Cid Harley, Emily, and Double-A are sitting in Cid's trailer in the halcyon remnant, with Double-A once again examining the ring through a hologram projected from her left eye. Emily likes to present herself as an outrageous idiot, but even she isn't stupid enough to use a malfunctioning artifact without making sure it's safe to do so; it's been slow work over the past month and a half, but Double-A has examined it enough that she finally has an answer.

    "And you mentioned that it sort of stopped time semi-locally immediately after this Higashikata character repaired it?" says Double-A.

    "Yep," says Emily.

    "Okay," says Double-A. "Seems like that was a one-off kerfluffle." She shrugs, and tosses the ring at Emily, who catches it easily this time. "We still aren't going to be able to repair it any further than it has been, buuuuut if it stops you from overusing your magic, I'm gonna give you the go-ahead to use it."

    Cid frowns at her. "What's the danger of overusing her magic?" he asks. "Or are we still talking about the Greater Eudaemon 'synchronization between magic and self' thing?"

    "Yes," says Double-A. "The short answer is 'we don't know, that's the problem.'"

    Emily plays a 'badum-tss' sound effect. "All righty then," she says, and the ring clips through her finger before settling into place. "Lessee ..."

    The world within the trailer inverts colors for a split second, and Cid and Double-A become frozen. "Now," says Emily, her voice faintly muffled, and she steps up and kicks the chair back. It freezes in place the instant her foot is no longer in contact with it. "I --"

    The world abruptly inverts colors again, and everything goes back to normal. The chair resumes falling over and hits the floor.

    "Now what?" asks Double-A calmly.

    Emily does a double-take. "Wait, you could see while time is stopped?" she says. But then she grins. "Nice, I can be even more extra with it than I thought!"

    There's a knock on the door. "Come in!" says Cid.

    Cal pokes his head in. "Hey, uh, what's going on?" he says. "There was this weird ... effect ... around the trailer just now." A group of other Eudaemons and a stray short stubby Machine Lifeform are worriedly peering in from outside.

    "How big was it?" asks Double-A, who's sort of slipped into scientist-mode.

    "Uhh ..." Cal shrugs. "I wanna say ... twenty feet? Twenty-five, maybe?

    Emily twirls the ring. "Well, now we know the size of the area of effect!" she says.

    Cal furrows his brow. "Huh?"

    "I," says Emily, raising the hand wearing the ring, "can now ..."

    Nothing happens. Emily frowns and waggles her hand and twitches her finger a few times. Double-A facepalms, but at that exact moment the timestop-effect goes off again.

    "Whoops!" says Emily, and time resumes again.

    "Whoa, what!?" Cal stumbles back, and everyone who'd been in the area of effect jumps in surprise.

    Double-A adds her other hand to the facepalm, and projects a hologram that says "x2 FACEPALM Combo!"

    Emily grins. "Uh, this malfunctioning piece-of-shit ring can stop time."

    "Warn us next time!?" says one of the Eudaemons outside who'd been caught in the effect.

    "No promises," Emily says cheerfully.