>>766619You think back to your time with Huitlapan. You imagine him running on a wheel. He can keep at it for quite the long time, having built up a respectable cardio routine.
>>766621Truth chuckles. "Yeah that's the trouble with being as skilled as I am."
>>766622>>766624"Check this out," Truth says. She flips to the front cover, where you see Kirk's class schedule penned out. The two schedules, in your copy and hers, could not be more different; yours is packed to the gills, and full of overlapping timeslots committed to multiple classes at the same time. The one in Truth's is rigorous, but sensible for a serious student of higher math and computer engineering. They do, however, have one commonality – an hour dedicated to Theater class, on all seven Cycles of the week, all at 9 pm.
"If anything," Truth answers Qhapaq. "It seems like it updates as Kirk explores. But, for some reason, he's now leaving behind two very different records of his time here. I wonder if, should I make another Alter, yet another different string of notes would be left behind."
>>766623You see that Kirk's study of programming is quite in-depth, stepping beyond ordinary, simple applications of randomness and into serious cryptography and theories of security practices. Were he to study this in Ironcastle, he could almost certainly hope to receive job offer letters from firms dealing in private security, detective work… maybe even the Lux Deorum.
But something else catches your eye. Some of the marginalia drawings don't appear to have been done by Kirk's hoof or horn. These others differ in color choice, the depth of stroke and thickness of line… was someone else drawing in his notebook? Truth seems an unlikely suspect– in this matter at least…
The subjects of these other drawings are of placid, ordinary life at the school. Lunches, school gardens and greenhouses, trails for biking and walking, horizons… horizons which bear peculiar aerial phenomena you don't recognize…
>>766620https://youtu.be/bePduDlbwnAAt the invocation of the word, 'Alter'… Images and scenes visit you in memory, juxtaposed and conjoined as they are in any dream, connected by a thin logic. You recently went home to Ponyville, and saw your parents and brother there. Now he's enrolled at your school– little surprise with grades as good as his. Some time later, you fought alongside a duplicitous, yet desperate lagomos named Mogao… who with a staff fashioned after a mythical icon called Moon, conjured apparitions from Agatecastle's tattered past. Apparitions that looked like your allies, all subtly different.. and a little time later, you saw many other such apparitions at the festival you attended with Mogao and Antlers… against whom you had been fighting not too long ago…?
These disparate, haphazard, slapdash storylines are all close at hand, conjured by that word, Alter.
Yet.
You never heard the word 'Alter' used to describe this phenomena at all.
Yet.
Here it all is.
And– this Truth lady's starting to look oddly familiar.