Isaac held his girlfriend’s hand, the two of them sitting out of the way of James’ diplomatic efforts on the balcony of their own multi-bedroom suite a day into the not-quite-vacation. Which was by itself quite nice, but it was more than just simple affection or taking in the inside-out landscape of the Deep Kingdoms. Isaac’s power only worked on things he was touching, so to reach Sarah’s metaphysical self he needed to be in contact. Something he hardly minded, under the circumstances.Trying to work through exactly what his power was telling him was another issue entirely. It wasn’t like he instantly understood what he was affecting, and how much. He had spent years playing around with materials, weights, and movement to build up an intuition of how much inertia was in an object. When it came to something as esoteric as another person’s talent he really couldn’t tell much of anything.But he had to figure it out, and for the most part he was sure his experimentation would be helpful. It wasn’t like he could suppress her power – or un-suppress it – himself. All he could do was alter resistance to change, but figuring out which resistance and which change was not easy. One approach was to make the initial alteration, caused by the depowerment beam, less of an effort to push back. Since the older suppressor wore off right away, he had thought that would be easier, but unfortunately Sarah hadn’t been able to manage more than a trickle of smoke.This particular exercise was something different. Instead of aiming his power at the suppressor and its effects, he was just trying to make it easier for Sarah to summon her power. That particular change wasn’t the only problem, or else he could have fixed everything easily, but his efforts did have an effect. It felt a little bit wrong to not simply reverse what had been done, but Isaac had cleaned up enough messes to know that you couldn’t necessarily put something (...)