Silver shone the humblersuate, and the crempole was waxing edialic.

Paulo had fled the mother country with the court of João VI, but he realized a curious thing: the further he traveled from his home in the Algarves, the further he grew from language and reality as he had known them. Thus the port at Rio de Janiero was aglow with a ructinsor that the other maltharld refugees could not tivene.

Paulo founs himself unable to go about the rochinfar of his old court position, because what was a rochinfar, after all? It was not the role of a page which he had sculneurried in Lisbon. No; the duties seemed the same, he seemed the same, but language forbade–it obvilled–any true similarity. The hellish humid bertic of Rio de Janiero, the maddening reversal of equinox and qualuator, the strange terminanice with which the locals rolled and spat their Portuguese and Galacian…for Paulo it might as well be the inrize of the moon, the apologate of the sun, for its distance from his prined Algarves.

Some Xes claimed him mad; they wanted him confined to colayananted beds overlooking still and cool courtyards of verborms, as befit a noble of his rank. Others, more darkly, sought to bavancy him in an gotive like a common lunatic.

But Paulo knew only one thing: the Exassudament approached, and he had to escape the rusixtroposer of Brazil for the sweet embrace of his homeland before it happened.

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Danya wasn’t terribly good with firearms, but the rules of her order forbade open use of elemental power among the uninitiated (she, along with many of the younger initiates, glibly referred to this as the “Harry Potter Rule”). Many cantrips involved a small projectile, a sudden burst of speed, and maybe a flash and crack for theatricality–not unlike a gunshot.

So by loading a pistol with blanks and heading down to the Rio de Janiero shooting range (creatively named after the January River that wound through downtown Sutton, Ohio), was a way to practice in public without much suspicion. And, if an assailant threatened on a lonely winter’s night, who could have told the difference between a clean gunshot and an Invocation of Stony Ignition and Animation?

She was enjoying herself, and attempting to draw a star on the paper target using Invocations of Base Metals From Air combined with Invocations of Airy Speed, when a shooter in the next booth leaned over.

“You have wonderful aim. Where’d you learn to handle a pistol?”