Fusion-A

Half of the Arcane Syndicate's Twin-Cell is a tall, striking figure in resonance-silver who opens every working the pair performs — and who has, like the other half, declined since the third semester to answer to the birth-name the Syndicate file still lists. The teachers stopped using it. Everyone calls them Fusion-A, and they prefer the designation to a name, on the grounds that a name implies a person who can be considered alone, and that is precisely the thing the Twin-Cell is not. They are striking enough that the Syndicate's recruiters wanted them on the demonstration bills; they declined that too, with the same even courtesy they decline almost everything.

Fusion-A is the opening-side of the Echo Array school: they begin the working, set its phase, and trust Fusion-B's quarter-second offset to close it. Inside the casting they do not hear their partner — there is no signal, no glance, nothing an observer could point to — and yet the next shape always arrives exactly where they left room for it. Alone, Fusion-A is a capable but unremarkable battle-mage. In the array, they are half of something that the Syndicate's senior researchers have spent a decade failing to write down: a single intention expressed in two bodies, sharp enough at full resonance to cut a problem in half before it finishes forming.

The Meroveil imperial court would very much like to borrow the Twin-Cell, and Fusion-A's chosen method of discouraging this is to be so exhaustively, tediously cooperative that the interested councillor loses the will to continue — answering every question in full, including the ones the councillor did not want answered, volunteering clarifications no one requested. It is working. The attendance has dropped from weekly to every other week. Fusion-A counts this as progress; their partner counts it as 'their way of doing what I am doing,' and the two of them have agreed, in a meeting the court is not party to, that neither half goes anywhere the other half does not.