each person," Roux said. "I obviously could have paid with my extraordinary wealth, but I wouldn't want to burden everyone with that kind of guilt."

"Roux doesn't have extraordinary wealth, if anyone's wondering," Kalei said.

"You don't know that," Syval said.

"And you don't have to believe everything Roux tells you," Kalei said. "OK, like for strategizing they have good ideas, but anything about them being rich and/or famous is probably made up."

"Probably! Which means it's potentially true," Syval said.

Kalei rolled her eyes. Before this talk turned into just those three bickering, I had to step in.

"Alright, before we hear this out I just wanna reiterate, if we're doing more of this we have to have more like…I dunno, prep time? Before going into a job like this," I said. "I'm still not sure what we got out of this to begin with."

Jeans popped up, almost like a slasher movie villain as she projected herself outwards. "You showed your current power level, and you did manage to bury a bunch of Sharai in their own ruins, which is oddly fitting."

"Retention sprites of Sharai," I said. "Well, now that you're here, wanna get your story over with?"

She just grinned at me. "You're feisty."

"I am too, and you saw how big my claws are," Kalei said, stepping in front of me as she made my heart skip a beat. "Quit talking to Marmalade like that and just tell us already."

Jeans put her hands in her pockets, a denim jacket. She really took her name seriously, it made me wonder if it was one she got to pick herself.

"The first thing I remember is this old station, Jammin' Tunes," She said. "It's an oldies station that my parents really liked until it shut down. They still have casette tapes of some nights they recorded, just staying up listening to blues and classic rock. A song on that station was playing as I waddled around the living room, looking outside to the night where rain gently fell."

"Waddled? Wait, are you starting at the beginning beginning?" I asked.

"It's the first thing I remember," Jeans said.

"OK, we don't need to start that early," Kalei said. "Unless you forgot, we're not friends, so I don't really care what song you were listening to when you were three years old."

"Can we just skip to the part where you get stuck in a magic crystal?" I asked.

"Fine," Jeans said. "I think my current predicament began when I got a bit more authority for my adventures. I'd always had a short leash, always having some Wildfire Hearts teacher around. I don't want to say keeping me in line because I don't think I've really done much wrong, but someone on hand to keep my imagination in check."

"Wanna share who your teacher was when you captured us?" Kalei asked. "I'd sure like to have a word with them."

"Nope, sorry," Jeans said. "But just after I had my fun with the Starlight Despair, that particular teacher left the school, and I was assigned Miss Corinani. Rem and I started working together more, exploring dangerous and uncharted void nodes, particularly the ones I'd joined together with the power of the Starlight Despair and my helpful power batteries."

"Tch, real rich calling us just batteries," Kalei said.

"I meant the devices themselves, but if you want to feel included in my work, I won't stop you," Jeans said.

"Also, totally bet that 'adventuring' part just means you and that dude were running around making the lives of everyone you ran into worse," Kalei said.

"You'd think I was some kind of barbaric monster listening to her," Jeans said, looking right at me. "It's just like Roux with their stories, don't believe what you hear about me, alright?"

I rolled my eyes, not wanting to give this girl even a centimeter.

Jeans continued, "Oh, and Rem, for those uninitiated, is a Pyre Cani who struggled with his explosive power—literally explosive, he can explode and reform himself—until he began learning at Wildfire Hearts. We made a decent enough team that we got called 'Explosions and Denim' as a unit, which I wasn't the biggest fan of. And sorry if you can hear this Rem, but you are a hothead, and that hotheadedness got us into a mess."

"Laenie's brother," Aira added, her voice a bit soft.

"After I got bored of my practice ruling over a castle, and unchallenged having such a doormat as Corinani watching over me, Rem and I moved onto a new endeavor," Jeans said, brushing over that castle bit completely like it was a normal thing to say. Although if she didn't brush over it we'd have to hear a forty minute story about how she got a castle in the void and made a bunch of retention sprites. I was behind on everything at Rising Shards and still felt like I only understood about a quarter of what was going on at any given time, but the castle and sprite thing was followable at least. "A powerful higher up conjured a full fleet of a space faring faction of Sharai warriors, even recreating their leader, General Blade."

"Most dorky tryhard name ever," Kalei said. "That couldn't have been the real name."

"Oh, she was most certainly real. She had a fleet of 5,000 void ships and would conquer everything she ran into. If her soldiers and ships couldn't handle it, she was stronger than all of them combined. Rem and I took a trip to visit her, wanting to push ourselves past our limits. We got through the sprite army recreation, made it to the general's base on the mothership…and because I wasn't able to strategize when Rem charged right at her, we lost to her."

"So she got you so bad you almost died?" Kalei asked.

"And you didn't go to a rescue facility?" I asked.

"Yes and no," Jeans said. "The void ships they used were leftovers from Blade's real forces. Unbenkownst to the faculty member, there were two Atrian crystals left that no one had claimed. Rem and I were wounded, and each were rejuvenated by a crystal, but unfortunately locked into our crystal's healing dimension since then. Thankfully we ended up…someone found us, but less thankfully we're now stuck in these two."

I couldn't imagine what Aira and Syval were going through. Syval at least didn't seem to have his guy popping up much, but Aira was stuck with Jeans. I hoped my sympathetic look reached her as Jeans kept yapping. If nothing else, I wanted to help get Aira out of this mess, because nobody deserved to have Jeans tethered to them.