Unease and worry kept Yamaguchi from sleeping. He didn't know the prince in the slightest, but certain parts of his writings struck a chord. What did the prince mean when he wrote about dreams? What about episodes, or consultations, seeing things? Perhaps the prince was ill, or mad. Maybe the emperor and his wife were right in their dismissal of their son's worries. Were they hiding him away because he was unstable? Maybe the royals sent away with the young Tsukishima's journals, so the kingdom did not lose faith in their rulers. Was the young prince the bloodthirsty one, bent on doing away with his family and blaming it on a weakened kingdom? The thoughts kept Yamaguchi restless with confusion and guilt for doubting the prince's testimony. Unable to stand it any longer, he brought out the box again.

It was empty now; Yachi had expertly wrapped and sent the journal off for delivery to the Futakuchis not three hours before. Still, for his sanity's sake, Yamaguchi felt around the bottom of the box, searching for anything. Much to his surprise, he found an inconsistency in the box's lining. A long rectangle of silken fabric at the bottom was just ever so slightly smoother than the rest, newer than what it should be. A false bottom, perhaps? Yamaguchi had to know, had to at least try and figure out what was going on. Grabbing his knife, Yamaguchi sliced open the inconsistent cloth to reveal varnished mahogany. On the left side of the panel was a grove, and using it as a handle, Yamaguchi pushed the wooden slat aside.

Sitting in the bottom of the secondary chamber, was yet another journal, this one far more worn than the espionage diary. Eager for more information, and filled with an extensive morbid curiosity, Yamaguchi risked a look. The handwriting was far messier than in the spy diary; the words simple and language less formal. It was to both disappointment and interest that Yamaguchi realized this journal had been written by a child. The first twenty or so pages were unintelligible, more akin to scribbles than words, but after that, things got interesting.

The journal detailed a series of extremely vivid dreams and hallucinatory episodes, as well as the prince's reaction to them. At first, or at least by age eight, when his writing was finally legible, the prince thought he was going insane. He went to his parents and older brother, convinced he was dangerous, but as time went on, his tune changed. His dreams and visions became less problematic, easier to see coming, and less intrusive upon his daily schedule. They also became far more vivid. Vague symbolism very suddenly made a switch to extremely realistic scenarios. Often, the dreams would show themselves in reality, an imagined trade deal and treaty suddenly seeming like déjà vu. It wasn't until the prince was eleven that he seemed to understand what was happening to him. If prince Tsukishima's journal was to be trusted, he saw his brother dead in the gardens. But the elder prince wasn't dead, and moreover, wasn't yet in the garden at all. He urged the guards to check the area around the gardens, and sure enough, lying in wait for a royal to walk by, was an assassin. It was the young prince who thwarted the first attempt on his brother's life. The youngest Tsukishima, and his hallucinations. His visions became ever clearer, ever easier to identify and enforce or prevent. The emperor and empress agreed that their young prince had been blessed by the goddess, just like the kings of old. Originally, they had hidden him away, trying to protect him from what the peasantry would demand of a mad prince, but now they hid him for another reason. The young prince Tsukishima Kei was a synergist, and that changed the tune of every decision ever made by the empire.

Hastily stuffing the dream journal in his pillowcase, Yamaguchi all but sprinted to the library. Were synergists still nothing more than a fantasy from the old days, or was the prince telling the truth? From the writing in the espionage journal, it seemed that the Iron Wall knew of the prince's visions, and they trusted in him even more than his own family did. Yamaguchi had only skimmed the book on synergists he had found, but perhaps it would provide further insight. If Tsukishima was telling the truth and not actually insane, then all previous motives for the war were moot. Maybe it wasn't a fight about trade routes and aid, maybe it was a fight for control over the weapon that prince Tsukishima could turn himself into.

The book was in the same place that Yamaguchi had left it, tucked between two much larger tomes and just as plain as before. Yamaguchi grabbed it from its resting place and sat himself under the sole lamp in the car. Skipping the introduction, he flipped straight to the section on synergy in kings. Even in the old days, foresight was a rare gift, but the book specifically detailed that the ability was unusually prevalent in the Tsukishima dynasty. Especially in second-born children. It was hereditary, then. Notes had been scribbled in the margins of the pages, written in a far more understandable recent dialect. They were theories from archivists and monks alike, recorded instances of presumed synergists.

Records of wars, as recent as one hundred and fifty years ago, that were fought not over land and resources but synergistic royals and peasants alike. The margin-writers made note of the loss of human magic over time, but insisted synergists still remained, unseen and in wait, perhaps even unaware of their skills. There was heavily documented proof of each type of synergy, extraordinarily skilled healers, military officials who never seemed to burn no matter how high the siege fires, fishermen who never drowned and always survived storms, in fact, the only synergists whose existence was in question were those who worked with machines. The margin-writers argued amongst themselves in written word up and down the section on mechanical synergists. Back when the text was written, very few people cared for the fallen artifacts, anyone who could repair one was likely labeled magic. Were they true synergists or just engineers? Supposedly only the isolated monastic kingdoms knew the answer, and no one loyal to the kingdoms dared share what they knew. The last bit of information spurred Yamaguchi anxiously to the shared quarters of Kenma and Kuroo.

Yamaguchi shunned the rising sun as he ran to where he knew Kenma and Kuroo to be; sleep be damned, he needed answers. Yamaguchi pounded on the door without any breaks, trying desperately to wake the two while he caught his breath. After about a minute, the door was opened by a bleary-eyed and shirtless Kuroo. Yamaguchi ignored the implications of the bruises on Kuroo's neck as he muscled his way into the room and held up the book about synergists, "I need answers, and I need them, now."

Kuroo grunted, shook Kenma until they woke up, and ran his hand over his face and through his somehow worse bedhead, "Freckles, you better have a damn good reason for waking us at ass-o-clock in the morning."

"Prince Tsukishima is a synergist." Yamaguchi blurted, throwing away all plans of decorum.

"Oh. Ok? Why do you know this? Why do we care?" grumbled Kuroo.

As quickly and concisely as possible, Yamaguchi explained what he and the others had figured out the previous night. "-but there was a second journal, the younger Tsukishima is a synergist. The kind that sees into the future."

"Premonators," Kenma helpfully supplied, "they're called premonators."

Still heaving with panicked exertion, Yamaguchi looked between the two former Koma-Nek residents, "You're from one of the monastic kingdoms, Koma-Nek; this book says you and Kar are the only ones still familiar with synergists. I need everything you know."

Heaving a great sigh, Kuroo resigned himself to an early start and began talking, "That book you have contains pretty much all the public information the monastery folk know about synergists, anything new is written by scholars in the margins. Whatever you read in there is true, mostly."

"And mechanical synergists? There's nothing but conjecture about them."

"They're real." Kenma said, finally sitting up from their laying position in bed, "They're real but pretty impossible to find. That book is right in saying they're uncommon."

Yamaguchi pulled up a chair and sat, staring intently at Kenma. Realistically, information on mechanical synergists was useless, but he couldn't help but hope. Yamaguchi had never had formal training with machines; it was all trial and error tinkering. The thing was, though, that he never really hit the error portion of the learning process. Sure, there were some things that took him a while to figure out, but he always got them in the end. It was stupid and self-centered to think he would be special enough to be a synergist, but the suspicion was there. The people in the town had always called him a wizard with machines.

Kenma looked Yamaguchi dead in the eyes, and analyzed the scant hope that shone there, "The alarm system never malfunctioned, you know."

"What?"

"The smoke pipes, they should have gone off, and the alarm system wasn't supposed to shut off until I turned it off from the control room. I never did flip that switch."

An inkling of excitement welled up in Yamaguchi, he didn't want to get his hopes up, but still, "What are you implying, Kenma?"

"Ever since you broke onto this train, it's been running perfectly. We haven't had a single malfunction, except for the one that benefitted you. You knew how to fix the alert system that I had broken just by looking at it; that's not a normal thing for a mechanic to know, Yamaguchi."

"Wuh- uh… Those are just coincidences; besides I'm used to fixing unfamiliar systems, layover from being a scrapper mechanic. You've got to be a quick learner out there."

"Tell me something, Yamaguchi, Akaashi's arms, how do they work?"

"Well, they're spring-loaded mostly, with some hydraulics for smoothness of motion. You can tell by the sounds his arms make when they move."

This time, it was Kuroo who looked confused, "What noise? Akaashi's arms are as quiet as a mouse, if they weren't so shiny, no one would know they were, well, mechanical."

"See?" said Kenma, almost smugly, "Those are not normal mechanic things to know."

"Well, maybe I just have really good ears?" suggested Yamaguchi.

"I know another synergist when I see one, Yamaguchi."

"Another?"

Kenma looked forlornly at their hands, "I used to be a mechanical synergist, like you. The thing about it, synergy, is that you can overwork yourself. Put too much energy out at once, and you'll lose it forever."

"I don't- I don't understand," mumbled Yamaguchi.

"As a synergist, your life force reaches out and connects with certain things. It could be fire, or water, machines, or fate itself, but something in our soles intrinsically latches onto those aspects, intertwines us. It's a connection, a symbiotic relationship between the universe and us. Use the power in small ways, to figure out a machine or request it not kill you, and the universe will respond, so long as you ask nicely. I did not do that. When Kuroo and I got this train, we didn't buy it. We stole it from a junkyard; it wasn't running then. But we were desperate and needed a fast escape that could also make us money. I used my synergy in too large a burst; asked too much from the universe. I forced the entire train into functionality, coerced it into running on no fuel with broken parts. It worked, and I kept it up long enough to fix it and get everything registered, but it drained me. We are but human; we have no right to make demands from the universe. In the four years since then, my connection with machines has been severed. They no longer respond to me as they used to; I am nothing more than human now." Kenma spoke with little regret, they had made their choice, and it had worked out for them. Perhaps they did miss the ease of mechanics as a synergist, but they seemed to have long since come to terms with their mundanity.

"So, moral of the story; don't push it?" Yamaguchi asked, trying simultaneously to lighten the mood and wrap his head around Kenma's story.

"Essentially, yes. Just don't try to force the impossible to happen on a large scale, and you'll be fine. I think the machines like you more than they ever did me anyways." Kenma chuckled dryly, the closest thing to a laugh Yamaguchi had ever heard from them.

"As for this prince of yours," Kuroo started, more worried about politics than personal revelations, "he sounds like he's in trouble. Wars have been fought for access to oracles before, I've got a strong inkling that our reclusive Tsukishima is in over his head."

"Yeah, I figured as much, especially since the snake has lost control over Tsukishima's journals." Yamaguchi grimly stated.

"You know who would love to know about this? Bokuto. Come on, If the Nekarasi is going to stage a rescue mission for this premonator prince, the whole crew better be in the know." Kuroo was right; Yamaguchi had dragged the Nekarasi into this political mess, he might as well make use of the people at hand.