Out of memory come images of well-armed security guards and a knight wielding a heavy machine gun, which have you turning to Ambrose.

"The Drakes have access to modern weapons," you note aloud.

"...yyyyes, they do," the wizard responds slowly.

"Would they happen to have any timed explosives that we could 'borrow,' turn invisi- no?"

He's shaking his head. "Do you know how to handle timed explosives, lad?"

You open your mouth-

"I mean the sort that involve electronic detonators, as opposed to simple fuses," Ambrose clarifies.

-and close it again.

Not as such, no.

The wizard nods. "Then no, I will not be borrowing timed explosives on your behalf." He pauses. "Sorry."

No, no, he does have a point.

"What about regular old grenades?" you ask then.

"What about them?"

"Well, I was thinking if we summoned a lot of small Earth Elementals, buffed up their mental faculties a bit, covered them with Mindblank, and then gave them a Telepathic Bond and some bombs, they could- no again?"

"Grenades aren't really anti-material weapons," Ambrose explains, "and I had the time to poke at the Gate in the room we invaded. That circular area in the center of the room was just the focus point for the portal; the actual mechanism was buried several inches in the floor, and pretty solidly built. I can't see grenades doing much more than scratch damage to it, even if an Earth Elemental were to slip the weapon right next to the machine before pulling the pin."

"Not even if we cast transmuted the grenades so that the shrapnel had the properties of adamantine?"

Ambrose and Balthazar both turn that notion over in their heads.

"You'd need twenty-five different elementals to get all the Gates, and they'd need time to find them all - and their summoner would need to be on the same plane." Ambrose turns to Shadow Alex. "Do you have enough energy left for all of that?"

"Right now, no," your lookalike replies, "but we do have a way to cheat on that."

Yeah, you can just dismiss this instance of your Shadow, use your remaining mana restoratives, and then summon a new instance of your Dark Self, who would have as much mana as you did. The only problem with that is that he'd lose the enhancements you placed on him, his blade, and his partner, so the needful ones would have to be restored - but if you could get Balthazar to handle that?

"Mind Blank, yes," the Merlinean Master replies, "and I could make him invisible and help enhance the summoned elementals as well, but your Shadow would have to renew the Spell of Foresight and the Spell to Walk Through Space personally."

...oh, right. If you cast Foresight on another person, it warns YOU of danger to them rather than warning THEM of it, while Walk Through Space is normally self-targeting and lasts only a couple of minutes, at best. Extending the duration to a more useful degree might make the spell too costly to affect another person, assuming Balthazar can make that modification in the first place...?

"I've never actually tried to," he replies, looking thoughtful.

Might be better not to experiment, then.

Anyway, that's a fair bit of magic Shadow Alex would be using, and given you've pretty well depleted this demiplane with your earlier rituals, he can't offload the cost that way - nor could he exploit the timelessness of this pocket realm, as the spells would instantly end when he left. That said, you could Gate over to the temporally accelerated demiplane, which is still pretty much topped off as far as ambient mana goes, and do the rituals there, thus saving not only mana, but time.

You should probably go to the accelerated demiplane anyway, as opening a Gate directly from your little refuge to Silbern would just be asking for things to go wrong.

There's also the matter of the disturbingly anatomically accurate Heart of Shadow that you received from the Heart of the Soul King in recognition of Shadow's actions. If you do your usual analysis before, during, and after assimilating the relic - and you really think you SHOULD, as this Heart has a different origin than the usual ones and definitely merits both caution and curiosity - that's going to eat up more time and energy. Ritual-casting on the accelerated demiplane would help with the latter, but there'd still be some cost.

That said, you have to imagine that a Heart meant to enhance your Shadow Magic will have direct and tangible benefits the next time you summon your Shadow, so it might be well worth the delay and expense.

With a tentative "Plan A" for the disruption of Silbern's portal network decided, you move on to backup ideas, for if the magically-modified grenades prove inequal to the task of disabling the Gates of the Sun.

Messing with the portals to redirect travelers to other locations is ruled out. For all that they have a similar USE as your Gate Spell, the mechanics of how the Gates of the Sun actually work is quite different - not the least because they run on spiritual power rather than arcane magic. Figuring out how they operate well enough to affect whatever they use as a targeting system is just too time-intensive a process.

You also bring up the matter of leaving the portal that matches to Souken's stolen key intact, but closing it off with a Spell of Dimensional Locking. Ambrose and Balthazar confirm that such magic will make the portal effectively impassable for as long as it persists, even to you.

"It'd be a different matter if you had a different focus," Ambrose notes, "but seeing as how that key is linked to the portal itself, it's kind of unavoidable."

So Shadow Alex will have to limit how long the magic lasts, as otherwise he might lock the lot of you out of the fortress until it's too late.

Your seniors also note that Dimensional Lock might be a way to shut down the other portals, if Plan A fails, but that there's a fair chance the Wandenreich could disrupt the magic. Most groups of exotic energy manipulators come up with an equivalent to the Spell to Dispel Magic eventually, and the Quincy are no exception to that.

"The only real question is whether or not they can bring enough power to bear to dispel one of your eighth-tier spells, without damaging the Gates in the process," Balthazar explains.

You also ask about the possibility of tracking down Gates of the Sun on Earth, perhaps by using fragments of the portals in Silbern to give your Divination Magic something to lock on to.

"Oh, certainly," Ambrose replies lightly. "If the Gates exist in matched pairs that only connect to each other, then taking a piece of one would let you track down its twin easily enough - but if they've got a more dynamic setup, where one Gate in Silbern can connect to multiple Gates on Earth, or even an arrangement like the Shinigami used, with no actual mechanisms on Earth at all? Then you're going to be out of luck."

You grudgingly admit that the latter arrangement would make a lot of sense. The Wandenreich has had centuries to monitor the Soul Society, and figuring out how the Senkaimon works - and so how it might be defeated - should have been a big priority for them, especially after how the Shinigami used the system during the war with the Lichtreich. And if they knew THAT much about a system that seems to allow for transport between any point in the Soul Society and any point in Japan... well, why NOT copy it for their own use?

Further discussion is temporarily tabled, as your stomach repeats its demands.


You're hungry, and there are a bunch of Magnificent Mansions nearby. Slipping into the one that's been claimed by the Kurosaki family and Tatsuki, you settle into the dining area to sate the beast.

Balthazar, Ambrose, Shadow Alex, and the Briars also avail themselves of the chance to grab a bite, and while you don't deny that your counterpart has earned a "last meal" after all the work he did today, you have to wonder exactly what happens to the stuff he consumes when he is dismissed.

The fact that it's all conjured to begin with just adds to the confusion.

Ambrose keeps his meal small, as he has to see a man about some munitions, and doesn't want to miss the opportunity to investigate your latest - and creepiest - god-given prize.

You have no real objections to that, though you do remind him to head to the accelerated demiplane instead of the current one when he comes back.

The wizard heads off after ten minutes or so, and you linger over your lunch for another twenty, enjoying a second helping and giving the old man time to run his errand. You doubt that whoever is in charge of distributing weapons at the Drake residence will hand over explosives simply because Ambrose asks for them - rather the opposite, really.

In any case, once you feel like you've afforded Ambrose enough of a head start, you leave the Mansion and move off from the "residential" portion of the demiplane to open another Gate.

Naturally, several of the Quincy in the area follow you to see what's going on, but you explain yourself without setting off any more arguments, before slipping through the portal that Balthazar has graciously opened for you.

Ambrose is not present when you arrive, so you settle in to wait.

About ten minutes on, from your perspective, a Gate opens up to allow the female knight that departed Silbern with the baggage train to step through, carrying several greenish-hued containers before her. Behind her comes a burly, balding man in combat fatigues who you vaguely recall seeing on past visits to the Drake home, and who is carrying a few more of the boxes. He doesn't turn up on your passive supernatural senses, and when you ping him with active scans, they reveal nothing, in that particular way you're starting to get used to seeing from a Spell of Mind Blank.

Bringing up the rear is the wizard, who you notice has picked up a satchel of mystical devices he wasn't carrying earlier. When you send a questioning look his way, Ambrose responds by gesturing at his new friend.

"He insisted."

"Damn right I did," the man says bluntly. "I am NOT going to be the one who tells Lord Drake that YOU, of all people, were allowed to wander off unsupervised with a few thousand pounds' worth of high explosives that you don't even know how to use properly - especially not if you managed to blow your fool self up in the process."

"It's not like I was going to use the things myself," Ambrose protests.

"And that might even be worse!" comes the reply.

The man's name is Todd, and he's here to make sure that your summoned bombers have at least some idea of what the heck they'll be doing.

You let Mr. Todd know it'll be a while yet before the elementals are present, but he assures you he can wait.

With that settled, you take out the Heart of Shadow-

"Good God almighty, what is that?" the newcomer exclaims.

-field some questions that you are oathbound not to fully answer, and eventually get on with the analysis.

In a move that reminds you of Urahara and Tessai's investigation of your demiplanes, Ambrose produces multiple gizmos from his new bag of tricks, some of which he hands off to Balthazar, while others are set up around the hovering Heart. You and Shadow make do with spells, your doppelganger having enough power left to carry out the examination and share his observations in the more conventional sense.

He COULD have done it with the Spell to Share Memory, but you're already working through one fairly sizeable download for the day. Why take the risk of muddling either or both of them up, when a simple verbal report will do?

After ten minutes of careful scanning, you determine that the Heart of Shadow has only a few differences from the Heart Containers you've encountered previously.

The first of these is its unsettling anatomical correctness - complete with life-like beating - which doesn't appear to serve any purpose beyond the aesthetic; even the mist of golden energy that sprays from the open arteries with each steady *ba-dump* isn't causing the energy levels of the relic or the area around it to change, beyond the moment-to-moment shifts.

The second difference is the divine energy running through the Heart, which - despite its golden glow - is pretty clearly NOT drawn from the Goddesses. Ambrose and Balthazar both have Questions about that, as they saw you receive a Heart Container for completing the Ring of Trials, and while they didn't get to analyze that one, they both have more than enough experience to distinguish between different "flavors" of divine power. Ambrose is especially keen on getting a straight answer, as he picked up this same energy when the mass-disappearance of the Wandenreich occurred.

Given your recent oath, you're forced to tell them that you can't tell them anything, aside from the fact that Shadow did a divine entity a favor during the raid on Silbern, the Heart Container was that being's way of repaying the debt, and the Goddesses are okay with it.

I still say that thing is creepy.

Mostly, anyway.

On that note, you take a moment to caution the wizard and the sorcerer not to look too deeply into the Heart's makeup, lest they offend its creator or see one of those Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. You aren't that familiar with the unnamed deity, so you can't speak with any authority on how much curiosity would be too much for it to tolerate, or what its preferred methods of item empowerment are like.

Ambrose and Balthazar give you very similar patient looks, Balthazar thanking you for the warning, Ambrose commenting "not to teach your grandmother to suck eggs."

Which... what?

The third difference is the Heart's attunement to the Element of Shadow, which is something you've not had a chance to observe in such a pure and stable form before now. It's in no way a concerning distinction, especially not when compared to the potential the Heart's first two traits had for unexpected developments.

Despite the differences in its construction, you don't see anything that makes you think the Heart of Shadow will fail to function just as well as the other Elemental Hearts you've already collected. As such, once all spellcasters have had their fill of scanning the relic in its natural state, you get on with actually absorbing it.

Gained Illusion C++
Gained Shadow Affinity D+
Gained Shadow Resistance F+
Altered Elemental Sense

More analysis ensues, and once it's done, Shadow Alex dismisses himself, Shadow Briar vanishing alongside him, while you break out - and break open - your restoratives.


*Crack*
*Crunch*

Used Green Mana Rupee
Used Low-Grade Mana Gem
Gained Green Rupee Dust
Gained Green Rupee Shards
Gained Mana Gem Dust
Gained Mana Gem Shards

As you absorb the energies stored within the two crystals, your mana reserve climbs back to half full, and then about halfway from there to the sixth-tenths mark before stabilizing again.

Once your energies are settled, you start gathering mana from the demiplane to charge up the Heart of Courage, both saving mana and ensuring Shadow Alex is re-summoned with as much power as you can manage.

Several minutes later, your dark doppelganger reappears, taking a deep breath - and holding one hand over his heart?

"Are you feeling alright?" you ask.

"I'm fine," the other you replies. "Just checking to see if that latest Heart Container had any interesting side-effects."

"Did it?"

"Well, my heartbeat is normal, my reserves all seem to be where they should be..." He looks up, and adds, "Briar is still here."

"And feeling quite normal, thank you," your partner's Shadow notes.

"All in all," Shadow Alex continues, "I'm not noticing any differences, or at least nothing obvious enough not to need a detailed examination. Anything on your end?"

You frown and peer at your counterpart, comparing what you can discern of him now with what his previous iteration felt like this morning, before he put up that Spell of Mind Blank. He has less mana and ki than he did at that time, but the current level is also probably greater than whatever he had just a minute ago, as an artifact of his respawning.

After about a minute of observation, the only significant difference you've managed to find is how your Elemental Sense picks up a slightly stronger aura of Shadow, echoing the change the Heart of Shadow has no doubt imposed upon your own magical signature. If there are any deeper effects, you can't detect them with surface scans, and you have other business to be getting on with.

On that note, as Balthazar begins casting the Spell of Mind Blank on your not-actually-a-clone, Shadow Alex starts ritually casting a Spell to Summon Monsters.

In your hands, the second-tier version of Summon Monster could summon a single Small Earth Elemental for a little less than two minutes. Shadow has opted to increase the duration to something more practical for exploring a huge fortress, making it a fourth-tier spell that will last almost exactly three hours - he reasons that the longer he and his not-so-little team are in Silbern, the more likely they are to be discovered, even with the benefits of Mind Blank, Invisibility, and the elementals' ability to move through walls, so there's little point in making the magic last all day. Two additional spell levels' worth of mana would allow your Shadow to summon anywhere from two to five elementals in one go using the standard formulas, but putting together a twenty-six being team might require him to cast that spell anywhere from five to twelve times - wasting anywhere from a sixth to two-fifths of the duration of the earliest summoning, or using up a lot of his mana.

Rather than worry about either, Shadow Alex attempts a mass summoning, aiming to pull out all the elementals your plan calls for in just two goes.

For your part, you get on with readying a Mass Spell of Fox's Cunning, as you're a little unsure of your ability to wrangle a dozen or more Small Earth Elementals without it - they're the rough equivalent of toddlers among their kind, with all that implies, and you are NOT comfortable with the idea of having a swarm of kids stronger than the average adult man playing around near boxes full of grenades.

Aside from Fox's Cunning and those Telepathic Bonds Balthazar agreed to set up, what spells (if any) do you wish to cast on the Earth Elementals?

Also, aside from Invisibility and Mind Blank, what spells will be cast on Shadow Alex?


By the time your Shadow completes his first Summoning ritual, you have the Mass Spell of Fox's Cunning ready and waiting to go. Balthazar has the Spell of Telepathic Bonds on standby as well, having noted that it would be best to apply this BEFORE Mind Blank.

Interactions between Mind Blank and benign telepathic powers, or spells that mimic them, can be a bit... iffy, as telepathy operates on similar metaphysical wavelengths as the varieties of magic that Mind Blank was created specifically to thwart. Telepathic Bond doesn't specifically gather information about the target(s), but it IS a medium through which information can be conveyed, so it can go either way. By having the Telepathic Bonds in place before Mind Blank is applied, the greater spell can essentially be tricked into regarding the connections as part of the target's own sensory abilities, rather than as an externally imposed one.

In any case, this leaves the two of you waiting on the results of Shadow's Mass Summoning-

*POOF*

/ Who call? /

/ Where this? /

/ Soft ones? /

/ Many kin... /

-which proves to be successful, filling the area around your dark doppelganger with four-foot-tall vaguely humanoid masses of earth and stone. A quick head-count gives you a total of eighteen Small Earth Elementals, which is a few more than you can cover with a single casting of Mass Fox's Cunning, thanks to the difference in your skills at Summoning Magic and Augmentation Magic.

Still, getting fourteen of them in one go is not bad.

/ What thiiiiooooh my mind... /

/ Nifty! /

/ Ha! We are smart now! /

/ I like this summoning already. /

Of course, this leaves the four "leftovers" looking around with some envy and apprehension, particularly when a trio of their kin start lording their "big brains" over the less fortunate. You, Briar, and the Shadows have to step in at that point, but fortunately, the young elementals prove less difficult to wrangle into good behavior than you'd feared they might.

You also take a moment to explain what Balthazar is going to do, so that the little spirits don't panic when they start hearing each other's and Shadow Alex's thoughts in their heads. Once that's done and general consent is gained, Balthazar begins linking the elementals to your Shadow in groups of five, while he gets on with summoning the remaining eleven, and you gather the mana for another Spell of Fox's Cunning.

It takes a bit to sort out all the spells you want to use, and more time to make sure you aren't accidentally applying the same spell to a given elemental twice: when you stop and really LOOK at any two or three of them side-by-side, you can make out individual differences; but larger groups viewed in passing all start to look alike; and it doesn't help that some of them are definitely feeling playful, sneaking around one another and through the ground to try and confuse you.

They get VERY interested when Shadow Alex turns into one of them, though. The only thing that makes him stand out from them at all is that the earth and stones which make up his new form are a bit darker than the others, somewhere between brown and grey - and of course, his eyes are more golden.

In the middle of this, you float the idea of throwing together a fake body patterned after Shadow Alex's adult form, and trying to make it look like he was killed at some point, but everyone other than your Shadow tells you it's a bad idea.

"Keep it simple, shorty," Mr. Todd advises. "You've already got enough on your plate trying to find twenty-odd magic doorways inside a giant castle with an unknown number of enemy troops running around. Don't go making extra work for yourself and giving Murphy more chances to stick his oar in unless you absolutely have to."

...shorty? Really?

"I can call you stupid if you'd prefer."

...no, thanks.

"Quite aside from that," Balthazar notes, "based on the story I heard, the Wandenreich pretty much HAVE to know that you're a magic-user of SOME kind at this point, and powerful enough to deflect or block their leader's eyes, besides. Even if they assume Abjuration Magic is your biggest asset-"

It's not, but the number four position isn't too shabby.

"-masters of defensive spellcraft don't exactly go down easily to physical injury, even if it DOES involve high explosives. And if they guess that high-end Abjuration is just ONE of your skills, well, that just means you'd be that much more likely to be able to fake your own death, doesn't it?"

"Besides," Ambrose chimes in, "do you even KNOW a spell that would create a believable corpse?"

...

It takes another ten minutes before you're done - at least mostly. Given the demonstrated mischievous tendencies of a few of the elementals, Balthazar agreed to hold off on applying the Spell of Invisibility until you were about to send this force through to Silbern, to avoid any further attempts at pranks.

Gained Elder King C

Also, while you did apply the Spell to Bestow Weapon Proficiency to give the elementals familiarity with explosives, it's probably for the best that Mr. Todd gives everyone a walkthrough and a demonstration of how to use the grenades he and the lady knight brought through.

*BOOM*

/ ! /

/ Thunder! /

/ And metal! /

/ Dangerous... /

There is, after all, a fair amount of difference between the sort of "explosives" the creator(s) of that spell had in mind, and what is available on modern-day Earth.

Gained Explosives E

Once the uses and dangers of grenades have been impressed on the elementals - and after Mr. Todd has gotten through "explaining" to you how the ONLY reason he's agreeing to hand off high explosives to a bunch of untrained brats is because the brats in question are summoned beings who can't actually hurt themselves, there's a hostile force in need of thwarting, and you have few or no other practical options - you move on to testing how well the Spell of the Heart of the Metal will work.

One much-reduced casting of the spell and a couple of thrown grenades later-

*BOOM*
*BOOM*

-and you're looking at a pair of shallow divots gouged into the earth of the demiplane. At a glance, they're almost identical, the blast radius, depth, and severity of the scorching of the soil in one crater indistinguishable from the other. Then Mr. Todd points out the smaller holes spread about within the pit, where shrapnel was aimed downwards. A little digging by the elementals shows that the fragments of the enhanced grenade dug deeper and further out than their counterparts, and a few of the little guys drag up bits of jagged stone that were scratched or even shattered by the passage of high-speed metallic fragments, which don't appear to have been much slowed by the rock's greater density.

/ Scary! /

/ Very scary! /

/ I could win SO many fights if I could hit that hard... /

You notice your transformed Shadow rubbing his stony brow.

"Problems?" you inquire.

/ It is very noisy in my head right now, / he rumbles in response. / In hindsight, being telepathically linked to twenty-five child-like elementals may not have been the best-considered move. /

...

You make a mental note for the future.

In any case, given the results of your experimentation, Mr. Todd thinks that the magically modified grenades might manage to disable the "enemy material assets" that Ambrose described for him - maybe.

"Fragmentation grenades aren't meant for demolition ops," he says, shaking his head, "but the armory doesn't stock enough demo charges for the job Ambrose described, and I wouldn't let you have them even if we did. Tempting the wrath of every drill sergeant on BOTH sides of the grave as it is..."

On a related note, he and the lady knight's Simulacrum brought five cases of grenades with them, each box holding ten units of boom, while the munitions used up in demonstration came from a satchel on Mr. Todd's belt. In other words, there are enough grenades available to arm each elemental with two, if you feel the need to max out their destructive potential.

Mr. Todd is not especially enthusiastic about the idea, for various reasons, but you think you could convince him - if you want to, that is.


You do have a plan in the works to acquire and learn the Spell to Create a Clone, and you know several spells that could create various facsimiles of a corpse, but at this time, there's nothing in your considerable repertoire that would specifically produce a human body.

"There you have it, then."

Seeing as how both Ambrose and the expert he went and found have pointed out that grenades aren't really intended for use against structures and other large objects, it only seems reasonable to maximize the amount of BOOM your troops can bring to bear, to increase your odds of wrecking the Gates of the Sun.

Mr. Todd reluctantly agrees with your argument, and starts handing grenades over by twos. As he's doing that, you and Shadow Alex cast the Spell of the Heart of the Metal and go around enhancing the explosives as planned. The elementals' hands aren't quite large enough for them to completely enclose the charges, but that's alright; they just shape various little spaces in their bodies and tuck the weapons inside, closing the "pockets" after.

Mr. Todd winces the first couple of times he sees that, but keeps distributing grenades until he's run out.

Once the buffing is complete, Shadow Alex looks around. / Does everystone understand the plan? /

There is a collective, / Yes! /

/ Does everystone have two thunder-weapons? /

/ Yes! /

/ Is everystone ready? /

/ YES! /

/ Except for the invisibility spells, / one of them points out.

/ ...we'll get to that now. /

On cue, Balthazar casts a Spell of Greater Invisibility, modified to last much longer and affect multiple creatures. The Merlinean Master has rather more proficiency with Illusion Magic than you do - a thousand years and more of experience has to be good for SOMETHING - but even so, he has to cast the spell three times to get every elemental, including Shadow Alex.

While all of that is going on, you work a quick Spell of Scrying to take a peek at the situation in Silbern, specifically in and around Gate Room J. Your spell's sensor materializes in the hallway just outside the ruined door, giving you a good angle from which to see down all three corridors, as well as into the Gate Room itself.

Looking through the shattered doorway, you see no Quincy, though you remind yourself that it's not impossible for there to be a few of them inside, hidden from your current point of view by the walls around the door.

Looking first left and then right, you see some lingering damage from the earlier battle, but again, no Quincy.

Finally, you look down the main hall, the one your Shadow, the Shinigami, and the knights followed on their way to the Royal Quarter. Once more, there is not a Quincy in sight.

Considering how Grandmaster Haschwalth allowed the invasion force to penetrate as far as the doors of the Royal Quarter before launching his counterattack, the absence of living spirit-archers is less comforting than it might otherwise be. Still, Silbern is a big place, and precognition or not, the man's only got two eyes; he can't be watching every location at once. It's quite possible that he wasn't looking at the right place at the right time to foresee the opening of the Gate, and with your little army covered by Mind Blank, Forced Quiet, and now Greater Invisibility, there isn't much to give them away - at least not until the explosions start.

"The Gate Room appears to be clear, Ambrose," you inform the old wizard, who has been readying the Gate Spell that will deploy your Shadow and his current minions.

"Good to know," comes the reply. Around muttered incantations, Ambrose adds, "Just to be safe... going to open this thing... in one of the corners... and facing away from... those of us who... aren't re-invading the place."

Perfectly sensible precautions, you feel.


Remain as Alex, and...

...and after a long moment where no soul-piercing energy-arrows or other attacks come blasting out of the portal, Shadow Alex's voice comes from seemingly empty air: / Forward! /

/ AVALANCHE! / a number of the invisible elementals rumble eagerly.

/ Quietly! / one of their number hisses.

/ ...quiet avalanche! / comes the mass whisper.

This is followed by a sense of movement and several muffled exclamations. Your mind conjures up the weirdly adorable image of two dozen Small Earth Elementals doing their species' equivalent of tiptoeing, complete with exaggeratedly cautious movements and some of them bumping into each other as they go.

Shadow Alex may be entertaining similar thoughts, or just troubled by the audible portion of the proceedings, because his voice comes from just off to your left: / Again, I fear we may have made mistakes with this plan. /

"Not much for it now but to see it through," you reply. "Good luck, and Goddesses go with you. Again."

We will.

/ Thanks. /

And that is the last you hear of him-

/ Who pushed me? /

/ Sorry, didn't see you there. /

"Telepathy," you remind them.

/ ...oh, right. /

/ Whoops. /

-well, almost.

Ambrose holds the Gate open for the full two minutes possible, and then lets it swirl shut.

"And now we wait?" he says.

"And now we wait," you admit. "For my part, I think I'm going to try and get some meditation in." The temporal acceleration within the demiplane will effectively double your recovery rate, which makes it worthwhile to at least try to recoup some of the energy you've expended. "You?"

"I have some knights to fetch, and a man to see back to base," the wizard replies, gesturing at Mr. Todd to emphasize the latter bit. "After that, there is a train of loot in need of sorting, preparations to make in anticipation of our next trip to the Quincy Fortress of Doom-"

"And an explanation to make to Lord Drake," Todd chimes in, from where he's closing up the emptied grenade boxes.

"-please, that will take five minutes at most."

"I'll open the Gate back to the other demiplane," Balthazar says, as he gets to work doing just that. "I may avail myself of your hospitality over there, Alex."

"Feel free, if you can find an unclaimed room," you tell him. "What about you, Briar?"

She replies with a question of her own: "You're going to stay here, meditate, and NOT leave?"

"That is the plan, yes."

"Then I think I'll head back to the other side and keep an eye on things. No offense, but watching you sit and hum has never been all that interesting."

Fair.

A couple of minutes later, you're alone in the demiplane.

You find a comfortable spot on the ground, sit down in your preferred meditative posture, close your eyes, and let go...

...

Hours pass - four of them, from your perspective. Kung fu sorcerer or no, even you can't spend that much time sitting around clearing your mind, and indeed, you spend over half the time performing light exercises - stretches, jogging, shadow-boxing, push-ups and sit-ups, to name a few - trying to maintain proper meditative focus while moving around.

You MAY have also taken a nap in there, somewhere.

It's been a busy day, and sleeping legitimately helps your brain sort out the information you got from your Shadow!

Somewhere past the four hour mark, you are stirred from your nap meditations by the arrival of a Sending.

"Fifteen located, thirteen disabled, J under one-day lock and cloak," comes Shadow Alex's murmured voice. "Remaining grenades detonated. Enemy casualties uncertain, personal combat avoided, light elemental casualties. Mana low."

If you're interpreting that correctly, the elementals were only able to find fifteen of the twenty-five Gates, and succeeded in damaging all but two of those. The former result is disappointing, but the latter is actually pretty good, considering you were warned twice that fragmentation grenades aren't meant for the use you were putting them to.

Meanwhile, Shadow Alex has put a Dimensional Lock on Gate J, and "cloaked" it under a pair of Illusion Spells as you discussed: one to try and make the mechanism appear to have been damaged in the same way as the other Gates; and the second to try and conceal the magical auras of the other spells.

You're honestly not sure how well those will work out. You've never seen the results of a pair of grenades being set off INSIDE a stone floor before, which will hamper your Shadow's attempt to produce a false image of the results. He may have been able to take notes by having Shadow Briar go with some of the elementals, and then casting the Spell to Share Senses and see what she saw of the aftermath, but...

As for the aura-jamming effect, you would have preferred your Shadow used the Greater Spell of Magic Aura, but the weight limit on that one was far too low to accommodate something as massive as the Gate mechanisms, and if he'd waited until AFTER the other Gates were bombed so he knew how to shape his first illusion, there may not have been time for a ritual attempt to conceal the spells on and around Gate J before Soldats and Sternritter started showing up at every one of the Gates. If that was the case, then your dark doppelganger either skipped the observation and took the chance his visual illusion would be inaccurate, or else he went with the weaker and less certain Spell to Mask Dweomers.

You're unsure how to take the news that Shadow Alex had the elementals simply dispose of two-fifths of their grenades. It's not that you object to him removing evidence that could potentially lead back to the Drakes, you're just kind of disappointed that he didn't save those munitions until the other Gates had been found.

And how did the elementals take casualties? You went to some lengths to make them imperceptible; did some of them have the bad luck to blunder directly into a Quincy, or were they exposed to a dispelling effect?

...you REALLY hope none of them blew themselves up...

In any case, the Spell of Sending will allow you to send a short reply to Shadow Alex.


You decide to keep your reply simple.

"Good work," you reply softly, taking your cue from your Shadow's low tone and keeping your own voice down, just in case he's in earshot of any unfriendly Quincy. "Do you need aid or extraction, and can you try to track down the remaining Gates? Will contact you for answer promptly."

You consider adding an "over" at the end of that, but hesitate in doing so just long enough that the Sending takes the message as-is, and then shuts down on your end.

Having already sat up when the spell arrived, you get to your feet, dust off your clothes, and begin working the Sending ritual. As you do so, some idle frustration at the limits of the magic in question bubble up in the back of your mind. Ten minutes of effort, for the ability to send no more than two messages of no more than two dozen words each? If it weren't for the spell's effectively unlimited range, near-perfect guarantee of reaching the intended target, and ability to cross planar boundaries, it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

One of these days, you may have to devise a more efficient form of the ritual...

Regardless, you finish the spell without issue.

"Mana at forty-five percent, other reserves full," you state quietly. "Can attempt aid, extraction, or resummoning if desired; otherwise, will rest for tomorrow."

With that, you let the Sending go, and wait.

...

For a moment, you wonder if the spell failed, or your Shadow was caught or dismissed himself. But then you hear his voice.

"Negative on aid, extraction, or resummoning," come the still-hushed but more urgent words. "Enemy on high alert. Can attempt exploration, but mana at fifteen percent. Call again or will proceed as suggested."

You wince. Fifteen percent? That's literally half of what your Shadow started with. Did he cast all three spells out of his reserves, or... no, even that wouldn't entirely account for the expenditure. What the heck has he been up to?

A bit of this, a little of that...

You shake your head and consider whether or not to perform another Sending, or just to let Shadow Alex get on with trying to locate the remaining Gates of the Sun.

After four hours of subjective time spent meditating, exercising while trying to meditate, and napping resting, you have pretty well exhausted your own patience for getting zen. At least for the next several hours. If you're going to remain on the accelerated demiplane any longer, you'll have to find something else to occupy your time.

As it happens, you have a number of such potential distractions at hand - or rather, in your pocket. While you can't conduct a complete examination of your loot without calling on your magic, and thus stalling out your mana recovery, you could still poke through your ill-gotten hard-earned gains the normal way.


Your mind offers no brilliant ideas to improve the circumstances your Shadow finds himself in, and none of the voices in your head make any suggestions, either. As such, you decide to save your energy and let your doppelganger get on with what he's doing.

If all goes well, you should hear from him again. Eventually.

And if it doesn't...

...well, you'll cross that bridge when you get to it.

You have a LOT of reading material to pick and choose from, but it doesn't take long for you to make your choice. As much fun as kicking back with a work of fiction might be, and as enlightening as some of the historical or mystical reference books no doubt are, your main concern right now needs to be figuring out what the Wandenreich are doing, and what they're likely to do in the near future.

As such, you reclaim your seat on that reasonably comfortable patch of earth, get out the half-dozen file folders that were hidden in the Grandmaster's office safe, and start looking through them.

Almost immediately, you spot some problems.

First, the files are written in the Quincy language. While your grasp of the spoken form of that dialect isn't completely terrible, it's also not at the level where you'd be comfortable conducting a business negotiation or some other bit of formal adult conversation. That's approximately the level of complexity you're looking at in these files.

The issue is made worse by your lack of experience at READING the Quincy tongue. For all that this language and English have Germanic roots, they've gone off in rather different directions over the last thousand years or so, and the pronunciation, spelling, and meaning of various words has changed accordingly. That trips you up a few times.

Further complicating matters is the fact that many of the files talk about things you have little or no prior experience with, refer to individuals and events that are equally mysterious, and include a fair bit of shorthand besides. You don't THINK any of it is in code, but the little abbreviations - and even some of the whole words, due to puzzling placement - might as well be a whole other language, for all the sense they make.

As yet ANOTHER confounding factor, while many of the files were typed, some are handwritten, and almost no two of those seem to come from the same person. Navigating the differences in writing styles gives you a mild headache, though thankfully it's less a question of the writers' skill - the various reports are certainly legible - and more one of working out how different hands form individual letters and combine them.

On a related tangent, Jugram Haschwalth may just have the finest penmanship you've ever seen - but then, you realize, he must have had ALL the practice.

Your own writing hand aches in sympathy at the thought of a thousand years of paperwork.

Enduring that phantom pain and the linguistic issues, you press on, and perhaps an hour later, you can confirm that the contents of the seven folders are entirely made up of reports submitted by other members of the Wandenreich. Initially, they seem to have no single topic in common, and quite a few are not even addressed to the Grandmaster's office, but rather to various "sirs" and "madams" - you spot Head Maid (Catherine) Adler among those - yet you quickly realize that each report discusses at least one promising, problematic, and/or just plain peculiar individual among the ranks of the Quincy militants. The papers have been arranged so that all the reports regarding a particular person are grouped together, and Jugram has made fairly extensive annotations, which range from questions to follow-ups to personal commentary.

Going by those remarks, you strongly suspect that the Grandmaster was personally vetting the potential Sternritter candidates, although there are a few sheafs among the lot that may just be disciplinary cases: a researcher with a bad habit of going overbudget and appropriating funds for private projects; a couple of Soldats with body counts among their nominal peers and even the civilian staff; and a name you dimly recognize from Shadow Alex's memories, Waccabrada, being accused of harassment by a number of different individuals, Mrs. Adler among them.

Perhaps not quite the information you'd hoped for, but it got you the names of several dozen of the current stronger members of the Wandenreich, and a chunk of their mid- to upper-level leadership, civilian as well as military. Some locations on Earth were also mentioned, giving you places to look for possible Quincy activity later on - if you can figure out where some of those places are, and how to scry or visit them.

Gained Bureaucracy F+++
Gained Local Knowledge (Wandenreich) E

At this point, it's been about five hours (from your perspective) since you left your Quincy guests to themselves, half that from theirs, and only about thirty minutes since you last spoke to Shadow Alex (from his perspective). You figure you could slip in another hour of investigation of your loot (again, from your perspective) while you wait for your dark double to check in, but if he hasn't contacted you after that, you should probably go back to the other demiplane and make sure nobody's shot anybody else.


Further insight into the mind of the man who's led the Wandenreich for the last millennium, and who (somehow) commands the eyes of their late King, strikes you as information it would be quite handy to have. As such, you get out the Journals that the OTHER Shadow looted from one of Jugram's bedroom safes, spend a minute searching the covers and the first few pages of each to figure out which of them is the oldest, and then return the rest to your pocket while settling in to read that one.

After a moment, you pause and focus your ki, invoking the Brain Enhancement technique; right after that, you call on your rudimentary psychic abilities to activate Mental Enhancement, trying to double-up on the boost to your brainpower, particularly your ability to retain and recall information.

The Journals aren't exactly small books, and after the trouble you had going through the files, some reinforcement wouldn't hurt.

Gained Mental Enhancement D+

The Wandenreich Grandmaster's first journal dates back about nine hundred years. Its very first entry talks of how, having recently seen his hundredth year, Jugram looked back at his life and realized that many of his older memories were less clear than he might have liked-

'A reminder that Time will have its due in the end.'

-and so decided to start committing his most precious thoughts to paper.

'A reminder to myself, and my due to the lost.'

You pause to wonder if the book you're now reading is the original copy, preserved through spiritual enhancement, or if the Grandmaster periodically re-copied the contents of older volumes into new ones. The book certainly doesn't LOOK like it's a thousand years old, but...

...eh, easy enough to sort out when you're prepared to throw some magic at it. For now, you get on with reading.

Jugram writes of his early life, of parents he barely knew before their passing, of the village that viewed him with contempt for being a "powerless" Quincy, of an uncle that forced him to hunt for food every day and beat him if he failed to bring home so much as a rabbit, and of the son of the local lord, an arrogant, gifted boy who became outcast failure's friend. The pages speak of Yhwach's conquest of the land where Jugram lived, of a terrible fire that destroyed the village and claimed his uncle's life, and of how he and his friend, Bazzard, would spend the next five years training to-

You pause and re-read that section, just to be sure you weren't seeing things.

Yes, it really does say that the two boys meant to kill Yhwach in revenge for the loss of their homes, only for the Quincy King to identify Jugram as "his other half" in their very first meeting and select him to be his right hand on the spot.

...interesting recruitment process.

As for this "other half" business, Jugram describes months spent training under the Quincy King himself, learning how to harness, control, and gradually master a power that did not behave like those of other Quincies. Where his kinsmen would use trace amounts of their own spiritual energy to reach out and gather spiritual particles from their environment, shaping them into the tools and weapons of their people, Jugram had never been able to do so, despite his soul clearly having the needed strength.

'Nature seeks balance in all things,' the journal states. 'The Hollows prey upon souls, their hunger endless so long as they persist, and destined in time to swallow all life. Thus were the Quincy born to bring death to the deathless - yet that power was also unbalanced, a force that naturally takes and destroys, and so it too required a counterweight, a force that naturally gives and builds.'

The technical details are glossed over, but what you're getting out of this section is that Jugram's soul - and perhaps Yhwach's as well? - sort of operates in reverse compared to other Quincy. Where their souls' energies naturally absorb spiritual particles from their environment, Jugram's soul's energy was instead drawn towards other souls on a similar "wavelength" - Quincy souls, in other words - and bound to them. The process is apparently as instinctive as breathing, and occurred automatically whenever another Quincy was nearby, as they were for most of Jugram's early life. Only when completely isolated or in the presence of another "giver" could Jugram recognize and overcome his power's natural tendencies, allowing him to utilize the same techniques as the rest of his people.

This is some fascinating stuff, but it would be more useful to you if you had another of these atypical Quincy to observe and run some experiments with. That's probably going to be a bit difficult to arrange...

Over the next hour, you get fleeting glimpses of Haschwalth's life in the long-fallen Lichtreich, of years spent building up manpower, materials, and fortifications in preparation for war with the Shinigami, and even of interactions with representatives of other nations, whose names don't ring any bells with you.

There's also no mention of Memoria. No way to know if that means they'd already fallen, if they were far enough from the heart of Yhwach's power to be "not worth dealing with" in the lead-up to battling Soul Society, or if there was something else going on.

And then, a few minutes before the hour ticks over, the entire tone of Jugram's narrative changes from a fairly neutral, factual summation of events to something... energized, emotional, almost poetic.

You think "passionate" is the word you want, and for more than one reason, because now, instead of himself, Jugram is writing about a woman.

'Heaven had a name,' a much younger man's words read, 'and it was Mathilda.'

...

...is this going to turn into a kissing book?

You hope not, you're kind of lacking an in-the-know grandfather figure to read it to you and skip over the embarrassing parts.

In any case, you decide to stop there for now, and not just because Jugram's Journal promises to get a bit silly.

For one thing, your Spell of Foresight just ran out, and your hodgepodge Spell to Bestow Insights isn't all that far from joining it. You might want to restore one or both of those.

Also, you note that your Mental Enhancement technique didn't hold up for the full hour, instead giving out after about forty minutes. While somewhat disappointing, it is a useful data-point for helping you figure out how your psychic powers work. At the moment, they seem to have more in common with ki techniques than with spells, but that could just be limited information giving you a false impression.

On a further point, you still haven't heard from Shadow Alex. While the accelerated nature of the demiplane means that it's only been a single hour for him since the two of you last spoke, it also means that unless he took the time to renew them, all of his various buffs should have run down by now - and considering how low he said he was on mana, and the risks of relying on rituals in the middle of enemy territory, he might well not have bothered.

And finally... it's been five subjective hours since you had lunch. You're once again hungry.

Putting the book away, you get to your feet and make ready to leave. There's enough ambient mana still drifting about in here for you to restore the Spell of Foresight, open up a Gate out, and cast a couple other spells if you wanted to.


Foresight is simply too useful a spell to go without, at least while you still have to deal with potentially angry Quincy. On a similar note, you don't want to lose the interpersonal insights you've been employing for most of the day; after all, if someone decided to shoot you even WITH those social boosters up and running, forging ahead without them might go badly.

Half an hour of rituals later, you've restored both spells and opened up a Gate back to the other demiplane. As the portal swirls open, you take note of the remaining ambient energies within this demiplane. For all the spells you, Shadow Alex, Balthazar, and Ambrose cast in here, the total energy used ended up being somewhat less than what you needed to ward all of the Quincy refugees.

It'll be informative to see how quickly this place can recover its original energy level, not to mention useful if another round of major spellcasting proves to be needed - such as, for example, putting together a big train of summoned allies for a looting expedition.

For the moment, though, you leave the accelerated demiplane to its recovery, and step through the Gate.

You re-enter the timeless demiplane near the parked vehicles. Unlike the last time, none of the Quincy are sitting or standing around the cars and minivans, and while you can see a few of them over by the Mansion doorways, it's a lot fewer than before.

Entirely unsurprisingly, Ishida Yukio is also not where you left him. Instead, there are the imprints left by his forearms, lower legs, and backside where they were partially or entirely buried by your magic, and have since been wrenched free by some method that left the impressions exposed and crumbling at the edges. There are also marks in the soil around the spot where Yukio was half-swallowed by the earth, a few small holes where devices of some sort were planted, and sketched symbols that mix Japanese and Germanic characters. The lot of them glow in your Spiritual Sight, the residue of whatever it is the Quincy did to bind the troublemaker's powers suggesting the equivalent of a fourth-circle spell.

It feels a bit like a curse, actually. What did they DO?

As you're considering that, Briar turns up, alerted to your arrival by the shift in the familiar bond. She quickly explains that most of the Quincy are sitting down to dinner - which goes well with your own desire to grab a meal - and having caught your interest in the spirit-powered ritual site, she adds that she's seen Yukio, and his powers are fairly well bound.

"And it pretty much IS a curse," she confirms your suspicion. "Not malicious or so powerful that it really HARMS him, just one of those mental impairment jobs that do a good job of shutting down magic-users and the like, and tied to a couple of the Elders so they can break it more easily later."

Ah. That tracks.

Aloud, you inquire, "How 'impaired' are we talking, here?"

Because you DID want to question Yukio later, once it was certain he wouldn't be able to shoot at you again, but if there are cognitive side-effects of having his spiritual powers sealed, that could impact your ability to get answers out of him - possibly for the better, possibly for the worse.

"He was dazed and kind of listless when they dug him out afterwards," Briar admits, "but a lot of that was the shock of having his powers locked down; it faded within the hour. He didn't seem particularly stupid or absent-minded after that, but then, he didn't BEFORE he decided it was a good idea to shoot at you, either-"

True.

"-and I don't really know him well enough to make an accurate assessment beyond that."

Fair.

Your stomach chooses that moment to remind you of its demands, and you head for the Mansion where the Kurosakis are staying, figuring they're the least likely to object to your company. En route, Briar lets you know that Balthazar is resting in one of the rooms in this Mansion; he had considered asking the Archers, but they and the Muhlfelds, being twelve hours ahead of the Kurosakis and Ishidas, had all called it a night by the time he returned from the other demiplane.

Speaking of which, Briar confirms that Ambrose took all of his Simulacra with him when he left.

You're filling your partner in on what you learned in her absence as you enter the Kurosaki Mansion and pass through the reception area, en route to the dining room. The door to the later is opened by one of the summoned servants-

"Hey, Miss Briar!"

-and you miss a step as the sight of the Kurosaki twins waving at your partner from their seats around the table helps your brain make a connection.

Jugram described himself as a "giver," with the power to increase the abilities of other Quincy.

One might well call such a person an "Empowerer."

Okay, first of all, it might be easier to run those experiments than you were thinking, as long as you give Isshin and Masaki time to cool down about someone taking an interest in one of their girls BEFORE you ask for permission to borrow Yuzu.

And second, HOW did you MISS that?

Maybe it's the stress of the day, and the load of inherited memories, getting to you? If so, perhaps you should follow the lead of your fellow Americans (South as well as North) and sorcerous senior after you've sated the beast.


"You alright, Alex?" Ichigo inquires. "You look a bit..." He trails off, waving one hand in front of his face to indicate... something.

"I feel a bit..." you reply, echoing the motion. "Don't forget, I'm either eight hours ahead of you or sixteen hours behind - and it's been a busy day."

"Gonna take a nap?" Yuzu asks, her innocent tone and expression failing to conceal the childish teasing intent.

"In a while," you answer easily, as you move towards the food.

Though the siren song of sleep calls to you, there are still a couple of things you should take care of before you get some shut-eye - and besides, you aren't supposed to go to bed immediately after a meal, right?

"Speaking of naps and hours," Masaki says then-

The twins' heads turn suddenly in their mother's direction, expressions worried.

"-did you know that watches don't work in this place?"

There are two tiny sighs.

You pause in the middle of piling stuff on a plate. "I hadn't really thought about it, actually," you admit. "Maybe because I don't wear a watch, myself." You raise one hand to display your bare wrist for emphasis before continuing. "Now that you mention it, though, it does make sense. Unless someone's empowered them somehow, watches and clocks are just physical devices; they'd be subject to the timeless nature of this place."

"About that," Tatsuki wonders. "If time is supposed to be stopped here, how come we can all move around?"

"The short answer is, 'because we have souls,'" you tell her. Plate full, you slide into one of the empty places at the table. "The soul exists at least partly beyond Time, so while it isn't immune to temporal shenanigans, it can be a lot more difficult for them to affect."

Over the heads of the children, Masaki glances at Isshin, silently questioning.

Her husband sort of half-nods and half-winces. Your read of his body language is: "That sounds right, but temporal mechanics give me a headache."

Which is fair. You've got memories from multiple timelines banging around in the back of your brain, and they've done little if anything to help you make sense of temporal nonsense. Time Magic is one field in which Ganondorf was, if not precisely ignorant, then not all that much more knowledgeable than most sorcerers.

It was, after all, one of Nayru's primary domains, and hence more the bailiwick of the Chosen of Wisdom than the Chosen of Power.

Setting that aside for now, you spend the next five or six minutes focused on your food. Towards the end of that period, the twins start getting restless - the Kurosakis were well into their own meal before you arrived, and they've since finished - and since you want to have a word with the parents, you send a message to Briar down the familiar bond, asking her to take the girls somewhere out of earshot.

This results in the twins and Tatsuki dragging a protesting Ichigo-

"Tatsuki, put me down! This isn't funny!"

-out of the Mansion, with your partner trailing along after them.

"Try not to jostle him too much, Daughter Number Three!" Isshin calls. "Dinner won't be nearly as enjoyable coming back up!"

"Don't worry," Tatsuki calls back over her shoulder and the struggling strawberry balanced atop it. "I know exactly how hard I can hit him before he pukes."

"'atta girl!" Then, abandoning his firstborn to his doom, the Shinigami turns to you. "So, what's the latest from beyond?"

You wait a moment, checking to make sure the kids are out of hearing range. "I MAY have figured out why Grandmaster Haschwalth was keeping an eye on Yuzu."

Isshin and Masaki are, as the saying goes, all ears, and you quickly lay out what you found in the first of Jugram's Journals-

"You stole HOW many of his books?" Isshin exclaims.

"The answer is, 'Yes.'"

-with some color commentary along the way.

They would, of course, like to see this book for themselves, and you have no issue with that, getting the first journal out and flipping it open to the relevant pages before handing it over to Masaki. As she reads and Isshin comes around to peer over his wife's shoulder - promptly grimacing at the Quincy language on display, and pleading with Masaki to translate for him - you resume your meal, to the sound of a quiet narration.

You've finished your second serving and are considering a third when Masaki stops reading aloud and puts the book down. "Well. That would explain a few things, if it's true."

"IF it's true," Isshin says, stressing the first word and looking very concerned. "Karin and Ichigo aren't exactly manifesting bows or doing that creepy trick with the blood vessels-"

"They haven't been taught how," Masaki retorts primly. "And Blut is NOT 'creepy,' you big baby."

"-it SO is, but ignoring that for a second, Creepy Love of My Life, YOUR spiritual abilities haven't shown any sort of explosive growth since the girls were born, either."

"...okay, that's fair," Masaki admits. "But Yuzu's spiritual pressure is barely any higher than that of any other girl her age, unless that girl's Karin - and MINE is a LOT higher. If Yuzu really does have this 'giving' ability, wouldn't its effectiveness depend on the strength of the soul using it, just like any other spiritual power? And wouldn't the impact of a relatively weak soul empowering a much stronger one - hell, TWO much stronger ones, and a third besides - be proportionately lesser?"

"That's... probably not wrong," Isshin concedes.

Seeing the uneasiness between the married couple, it occurs to you that the two of them may want some time to themselves to discuss this, and you DO have something else you were planning on attending to.

Against that, the prospect of dessert is tempting...


Oh, why not? It HAS been a long day, you'd say that you've earned a little self-indulgence.

As you get up from your chair and head over to inspect the desserts on offer, you consider what Masaki just said regarding Yuzu potentially empowering three out of four members of the immediate family. Aloud, you state, "If you're thinking of finding out if Yuzu really has been unconsciously helping Ichigo get stronger over the years, I should probably point out that I'm not entirely sure how I'd go about testing that."

While Divination Magic is one of your best schools, and you have access to a pretty broad range of abilities as a result of that, a spell specifically meant to analyze souls isn't among them. You might start by using the Spell to Analyze Dweomers to look for current flows of power and recent enhancements, but that spell isn't meant for in-depth analysis of living beings, so its utility would be limited. From there, it'd all be spontaneous rituals or summoned aid: the former aren't as reliable as tried and tested spells; and the latter might involve more outside(r) attention than the Kurosakis really want to deal with.

Isshin and Masaki look from you to one another.

"Kisuke?" Masaki sighs.

"Kisuke," Isshin agrees in a similar tone.

Yeah, that was probably inevitable.

Oh, they have cake!

Following a vanilla icing with fresh-cut strawberry-topped serving of delicious, fluffy cake, you excuse yourself, letting the Kurosakis know that you're going to speak with whichever of the Elders are still awake. You mean to let them know that you're planning to perform a quick Spell of Scrying to see whether or not Auswahlen really was stopped, but you also want to ask the Elders if they have any suggestions for people you might look in on to verify that.

It's a bit doubtful that the Ishidas will be able to help you. From all accounts, you managed to scoop up all their Quincy relatives in Japan, and none of them made any particular fuss about family members living or working overseas, which implies that either no such persons exist, or else that the ties of kinship to them are not strong. That would make them rather difficult to scry for, and potentially straight-up impossible.

You feel more confident about your chances with the Muhlfelds, provided that any of them are still up, because you know Elder Nicolau has blood relations that he's been on the outs with since before his daughter was born. It'd be best if you worked with him, as he'd have the closest and strongest links to those relatives, but his daughter or any of his grandchildren could potentially stand in his place.

As for the Archers, you're honestly unsure.

Failing that, you're at a bit of a loss on who to look for. You supposed you could try scrying on some of the Wandenreich servants, since as lower-ranking members of the organization, they'd be likely targets to make up for any lacking numbers in "impure" Quincy if the Selection did indeed go down despite your efforts.

Then again, between the timeless nature of the demiplane and how you've been hopping back and forth between it and its temporally accelerated neighbor, you're honestly a bit uncertain as to what time it even IS.

Hopefully, the Elders will not only suggest someone for you to look in on, but said person will also be near a clock.

Worse comes to worst, you can always scry on one of your friends or family, and convey a Message Spell through your Scrying ritual to just ask them what time it is - but you'd rather avoid that if possible.

Subsequent questioning of the Quincy still hanging around outside the Mansions reveals that your luck is not in, and Nicolau Muhlfeld and Miles and Alice Archer all felt tired enough to turn in for the evening before you came back.

Evidently, you aren't the only one who feels that it's been a long day.

The Ishida Elders are all still available, though, and in the process of explaining why you wanted to meet them, you actually find out what time it is. It turns out that Balthazar has an old-fashioned pocket-watch that's enchanted to always show the current time in New York - and the matching times in several other locations - and Miles knew about it and checked in with the sorcerer when he came back from your other demiplane.

That was about three and a half hours ago, in objective terms, and it was 11:23pm, New York time, meaning it should be around three in the morning there now, which works out to... huh. Almost exactly four in the afternoon in Japan.

Convenient.

In any case, as you expected, the Ishida Elders can't offer you any useful targets for scrying. It's not that they don't know other Quincy living outside Japan, but the connections they describe are too distant and too weak for you to exploit.

As one example, Elder Michiko's husband came from overseas, but he's been dead for decades, and the handful of his relatives that she ever met have all passed on as well; she thinks she has a great-grandnephew-in-law kicking around somewhere, but even if you got one of her children to stand in as a blood focus, that's a connection too far removed to be useful. Nor did she or her caretakers bring anything that might allow you to establish such a link.

It would have been nice if you'd thought to bring Elder Asuka's photo albums along, as she DOES have a few pictures of more distant relatives, but sadly, the Spell of Foresight doesn't work that way, let alone that far in advance.

...on the other hand, you HAVE been to Asuka's place. With her permission, you could return via Gate to fetch those albums.


There are only three real risks and one drawback in returning to Elder Asuka's place.

The first danger is that, if Auswahlen is still going to happen, opening a portal to Earth from your demiplane would give the Selection a clear line of attack. You can prevent that from happening by going back to the other demiplane first, and making sure the way between the pocket realms is shut before you hop another Gate to Earth.

The second problem is that taking Asuka or any of the other Quincy along might put them in danger, even if you renewed all the defenses you currently have on them. This can be avoided by you simply going alone.

The third peril is that, with the local supernatural authorities likely to be on the lookout for more Gates after your earlier portalling spree, opening another planar passage might draw attention to Asuka's home. While you can't completely escape this particular issue, you could ameliorate it by opening the portal inside the Elder's house, relying on her home ward scheme and the simple mass of the building to obscure the Gate's energies. Similarly, if you're fast - and using ki - you can leave the Gate open, get in, get the album, and get out again in very short order, minimizing the time any prying eyes would have to track down and analyze the spell.

As for the drawback, that's mana consumption. You'll need to open three Gates, all told, and while you can use rituals to defray the costs of the two that you perform on the accelerated demiplane, there isn't enough ambient energy left in the timeless plane to fuel the third, so it'll have to come out of your reserves.

An irritant, but a minor one, and made less so by the knowledge that you're going to be taking a nap getting some actual sleep before too much longer.

So you go ahead and ask the Elder if she'd mind you making a quick-ish trip to fetch her photo collection. You state your preference to go alone and return quickly, and why.

You also note that, if Asuka would prefer that you not open the Gate in her living room, you can put it somewhere else and use teleportation to try and avoid leading anyone to her place. This would be more expensive and time-consuming for you, which is why it isn't your preferred option, but it IS an option.

Asuka hears you out, and then admits that while she's willing to let you visit her house, she'd like to avoid putting a bullseye on the place in the process.

Entirely fair.

So, if you could just borrow her housekey...

Returning to the accelerated demiplane via one Gate, you take a moment to consider disguises. It's around four in the afternoon on a Saturday in Japan, so you're not going to get called out for skipping school, and you look several years older than you really are, which reduces the odds of people thinking you're a kid in need of help. That said, you like to think that your normal appearance is fairly memorable, and your resemblance to Shadow Alex's adult guise could be problematic if anyone who's seen him sees you.

As an aside to that, you aren't worried about being spotted by the Wandenreich on this outing. While they'll doubtlessly be on the lookout for the "mysterious sorcerer" that showed up with the Shinigami and ruined their master's plan, you can't imagine that the Heart of the Soul King would have sent them to Japan when it gave them the boot from Silbern.

Getting back to the matter at hand, you've been using stealth of one kind or another all day, so the urge to keep it up is fairly strong.


The problems you've been having with the Wandenreich sympathizers could possibly have been avoided, if they didn't know what your real name and appearance were - although using a false identity might have caused other issues, as your adult form IS rather intimidating, and you would have been relying on the people that know the real you not to break your cover.

Tatsuki or the Kurosakis might have done it by accident, just from trying to treat you as an adult instead of a kid.

Ambrose would have done it on purpose, if the prospect amused him enough.

The point is, if you don't want to risk your real identity being linked to a particular event, then "you" shouldn't be seen there, and neither should anybody that looks like you, such as Shadow Alex's idealized adult form - much less your own.

With that decided, you go ahead and cast the Spell to Disguise One's Self, taking on the semblance of an adult Japanese male. You eschew the salaryman look for something more casual, and briefly consider adopting some of the features of the Ishida family before dismissing that and aiming for something more nondescript.

While it might appear less suspicious for a likely, if unknown relative of Asuka's to be moving around her neighborhood and especially her house, that might also invite attention from the locals. Even if it didn't, the Ishidas would probably prefer that you not go walking around looking like one of their own, at least not without asking.

Once the disguise settles, you take an additional precaution, casting a modified Spell of Invisibility atop it. Because if having a mysterious relative seen poking around might be suspicious, having a complete stranger do so definitely would be. This way, no normal person should ever know you were there, while the paranormal people will likely be every bit as ignorant.

Invisibility on top of Mind Blank makes one pretty hard to detect, after all, as long as nobody's throwing around counterspells or antimagic effects.

Precautions taken, you start the ritual to open another Gate, and less than a quarter of an hour after you started, you're back on Earth.

At the Tokyo Tower, to be precise.

...

Honestly, you blame Shadow Alex's memories.

The bad news is that there was a crowd of about twenty tourists passing by when your Gate opened up.

The good news is that, as far as you can tell, nearly all of them are regular people. A few have the mildly heightened ki signatures of amateur athletes and student martial artists, and a few others might become modest magic-users with a few years of study, but that's about it. None of them register as the sort of obvious blank spot that cruder forms of anti-Divination spells can produce, and you don't pick up any heightened spiritual energies, youki, or demonic taint.

The sole exception is the tour guide, whose personal signature hints at a little too much exposure to magical and spiritual forces to be normal or even just bad luck, and who is wearing an empowered ofuda around his neck, besides.

Nobody rushes forward or runs away screaming-

"I-is this part of the tour?"

"Cool!"

"Pics! I need pics!"

-although in some cases, that may be because they're too busy scrambling to aim cameras and camera phones at the hole in space-time. And about a quarter of the crowd DO make a point of moving along, though even most of those lost a couple of seconds to surprise and curiosity before their self-preservation instincts kicked in.

You quickly step clear of the portal and will it shut, to avoid any adventurous foolishness.

"No, no, wait-!"

"Stupid phone, focus!"

"Did you get it? Did anyone?"

The guy with the actual camera definitely took a couple of snapshots - good reflexes, there, though you can't speak to the quality of the images - and one of phone-users is grinning, but the rest are visibly and audibly disappointed.

The tour guide is facepalming and muttering something you can't quite make out. Maybe if you got closer...?

Moving off from your landing zone, you gather the energy for a Spell of Teleportation, which you begin modifying for lesser range. The reduced power draw should make the magic just weak enough for you to conceal its signature, which the ritual casting method will help minimize.

Five minutes later...


Although you are tempted to be about your business in a timely manner, your incessant curiosity gets the better of you, and you take a few steps towards the dismayed tour guide, focusing on the movement of his lips while trying to ignore the sounds coming from the rest of the crowd.

"-ember your training, they covered 'undeclared magical arrivals,' just-"

"Mr. Yamada, sir!" one of the tourists says, turning to the guide with a wide-eyed expression. "What in the world was that!?"

"Yeah, was that part of the tour!?"

"Was it magic!?"

"Was it aliens!?"

The guide seems to slump further under the barrage of questions.

You feel a little bad for the guy, but not so much that you're about to pull out a Spell to Modify Memories or something. The basic Spell of Invisibility is rather notorious for failing the moment the person under it attacks another being, a weakness that arises from its nature as a perception-altering spell.

While it does have a physical component that involves the bending of light, fundamentally, the spell is the caster telling the universe - or at least the small part of it embodied in his audience - that "there's nothing to see here," and getting it to go along with the idea. As long as nothing happens to contradict the caster's "statement," the spell holds up reasonably well, but when someone gets hit by a weapon or a spell that comes out of nowhere, their perception shifts from "there's nothing here" to "there's something here!" in a big way. Similarly, even a prepared and self-controlled attacker's perception tends to go from "I am not here" to "I got you!" in the moment they strike. Because of the way the physical and mental elements of the magic are tied together, in that fleeting instant when both sides know and agree that something is present, the invisible assailant BECOMES visible, and since light moves so ridiculously fast, the effect propagates through the spell's matrix before the caster can even BEGIN to think about compensating for it.

Incidentally, the Greater Spell of Invisibility still suffers from that same fundamental flaw, probably because its creators didn't understand the concept of lightspeed, or at least couldn't grasp just how quick it really was. Instead, they came up with a workaround - rather than telling the universe "there's nothing to see here," Greater Invisibility says, "there is something here, but you can't see it."

That is also apparently part of the reason why the basic form of the spell doesn't last as long as its lesser counterpart, despite being functionally identical in almost every other respect. It would seem that universes don't mind playing tricks on (parts of) themselves, but also don't like being told that they can't do something.

Who does?

Leaving the guide to handle his clients, you back off a bit and murmur the incantation for the Spell to Dispel Magic, which you aim at the area where the Gate opened. Fortunately for you, nobody's wandered into that spot - the crowd are, in fact, keeping a reasonable distance even as they press the guide for answers.

"Please remain calm," Mr. Yamada says in a dull voice, while projecting the fakest customer service smile you think you've ever seen. "There is no need to panic. There is a perfectly reasonable explanaton-"

"Yeah, like magic!"

"Or aliens!"

"A. Perfectly. Reasonable. Explanation," the guide repeats, as his smile fails to shift even a hair or become any more convincing.

With your tracks at least somewhat covered, you start moving off.

When you notice a couple more of the Tower's staff, including a security guard, moving towards the tour group, all of them radiating as much magic as the beleaguered guide - and somewhat more, in at least one case - you pick up your pace a bit.

You're not worried about being detected, so much as you are about being in range of someone else's casting of Dispel Magic, or the Spell to Purge Invisibility.

Besides, you have one more spell to cast here, and if you can do so well away from the obvious magic-user on the staff, you will.

In short order, you've found yourself a relatively quiet and out-of-the-way nook from which you cast your modified Spell of Teleportation.

The magic takes effect, the world blinks out-

!

-and you look around, slowly frowning as you fail to recognize any of the buildings around your point of arrival. Moving towards the nearest corner - carefully, so as to avoid the afternoon foot traffic - you read off the names of the streets, and are tempted to say something impolite as both of them fail to jog your memory.

You appear to have gotten lost.

Restraining yourself, you head into a nearby alley, make sure you're alone, and then cast the Spell of the Lay of the Land, seeking a better idea of how fa-

EIGHTY MILES?!

Bit of a whoops.

"We landed HOW far away?" Briar exclaims.

You're almost- wait, did you say that out loud, or-?

"No, I caught that through the familiar bond."

Oh, good - and, uh, sorry.

"No problem."

Exhaling your annoyance at the teleportation mishap, and inhaling patience, you begin the ritual again, thinking harder on the image of Elder Asuka's living room.

Offering up a short prayer for guidance, you trigger the spell-

You're good this time.

!

-and arrive on target.

Quietly thanking the Goddesses, you move over to the bookshelf, take down and pocket the album, and spare a minute to find a clock.

3:50 pm.

Not enough time to ritually cast Teleport and a Gate spell like you'd originally planned, but enough for a Ritual Teleport and a Gate back to your accelerated demiplane, where you will have... just enough time for a ritual Gate cast there to return you to the other demiplane for the "promised hour."

Unless there's something else you'd like to do, while you're here on Earth?


You don't know for sure that Auswahlen will happen, and you don't know what you'll do if it does, but you DO know that if it does transpire, then for you to have any chance of helping the Quincy refugees, you'll need to BE there with them when the moment comes.

With that in mind, you start casting another Ritual of Teleportation. It doesn't matter too much if this one drops you off at a random location, as long as it's not too near Elder Asuka's house or any other place you'd prefer to avoid drawing attention to.

...

Actually, that rules out a number of potential landing zones. You don't want to bring trouble to the Hakuba Shrine by opening a Gate on their property, and the same can be said for the people you've met through your association with the place. Gen doesn't need that sort of attention, either, you'd like to avoid Karakura if you could, and while the Shuzens could probably weather it, it'd be rude to draw eyes their way when they've already opted out of this entire affair. Plus you're not sure if your cut-down, concealable Teleport Spell has the legs to reach their territory from your current location - which probably rules out Lady Takara's former residence as well.

That last one strikes you as kind of a shame, because leading anyone who's trying to track the opening of your Gates to the former residence of a nine-tailed fox seems like the sort of trick a kitsune would appreciate.

Anyway, while you've eliminated a bunch of other possible destinations that are better avoided, there are still some locations that come to mind.

One's the American embassy that you briefly visited on your first trip overseas. From what you can remember, they had pretty good security, so anybody who showed up to investigate your portal would have to behave themselves or risk starting an international incident. Plus, it kind of appeals to you, considering that you're about to go on a "trip"...

Another option is the arena where most of the proceedings for the World Tournament were held. Tens of thousands of people must have moved through there just in those few days, and it's probably seen similar crowds a number of times in the year and change since. The only catch there is you don't know how many of those crowds were there in response to events with supernatural activity; if it's none, that might point back to the Tournament, which could be a little too close for comfort.

The hotel where you stayed for most of the Tournament also sees a lot of traffic, and a Gate opening up there wouldn't necessarily be connected to the World Tournament. Powerful magic-users need places to stay, too, and plenty of them either can't or won't whip up Magnificent Mansions and other temporary shelters when there are mundane alternatives.

The convention center from Halloween is another option, but it strikes you as awfully similar to the arena, only smaller.

You could just double-back to the street you accidentally landed on getting to Asuka's place. You ended up there quite at random, and there's nothing at all to connect you to that stretch of road.

For that matter, going back to the Tokyo Tower is an option. While the kami that Shadow Alex met described it primarily as a "destination," being a regular locus for teleportation and planar travel effects would help to muddle your trail. Against that, there's the fact that you came from the Tower less than half an hour ago, and the staff might still be on the lookout for invisible people popping through Gates.


After a moment's thought, you decide that the best option would be to backtrack and open up your exit-Gate near that street corner you left a few minutes ago. An entirely random spot that neither you nor anyone you know has any obvious prior connection to is arguably the safest spot for such a thing.

And if you experience another mishap and end up displaced miles off-target? One random street in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area, arrived at by accident while attempting to teleport to a different site, is just as good as another!

You complete the ritual, hold it for a few seconds-

"Five minutes, mark!" Briar calls.

-until Elder Asuka's clock ticks over, at which point you and your partner are relocated-

Again?

What, seriously?

-to an unfamiliar rooftop.

How far off-target did the Kid-King manage this time?

About twenty-six miles.

Yeesh.

You are not having the best luck with the Spell of Teleportation today.

Well, never mind. A random rooftop works just as well as a random street - better, even, in that there aren't any pedestrians up here to-

A vaguely familiar ponytailed boy about your age wearing a slightly worn Chinese-style red and black outfit goes bounding past, his hands and mouth full of food.

Behind him is a middle-aged man wearing an old martial arts gi, glasses, and a bandana over his head, who is similarly burdened by a load of edibles.

"'asta', 'oy!" the man barks around the bag held between his teeth. "'ey're 'ainin'!"

"'oin' as 'ast as I 'an, ol' 'an!"

"SA-O-TO-ME!" several voices cry in unified fury. You see what appear to be food vendors racing across the rooftops in pursuit of the two martial artists.

"Come back and face your death like a man!" the lead figure thunders.

"But not before you pay up!" the one on the right says quickly.

"With actual yen this time!" the one to the left adds.

"AND INTEREST PAID IN PAIN!" screams the one bringing up the rear.

There is a collective roar of bloodthirsty agreement.

...

No. Just... no.

Side-stepping the rooftop rush-

Gained Parkour E+++

-you get on with opening up your first Gate-

"Hey, what's that glowing thing over there?"

-hurry through, and close the portal before any of the locals can follow you through. Then, after dismissing your Spell of Invisibility and the Spell to Disguise One's Self so that you don't spook your guests, you get started on the ritual-casting of the Gate that will take you to your timeless demiplane.

All the while, Briar continues to count down from five-

"-four-thirty-two, four-thirty two, four-thirty-one, four-thirty-one-"

-in a way that accommodates how time flows faster on this demiplane.

She's reached the one minute mark when your next and hopefully final Gate of the day swirls open, allowing you to return to your refuge.

"Welcome back," Elder Asuka greets you. "How did it go-"

"-fifty-seven, fifty-six, fifty-five-"

"-and why do I hear a countdown?" she adds, frowning.

"The trip was fine," you reply, getting out the photo album and handing it over to its owner. "As requested, I didn't open a Gate in or near your house, and I kept the teleportation spells I used to cover the distance as quiet as possible. You should be in the clear, as far as that goes."

"Thank you."

"-forty-five, forty-four-"

"As for the counting," you continue quickly, "Briar and I took a minute to check the time while we were at your place, and by your living room clock, it is-"

"-forty-"

"-forty seconds until four in the afternoon."

"...ah."

"Well," Souken sighs. "Grab a seat, and let's see how this goes."

You have-

"-thirty-three-"

-about half a minute before Auswahlen hits, if it hasn't been averted by Yhwach's messy demise. Are there any spells you want to cast?


As the Quincy ready themselves for what may be to come, your gaze trails over to where you planted the Memorian Standard when today's mess began. Since the plan essentially called for your Shadow to march to war, you'd considered summoning him with his own copy of the item, but you ultimately opted against the idea - in part because you figured your not-evil twin would need both hands free, but mainly so as not to give the Wandenreich (or the Shinigami) a free clue to one of your associations.

After all, standards are meant to stand out, both in physical sight and in memory, and some of the ancient archers (and psychopomps) might just have been alive when Memoria still stood, or at least knew of its fall as a relatively recent event. Better to leave that connection hidden from people who might have the knowledge and resources to actually do something about it.

The Standard has been hanging over the demiplane undisturbed ever since, a silent statement of your intent to defend this ground and the souls taking shelter upon it against the threat of Auswahlen. You aren't sure if its enchantments have been protecting the people you've taken responsibility for, but you aren't sure they HAVEN'T, either.

You have seen a number of the Quincy giving the banner puzzled looks, though none of them have asked you about it as of yet.

Isshin and Masaki, who actually knew where you got the thing - and who from - asked you in an aside if they should expect any ghostly not-Romans to show up. They were both relieved to hear that wouldn't be the case, although Isshin was a bit disappointed about not being able to join another drinking party.

Walking over to the base of the banner now, you look up at the boar emblem for a moment, straightening to something like attention. Turning about so that you stand before the Standard, you take out your Blessed Sword and plant its tip against the earth, both hands resting atop the pommel.

"Thirty- Alex?" Briar half-wonders and half-sighs through her ongoing countdown. "What are you doing? Twenty-nine..."

Not taking your gaze away from the "horizon" of the pocket realm, you answer. "I promised to save these people, and I've done... okay, not EVERYthing within my power to do-"

Just for starters, there was that whole notion of soul gems and/or evacuations across the planes (nearly) to Hyrule, which never came to pass, to say nothing of the possibility of going on the Silbern raid yourself.

"-but everything that seemed reasonable-"

Briar doesn't QUITE laugh when she says, "Twenty-three," but it's a near thing.

"-to reach that goal, and MAYBE it was already enough, MAYBE there's no danger anymore. Or maybe there is. No way to be sure, not in the time that's left, but whatever happens, I'm going to keep my word. I WILL do everything in my power to protect my friends, my allies, and their families. I stand as watcher and guard, and Auswahlen shall not have them!"

The nearby Elders regard you with some surprise.

Michiko turns to Souken and says, "Does he do that a lot?"

Souken doesn't seem to know how to respond.

Perhaps it's just as well, then, that Briar's countdown has reached the last leg. "Ten!"

Those of the Quincy that can hear her sit or stand up straighter, and the rest take their cue from those.

"Nine!"

One by one, they join you in looking towards the false horizon-

"Eight!"

-the misty sky beyond which the potential danger lurks.

"Seven!"

Some of them reach out to one another-

"Six!"

-hands joining or resting on shoulders-

"Five!"

-in perhaps a final act of comradery and kinship.

"Four!"

For your part, you take a deep breath-

"Three!"

-gather your ki and mana-

"Two!"

-and ready yourself-

"One!"

-for ANYTHING!

...

...anything?

...

...hello?

...

...well, then.

"Did it-?" Michiko's granddaughter starts to say.

She is instantly and firmly hushed by the Elders.

There is a long minute of silence after that.

"Are we-?" another of the younger Quincy in earshot begins.

Again, he is shut down by sharp hissing and hand-waving cutting motions.

The Elders, it would seem, are all too familiar with the demon Murphy, and have no wish to invoke his particular brand of attention.

Deciding to deal with that, you clear your throat, and ask Elder Asuka for a picture.

"I've got three," she replies, holding out the images in question.


You take all of the offered photos. Two you pocket - in the mundane sense - while the third you hold before you, studying it intently as you begin gathering your mana.

"Nobody interrupt me, please," you say to the crowd.

The image, picked out at random from the small set, is of a man in his late twenties or early thirties. He has the dark-haired, keen-eyed, glasses-wearing, slightly cold yet handsome look you've come to expect from the Ishida men, though he's also dressed in formal business attire that makes even Ryuuken's preferred suits look somewhat casual. Every button polished, every fold pressed, not a hair out of place - this is a man who makes a serious effort to look professional.

And this is a family photo.

He must be fun at parties.

You fix the man's features in your mind as you weave the spell, gesturing over and around the photoprint and gradually incorporating it into the magical matrix.

As you work, it occurs to you that this scrying attempt has a rather high probability of failure. Never having heard of this man before, and with no direct blood relatives on hand to provide a connection for you to trace, it's only your possession of his likeness that allows you to seek him out at all. Even then, the odds are weighed against you quite sharply - all the more so considering that you're scrying from another plane of existence.

Unfortunately, there's not much help for it. True, you're effectively a master of the School of Divination, but the benefits your aptitude for and experience with such magic normally provides you only offset a portion of the obstacles in your path. There IS a particular trick for heightening a spell's ability to overcome a target's resistance without altering its other parameters, but you have yet to learn that particular bit of arcane tinkering - and even if you DID know how it was done, it would still make the spell too powerful for you to conceal.

Not that you're worried about being detected on your rented demiplane, or even being tracked back to it - thank you, Mind Blank - but you'd like to keep the other end of the Scrying Spell as low-profile as possible. You have no idea where in the world this Ishida cousin is, after all, and there and eyes on at least three continents (if only very local parts of them) will be on alert after everything you and Shadow Alex have gotten up to today.

Drawing unfriendly attention to your target when members of his family are watching would be... counter-productive... and just plain rude.

It's for that reason that you don't try casting an unmodified Greater Spell of Scrying, either.

Your worries linger for the duration of the ritual, but prove needless. The magic takes effect, and though there is a moment between the completion of your invocation and the manifestation of the results where your concern spikes, the familiar viewing globe takes shape thereafter.

It shows you a tropical beach, which immediately stirs memories of Bali Ha'i. It doesn't take long for you to realize that it's not the best comparison: the sand you see is darker than that which lines the shores of Kahine's island; the beach chairs, umbrellas, and other accouterments spread out along the beachfront have a much more modern, post-industrial look than the traditional island style you and your ghostly helpers went for when setting up; and there are easily twenty people visible within the relatively limited viewing area of the spell, something which only happened at meals and the planned events during your three-day birthday party.

As for the subject of the spell, his appearance is at once distinctly altered from and yet remarkably consistent with Asuka's photo. He's traded in the formal suit for dark blue shorts, a white t-shirt, and a short-sleeved jacket - open in the heat - that matches the shorts; similarly, the crystal-clear eyewear from the photo has been swapped for tinted sunglasses. Despite that, he's not visibly aged or altered his haircut since whenever the photo was taken, he doesn't appear to have been out in the sun long enough to pick up a tan - though the faint sheen of sunscreen offers another possible explanation there - and the way he's carrying himself still manages to project that air of ultra-professionalism.

This, while he's standing next to the bar in one of those beachside restaurants, an umbrella drink in the hand he isn't gesturing with as he speaks to a mixed crowd of men and women - maybe a dozen in all, the men outnumbering the women five to two - a lot of whom are dressed and carrying themselves similarly to the Ishida.

He seems to be talking about... free market trade?

...

Not what you'd pick for a beachside conversation, but it seems to have his audience's interest.

Regardless, the man is clearly very much alive, which would tend to suggest that his soul hasn't been yanked out or heavily mutilated. A more detailed assessment to confirm that would be nice, but even the Greater Spell of Scrying will only permit low-level Divination Magic and equivalent effects to function through it, and you'd need more than that to give this Ishida a clean bill of spiritual health.

So you let the spell lapse, and start re-casting it for the people in the next two photos.

One of these is a young woman wearing the sort of gown and funny hat people insist on wearing for university and college graduation ceremonies. You find her in an office somewhere, working away at a computer in a neatly-arranged cubicle.

The last photo depicts an older couple, neither of whom look all that much like members of the Ishida family. When you check with Asuka, she confirms that the husband is an ordinary person, so you focus on looking for the wife. You find them both together, driving along through the country somewhere in a car that your American sensibilities view as entirely too small.

All in all, it seems reasonable to conclude that Auswahlen really didn't happen.

As you return the photos to Elder Asuka, one of the Quincy asks, "So, what now?"

"I don't know about the rest of you," you reply, "but I've been up for almost twenty hours straight. Unless there's anything that urgently needs my attention, I'm going to get some rest."

The Elders and the handful of other Quincy in the area trade glances, but nobody says anything.

Nodding, you head for the Mansion where the Kurosakis are staying. There should be a spare room...

About halfway there, you stop, and facepalm as something belatedly occurs to you.

You're on a timeless demiplane. While this has been useful for a number of reasons, one of the drawbacks is that if you sleep here, the temporal weirdness means you won't recover any mana. Considering that you've largely depleted the plane's ambient energies and your own reserves are down to about a quarter, this is a bit of a problem.

And then you blink as you recall that Balthazar was talking about taking a nap siesta himself. Did he not consider this, or...?

Well, no helping that right now. What will you do?


Your mana is low enough right now that you could potentially trap yourself on this demiplane by dint of mana exhaustion, and all your guests with you - and while Ambrose and Balthazar won't let it come to that, you'd really rather not make such an easily avoidable mistake.

The wizard, at least, would milk it for all the mockery it was worth.

Plus, you have those plans for another looting run on Silbern. The more mana you have for that, the better.

As such, you open up one more Gate and pop through to the accelerated demiplane, where you look around for a few minutes, feeling out different patches of the plant-covered ground with your feet and then your hands.

"Wait," Briar exclaims. "Are you seriously planning to sleep on the ground?"

"I didn't think to bring a sleeping bag with me," you answer from where you're currently kneeling, "and I'd rather not spend the mana conjuring one."

"In that case, let me help!"

"...help, how?" you wonder, looking up.

You're hardly about to refuse your partner's assistance, of course, but you have to wonder what she could do-

"Oh, just watch me, mister," Briar replies to the emotions passing through your bond, before she starts zipping about the pocket realm, hovering over certain spots on the ground for a second or two before moving on. It doesn't take a stretch of the imagination to consider that she's doing what you were just doing, but if that's all-

At that moment, you feel Briar's magic well up. She begins to fly in a circle over the area in question, motes of green light falling away in her wake, and where that energy hits the ground, you see leaves and blades of grass swell and shift and bend over. In short order, the greenery has loosely woven itself into a thin mattress.

"Taa-daa!" the fairy declares. "So, what do you think?"

Walking over, you bend down and give the matted grass a few exploratory pats.

It's surprisingly soft. Maybe not to the same degree as a modern mattress, but at least as good as a nice blanket. Also, the ground underneath doesn't seem to be too hard.

"I think that I occasionally forget that you used to live outdoors all the time," you admit.

"Well, not ALL the time," Briar concedes. "It just makes too much sense to have a den or a nest or an actual house to take shelter in when you can get one, because being rained on sucks for anyone who isn't a Zora, you always have to sleep with one eye open for passing monsters, and occasionally the animals don't look where they're going... but yeah, sometimes, on a clear summer night, we'd find a nice spot of grass or a patch of moss or the like and just bed down." She stretches, the motion just visible against her personal luminescence at this range. "Doesn't usually take that much energy," Briar adds with a yawn, "but then, you are annoyingly huge."

You make no apologies for being a healthy, growing young boy.

It's cool enough on this demiplane that - given your lack of pajamas or blankets - you decide to keep most of your clothes on, but it's not so bad that you can't remove your shoes and socks to let your feet breathe easier for a while.

Laying down on the grass, you make yourself comfortable while Briar readies a different "bed" for herself nearby, before echoing your movements.

"You did a good thing today, Alex," your partner says after a moment.

"Thanks, Briar."

"Just try not to make this whole 'getting involved in ancient wars' thing a habit, okay?"

With that, the two of you drift off.

When you come to, it's with a certain stiffness in your shoulders, back, and hips that tells you that, despite Briar's magic - which appears to have faded, incidentally - your body just isn't used to accommodations of this nature. Still, it wasn't a total loss, and not just for the significant mana recovery; you also have a better appreciation of the meaning of the term, "roughing it."

As you check your reserves, you note that a couple of your enhancement spells wore off (again) while you were sleeping. The Heart of Courage, meanwhile, still feels like it's active, which tells you that Shadow Alex has managed to avoid destruction.

You wonder how much of Silbern he's managed to map...?

A quick cantrip as you pull your socks and shoes back on confirms that you got a little over six hours of rest, and a second minor spell cleans out any grass-stains and dirt, along with most of the generally unpleasant feeling of clothes that have been worn for too long.

After some light exercise to limber up and deal with the stiffness of sleeping on the ground, you consider your next move.

It should only be about seven in the evening in Japan, so anyone and anything that you spooked with all your Gate-hopping will likely still be on the lookout for further interplanar transits or similar space-time disruptions; that and the hour, then, largely rule out going to Gen's to look for mana restoratives, which you had considered.

New York is probably still buzzing, too, given what Balthazar said he saw after you left with the Archers, but it's also around six in the morning there. The literal dawn of a new day may have cooled things off a bit, and if not, most people should be either short on sleep (from being up all night) or still muggy from having recently gotten up. Either way, the potential exists for sending the Archers home, though in all honesty, you'd prefer if they stayed a day or two longer, just to be sure.

On a related note, provided that Balthazar is awake and amenable to some early-morning weekend business, you might see if he's got any restoratives in stock at the Arcana Cabana - or even on his person, now that you're thinking about it. If yes to the former, Gating to the shop might be on the table. For that matter, you could take the Archers home that way, shrinking and unshrinking their vehicles as needed.

Recife is likely quieter than New York or Tokyo, seeing as how you only opened the one Gate there, so the repatriation of the Muhlfelds promises to be the least complicated... which, honestly, makes you a little wary, but that probably just your well-developed paranoia speaking.

Probably.

In any event, sending ANY of the Quincy home should probably wait until you've sorted things out with Ishida Yukio, Josuke, and the rest of that lot. You ought to get on with that if you mean to have it done "today," as the Japanese Quincy are only a few hours from calling it a night - less, for those of them with kids.

And then there's whatever Ambrose has been up to for the last few hours, provided that it wasn't "sleep." You really don't know how he sorted out being eight hours ahead of events in Japan, and he IS an old man.


"I get what you mean, Briar," you start, "and I do tend to agree with you. Not my circus, not my elephants-"

"Not your peanuts?" your partner interjects.

"-not my peanuts," you admit, as you wonder how long that particular analogy is going to haunt you. "With as much trouble as this one's been to deal with, I really don't feel the need to go looking for more centuries-old blood feuds or similar conflicts."

"I hear a 'but' in there."

"But," you oblige her, "if one shows up despite that, and I CAN do something about it, then, well..."

Briar sighs. "I suppose you wouldn't be a very good prospect for the Chosen of Din if you weren't willing to take on challenges as they came."

No, he wouldn't.

She has a point there. Dinnite philosophy doesn't forbid its adherents from backing down from a challenge or opponent that they believe is too much for them to handle, but the act IS taken as an admission that who- or whatever you're backing down from is more powerful than you, which really shouldn't be the case for the Chosen of Power.

Seeing as how it's still quite early by New York Time, you decide to give Balthazar some more time to rest and/or wake up before you go pestering him about mana potions. And since you'd like to be at your best, energy-wise, before you check in with Shadow Alex and start making plans there, you decide to take an hour or so to read through another bit of Jugram's Journal.

Even if it DID look like it was going to turn into a kissing book.

As you get the first journal out of your pocket, you take a moment to shore up your faculties with ki and psychic energy, as you did before. Suitably fortified, you find another relatively soft patch of greenery and soil and settle in to read, while Briar continues to snooze.

You kind of come to regret boosting your memory retention.

Jugram - and it is most certainly the MAN, and not the Grandmaster of the Wandenreich, who wrote this part of the book - spends a good forty pages waxing eloquent about his lady Mathilda, from the first time he saw her at a distance in Yhwach's capital to the weeks he spent wondering who she was and how to approach her, or if he was even worthy to entertain the notion, to their actual first meeting and the courtship that followed.

It doesn't read like some great drama or a romantic comedy. It's simply the story of a young man, raised largely in isolation and so quite inexperienced with women - and honestly, not having been all that interested before - suddenly getting ambushed by his heart, his hormones, and the baffling, wondrous notion that there could be a person who he WANTED to spend the rest of his life with.

Even with your boosters - one of which, the psychic variant, you have to renew at one point - a lot of what is written down just goes over your head, and will probably continue to do so unless you lean on Ganondorf's memories more than this probably merits, or get a fair bit older.

As the silliness wears on, however, bits and pieces of more serious information start to appear, speaking of the Lichtreich's preparations for war, of the selection of new Sternritter and the development of their powers, and of a growing number of skirmishes between Quincy patrols and squads of Shinigami prowling the empire's borders.

'His Majesty has given the word,' one page declares, the writing of the lovestruck young man wholly overtaken by that of the warrior. 'We are at war.'

That seems like a good place to stop, so you do, and put the book away again.

While it's only been about half an hour outside of this demiplane, you don't want to wait too long before you "start the day," as it were. There's a fair bit that needs doing.

Casting the Spell of Sending, you dispatch a message to Balthazar: "Mr. Blake, do you sell mana potions? And if so, would you have any in stock or on your person?"

You let the spell go and wait a beat, hoping that you didn't catch the Merlinean Master while he was still-

"The answer to all three questions is, 'Yes,'" comes Balthazar's reply. "Give me twenty minutes to finish breakfast, and we can do business."

That works for you.

You get Jugram's Journal out again and settle in to read and wait.

Ten minutes later from your perspective, a Gate opens up, and Balthazar steps through.

"Good morning and good evening," he greets you.

"Likewise."

Looking around, Balthazar frowns. "...did you actually sleep on the grass?"

"It turns out Briar knows a spell for making greenery into temporary bedding," you explain.

"Sounds like exactly the sort of thing I would expect Fae and druids to know," Balthazar says, nodding once. "So, mana restoratives. I only brought three with me, and they won't have as much kick as those Hyrulean brands you've mentioned, but I have a somewhat larger supply back at the Arcana Cabana..."

Of the three potions Balthazar is carrying on his person, two - which he names as "Night's Essence" - sound like the functional equivalents of the Spring Dew Potions you get from Gen's. The third, "Moondrop," is NOT the equal of a Potion of Smoke Water, but falls in-between it and the lesser brand. He has more of each back at the shop, plus a couple shots of "Liquid Starlight," which DO sound like they'd match up to Gen's top-quality restoratives.

So, what are you in the market for?


You're glad you brought your wallet. You've got enough cash to clear out Balthazar's stock of restoratives, and since he's willing to sell, you see no reason not to buy.

A quick Gate-trip to the Arcana Cabana, and...

Gained Liquid Starlight (x2)
Gained Moondrop (x3)
Gained Night's Essence (x6)
Spent $900

"This won't inconvenience you?" you ask the senior sorcerer, as you pocket your purchases at the counter.

"Not particularly," Balthazar replies. "Barring some elaborate warding schemes or someone managing to bind my abilities altogether, I have more or less unlimited energy to work with as long as I'm on this plane of existence or have a workable connection to it. How much of that power I can channel at any given time, and how much doing so wears on me OVER time, is generally much more of a concern than the possibility of running out my personal reserves."

"...the demiplanes aren't directly adjacent to Earth," you muse, "and they don't have a direct planar connection, either... so you brought the restoratives along just in case you wore yourself out?"

"That, and to be prepared in case the opportunity for a sale presented itself. Which it did." He gestures at the bottles still sitting on the counter. "For the record, I only had about a third of these in stock before you brought the whole business with the Quincy to my attention; I laid in the extra supply after you'd presented your plan to hide them elsewhere."

"Thanks for that," you say, reaching for the remaining potions.

"I've also got a few more restoratives as safety stock," Balthazar adds, "but I will not be selling those to YOU for the foreseeable future, unless things go very, very badly. You already have enough potions on you that I'm worried you may give yourself mana poisoning."

Hand on glass, you pause, glancing from Balthazar to Briar. "How realistic a concern is that?"

"I mean, it's not rare," Briar says, "but your magical capacity is so high that you've got a lot more tolerance for infusions than the average spellcaster - or even the average archmage."

Balthazar nods. "As a rule, whatever your personal capacity is, you don't want the amount of restoratives you intake in a twenty-four hour period to exceed half that, if you can reasonably avoid it, and you definitely don't want to use enough restoratives to EQUAL your normal capacity. The closer you get to doing so, the more likely you are to start experiencing side-effects."

You think back on your use of mana potions over the last year and more.

You MAY have crossed the halfway mark a few times - and you KNOW that Shadow Alex did, yesterday - but you don't believe you've ever reached the second mark.

"While we're here," you say to Balthazar next, "what are the chances I could trade a bag of jewels my Shadow picked up in Silbern for the sort of diamonds it'd take to stabilize a Spell of Permanency on the demiplane we just left?"

Balthazar blinks. "The accelerated one, you mean?"

You nod. "I'd be casting the spell myself, if that helps."

At least, you're pretty sure you can do the job, with a little sorcerous support from Shadow Alex.

"It does, and it doesn't," the senior sorcerer replies. "I can look, but I'm pretty sure I don't have the sort of stones you'll need for something like that. Finding even ONE diamond that's compatible with the essence of a timeless demiplane created by a Great Fairy, as well as a Spell of Permanency cast by... well, YOU... is a pretty tall order. Worse if it's a particularly valuable stone, or if it takes more than one to fit the bill. Either way, I doubt I could have them here by order before that plane dissipates. You did say it would only last another week, right?"

Again, your head bobs. "That's okay. I mean, it'd be great if I could get what I need in time to stabilize THIS pocket realm, but as long as I have them available the NEXT time I can bargain with Navi to create a temporally-accelerated demiplane, that'd be golden."

...is he making a joke?

I don't think so...?

Hehe. Golden.

"Thinking ahead, I see," Balthazar says with a note of approval, as he heads towards the back room to look for diamonds.

It says something about sorcery, and the practitioners thereof, that you can use that sentence with complete seriousness.


"Why didn't you mention this before, Briar?"

"Like I said," your partner replies, "your tolerance for magical energy is kind of stupidly high. The content of the potions themselves wasn't going to hurt you, unless you started chugging Smoke Water in groups of four or Spring Dews by the dozen-"

Your mouth and throat tingle unpleasantly as you imagine the taste and possible aftereffects of such a binge.

Belching would not be unexpected, and expelling mildly energized vapors not completely out of the question.

"-and that would have put you at risk of overdrawing on your reserves anyway," Briar continues, "and I would have said something if it looked like you were heading that way. But you didn't, so I didn't."

You consider that for a moment, and what you know of your partner.

"Balthazar," you ask slowly, "what exactly ARE the effects of mana poisoning?"

Briar flutters in place.

"It depends on the individual, and the intensity," the older man replies with one of his wry smirks, "but at low levels, a state of impaired judgment and physical coordination, transitioning into nausea and headaches, is fairly common."

...

Slowly, you turn back to your partner. "Were you were waiting to see if I'd get myself DRUNK on magic potions?"

"Mmmmaybe?"

"Why didn't Gen ever mention this?"

"You'd have to ask him that to be sure," Briar says with another shrug you feel through the bond more than you see it with your eyes. "Given the way he acts and how he was on such good terms with a Great Fairy, though? He was probably waiting to see how you handled it, too, and trusting me to step in if you started getting out of hand. Plus, you did have Lu-sensei with you the first time you showed up at the shop," she reminds you. "Gen might have figured he'd be keeping an eye on you as well."

...

You'll buy that, though you should probably talk to the old man to be sure.

...Gen, you mean.

Although talking to your martial arts teacher about the effects of magical restoratives might also be in order. Who knows? There could be ki-based recovery draughts out there that you simply haven't encountered yet.

While Balthazar is checking to see if he has suitable diamonds in stock, you go ahead and drink one of the Night's Essence potions. It'll give you a nice boost to your mana, without bringing you close to that halfway mark Balthazar just recommended against passing.

*Glug*
*Glug*
*Glug*

Used Night's Essence
Gained Glass Bottle

You take a moment to inspect the empty container. The glass it's made of is on the heavier end for its size and seems fairly solid, but you can tell that it doesn't have anything like the resilience of Hylian Glass; consequently, while the small container could withstand jostling, being dropped a short distance or onto a soft surface, and other such disturbances, a good throw at a relatively unyielding surface would probably be enough to shatter it.

You spend a couple of minutes poking around the store, just to see if anything new and interesting has come in since your last visit, but nothing has caught your eye before Balthazar reappears and lets you know that his suspicion was correct, and he doesn't have any diamonds (or the dust thereof) suitable for your request.

You are neither surprised nor disappointed.

"Did you want me to hand over the jewels now, or-?" you state, reaching for your pocket.

"Hold on to those for now," Balthazar replies. "I might see something else in your share of the loot I'm more interested in trading for."

Okay.


"Bad fairy."

"Maybe a little-"

"'A little'?"

"-but I though it could be a useful learning experience, too!" Briar defends herself.

"A learning-? Briar, in case it's slipped your mind, I'm capable of eighth-tier sorcery in basically EVERY school, where I'm not even better. Drunkenness combined with that much magical power isn't a 'learning experience,' it's an apocalypse looking for a place to happen!"

"In your partner's defense," Balthazar speaks up, "it IS sort of traditional to take a young sorcerer drinking at a certain point in his training, both to see how well he handles magic while intoxicated, and to give him an... appreciation... for the potential consequences of casting while soused."

You regard the Merlinean Master for a moment. What does "sort of" traditional mean, and who would think that it was even a...?

Oh.

"Ambrose?" you sigh.

"Ambrose," he affirms. "But in fairness to HIM, it wasn't JUST so he could laugh at me and hold the memories over my head."

"...oh?"

"The odds are pretty good that your typical adolescent sorcerer is going to experiment with alcohol at SOME point," Balthazar explains. "And if by some chance he doesn't, there's all the rest of his life to consider. It's safer for the sorcerer and for everyone around him if he has some idea of his own tolerance, as well as how even small amounts of alcohol can interact with his abilities."

"See?" Briar declares.

"That said," the senior sorcerer continues, looking the fairy's way, "this particular sort of training is supposed to be performed on sorcerers who HAVEN'T broken into the third circle yet, and preferably with a more skilled magic-user present to run damage control."

...

"...okay, that COULD have been an issue," Briar admits. "But he didn't ACTUALLY get drunk on anything, and now he knows, so, no harm, no foul, right?"

You can probably find a use for this. Waste not, recycle, and all that.

You decide to save yourself some mana and just cast the Spell of Sending from the Arcana Cabana, after getting Balthazar's permission, of course.

Ten minutes later...

"I am currently at half mana," you state in a quiet voice. "What is your status, and do you need me to do anything to help you?"

You send the message, and then wait.

"Status is invisible, flying, blanked, no minions, and very tired," comes Shadow Alex's murmured reply. "Mana too low for Gate, too many Quincy to risk ritual attempt. Advice, help?"

You convey the response to Briar and Balthazar even as you parse it.

"Invisible, flying, blanked" is a pretty straightforward indication that your dark doppelganger is still running under a Spell of Invisibility (probably the Greater version, though perhaps not due to mana concerns), the Spell of Flight, and the Spell of Mind Blank. That said, it's been long enough since you last saw him that he's probably had to renew all of those, which would account for one of the upcoming bits.

"No minions" is exactly that, though since he didn't use the word "alone," Shadow Briar is likely still with her partner. She's not a minion, after all.

"Mana too low" tells you that Shadow Alex has hit that point where any further casting - or at least casting of a ninth-circle spell - would risk digging into the energy he needs to maintain his own existence, which if memory serves was somewhere around one-sixth of your full capacity.

As for "very tired," while you did re-summon your Shadow Self before sending him on this second raid of Silbern, that was before you took your nap siesta, so he would have "inherited" the fatigue of a long, busy day that you were already feeling - and which would have been compounded by the memories you got from the PREVIOUS Shadow Alex.

Finally, there is the matter of what advice or help to offer.

Opening a portal to Gate Room J will not be possible, unless you tell Shadow Alex to dispel the Dimensional Lock he put there - or if the Quincy have already done that somehow. In the latter case, they'd probably be watching the room, because it being singled out to be sealed when a bunch of other Gates of the Sun were bombed is kind of obvious.

That said, since you have the earlier Shadow's memories of being in part of Silbern, you could try to open a Gate somewhere he had been that wasn't Gate Room J, and so shouldn't be inconvenienced by the Dimensional Lock. Probably, anyway. You could try to improve your odds by leaning on the sympathetic connection you have with Shadow Alex, who is after all not just a creature you summoned, but a reflection of yourself. That would help you "aim" the Gate at his location, although if he's not somewhere his earlier... self? Incarnation? If he's not somewhere the previous Shadow Alex was and that you're thinking clearly of, the Gate might not open.

Or perhaps there's something else you'd rather try?

Briar doesn't have any new suggestions, whereas Balthazar notes that Shadow Alex's being stuck on another plane, hiding from an army of hostile beings, kind of limits your options, at least with your current intel. If you had a better way of getting in touch with your not-evil twin, like passing Messages through a Greater Spell of Scrying, you might have an easier time putting together a plan, but that brings up the risk of a passing-by Wandenreich member noticing the scrying sensor, or perhaps even hearing Shadow's whispered communications.


"Just because nobody had gotten hurt YET doesn't mean they WOULDN'T have, Briar," you say firmly.

Maybe it's just your protective instincts speaking, but the idea of you losing control of your magic around your friends and family or people like the Quincy refugees you're trying to help, let alone in the middle of a battlefield, is disturbing.

Even just the notion of not being able to use your powers as effectively as you otherwise could in a pressing situation unsettles you, because even without those secondhand memories of the previous Shadow Alex's clash with the Wandenreich - in particular, how close those two fights with the Sternritter really were - you have direct personal experience with events where the correct and timely use of your magic undoubtedly saved lives. And not always just your own.

"Alright, I admit it, it was a bad idea, or at least a badly implemented one. I DO still think we need to figure out how you handle being" -Briar pauses, hunting for a suitable word- "impaired, I guess, both when you're trying to use magic and when you're NOT. But that can wait until... you're..." She trails off for a moment. "Actually, it probably CAN'T wait until you're older. You'd just be MORE powerful then, which would make finding someone who could stop you even harder."

...she's not wrong about that, but you can see a few options.

One is that you just don't drink alcohol or use any other potentially mind-altering and/or judgment-impairing substances, ever. While simple enough in theory, the practice is likely to prove more difficult, and not because you have any particular urge to experiment with such things. Rather, there are material components called for by certain spells that have those sorts of properties, which you would be unavoidably exposed to or even required to use if you wished to perform the magic in question; you might also end up handling such things through your work with Gen, or in other situations. There are also plenty of beings in the world with ways of inducing such effects, whether by poison, spell, or other methods, so you can't rule out hostile action.

Another approach would be to perform the "training" that Balthazar described, once you're of age to do so, but with the precaution of emptying your mana reserve beforehand. And maybe your ki and other energies as well, just to be sure. With no gas in the tank, so to speak, the potential for accidental misuse of magic - or other supernatural powers - would be almost eliminated. Not ENTIRELY so, no, but if you were in a state where you had to resort to a thirty-second ritual to carry out even the least of any "good ideas" you might have while under the influence, it wouldn't even require a fellow magic-user to stop you, just someone who was in the know about your capabilities and able to interfere with your efforts.

While it would probably work, this approach carries other drawbacks - namely, that you'd be out of magic and the like during it, and for some time in the aftermath. That would be inconvenient at the very least, and potentially actively hazardous, depending on when and where you performed the exercise, and what else was going on around it. That isn't even getting into the fact that you've been working with and relying on your magic almost for as long as you can remember - which is REALLY saying something - or that your ki has become a similarly valuable and heavily-used asset since you unlocked it.

Even as a theoretical exercise, the idea of emptying your reserves and reducing yourself to normal human levels is surprisingly off-putting. It's one thing to hold back while you have the capability to do more, but to remove the potential entirely, even if it's just for the span of a few hours? That is... well...

...

The third notion that comes to mind is similar to the second, and would involve creating some item that could temporarily bind your powers - a set of Anti-Magic Shackles, for example - and then wearing or otherwise using that. While still... somewhat disturbing to contemplate, it's a bit less so than the above option, because you could simply design the item to be turned off, and then entrust the means of doing so to someone with good judgment - or even just program the thing to switch off by itself after a certain point. Either way, the main issue would be actually sitting down to make the thing, and to a lesser degree, what you'd do with it afterwards. Spending however many thousands of dollars to create something you'd only use one time isn't really appealing, but a set of bindings that would work on someone's supernatural powers as well as their physical body are the sort of thing that might come in handy, if you're ever in a situation where you want or need to take prisoners.

Shadow's encounter with Bambietta may be influencing your thinking, there.

The last prospect that comes to mind is finding someone capable of dealing with you regardless of WHAT level of power you can bring to bear. This, you have to admit, seems unlikely, unless you somehow managed to call up the Avatar of Din - which would invoke a whole OTHER host of issues. Probably not the best idea, all in all.

Thinking it over, you start casting the Spell of Sending again.

Ten minutes later, you speak: "Can you get to an empty, out-of-the-way room large enough for a Gate - in the Servants' Quarter, maybe?"

The reply comes back: "I think so. Give me fifteen minutes, and contact me again before opening the Gate to be sure."

You can do that.

And so you do, waiting five minutes before starting the ritual communication spell for the third time - and this time, in Balthazar's ritual room, so that if you have to open the Gate quickly, you won't be risking angry Quincy shooting and/or storming into his store proper.

As you're doing that, Balthazar casts a couple of spells of his own, raising the defensive wards within the chamber and setting up a Spell of Illusion to hide your true appearances.

"Are you clear?" you finally ask.

"For the moment, but I can't be sure how long it'll last. Even the Servants' Quarter is being picked over."

Well, then.


It won't be easy to find someone who can really match up to you in sheer breadth and depth of ability, especially not if you also want them to be close to you in physical age - you're just going to rule out mental age out of hand, your situation there is Weird - but that kind of makes you more eager to look.

You are trying to live up to being the Chosen of Din, after all. To call something "difficult" is merely saying that doing it would be a worthy test of your power - and success, a validation of it.

That's not the only appeal, either. Many of your friends can keep up with you in a few areas, and some of them promise to maintain that level of performance as you all get older, or even to exceed your abilities in certain fields, but thus far, your versatility is unique among your circle of acquaintances. Finding just one other person who could compete with you on even footing, or at least a level that approached it, would be... nice.

Of course, even with a true peer to run damage control, it might be wise to take some added precautions before you start experimenting with mind-altering substances. After all, if you leave aside the fact that you could dismiss him at a moment's notice, Shadow Alex is technically a peer of sorts, and his odds of countering your magic would only be fifty-fifty, maybe sixty-forty with the right preparations. That's not bad, but it's not great, either - certainly not something you'd want to trust people's safety to if you had a choice.

So as much as it disturbs you, you aren't going to rule out the idea of purging your reserves of supernatural power before conducting those experiments.

But you're not going to rush into them, either.

...a couple of generic Men In Black. ...what?

Your request earned you a curious look from Balthazar, but he obliged you-

"Oh, thanks!"

-and even included Briar in the illusion, sort of anchoring her to the "head" of the image of a Woman In Black. All three of your disguises are remarkably unremarkable, being of above-average height and fit but not overly muscular builds, with short combed-back black hair, dark glasses that conceal everything behind them and appear to reflect what is before them, expressions so bland that they're nearly as good as physical masks for concealment, and of course, the professional black suits.

You don't feel like testing your luck or delaying any further. If Shadow Alex has found a spot that is not being observed, and will not be for at least the handful of seconds required to retrieve him via a Gate, then that's all you need.

Making one last confirmation with Balthazar that all is in readiness, you open up yet another hole in the local fabric of reality-

!

-and find yourself looking into what appears to be a kitchen storage room or walk-in closet. You say "appears to be" because the place has been ransacked, with cupboard doors and drawers hanging open and shelves standing almost entirely bare. Only a few strings of withered vegetables hanging from the ceiling, a couple of dusty boxes jammed into the back corners, and a double-handful of salt or sugar spilled along and over the side of one counter remain to indicate what might have been here before.

You see and sense no one in the room, and for a moment, you wonder if you missed.

Then you hear Shadow Briar, asking, "What's with the suits?"

"Department of Immigration, Division Six," you and Shadow Alex say in unison.

"Please step through the portal in a timely manner," you continue.

Instead, you hear the whoosh of displaced air as one large object and one much smaller shoot through the Gate.

"We're through!" your doppelganger says swiftly. "Close it!"

Having no further reason to leave the Gate open, you do as requested, and the portal snaps shut without issue.

A moment later, the two Shadows fade into view, the Spell of Invisibility that had been cloaking them dismissed.

"SO glad to be out of there," Shadow Briar complains.

"That makes two of us," her partner sighs as he turns to you. "I've got enough left to pass on the memories of my scouting mission. How much do you want?"

You consider that. Part of you is temped to take the whole thing, but Shadow Alex was in Silbern for several hours, and coordinating a large force of elementals equipped with explosives for a portion of that. You already have several hours' worth of memories from "yesterday's" events, and while the sleep you got started the process of unpacking and integrating those, it's not yet complete. A second lengthy download might not be a good idea.


While you want to know everything Shadow Alex saw and did during his excursion, you don't NEED to learn all of it right away - and strictly speaking, it's probably for the better that you don't, given the other information-download you're already working through.

With that in mind, you suggest that your doppelganger give you two separate packets of information: one containing what he's learned about the layout of Silbern, which you'd like to have made accessible immediately; and the rest of it being packed away to assimilate slowly over time.

If there's anything in that larger bundle that you need to know right now, your Shadow can just tell you.

"...probably have enough for that, but I'll need to use a ritual, and I might be tapped out in the process," your not-evil twin replies after a moment's thought. "So, before I get to chanting..."

It seems there ARE a few things he thinks you need to know.

First, Shadow Alex states that he does NOT recommend having a few dozen telepathic links going at once.

"Maybe it would have been easier if they were more mature, or at least more human-like in their thinking," he says, rubbing his left temple. "And then again, maybe having that many different minds linked together would have been a headache no matter WHAT they were."

"Is that a literal headache, or...?"

"Literal AND figurative," he confirms. "Wrangling all those boulder brats with my BRAIN was NOT fun."

On the subject of "wrangling" summons and other minions, Shadow Alex strongly advises that you NOT attempt to deploy another force of that size without including officer-equivalents that you can delegate to.

"If the goal had just been to bury an enemy in overly energetic rocks, that would have been fine," he says. "Just point, say, 'Smash!' and let them go wild. And I think I could have handled leading a group of five or six pretty well, even if they were spread out over a large part of the fortress. But that many of them, in that many different locations?" He shakes his head.

"Bad?"

"We lost a lot of time because I had to keep telling different guys to stay put while I dealt with another problem," Shadow Alex explains, "and the Spell to Bestow Weapon Proficiency only had a two-hour time limit to start with. I waited as long as possible before telling the elementals to use their grenades, but two-fifths of them were still trying to FIND their targets at that point. When the explosions went off and the alarm went up, they all got nervous or excited - and some of them got careless, and came out of walls in what they THOUGHT were empty rooms or stretches of hallway, but actually had Quincy far enough away that the elementals hadn't felt their footsteps."

"They were invisible and Mind Blanked, though," you point out, frowning.

"Carpets and banners," Shadow Alex replies dryly, gesturing over his face as if wearing a long hood - or covered by a large piece of fabric.

You allow yourself a facepalm.

"That was my reaction," he agrees with a sigh.

"Anything else to report?" you ask.

"The sabotage spooked the Wandenreich," Shadow Alex tells you, "but it didn't scare them off. They've set a fair-sized guard on all the Gates that I could find, and brought in even more people to help with stripping the place for supplies. Good news there is, the Gates they can still USE are all located away from the Royal Quarter and the higher-security area around it, and they hadn't NEARLY finished clearing those rooms out when the grenades started going off. The Sternritter and other officer-types are still TRYING to get their stuff out, but they're going a lot slower, now, and I heard arguments and complaints about it."

You turn that over in your head. The Wandenreich's elites would obviously want their personal belongings, but every minute they have their subordinates working on rescuing their own treasures is a minute they're NOT hauling out food, clothing, or other general supplies that the rank-and-file could use - and with the nearest Gates out (or in case, locked down), that's a lot more minutes used up, possibly even wasted, depending on how you look at things.

Arguing and complaining would make sense.

You wonder what the Grandmaster's opinion of it is...?

Shadow Alex doesn't appear to have anything else he considers urgent enough to require a verbal report, as he's gotten started on that ritualized memory-transfer.

Six minutes later, he finishes, reaching out and tapping your forehead.

You wince as a mental map of Silbern takes shape in your conscious mind, while a greater "weight" settles into the deeper reaches of your awareness.

As you're dealing with the download, Shadow Alex frowns down at his hand. "...huh."

"I know that sound," Briar sighs. "What happened?"

"I think I just confirmed that the Heart of Shadow DID do something to me," your darker aspect says curiously.

You and your partner trade glances, before you carefully ask, "What sort of 'something'?"

"My limit for using mana seems to have increased a bit," he replies. "The last time I was this low on magical energy, I started getting smoky at the edges. Right now?" He waves his hand back and forth, but nothing out of the ordinary happens.

To quote your dark self, "...huh."

Is there anything else you want to do with Shadow Alex?


"How low can you go?" you ask Shadow Alex.

He looks at you. "...let's find out."

With that, he starts casting. First it's a cantrip, the Spell of Light, followed by the Spell to Disguise One's Self, which gives him the appearance of his idealized adult form.

After that comes an array of first-circle Illusion Magic.

A sword-shaped Shadow Weapon clatters to the floor, and then is given the appearance of an axe by the Spell to Disguise A Weapon.

A second Shadow Alex appears next to the first for an instant, moving as if attempting to dodge an incoming blow, which you recognize as the Spell of the Darting Duplicate in action.

After come a series of Silent Images, each one cast and released to make room for the next. Ghostly figures swirl around your Shadow as a result, half-formed semblances of Hyrulean monsters becoming just complete enough to identify before they fade away.

The first of those is a Bokoblin, and as the vision of big-headed creature wavers in and out of view, you notice your doppelganger shift uncomfortably. An Octorok and a Leever later, you glimpse a brief darkness flickering across your Shadow's person, and when he produces the image of a Moblin, you finally see black wisps of something that isn't smoke beginning to trail from his form.

"...alright," he says, as the looming image of the bulldog-faced goblin disappears. "I think that confirms it. If I could previously use up to five-sixths of a full tank before basically cannibalizing myself, I can get down to eleven-twelfths now."

You run the numbers, and nod slowly. That's enough extra energy for a couple of ninth-circle spells - maybe a couple of tenth-circle, but you'd have to test how magic on that level interacts with your Shadow's real/not-real nature before drawing any conclusions.

Even if that doesn't pan out, it's still a nice little boost.

You wonder what other effects the Heart of Shadow has had? Not just on your sort-of-clone, but on your Shadow Magic in general...?

Well, that's for another time.

"Just to be sure," Shadow Alex says, before casting one more time. From the way his real body swells up and fills out within the illusion of his adult form, it would appear to be the Spell to Enlarge a Person, yet even as it takes effect, the not-smoke that is the essence of Shadow - in more ways than one - begins pouring from the suddenly almost ten-foot-tall form.

The overall effect is not unlike watching an explosion, albeit a very slow one, and when it's over, your Shadow has vanished.

"Later," Shadow Briar declares, before checking out alongside her partner in another puff of darkness.

Balthazar, who had been watching all of this with the quiet interest of a professional, now says, "Are we done here, then?"


"I think so..." you begin, a plan forming in your thoughts. Then something occurs to you that has you dismissing a chunk of that and fishing out your Magic Cellphone. "Actually, I need a few minutes to make a call. Will your security wards interfere with this?"

"That's the phone you got from Ambrose, right?" Balthazar says.

You nod.

"Have you modified it?"

You shake your head.

"Then I'll need a minute to turn off part of the ward system, and you'll want to make the call from the Arcana Cabana proper, rather than down here."

He gestures around at the spellcasting chamber where you opened the Gate - all brick and mortar and metal piping that doesn't have anything to do with heating or plumbing, the currently inactive Merlin Circle seemingly just a burn mark on the floor - and you have to nod in agreement. Rooms like this tend to be among the more heavily reinforced parts of a magic-user's residence, to prevent miscasts, runaway experiments, or angry summons from wrecking the rest of the building and its neighboring structures. Such wards, as well as the underlying physical reinforcement that any sensible spellcaster includes, tend to interfere with signals - which is really just another reason to have them, whatever the inconvenience.

In any case, you leave Balthazar to his thing and head back up to the shop. A couple of minutes later, he calls down that you're good to go, so you dial the number for Urahara Shop.

Because why spend time and mana on a Ritual of Sending that has a small but non-zero chance of failure, when you could just make a phonecall?

*Ring*

*Ring*

*Ri-*

"Urahara Shop, Urahara speaking," Kisuke declares. In the background, you hear what you think may be a television playing.

"Mr. Urahara, it's Alex."

"Ah, good evening! How goes the Quincy rescue operation?"

"It goes," you reply. "The good news there is, even with the prophetic angle in play, Auswahlen appears to have been completely stopped by Yhwach's death - and not just for the people I evacuated."

You briefly explain about the other, very much alive Ishida relatives you scryed on.

"So what's the bad news?" Urahara inquires without prompting.

"I've got a few confirmed Wandenreich sympathizers among the refugees."

"How 'confirmed'?"

"One of them tried to shoot me," you say. "I managed to secure him without either of us getting hurt, and the Elders agreed to bind his powers, but he knows my name, what I look like, and that I was pretty heavily involved in taking down his once-and-future god-king."

"You thought to disguise your Shadow, somewhat, but you didn't disguise yourself?"

"In hindsight, there are a number of things I could have done better," you admit. "It could be worse, though; at least I found out BEFORE letting him and the others leave-"

"Okay, yeah, that WAS a lucky break."

"-and I CAN try to erase their memories."

"...'try'?"

"I don't know a specific spell that suits this particular situation," you tell the shopkeeper-scientist, "but I'm sufficiently proficient with Enchantment Magic that I could try to brute-force something, and that's assuming I can't summon something trustworthy to wipe the knowledge for me." You shake your head. "Anyway, I'm getting off-track. I had two things to talk to you about. First, regarding those computer files?"

"Yes?"

"I have divine confirmation that making copies wouldn't violate my oath, so either I or my Shadow will be along at some point so you can do that - definitely no later than the date of that spar my Shadow has with Captain Zaraki, so a week from now-ish at the latest."

"That's... good to know," Urahara says slowly, "but what is this about a spar with Captain Zaraki?"

...

"...my Shadow didn't mention it?" you half-state, half-inquire, after casting back through transferred memories and failing to recollect such an exchange.

"He did not," comes the answer. "And where, exactly, is this 'spar' supposed to take place?"

There is a concerned suspicion in the Shinigami shopkeeper's words, and you quickly assure him that you'd only be MEETING Zaraki in Karakura, before traveling to one of the demiplanes for the actual match.

Urahara is relieved to hear it. "Okay. So, unless THAT was the other thing you wanted to discuss..."

It wasn't.


Although Isshin and Masaki agreed with one another that they were going to (have to) talk Urahara about Jugram Haschwalth's interest in Yuzu, they didn't specifically give you permission to inform the man in their stead. It's a small distinction, but it's often the little things like this that make or break a relationship, and you prefer to err on the side of caution.

For that very reason, however, you'd rather not send Urahara into that eventual meeting entirely unprepared, as it would just waste time and leave a lot of questions and potential vulnerabilities unaddressed.

So you let him know about the collection of portraits your Shadow found hidden behind the Wandenreich Grandmaster's private chambers, and how your investigation of them turned up the word, "Empowerers," as a connection.

You also mention how, in looking through one of Jugram's journals-

"I would VERY much like to see THOSE," Urahara states.

You're sure he would, although fair warning? The first one's just been a diary so far, and not one with much if anything in the way of scientific commentary.

"Even so, the insight into the mind of an opposing leader isn't something to be passed up!"

-you found the term "giver" used to describe a particular rare type of Quincy with the ability to increase the powers of others. Jugram and Yhwach himself both belonged to this category, and each apparently considered the other to be his "other half," whatever that means.

"Almost certainly has something to do with that business of sharing eyes," Urahara muses to himself in a lowered tone. More clearly, he continues, "You think it'll be relevant going forward, even though Yhwach is dead?"

You think of the picture of the Kurosaki twins, and of Ichigo's ridiculous spiritual growth.

"I can just about guarantee it," you say, "so I thought I might give you a heads up to brush up on the topic before that happens."

"Ah, forewarning. The only thing worse than getting it is not getting it."

How true.

In any case, that's addressed your reasons for calling Urahara, so you conclude the conversation, wish him a good... night, as it's getting on towards eight in the evening back in Karakura, and then hang up and return to Balthazar's spellcasting chamber.

"All done?" he inquires.

With the phonecalls and such, yes, but you had an idea you wanted to fly by him...

"Oh?

You bring up the rough plan you concocted earlier for dealing with the Wandenreich sympathizers among the Ishidas. It's occurred to you that, rather than try to brute-force a memory-suppression spell, you might be better served by summoning a creature with the necessary mental abilities to do the job in your stead, as well as the... moral and ethical framework to be trusted not to make any OTHER alterations.

Balthazar's eyebrow had started to climb midway through that, but settled back down once you mentioned trustworthiness.

"Are you asking me if I know of such a being?"

"That, if you have any suggestions for improving the plan - I'm considering on using the Spell of Divination to get the Goddess's advice on it, just so you know - and also one other thing."

"Oh?"

The bit about summoning help to solve one problem gave you the idea of trying to do the same to address your personal desire for the diamonds you need to stabilize one or both of the demiplanes.

"If I were you," Balthazar interrupts, "I would put any plans regarding the diamonds on hold for now, at least until you've finished sorting out that first batch of loot from Silbern. I'm willing to extend you a certain amount of trust - if not credit - because of your past patronage, your positive relationship with and influence on Dave, and because you're an excellent distraction for Ambrose-"

Hey!

"-as well as one of the few people I've ever met who manages to drive him to drink on a consistent basis," the Merlinean Master adds smoothly.

...that's better.

"You won't have those advantages with any dealers in arcane gems you manage to make contact with, however you end up doing it, or with any creature you call up blindly, which means you need to know what assets you've got to work with before you start looking for a salesman. No one's going to do business with you if they think you can't cover your end of a deal."

That is... fair, if frustrating.

"And the part about the Quincy?" you ask.

"Memory magic isn't one of my personal strengths," Balthazar says, "and while I do know of a few enchanters who could do the job, I wouldn't consider most of them trustworthy - it's an unfortunately common failing of the school."

Yeah, when you can literally change a person's mind on a whim, the temptation to abuse that power is considerable. Granted, every other school of magic has its own potential for such misuse, but Enchantment Magic exists almost entirely in the minds of its targets, making evidence of wrongdoing... not non-existent, but certainly harder to recognize for what it is. And if you're that much less likely to get caught, or even to recognize when you've made a mistake, things can go downhill very quickly.

"Of the remainder," he continues, "a few could be trusted to do the job, but not to keep quiet about it - and being masters of mind magic, they'd remember. A couple more would keep quiet, but would try to summon you in exchange at the first opportunity - and since that's fairly likely to fail even if they go all-in on a ritual, they'd get VERY interested and start looking for information about you." He pauses to give you a dry look. "I'm fairly sure you don't want that, but just to be clear...?"


While it is tempting to get the names of skilled magic-users who could not only help you out with your current issue, but also potentially give you pointers on shoring up your shortcomings in their field of expertise, you already have more attention on you at the moment than you want. Having one or two curious, capable enchanters trying to find out about you isn't nearly the sort of threat that the Wandenreich's interest in you represents, but you'd still rather not have said spellcasters poking around.

Yes, you know the Spell of Mind Blank and could live out the rest of your life under its daily-renewed protection, but just because that spell shuts down Divination Magic aimed at you - and grants no small level of security against Enchantment Magic besides - it doesn't mean that you're completely unfindable via magic. You're just a harder target.

As an example, a spellcaster could use the Spell of Communion or the Spell to Contact Another Plane to query their patron or other powerful entities about you. Most of said Powers wouldn't be able to divine anything about you - though you're not going to bet against any Gods of Knowledge and/or Magic having ways to bypass Mind Blank - but they also wouldn't be prevented from passing on anything they already knew, consulting other beings for what THEY knew, or employing other indirect methods to get around your anti-Divination ward.

That's not even getting into mundane methods of information gathering.

Anyway, when you confirm Balthazar's suspicion, he nods. "Ruling out enchanters, then, you'll either need a fairly powerful telepath, or the right kind of summoned creature. I don't know any telepaths I can recommend; psychics in general are kind of thin on the ground, and the handful I'm aware of with that level of ability either have organizational ties I don't entirely trust or are just crazy."

You immediately think of Grey Voice-

"As for summons," and here, Balthazar smirks, "I do know of a particular kind of creature which would be capable of doing what you need done, quite easy for you to summon even in bulk, and just ironically appropriate."

-and find yourself curious. "Go on," you say.

Balthazar describes an extraplanar entity called a viduus, a type of psychopomp that acts as a record-keeper of the afterlife. They're not specifically aligned with any one plane or pantheon, instead being part of the greater bureaucracy of the beyond, which acts to ensure that the cycle of souls remains safe from predation or exploitation, and stays in good order.

"This sounds familiar," Briar comments.

"They do have interests in common with the Shinigami," Blake agrees, "which happens to include a certain amount of annoyance towards the Quincy for making their jobs harder. Not so much that they'd seek to harm them, but given the opportunity to harmlessly mess with some of them... they wouldn't say no."

"And these record-keepers can do something about the knowledge the Wandenreich sympathizers have that I'd really rather they didn't?"

"They're able to modify the memories of the living," comes the confirmation. "Not freely, and not exactly easily, they have these quills that they use as weapons-"

"Seriously?" you interject.

"-yes, seriously, and if they draw someone's blood with one of those, they can re-write or remove up to a full day's worth of memory. And they can do that repeatedly."

Okay, that would be very useful for your current needs. Twenty-four hours' worth of memory is more than enough to erase the knowledge of your appearance, or even to smooth over the actual Auswahlen incident entirely. You could ask these viduus to make the problematic Ishida think they argued with their relatives about it, went off and had a few drinks in a temper, and woke up later with no idea how they'd ended up where they were!

The bit about having to draw blood is an issue, since even a minor injury is enough to break the Sleep Spells you know, but if you knocked them out once, you could do it again, especially if Shadow Alex was present to help. Add in a quick Spell of Memory Lapse to be sure the problematic Ishidas don't remember waking up to see you, and it seems pretty doable. A little more mana-hungry than is completely ideal, but doable.

"I'll add that the memory modifications aren't necessarily permanent," Balthazar cautions you. "They can be undone by the Lesser Spell of Restoration or by other effects that modify memories or heal the mind. It's also technically possible for someone to recover their true memories by reading the book they were copied to, but that's fairly unlikely."

...honestly, you're starting to lean towards summoning Grey Voice again. The only catch is that, while you know he's psychic, you don't know if he's the right KIND of psychic for the job you have in mind, or that he'd be willing to do it. You don't know the alien sage all that well, and he could have some sort of "elder race vow of non-interference" going on.

You ask Balthazar if he's aware of any other creatures with the necessary abilities.

"None that I can vouch for," he answers seriously.


You aren't going to dismiss Balthazar's suggested option out of hand, but you would like to see if Grey Voice can help you out with this matter before you go bringing yourself to the attention of ANOTHER entire afterlife bureaucracy.

The Merlinean Master does note that, while viduus are able to perceive souls, they don't do so especially clearly. They can determine location, distinguish among different individuals in a group, and even tell the difference between the living and the undead, and all of these regardless of the level of ambient light, but they don't have any other special ability to penetrate disguises.

Balthazar does caution you that some of their more powerful "relatives" DO have the gift of truesight, so you'll want to be careful about summoning or otherwise dealing with any of THOSE, but the viduus themselves could be fooled by a Spell to Alter One's Self and some good acting.

"Not the Spell to Disguise One's Self?" you ask.

"It might work, but your odds wouldn't be great," comes the explanation. "Viduus' mundane senses are quite sharp, they have strong and detail-oriented minds, and they're immune to mind-affecting effects."

Duly noted.

Gained Parazoology B+

Setting that aside, you get started on calling up Grey Voice - and it IS a Calling spell that you use, because you've never brought forth the Chozo with the Spell to Summon Monsters, you think the alien bird-sage's spirit might be too powerful for the conventional levels of that spell to hold, and Balthazar isn't sure if his wards are up to dealing with a tenth-circle Summoning Spell.

That... seems like a bit of a design oversight to you, unless of course, he can't USE tenth-circle magic... which you don't ask nearly so directly or rudely.

"Out of curiosity," you inquire, as you lay down your usual summoning array of pure energy, "just what IS the highest-tier spell you can cast? Ambrose mentioned that he was too old to use tenth-circle spells casually, but that implies that he DOES have the ability..."

"I can manage some tenth-circle rituals, if I really need them," Balthazar admits, "but most of the time, I manage to NOT need to. The time investment for rituals means there's always that chance of something disturbing you before you're finished, or not having enough time to cast the spell when you want to use it, and calling on that much power draws too much attention anyway, especially in the modern age."

"Is that because there are fewer practitioners these days, or...?"

"Actually, the overall NUMBER of magic-users in the world is higher today than it's ever been," Balthazar corrects you, "but even when you take individuals like myself and various demonic or undead practitioners into account, the number of POWERFUL spellcasters is lower than it used to be."

"The Powers again?" you guess. With their injunction against divine interference (or its demonic equivalent), spellcasting traditions that rely on patrons and pacts would have been largely locked out of the higher tiers of mortal magic.

"Some of it, yes," Balthazar admits, "but the modern world itself bears some responsibility as well. It's so much easier to get things these days than it used to be, and that's a knife that cuts both ways... but I'm distracting you."

You nod and get started with the ritual proper, but Balthazar's words linger in the back of your mind the entire time, because you can see what he was leading up to.

On the one hand, it's a lot easier for a novice to get into magic in the modern world, where basic necessitities of living are readily available and don't require back-breaking labor from dawn to dusk every day of one's life. The higher standard of living means more people have the time and the money to spare for such interests, and shops like the Arcana Cabana, Gen's, and the Magic Box back in Sunnydale provide far easier access to reagents, books, and especially magic items than would once have been the case.

But on the other hand, more practitioners means more demand for a limited supply of goods and services, and some supplies are going to be VERY limited indeed, just by the nature of the beast - sometimes literally so. Easier and more widespread availability also ensures that some people are getting into magic that they shouldn't - whether that's "yet" or "ever" - or simply muddling through without proper instruction, and THAT means bad things: accidents; injuries; corruptions; and deaths, just to name a few. And even leaving the hazards of the art itself aside, there's the REST of the modern world to consider, and how its fast food, faster cars, cheap books, powerful weapons, and increasingly common telecommunications networks would distract and detract from most people's ability to focus on their studies...

You push those thoughts aside as you complete your spell, and Grey Voice appears in the luminous circle.

"A different location, I see," the Chozo spirit muses as his head turns to take in the room. Fixing his orange-eyed gaze upon you, he asks, "Have you obtained a new workshop, young one, or are you merely borrowing your elder's?"

"The latter," you admit, "although I do have a potential lead on the former... but that's not why I called you."

You quickly explain the peanut Quincy situation to Grey Voice.

While you're still figuring out alien bird body language, the Chozo seems pleased by your decision to thwart a mass-murder, particularly in the way you sought assistance from proper authorities, didn't put yourself directly in harm's way, and even pulled potential troublemakers out of the fire along with their kin.

"Doing the right thing is hard," he says. "That makes it all the more satisfying when you succeed."

Learning that Shadow Alex opted to kill Yhwach does prompt an inquiry if he had any other options. The only one that comes to mind would have involved summoning Batreaux to cast the Spell to Trap the Soul, which would have required you to get your hands a gemstone of likely incredible value - and even then, that strange damage-reflecting shield the Quincy King slept under may well have interfered.

Grey Voice hears you out, and then nods. "Then while perhaps distasteful, it was the needful thing."

Finally, you get to the crux of the matter: the Wandenreich sympathizers; their dangerous knowledge of your identity and involvement in their King's demise; and your solidifying plan to suppress or erase their memories of the entire affair.

Grey Voice makes a warbling noise. "I see. And you wish to ask my assistance in this."

"If you're able to provide it, and willing," you agree.


Grey Voice blinks once, slowly, as he registers your offer.

"I see," he replies. "You do realize that there is very little a being in my condition would want, correct?"

"I have run into the issue before," you admit.

The situation with Archer is different from this, if only because he manifests in a corporeal form and has some kind of fixation on that Emiya Shi- sorry, on that Masane Toushirou kid, but the whole part about not having any interest in or use for material things is very much the same.

"Still," you continue, "'very little' isn't the same as 'nothing at all,' and it would probably keep some of the local Powers happy if I wasn't getting your aid for free, so I figured it was worth making the offer."

"Ah, yes," the Chozo replies, orange eyes narrowing slightly. "Them."

Right, he has a bone or two to pick with the local movers and shakers.

"There is certainly ONE service I would very much appreciate," Grey Voice mutters, "but before we get to that - yes, I am capable of altering the memories of other beings, but not quickly or casually. Depending on how many of these 'sympathizers' we are talking about, and how long a period of memory would have to be altered for each...?"

"Nine people, all told," you reply, "and one, maybe two days' worth of memory?"

Grey Voice shakes his head. "Then I regret to say that I cannot be of practical assistance to you in this matter."

Damn.

"Too costly, or too time-consuming?" you inquire.

"I can selectively edit several minutes' worth of memory at a time, but that requires an equivalent period of effort on my part," Grey Voice explains. "To alter a full day's recollections would be the work of another full day - and that 'day' would by necessity have to be spread out over a matter of a week or more."

You wince. You REALLY don't have that kind of time, and even if you limited things to altering your appearance and name in the Ishidas' memories - because outright removal would leave an obvious blank spot - you interacted with them enough that it would still take too much time and effort, unless he could use that power on multiple creatures at once, but what are the odds-

"In point of fact, I can do that," Grey Voice replies.

-wait, really?

"Erasing memories was a skill I had little use for in life," the Chozo says with a feathery shrug. "Not just because of the effort involved, but also because it only worked on organic minds - some of them, at any rate - while artificial ones and electronic surveillance systems and databases were unaffected. It was much more practical to use the ability to convey selected memories to others, or help them to recall the details of events clouded by age, trauma, or simple forgetfulness."

You consider that for a moment, and then dismiss the image of ALIEN BIRDMAN, SPACE DETECTIVE to focus on the matter at hand.

Working out the specifics with Grey Voice, you determine that he could edit the memories of the nine Wandenreich sympathizers so that you looked and sounded like a palette-swap of Shadow Alex - and it would not have to be your natural coloring, at that - and used a different name. Editing all the memories involving BOTH of you might also be possible, thanks to how much time you and your Shadow DIDN'T spend on the timeless demiplane, and how often you were together when around these particular Ishidas, but it would likely be running up against the limits of Grey Voice's psychic strength.

While either approach would offer you some protection, it wouldn't be nearly as effective as having the Ishidas' memories of the entire couple of days altered, to say nothing of the danger their relatives would be left in if and when the fools went to the Wandenreich.


As much as you would prefer to hire someone you already know and know to be disinclined to spreading your secrets around, Grey Voice simply can't do the job that you need done - not to the level that needs doing to assure everyone's safety, in the time you have available.

It'll have to be the viduus, then.

Before you dismiss the Chozo, however, you pose a question: "For future reference, what WERE you interested in as possible payment?"

"It has not escaped my notice that you have acquired a much more effective means of shielding your mind since our last encounter," the alien ghost answers, regarding you keenly. "And while I am trained in techniques to conceal and defend the mind, my own efforts fall somewhat short of the level you appear to have achieved."

In plainer language, he wants Mind Blank.

You can hardly blame him, but at the moment, your ability to grant such a request would be limited to casting the spell, with or without a slightly extended duration. Making the effect permanent is beyond your current skills, and crafting a suitable magic item would, at best, be testing the limits of your item-crafting abilities - as Mind Blank is a MUCH more potent effect than those you've attempted to imbue into an object before - but would more likely prove too difficult for you.

Still, it's something to keep in mind for the next time you summon the bird-man from beyond the stars. Maybe you'll have come up with a workaround by then, or just developed your skills as a craftsman far enough to do the job the normal way? Or you could just cast the spell on him and let him go from there; even if it's temporary, twenty-four hours of effective invisibility even to your average god-like being's clairvoyance is an advantage not to be taken lightly, and you can imagine at least ONE thing Grey Voice would like to do in that time.

A part of you is curious to see what your extraterrestrial avian associate would make of the creatures you're going to have take care of the Ishidas' troublesome memories, but it'll be some time yet before you summon the viduus, and honestly, with your concerns about information-security, it makes more sense not to let people you don't trust know about your connection to Grey Voice. Especially when he's a ghost, some of those people are spirit-destroying archers with a bad cultural history with certain kinds of ghosts, and others are agents of the cycle of death and rebirth, who would probably disapprove of a soul lingering beyond its appointed time.

Thanking Grey Voice for his counsel-

"You are welcome."

-you release him from your spell and allow him to depart.

Idly, you wonder where it is that the ghost spends his afterlife when he isn't interacting with you or remotely monitoring the reincarnation of his people's wayward creation, but that's a question for another time.

Bringing your mind back to the present, you consider your next move. As previously noted, it's still somewhat short of eight in the evening in Japan, so if you wanted to send the nine Ishida Wandenreich sympathizers on their way, you could - and arguably should - do that now, or else wait another ten to twelve hours, so that you don't leave the Quincy wandering around after dark in Hollow territory.

The only real argument you have in favor of that approach is that it'll be a few more hours before the Heart of Courage finishes recharging and allows you to summon Shadow Alex to assist you in dealing with the Ishida troublemakers, without expending more of your mana.

Considering how many mana restoratives you just purchased from Balthazar, it's really not much of an argument.


You decide to open a Gate back to the temporally accelerated demiplane, so that you can leverage some additional mana recovery while you wait for the Heart of Courage to recharge. You consider trying to go back to sleep to max out your personal recuperation, but you don't feel tired enough to nod off naturally, and putting yourself to sleep using magic wouldn't work out that well.

The basic Spell of Sleep only lasts for a quarter of an hour at best; as soon as it wore off, you'd wake up again. Extending the duration would only put you under for about two and a half hours, and the use of magic would compromise your recovery - not entirely, but significantly enough for it to be an unattractive option. A further extension could put you down for sixteen hours, which wouldn't be healthy OR remotely comfortable when you finally woke up.

Besides, you have more productive things you could be doing while you wait, like trying to finish that book.

Taking out Jugram's Journal, you restore the mental enhancements you were using earlier, settle down on another comfortable-seeming patch of greenery, and resume reading.

Haschwalth's account of the war between the Lichtreich and the Soul Society starts out fairly detailed, describing staff meetings, the movement of troops and supplies, secondhand accounts of early battles, and a surprising amount of political maneuvering. It would seem that even under the rule of a god-king and in the early stages of what would only narrowly about becoming a war of extinction, some people are still going to put their own interests ahead of the state's, with fairly predictable consequences when said ruler's loyal right hand finds out.

There are also a couple more pages' worth of text that detail meetings with The Girl. You don't really know what the normal reaction for a young woman of "gentle birth" in times of war is supposed to be - Ganondorf's memories are NO help here, as Gerudo being Gerudo and Hylians being terrorized by demonic armies are in no way normal examples - but the impression you get is that Mathilda was not only fully supportive but personally eager for the conflict.

That could just be the younger Jugram's opinion, though.

In any case, things change when the younger man sees his first major battle. The detailed account breaks down into short, terse summaries that jump around quite a bit and frequently just stop in the middle of recording a particular thought. The handwriting remains as neat as the rest of the book, which again leads you to suspect that this book may be a copy of the original, and that Jugram cleaned things up a bit somewhere along the line, even as he left the unfinished parts alone.

Certainly, you could see some of these entries being written hastily, in quiet moments on the edges of the battlefield - from what you can piece together, the battle in question lasted several days - but there are other parts that feel more like they were added after the fact, as Jugram looked back and tried to make sense of chaotic impressions and blank spots in memory.

Or maybe it's the neat handwriting throwing you off again.

Among these disjointed sections, there is a partial account of meeting a "beast in bloodstained black and white" on the field, a Shinigami captain whose name is not given and whose description here, particularly of his zanpakuto's abilities, doesn't sound like the Captain-Commander. Rather than commanding fire, the weapon seems to have been of a more straightforward and relatively melee-oriented nature, imbuing its own blade with a dark energy that enhanced the speed, force, and cutting edge of its blows, and occasionally flew off in the form of a deadly crescent-shaped projectile.

Jugram survived that encounter, obviously, but he doesn't mention having killed that Shinigami, and the next entry is dated several weeks following the battle. The broken sentences are gone, but so is the previous depth of information, instead replaced by the succinct language that first appeared in combat. Only when recounting meetings with his lady does Jugram's original style start to peek through, and even then, he talks about Mathilda less and less as the war goes on.

Guided by Yhwach's "peerless foresight," the Quincy forces are deployed in ways that you think would have any conventional military commander tearing out his hair in frustration, if not for the manner in which each such dispatch accomplishes something critical. Here, a Shinigami raid force is intercepted and wiped out; there, a faltering defensive position sees its assailants hit from behind and driven off; and elsewhere, a unit is destroyed to the last man, delaying a captain's advance on another position long enough for it to be reinforced or evacuated.

Weeks pass into months, and then a year. Casualties mount, territory is lost and retaken and lost again, Jugram's meetings with Mathilda become fewer-

'Her brother goes to the front. She is so proud of him, and unafraid. I dread to look upon the boy with His Majesty's Eyes, for fear of what they may show me of his fate. I dread not to look, for fear of what I might miss that could save him.'

-and at times, less comforting.

Unlike mundane warfare of the period, the onset of winter doesn't truly stop the fighting. The Shinigami don't appear to be inconvenienced by such a thing as cold weather, or at least not nearly to the extent that a mortal army would be. Winter proves more of an issue for the Quincy, and while their own abilities let them overcome at least some of the attendant issues, others prove inescapable.

Roads reduced to mud by autumn storms or buried by winter snow are little hindrance to a soldier than can run on empty air as though it were solid ground, but horses and the wagons they haul are another matter. Attempts are made to work around the problem, with squads assigned to deliver supplies on foot or to clear roads, and a few experimental trials with floating wagons, but without Bags of Holding or similar spatial tricks, which the Lichtreich don't appear to have had, even a mystically enhanced courier can't carry as much as a single horse-drawn wagon. The floating wagon idea reminds you of the classic Spell to Conjure a Floating Disc, but apparently it fell through, due to there not being enough resources on hand to build the needed amount of vehicles, nor enough skilled craftsmen to make them - mainly because those were already being channeled away to build what would become Silbern.

Weather remains a hindrance regardless, particularly when one Shinigami captain whose zanpakuto commands ice just as the Captain-Commander's does fire takes to the field as the seasons turn, and transforms what might have been an ordinary winter into a frozen hellscape. HE is hunted down by the Sternritter as swiftly as possible, Jugram crediting the kill to someone named "Lille," but the damage that one Shinigami leaves in his wake is staggering, with entire settlements buried alive or frozen solid.

And in the wake of such widespread devastation and despair, the Hollows come.

More than that: they INVADE.

It doesn't happen without warning, for there was mention in the Journal of Hollow activity steadily increasing as the war dragged on and the levels of spiritual energy all across the Lichtreich continued to build up, yet what Jugram describes in the dark of the winter isn't a mere upswing in the number of individual Hollow attacks or the sighting of hunting packs, but the appearance of an entire ARMY of the monstrous ghosts. Their numbers are legion, they operate in units, they fight like soldiers... and they have a leader.

'None wished to believe the reports of Crowned Death's presence,' the man writes, 'I least of all, for I saw no sign of him, even when I glimpsed the Hollows in their multitudes. Yet those reports now stand confirmed, for the King of Hueco Mundo leads the army that marches on our walls. His Majesty makes ready to enter the fray himself, for no other yet has the strength to face Barragan.'

...

There's a Hollow King, too?

...actually, on second thought, that fits. The Shinigami have the Soul King, the Quincy have (or had) Yhwach, so why should the third major faction of this particular feud be any different?

You pause for a moment, as the two buffs you've been using run down - the psychic technique of Mental Enhancement for the second time since you started, no less.


Aside from the introductory section that leads up to Yhwach marching out to face the King of the Hollows, Jugram's account of the Hollow siege of the capital of the Lichtreich reads like it was written after the fact. From what you can put together, the "siege" only lasted a single night, as while the Hollows were relatively united and organized, they were still Hollows. Only fear of, respect for, and - in some cases - loyalty to their King kept them in order, and even then, Jugram writes of Hollows reverting to their base instincts once out of sight or sensing range of the greater army and its commanders.

Once Yhwach engaged Barragan directly, forcing the Hollow King to focus his attention on a peer opponent, control of the army devolved to his lieutenants - powerful, intelligent Hollows who nonetheless lacked their lord's overwhelming strength and fearsome presence, and had their own internal quarrels besides. One large army working towards a united purpose effectively became several smaller forces whose coordination was poor at best, while the most independent or least intelligent Hollows broke away entirely and began acting on their own, many taking the opportunity to attack hated rivals who were injured or even just distracted at a critical moment by the Quincy.

For their part, the archers were still in a bad spot, as even the most savage of the Hollows still recognized them as mortal enemies, but the Quincy were at least able to set aside their internal politics in the face of a clear and immediate threat.

The sight of one God-King being matched by another - and large swathes of their fellows being obliterated as collateral damage of that fight - undoubtedly sapped some of the Hollows' eagerness for battle, and when the Sternritter started acting in emulation of their lord by targeting Barragan's commanders, the chaos and disunity of the Hollow horde only increased.

Jugram also notes that Barragan only brought about half of his army to the siege of the capital. The other half had been divided between his TRUSTED subordinates and sent to raid all over the Lichtreich, while the Hollow King directed the more expendable of his forces against the heart of Quincy power. Barragan's goal appears not to have been to destroy the city, but to tie down its defenders and prevent them from responding to the attacks on more outlying positions, so that his men would have time to crush the lesser but still significant concentrations of Quincy strength.

Had it succeeded, by Jugram's calculations, the Hollow King's plan would have weakened the Lichtreich almost as badly as the loss of the capital and the surrounding heartlands. How unfortunate for Barragan, then, that Yhwach had managed to arrange things so that several of those strongholds were also due to be attacked by Shinigami units.

While outnumbered by their enemies in most locations, the Quincy defenders had the advantage of being ranged combatants with access to prepared fortifications and stockpiled supplies (however diminished by the preceding year of war), whereas both groups of attackers were more melee focused, relatively exposed (at least until they got in close), and limited to whatever supplies they'd brought along or could scrounge up (the latter being disturbingly easy for the cannibal ghosts).

Factor in how even the elite of Barragan's forces still had more in common with packs of hunting beasts or bands of violent thugs than a properly trained army, while being up against two separate forces that DID have that organizational advantage, and the Hollows took the worst of the casualties that night - an estimated sixth of Barragan's army, perhaps as much as a fifth.

The Shinigami, meanwhile, had come intending to storm buildings under a rain of arrows, not to engage in sword-and-claw street fighting WHILE being shot at. Though only two of their teams were destroyed outright - one in an attack where no Hollows were involved at all, strangely enough - most were forced to abandon their original missions due to a mix of casualties, combat fatigue, and the possibility of enemy reinforcements.

Whether because Yhwach's manipulations were not absolute, because their fate was unavoidable, or simply because their King didn't care to exert himself enough to save them, several Quincy settlements were still overrun, but the overall damage to the Empire of Light was far less than it could have been.

Barragan withdrew the greater part of his surviving forces to Hueco Mundo following the one-night assault, which still left hundreds of Hollows roaming the Lichtreich in dozens of packs. Taking counsel with his surviving lieutenants, the Hollow King learned of the Shinigami "interference" in his plans, and launched an immediate attack on Soul Society to punish them for the offense. This lasted for a month, perhaps two, easing the pressure on the Lichtreich and allowing the Quincy to hunt down most of the Hollow stragglers and repair at least some of the damage from the overnight invasion and the longer war.

Jugram once again writes of the concerns of the lesser leadership about that particular point, noting their beliefs - true, as it happens - that more could have been done to shore up their defenses and rebuild their infrastructure. But Silbern's construction was being hastened in the wake of the brief Hollow invasion, as if the battle with Barragan had shown Yhwach something he'd not previously considered... or perhaps, not yet seen.

Haschwalth DID mention that he wasn't able to see the Hollow King when using the Almighty. You don't know why that might be, but you do know that the Spell of Mind Blank was enough to render even the modern-day Grandmaster - a thousand years older, more powerful, and more experienced at controlling and interpreting that inherited power than the man you've been reading about right now - blind to the future-presence of your Shadow. Only when seeing him in the flesh could Jugram recognize Shadow's existence.

Could the same have been true for the Quincy King, all those years ago? Could the Hollow King have had some form of defense against Yhwach's all-seeing eyes, making him invisible to that god-like foresight, or even merely difficult for it to predict?

If so, such could have come as a nasty shock for a man used to controlling the future, particularly given the timing of the Hollow invasion. Perhaps the damage, limited though it may have been, was enough to tip the scales of the Quincy-Shinigami War in the Soul Society's favor? Or maybe Yhwach merely considered that if one being could exist with the ability to resist his eyes, the power to contest with him directly, AND the freedom to do so, whatever the Powers might have to say, then there might be others?

Regardless, it was during this time that Jugram proposed to Mathilda. From what he writes-

'I was aware that I could lose her, or she, me. We are at war with enemies of terrifying power that seek not only our destruction as a nation, but our extinction as a people. The Shinigami have proven themselves to be relentless and pitiless, without mercy or honor: none that have stood against them have been spared in defeat; and those who did not or could not take up arms to defend themselves have been slaughtered all the same. Death has been a constant companion, a shadow waiting to swallow each of us in turn or both together, and yet always before, my lady has been protected within the capital, as safe as any of us can hope to be.

It was not until I saw His Majesty clashing with the specter of Crowned Death itself over the heart of our nation that my eyes were opened to the truth - that there is no safety for our people, and will not be unless we are victorious over the Soul Society, whether that is today or a thousand years hence. No longer am I simply aware of the possibility of our separation, I KNOW that it may, and WILL, come to pass, for we are only mortal, and our lives are, by definition, limited.

I fear to look with His Majesty's eyes, to see how much time together my lady and I may have. Yet however much or little, I think I would like to spend as much of it as possible calling myself her husband, and her, my wife.

...I think I would like that very much.'

-well, what he said.

Then spring arrived, late - perhaps due to the actions of that ice-controlling Shinigami captain, perhaps not - and the reapers, having beaten back Barragan's forces, secured their own borders, and rebuilt their strength, now returned to finish the Lichtreich.

The last section of the first Journal recounts another three months of battle, bits of one engagement leading into another, and then turning up again in a third. Defeats begin to pile up for the Quincy Empire, as do costly stalemates and the rare pyrrhic victory, and Jugram's writings grow increasingly terse, even erratic, while more and more, you get the sense of a man being pushed to his limits. Yhwach is described fighting on the front, now, leading the Sternritter against the Shinigami's Senkaimon-deployed raids that Arturia guessed at. Barragan reappears and clashes with the Quincy King for a second time, and then a third - and then the Captain-Commander of the Thirteen Imperial Guard Divisions turned up in the middle of that one, and it became a three-way brawl that left a city in smoldering ruins, the Hollow King with a new scar on his skull, and Yhwach with the absolute conviction that Yamamoto Shigekuni was nothing less than a demon in human guise.

And then, quite abruptly, the broken narrative stops about a third of the way down one page. Written below that is a single line:

'She is dead.'

The last dozen pages of the Journal are blank.

Gained Local Knowledge (Hueco Mundo) F
Gained Logistics D
Gained Strategy D

Putting the book away, you consider your situation. It's been about three hours from your perspective since you started reading, so you've still got... an hour, maybe, before the Heart of Courage recharges? Two at the outside.

While it might be a little early by California time for you to have breakfast, you've been awake long enough by this point that you could and probably should eat something. Though that might just be your stomach and the time-displacement talking.

But you probably SHOULD check in on the Quincy, to let them know you haven't up and abandoned them...


...talk to the Muhlfelds, first, about going home...

"Didn't you have dinner a few hours ago?" Ichigo wonders as he stares at you filling your plate in the dining room.

You've returned to the Mansion where the Kurosakis and Tatsuki are staying for your latest meal. As it's around nine in the evening Karakura time, the twins have been put to bed, and Ichigo looks like he's not far behind. Tatsuki is in the twins' room, womanfully enduring the indignity of an early bedtime for the sake of a sleepover and keeping the younger girls happy.

"That was dinner, this is breakfast," you reply, as you finish pouring syrup over your waffles. Far from what you'd pull out of the frozen foods section of the grocery store, these are freshly cooked - "ironed," maybe? The correct term for preparing waffles escapes you, if indeed there is one - with a full-bodied fluffiness that something popped out of a toaster just can't compete with.

Sorry, Eggo. You are convenient and enjoyable, but you're also mass produced and often undercooked, burnt, or both.

"...California time?" he guesses, looking rather unconvinced.

"That, and I've spent most of the last... four, five hours?" You pause for a moment, thinking back, and then shake your head and concentrate on pouring the syrup. It's hard enough to keep precise track of time when you've slept through a chunk of it; bouncing between Earth, a timeless demiplane, and a temporally accelerated one is not remotely helpful to the attempt. "Well, however long it's been in real time since I last ate, I spent most of it on the other demiplane, where time is moving twice as fast as normal. It's still a little early for me to be having breakfast, but not so early that I can't eat."

Ichigo processes that.

He ends up wearing the same sort of "this stuff gives me a headache" expression that his father did when you were talking about the interactions of Time and souls, earlier.

Once again, entirely fair.

Speaking of Isshin, he's leaning against the wall next to the door that leads to the bedrooms. "So what will you be doing once those of us on Japanese Standard Time have called it a night?"

"Talking to the Muhlfelds about going home," you reply as you take your seat at the table, leaving room for a human-sized Briar to move in and start making her pile of waffles, drowned under syrup, jam, and melted butter. "They're the smallest group, they've got no connections to the Wandenreich, and I only had to use one Gate to evacuate them - and that was in a relatively public place rather than at somebody's house."

Isshin nods. "Nothing really keeping them from going home now that the danger's passed, then."

You make a sound of agreement around a mouthful of fluffy, sugary goodness.

"Planning to see the Archers off after that?" Mr. Kurosaki guesses.

"That is the plan," you reply after swallowing. "It'll be trickier, given what Balthazar said about how New York's magical community reacted to my Gates, how I opened them up in Miles's and Alice's garage, and the nephews with Wandenreich ties, but Balthazar's already agreed to let me borrow his spellcasting chamber for the Gates. I can shrink their cars and send everyone through on foot if I have to."

That doesn't address what to do about Miles's nephews, but one problem at a time. You have to deal with the Muhlfelds before you worry about the Archers, and before you can focus on the Archers, there are waffles in need of eating.

Also, bacon.

You get on with your breakfast.

By the time you and Briar are satisfied, Ichigo has seen himself off to bed, and Isshin and Masaki have curled up together on one of the couches in the front room. She's reading more of Jugram's Journal, which you handed over, while Isshin is just sort of being there, enjoying the moment.

Wishing the Kurosaki parents a good night - or whatever, the light in this demiplane is basically an unchanging just-above-twilight level - you head out to find the Brazilian Quincy.

It goes remarkably quickly. This should not be taken as an indication that Nicolau and his daughter's family are in any way ungrateful for being pulled out of danger, or that they haven't been making the most of their odd vacation, but they're also not about to pass up the chance to get back to their normal lives as soon as is practical.

From the way the members of the small clan are acting, you get the impression that they've gotten past the initial "ooh" and "aah" and "magic is real and WE'RE IN ANOTHER DIMENSION!" stage, and moved on to the "having trouble accepting all of this in my worldview and would like to go home now, please" phase. Fortunately, even Andreia is old enough to be past the point where she'd have trouble accepting that the danger to herself and her family was real, when it all happened thousands of miles away and a couple of dimensions over, so that's one hassle you don't have to deal with. At least with this bunch.

You're about halfway through talking things out with the Muhlfelds when you feel a single silent pulse from that place within yourself where the Heart of Courage rests, signalling the recovery of its power.

When you re-summon Shadow Alex, what buffs do you want to place on him?

And when you send the Muhlfelds home, are there any particular precautions you wish to take? You will be opening a Gate to the other demiplane first, just to avoid opening any direct lines of sight or transmission between the timeless plane and Earth, but do you feel any further safeguards are necessary for this group? Remember that the spells you put on them when you first brought them to the demiplane will lapse upon their departure.


It won't cost you anything to let Masaki hold on to the Journal for the moment. Just in case you don't see her again before she calls it a night, you ask her to hand the book off to one of the servants and order it to return the volume to you the next time you stop by. That should be sufficient.

Masaki agrees, and you leave the Kurosakis to their quiet time.

While the Muhlfelds are packing and gathering up their things, you summon your Shadow - and no sooner have you done so than he takes on his adult guise, using the Spell of the Threefold Aspect. That's followed by the Spells of Mind Blank, General Augmentation, Greater Heroism, Walking Through Space, and Bestowed Insights in short order.

In between mana cycles, he applies several ki techniques and shores up his mind with Mental Enhancement. You do the same, reasoning that it's better to be over-prepared than the reverse.

You get an Overloaded Brain Enhancement up without issue, but when you move to activate and similarly enhance a Staggered Flicker, you belatedly remember that you can only maintain TWO Overloaded ki techniques at one time, and then only at reduced levels of effect.

...well, at least Brain Enhancement is definitely working?

Gained Brain Enhancement D
Gained Ki Overload C+

Mental Enhancement goes up without issue, for whatever it's worth.

Then your oversized other pauses. "Spell Immunity, or Greater Spell Immunity?"

...hmmm, point.

The former version of the spell is less expensive, but whether you're anticipating a Wandenreich interrupt while you return the Muhlfelds and Archers to their homes or merely preparing for Shadow Alex to make a return trip to Silbern, "Lesser" Spell Immunity won't be effective if any Sternritter show up - which paranoia says they probably WILL, at least if they're responding to an Almighty vision of "missing Quincy" showing up out of thin air.

But casting Greater Spell Immunity and making it effective against adult opponents is at the limits of your normal abilities. You'd need a ten-minute ritual to make it last longer than it already does, and that would only be enough to protect one person per casting.

Shadow Alex also notes that there's no need to cast the Spell to Alter One's Self right this moment, as you're not summoning the viduus until they're needed - which, he doesn't say aloud, won't be until you take the problematic Ishidas back to Japan, probably in the neighborhood of ten hours from now.


After some thought, you decide to put the full force of your Ki Overload behind your Staggered Flicker technique. It's the least developed of the Ki techniques you plan to activate, and is already a watered-down version of your standard Body Flicker besides, so objectively speaking, it's the skill most in need of such a performance booster.

Gained Staggered Flicker E++

Although you're leery of leaving an opening in your defenses that the most powerful Quincy could shoot through, it is an unfortunate fact that most of the Sternritter would likely be able to do that even if you DID cast Greater Spell Immunity on yourself. You only saw about half a dozen of the Wandenreich's elites during your run through Silbern, and due to having played teleport taxi for the assassination squad, you didn't have enough exposure to most of them to analyze their attacks - and of the two guys you probably COULD tune Spell Immunity to, one's dead, while the other got cut off from a major divine power source, which MUST have altered how his powers in general work.

Seeing as how a single casting of Spell Immunity can only counter a few spells - up to four, in your case - that multiple castings don't stack, and how individualized the abilities of the Sternritter seem to be, you were never going to be able to shut them down that way regardless of what you did. With that in mind, it makes more sense to you to focus on no-selling the standard attacks of the rank and file Soldats, which you DO know how to counter thanks to Souken's help; that will largely pull the regulars' teeth if any of them show up, allowing you to focus more on their leaders.

Shadow Alex fronts the cost of casting that spell on both of you, but when you suggest using the Spell of Persistent Vigor, each of you has to cast it alone to get the desired duration.

While your doppelganger gets on with casting the extended Spell of Foresight, you turn to Elder Nicolau to make sure he's up to speed on a few final matters.

You reiterate the warning you received from the Goddesses about not being around "unwarded" Quincy in the future, and explain how you interpreted that to mean that Grandmaster Haschwalth may be looking for people and things using the Almighty. While you know that the Spell of Mind Blank can no-sell Jugram's use of Yhwach's eyes, you have no practical way of covering the Muhlfeld family with that effect going forward. The base form of the spell only lasts twenty-four hours, and even if you were to alter its parameters and use a ritual casting to boost your power, you couldn't make the effects last indefinitely - not at a level that would be effective against Jugram's searching. Repeated castings of such powerful magic would soon rack up a debt you think the Muhlfelds would find untenable, whether in financial or mystical terms, and your crafting skills are not at the level where you could create magic items to grant the benefits permanently for a one-time cost - which would still be fairly high.

Nicolau nods, and asks if you have an alternative.

You tell him about the Spell of Nondetection, describing it as a precursor to Mind Blank, offering a similar but less absolute coverage against methods of mystical detection. You could make this spell permanent or bind it to items, for a cost, and you'll be applying a temporary version to the Muhlfelds before they leave regardless - but you caution Nicolau that you're not sure if this will be enough to shield them against the Almighty. It also won't interfere with mundane methods of surveillance - not that Mind Blank would have either - so you recommend that the family be on the lookout for observers, or perhaps get in touch with local private investigators or something.

The Brazilian Elder hums thoughtfully. "I believe I can do one better than that."

"Oh?"

"My family has a few contacts in law enforcement," he replies. "Nothing official, of course, but certain officers know to call us if they have reason to believe that an ongoing investigation involves an angry ghost."

Huh.


"How did that come about?" you inquire. "If you don't mind my asking, that is."

Your own feelings towards law enforcement are... mixed, to say the least. The Sunnydale Police Department is FAR from a shining beacon of law and order, a significant portion of the people you spend time with exist within the cracks of the legal system - whether by personal choice or as a consequence of being or doing something mundane law doesn't consider to exist - and if the government ever clues in to the full extent of your teleportation-enabled globe-trotting, there will probably be a small war between petty bureaucrats who want to bring charges over your failures to properly declare your activities, and shadowy agents who want to turn you into an asset.

However, for all your (relatively mild) criminal tendencies, you haven't lost your respect for the rule of law and the agents thereof just yet. It helps that you're aware there was government and military involvement - multiple governments, at that - in the whole Dracula business, and your steady perusal of Twentieth Century Sorcery has enlightened you about other incidents where local, state, and federal agencies played crucial roles in keeping the world turning, to say nothing of their involvement in cleaning up and managing the aftermath.

Whichever side of the law you ultimately come down on, it wouldn't hurt to have a better idea of how one can go about establishing a good working relationship with cops and such.

"I don't, and it was due to a certain amount of careless arrogance on my part," Nicolau admits easily. "I originally lived in a relatively isolated part of Brazil, where police presence was thin and encounters with Hollows or other unquiet spirits relatively rare. After I married, however, my wife and I relocated to Recife, which was of course much larger and more densely populated than where we had previously called home. While my younger self realized that more people meant more deaths - and hence more ghosts and more ghosts going bad - I failed to consider that it also meant more EYES. And in my youthful pride and stubbornness, I did not give my countrymen enough credit as observers, even though I'd not yet mastered the Flying Leg technique, and had no means whatsoever of turning myself invisible."

You consider that, and also take into account the tendency towards white cloaks, coats, and uniforms that you've noticed among the various branches of the Quincy.

"Did you wear white?" you venture.

"Ha! I did!" Elder Muhlfeld shakes his head, amused at his own foolishness. "And so, the police received a number of reports of a young man matching my appearance, being seen in areas where strange and often inexplicable disturbances took place - most of which, I would note, ceased shortly after I was spotted." He frowns. "In hindsight, I was lucky they found me when they did, and again in the identities of the officers sent to question me. I don't know how familiar you are with the history of my homeland...?"

"Not at all," you admit.

"Ah. Well, suffice it to say that it would not have been good for me to come to official attention after the coup in '64. Fortunately, it was only the middle of '62, and the officers who interviewed me had realized that some of their cases involved things they were not equipped to handle. Having a special consultant for those incidents was useful to the gentlemen in question, let alone how I could question the ghosts of victims in other cases."

Oh, yes. You'll just BET the police liked that.

"It did require some creativity to make sure the chain of evidence was intact," Nicolau says, as if reading the thoughts in your head, or at least the expression on your face, "but we cleared enough cases over the next year and a half that the rest of the stationhouse had long since stopped questioning my presence and come to view me as something of a good-luck charm. Not all of the officers knew exactly how I was helping, of course - not even most of them - but enough did, and valued my aid highly enough that when the military took power, they kept my secret rather than turn me over." He pauses, and grins wryly. "It probably did not hurt that a dozen of them had enough spiritual awareness by then to see ghosts themselves, or that they'd seen me shoot a Hollow that tried to eat the good captain."

It probably didn't at that. Get rid of their only Quincy, and then THEY'D have to deal with all the creepy spooks directly, to say nothing of the hungry ghosts. Speaking of which...

"How often do you get Hollows in Recife?" you ask curiously. "I know they're most common in Japan, but I'm not clear on exactly what the difference is in other parts of the world."

Nicolau informs you that the rate of Hollow attacks isn't really something that can or should be tracked on a national level, as doing so would be misleading. The cannibal spirits don't pay attention to human borders in their activities, they're attracted to large concentrations of spiritual energy, and while that tends to lead them to large human populations, it can also result in Hollows wandering quite far afield. Through his late wife the medicine woman and his long friendship with Shaman Tiriaq, Nicolau is aware of a number of locations that just naturally host high levels of spiritual activity, where Hollows can be found despite the low or even nonexistent human population. Conversely, there are densely-populated places that Hollows seem to almost actively avoid, because something there doesn't agree with them.

Sunnydale comes to mind.

All of that having been said, Recife sees Hollow attacks once every month or so, which the Brazilian Elder says is a bit on the high end - though still down from the almost twice monthly average when he first moved to the city four decades ago. He attributes the relatively high incident rate to the size and age of the city; the fourth-largest urban area in Brazil, Recife was founded in 1537 as a slave port, and has been a major harbor for most of its existence. That significant age would have given the Hollows plenty of time to stumble upon the place in their travels from Hueco Mundo, and the city's unpleasant origins would have created something of a beacon for the creatures.

And yes, Nicolau is just a bit pleased that his family's presence and activities have been contributing to that downward trend in Hollow appearances, though he does note it's at least as much the result of their working with the police to settle unquiet spirits and prevent Hollowfication in the first place, as it is of the Hollows they've destroyed.

Gained Local Knowledge (Hueco Mundo) F+
Gained Local Knowledge (Recife) F+

Of course, most of the cops that Nicolau originally worked with have since retired or passed away, and he himself is a bit too old to be riding along as he once did, but as he says, his name still carries some weight with their successors. It helps that his daughter got into the "family business" in her teen years-

"It was safer than having her run off on her own," Nicolau explains.

-and might well have ended up going to the police academy if she hadn't met her future husband. Even then, she still did part-time consultations while raising her kids, and her son is on course to becoming a policeman himself.

It's at about this point that Shadow Alex finishes his Ritual of Foresight.

"Are you done, then?" Andreia Muhlfeld asks from where she's hauling a backpack, not whining but definitely impatient to be on her way home. "Can we go?"

The rest of her family, nearby and similarly burdened - though the pregnant sister's husband is carrying some of his wife's things - seem to be of a similar mindset, even if none of them voice it.

"Almost," Shadow Alex replies, before turning to you. "Spot me a mana potion?"

You do him one better, or rather, three better.

Shadow Alex considers the glass bottles for a moment before pocketing the three Night's Essences and downing the Moondrop.

While the family are heading over to their car, you and your Shadow gather your magic for a couple more spells. In your case, it's a modified Spell of Nondetection. Third-circle base, plus two circles to offset the material component - diamonds again, why is it always...? - and three more tiers to affect the entire family, giving them about sixteen hours of coverage.

Although, you could reduce the number of targets to extend the duration, and just recast the spell once or tw... no, actually, it would work out to once in either case. Convenient, that.


If you're going to go the extra mile in casting this spell, you might as well go all the way, and make it last as long as you can.

You cast the modified Spell of Nondetection to last for the next two weeks and change, and then apply it to about half of the Muhlfelds, before re-casting the spell and covering the rest of the family.

"So, if this one can hide us, why didn't you just cast it before?" Andreia asks.

"Nondetection only hides you from things like remote viewing, aura reading, and other spells or effects of that nature," you clarify, "and it isn't perfect concealment. The stronger the person trying to find you, the more likely they are to succeed, and Yhwach was powerful enough and had too many other advantages for me to trust Nondetection to work against him."

Heck, you weren't sure MIND BLANK would have worked properly against that guy, even for yourself. Its odds for hiding the Quincy were distinctly Not Great.

"Oh. So now that he's dead, you can do things more easily?"

You nod. "Some things, anyway."

"Didn't you say something about the guy in charge of the Wanden-whatsit having the King's eyes?" Andreia's brother asks then.

"I did, and he does, but we" - you nod at Shadow - "were able to confirm that even if Grandmaster Haschwalth HAS the Almighty, he can't USE it as well as Yhwach could. It's like... if Yhwach was cheating by having a direct spiritual connection to all of you AND potentially divine origins, Jugram isn't cheating any more than any other powerful, skilled magic-user."

After all, Shadow's use of Mind Blank worked just fine against Jugram's use of the Almighty. That implies other magic should have proportionate effectiveness, which is why you're willing to give Nondetection a chance - that, and the fact that Jugram is TREMENDOUSLY unlikely to know the names of every single Quincy on Earth. It's going to take him time to find out who they are and look in on them, and right now, he's got to be just a bit busy keeping the Wandenreich together and on-task, to say nothing of dealing with his own shock at the unexpected death of his King - and, quite possibly, your act of grand theft library and other bits of larceny.

Plus, not to toot your own ocarina or anything, but you ARE one of those powerful, skilled magic-users.

The Muhlfelds pile back into their family vehicle, and Shadow Alex releases the completed Gate Spell he's been holding, opening up the way to the accelerated demiplane. Fortunately, you warned the Brazilian Quincy that you wouldn't be sending them straight home, and why you were doing it this way, so there's no delay or protests at the sight of the other misty twilight pocket realm. The van simply drives through the portal, earth and greenery crunching under the tires, and once it's across, Shadow Alex follows.

"You coming with?" he asks.


With your Original having decided to hang back once again, you close the Gate.

"So how are we doing this?" Nicolau's son-in-law asks. "You open up a portal back to the square, and we just drive through, head home, and go about our lives like nothing happened?"

"If all goes well, exactly that," you reply. "We'll keep an eye on how things develop, and if it looks like there's going to be more trouble for you - or even if we just find something that seems important or interesting enough to share - we'll pass that on."

"...I'd appreciate that."

You nod, and add, "It might not be in person, though. Even with two of us working on this, you may have noticed there's a LOT to keep track of."

"I had noticed," the older man says seriously. "Should we expect further phonecalls, or something in the mail?"

"Most likely by mail, unless it's very important - and at that point, we'd probably just show up in person anyway. On the topic of mail, though, we try to avoid sending information about the supernatural through the mundane post; we've got a deal with a, um..." You pause, the limitations of your grasp of Portuguese catching up to you. "What's the word for a holy person?"

"A saint?"

"No, not that."

"An angel?"

"Not quite that, either." You lapse into English for a moment. "The word I want to use is 'celestial'."

"As in the sense of something that is of heaven, or else very good in nature?"

"Yes, that."

There are some smiles. "That would be, 'celestial'."

...huh. Go figure.

Gained Portuguese E++

Shrugging off that linguistic coincidence, you explain that you have a contract with a sort-of divine messenger to handle your mystical mail, and he'll most likely be the one to deliver your findings to the Muhlfelds. Similarly, if the Muhlfelds feel the need to alert you to a development on their end, they should let him know.

"Just look for the guy in a white track suit, red hat, and sandals, with pointed ears, very small wings on his heels, and a faint golden aura."

That prompts a number of surprised looks, but any further inquiries are tabled when you ask if everyone is ready to proceed.

Having confirmed that they are, you cast a modified and ritualized Greater Spell of Scrying, aiming for that square where you originally met Nicolau and more recently picked up his family. It'd be kind of silly to open the Gate there if the area was full of traffic or other witnesses.

Five minutes later, an image of the site appears before you. Your caution is validated, as you can see a car moving past, and a few people walking through or just standing around - all of whom seem to be moving very slowly, thanks to your being in a temporally accelerated location, while they're still acting under normal time.

You consider your options.

Opening the Gate and sending the Muhlfelds through would be the quickest and simplest approach, but it would also pose some risk of their being identified. Maybe not a BIG risk, given the relatively few witnesses, but a fully-loaded family van appearing out of a glowing hole in space would be fairly memorable, and even if none of those present recognize the Muhlfelds or their vehicle, they might catch the license number and/or pass the description on to somebody that could find them.

Granted, Nicolau did just say something to your Original about having friends in the police, but you were kind of focused on your ritual - and better not to make trouble for a friend of a friend if you can, right?

Opening the Gate in a more secluded location is a possibility, but you can't see such a location through your Spell of Scrying, nor do you recall a convenient side-street, fenced-in parking lot, or anything of that nature. It doesn't help that your Original has only been to Recife twice, both times to this same location, so you don't really have any options for alternative landing zones; you'd have to cast additional Scrying Spells to leapfrog about, hoping you found what you needed, and that just seems like a waste of time and energy.

You briefly consider turning the van invisible, but quickly rule that out. The Spell to Create a Sphere of Invisibility could probably do the job, but having an invisible vehicle of any size driving around a major city would just be asking for trouble. Much safer for everyone if you just alter the color of the van, or made it appear to be a different kind of vehicle - you don't have a specific spell for either of those effects, but changing the color of an object is one of the simplest of all magical effects, and your grasp of Illusion Magic is more than sufficient to putting together a Spell to Disguise One's Automobile, or whatever you might call it.

It does help that you remember reading The Infernal Combustion Engine and spending all that time at Rory's shop, though.

Another option would be to sit tight and wait for the way to clear, but given the time differential, that could end up taking a while, especially if more people enter the scene while you're waiting for this first lot to make themselves scarce.


The image of a delivery truck comes to mind as a reasonable option for disguising the Muhlfeld family van, so you let them know of your idea.

"Couldn't you just make us invisible?" Andreia asks, frowning.

"I could, and I did consider it," you admit. "Then I considered that an invisible van would be an accident waiting to happen - no offense to your driving skills, Mr. Muhlfeld."

"No offense taken," he replies, wincing at the very thought.

"...oh, right," Andreia says, sort of shrinking into her seat. "Because traffic is a thing. Ah-ha-ha. Ha."

"You suggested a delivery truck?" her older sister inquire.

"A forgettable one," you clarify. "Either unmarked, or with a decal so common that it might as well be."

The family trade glances and begin comparing recollections of deliveries in and around their neighborhood. Gradually, an image takes shape, and you form your Spell of Illusion accordingly, turning their van mostly white, with dark green and gold stripes along the sides, and windows that are opaque from the outside. A few of the passengers actually get out to offer advice and walk a circle around the finished product, before finally declaring it good enough to pass.

As part of your spell, the license plates have also been given a different appearance. Nicolau's son-in-law looks a little uneasy at the prospect of driving with false plates, but doesn't openly protest.

It's for his family, and it's only temporary. Specifically, about fourteen minutes, which some quick discussion confirms is time enough for them to get somewhere out of sight, so that the spell doesn't wear off in public.

This does require you to open the Gate immediately, but it's fine, you've got plenty of mana to work with.

You open the portal to a clear spot on the street-

The images in your scrying sphere seem to stutter, as space-time within both planes is synched.

-and Mr. Muhlfeld drives through.

Someone on the other side shouts something in hasty Portuguese. You don't catch the entirety, but it sounds like startled swearing.

You are tempted to peek through the Gate, but you made a point of standing to one side of it, so that you'd be out of the line of sight of the scattered passersby - and anyway, your Scrying Spell is still going, so you've got a pretty good view of the area.

From what you can see, only two people were looking in the direction of the Gate when it opened, and one of those is the man with the dirty mouth; the other man has fallen on his face, apparently having missed a step in his shock at seeing space-time rearrange itself to your will. The other locals in earshot are turning towards the shouter with varying expressions of curiosity and disapproval, and some of those are taking on the first hints of blank-faced bewilderment as they catch sight of the hole-in-space and the van that emerged from it - and which is now starting to pull away, picking up speed at a perfectly street-legal rate as it goes.

You don't see so much as a white beret among the bunch.

Anyway, the Muhlfelds are through and on their way home, the lack of any immediate response suggests that Jugram didn't see them - at least not yet, unless of course he took a delayed approach... - and you've got a Gate that you could leave open for the better part of another couple minutes, if you wanted. You can juggle the mental effort of keeping the portal going and monitoring your Spell of Scrying well enough, but if you want to cast another spell, you'll have to let the Gate close.


With the Muhlfelds back in Brazil and no immediate signs of forthcoming activity from the Wandenreich, there doesn't appear to be any reason for you to cross over to Earth, at least at this time. On top of that, you've got half a dozen or so spooked witnesses in the area who might try to poke at the glowing hole in space once they've gotten over their immediate shock, which could end badly for them.

As such, you release your mental hold on the spell, allowing the Gate to begin closing. You make sure to keep an eye on the surrounding area through your Spell of Scrying as it does-

!

-and frown as the Muhlfeld van drives through the area, its outline... fuzzy?

...

Oh. Right. Nondetection interferes with YOUR spells, too, and your skills in Abjuration Magic are only just behind your grasp of Divination Magic.

Man, now you're kind of glad that you DIDN'T try casting Mind Blank on all of them. It would have been dangerous, not to mentional awfully embarrassing, if you and your Original ended up losing track of the Muhlfelds for a couple of weeks because you couldn't see through one of your own spells!

Shaking your head, you get on with things as the Gate closes.

Your knowledge of the number of recovery potions that Original Alex picked up at Balthazar's has you considering downing another of them, but after checking your current mana level, you decide not to do so at this time. You're not that far below half-full, and it kind of grates at your sense of efficiency to use up a valuable resource that you don't really need to.

Putting that aside for now, you start gathering power. You want a better idea of what the Wandenreich are doing right now, and as fate and the vagaries of storming their fortress-city would have it, there are a couple of them that you interacted with closely enough - for given values of "you" and "interaction" - that you feel pretty confident in your chances of locking on to either of them with a Spell of Scrying, even when cast from another plane without any material focus.

Of the two Quincy in question, you figure Young Miss Basterbine is rather less likely to be able to shrug off your spell than Sir Valkyrie, as even with the loss of the Soul King's Heart having likely reduced his powers, he's still an adult, with the advantage of decades or even centuries of experience over the young girl.

For reasons of stealth as much as efficiency, you go with a ritual casting. Fortunately, the accelerated demiplane still has enough mana to cover this, although you note in passing that it's starting to get low again, not having fully recovered from your extensive exploitation the previous day, however faster time moves here.

As you cast, you keep one eye on your already-active Spell of Scrying, watching as the pedestrians in that square in Recife pick their jaws up off the ground - or themselves, as the case may be - look around in collective confused concern. Some proceed to make themselves scarce, taking off at a fast walk or a dead run, but four of the witnesses quickly come together, speaking over one another and with such excited speed that your modest grasp of the local language can't keep up. They do calm down eventually, at which point you get a lot of...

"Did you see-?!"

"I saw!"

"Can you believe-?!"

"I can't!"

"This is incredible!"

"I know!"

...well, that.

You're still a minute or so from completing your Ritual of Scrying when a flicker of motion in the active scrying sphere catches your attention.

The man who's entered the Scrying Spell's field of view doesn't look much different from the small group still chattering away and gesturing excitedly at one another and their surroundings. Height, build, features, clothing; you could lose him in a local crowd in a minute or less. The thing that catches your attention, aside from him being the first person to enter the scene since you closed the Gate, is the way he moves. He's moving too cautiously for a man out for a walk, carrying himself with an alert, guarded stance which isn't that of a seasoned martial artist, but does speak to some degree of experience with the need for good situational awareness in hazardous situations.

As the newcomer gets closer to your invisible sensor, you get a better look at him, and start to pick out a few details. He's wearing a bit more in the way of accessories than you normally see on most men on the street, with bracelets peeking out from under each long, loose jacket sleeve, a necklace of some sort similarly not-quite-hidden behind his shirt collar, and a couple of rings - worn one to a hand - that might be plain bands, might have the jeweled bits turned down, or might be otherwise disguised. Add in the belt that's a bit too shiny, the subtly complex threads woven through his jacket, shirt, and hat, and you suspect you've found a Brazilian magic-user.

The way his gaze turns toward the spot where the Gate opened and narrows behind the lenses of his glasses - did those just flash, or was that your imagination? - reinforces that suspicion.


There isn't much this likely magic-user can do against you in this situation. True, if those are Glasses of Magic-Detection that he's wearing, he'll have just grabbed the lingering magic signature of your Gate Spell, and could pick out the normally imperceptible sensor of your Spell of Scrying, but as long as your Spell of Mind Blank is active, he can't leverage either piece of information to find or identify you, much less your Original.

Then there's the matter of how you won't be around forever...

...

...actually, now that you're thinking on it, how DOES that work? If someone were to cast a Spell of Divination to obtain information about you, the Shadow of Alex Harris, at a time when you weren't currently in existence, what sort of results would they get? Some spells, you know, would be effectively foiled by such a state of non-existence, but others might function normally, and yet others would run into your Original's defenses...

While you're turning that over in one corner of your mind, another stays focused on the ritual you're still performing, while your eyes track the movements of the man in the active scrying globe.

After staring at the location of the Gate a bit too intently and for a bit too long, the newcomer resumes his cautious advance, head turning back and forth like some kind of slow radar dish. Despite that impression, he doesn't look up, and in fact seems focused on the ground - likely trying to find the tracks of whatever came through the portal. It's not a bad call on his part, as most creatures summoned onto the Earthly Plane by ninth-tier magic would leave trails that ought to glow in the dark, so to speak, whether from the spells that bind them to service or other effects active on their persons - provided they weren't shielded in some manner, of course.

The Muhlfeld family van, however, is just a machine, with no arcane essence in either its physical form or its method of propulsion to leave such a trail. While your Spell to Disguise a Car DID give the vehicle a faint aura, it was weak enough that it'll have already faded too far for the common Spell to Detect Magic to get a reading off of it. In addition, you didn't alter the appearance of the van's tires, so the spell technically never came into contact with the ground and wouldn't have left much of a trail even for stronger detection spells to pick up on - but from the way the man in glasses is frowning and not looking in the direction Nicolau and his family drove off, you think the enchantment on those glasses must not be one of the stronger spells to begin with.

After maybe thirty seconds of casting around for additional evidence and coming up with nothing, the man turns his attention to the excitedly babbling witnesses and starts walking toward them in a purposeful manner. He forces himself out of his guarded posture, obviously trying for a relaxed, casual stride, and probably coming across that way to most ordinary people. To someone with your (secondhand) experience, it's kind of awkward.

As he nears the group, an expression of recognition passes across the man's face, and he calls out, "Hey, Miguel!"

"Hm?" One of the four witnesses turns to look, and breaks into a friendly smile. "Oh, hey, Altair! What brings you by?"

"Oh, just getting in my daily exercise, thought I'd mix up the route."

"You picked a heck of a day for it, my friend."

"What makes you say that?"

"There was a hole! In the air!" one of the other people bursts out in excitement. "And then a van came out of it!"

"...a van?" Altair says, with a tone of bafflement that matches his expression. Both, you expect, are fairly honest reactions, because how often does one see a motor vehicle driving through space, time, and other dimensions?

Not counting the Youkai Academy bus, you mean.

Altair's puzzled inquiry seems to set off the rest of the group, including his apparent friend, like a match to gunpowder. You only catch some of the babble:

"Ten feet across-"

"-saw it open-"

"-symbols written on the air-"

"-like space UNRAVELLED-"

"-some kind of misty park-"

"-and then the van-"

"-drove through like a bat out of hell-"

"It was under the speed limit, though?"

"It's a figure of speech!"

They're still talking up a storm when you finish your second casting of the Spell of Scrying.


While the events playing out on the viewing sphere of your currently active Spell of Scrying are interesting, they're not nearly as important to your agenda as finding out what the Wandenreich are doing. As such, you ask Briar to take over observing the Brazilian quintet for you-

"Will do!"

-while you move a short distance away and complete your second spell. The magic reaches across the planar boundary between the demiplane and Earth-

!

-and then promptly fizzles out.

...

What went wrong?

You take a moment to review the formula of the spell, mildly concerned that you didn't correctly account for the temporal differential and/or planar drift, but all the calculations come back positive. The spell was cast correctly, it just didn't take.

...is your connection to Bambietta not strong enough? Could it be that, since the current "you" hasn't actually met the Quincy girl in person, only inherited your Original's secondhand memories of another instance of "you" doing so, the usual connection afforded by a face-to-face encounter has been degraded? If that were the case, then when combined with the difficulties in scrying on a subject on another plane, as well as the possibility that the somewhat foul-minded young Knappe is back under wards somewhere, it could account for how your spell was thwarted.

Either that, or the flows of magic are just REALLY not in your favor at this moment.

You do believe this is the first time since learning the Spell of Scrying that any instance of Alex has had it fail this way. You were intellectually aware of the possibility, of course, but you've always had such good luck with Divination Magic before now that it just seemed like the sort of thing that only ordinary magic-users had to worry about. Discovering otherwise is... annoying, especially since you won't be able to try scrying on Bambietta again for twenty-four hours, as the ripples of your failed attempt obscure her from further uses of the spell.

Well, if she's out, you have other options - and if you really are having to work from "secondhand" knowledge of potential targets, then pretty much any Quincy that previous "yous" have seen would be as good (and bad) a scrying target as any other.

You're most inclined towards looking in on Sir Valkyrie, as while he's a Sternritter, his separation from the Soul King's Heart should have weakened him, which ought to make him a bit easier to locate. You can't say the same for any of his peers, who, logically speaking, ought to be approximately as powerful as the Heart-boosted warrior was.

Another option that comes to mind is scrying on Grandmaster Haschwalth himself. Your Original DOES have some of the man's hair stashed away, thanks to Previous You's looting, you could hop back to the other demiplane and get it to help focus your spell. That said, you're a little leery of looking in on a man with a godling's eyes, as even if you know that Jugram's lesser form of the Almighty is thwarted by Mind Blank, that wouldn't stop him from noticing your scrying spell's sensor and destroying it - which would make the entire exercise a waste of time and energy.

Most of the Soldats are too indistinguishable from one another to be valid targets, their faces blurring together in your memories, and you can't be sure which of the ones you saw survived the fight with the Shinigami and the knights, besides. Instead, perhaps you should skip the warriors altogether and try locating some of the civilian staff? They'd be easier targets, being less powerful, but they could also be out of the loop on the decisions being made right now.


You want to get actionable intelligence if at all possible, and scrying on the servants whose names and faces you know seems fairly unlikely to get you that; even that head maid - Mrs. Adler, was it? - probably doesn't know as much about what's going on right now as one of the Sternritter. She might find out eventually, depending on how fast gossip travels among the Wandenreich, but at the moment, you'd be better served looking elsewhere.

Since spying on Jugram seems fairly likely to end with poor results, you figure you might as well target Sir Valkyrie. It's still possible that it wasn't a weak secondhand connection that thwarted your attempt to target Bambietta with your Spell of Scrying, and if that's the case, Gerard is your best bet among the remaining targets; even if that factor does apply, the likelihood that he's lost some power since being severed from the Soul King's Heart is a potential advantage you're unwilling to pass up.

That said, since the specter of possible failure is on the table, you think you can and should tilt the scales a bit before you actually cast the Spell of Scrying again. Through your twice-inherited memories of the Gerudo, you're aware of a spell that allows a witch to temporarily sacrifice a portion of her strength to empower spells cast by one of her sisters. Commonly known as the Spell of Sharesister, the trick works perfectly fine for men as well, and it yields greater benefits - albeit at exponentially greater cost - as the caster's personal power increases, so if you summon a powerful male witch, you could get him to boost your magic before you cast the Spell of Scrying.

The catch is that you first have to summon a male witch who actually KNOWS the spell, and general summoning doesn't allow for that degree of precision.

You could call for a magic-user easily enough, and narrowing the field to witches only wouldn't be any more difficult. You could even specify that it has to be a male witch, because physical qualities as pronounced as sex and species are reflected in a being's magical signature and can be selected for or screened out, but choosing targets based on their knowledge of a single spell is just asking too much. For THAT level of specificity, you need to use an individual summons, and unfortunately, you don't know ANY male witches, much less one who...

...

...well, no, that's actually not true, is it?

Oh, he's NOT...

Could you...?

What was that?

...

You think you could, but would it work?

He is!

Nayru, what are you babbling about?

...

You think it might.

Grinning, you begin the most powerful Ritual to Summon a Monster you are capable of casting.

Okay, I have to ask-

"What are you doing?" your partner wonders. "And why are you stretching your face like that?"

-what she said.

"Because I... have had... an IDEA," you declare, through breaks in your chanting. "A wonderful... AWFUL... IDEA! Hahahaha, AHAHAHAHAHA!"

Small bolts of golden lightning crackle around you as you cackle.

"...ooookay?"

Because it's starting to look like the Shadow just up and went Evil on us, and it's a LITTLE concerning!

He didn't, he's just... well, just watch, you'll get the joke in a bit.

Ten minutes later...

"In the Name of Din, I command you to come forth! Rise, and serve me: ALEX HARRIS!"

What the HE-

*CRACKATHOOM!*

As the flash and the smoke clear, a youthful voice declares: "Who DARES to summon- OHSHITGANON!"

Wait, wha-

And then the summoned instance of Original Alex surges towards you in an Overloaded Body Flicker-

*Flicker*

-which you narrowly avoid by burning one of your Overloaded Staggered Flickers. And by "narrowly," you mean that instead of burying his fist in your solar plexus, or possibly your crotch, Summoned Alex clips you on the hip as you blur to one side, Ki Armor and Ki Enhancement soaking some of the blow, but still scoring a decent hit.

"Hold it, hold it, HOLD IT!" two instances of Briar call in unison.

"Wait, since when can Ganon move like-"

"I'm NOT Ganon, you idiot! It's ME, your Shadow! And did you just try to NUT-SHOT me?!"

There is a period of shouting. Fortunately, it is brief.

Afterwards, you explain why you summoned your Original, and he checks his abilities to see if the Summoning Spell has impeded him in some form - because even allowing for a the sympathetic advantage of summoning "yourself" on top of the boosts for using the ritual method and leveraging your *ahem* dramatic flare, you probably shouldn't have been able to summon a spellcaster exactly as powerful as yourself.

And there do turn out to be limitations on Summoned Alex's power, aside from the standard ones that all summoned entities must deal with. It seems that the process of "fitting" him into the "container" created by a tenth-circle extended Spell of Summoning has imposed a hard upper limit on how much of his power he can bring to bear, effectively locking him out of spells of the eighth-circle or higher, and with a similar limitation on how much power he can put into lesser effects.

Rather annoyingly, this is just enough to prevent him from using the most powerful version of the Sharesister Spell, but the intermediate form will still work.

With that confirmed, Summoned Alex casts the spell... and promptly has to sit down, looking pale and queasy in a way that reminds you of the last time the flu bug made the rounds in Sunnydale - and even then, it was only other people that Original Alex saw looking this unwell.

"You look awful," you say bluntly, even as your own power rises.

"I FEEL awful," he replies. "Take a note: enervation SUCKS."

You nod, and get on with your Ritual of Scrying. While you'd like to boost the power further, the arcane technique for heightening a spell's potency isn't one that you've learned yet, so you'll just have to make do with what you can manage.

Several minutes later, a globe appears before you...


Your Spell of Scrying finds the Viking-like Sternritter back in the halls of Silbern, though not a part of the fortress that you recognize. The walls, floor, and ceiling aren't the stark white of the Royal Quarter and its surrounding levels, but rather a duller grey that seems... more solid - heavier, even - than the pale stone the Quincy used to decorate the sanctum of their king and his elites.

There are no rich red carpets covering the floor here, and while you can see a couple of banners on the walls, they appear to be of lower quality than those you've seen since you started investigating and invading the place - or maybe they're just poorly maintained? Likewise, you don't see any of those faceless warrior-statues.

Truth be told, if you were just looking at Gerard's surroundings, you might be tempted to think that he wasn't in Silbern at all; the place just looks that different. The thing that makes you suspect otherwise is all the other Quincy around, and more precisely, what it is that they're all doing.

Servants, Soldats, and Sternritter alike are engaged in the laborious task of emptying out a large storeroom, picking up crates and sacks two at a time - if not more - and hauling them... well, somewhere "off-screen"; your viewing globe only shows an area about twenty-five feet across, and Sir Valkyrie is big enough to take up a fair portion of that all by himself, let alone with the half-dozen boxes he's got slung over his shoulders, roped together with faintly glowing silver chains, or the two more crates tucked under his arms.

"-beneath your dignity, sir," one of the Soldats is saying.

"Nonsense, Julio," Gerard replies grandly. "Logistics are also a part of warfare, and if less lauded than the clash of arms or the stratagems of generals, they are no less vital. The warrior who will not lend his aid to such endeavors when the situation demands is no true knight, but a fool!" He pauses, and then ducks his helmed head slightly, lowering his voice to sheepishly add, "Also, I wanted to see if I could secure a supply of Grandmother Petra's favorite tea. She gets... cranky... without it."

The Soldat winces, and mutters something about old women having no business being that scary, before asking if his superior succeeded.

Gerard raises the crate under his left arm, patting it somewhat awkwardly with that hand for emphasis.

The junior officer nods. "I'll get out of your way, then, sir."

"It is appreciated."

With that, the Sternritter heads out at a brisk walk. Considering that you've seen him move fast enough to give a Shinigami captain competition, the relatively slow pace strikes you as a little odd, at least until your brain catches up and reminds you that his cargo is probably not rated to handle movement at speeds faster than the eye can see. Then too, while Silbern's corridors are very large, having people blasting up and down them at Body Flicker-equivalent speeds would at the very least be disorienting for everyone else using them, and more likely risk some accidents - never mind that you're quite certain that the servants, at least, can't move anywhere near as fast as a Sternritter.

You follow Gerard's progress through the fortress for a few minutes, his route taking him past more workers going in the other direction, as well as the occasional group crossing the corridor on a different errand. The warrior hails everyone he passes, but he never slows his pace, and so little of substance is said. In those moments when no one else seems to be around, the Sternritter's boisterous attitude falls away, replaced by a moody frown.

Finally, Sir Valkyrie comes to the door of a Gate Room, which is guarded by a dozen heavily-armed Soldats. The doors stand open, at least in part because one of them has been ripped off its hinges somehow. The sight doesn't stir any particular sense of recognition in your twice-inherited memories of the previous Shadow Alex's run through the place, but you suspect he or his grenade-wielding mob of little elementals were somehow responsible.

As Gerard enters through the forcibly-opened door, you get a better look at the Gate Room. The Wandenreich personnel have piled boxes, crates, cases, and bags onto trolleys and pallets of what appears to be plain steel, and are sliding as many of these as they can into the ring on the floor that defines the Gate of the Sun. They're also piling the load up, though only two levels high; you're not sure if that's because of a weight limit on the portal or because this is an efficient amount of material to send through, but either way, the practiced manner of the workers tells you they've done this sort of thing before, and quite often. Several of the Soldats in the room are clumsy or awkward by comparison.

"-thirty seconds," someone in the room says. "Secure final load and stand clear of the Gate."

Sir Valkyrie moves over to one side of the Gate Room and starts setting his cargo down with some assistance from a couple of the porters.

"How goes the operation?" he inquires.

"It could be worse, Sir Valkyrie," one of his assistants, a female Soldat, says respectfully. "We've had no major delays, and no mishaps with the intact Gates, but-"

There is a brief flash as the cargo is transported to Earth, leaving the floor empty. At once, people begin moving new trolleys and pallets into place.

"-none of the damaged Gates have been repaired, and their absence on top of the loss of the destroyed Gates is seriously cutting into our efforts," the Soldat continues sourly. "Then there's whatever is going on with that green energy field at the J-Gate, which..."

Gerard waits.

"Sir, according to Technical Division, that field definitely isn't the result of a Shinigami kido - it's not a spiritual construct of any kind, and in fact it appears to be arcane magic."

"There were mortal magic-users with the Shinigami during the raid," the Sternritter points out.

"Yes, sir, but judging by the strength of that field and how it compares to some of the other readings Technical have taken since the battle, they estimate there were at LEAST two magic-users capable of harnessing what they called 'ninth-order arcane effects - or the rough equivalent of nintieth-level Shinigami kido' running around during the incursion, as well as something almost as powerful that appears to have been some kind of DRAGON."

Sir Valkyrie suddenly looks like a kid at Christmas. "A dragon? Truly?"

"According to Technical," the Soldat reiterates with a bland expression. It quickly turns to one of worry. "But sir... there aren't supposed to BE mortal magic-users that strong anymore, and the dragons are supposed to be DEAD."

"Ah," Gerard says with a sudden insight. "And so you worry what the appearance of no less than three such 'impossible things' on the side of our enemies means, much less... their presence on that day."

All three of the Quincy fall somberly silent for a moment.

"...yes, sir," the Soldat says quietly. "More than that, though, the story is going to make the rounds. People are already shaken up over... over everything, sir. Finding out that we MISSED something like high arcanists or dragons still being in the world? The danger they clearly ARE, the precautions that SHOULD have been taken to limit that threat, the potential assets they COULD have been, if someone hadn't dropped the damn ball-!" She cuts herself off short, lets out a sharp breath, and shakes her head. "There's going to be trouble over that, sir."

Sir Valkyrie sighs. "So there will. As if we were somehow lacking for it at the moment..."

You review what you've seen and heard thus far. While spying on Sir Valkyrie as he lends his support to the Wandenreich's evacuation efforts isn't without some value, it seems likely not to include the sort of tactical or strategic windfalls you were hoping for.