After the Ancient One and Tony went off to make their respective preparations, Lynn completely switched off for two days.
He thought about nothing. He put his notebook in a drawer and never opened it once. In Kamar-Taj's dining hall, he slowly finished a whole plate of vegetables and rice, drank two bowls of hot soup, and made up for all the food he had missed over the previous few days.
When Wanda and Pietro came to find him, he was leaning against a stone pillar in the courtyard, basking in the sun. Pietro ran ahead, noticeably faster than an ordinary child, his silver-gray hair blown into a mess by the wind; Wanda followed behind, her steps much steadier than before. Both their faces had filled out a little, no longer as gaunt and hollow-cheeked as they had been in the slums. The siblings wore the plain robes of Kamar-Taj apprentices, but traces of their old selves remained in their bearing. Pietro still had that irrepressible wildness in his eyes, but when Wanda smiled, the curve of her lips was far more natural than before they had arrived.
"Lynn!" Pietro skidded to a stop in front of him. "Are you free today?"
"Yes." Lynn straightened up from the pillar. "What is it?"
"We wanted you to come out with us for a bit." Wanda walked over, sounding less reserved than before, though she still habitually checked Lynn's expression first to make sure he wasn't impatient. "There's a river at the foot of the mountain. Senior Brother Mordo said it freezes over this time of year, so we can skate on it."
Lynn looked at her, then at Pietro, who had already started jogging in place beside her in his impatience, and chuckled. "Let's go."
They spent the entire afternoon playing on the frozen river. Pietro raced across the ice like the wind and fell four times. Each time, before Wanda could reach out to help him, he sprang up and kept running, the knees of his trousers covered in chips of ice. Wanda skated cautiously, sometimes reaching out to steady her brother, sometimes stumbling when he tugged her along. Lynn sat on a large rock on the riverbank, watching the siblings skate farther and farther away without going down onto the ice.
Pietro ran back and tugged at him. "You come too!"
"I can't skate."
"Liar! You can do anything!"
"I really can't this time." Lynn spread his hands.
Pietro kept pulling at his sleeve, refusing to give up, while Wanda stood beside them, smiling without helping him pull or trying to talk him out of it. In the end, Lynn was dragged onto the ice. After two steps, he fell flat on his backside. Pietro doubled over with laughter, and Wanda couldn't help laughing aloud too. Sitting on the ice and rubbing his tailbone, Lynn looked at the smiles on the two children's faces and couldn't keep himself from laughing along.
The next day, he took the siblings to a pine forest in the mountains behind Kamar-Taj. The snow was thick enough to swallow their ankles when they stepped into it. Pietro practiced parkour among the pines, jumping from one rock to another, his movements far more agile than they had been two months earlier. Lynn sat on the trunk of a fallen dead tree, watched Pietro run off into the distance, then looked at Wanda beside him and found her drawing something in the snow with her finger, her head lowered. It was a circle with several irregular lines inside it, looking like some sort of symbol.
"What are you drawing?" Lynn asked.
"I don't know," Wanda said. "There was just a pattern in my head, so I drew it. It might be a rune I saw in a dream a few days ago."
Lynn looked at the crooked figure in the snow. It was a faint, still-unformed trace of Chaos Magic. Unconsciously, she had given the energy fluctuations in her mind tangible form at her fingertips. The Ancient One had been right. Her potential had yet to break through the soil, but it was already growing.
"Nice drawing." Lynn said nothing more.
Wanda glanced up at him, seemingly trying to read something in his expression, but there was only that easygoing smile on his face. She asked nothing, pursed her lips, and lowered her head to draw something else.
Over those two days, Lynn hadn't touched anything related to magic. He hadn't opened portals, conjured fireballs, or used the Farsight Spell to peek at what the dining hall was serving for dinner. He let himself be like a radish pulled from the soil, left out in the wind and sunlight of the snowy mountains, doing nothing at all.
On the morning of the third day, the Ancient One sent Mordo to fetch him.
When Lynn entered the study, Tony was already there. He stood beside the Ancient One's meditation cushion, wearing a dark gray casual jacket with his folded sunglasses hanging from his collar, looking every bit as though he had just flown in from New York. Two things lay on the low table before him: a pair of glasses and an in-ear earpiece.
"The magic array is ready," The Ancient One said.
"Everything's ready on my end too." Tony pointed at the two items on the low table. "The AI we talked about. Not FRIDAY, but a backup of JARVIS. Two terminals, a pair of glasses and an earpiece. You can switch between them for different occasions. The processing core is on Stark Industries' servers, the signal runs through an encrypted channel, and latency is below 0.3 seconds."
Lynn walked over, picked up the glasses, and turned them over. A row of miniature sensors lined the inside of the temples. The lenses were nonprescription, but he could just make out an extremely thin display coating around their edges. Then he picked up the earpiece. Its casing bore no markings, but it felt smooth and warm to the touch, and the curve of the in-ear section fitted the contours of his ear. It had clearly been custom-made.
"FRIDAY is still being debugged. I've written half the code and haven't had time to finish it. Besides, without debugging, FRIDAY couldn't handle the processing load you need. JARVIS is different. I just had to make a copy." Tony said this as casually as if he were explaining why lunch today was a sandwich rather than steak. "JARVIS also has an order of magnitude more processing power than FRIDAY. He'll monitor your nervous system data in real time, predict your processing load based on your behavior, and remind you when to trigger the magic array."
Lynn settled the glasses on his nose and slipped the earpiece into his ear.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Lynn." JARVIS's voice came through the earpiece, exactly as Lynn had heard it in Tony's lab: low and steady, with just the right touch of warmth. "It's a pleasure to work with you."
Lynn took off the glasses, set down the earpiece, and looked up at Tony.
Tony was about to say, "Don't lose them. These two terminals cost..." Before he could finish, Lynn stepped forward and put his arms around him.
It was a brief hug. Tony stiffened for a moment, his hands hovering in midair. Only after two seconds did he pat Lynn on the back, a little awkwardly but very gently.
"All right, all right... one hug is enough. If you lose those glasses and that earpiece, selling you wouldn't cover the cost."
His voice regained its characteristic Stark nonchalance. "Don't think this means I'm canceling your plan to work off your debt."