Sungmin finishes up the last sigil. He went with blue and yellow chalk this time.

He steps back, wiping the chalk off his hands with a nearby rag.

“When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll probably be repeating the Sigillum Dei sigils over and over again like a madman,” he mutters to himself. “God knows I’ve drawn them enough.”

He flips open the journal again, checking the next line. Looks like Kyuhyun already scribbled down his message that he’s ready for –

That’s odd.

There’s a jagged line of ink running off the page.

Sungmin his head to the side. This doesn’t feel right.

He claps his hands together, brushing off the usual burst of power and flickering lights, and quickly runs through the incantation. The glowing chalk splashes blue and gold light across the walls.

He waits for the usual blue smoke to curl from the floor.

Nothing happens.

Did he fumble a sigil or a word in the incantation? He sweeps an eye over the Sigillum Dei sigils, but they all seem to be correct.

He narrows his eyes and claps his hands again. The burst of power brushes past him. He carefully, slowly enunciates this time, and watches the chalk light up.

A second goes by before the chalk light sputters out like a short-wick candle.

Still no smoke. Still no Kyuhyun.

Sungmin frowns. The Sigillum Dei is correct, the incantation is correct, his ritual is correct.

The problem must not be on his side.

Someone else must be interfering. The Sigillum Dei is a very tightly woven summoning circle, and the spell inhibiting it must be extraordinarily powerful.

“It must have tripled wards, a sealed lockdown, and no defensive safety sigils in order to bypass the basic Dei overwrite,” Sungmin mutters. “And it probably wasn’t authored by a particularly well-intentioned magician, either.”

He studies the messy inkblot dragged down the journal page closely. He may only have met him a few days ago, but Sungmin knows one thing for certain. Kyuhyun isn’t messy.

Sungmin swallows. There’s only one conclusion he can draw about this situation, really, given the evidence.

Kyuhyun is in trouble. And lots of it.

But what can Sungmin even do about it, if he can’t summon Kyuhyun here through the most powerful summoning circle in the known magical world?

Sungmin sets his jaw and grabs the nearest piece of chalk. If Kyuhyun can’t come to him, then, by god, he will go to Kyuhyun.

He dissipates his Sigillum Dei into a cloud of chalk dust with a sharp cut of his hand. He coughs and sneezes through it, dropping to his knees on the hard cement floor and scribbling frantically.

Time to skip from harebrained, scholarly magical theory right into test subject field experimentation.

Sungmin draws the outer lines of a Dei circle, but adds in particularly aggressive hell-banishing sigils near the center that should make his destination perfectly clear. He writes in Kyuhyun’ last known transport coordinates in three different magical codes just to be safe, and a formulaic, automatically triggered anti-constraint once transport is complete so he can move about freely once he arrives. He adds in an ironclad return trip and a few protective force fields just to cover all of his bases.

“Right. That should do it. Theoretically.” Sungmin stands up. “Now for something to deal with the... climate.” He looks around the workroom for something, anything he could use as a protective talisman. He grabs a pen, empties out the ink, puts in a bit of water, a small bit of his hair, and, most importantly, air. He carefully copies down the series of symbols that he used for Kyuhyun’ pocket watch on the length of the pen, and they glow and sink into the metal when he finishes.

There. This pen should protect him from hell’s toxic environment by surrounding him with a copy of this dimension’s atmosphere. He clips it into his shirt pocket for safekeeping.

With no other preparations to make, Sungmin steps into his hastily made transportation circle and claps his hands together. The hum of power and flicker of the lights means it’s working so far. That’s promising.

Sungmin feels a bead of cold sweat drip down the back of his neck. This has never been done before. Well, it hasn’t been done by anyone who’s lived to tell the tale, anyway.

Sungmin takes a deep breath.

Kyuhyun needs his help.

He firmly incants, “O mysteria potentior universi. Dimittite me, ut alia re, per hunc circulum. Misit me ad Inferos.”

The chalk circle he’s standing in begins to glow white and pink, and the workroom shivers and warps around him, swirling and spinning closer and closer until it him in like water eddying down a drain.

Wind whistles through his ears and his stomach swoops as if he were falling off a cliff. And yet, when he looks down at his feet, they seem perfectly grounded. He can still see the shimmering pink and white chalk circle from his workroom floor, even as he sees a squiggly, swirling void whipping past him at impossible speeds all at once for miles in every direction.

Lines of vibrating light rumble past him in slow motion, curling through the squiggly void and cocooning him into a long tunnel pointing straight downwards.

He peers down, but it’s too dark and indistinct down there. With lights all around him, it’s too bright to really see what’s waiting for him. He coasts downwards on his transportation circle until he touches down at the very end of the tunnel.

The smooth floor dips under his weight, eerily similar to the bob at the end of an elevator ride. Then the glowing circle burns into the carpeting, and the void shivers and warps until it settles into a nondescript but well-to-do office hallway.

Sungmin blinks and straightens up. It seems to be over. He’s in hell. Seems a bit more clean and drab than he was expecting, really.

He looks around and spots a door down the hall. He wal