"Hi, Luz, hi, Amity!" Hooty shouted as they approached.

"Hey, Hooty," Luz said without looking at him. She opened the door and led them inside, closing it behind them.

"Hmph, rude," Hooty said through the door.

Amity followed Luz through the living room of the Owl House, holding her books to her chest. Her eyes roved across the odds and ends lining every inch of the walls. It didn't matter how many times she walked through Luz's home, she always saw something new and strange.

"They're up in my room, c'mon." Luz led the way through the back of the house and up the winding, rickety stairs. Luz stopped halfway up, let out a yelp of surprise, and pressed herself up against the wall. "Watch out!"

Amity's eyes widened as King plummeted down the staircase riding on an upturned garbage lid. He shouted, "Gang way!" over the horrible banging noise of the lid on the stair runners. Amity leapt aside just before he passed, getting winged in the shin. The lid careened sideways into the opposite wall and dumped King out, who went tumbling the rest of the way down the stairs. The lid landed on his head with a clang. "Again!" he cried.

"Ah, son of the Titan!" Amity hissed, lifting her leg and rubbing the sore spot.

"You okay?" Luz asked, jumping down a couple steps to meet her. She frowned in concern. "That's your bad leg, isn't it?"

Amity let out a breath as she wiggled her ankle, then set her foot back down on the stair. "I'm fine, I think." She tested putting her weight on it, then nodded. "Yeah, it just stung."

Luz let out a sigh of relief, then glanced down to the landing. "You okay, King?"

"I will be, as soon as the house decides to stop spinning. You hear me, Hooty! Knock it off!"

They heard Hooty shout back from the distance, "It's my mud puddle, I found it, and you can't take it away from me!"

King dragged himself up, rubbing his head. "Well. That was stupid and dangerous. Get out of my way, I'm gonna do it again."

"Don't you have something to say to Amity first?"

"… Hi, Amity?"

Amity cracked a smile and rolled her eyes. "Hi, King."

Luz giggled and shook her head. She looked back to Amity, concern returning to her expression. "You sure you're fine?"

Amity nodded. "I might get a bruise, but that's it." Luz turned and continued up the steps, with Amity following. Her smile fell to a neutral line and she rubbed her chin. "I don't know why you called it my bad leg, do I do something weird with it?"

"What?" Luz glanced over her shoulder with an eyebrow raised. "Um, I meant that that's the leg you broke at the Grudgby match."

"Oh. Yeah, it was. So what, is that some sort of human expression about bad luck, getting hit somewhere you were hurt before?"

"Not really, it's more just … I guess in the human realm, if you break a bone, you don't always recover from it all the way and the leg or whatever doesn't work as well as it used to." She opened the door to her bedroom. "It might not be as strong, or you might have to walk with a limp. I guess that sort of thing isn't as common when you have healer magic."

"Huh. Okay, yeah, that makes more sense why you'd call it a bad leg. Anyway, it's all the way healed now, it's like I never broke it."

"Nice, I won't worry about it then." Luz pushed her pillows toward the wall and sat at the head of her bed. She rummaged around on the lid of a chest behind her headboard, then patted on the bed spread next to her.

Amity felt her cheeks warm up as she walked over and awkwardly sat down. She shoved her thoughts about being on Luz's bed out of mind and tried to focus on the muffled crash that came from the hallway. Luz handed her a crinkly, yellowed newspaper sheet.

"That's the boring issue. And before you ask where the rest of it is, I dunno. They only had that page."

Amity looked it over carefully. The emboldened title of Hexside Herald filled up the top of the page, with the date written in small runes underneath it, declaring it was an issue from early in the dry season, fifty-odd years before. Below the title, a grainy, faded image of the Grudgby field filled up half the page, followed by the headline Banshees' Winning Streak Goes to Twenty.

She glanced down at the main text, skimming through it. "The article any good?"

"Eh. Might be cool if I knew who any of the players were. Maybe they went on to be pros or something. Are there pro Grudgby players?"

Amity gave her a bewildered look. "Yeah?"

Luz held her hands up in surrender. "Hey, don't look at me like that, long-term visiting human over here."

"Right, sorry, it just still catches me off guard sometimes. Maybe instead of sorry, I should say lo siento?" She gave Luz a questioning smile.

Luz laughed and nodded. "Nice, you remembered!"

Her smile widened. "Okay, good. Did I say it right?"

"Pretty good pronunciation for a blanca." A beat of silence passed. King smashed into something downstairs, then laughed maniacally. "… Don't worry about what that means."

"You're making fun of me in Spanish, aren't you?"

"Just a little." She flashed a grin. "Anyway, look at the back page, it's mostly ads, but it's got the printer on it, too."

Amity returned her attention to the newspaper. She flipped it over to what served as the back page of the paper originally. It was in fact filled with ads, mostly personals and classifieds from different students fifty years before. She felt a mischievous smile grow as she looked through it. She pointed at the lone ad with a picture on it. "Want to find out if this bike's still for sale?"

Luz chuckled. "Worth a shot, it's probably vintage, might be worth a ton of snails now."

Amity ran her finger along the bottom line of the page, leaning in to read the fine text. "Printed by Bonesborough Publishing Services." She frowned in thought, picturing the rough spot in town that the listed address was in. "I think I know which clothing store this place turned into."

"Not really my style of stuff, from what I could see through the window. Recognize the name of the printer?"

"No. It is a pretty generic name. Might still be around, though, that area of town isn't really known for manufacturing stuff, those shops all moved to around the Conformatorium after it got built."

"Any way we might be able to find it?"

Amity spun her finger and caught her scroll as it popped into place. She slid it open and poked at the surface. "… Hmm … okay, maybe? There's a place called Bonesborough Publishing Services that's open still, according to their penstagram page. It might be the same place." She scrolled down, still reading. "And they are over by the Conformatorium. It's at least a start." She spun her finger and her scroll vanished.

Luz sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. "I really gotta get me a scroll. I can barely use my phone at all anymore, and even if I could connect to the human internet still, it doesn't connect to the Isles' magic network."

Amity squirmed in place, thankful another rush of noise from King bought her a chance to think for a moment. "Erm … not everyone has a scroll here, don't feel bad that you don't." Her tone lowered further, and she muttered, "They can be pretty expensive."

"Eda's just still used to being a wanted criminal," Luz said dismissively. "She doesn't trust scrolls. She'll come around one of these days, though, then she'll let me get one."

Amity opened up the folded over single sheet of the paper and looked at the first and last interior pages. The last one was mostly full of other classifieds, plus the end stub to an article that Amity guessed was about some student getting caught cheating. The first page had a story about the choosy hat causing trouble, and the start of an article bidding farewell to a teacher who was retiring.

Amity let out a breath and shook her head. "I really know that I should be arguing for the value of newspapers and everything, but you're right, this is boring."

Luz snickered. "Right? Even if it was about people we knew, who cares? Anyway, if you don't wanna be bored, check this one out." She handed Amity a second newspaper.

The dimensions of the pages were smaller compared to the single sheet of the boring issue, and the paper itself was thicker. The whole issue had been kept in much better condition as well, even beyond having more than one page to it. It had still gone yellow and brittle, but there was some bend left to the pages and the ink looked sharp and dark. "Wow, you can really tell that someone kept this safe for a long time."

"Yeah, Eda was right, they're kind of a collector's item. The boring one was just a couple snails, but that one was fifty."

Amity's brows shot up. "Fifty snails? For a newspaper?"

Luz shrugged. "It's a collector's item!"

"I guess …" She shot Luz a glance from the corner of her eye.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'm just … planning on paying for the ice scream for both of us the next couple of times we go."

Luz snickered. "Hey, I'm allowed to waste my money however I want to, and I thought it might have some important stuff in it for us. Stop looking at me like I'm psycho, I'm planning on selling it again later, I'm not gonna start collecting a bunch of old, mean newspapers."

"Sorry, I don't mean to judge or anything, I just … can't really imagine spending that amount of snails on something like this." Amity shrugged and returned her attention to the first page. "If you end up not being able to sell it for the full fifty, I'll split the cost on it with you."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know. But I'd like to." She read over the rogue paper's header, which declared Hexside Herald the same as the original, in a slightly different, looser font. The date was written out in words instead of runes, the issue hailing from roughly a decade later than the first. The headline story stated Principal Bump Accepts Bribe From Emperor's Coven. An image of Bump filled most of the page below the words. In the image, he looked almost exactly the same, as if he hadn't aged a day over the previous forty years. Amity's eyes widened. "Whoa."

"I told you it was pretty brutal." Luz grinned. "It's full of stuff like that. Some of it'd probably be cooler if I knew who the heck anyone was, but it's still pretty cool."

"And it's all true? What was Bump bribed over? Did he get in trouble for it?"

Luz shrugged. "The article's a little wishy-washy about it, but it sounded like he got bribed to push for the school to make changes to the coven tracks. If he got in trouble, I dunno, I asked the demon at the shop if he knew anything about it and looked at me like I was crazy for asking. I thought it was because it was either super obvious that he did get in trouble and everybody knew it happened, or that I was just asking him about something that happened forty years ago and it was stupid for me to think he knew anything about it." She rubbed her chin and frowned. "I guess if you don't know it means it's the second one?"

Amity shook her head with a smile. "I suppose it's silly for me to be asking you if you knew, so don't feel too bad. I just don't think a lot of people know about this period of time." She looked down over the page and her smile faded to a thoughtful frown. "We are talking about things happening on the Isles forty years ago specifically, so there are some things we can make guesses about."

"Oh?"

"For one thing, Emperor Belos hadn't been here for that long and the coven system itself was still pretty new. Witches adopted it quickly since it was passed down directly from the Titan—"

"Allegedly," Luz interjected.

"Allegedly passed down from the Titan," Amity said, rolling her eyes. "But adopting it and integrating it were different things, and there were arguments over how to do it." She deepened her frown, skimming over the article itself. "… If I had to guess what the bribe was for, I'd think that it was to change the rule to make it so students couldn't study different tracks at the same time."

Luz frowned, rocking her head side to side in thought. "Huh. What makes you guess that?"

"A couple of reasons, honestly. Bump was very quick to give up on that ban after the Greater Basilisk attack, I find it hard to accept that he actually believed in the rule in the first place if he was going to just cave in like he did, so it would make sense if he got bribed into doing it in the first place. Plus, the tracks themselves have been around for hundreds of years longer than the coven system has been, but there wasn't a rule about not studying different tracks at the same time back in the wild magic days, so that was something that had to have changed. I don't know when exactly it changed, but it makes sense that it could've taken a while. There are arguments under the coven system for either method."

Luz leaned against her headboard and rested her chin on her fist. "Yeah, I guess so. If you've got the whole coven thing where witches seal off their other types of magic, you could say it doesn't make sense for them to bother studying other magic in the first place."

"While gaining a base level of knowledge and experience in multiple forms of magic would give many witches the opportunity to discover what they're best at before they need to commit to a specific field of magic."

"Preaching to the choir here, Amity."

"… I have no idea what anything you just said meant."

Luz giggled. "Human saying. You basically explained one of the main reasons why I wanted to study all of the tracks."

"Well … yeah. That's what I was doing." Amity grinned at Luz. "I do pay attention when you talk, you know." She flipped another page of the paper, past an article of a teacher she didn't recognize getting caught stealing chalkboard erasers, and she skimmed the words without really reading anything. "Anyway, I could be totally wrong, the bribe could have been for something else. That just seems like the most likely reason."

"I can't believe how smart you are sometimes."

Amity flinched in surprise and flashed an embarrassed look. "Luz!"

"What? It's true! You looked at the page of a newspaper that's more than twice as old as us and came up with that theory in, like, two minutes! Don't pretend that isn't super impressive."

Amity shifted in discomfort, feeling her cheeks warm up. "It isn't like that, I've been kind of thinking about that stuff with the tracks and Principal Bump since the Greater Basilisk attack." Her blush faded and she frowned. "It's weird, you know? A lot of things around the coven system are weird, and nobody really questions any of it, it's just … how things work." She shrugged, waving her hands in the air. "It's how things work, right up until you think about it for two seconds, and then none of it makes sense at all anymore."

"Well … yeah. It doesn't have to make sense if it's the will of the Titan." Luz wiggled her fingers as quote marks. "Then it's just how stuff works, because the Titan said so." Amity opened her mouth to object and Luz held up her hands to halt her. "We're getting off track, I think. I was busy complimenting you, not getting into an argument about politics."

Amity huffed through her nose, then nodded. "Okay. And I will just take the compliment. Thank you, Luz, that was nice of you to say."

Luz grinned and rolled her eyes. "You're welcome! Anyway, I don't really know if there's a way to find out for sure if all the stuff in there actually happened, but I'm not sure it really matters, either."

"Yeah, it probably doesn't matter very much. We can operate under the assumption that it's all true, or at least had enough in it that was true that the faculty reacted the way they did, but that doesn't really answer any of our questions about the printing press." She flipped through the newspaper, skimming each page as she passed. The interior sheets had been protected from the light better than the outside, with the yellowed paper fading to an almost clean gray toward the middle. It was filled to the brim with actual articles, and nearly every article had some secret to spill about someone connected to the school. She got to the final pages, frowned, and squinted.

The last two pages of the newspaper were laid out in a grid for classified ads of different sizes and fonts, but the text in each one she looked at read exactly the same. 'Don't want to appear in this newspaper? Don't get caught. —Hexside Herald'

Amity smoothed the paper out and shook her head. "You were right, this is anything but boring." She handed it back to Luz, who set the paper down on top of the trunk. "And I didn't see anything about printing on it, either, but I didn't spend that much time looking at it. Seems like it's the same size and type of paper as how we first found the printing press."

Luz nodded. "Yeah. I think it's pretty much just like what we were thinking it was, where the original, normal paper got printed by this Bonesborough Publishing place, and after they stopped and the new, weird paper came along, they used the printing press, wherever it came from." Luz frowned and shook her head. "Not that any of this helps us figure out where it came from, anyway."

Amity sighed and nodded. "You're right, it doesn't. We at least know that there wasn't something super obvious we missed, though, and that issue was cool to see." She gave Luz a lopsided grin. "Maybe not fifty snails cool to see, but still cool."

Luz grinned and nodded.

"And we do still have somewhere to look next." She popped her scroll back again and refreshed the penstagram page for the printing shop. "I don't know how much they could tell us, even if they are the same shop that printed the original paper, but there might be something we can find out. We're assuming that the rogue paper started out being made on the printing press, but that might not be true. Maybe they started out the same as the original paper, but got in trouble and had to figure out a different way to get it printed once the teachers started to get angry. It might have even started out as a normal paper, then over time changed into the sort of paper that publishes stuff like that." She looked at the address on her scroll, then let out a long sigh.

"What's up? Are they, like, not open today or something and we have to wait?"

"No, they're open. They're just far enough into town that I don't think we're going to have time to get ice scream, too."

"Well, darn," Luz said with a giggle. "We'll have to get ice scream tomorrow then. C'mon." She got up off her bed and stretched, then offered her hand for Amity. Amity took it and let Luz help her up. "Let's go check the place out before it gets any later." She paused at her door and grimaced. "Um. You might want to hang back for a sec, I'm gonna open this really carefully."

"Huh?"

"I dunno if you noticed, but I haven't heard King on the stairs in a while, and that's either a really good sign, or a really bad sign."

Amity tried to hide her smile, then stepped a few prudent paces back from the door. Luz opened it slowly, then peered out into the hallway. After a moment, she gestured and they both headed out of the room, got to the top of the stairs, and stopped.

King lay in a heap at the bottom of the staircase. The garbage lid was dented around his head with his good horn poking clean through. "Don't be alarmed," he wheezed. "It can't look half as bad as it feels."

Luz sighed and put her hands on her hips. "Have anything to say for yourself, mister?"

"Again." He raised a shaky claw in victory, then let it fall to the floor and groaned