Ultimately the wards were gridlike, ordered, and therefore easily surveyed for something out of place, which at first glance was nothing. The six of them had designed the structure of the security system in a spherical globe, within which a tightly woven fabric of magical defenses cloaked the Society and its archives. Physical entry would be easily repelled by the shell of altered forces surrounding the house, while intangible magical entry was readily sensed by the internal system of woven, fluid sentience.
How, then, had Eilif managed to slip them in order to wind up in his sink?
Probably best to check the pipes.
Nico closed his eyes with a grimace and examined the house’s plumbing, feeling at the edges for the warps of magic he recognized as his own, or possibly Libby’s. In terms of magical fingerprints, their signatures were almost identical; a consequence of similar training, perhaps. Nico felt another bristle of guilt or irritation or allergies and shrugged it away, trying to focus more, or possibly less. Intuitively it didn’t matter which specific element of magic belonged to him. Libby’s or his own, it would respond just as obediently, mastered by the skill regardless of the hand that cast it.
Sure enough, upon closer inspection there were numerous bubbles and blemishes, little bastardizations of security from what Nico could feel around the pipes and then, upon further scrutiny, between the layers of insulation in the walls. Not enough to prevent a person from emerging corporeally through the cracks—compression was a difficult task, requiring enough energy to set off the house’s internal sensory wards before any conceivable success of entry—but for Eilif, or for some other creature attempting entry? Possibly, if what Reina said about refinement of power was true. It wasn’t as if air ducts or other methods of entry had never been neglected before, and in this case, Nico could feel the way the house’s infrastructure strained beneath their wards, corroded by magic and hard water and whatever else eroded metal over time. He wasn’t much of a mechanic, but perhaps that was precisely the problem. The medeians elected for the Society were academicians, not tradesmen, and they certainly weren’t chosen for their efficiency at knowing when an old house required maintenance. Sentient though it may have been at times, it was still a physical structure, and Nico’s element was physicality. Perhaps this was always meant to be his （or Libby’s） responsibility to maintain.
Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable. Nico would simply have to repair the areas where the wards were weakened, reinforcing them with custom bandages where they may have waned and warped.
Whether his remedies would hold would be a matter of adhesion, which was… slightly difficult, but hardly impossible. Nico would simply bend back into shape what he could and then cover up what he could not.
Distantly Nico was aware he was considering something Gideon would deem “irresponsible”—or possibly it was Libby calling it that, and Gideon was standing somewhere over her shoulder in Nico’s head, grimacing in agreement. Max would not care either way, which Nico foggily pieced together was something he positively adored about Reina. He could go and grab her now, he thought, considering that the extra burst of energy he seemed to consensually borrow from her might be wise to have at present, but at the disastrous implication he might have been behaving unwisely （“Something stupid,” Libby irked snottily in his head） he promptly nudged the idea away, flicking it aside with a twitch of dismissal.
So what if he overexerted himself, just this once? His power was renewable, easily replenished. He would be sore for a night or three and then the discomfort would pass, and no one would have to know the mistake he’d made initially by overlooking it. If Libby lorded it over him that he was more tired than usual, so be it. It wasn’t as if he was much use in the realm of time, anyway. He had no interest in fountains, youthful or otherwise.
The bristle of recalling his current uselessness was enough to secure Nico’s decision. He disliked the anxiety of listlessness, which was as constant to him as Libby’s unrelenting undercurrent of fear. Fear of what? Failure, probably. She was the sort of perfectionist who was so desperately frightened of being any degree of inadequate that, on occasion, the effort of trying at all was enough to paralyze her with doubt. Nico, meanwhile, never considered failure an option, and whether that was ultimately to his detriment, at least it did not restrain him.