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"Are you alright, Hector?" said Abbas, standing quite close to him now, right in front of the big glass orb.

Whoa. Hector hadn't even noticed most of those steps. His immediate memory of Abbas walking over here was like a slide show.

Okay. Maybe he was trying to do too much here. He decided to cut that one thought process some slack and abandon the organization effort for now.

Not that it was trivial to do so. The Candle's memories were their own brand of invasive. He had to "lock" them away in a kind of vault within his own mind, away from his conscious attention.

Thankfully, he knew of a mental technique that seemed perfect for the job--one that Emiliana Elroy had told him about. "Sto," she'd called it. A mental storage technique.

He'd tinkered with it a few times ever since she'd explained how it worked, but he'd never actually found a use for it. Until now, that was.

His head cleared up almost immediately. Which kinda surprised him, actually. Prepping Sto on the way here had been the right call, it seemed, even if it had made the flight a bit more turbulent at various points.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just, er... have a lot to process." Hector motioned toward the glass. "Show me."

Abbas still looked like he had about a dozen more questions for him, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he pulled a metal slab out from behind his back and handed it off to Hector.

Hector just kind of took it without even thinking. What even was this? Wait, a heater shield? With a checkerboard pattern? What the--?

The glass orb lit up with a soft glow.

Oh, Abbas was just going now. Hector paid close attention.