Director: Makoto Sokuza
Writer: Shōgo Yasukawa
First Aired: 18 August 2023
Adapts: Volume 2, Chapters 1-2
Four months have gone by since "Arise", and the faculty are still mulling over Darius Grenville's disappearance. While they try and fail to figure that out, Pete wakes up from a bizarre Catapult Nightmare to discover, to his shock, that he's suddenly sprouted breasts. He's still irritable at breakfast, snapping at his friends, while they get ready to take their first class in Flying Broomsticks with Professor Dustin Hedges. On the way there, they run into a relative of Chela's: Stacy Cornwallis and her servant Fay Willock, the former of whom snubs her cousin's greeting and keeps walking.
Nanao, as usual, is a natural: the broomsticks are excited by her clear mana, and she's experienced with horses. She zeroes in on one sitting by itself, comparing it to her war horse back home, and to Hedges' astonishment takes off into the sky. Oliver is surprised too, because that broom used to be his mother's.
The afternoon classes include the main cast's first face-to-face meeting with Theodore McFarlane, who is subbing for the missing Grenville, and then bring us face to face with the first of Oliver's targets we hadn't previously met: Enrico Forghieri, the Mad Scientist who teaches magical engineering. He sets the students to disarming traps, with Oliver taking charge as usual. They get three done under the wire, but the fourth goes off, showering them with venomous snakes. Oliver dives to shield Pete, while Guy douses himself with a potion and destroys several of the snakes with a lightning spell over his skin, impressing Forgieri.
After class, Oliver takes Pete aside, having realized his body has switched sex. He explains that his roommate has awakened as a "reversi": a mage whose body periodically changes its biological sex. And he's beaten Carlos Whitrow to the punch: turns out that Godfrey's Number Two also heads up a campus support club for students with Sex Magic and related traits, and invites Pete to join. Oliver tags along to keep him company, and the club greets them both with open arms. As they enjoy a music recital by Carlos and Oliver's brother Gwyn, Pete decides that maybe he can handle this new development.
Oliver and Pete return to the dorms after the show, with another first-year student looking on from an upper floor and monologuing about how much the group annoys him as the credits roll...
This episode provides examples of the following tropes.
- Adaptation Deviation: The episode focuses on Nanao learning to fly, the magical engineering class and Pete becoming a reversi, both of which happened in the second half of volume 2's first chapter. The alchemy class with Theodore McFarlane is from chapter 2.
- Adaptation Explanation Extrication: The first shot of the episode is of Vanessa Aldiss transforming her arm and eating a screaming man with a mouth she's grown on the end of it, but the episode left out the first part of the scene that explains how he even got there: he's a member of a Gnostic Apocalypse Cult that tried to infiltrate the school building and Vanessa caught him.
- Adaptational Early Appearance: Due to the events of Volume 2 being rearranged, Stacy Cornwallis, Fay Willock, and Tullio Rossi are all introduced earlier than the event where they appeared in the novel.
- Beautiful Singing Voice: Carlos Whitrow is revealed to have a singing voice that is literally magical, though Oliver notes it's not a charm effect, but "something more pure."
- Breather Episode: Last episode had the conclusion of Oliver and Nanao's fight with Miligan, including our first look at a spellblade, and then The Reveal that Oliver is leading a Students' Secret Society plotting to murder half the faculty, starting with the Rasputinian Death of Darius Grenville. This episode? Pete turns into a girl and Nanao rides a broom. The Stinger indicates things are about to ramp back up, though.
- Catapult Nightmare: Pete dreams of his body shifting from male to female and then jerks awake. Then he puts his glassed on and realizes That Was Not a Dream.
- Compressed Adaptation: Most of the alchemy class with Theodore McFarlane is left out of the episode, including the actual answer to Pete's question about the differences between the editions of his travelogues.note
- Embarrassing Relative Teacher: Chela's first reaction to running into her father Theodore is to berate him for leaving Nanao in the lurch for six months after bringing her to Yelgland, then to cringe when they find out he'll be teaching their afternoon alchemy class.
- Evolving Credits: Beginning with this episode, the clip of the domino mask at the end of the opening credits now shows it being picked up and put on by Oliver, since we now know about his secret double life.
- Flashback Echo: Oliver recognizes the broom that Nanao picks: it once belonged to his late mother, whom he recalls once again when Nanao takes off on its back.
- Flying Broomstick: Explained in this episode to be a kind of magical creature in its own right. Nanao in particular bonds with a Moody Mount that she dubs Amatsukaze.
- Foreign Language Title: "リバーシ", "reversi", with the definitional kanji 両極往来者 ryōkyoku ōrai-sha, literally "bi-polar visitor".
- Foreshadowing: Theodore McFarlane fawns over the main cast, but pointedly snubs his niece Stacy.
- The Gadfly: Theodore McFarlane appears in person for the first time, having snuck into the Omniscient Council of Vagueness's meeting to surprise Esmeralda's insiders. When Aldiss and Esmeralda tell him to knock it off, he comments that it's just in his nature to stir the pot if it's too settled.
- Horse of a Different Color: Since broomsticks in the series are living things, Nanao's experience as a cavalrywoman in her former life gives her a leg up riding them.
- The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Pete is very thrilled to meet Theodore McFarlane: he's apparently such a huge fan of his travelogues that he's read every printing of every volume.
- Laughing Mad: Enrico Forghieri obviously has quite a few screws loose and constantly jokes around and cackles.
- LGBT Awakening: Pete becoming a reversi is an obvious allegory to this trope, complete with Carlos Whitrow, who is nonbinary, inviting him to join the in-universe equivalent of a queer students' club.
- Magic Music: Oliver notes that Carlos's singing voice is literally magical, but "more pure" than a charm effect.
- Moody Mount: Dustin Hedges is astounded when Nanao mounts Amatsukaze because he'd tried to tame that same broom multiple times and failed.
- Never Found the Body: Oliver's comrades succeeded in covering up the assassination. As far as the faculty knows, Grenville simply disappeared without a trace in the labyrinth.
- Omniscient Council of Vagueness: Downplayed. The six remaining members of The Conspiracy that killed Chloe Halford meet around a table in a candlelit room, but we can see all their faces and they know a lot less about what's going on than the audience does.
- Sex Magic: Carlos Whitrow runs a club for students with sex- and gender-linked magical traits, including Sex Shifters like Pete.
- Sex Shifter: Pete Reston awakens as a "reversi", a mage whose body periodically switches between male and female.
- Sink or Swim Mentor: Forghieri isn't actively sadistic like Grenville or Aldiss, he just likes to throw students into the deep end with minimal instruction. He does provide healing to students injured in his class, though: after the trap the students fail to disarm releases a swarm of venomous snakes, he passes out lollipops containing an antivenin.
- The Stinger: Tullio Rossi makes his first appearance just before the end of the episode, muttering to himself about how much the Sword Roses irritate him.
- Street Smart: Guy Greenwood has up to now been a middling student at best (Oliver and Chela have both had to help him with lessons in previous episodes), but he knows how to handle venomous snakes from farm life: he douses himself with a potion to make his skin and clothes more conductive, wades into the snake swarm, then casts Tonitrus on himself to fry them all at once.
- Supernaturally-Validated Trans Person: Discussed: Oliver says that gender dysphoria is a possible early sign of being a reversi, though we aren't told whether Pete had previously experienced any.
- Taking the Bullet: Oliver again puts himself at risk to shield Pete after a side effect of his reversi transformation keeps him from getting clear of the trap before it detonates, and gets bitten by the snakes inside.
- Time Skip: Four months have passed In-Universe since the last episode.
- Varying Competency Alibi: The teachers consider the possibility that a student might have killed Grenville, but consider it laughable: Esmeralda says that if it was a student, then Grenville was never worthy to be a Kimberly instructor. Aldiss believes nobody outside the six of them besides Luther Garland or Theodore McFarlane is capable.
