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Your grandma hesitates—and from the way her hands seem to hover in midair, you wonder for a moment if she is really considering taking you up on your offer.

But in the end, she turns around and looks you in the eye.

"Thank you, Huknock, but…no. It wouldn't be right," she tells you with an anxious shake of her head. "I know I haven't been open about what I've been doing so far, but now that you're here, I think it's best that you know what's going on. It concerns you as well as me, after all. And—well, I think I need to show you that I trust you, too."

She swallows and gives you a small nod before going back to whatever she was doing before. Eventually, however, she seems to have finished with whatever was distracting her, because she relaxes her shoulders at last and comes back over to where you're sitting.

"I haven't asked you why you came to the forest today," your grandma says, sitting down and pouring herself some more tea, "but I think I can guess the reason. Did you feel it?"

You open your mouth, about to ask "feel what?" But then you realize: Of course. You did feel something emanating from the forest. Something connected to all the malfunctioning electronics.

And it stopped right before your grandma appeared.

"That was you?" you ask, amazed. "You were making all the lights and stuff act like that?"

Sighing, your grandma nods.

"A side effect of what I'm trying to do. Not something I planned for, and even now, it's not something I quite know how to solve. I don't want to risk anything by doing this, either over there or out here. Especially not if…if it means anyone could find out what's going on."

She fixes you with an unwavering stare. She's still being as vague as ever—but you think there's only one thing she could really be worried about people discovering.

"You don't want anybody to find out about the magic?"

She shakes her head emphatically. For a moment, you see her grip the arms of her chair.

"I'm not willing to risk that. If it comes to it, I'd rather take our chances—wait and see if these developments do affect our magic at all—before I risk exposing it to everybody while trying to save it."

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