Hey Diary,

  There was another huge earthquake today. All the buildings here which were still standing… now aren’t.

  I hope everyone in big cities are ok. I mean, if there was this much destruction here, in a town where all the buildings were a little apart from each other, how much must there have been in crowded cities? And yeah, they’ve got people who can keep walls up for the important buildings, but all the little shops and buildings where lots of families live must have come down.

  Tomorrow there’ll be exactly one week left before the super big earthquake. For the earthquake today, I couldn’t even sit up. I can’t really imagine how much worse it could get.

  This morning, the Goddess Bonnie gave churches a scale for earthquakes. Scientists in Raddish came up with a good way of quantifying the earthquakes. Basically, there’s a pen on a very wobbly wire, and when the ground shakes, the pen moves. Then, however far the pen gets from the center, we can see how big the earthquake was.

  Some people pointed out that that scale shows how big an earthquake was. So it’s kinda useless for us. We know how big the earthquake was; we felt it. And saying “yep, that earthquake was big enough to bring down houses” is annoyingly pointless to someone whose house fell down.

  The scale goes from A to Z. Today’s earthquake was, apparently, a J. The big giant earthquake will be an O, according to the priests.

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  I don’t know. Maeve was pretty excited about the scale thing. She likes science and numbers and lists. She says once we’ve been using the letters for a while, it’ll be fun to look at it and see what each earthquake is rated. And Maki says it’ll help people mentally, knowing that the earthquakes weren’t just scary in their minds; that someone Official saying the earthquake was Officially Scary is very validating and good.

  I do understand that. Having someone agree that what you went through was scary is nice.

  Oh, Maki got psychic magic. He’s a little… loud. Like he doesn’t understand how volume works in telepathy. Which, fair, he just got it.

  My dad has psychic magic, so I’ve kinda been using it my whole life. It wasn’t mine, but from very little he explained to me how all the major spells work. Maki never worked with Dad, so I guess Dad never had to explain to him how all the magic interacts with brains.

  In emergency situations it doesn’t really matter. But having someone shout full-volume “HEY CAN YOU HEAR ME” directly into my brain… hurts. It hurts a little. I might have to explain everything to him the way Dad explained it to me.

  There’s a library here; I wonder if there’s any books on how psychic magic works.

  Or, well, there used to be a library. It’s kinda just a big pile of books and broken shelves now.

  I should still be able to find a useful book, though. If I’m careful. I could always ask a bird to grab the book for me, if it’s in a spot I can’t get to.

  Maki doesn’t really love reading, though. Might be best if I just sit down and talk to him about it.

  Yeah. I’ll go do that.

  Signing off,