It has been a busy month. And by "busy," I mean it's been a complete and utter dumpster fire for anyone who is a magician
With magic on a total freeze, the world felt like it had been collectively slapped across the face. It's exactly like having your credit card frozen by the bank because of "suspicious activity" except the bank is a group of cosmic janitors, and the "suspicious activity" was Kai treating a deity like a rechargeable AA battery. Suddenly, everyone's trying to swipe their metaphysical plastic, and the universe is just flashing Declined. Insufficient Funds.
Predictably, this made things considerably harder. It turns out that when you spend your life using magic to tie your shoes or make coffee, you tend to forget you actually have hands. Watching a room full of master magicians struggle to operate a manual can opener was, in Kai's professional opinion, the funniest thing to happen since the invention of the levitation spell. They'll live, though. Or they'll starve to death staring at a can of beans. Either way, it's a win for entertainment.
The most interesting part of this little recession was the magical creatures. Just like in the series, the vampires, and the monsters were still chugging along just fine.
It's all about the hardware. Magical Creatures are born with a built-in battery, a core that stores and generates its own juice. They're off-the-grid.
Human Magicians however are basically solar panels with ego problems. They absorb whatever magic is floating in the atmosphere or the surrounding nature. It's a more powerful way to play the game, sure, but the risks are... well, spicy.
Then, of course, there's the whole "burning yourself out" thing. Kai had spent a good portion of the month pondering the mechanics of Niffining out, and honestly? He thought the whole thing was a bit too dramatic.
"I mean, really," Kai muttered, poking at a dormant ley line with a stick in a graphical representation he conjured up in his head. "It's just basic physics. You overfill the container which is the soul with more ambient magic than it was ever designed to hold. The soul starts to crack, then it starts to smoke, and eventually, the container melts. And then? Poof. You're reborn as a sentient tantrum made of baby blue light."
To the rest of the world, a Niffin was a tragedy of a lost soul consumed by its own power. To Kai, it was just an educational example of poor cable management. If you try to run a lightning bolt through a copper wire designed for a toaster, the wire is going to give up. Simple as that.
The fact that the resulting "spirit" then spent the rest of eternity being an insufferable, all-powerful brat was just the icing on the cake.
How did Kai know all this? Well, let's just say he'd spent a disturbing amount of time poking at Alice's niffin brother, Charlie, who was still tragically or conveniently trapped in that little wooden box. It's amazing what you can learn when your test subject can't run away.
Back in the real world, things were getting desperate. The Board, as Henry Fogg so formally called those bureaucratic buzzkills, had started rationing magic. They'd sucked up every stray trace of magic they could find, emptying every magical battery hidden in the nooks and crannies of Brakebills. It was a bit of a shock to the system, mostly because the TV show never mentioned the school was littered with AA-Duracell-magic packs, but hey, Fogg's a liar. That's just a Tuesday.
The students had spent the month like caffeine addicts in a world without beans, twitching and hunting for any whisper of a spell. But there was nothing. Total radio silence.
Well, except for the group currently gathered in the Physical Kids' cottage, staring at a very handsome, very relaxed am annoying man sitting on the couch. Kai was lounging there with a pint of blood in a plastic bag, sipping it through a straw while wearing a smile that was statistically designed to be the most annoying thing in the room.
"What? You all don't miss me?" Kai asked with a smile.
Quentin was the first to speak. "Where the hell have you been?"
"Yeah," Alice added, crossing her arms. "You vanished right after the party a month ago. Right when magic went out of commission. We didn't know what was happening until Fogg told us it was a divine intervention and our 'punishment' for what happened to the gods."
Penny scoffed, pointing a finger at Kai. "Yeah, well, the gods deserved what they got. But you? You're a whole other problem. Start talking."
Kai's gaze drifted over to Alicia. She was watching him with that look again. The kind that sent a pleasant, sharp tingle straight down his spine. Then he glanced at Julia. She looked absolutely pissed, which, coincidentally, made her look incredibly hot and made him feel his little Kai grow a tad hard.
"Look, magic got put on a time-out," Kai said, waving a hand dismissively. "But I didn't think it would be such a crisis for you lot. Where's the ingenuity? The grit?"
"You didn't answer the question, Kai," Julia said, her voice dropping into a dangerous low. "What have you been doing?"
Kai sucked on the straw, making a loud, obnoxious gurgling sound as he hit the bottom of the bag. "Well, I was on a very long hold with Customer Service, trying to find out why my 'Reality' subscription was being throttled, but they had me on hold for three weeks." He saw their blank, unamused stares. "No? Nothing? Tough crowd. Fine."
"Believe it or not, I've been working on a World Engine."
"A what?" Kady asked, leaning against the doorframe.
"A World Engine. I've been trying to figure out how to give my prison realm its own dedicated source of magic. A stable supply, a foothold in reality that doesn't rely on the 'Main Tap' that the Plumbers just shut off."
Alice stepped forward, her mind already racing through the mechanics. "That's theoretically impossible, Kai. To create a self-sustaining loop in a pocket dimension, you'd need an Anchor and a Zero-Point. You can't just make energy. You need a source that exists both inside and outside the realm simultaneously to act as a bridge."
Alicia chimed in, her voice clinical. "She's right. You'd need to solve the displacement problem. If you pull magic from a source into a closed system, the pressure eventually causes a dimensional collapse. You'd need a regulator that can handle infinite throughput without burning out."
Quentin's eyes widened as the horror dawned on him. "Wait... for that to happen, for a regulator to handle that much power... you'd need a god, wouldn't you?"
Julia stepped into Kai's personal space. "Kai. What exactly did you do to Ember?"
The sound of Kai nervously sipping at the air in his empty blood bag filled the room. Sluuuuurp.
"Uh... thirsty?" he offered, pointing the bag at Julia. She didn't blink. He sighed, throwing his hands up. "Fine, fine! I have him trapped at the bottom of my realm. He's being... well, 'continuously crushed' is a bit of a dark way to put it, let's say he's being 'compressed' for magic. He's an unlimited source, and since he's connected to the Wellspring, he's basically a living door. He supplies my realm with all the juice it needs by absorbing from his own source which is the universe itself."
He stood up, brushing off his jeans. "And that brings us to why I'm actually back.
Kai stood up. He reached into his pocket and pulled out six stones, cradling them in his palm. They were beautiful, shimmering like blue pearls, but they pulsed with a low, rhythmic thrum that made the air in the cottage vibrate.
In the world of The Magicians, the biology of power is a cruel joke. Humans don't have cores. They are vessels, filters, or if they're lucky conduits. They scavenge for magic like beggars. The only beings who truly own their power are the gods, and even then, half of them are frauds. Take Bacchus and his merry band of idiots, for example. They weren't born divine; they just sliced up the Monster's sister, turned her remains into artificial power sources, and huffed the fumes until they could call themselves "gods."
But Kai? Kai had a god in the basement, a "Plumber" in cuffs, and a god transforming into a jinn in a lamp. He had the ultimate laboratory. These pearls weren't just stones; they were crystallized, stabilized portions of divine essence and the biological blueprints for a core.
"You're all going to swallow these," Kai said, his tone as casual as if he were offering around breath mints.
"What the actual hell is that?" Penny asked, backing away as if the pearls were live grenades.
"This is your upgrade, Penny. It's a seed. Once swallowed, it'll help you develop a core of your own. You won't be a solar panel anymore; you'll be the sun. You'll generate your own magic, and it'll grow the more you use it and the more ambient junk you absorb from the air."
Alice leaned in, her scientific curiosity fighting with her common sense. "Why haven't we heard of this? Why is this suddenly an option?"
"Because normally, it's a death sentence," Kai said with a bright, terrifying smile.
"Why?" Alice pressed.
"Well, the core is designed to constantly suck in magic from the surroundings. It doesn't really have an 'off' switch. Usually, the influx is so fast it would liquefy your internal organs before your body could adapt. But since the Plumber, the person who shut off the magic has decided to put the universe on a magic diet, the flow is at a trickle. It's the perfect time to install the hardware while the electricity is out. By the time the lights come back on, you'll be sturdy enough to handle the surge."
Alicia looked at the blue pearl, then back at Kai, her eyes searching his. "Is this safe, Kai?"
Kai shrugged, his face a mask of comical honesty. "How should I know? It's not like I'm a sociopath with a God-complex, I'm also not a doctor. We won't really know until you swallow it and the real experimentation begins! That's the fun part of science!"
Kady looked at the pearls skeptically. "Are you sure this isn't just a very elaborate way to get us all hooked on supernatural meth?"
"Please, Kady. If I wanted to get you high, I'd use something much cheaper than a distilled deity. This is artisanal, small-batch divinity. Much classier."
Julia stared at the pearl. She was tired of being powerless. "What the heck," she muttered, reaching out. But before she could grab one, Penny lunged forward, snatched a pearl, and downed it like a tequila shot.
Everyone froze. Even Kai blinked.
"What?" Penny asked, wiping his mouth. "I'm tired of being a spectator."
Kai's smile widened into something jagged. "Oh, nothing. Brave choice."
Seeing Penny still standing, the rest followed suit. Quentin held his pearl up, whispered, "Bon appétit," and swallowed. One by one, the six blue stones vanished down six throats.
"See?" Penny said, crossing his arms. "That wasn't so bad. I don't feel a—"
He stopped. His eyes went wide.
'Oh, wait for it, ' Kai thought, leaning back.
Penny let out a guttural scream, doubled over, and slammed into the floor.
"What the fuck! Penny!" Kady yelled, dropping to her knees beside him. She whipped around to face Kai, her face contorted with rage. "Kai, what did you—"
Before she could finish, her own chest hitched. A look of sheer agony crossed her face as she too collapsed. Within seconds, the entire group was on the floor, bodies arching and twisting as the divine seeds began to tear into their souls to find a place to root.
As the first wave of screams ripped through the room, Kai casually snapped his fingers, casting a high-level silencing ward. To the outside world, the cottage was silent. Inside, it sounded like a choir in a meat grinder.
Kai leaned over the back of the sofa, watching the carnage on the floor.
"Oh, yeah! I totally forgot to mention," Kai called out over the sound of grinding teeth and muffled groans. "Since this is basically a new organ you're growing, it needs to find some real estate inside you. It's going to act like a biological squatter, which means it'll tear and reconstruct your insides just a... well, a tad bit."
None of them were listening. Quentin was currently trying to swallow his own tongue, and Penny looked like he was being turned inside out by an invisible hand.
Kai winced sympathetically, "So, uh, yeah. A little pain will be involved. Think of it as puberty, but instead of hair in weird places, you get a localized supernova in your chest cavity."
He felt a weight on his soul, that specific, heavy pressure that only comes when a very powerful, very angry woman is staring at you. He turned his head slowly.
Julia was the only one still semi-conscious, propped up on one elbow. Her skin was glowing a faint, sickly blue, and sweat was matting her hair to her forehead. She wasn't screaming. Instead, she was pinning Kai with a look of such concentrated, murderous promise that it made his own phantom heart skip a beat. If looks could petrify, Kai would have joined Martin Chatwin as a decorative lawn ornament.
Kai's cheerful smirk faltered. He let out a small, awkward cough and adjusted his sleeves.
'I'm in trouble, aren't I?' he thought. Like, 'don't-sleep-with-your-eyes-closed' kind of trouble.
"Right then!" Kai chirped, backing toward the door as the silencing spell vibrated with the sheer volume of the agony in the room. "I'll just... go check on the Plumber. Let you guys have some 'me' time. Drink plenty of water if you survive!"
He vanished in a flicker of movement, leaving the Physical Kids to the tender mercies of their own evolving biology.