1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

--Arthur C. Clarke

Kepler stared at the pile of brick and steel and concrete that used to be the headquarters of Section Thirteen for a very long time before the two kind agents led him away. Funny how he couldn't recall their names right now. He sat on the other side of the relief tent with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, watching them lean against each other in their chairs, each relying on the other to keep him upright and not be swept away in grief; he knew the feeling. Gone... years of work, blood, sweat, and tears, but also quite a bit of triumph, laughter, happiness and practical jokes... all of it gone in a matter of hours in something he couldn't even explain.

A dragon had done it. Really. Kepler couldn't believe it himself- he wouldn't have if he hadn't seen the green-skinned firebreather himself. For the past five years, he'd dismissed some of the rumors that had gotten around Section Thirteen as just that- rumors, or superstition, or flights of fancy of the little Chan girl.

Oh, that was another thing that was gone! Not Jade, of course, though she had been in the middle of it and had nearly bit the dust several times throughout the ordeal. But she wouldn't ever again bother him while he was working in his lab- he didn't mind the breaks in the day when she would try to present some sort of "magic" he couldn't explain, or try to steal his inventions. He was honestly shocked that he wasn't murdered, fired, or deported after she took his jetpack for a spin, though the fact that Black couldn't seem to design a security system strong enough to stand up to her probably mitigated circumstances. But his lab was gone, all of his projects melted or ground to dust under the rubble. The ideas, the concepts behind them, lived on in his head or bumming around the servers as backups, but it was going to be very hard to replace it all.

But he would replace it- that was what science is, after all. Everything you do can be redone, either by yourself or by someone else. It wasn't magic, where some things could only be done on a Tuesday in July by the light of the full moon.

Kepler stared hard into his cup of coffee. It was magic, maybe- the magic that worked. He had spent all that time building and testing and tearing down for ideas and parts, and magic had gone through again and wiped it all away. It was impossible- improbable. Kepler frowned as he realized he was going to have to get used to that word.

Yes, it had been magic. But magnetism had once been magic, and electricity still seemed that way to the majority of people in his experience. So had been grass growing, or birds singing, or apples falling down instead of up. The magic of medicine, the magic of flight, and the magic of the slimy things in the bottom of the pond- when you boiled it down, they weren't magic at all.

Maybe this was like that. Yes, maybe- no! Not maybe! It had to be! The world didn't have sets of laws for special people or circumstances- there was no law for the rich that wasn't different from the law for the poor. That was why he had joined Section Thirteen in the first place! Everything and everyone had to play by the same set of rules, and really, they had only just begun to figure out what those were; maybe this was just another unread page in the rulebook- until now.

Kepler sat down his tepid coffee and reached for his briefcase; in it were the few precious things that he had grabbed from his lab before the attack. Ha- no long weekend away from the lab for him now. Or rather, a very long one, with plenty of time to think about things.

He pulled out the red spiral-bound notebook that was the birthplace of his better recent ideas, opened it to a blank page, and began to write.