Her antennae flinch in a mix of both frustration and honor.
"Invasion," she address, "sir."
"I think you're right. That sounds like a shard of Ohrine, but one that uses mana dampening as its source magic."
"How does that even work?" she asks.
"It's a long story," Invasion Minion explains over the line. "But Ohrine, as the legend says, could use any kind of magic in any form she desired, and it drove her crazy with the knowledge that she gained from it."
"Which I know perfectly well, thanks," she snips back as she eyes around the dark corners of the place with a new-found alertness. Once she's done with the goggles she'll be able to see as well as Mime can.
"My hypothesis, Scout, is that there's so much "free radical" mana inside of that place right now that a person can simply will magic into existence, albeit in a form that's unexpected," Invasion explains.
"Like… nothing," Scout replies.
"Nothing?" asks the voice on the other end of the line.
"Yeah, man, it's nothing at all," she says, finishing up her goggles and finally pulling them over her face.
Suddenly, the world Scout sees transforms. Long, deep neon runes glow blue, pink, green, orange, purple, and red all around her as the entire building pulses with pure, infectious wild magic—magic that has been left without an owner or a cause for what could have been thousands upon thousands of years, saturating this facility to the brim until it was entirely unrecognizable.
She glances over at Mime Minion, taking in the suit of armor he's wearing, the heavily enchanted arcane rifle slung over his shoulder, and the spear and sword at his hip, he's been crafting this stuff the whole time.
Scout puffs a sigh of embarrassment. "I guess everyone has something to teach you," she mumbles.
"What was that?" asks Invasion Minion.
"Nothing. Hey, we're gonna take care of this, alright?"
"Are you sure it's a shard? You know we have a team for that. There's no doubt it's going to be highly charged, and if it's conscious, it will probably have a mastery over its magic that you won't be able to compete with if you're just now being introduced to it."
She glances back, squinting at Mime Minion. For the first time in quite a while, she feels that unique twinge of admiration when someone has a distinct advantage over her as a peer.
"Actually, I think we're gonna be alright. We'll keep you on speed dial, but we're taking care of this one."
There's a pause over the radio, and everyone knows that's a bad sign when talking to Invasion Minion.
"…We need to assemble the shard exploitation team, Scout."
She flinches. "Dude, sir, n—"
"I'm calling them in. They'll be there in about two minutes," he responds.
Scout laughs. "Bet. We'll have this whole thing wrapped up with a bow by then." She says with a smile as she picks up the radio and walks with the headset, nodding to Navigator Minion to continue on with him.
"That's untenable," he adds. "And he would not accept it."
"Love you too. Bye," Scout says hurriedly, clicking off the other side of the radio.
Navigator Minion mumbles as he keeps pace with Scout. "Did you just hang up on Invasion Minion?"
"Sure did. If he cares so much about it, he can come down here and sort it out. But he won't. He'll be up there drinking tea and complaining about us go-getters as usual," Scout says, tossing the invisible radio aside, only for Navigator Minion to barely catch it.
"Right, let's carve these apes!" she says with a pumped-up grin, using an old dragon kin phrase for when one's about to do something both exciting and easy, which certainly does not have historical connotations to when roving dragon kin clans would eat whole towns of humans. She turns to the others. "You coming?"
Mime Minion gives a happy thumbs up and hurries to join them. But Explorer Minion takes a moment to look up from his hands.
"Of course," he says, a frenzied glare still in his eyes.
The world of the ziggurat is a different place. With the goggles on, she can see pathways that seemed unreal at first.
Where she once saw walls, she sees passageways, and where there she saw passageways, she sees traps.
She sees light cutting through all forms of darkness. In a certain way, it reminds her of that one time she and a few other minions broke into Galac-Mall and played some neon mini-golf before Chaos and all the Minionry were banned forever, which, if we're being honest, didn't take long considering things always seemed to break when they were around.
The pathway is clear to see. There are plenty of distractions, plenty of things that are not the source, but it's like a pulse emanating from a heart— nerves that lead to a center.
It's as if all the magic originates in a wave from a single source, and she can now see that path. She looks over to Mime Minion, who points the same way she's thinking about going.
She nudges him gently with her elbow. "Good thinking, dude."
Mime Minion gives her another happy thumbs up, and they continue into the correct passageway.
In only a minute of walking through these arcane chambers, they find the source of this grand, millennia-long disturbance.
The source of the darkness that their enchanted eyes cannot see through without the assistance of their own spells or goggles appears to be a massive feathered skull.
"There it is," Explorer Minion says under his breath. "And it will be all mine," he adds under his breath as his breathing picks up.
"What the hell? That's the shard?" Scout Minion asks.
"According to the stories, they can take just about any form they want, right?" Navigator Minion asks as Explorer Minion begins looking very intently at Mime Minion.
Mime Minion hesitates for a moment, looking a bit uncertain. Deep in the room, they can see the shard's power sealing off the passageway using nothing but the raw power of its imagination and free-floating mana.
She steps forward, but hits an invisible wall.
"What… the hell?"
"Oh, that?" Explorer Minion cackles. "I made an invisible box."
Scout pauses with a dull look. "Okay," she says, "neat?"
"Now, stay there and I'll take care of this shard, thank you," Explorer Minion says with a gentle, disturbed chuckle.
"Uh, no. Let me out," Scout says as Mime Minion begins looking over Explorer Minion carefully.
"What… are you doing?" Navigator Minion asks as he taps his knuckle on the invisible box that's trapped the three of them.
"Getting what's mine without you all meddling in my affairs, of course! It chose me!" Explorer Minion explains as he begins stepping up to the feathered form of the shard.
"Hey! Let us out right now, dumbass!" Scout yells, only to be met with the insulting cacklings of Explorer Minion.
She's about to start using the really nasty "gamer" words on him when Mime Minion raises his head and glares a little differently at Explorer Minion.
Scout Minion's never seen that look on him before, and rightfully so. No one in Towerne has seen that look on Mime Minion. He walks through towards the shard, completely undisturbed by the box.