"Why not?" Valentine said, grinning even more broadly. I was starting to dislike the man, and this after such a good start. "Won't it keep time-"

"Obviously not," I said, pointing at the zodiacal marks. "It's calibrated to the stars, to a sidereal day, not a solar day, so it will lose time-a whole day, as the Earth goes around the sun. Didn't you take astronomy in school? And what if he moved? It would be off by however many time zones were involved!"

Valentine's jaw remained open. Nicholson remained undeterred.

"It has 'knobs' so you can reset it," he said, pointing.

I stared at the design for a moment. "It… does," I said. The more I looked, the more masterful the design appeared. "That's… good. To use the knobs, I'll need to tattoo contact points on the fingers of… oh. That's these associated disc designs here?"

Nicholson leaned forward. "Uh, yes. So they are."

"Who did this?" I looked back and forth at Nicholson and Valentine, who looked back and forth at each other. "This is expert work, but I certainly didn't do it, nor did anyone I know of in the Southeast. Where did you get it?"

"I have my sources," Valentine said, leaning back in his chair.

"Weeeell," I said, miming his earlier intonation. "I can't just ink this as is-"

"I told you so-sorry, am I jumping the gun?"

"Don't be a dick, old man," I snapped. "I take my profession as seriously as you do, and I am not going to put a permanent magical mark on the human body without two things: first, you have to get me some virgin flash-meaning unfolded, without lines that obscure the design. And no low-quality photocopies, either. I need something as close to the original as possible or a high-resolution digital image, TIFF preferred."

"A… 'tiff?" asked Valentine, looking at Nicholson.

"It's a… graphics format," Nicholson said. "Like a JPEG. Not a problem."