Liam was leaning on the golden cloud with the posture of someone who has found an extremely comfortable lectern.
"The six types form a circle," he said. "Adjacent types share a border. Opposite types are as different as possible. Everyone has one home type, but nobody sits exactly in the center of it. You lean toward one neighbor or the other, which matters when you're deciding how to train." He looked at the six people in front of him. "Technically you'd need to practice the four basics first before the Water Divination would work. But since I have a more direct method available, we can skip that step."
Shizuku had prepared a glass of water on the table.
Liam looked at Caitlyn.
Caitlyn walked forward. She had not decided to walk forward. She arrived at the table and found her hands extending over the glass before she had formed the thought.
"Pay attention to the sensation right now," Liam said. The voice had a quality to it that moved differently than conversation, slower and more even. "This is Ten. The energy isn't leaving your body. This is Zetsu. Everything closes."
Caitlyn felt the heat she had noticed earlier moving with instructions. Gathering, then tightening, then sealed completely inward.
"And this is Ren."
It expanded. Not painfully. The way a breath expands when you have been holding it without realizing.
"Now release it toward the water."
Her hands moved over the glass and something came out of them. She felt it leave. It was not a large thing yet, just a current of what she had been carrying since Liam snapped his fingers an hour ago, but it was unmistakably something.
The water in the glass changed color. Clear to cornflower, cornflower to the deep particular blue of clear sky seen from very far below.
Claggor stared at it.
"Did it change flavor?" Vi asked.
Caitlyn dipped one finger in. Tasted it. Nothing different. She lifted a strand of her hair and smelled it. Nothing different. Just the color.
"So color change," Jayce said, recalling what Liam had explained about the test. "That's Emission."
"Yes," Liam said. He was watching Caitlyn with an expression Jade, from her perch on his shoulder, clearly recognized. His eyes had a specific quality when a new ability was running: focused, slightly inward.
Through the Moon Mark, Shizuku heard a brief description in her ear of something Liam had put together in the last few minutes. Enhancement, Emission, and Manipulation, running simultaneously, feeding a small stream of his own aura into the target's field and reading the response intuitively. With Caitlyn's Star Mark already in place, even the injection step was pre-done. He was calling it Aura Reading.
"Your base type is Emission," Liam told Caitlyn, "but your natural tendency sits between Emission and Enhancement. Closer to Emission, but the other direction is accessible. You're not limited to one."
Caitlyn considered this. She had assumed Conjuration, if she was honest with herself. The idea of materializing exactly the equipment she needed whenever she needed it had seemed obvious. But Emission meant something she could send outward, project, control at a distance. Something that did not need to be held in her hands to be directed by them.
She looked at her hands and thought about this for a moment.
The others went in order.
Jayce's glass filled. The volume increased visibly, the surface rising until water ran down the outside. He stared at it like it was a successful experiment result, which it was. Enhancement. Direct, physical, building-oriented. Everything about this was consistent.
Vi stepped up already skeptical.
The water's taste changed. Just the taste. She took a sip without being asked, made a face, took another sip to confirm.
"Transmutation," Liam said. "You change the properties of things. Including your own approach, your own methods. You adapt." He looked at her. "You expected Enhancement."
"I hit things for a living," Vi said.
"Enhancement strengthens what you already are. Transmutation changes what things are into something else. The hitting is the method, not the point." He looked at Aura Reading, at where her tendency sat on the circle. "You lean toward Enhancement from Transmutation, which means the raw physical output will always be there. But your ceiling is creative, not just strong."
Vi looked at the glass of slightly wrong-tasting water and said nothing.
Claggor's water turned a different blue than Caitlyn's. More toward the green end. Emission with Enhancement tendency, about a third of the way across the border. He accepted this with the calm of someone who has just been told something that explains several things about himself that he had never managed to articulate.
Mylo's glass moved. The impurities drifting in the water rotated toward his hands, then toward the center of the glass, then toward his hands again, in a pattern that read as questioning the instructions. Manipulation. Shifted significantly toward Emission.
"Manipulation with range," Liam said. "You're going to want to direct things from a distance. Control without requiring close contact."
Mylo looked at this assessment and appeared to simultaneously agree with it and resent that it was accurate about him.
Then Powder stepped forward.
Shizuku picked up the glass and held it at arm's length. This had not been announced as a protocol change. It was simply something she had decided to do.
The water exploded.
Not violently. It dispersed outward and upward in a spray that caught the light and turned it into something: red mist and blue mist simultaneously, moving in opposite directions from the same center, drifting in the air of Jayce's apartment like the moment after a small and extremely colorful celebration. It was beautiful in the way that things can be beautiful when they are entirely unexpected.
Powder looked at the mist hanging in the air.
"Specialization," Liam said. His voice had the quality of something he was being careful with. "Specialization doesn't follow the standard rules. It doesn't fit the hexagon model. It does its own thing, and what that thing is can't be predicted from the type alone. The abilities that come from Specialization are unique. Nobody else will ever develop the same one."
The mist was settling. Red and blue, thinning into the air.
Mylo opened his mouth.
Vi turned to look at him.
Mylo closed his mouth. Then he opened it again, looked at Vi's expression, assessed the distance between them and the probable force of the correction, and said: "Fine. Fine. I wasn't going to say it."
Vi hit him anyway, with the efficiency of someone who felt the statement had already been made.
"Why are you Transmutation?" Vi had been staring at nothing in particular for a few minutes. She had her fists in front of her, looking at them. "I was certain I'd be Enhancement."
"Enhancement is what you use," Caitlyn said. She was not looking at Vi. "Transmutation is what you are."
Vi looked at her.
They had ended up standing next to each other without deciding to. Caitlyn had her arms folded, looking at her own hands. Between the two of them was the shared and slightly uncomfortable recognition that they had each just been shown a version of themselves that they did not previously have language for.
Vi saw it in Caitlyn's posture: something direct underneath the composure, a quality of commitment that preferred results to process.
Caitlyn saw it in Vi's expression: something precise underneath the impact, a calculation happening behind eyes that looked like they were just being angry.
Neither of them said any of this. They looked at each other for a moment and then looked away.
"What about the rest of it?" Jayce had been patient, by his standards, for approximately four minutes since his Water Divination result. "The energy in the air. I can still feel it. That's not what you just taught us, is it."
Liam tilted his head slightly.
The ambient field of this world was different. He had been feeling it since they arrived. The Piltover air had a density of purpose to it, a concentration of something that moved like natural energy but had been shaped by centuries of active engagement with it. This world had mages. It had systems. It had a whole history of people who had spent their lives studying exactly what Liam was sensing and had built frameworks to describe it that predated anything in his own world's recorded knowledge.
The blank natural system that he had stumbled into barely two years ago, that the HxH world had no name for, was a category here with subcategories.
He thought about the magic research center that the stories described: the island where the greatest minds of this world had gathered to map the arcane. The Blessed Isles. The place that was now called something else. That had been called something else for a long time.
It would have been fascinating. Unfortunately, catastrophic things had happened to it, and he was not the kind of person who could work around that.
"Ask a mage," Liam said to Jayce.
Jayce stared at him.
"There are things I can't teach you about this world's magic better than someone who's lived in it." Liam pushed off the golden cloud and stood, clapping his hands. "Anyway. It's getting late. Anyone want to show us around the lower city?"
The cloud turned out to have opinions.
The four from the Undercity climbed on without incident. Mylo went last, muttering something about being a "test case," and sat down on the golden surface without falling through it. He looked at his own hand, then at the cloud, with the expression of someone whose self-concept has just been confirmed in an unexpected venue.
Jayce stepped forward.
His leg connected with the cloud's surface and went through it.
He stepped back. Looked at the cloud. Tried again. The same result. The cloud had a calm quality about this, the way an old bouncer has a calm quality about people who don't get in.
Liam looked at Jayce with the expression of someone who has been a teenage boy and remembers what that is like and is not going to say anything out loud about it.
He raised one hand and let natural energy shape itself into something useful. Wind gathered around Jayce, lifting and directing, not the cloud's judgment but something purely mechanical and uninterested in moral evaluation.
"Jump," Liam said.
Jayce jumped off the balcony and was immediately carried on a current of shaped air, moving toward the bridge, trailing the cloud above him.
Caitlyn watched them go from the balcony.
The cloud moved across the Piltover sky with four people on it and one person suspended below it by a column of directed wind. It crossed the bridge. The lower city opened below them, its grays and greens and the sounds that came up from it even at this distance.
She turned back to the empty apartment.
The experimental housing was on the bench. The water glass, the one she had used, was still on the table, still blue. The small crystal Liam had created from nothing was sitting next to the ones that had always been there, indistinguishable from them.
Liam had said: tomorrow, same time.
She would be here.
Caitlyn stood on the balcony for another moment, looking at the sky where the light curtain had been, then at the sky where the cloud had gone. Then she turned to face the apartment again, and everything she had learned in the last few hours arranged itself in the only way it could, into something that required a response.
Emission. Enhancement tendency. Practice the basics. Pay attention to what the energy does when you point it somewhere.
The future Enforcer clenched her fists.