Jordan said her goodbyes the next morning and went back to her parents. The weekend passed relatively peacefully and uneventfully — or whatever peacefully and uneventfully meant for seventeen young adults, a raccoon, and Maya Torres — and before anyone noticed, the week had come to an end.
When Magnus came down for breakfast on Monday morning, he was blocked at the staircase by girls. Or more specifically, single girls: Valeria, Jasmine, Katie, Tori, and Priya — who was very obviously dragged here by Tori, and even more obviously still texting her ex while standing there.
"Well?" Valeria asked him expectantly.
"Well, what?" Magnus began slowly and warily. "What's this about?"
"Your System, genius!" Tori snapped. "Did it ping any of us?"
"Oh!"
Katie cleared her throat. "We're all single, so if it pings one of us, it'd be less complicated, in comparison to the others."
Jasmine simply shrugged. Priya still hadn't looked up from her phone even once.
"Well?" Valeria prompted again.
"Nothing yet," he admitted.
"Guess it's gonna be complicated then," Priya said, already turning around and walking down the stairs.
They all filed downstairs. Magnus was about to go down as well when Valeria held him back.
"Hang on," she said. "Let them inform the other couples first, then you can come down."
Magnus blinked. He'd never imagined a day when his System's quest target selection would be handled by bureaucracy. Still, he simply sighed and stood back.
Downstairs, Nicole looked up from her mug as the singles entered the room. "Well?"
From next to her, Alex and Sofia looked up expectantly as well.
"It didn't pick any of us," Priya reported.
"So, if any of you don't want to be here, you should leave," Tori added.
Camila, Rachel, and Carmen all looked at their boyfriends.
Miguel shrugged. "We can discuss the details if it comes to that."
"Agreed. Magnus and Alex are reasonable people," Aaron concluded simply.
"Cam and I are experimenting anyway," Ethan announced.
"You two are still on that?" Priya said without looking up from her phone.
"Yes, we're definitely not the most vanilla couple in this beach house anymore!" Ethan said proudly.
Camila puffed up beside him.
Aaron stared at them. "Nobody cares about that."
"We do, and that's enough for us," Camila said.
Jasmine cleared her throat. "So, Nicole?"
Nicole shrugged. "If it pings me, I'll call my boyfriend and explain the situation."
"You sure that's a good idea?" Carmen asked. "If you can't explain the whole System secret to him, or if he doesn't believe it, it'll be like asking him to let you cheat on him. Most guys don't take well to that."
"If he can't even handle something like that, he won't be able to handle other things in my life, most of which are far more complicated than this."
Carmen opened her mouth, then closed it, apparently deciding it wasn't her place to say anything.
"Alright, bring him down, Valeria," Jasmine called up.
A few seconds later, Magnus was finally allowed to walk downstairs. As soon as he reached the first floor and turned toward the dining room, all eyes were on him.
"Well?" Valeria asked again from behind him.
He glanced around the room. "Nothing."
"But this is already everyone, isn't it?" Ethan asked.
"Not exactly…" Aaron corrected him.
"Yeah, but Maya was already last week's target. And targets don't get repeated, right?"
"No." Magnus shook his head. "Not as far as I can tell."
"See?"
Aaron shook his head. "I wasn't talking about Maya."
"Could it be Chloe this time?" Sofia caught on.
"No… it couldn't, could it?" Alex paled.
As if on cue, Maya's voice could be heard before she could be seen, dragging her girlfriend down the stairs. "What are y'all doing this early in the morning?"
Magnus looked up the stairs, heard the familiar chime, and froze. His face paled, his heart was already attempting to exit through his throat when he finally heard the name of the actual quest target:
[Conquest Quest Initiated: Seduce and Sleep with Target — Trần Bảo Ngọc. Time Limit: Complete by Sunday at Midnight.]
Jade walked down the stairs right as Maya and Chloe were walking past Magnus. She stopped a few steps away from him.
"Okay…" she said. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
***
Approximately fifteen minutes and one breakfast later, they were all sitting around the living room table again.
"What's the power this time?" Ethan asked.
Magnus opened his menu, stared at the new power's description, blinked twice, then rubbed a hand down his face. "I swear this thing hates me! It rarely ever gives me things I can understand."
"Well, we have a whole room full of people to help with that, so just read it out loud," Valeria pointed out.
And he did:
[Linguistic Attunement Lv1 (Trial): Through intimate attunement (i.e.: mouth-to-mouth contact), the bearer may synchronize with the linguistic matrices of another, bringing foreign tongues into effortless comprehension and expression. What is shared need not be studied; what is received need not be remembered. Yet let the bearer not mistake borrowed understanding for borrowed wisdom: this attunement synchronizes language alone. Memory, custom, history, and judgment remain beyond its reach.]
Everyone in the room stared blankly at him. Then:
"Language Assimilation!" Jade and Ethan said almost in unison.
All eyes turned to them.
Choruses of "How did you two even figure that out?" and "What does that even mean?" rang out.
Ethan and Jade shared a look.
"It's basically badly translated English," Jade said. "If you know at least two languages and read a lot of machine-translated stuff, you develop a sense for these things."
"Yup, that." Ethan pointed at her. "As for what it means." He turned to Magnus. "Do you also read DC comics—or even watch some of the old DC cartoons back in the 2000s—"
"It means you learn a new language by kissing someone," Jade interrupted him.
"I was getting there!"
"You were taking too long."
"I was trying to build dramatic tension, drawing from examples of—"
"Starfire kissing Robin to learn English?"
"How did—"
"It's not that hard to guess, and you could still have said it after the explanation, like I did just now."
"Okay." Valeria cleared her throat. "That seems like a cheat code. Learning a whole new language just from a kiss."
"Test it out?" Sofia asked. "Any volunteers?"
Jade raised her hand.
Magnus blinked at her. "You sure?"
She shrugged. "We'll have to have sex before the end of the week anyway—being shy about a kiss for scientific purposes now makes no sense."
Jade stepped closer. Magnus glanced at Alex out of habit more than anything else, and she gave him a small nod, entirely unbothered, already watching with more curiosity than concern.
"For science," Jade said dryly, and kissed him.
It was brief. Efficient, almost — the way she seemed to approach most things, without wasted motion. When she pulled back, she immediately said:
"Sao? Nghe hiểu không?" (Well, can you understand me?)
Magnus blinked. The words arrived in his head with an odd double-layered quality — sound and meaning simultaneously, the way English always did, except this wasn't English and a second ago he wouldn't have understood a syllable of it.
"Không hiểu à? Hay hôn chưa đủ lâu?" (You don't understand me? Is it because I didn't kiss you long enough?)
He opened his mouth. The words came out slower than he wanted, like reaching for something just slightly out of arm's length. "Tôi… tôi hiểu. Ít nhất là… tôi nghĩ vậy." (I… I understand. At least… I think so.)
Jade's eyebrows went up slightly. She said something else — longer this time, multiple full sentences with the easy cadence of someone speaking their first language.
Magnus caught most of it. Something about testing further, something about whether he could actually respond or just comprehend. He tried to answer in kind. The words assembled themselves in his head correctly — grammatically sound, vocabulary present — but something about the delivery felt stiff even to him, like he was reading a script rather than speaking.
Jade tilted her head, listening. Then switched back to English.
"Okay," she said. "You understand almost everything. Your pronunciation is actually really good—better than most people who study it for years." A pause. "But you don't sound like someone speaking it, or even someone who's been studying it for years. You sound like… someone new at it—still using the dictionary and very carefully translating everything before reading the translation out loud. Which, I guess, is technically what's happening."
"So I'm fluent but not natural," Magnus said.
"Borrowed understanding, not borrowed wisdom," Jade said, quoting the description back at him. "Everything you said was grammatically correct, but not how a native would say it. But that's true for every language. I used to make a lot of mistakes like that too, when I was learning English at first." She shrugged. "You'll get better with time, and practice. If you're actually interested in really learning the language, save my number—we can chat sometimes."
Sofia leaned forward, delighted. "Okay, this is genuinely useful. Anyone else want to try?"
Nobody immediately volunteered. Sofia waited a beat, then shrugged.
"Doesn't matter," she said. "All the remaining girls in this room really only speak Spanish anyway, so he'll get there eventually. Alex can't go a full day without kissing her boyfriend, so it's just a matter of time."
"That is factually inaccurate," Alex said, already moving.
"Is it, though?"
Alex had, in fact, begun crawling across the living room floor toward Magnus with the shameless determination of someone actively proving a point she'd just denied, when Tori's arm shot out and caught her by the collar.
"No," Tori said flatly, hauling her back. "We are not doing this right now. There are children present."
"There are no children present," Alex said, still reaching.
"There's Chloe," Maya volunteered.
"I'm eighteen," Chloe said. "And I'm your girlfriend!"
"You're still younger than everyone else here, that's basically a child in this context," Maya said unhelpfully.
Chloe narrowed her eyes at her. "Alright. No sex for you for a week, since you consider me a child."
Maya blinked, realizing she'd just shot herself in the foot. "No, Clo. What I meant was—"
But Chloe was already turning away from her.
Alex, meanwhile, made one more valiant lunge, which Tori blocked like she had done this before — which, Magnus suspected, she probably had — and finally settled back with the air of someone who considered her point sufficiently made regardless of the outcome.
Meanwhile, Ethan and Aaron had drifted into their own conversation entirely, which by this point surprised no one.
"So what actually counts as intimate attunement," Ethan was saying. "Because 'mouth-to-mouth contact' is specific, but the description also says 'through intimate attunement, i.e.,' which implies the mouth-to-mouth thing is just an example, not the only method."
"That's a reasonable reading," Aaron said. "Though we don't have enough data to know if other forms of physical intimacy would trigger the same effect."
"Right, so what if it's any skin-to-skin contact with sufficient emotional context? Or what if it's specifically mouth-related but doesn't require full kissing? Like, would a cheek kiss work? Would that even count as 'intimate'?"
"Those are testable variables, in theory."
"Exactly." Ethan turned to Magnus with sudden focus. "Bro. For science."
"No," Magnus said immediately.
"I'm not saying full kiss. I'm saying we should isolate the variables. Establish a control."
"Ethan!"
"I'll even let you pick the variable. Handshake. Fist bump. High-five with prolonged contact. Hugs while we look deeply into each other's eyes. No homo, of course."
"I'm not testing anything with you!"
"Look, I get it, I get it." Ethan raised both hands in mock surrender. "I don't mind hugging you, bro. But no kissing. I have limits."
"You just spent thirty seconds trying to convince me to kiss you."
"On the cheek. And for science. There's a difference." Ethan turned to Aaron. "Right?"
"There is a difference," Aaron agreed. "Whether it's a meaningful one is a separate question."
"Honestly, I don't know if I should be jealous of Aaron at this point," Camila said from across the room, not looking up from her magazine. "You two argue like an old married couple."
"We just have a very strong friendship," Ethan said.
"Built on a foundation of you two arguing about spikeball rules," Miguel noted.
"Every great friendship has an origin story."