She pulled out the chair and sat down, almost demurely. Why weren’t they talking? They just looked at her calmly, like a parole board.

So. She’d met their expectations. It was time they met hers. Cards on the table. Show me whatcha got. Read ’em and weep.

“All right,” she said. “So what are we doing?”

“What would you like to do?”

It wasn’t Pouncy who spoke, it was Gummidgy. You tell me, Julia wanted to say. You’re the pyschic. She was built like a model, tall and skinny, though her face was too long and severe to be really beautiful. Julia couldn’t place her ethnicity. Persian?

“Whatever comes next. Whatever comes after level two hundred fifty. Two hundred fifty-one. I’m ready.”

“What makes you think there is a level two hundred fifty-one?”

Her eyes narrowed. “The fact that there were levels one through two hundred fifty?”

“There is no level two hundred fifty-one.”

Julia looked at Pouncy, Failstaff, Asmodeus. They looked back at her patiently. Asmo nodded.

“How can there be no level two hundred fifty-one?”

“There’s nothing after two hundred fifty,” Pouncy said. “Oh, you can craft more spells. We do it all the time. But at this point you have all the building blocks, all the basic components, that you’re going to have. The rest is just permutations. After two hundred fifty you’re just rearranging base pairs on the double helix. The power levels plateau.”

Julia had a weightless, floating feeling. Not a bad feeling, but like she’d been cut adrift. So this was it. As mysteries went it wasn’t exactly a showstopper.

“That’s it? That’s all there is?”

“That’s it. You’re done leveling.”

Well. You could do a lot with what she had. She already had some ideas about spells involving extreme temperatures, extreme states of matter. Plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates, that sort of thing. She didn’t think they’d ever been tried. Maybe Pouncy would front her some money for equipment.

“So that’s what you’re doing here. Running the permutations.”

“No. That’s not what we’re doing.”

“Though we have run a hell of a lot of permutations,” Asmo put in.

She took over the narrating.

“Once we realized that the way forward consisted of an indefinite series of incremental advances, we began to wonder if there was an alternative to that. A way to break the cycle. To take the power curve nonlinear.”

“Nonlinear,” Julia said slowly. “You want to find a magical singularity, kind of thing.”

“Exactly!” Asmodeus grinned her wide Cheshire grin at Pouncy, as if to say, see? I told you she’d get it. “A singularity. An advance so radical that it takes us into another league, power-wise. Exponentially bigger energies.”

“We think there’s more to magic than what we’ve seen so far,” Pouncy said. “A lot more. We think we’re just dicking around in the minors while there’s power sources out there that could put us in the bigs. If we could just access the right power grid.”