Not exactly calm before the storm, but at least the next movement is beginning.
The episode’s first thread is simple: Qifrey and Coco are both working late. It turns out that Coco is studying hard because she now understands her goals, while Qifrey… has ulterior motives, using the twinned bottle in order to try to seek out (or hunt down) the brimhats.
During this we get a brief background information about where the Brimhats came from, specifically that some of the last holdouts against the general Witch conspiracy were healers, practitioners of magic that by its nature had to be cast on people. This is why their corrupted successors have twisted forms of many magical techniques that would have been useful to healing (including the bottle spell, which was used to always have medicine on the fly) and why we never see Witches with the ability to handle injury or illness, something that was pretty relevant with the little boy from the previous arc who got pinned under a rock.
This goes badly for Qifrey, as anti-tamper trickery alerts the Brimhat, who shocks Qifrey into submission after half drowning him and destroys the bottle in order to sever the link, lamenting only that it took so much work to get that into Coco’s hands in the first place.
On Coco’s side, we also discover that she’s finished remaking Agott’s flying shoes, something that shocks Agott as Coco never pointed a finger at her or called her out for that whole “pushed into the test” stunt, and we start to understand that Agott has clearly been shown so little kindness that she doesn’t really comprehend a genuinely nice person.
Qifrey and Coco are both tired the next day, but Qifrey is a little worse off, and goes to pick some herbs to help them both get a little rest. It turns out that Coco is also worse off, collapsing in front of Agott, who rushes to get Qifrey. It seems that Coco is running a nasty fever, which prompts Qifrey to take her to the hospital in town.
There, Qifrey runs into Tartah, who has some suspicions about his grandfather not remembering things. He shows Qifrey to the hospital, but the show ends with him having a question to ask.
I’ll keep it short this week. We’ve got at least a few episodes left (though I do hope the adaptation continues past 12) and bigger fish to fry when we get to them.