There was an ongoing and vicious debate online as to whether her game run-throughs were magically assisted, but she swore she never used her powers while gaming. I’d been among the skeptics until I watched her beat the original Super Mario Brothers in under five minutes. ‹Did you make any progress on those gaming manuals?›

‹I think it’s a lost cause. Nobody reads the manuals these days. Everything’s online. And the manuals have some of the same limits as comic books: too many pictures, not enough active reading. It’s a shame. I wanted to see what a 1UP mushroom would do in the real world.›

‹Better than the fire-flower you were working on.›

‹Says the man with the flaming spider.›

I double-checked Smudge, but he was resting peacefully in his cage. ‹Where are you at with the IAS Project?›

‹Ready for a trial run. We’re just waiting for FCC approval.›

Natural disasters were one of Talulah’s obsessions. In addition to working to predict and detect them more quickly, she’d been developing a tool to give people as much advance warning as possible. Her proposed International Alert System was intended to broadcast to television, radio, cellphone, even things like hearing aids. An extra five minutes’ notice could save thousands of lives.

Before I could respond, Charles Brice strode into the room and took a seat at the far end of the table. “How long’s this gonna take, Isaac?”

When I’d first heard that a Nebula award-winning science fiction author would be joining my research team, I’d been ecstatic. That feeling lasted until approximately thirty seconds after meeting him in person.

Most libriomancers had an arrogant streak. Playing fast and loose with the laws of the universe had that effect. But Charles took it to an entirely new level.

Part of his problem was that he’d worked as a Porter researcher for twenty years, and wasn’t thrilled about having to report to an upstart half his age. I was pretty sure he thought he should have been put in charge of research at New Millennium. The fact that I had to supervise and sign off on his research was weird to me too, but he took it as a personal affront, and never passed up the chance to catch me in a mistake or undermine me in front of the team.

His wife and frequent co-author Jodi was far more pleasant. She had no magic of her own, but had been living on site with Charles for the past four months. The last I’d heard, she was close to finishing up a solo project about libriomancers fighting off a colony of mutant vampires from Venus.