It is with a sense of someone else's relief echoing in your mind that you escort Navi up to the head of the table, where she takes a seat next to Priest Cato. You then grab the spot next to Magus Hermanus and engage in some light conversation for a bit-
"Nice glamor," Hermanus compliments Navi, one magic-user to another.
She nods. "Thank you."
"The lady magus looks like she doesn't know whether to panic or press you for any information you'd be willing to trade," Captain Marcus notes.
"That was part of the point," the Great Fairy agrees.
"Only part?" Cato wonders.
"A girl likes to look her best," you reply, echoing something you've heard from… well, from a lot of people you know. Cordelia, Kahlua, Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Drake – you could go on.
-before a signal from the kitchen area has everyone quieting down and turning their attention in that direction. Several of the ghosts who'd been seated or standing about move into the back, and when they return, they and the chefs are carrying platter upon tray of food. The Island Boar Meat that you provided is the centerpiece, but it's accompanied by some game that the soldiers hunted – from the auras, some in Faerie, but some locally – as well as an assortment of vegetables and fruits. There is even some fresh-baked bread, which has you wondering where they got the wheat, and blocks of cheese which must have been acquired through Mr. Pritchard's people.
The wine bottles and kegs of what you're assuming are beer definitely were.
All the food is quickly laid out on the tables – or in the case of the kegs, set up along one side of the room – and once the last platter is set down, Cato and Navi trade glances, nod, and rise from their seats. There is an old altar to one side of the dining hall, behind the head of the table where you and the leaders have been sitting, and the ethereal priest and the corporeal fairy move towards it, Cato standing directly before the polished stone, while Navi stands off to one side.
All of the soldiers rise, and you and the other guests follow suit-
There is a rumble from Hornfels' direction, and some ghostly chuckling, hastily muffled.
You don't look, but you suspect the paladin nearly hit his head on the ceiling.
-as at each table, one of the still-standing cooks takes a clean plate and accepts a piece of food from one of his fellows: the freshest bread; some particularly juicy fruits; a… cluster of rocks?
Wait, no, that'll be for Hornfels.
And of course, the meat from the largest of the boars, which two ghosts carry forward between them. One man grabs an unopened bottle of wine, while another taps one of the kegs to fill a mug, before joining the line that has formed to the altar. One by one, with a certain mix of ritual slowness and practical speed, the offerings are placed upon the large plate that rests atop the stone, each soldier bowing once to the altar, once to Cato, and once to Navi before backing away and returning to the tables.
When the last offering – some sort of small cake – has been made, the priest raises his arms and speaks a prayer that is both a religious observation and an act of magic. He calls primarily upon Mars, naturally, but several other gods honored by the Memorians are individually named, while the rest receive a more general mention. Cato also speaks, slightly obliquely, of "the gods and goddesses of our allies in the final days of the long darkness," and with each word he utters, some of the food disappears from the altar-
*Pop*
-while the wine bottle uncorks itself and gradually empties.
And yes, one of the gods does take the rocks. You don't dare to speculate who, or whether or not they actually eat them.
Navi doesn't obviously DO anything, but then, she hardly needs to.
When the ritual is completed, Cato bows to the altar himself, then to Navi – who returns a nod – and then the pair of them return to the tables.
And now, it's your turn.
You think you might be able to cast the Spell of Ghost Food over the entire feast at once, but your grasp of metamagic doesn't give you quite enough flexibility for that, meaning you'd have to use one of your freeform rituals to pull it off. That's an aspect of your magical skillset you'd rather keep hidden from the Einzbern representatives, not to mention how it would reveal that you're just as capable in Necromancy as you are in Abjuration, which is another thing they don't need to know.
And so you begin walking down the tables, casting the spell over and over as you go, using a little metamagic to speed up the process – but not so much that you can't try to suppress the spell's signature. Between that and your Spell of Mind Blank… well, you're not going to say that you completely hid what you're doing from Miss Holzknecht – if nothing else, she could just scan the food of the ghosts sitting down the table from her – but you definitely made it harder for her.
At least a little!
When your work is finished, you bow to the crowd as a whole and return to the head of the table.
Captain Marcus waits for you to reach your place before he raises a cup. "To the gods!"
"TO THE GODS!" the dead men and monsters reply in unison.
"To Memoria!"
"TO MEMORIA!"
"And to our allies!"
"TO OUR ALLIES!"
And then, as one, every undead soul in the place takes a drink – many of them for the first time in a thousand years.
"And now," Marcus says, taking his seat, "WE FEAST!"
"OOOOAAAA!"
Is there anything you want to say over the meal?
You take a few minutes to just enjoy the food before resuming your conversation with the leadership.
The first topic that comes to mind is to inquire if they've obtained any additional information about that cult of demon-worshippers, be it the mortal membership or the demonic leaders. Because for all that it was a thousand years ago, that organization could conceivably still exist in some form – certainly, the demons that were pulling its strings could easily still be out there, if no one managed to kill them in a timely manner.
And maybe even then. Powerful demons can be annoyingly difficult to put down permanently…
You don't say.
"Bits and pieces," Marcus replies in answer to your question. "Nothing so convenient as one of the traitors having a list of names, of course-"
Yeah, it's never that easy, unless it's a trap.
Once again, speaking from experience.
"-but in the cleanup, we found a couple 'holy' symbols that were intact enough for Cato and Hermanus to use in some Divinations."
"Given the mock-werewolves we fought and the cult's use of lupine symbolism, I half expected to find that the demons had been using titles based on the same," Hermanus says then. "Instead… Fleas."
…
"…I'm sorry, what?" you reply.
"That was my reaction," Marcus says.
"You're saying that the demon's name – or its title?" You pause, looking at Hermanus
The mage nods.
"So its title was… 'Fleas'? Or 'the Demon Lord of Fleas'? Is that even a thing?"
You've heard of the Lord of the Flies, but…
"It is, but that's not what the wretch's title was. It's just a Demon of Fleas."
So not the Demon Lord of Fleas, not even THE Demon of Fleas, just… a Demon of Fleas.
…
Okay, your personal history with Demon Kings, Dark Lords, and apocalypses may have been skewing your expectations in that area. After all, while the rise of the demon-worshipping cult and the disappearance of Memoria took place very close together, you didn't and still don't actually know for sure that the former was the direct cause for the latter. A contributing factor, almost certainly, but not necessarily the sole cause.
…it does kind of explain the corpse-demon involvement, though. If you turn your head and squint. Maybe?
"Do you know if it's a demon in the shape of an actual flea, or if it was just associated with fleas?" you ask.
Because you know from Ambrose's lecture on the Fourth Grail War that there's a creature called a Fleaman which has almost nothing in common with actual fleas, save for being on the small side and being quite good at jumping.
"We weren't able to verify that much, unfortunately," Hermanus reports, "but if the condition of the fake werewolves was any indication – specifically, their lack of insect features – then I would tend to suspect the latter."
So rather than a giant bug demon or a demon with bug-like features, you're probably looking for a demon of the disgustingly shaggy and flea-ridden variety.
"That would fit our information," Cato agrees.
You'd like a copy of that information before they depart, if you could.
"We have two copies each for you and the knight to take with you," Marcus assures you.
Oh, good.
Yeah, for all that your currently adult-sized form ought to be able to handle the contents of a single glass of wine without real issue – especially over a meal – you don't know for certain how you'd react. The magic in your system – both the active spell and the stuff that's always there – could affect your tolerance, and it's also entirely possible that you're actually a lightweight and just don't know it yet.
Regardless, it's not an area you're keen on experimenting with, especially under the current circumstances. Not only are there a couple pairs of not-friendly ears to worry about, you ARE going to be teleporting later. You've heard public service announcements warning against drinking before driving or operating heavy machinery, and you can't imagine that being tipsy while performing a calculation-intensive form of magic like your own would be any better of an idea.
Granted, there probably ARE styles of magic that would benefit from, or even require, the caster getting at least a little drunk, but that's one sort of magic you don't feel any particular urge to investigate, at least at your current age. Maybe you'll feel different in another decade or so, but until then…
Anyway, you limit yourself to taking a sip of the wine as part of Marcus's toast.
…hm, kind of sour, although not as awful as you were expecting based on past experience with the scent of various kinds of alcohol. Is that because of the type of drink, a quality of this specific brand of wine, or are your taste buds a bit different in this form?
Something to wonder about another time. For now, you set your glass down. You might take another sip or two over the course of the feast to be polite, but otherwise, you'll stick with water.
After discussing the matter of the treacherous cult, you bring up a related matter.
"What happens to the base in Faerie after this?" you inquire.
"That is actually something we were meaning to ask you, lad," the captain replies.
…oh?
"The demonic contamination of the outpost was less serious than what we found here," he explains. "Some of it was due to that group of traitors not having any of those fake werewolves with them, and some of it was the result of your efforts and those of the priests-"
The memory of Ginta's unexpectedly effective Holy Smite flashes before your eyes.
"-not to mention our VERY unexpected batch of godly guests-"
Yes, all those kami being given a tour of the place likely would have left a mark, wouldn't it?
"-but on the whole, the fact that we were on Faerie and thus not as easily reached by the cult's backers seems to have been our major saving grace," the captain continues. "Not that they were actively sending power or further minions to this place for all the centuries it was sealed and buried, obviously, but Earth's environment is unfortunately hospitable for demons, which helped the filth that was already in here get by on its own. Faerie was less accommodating for them, if not actually hostile."
"That," Hermanus adds, "and our traitors seemed to have some issues with those giant spiders."
Oh?
The two ghosts who were active for most of your off-world exploration nod. "Going over the place in the aftermath of the battle, there were some clear signs that the cultists and the Gohma, as you call them, weren't exactly getting along with each other until we gave them a common enemy. Traitor corpses carrying trophies of spider-parts, other traitors bound up in webs, that sort of thing."
Ah, demonic territorial instincts. That helps to explain why the Gohma hadn't overrun the entire complex, even with their parent there to replenish their numbers. Mere zombies, they could have handled, but ghosts, even those that had sunk into torpor or gotten stuck in mindless routine as the Memorians and their treacherous counterparts had, would be tricky opponents for the largely non-magical arachnids. The nest-mother was probably powerful enough to have "injured" and disrupted a ghost, but she couldn't exactly get into the deeper parts of the base, and you have your doubts she could permanently remove a ghost. The specters, meanwhile, weren't conscious or organized enough to take action to push the arachnid invaders out, at least not until you showed up and started reviving the loyalist contingent, at which point all the bad guys had more urgent concerns.
…you do have to wonder how Dark Link fit into all of that, though, if he did at all. Rather than a three-way stalemate between Memorians, cultists, and Hyrulean entities, there may well have been FOUR factions holding territory in the outpost, each of them hostile to all of the rest.
"Taking all of that into account," Hermanus continues, "most of the damage to the outpost was less pervasive and more easily addressed than what we found here."
"Your own contributions to the control arrays notwithstanding," Marcus notes.
"Shut up about that, already."
"Never."
"Once we started clearing THIS place out and finding ourselves in need of untainted space to temporarily stash things while we figured out what to do with them," Cato takes over, giving his two peers an exasperated look, "we ended up moving a fair bit of material through the gate to Faerie."
Loot senses, tingling.
"…would any of that material happen to still be there?" you inquire carefully.
"We brought some of it back through for our departure," Cato answers, "but yes, there is a fair bit left over."
Tingling intensifying.
"And while the outpost's portal has been deactivated, as a test-run for what we'll be doing with the one here in the base," Hermanus resumes, "everything else is still there, and could use a caretaker. Or just a new owner."
"And it did not escape us that we had an auxiliary who had proven capable of traveling to Faerie under his own power," Marcus concludes. "If it wouldn't be too much hassle for you to keep an eye on the place, that is?"
That's a trick question, right?
You ask a few follow-up questions regarding the state of the Faerie Outpost and the magical transfer of authority over it, but the soldiers assure you they've already prepared for that, as part of today's final ceremony.
"It's literally just the ritual changing of command," Hermanus says. "After all, we're leaving our current post to report to a new assignment, and leaving someone in charge of the old one – or one of the old ones, anyway, but clearing this place out and destroying the sensitive bits or securing them in the Outpost settled accounts here well enough."
"And the fact that you're 'reporting' to the Underworld doesn't affect the magic?" you inquire.
"In and of itself, no," the mage replies. "The rite DID need some tweaking to get around the fact that Marcus and the rest of us are already dead, as the legions usually release you from service at that point, but once we had that accounted for, where we're going afterwards wasn't a concern."
Speaking of where they're going, you inquire if the Memorians would object to you calling some of them up – a good while down the line, of course, after they've had a chance to settle into the hereafter – to provide accounts of their nation's history.
"The knight and his scholar are well ahead of you on that one, lad," Marcus chuckles.
Following his glance towards the guest seats, you see Dr. Megalos engaged in conversation with some of the ghosts. At the moment, the archaeologist is listening intently to what one of the undead soldiers is saying; you can't make out the words over the general noise of so many diners, and the see-through state of the legionary's head makes lip-reading far too difficult, but whatever is under discussion seems to have the living man enraptured. He isn't taking notes or recording, but you can sense a low-end spell of Enchantment, Augmentation, and Divination going about his person, something focused on boosting personal reception and retention of information.
In other words, he's cast a spell to help him commit whatever he's hearing to memory, so he can recall it accurately later on.
Incidentally, Miss Holzknecht isn't paying attention to the professor, as not only are the two of them sitting on opposite sides of the guest-group, but the magus is engaged in her own conversation with one of the neighboring ghosts.
Well, then. If the professional student and seeker of history is on the case, and the Memorians don't have any objections to their stories being written down and potentially told-
"Not in the sense you mean," Marcus replies with a laugh. "Although we have had to break up a few arguments about who actually got to talk to the man over the last few weeks, or how truthful their accounts were."
-then you can probably leave that matter alone. Or at least wait to talk to Dr. Megalos about it later on, to see if he's receptive to the idea of historical witnesses being called back to provide testimony from beyond the grave.
He might not be, or he might just not need the help. The good doctor's own magical abilities are limited, but he does work for a man who knows Ambrose, after all.
The feast continues, and as it does so, you notice some of the diners getting up and changing locations to speak with somebody.
After a couple of courses and rounds of conversation with the legion commanders, you decide that since you are in Memoria(n territory), you should do as the Memorians are doing, and mingle with the crowd a bit.
This is, after all, going to be the last time that you see most of them, much less break bread with them. Even if you wouldn't describe your relationship with any of the ancient undead as a close one – you hardly know the names of even a dozen of them – it's been a positive one all the same, and the knowledge that it will soon be ending gives this whole day a bit of a melancholy air.
Granted, your inherited memories, accumulated arcane lore, and tremendous magical power mean that death isn't the sort of impassable barrier or final destination for you that it is for most other people. Even so, the fact remains that this will be the first time you've had to "bury" anyone you knew in this lifetime, much less anybody you were on good terms with, and that's something your magic can't really help with, short of mind- or emotion-altering magics that it wouldn't be appropriate to use.
Ganondorf's memories are no help at all in this area, or at least, you can't recall him ever attending a funeral for anybody he gave a damn about…
Where were you? Socializing! Yes. With the dead people.
…
Somehow, even though you know Briar will absolutely tease you about it when she finds out, you end up looking for Trill the Harpy. The avian lady in question is currently perched sidelong on her seat – literally perched, in fact, she has her legs pulled up underneath her and is grasping the bench with her skeletal talons – staring down the way and up, up, up at the mountainous presence of Hornfels-
*Crunch*
-as the elemental paladin enjoys his portion of the feast. The subtleties of fine dining among the denizens of the Plane of Earth are rather a mystery to you, but there are strips of worked stone and fragments of metal piled alongside clumps of raw rock on the section of table before the holy warrior, and you think you spot the glint of a polished crystal or two among the offerings.
…did they rip out part of the base's magical arrays to use as food for the big guy?
Shaking your head in wonder, you move up alongside Trill and come to a halt. "Hello, Trill."
"Hey," she replies absently, bird-like stare not shifting away from Hornfels.
"…you've never seen an Earth Elemental eat before, either, have you?"
At that, the harpy shakes her head. "Mountain that eats," she declares, sounding both fascinated and a little nervous.
"Yeah," you respond, "Hornfels… wait, no, that joke doesn't work in Latin."
Trill finally stops staring at the elemental and turns her attention to you, her expression curious.
You explain to her how, in English, there is a word for stones that sounds like the word for a type of movement, and which has also come to be used for a form of music. From there, it's expanded to mean something that has a quality of excellence.
Trill listens to this, nodding patiently and humming affirmatively, before finally saying, "I don't get it."
…
Yeah, running through your moderately expansive Latin vocabulary, none of the words you can think of for identifying a physical thing as a rock – or a type of rock, as the case may be – are pronounced like words for the act of rocking.
Well, you tried. And at least you weren't using a translation spell for this, Goddesses only know what it might have come out sounding like…
We do?
Some of us more than others, at least…
With your attempt at humor having fallen flat, you cast about for something else to chat about. Maybe it's the ongoing crunch and crack of Hornfels' meal drawing your attention to the topic of "food," but you end up asking Trill if she's enjoying the meal.
The harpy smiles. "Very much. Thank you."
Her answer is echoed with enthusiasm by the nearby legionaries, several of whom demonstrate their gratitude by grabbing some random foodstuff off of their plate and taking a big, hearty bite out of it, or just shoving the entire thing into their mouth – Trill does the latter with a fish, swallowing it whole in one gulp. It wasn't a very big fish, but the harpy isn't a very big person, either, and you can't help but wonder if she ate like that in life. Seems like it'd be a choking hazard, if you're being honest, not to mention the scales, head, and possibly bones that had been deliberately left in place with that particular fish and some of the others…
Probably best not to bring it up, though. In either sense of the phrase.
After a few minutes of idle chit-chat, you wish Trill and the other ghosts that got drawn into the conversation a pleasant meal, and excuse yourself to begin making your way back to the head of the main table. You take a circuitous route that carries you past the other living guests and a fair sweep of the rest of the room, getting into a couple more short discussions along the way, but nothing of particular substance.
It probably helps that Miss Holzknecht is eagerly talking to any of the ghosts that will respond to her, which happens to be most of them that she approaches. You aren't sure if that's because the Memorians just like the prospect of someone knowing about them after they're gone, or because they're a bunch of soldiers presented with a good-looking woman who actually appears to be interested in them, but either way, it seems to be giving Hartwin a headache.
Dr. Megalos certainly doesn't get quite the same warm reception when he makes the rounds, which lends some credence to the idea that the legionaries are enjoying having a pretty face to look at, but the archaeologist isn't exactly having trouble finding conversational partners himself.
You silently wish him well in his magically aided note-taking, but don't interrupt him to speak about your idea of summoning Memorians for later interviews. There will be time for that later.
Eventually, you return to your seat and settle in for the next course.
And so the meal goes.
An hour, the feast lasts, and then the better part of two. Towards the end, the serving platters are gradually emptied until little but the bones remain-
*Crunch*
-and not even all of them, courtesy of certain monsters in the crowd-
"You know, this bone looks like it'd be an almost perfect fit for the gap in my forearm…"
"Are you quite serious?"
-as well as a few… others…
Anyway, as that's going on, you eventually notice individual Memorians getting up and taking their plates and cutlery into the kitchen, and then not returning for a few minutes. Most retain their cups, to engage in a bit more social drinking, but as the event draws on – and perhaps more significantly, as the wine and beer are gradually exhausted – more and more of the ghosts clear their places at the tables altogether.
Marcus, Cato, and Hermanus assure you and Navi that as guests, you aren't expected to take care of your own dishes, but you both politely insist, which seems to please the trio all the same, at least in your case. You also note the other living guests doing the same, save for Hornfels, who wouldn't fit into the kitchen, at least not without a lot of stuff getting broken; having been eating with his hands and drinking not at all, he resolves the matter of clean-up by eating his plate.
It does take some doing for Dr. Megalos and Miss Holzknecht to be pulled away from their ongoing investigations, but the latter is eventually coaxed into it by Hartwin, who simply stares at her, somehow projecting expectation from that bland expression until the magus gives in.
As for the archaeologist, Sir Pritchard and Mr. Clarkson simply walk over to where he's talking with his latest conversational partner, apologize to the ghost, and then pick the good doctor up by the arms and haul him away, ignoring his protests to the contrary.
The spirit seems to find that more amusing than you think it really is. Maybe he's had a little too much necromantically enriched wine?
Regardless, the tables are eventually cleared, and the last of the Memorians exit the kitchen in a hurry to re-join their allies, all now standing at attention around the tables. You and the other living guests take that as your cue to stand up as well.
Captain Marcus issues some final orders. A couple of soldiers who slipped away from the celebration earlier and who have since returned clad in armor and with their weapons at their sides and in hand are to take charge of the living guests and escort them to the gate room. A dozen more such souls, as well as several of the monsters, are dispatched to make a final sweep of the base interior and perimeter. Most of the remainder are simply sent to re-equip themselves, while Cato remains in the dining hall to de-consecrate the altar at the back.
"If you'd give me a few minutes, Auxiliary," he notes, "there is something I would like to discuss."
You do that, waving off the questioning looks from the other living souls.
They don't have to drag Miss Holzknecht away this time, but she keeps looking back in your direction for a while. Fortunately not with any magical probes going.
You wait patiently while Cato conducts his prayers, and once the quiet aura of divinity has been lifted from the block of stone, the two of you proceed to have a little chat about semi-recent events as you make your way to the gate room.
Which results in a somewhat unexpected presentation.
Gained Memorian Relics
Gained Memorian Name
There is a lot of cheering and applause at the end of it.
Miss Holzknecht politely claps, but she looks like her mind is a hundred miles away.
Following the bestowal of your new name-slash-title – boy, that is going to take some getting used to – the Memorians proceed to the ceremonial transfer of command.
This is, as Hermanus notes, a task made rather easier now that you've been officially acknowledged and named in the Memorian style. Just to be clear, that wasn't actually enough to make you a Memorian citizen – even if the nation weren't a thousand years dead, there are legalities that the undead legionaries don't have the authority to address and oaths that they can't act as witness to, among other hurdles – but recruiting non-citizens to serve as auxiliaries is something that was part of legion life since the days of Rome, and the concept of "battlefield promotion" is older by far.
The ceremony is fairly simple. One of the troops brings a pair of batons to the three commanders, Cato and Hermanus inspect them, and then Captain Marcus takes one and holds it in a reversed grip, the undecorated head aimed towards himself while the butt of the rod points at you.
As you take hold of the token of office, the captain charges you to take command of "our outpost" and see to its continued upkeep, security, and operations, until such time as you pass command to another, are relieved of duty, or elect to destroy the compound to keep its remaining secrets out of enemy hands.
You agree to these terms, and Marcus lets go of the baton, officially placing you in charge of the Faerie Outpost.
Gained Memorian Rod of Office
Then he takes the remaining rod of office, turns to his men, and orders them to activate the portal and prepare for departure.
The great ring that has been sitting in the middle of the chamber now hums to life, the lines and symbols cut into the stone surfaces glowing brighter as the mana builds. It takes a few minutes for the power to reach its peak – not as many as you'd need to ritually cast the Gate Spell, you note in passing – which is something that Hermanus says is a consequence of their having adjusted the device to open to a destination that doesn't actually have a partner portal.
"It wasn't really built to function this way, so we had to make some allowances," the mage says, shrugging. "It's not pretty, but it will do the job we need it to."
Eventually, the portal opens-
*Ka-whoosh!*
-creating a shimmering energy field akin to sunlight dancing on the surface of a rippling lake. The visual spectacle lasts only for a moment, as Priest Cato steps forward and calls upon Lord Mars and Lord Pluto, entreating them to allow passage to the Underworld for soldiers whose service has lasted far too long, and whose time of duty has finally come to its end.
In response, the rippling light within the Gate fades and grows dark, and then pulls apart to reveal a dim, rocky cavern filled almost to knee-height by a thick, heavy mist, tendrils of which begin to sluggishly billow out of the portal. Despite the lack of light on the other side, unworked gems and metallic ores glint among the stones, and you can quite clearly make out other spectral figures clad in the Memorian style, some of them as legionaries, others in the robes of priests. Their ghostly forms are more solid than those of the undead on this side of the portal, the image – or remembrance? – of flesh fully covering the bones beneath.
"Your entreaty is heard, and approved," one of the ancient and long-dead clergymen replies. "Your duty is done at last, and your places in Lord Pluto's domain have long awaited you. Come, now, and find the rest long denied you."
"Men and monsters of the Fifth Legion!" Captain Marcus calls out. "Make ready!"
At this, the troops begin moving, not towards the gate, but rather towards a feature of this room that you've been politely avoiding looking too closely at since you approached with Cato – this being the many corpses that have been laid out on the floor, and back down along the hall. As each legionary comes to a particular body, he or she first kneels next to it and then lies down, spectral forms overlapping long-dead bones and what little remains of the flesh.
And then, after a moment, the bodies stand up, corpus and animus reunited for the first time in a millennium.
Not all of the legionaries do this. Some of them had retained possession of their physical forms from the start, while others have no corpse left to claim. But they move with their newly re-corporealized comrades all the same, for there is a task that needs all hands the legion can muster, this being the retrieval of the bodies that have no lingering souls to attend them. These, their brothers and sisters who died to the long-ago treachery without the strength of grudge or will necessary to return – possibly without even realizing they'd been betrayed to their deaths – the Memorians have already set on simple biers, which they now pair off to lift and begin steering with all due solemnity towards the waiting gateway.
Rather than walk on through, the soldiers form ranks once again, waiting for all of the unit to finish their very final preparations.
Trill, incidentally, takes this opportunity to hug Briar and give you a pat on the shoulder, which is about as high as she can reasonably reach with you in your current form. It is really not the same as being patted on the head, and from her disappointed frown, the harpy feels quite the same.
You take in Trill's disappointed look, sigh, and crouch down enough for her to reach.
The harpy lets out a soft song of delight as she raises her taloned hand.
"Seriously, again?" a dead man mutters in dismay.
"Some guys have all the luck…"
*Pat*
*Pat*
…
And you're back.
"Happy?" you ask, as you straighten up again.
"Mm," Trill replies, nodding once.
Then, somewhat to your surprise, she hugs you, a feeling akin to… well, being partly encircled by some bones wrapped in feathers.
"Be careful, hm?" the harpy says, as she pulls back.
"…I will do my best to," you answer. "Take care, Trill."
"Bye," she says, waving, before she goes to join the rest of the unit.
…
Miss Holzknecht and Hartwin are staring at you. The former looks baffled and somewhat judgmental, the latter… wait, why is he nodding?
Altria, on the other hand, is grinning smugly at you, the sort of expression that only a dragon or a cat can wear.
She says nothing, but you nonetheless fear that you may have made a tactical error…
Captain Marcus looks over his command one final time, nods, and barks: "Company, march!"
Someone in the unit immediately strikes up a song, one about going home. The rest of the troops quickly join in, as they begin moving two-by-two – or is it two-by-three? – into the gate and the eternal rest that waits beyond. Their bodies shimmer as they pass through the portal, withered corpses filling out in places while spectral flesh simultaneously grows opaque, leaving the animated soldiers looking much like their counterparts who awaited them.
The truly dead ones remain so. What that means, you aren't sure.
Marcus watches in silence as his troops deploy, nodding for Hermanus and Cato to join the rest. In due course, he is the only Memorian left in the gate room – in all of both ancient bases, you know – and it is only then that he steps through the portal.
Captain Marcus Valerius Faustus then turns to face you and the other living souls who are now quite alone within the base. Looking and sounding far more alive than you have ever seen him, yet still somehow distinctly and definitely dead, the Memorian commander raises the rod of office that he still holds towards you in a salute.
You return the gesture with your own baton.
Then, without word or ceremony, Marcus grasps his emblem with both hands and brings it down over his knee.
*Snap*
Given all the (un)dead bodies you've seen today, how ghastly Marcus has always appeared in your previous interactions, and your knowledge of how brittle exposed bone can be, your mind conjures up the brief, mildly humorous – hah – image of the good captain breaking his own skeletal leg in this display, but the two pieces of the sundered rod fall to the ground in different directions, making it quite clear that's not what happened.
A faint magic ripples outward from the broken length of wood, less a spell than a trigger for one. There is a moment where nothing appears to happen as a result of that, but then the portal starts to ripple again and tear at the edges, as glowing portions of the stone ring around it visibly flicker, while the material itself emits audible cracks.
There is a sound of dismayed protest from Miss Holzknecht at this.
"Farewell, Alexander," Marcus says, as the gate fails. "And thank you."
"Rest well, Marcus," you reply.
Then the portal zaps shut and winks out, which is followed by the gate mechanism simply shattering to pieces – and not a half-dozen segments of disassembled ring like the ones you saw the Memorians pulling out of storage in the Faerie Outpost, but hundreds, possibly thousands of broken fragments. It's rather like a Spell of Shattering went off, although you know that isn't the case – the spell only works against nonmagical items, and then only up to a certain size, which you're pretty sure even the individual segments of the ring would have been too massive for.
Did you want to collect a bit of the broken gate for examination?
There is quite a bit of noise as the gate goes to pieces. Much of it is either the actual shattering of the stone ring, or the subsequent clatter of countless fragments of magic-laden stone falling to the floor, but there are some cries of astonishment and concern from the other members of the audience.
Hornfels surprises you by being one of those, more so for the heavy *boom* as he takes a step backwards from his prior position, stone arms half-raised in a defensive position before he thinks better of it.
"What was that about?" you wonder.
/ I've run into Spells of Shattering a few times, / the elemental paladin explains, the tone of his rumbling and his overall body language indicating a distinct dislike. / They were… unpleasantly memorable. /
Considering that Hornfels has emeralds for eyes, you can see understand why he would consider such an experience a negative one.
For that matter, while ordinary rocks cannot be damaged by the area-effect version of the Spell of Shattering – a resistance arising from the fact that their mineral composition is very irregular compared to that of crystalline substances – they CAN be damaged by the single-target variation, which focuses its energy enough to create a destructive resonance in a non-magical, non-living target.
Witnessing other rocks being blown apart by that magic would probably be a nasty experience for an earth elemental. Too easy to picture one's self, or one's acquaintances, in the place of that unfortunate stone – especially if their bodies were made up of the same stuff, or one of those kinds of rock that crystals tend to occur in.
You're just guessing, here, but Hornfels probably doesn't like Shout Spells very much, either. Something to keep in mind for future summonings.
Well, regardless of that, once all the crumbling and clattering has come to a stop, you step forward to look the pile of wreckage over with eyes and Mage Sight alike. Spotting a piece of decent size and magical essence, you pluck it from the heap and pocket it-
!
-hello, what's this? Your Gratitude Crystallizer is full! When did that happen, and how did you miss it?
Gained 50 (!) Gratitude Crystals
Gained Memorian Gate Fragment
As for the remaining pieces of the portal, you should definitely get rid of them. Keeping secrets out of enemy hands was the whole point of destroying the thing and stripping or burning the rest of the base, so why leave that job only partly finished? Particularly when you've been charged with the defense of the outpost that is the counterpart to this base, and which holds the gate that is – or maybe was? – the partner to this one. There's a fair amount of magical sympathy there, which would make spells meant to find or travel to the Faerie Outpost rather more likely to work, and that's something you need to prevent.
A Spell of Disintegration would be ideal for this purpose, except that you aren't entirely sure if you can affect the portal in its fragmented state. Does a pile of debris count as a single "object" in magical terms? Does being the scattered parts of a single, previous object help?
It would be a lot easier if the thing were intact or if you put it back together… and conveniently enough, the Spell to Make Whole can make that happen. Oh, it won't restore the magical properties of the portal – you'd need to use your ritualized "Even Greater" Spell to Make Whole to pull that off, which is something you would rather not do in front of the Einzbern witnesses – but just putting the stone ring itself back together, with no concern for its enchantments? Entirely doable, and as a bonus, it won't suggest anything unusual about your aptitude in the field of Transformation Magic. Make Whole is only a second-circle spell, and the volume it can affect is generous enough for most skilled but not truly exceptional modern spellcasters to pull off what you want to do.
One question remains: do you want to let Miss Holzknecht grab a fragment of the gate before you dispose of the rest? From an absolute security perspective, the answer SHOULD be "No," but you can see distinct advantages in allowing the Einzberns to have a piece of the portal – namely that, if you handle it before passing it over, you'll be able to find it again later much more easily, especially with your recently-mastered Spell to Discern Location.
Given your as-yet unformed plan to raid the Einzbern residence with Ambrose and whatever other assistance you can summon, hire, or otherwise turn to the task, the inside intel you might acquire that way could be very, very useful…
While you do have some concerns, the fact remains that Marcus, Hermanus, and Cato all seemed quite satisfied with their precautions for disposing of this gate and preserving the security of the one in Faerie. Yes, they invited you to take any follow-up actions you felt were necessary, but they didn't insist on it, which suggests what's been done already is sufficient from the perspective of upholding duty.
With that in mind, Mars shouldn't get annoyed if you let the Einzberns take a piece of the portal to do magical things to – especially since you're planning to turn their "prize" into a potential informational asset for a future mission.
As such, after pocketing your personal fragment-of-choice, you pick the next-best candidate for research and/or reagent purposes from the pile, turn it over in your hands, and then turn to Miss Holzknecht.
"I'll be disposing of these fragments in a moment," you say, as you extend the hand holding the fragment. "But before I do, would you care to take a piece for your family's studies?"
Crescentia is visibly surprised by your offer, an expression that she leverages to try and hide distinct eagerness.
"You and your allies don't object?" she asks, politely.
"They'd already taken precautions they considered sufficient, at least for present company," you reply. "I'm just being thorough, in case someone unexpected were to come along."
"…would 'someone unexpected' happen to include Wizard Ambrose?" the lady ventures.
You pause at that, and turn to Sir Pritchard – and less obviously, Altria.
The knight chuckles and shakes his head. "Ambrose said nothing about collecting samples to me. Lance, Walt; did he talk to either of you?" he adds, looking to his son and the disguised Drake.
The pair shake their heads.
"No, sir," Altria replies.
"Not a peep, Dad," Lance adds.
And you can't collect a reagent on Ambrose's behalf without contaminating your own, Hornfels isn't actually here, and Navi and the Hakubas aren't about to see the wizard again any time soon.
What a shame.
"Isn't it just?" Briar agrees sweetly.
"Yes, terrible, just terrible," Roderick agrees, chuckling.
"Ah," Miss Holzknecht says, with some delicacy. "In that case, I believe I will definitely be taking you up on that offer, Dr. Jones."
"Family would never let you live it down otherwise?" you guess.
"Not hardly," she admits.
Despite the phrasing of her acceptance, it's not the magus who comes forward to take the shard of stone, but Hartwin. The homunculus turns the fragment over in his hands a couple of times, visibly probing it with his own mage-sight, before turning to his charge, nodding once, and handing it over.
"Thank you, Hartwin," the lady says. "And thank you, Dr. Jones."
"You're welcome."
With that out of the way, you get on with your Spell to Make Whole. As there's no real way to speed up the ten-minute casting time required by the ritual, Briar, Hornfels, and Mr. Pritchard volunteer to show the other guests around the base, an offer that is readily accepted by all parties. Even Miss Holzknecht is more eager to take a look around – no doubt in the hopes of spotting some bit of arcane lore or material that the Memorians left behind, though it's also possible she's just interested in the ancient architecture – than she is to stand around watching you perform a minor spell, and so the lot of them head off.
Hartwin is the last to depart, eyeing you and the bits of rock gradually floating up from the pile to fit themselves back together with some guardedness.
Your concentration is sufficient for you to spare him a wave without disrupting your spellwork, and the homunculus huffs and goes on his way.
Aside from reassembling and then completely disassembling the portal, is there anything else that you feel needs doing here, before escorting everybody out of the base and seeing the Hakubas home?
As you get further and further along in your casting of the Spell to Make Whole, more and more of the pieces of the shattered portal rise from where they've fallen, floating about you and each other and gradually forming groups as your mind and magic determine points of similarity between them.
Here, several pieces that noticeably don't fit together, but which are all convex on one side, indicating they should be along the outer rim of the portal.
There, parts whose concave faces tell you they're from the inner rim of the device.
Elsewhere, groups of two or three fragments whose jagged edges line up together smoothly
A cloud is soon formed from a large number of pieces that are carved on one or two faces, evidence that they originated from the face of the ring.
Another collection of broken bits comes together, the individual stones bearing no obvious markings of any sort, which suggests they came from deeper within the device.
And so it goes, the Spell at first sorting through the debris at a rate comparable to what you might achieve if you attempted a task like this with only your hands, eyes, and mind, but rapidly picking up speed as time goes on. Every now and then, there is a click as seemingly-matching pieces of rock are pressed together to see how well they fit, and these sounds also begin to happen with greater frequency as the ritual advances.
By the three-minute mark, you've got several loose chunks of stone approximately the volume of baseballs put back together.
By five minutes, there are a lot more of those chunks, as well as several basketball-sized lumps floating about.
After seven minutes, the outline of the ring is fairly obvious, and at nine, it's mostly complete, the magic now focusing more on holding everything in place as a crackling hiss runs through it, fusing the pieces back together.
And then you're done, and the portal stands before you, seemingly reassembled – at least physically. Magically, it's still no more functional than when it was in a million pieces. Still, the magic originally imbued into the device lingers, strongly enough that restoring it probably wouldn't be beyond the skills of a family with the resources and connections the Einzberns command.
So, after all that work, you cast the Spell of Disintegration-
*Zap*
-and reduce the ring to so much inert dust.
It's a shame, but at least you have the other ring in Faerie to look at later, and maybe make use of. While these gates were designed to work in tandem, the Memorians' departure handily demonstrated that it IS possible to open portals to locations that don't have matching rings – though at the same time, Hermanus's comments suggest that it's not something easily done, and probably not something to be done frequently…
Well, whatever. You'll worry about that when you have some time to study the thing, as well as whatever other magic items the legion left behind in the Faerie Outpost.
For now, you decide to head to the base's arcane workshop, to get a better idea of what, if anything, Marcus and his men and monsters left here...
So, it turns out that the answer to the question of what the Memorians left behind is, "Not much of anything."
True, the workshop still contains some spoiled potions and a lot of organic reagents that have decayed past the point of usefulness, plus some surviving inorganic materials: mostly glass and crystals; some samples of various non-precious metals; and a few stones that might be worth selling if they were properly cut and polished – not that you have any idea how to do that, or if there's even a technical term for the process beyond "gem-cutting."
But when you look around with augmented senses, even peering through the walls in a couple places with a ritually-cast Spell to See Through Stone, you find no enchanted items more impressive than a couple of potions that can still be considered "well aged" rather than outright ruined, and even some of those have been obviously contaminated with necromantic energy, making them largely worthless.
As for the arrays that you know were built into the walls, doorways, and other surfaces of this place? Many have been physically removed, or – as Hermanus stated at the feast – subjected to a cleansing by fire, which not only burned out whatever demonic taint might have crept in, but also warped and melted some of the metals used, rendering them both non-functional and irreparable, at least via the spells you're familiar with.
Given the existence of the Spell to Warp (or Unwarp) Wood, you suppose that somebody might have come up with a Spell to Warp (or Unwarp) Metal, but it's not a magic that you can recall knowing or hearing of. Might be something to look into… regardless, there's a difference between fixing metal that's merely been warped by heat, and metal that's been outright melted. Such magic wouldn't be able to pull it off, and you can't think of any spell that might, short of throwing a Limited Wish at the thing. Which would just be hilariously inefficient and expensive.
Fire is really good at destroying stuff. Sometimes it's convenient, and at other times, like this one…
Well, at least the Einzberns aren't going to get much out of this place. Maybe some gold, silver, and such to sell off or recycle into their own projects, but little if anything in the way of new information.
You don't have time to search the entire base before your fellow visitors show up looking for you and expect to leave. But maybe you could check one or two other locations…?
You suppose you could call up Bando or Elder Terok and see if they have any skills at working with gemstones, or if they know any Gorons that do. For that matter, maybe they'd just take the things as payment for something…?
Before popping the unworked stones into your pocket, you spend a minute and some of the charges of your Spell to Analyze Dweomers to study their auras in more detail. You want to make sure none of these gems came from the same location, originally, and also that their long storage in the Memorian workshop hasn't contaminated them.
…
Huh.
One of the little storage shelves bears a lingering aura that your Spell ignores, but which your Mage Sense and Mage Sight can pick up. There was a crystal, gem, or lump of ore sitting there until just a few minutes ago, which had an interesting aura of Earth mingled with Darkness and Spirit in that particular manner that denotes Necromancy – and from the similarities to what you recall the atmosphere of the base having been like when you were helping to clear it out, that was undoubtedly a result of contamination, meaning the minor preservative wards on that storage compartment failed.
Seems like Miss Holzknecht had the same idea that you do, and beat you to this place.
Well, it's not like you didn't know she was a magus, or that she cleaned the place out entirely… although you are looking at some of the empty spaces on the shelves, counters, and drawers in a new light.
If Hartwin has bulging pockets or a looting sack hanging over one shoulder the next time you see him, you'll know for sure.
In the meantime, there are two stones that do indeed seem to share a common origin, so you just estimate which of them is the more valuable of the two and pocket that one, leaving the other alone. The rest of the rocks are in good condition and show no indications of shared geneses, so you can take the lot without concern.
Gained Uncut Gems
Take the good potions and the contaminated ones.
As with the stones, you scan the flasks and their contents to see what you're dealing with.
Okay, that's a minor Potion of Healing, maybe a bit more or less potent than it originally was, now that it's had ten centuries to steep, and that oil seems to have been meant to temporarily enhance weapons with the essence of… silver? Well, that would explain why it seems to still be in good condition: most metals are fairly hardy to begin with; and silver has associations with purity that would help it out.
You can understand why Miss Holzknecht didn't bother taking those. The Einzberns can probably make their own, or just order them in bulk through trusted channels. You are somewhat less fortunate in your means-
*Yoink*
-which is why you have no compunctions about grabbing those for use and/or study.
As for the contaminated potions… one of them looks like it started out as another healing potion, but the way the fluid has thickened and darkened to an almost blood-like consistency, you don't think you'd care to try drinking it. The second seems like it may have been a Potion of Energy Resistance, but which element it was meant to work against is unclear. The last one simply baffles you, and is going to need a more detailed investigation than you can perform here to figure out.
Maybe Vira-
HAIL!
-would be willing to add the analysis of those hazardous potions to your upcoming lesson plan?
Something to talk about, the next time you speak with her.
Gained Memorian Healing Potion
Gained Memorian Silversheen
Gained Memorian Contaminated Potions x3
Anyway, as there's nothing else of value here that you can or wish to claim, you exit the workshop and head for… hmmm.
The prospect of studying that teleportation ring in the barracks certainly has its appeal, but the barracks are not only pretty far from your current location, they're also right next to the exit – so if your companions spot you along the way, they will probably expect to leave the base shortly afterwards. On top of that, the ring seems like the sort of thing that the Memorians would have taken steps to remove or destroy when they were preparing to abandon the base.
The fact that they left the portal-doorway you used to get in alone is something you have to write down to "hospitality," though you find you can't quite rule out the possibility of a lingering self-destruct, either. Sure, Hermanus thought the idea of rigging your entire base to blow up was foolish, but he didn't speak against subtler sabotage, and was demonstrably involved in quite a lot of it besides…
That said, you want to check the baths and the storage chambers, too, and you'd have to pass both of them to get to the barracks anyway.
It'd be convenient if you could just teleport from site to site, but while the Memorians may have destroyed the systems on and within their stronghold, those wards to prevent the use of Summoning Magic outside of very specific areas were running for a very long time, and have left something of a mark on the Astral side of things. The disturbance will clear up on its own eventually, but for the foreseeable future, trying to teleport into or around this place is still not a good idea.
Check the baths. You seriously doubt Miss Holzknecht will have paid attention to this place, and you can't see the Memorians having put much effort into sabotaging it.
Some people may find your decision to check on the plumbing bizarre, when the possibilities of examining ancient mass-teleportation devices or collecting more loot are on the table.
Many of those people would not be aware that there are more or less intact examples of the barracks teleporter in the Faerie Outpost, which you can study pretty much at your leisure, or that you're planning to do some serious construction work in the coming months, for which some knowledge of how arcanists deal with plumbing would be useful.
True, there are baths in the Faerie Outpost, but they weren't in great shape when you passed through, and you aren't sure if the legionaries bothered to do any restoration work on a magical system that they really had no further need for.
For this base, though, you know that – whether by good fortune, deliberate effort, or more likely a bit of both – at least SOME of the plumbing is in working order, as there were operable sinks in the kitchen, and a couple of the other living guests took bathroom breaks towards the end of the feast. The Memorians still might not have bothered to restore the baths, but unless there were more of those demonic slime-monsters hanging out in the bathing pools, you can't see a reason for the Memorians to have put the kind of effort into sabotaging the plumbing that they did into ripping or burning out the base's warding and control arrays.
Seriously, it's the BATHS. Spells to produce hot or cold water on demand, maintain preferred temperatures, and whisk away filth aren't exactly state secrets, or the sort of thing that a magus family would make the heart of their efforts to reach the Root…
…
…damn it, now you're going to have the image of a "Bath Magus" stuck in your head.
You glance into a few of the rooms you pass on your way to the baths, looking for signs of recent passage, but the stone flooring bore up even under Hornfels' great weight, and if the Memorians didn't bother to repair a lot of stuff, they at least swept away the dust, cobwebs, and other detritus that had built up over the last thousand years. That said, the rooms you look into are either entirely empty and devoid of magical auras, or contain only ancient furnishings-
!
-hm? Another potion, left sitting atop a half-rotted table in what appears to be… maybe a meeting room? A quick examination shows it to be another that's been contaminated by necrotic energy, and badly enough that its original purpose escapes you.
Not long after that, you reach the baths, and start looking the place over.
…
There is good news, there is average news, and there is bad news.
The bad news is that there probably WAS at least one of those ectoplasmic abominations in here at some point, because some of the piping buried in the walls and floor has been subjected to the same purgation by flame that you saw signs of back in the workshop, and even the bath proper looks a little cooked towards one end.
The average news is that most of the plumbing that's been left intact and untainted is in the same condition of neglect and decay as the baths in the Faerie Outpost were, the last time you saw them. So the Memorians did indeed not bother to do much restoration work in here, if any.
And the good news is that despite all the damage, two of the taps, three of the drains, and their connected bits of pipe are actually still functional-
*Grooooaaaan*
-for given values of "functional," anyway. That one tap that makes concerning noises if you try to open it up too far won't produce water at anything more than a sluggish drip, but the enchantments are still working well enough to let you control the temperature, and the water dripping out seems clean enough to bathe with. The other tap gets much better output, but its temperature controls seem to be busted, and the water that runs forth is kind of oily-looking.
Making sure everything is turned off again, you use your Spell to See Through Stone to backtrack the pipes that carried the water to the taps, ending up in an obvious maintenance room that contains several large stone tanks with hinged metal lids. One of those is rusted shut, while another has been torn off its hinges and set to one side, leaving the mostly-empty and fire-blackened interior of the otherwise smooth-sided container exposed. The last two tanks seem to be in working order, though, and a quick look under the lid reveals them to be recipients of simple Spells to Create Water and Purify Water, as well as a similarly humble monitoring spell meant to alert an observer if there was a problem inside the container.
Nothing special, but very practical. You wonder if the Memorians would have also used these water-tanks as a backup water supply, if their primary source became unreliable? The room is too inconveniently placed for it to be said source, and there don't appear to be any other pipes connecting to it…
As for the drainage, that proves to lead down to a lower level, in a chamber that has no active lights, meaning your Spell to See Through Stone can't reveal anything beyond the fact that it's there. You start looking for a door or stairwell-
"Calling Doctor Jones?" the voice of Briar's disguise form calls.
-and are interrupted.
Take it.
Waste not, and all that.
Though you do have to wonder what a potion was doing in this particular room…
Gained Memorian Contaminated Potion
"Let me guess: the creepy groaning noises got your attention?"
"They did," Briar agrees, from just outside the main door. "It's honestly kind of eerie just how quiet and empty this place feels, now that the Memorians are gone, not to mention how far sound carries, and well, when something started making noises like that without warning…"
The quiet was fairly self-evident, but you hadn't noticed any sort of emptiness. Then again, Briar IS Fae, and this place WAS warded against Fae intruders – even with permission to be here having been granted by the late occupants, combined with the destruction of the wards, the base probably just isn't going to feel comfortable to your partner or any other Fae for a good long while, if it ever does.
Fair enough about the groaning pipes being a little off-putting, though.
"Can you see a door or stairway from where you are?" you call out, as you climb the short ladder out of the empty bathing pool.
"…what were you doing down there?" your partner wonders.
"Tracing the path of the pipes, trying to get a better idea where the drains go," you reply, glancing at Briar to see whether or not she's alone – and no, "Wart," Lance, Ichirou, and Miss Suzuka are all with her. Since there's no sign of an Einzbern, you add, "I was just considering if it might be faster to turn into an earth elemental and pass through the stone to see what's down there."
Altria frowns. "Would that not mean falling through the ceiling?"
"I'm tough, especially in rock mode. I could take it."
"Yes, but… would a drainage chamber beneath all of this" – she gestures around at the facilities – "not essentially be a sewer?"
…
"…it'd be a thousand-year-old sewer?" you offer uncertainly. "I'm sure that… everything inside would have, you know, dried up and turned to dust centuries ago. Probably."
Plus, worst-case scenario, it's just old bathwater. How bad could it be?
Altria does not appear convinced. Nor do the rest of the small group.
"Anyway," you hurry along, "why are there five of you?"
"Well," Altria begins, "there was the very, very small chance of running into an opportunistic monster or demon-"
Vanishingly small, is more like it.
"-as well as the possibility that something was about to collapse in on itself or blow up, now that the Memorians have departed-"
Still not very likely, but probably a more realistic concern.
"-but mostly, we seized on the excuse to not send anybody off on their own, so as to get away from the adults."
You frown.
Lance sighs. "Dad, Uncle Paul, and the Einzbern lady are being Roman history geeks. It's kind of embarrassing."
…
Huh.
"And to answer your prior question, 'Doctor,'" Miss Suzuka says then, obligingly staying in character despite the lack of a problematic audience, "there appears to be a door over there – or perhaps just a closet?"
It turns out not to be a closet, though it's also not the stairway you were looking for, at least not right away. Instead, it's a side room with more racks for towels and personal possessions, as well as two doors towards the back of the baths. The one on the right proves to contain another pool, much smaller than the ones in the central bath, and with visibly different construction in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Thicker insulation, which interferes with your Spell to See Through Stone. A sauna, maybe?
Well, whatever it was for, you leave it to check out the door on the left, which proves to lead to a smaller room with another water tank to one side, and a stair in the corner.
Calling up a simple Light Spell, you head down.
Do you have anything you'd like to say to your current batch of companions while you poke through the probably-not-a-sewer?
As you make your way down the stairs, you note that they're fairly spacious as these things go: large enough for two lanes of traffic; space enough that each "step" is more like a small landing; and a sufficiently shallow incline – or decline, since you're heading down – that a custodian having to maneuver a cart full of cleaning supplies or replacement parts up or down the stairs could take it in easy stages.
Several steps down, it occurs to you that the comfortable rate of descent also makes for a relatively slow one, so you decide to ask a few questions to pass the time.
The first thing that comes to mind is to inquire if your companions found anything neat while looking around.
"Depends on how you define 'neat,'" Lance Pritchard replies. "I mean, this whole place is pretty amazing, just for being as well-preserved as it is."
"Every with the battle damage and melted-down magical arrays?" you wonder.
"Even then," the older says, nodding. "Uncle Paul said he could write a book on the architecture alone, and how it evolved from the known Roman and post-Roman styles, and then do another volume on the artwork."
Yeah, there are a fair number of decorative statues and frescoes in this place, although a lot of the former were cracked or smashed during the outbreaks of violence at opposite ends of the millennial abandonment, while the former have lost some color, and in a few cases been actively defaced.
It does kind of figure that demon cultists would hate artwork depicting gods-
?
-hello.
"Mind the step," you say, taking a longer-than-usual stride over the edge of one stair that was cracked and crumbling for some reason. Looking at it, you would venture…
""Mace,"" Altria and Lance say in unison.
"I was just going to say that."
But yes, it does look like somebody took a relatively heavy and blunt instrument to that stone step a few times, and with considerable force. There are no burn marks, and no indication of corruption or residual magical energy, at least not that your passive senses can pick up – and when you peer at it with an active probe, all you get is a fading sense of purifying magic.
Looks like the Memorians included this area in their post-battle clean-up, and found some filth that needed special effort to remove.
"But aside from ancient architecture and artwork," you continue, "did anything catch your eye?"
Lance pauses for a moment, and then – even though you're not looking his way – you can almost feel him grin.
"Lance, no," Altria says at once.
"There was A- I mean, Wart's reaction-"
"Lance, stop!"
"-when he saw those shiny rocks laying in that work-"
"Shush! Shut up!"
And then the older boy does have to stop talking, though that's at least partly because he's snickering enough that it would be difficult to continue.
"Just because Kenneth isn't here, that does NOT mean you have to fill in for him!" Altria growls, as she continues to swat at her compatriot.
"This is like that time I tossed a gold coin down the hall in front of he-im, isn't it?"
You catch and correct yourself before you state Altria's actual sex aloud. It probably isn't necessary, since neither of the Einzbern reps are down here with you, and the distance and various walls between you and them – plus the floor/ceiling, now – would interfere with most listening spells Miss Holzknecht might have had the skill or time to prepare without being noticed, but it's just a good idea to keep referring to everybody who's in disguise using the names and pronouns appropriate to their disguises.
Less chance anybody will mess up that way. Plus, Lance already did the same, so you're just following his lead on this.
"Et tu, Sorcerer?" Altria demands, groaning.
"I haven't heard about this," Lance says eagerly, and almost in the same moment.
"No."
You glance at Ichirou and Miss Suzuka, who contrive to look politely interested.
"Well," you say, "it started-"
"Do not force me to resort to violence," Altria warns.
You pause and turn to look at her. "Not on the stairs," you reply firmly.
Wart blinks and looks around, visibly measuring distances and considering quantities of force. "…you could take it, and safely," comes the eventual answer with a sigh of reluctant agreement, "but that is likely the better call."
You nod, and resume your downwards march. "So, context. Due to an incident that I won't go into detail about, Wart's family were keeping a rather large amount of loot in storage…"
You recount going down into the storage area, coming face-to-face with the World's Smallest Bond Villain (and Their Cat) sitting in a chair you'd acquired-
"Wait, you stole someone's chair?" Suzuka wonders.
"Looted," Ichirou corrects his lady-friend.
"The difference being?" she retorts.
"Whether or not you won it in a fight, generally," you admit.
The miko considers that. "…was it a magic chair?"
"No."
…
"Then why…?"
Furniture fusion?
"Well, first of all," you reply, "the previous owner was directly involved with a plot to murder a thousand people, plenty of them innocents, so he absolutely had it coming."
Miss Suzuka nods slowly. "I can understand retribution in that case… but still, why take the chair?"
"It's a very nice chair, as Walt, here, can attest."
The Japanese couple turn to Altria, who coughs and looks away, even as she nods. "It is."
The exchange of witty banter, and then the subsequent high-speed chase through the halls of the (not openly named) Drake Estate.
"There I was," you state, as you near the bottom of the stairs, "hidden just out of sight around the corner from my pursuer, a Ring of Invisibility on my finger and a Doppelganger running down the hall as a distraction. Then… hang on a moment," you add, pausing in the doorway of this basement level and raising the Light in your left hand higher to illuminate more of the room.
There's a number of pipes hanging down from the ceiling, each of them running down into more tanks similar to the ones from the ground floor. These are rather larger than their upstairs counterparts, which makes sense, considering that they'd have to be capable of handling the contents of an entire pool whenever it was drained – the main bath would only be about a meter deep when filled, but its other dimensions are comparable to a modern swimming pool, albeit not a competition-length one, which makes for quite a lot of water.
Both the pipes and the lids of the tanks are visibly worn with age, and several are dented from external impacts besides, two of the pipes to the point where a whole section has just been smashed away. From the lack of dripping, neither of those connect to the drain for the pool you were running the water in a little while ago, though if you perk your ears up…?
…
Nope. Either that drain goes to one of the tanks towards the back of the room, or it's just too quiet for you to make out even in the general hushed stillness of the base.
Anyway, aside from the patina of age and evidence of physical violence, there's also scorch marks scattered about the room, in a pattern which suggests a moving target.
When you turn your Spell to Analyze Dweomers on the nearest of the receptacles, you find that it's enchanted with somewhat more complex and powerful purification spells, magic capable of breaking down quantities of substances that a standard Spell to Purify Water might not affect, or else only separate out from the main body of water. There's also an analytical spell meant to alert someone to the presence of solid objects in the tank that these purifying magics couldn't remove – jewelry and other small items that might have slipped down the drain.
Speaking of drains, the tanks all have pipes on them that lead elsewhere, but you can't tell exactly where to from the door.
"Right," you say aloud, "so there I was, hiding around the corner, when it occurred to me that a further distraction might be in order. So what I did was, I took out a gold coin-"
"YAAAH!"
*Whoomph*
And like that, you have a tiny disguised dragon hanging off your back.
"You agreed!" you call. "No roughhousing!"
"We are no longer on the stairs!" Wart shouts back.
Which, fair, but…
While you do need to take a couple of steps to shed momentum and recover your balance, you refuse to be silenced or distracted from your story by something as simple as this!
"I took out a gold coin-" you repeat.
"Quit it!"
"-flicked it down the hall-"
"I will strangle you!"
And she does try to get an arm around your neck, however playful the action or the note of warning that preceded it. However-
"-and I swear, this one must have a gold radar or something-"
"Why must you be so cursed BIG…?"
-yeah, even when you're in your "Wizard of Indiana" Jones form – which is not as big as your idealized adult self – and Altria is disguised as Walt – and actually physically larger than normal, due to the Transformative element of the magic of the Hat of Disguise – you still have a considerable size advantage. It's not quite enough for you to simply treat her as a limpet and continue on as you were, but a certain shift of your shoulders and raising your unoccupied right arm to shield your throat is enough to foil her threats.
Her added weight, not to mention the fact that she's moving around, does require some further caution on your part, so as to stay upright, but it's not too much worse than carrying Zelda around during one of your at-home wrestling matches.
"-because the moment the *ping* of the metal rang out, it was like the gold was the only thing in the world that mattered."
"Lies and slander!"
"For two or three seconds, at least," you concede. "After which the chase was back on."
"Which reminds me, one of these days, I want a race…"
"At least until I won the follow-up wrestling match."
"Invisibility is cheating!"
"I'm not invisible now."
"Using magic to drastically change your size is ALSO cheating."
"And attacking from behind isn't?"
"That is just taking advantage of tactical positioning! And I did warn you!"
"Are you just… going to hang off his back while you argue, now?" Lance wonders.
You and Altria look at the older boy.
"Only until he gives up," she replies.
"Or her arms get tired," you add.
"Silence, knave."
You pause, then smile and, without a word, reach up to tousle Walt's hair.
"Stoooop…!"
Bickering good-naturedly, you resume your investigation of this basement.
There's not a whole lot more to see, though, or at least not a whole lot that's new. There are more signs of battle, with bent piping, spots where the floor or the tanks have been cracked or chipped by hard impacts, and burn marks – and also some oddly smoothed over or bubbly-looking areas, which you think might be the result of a corrosive substance splashing on the stone.
What did they fight down here, you wonder?
The pipes that lead away from the tanks all come together in one large pipe – about a foot wide – that continues towards the back of the room, and then on into a maintenance tunnel. You follow that for a bit, but quickly find that there's another little maze of passageways down here, one with pipes going along the walls, ceiling, and floor, and, here and there, going across the corridors. Mostly, that's the bigger tubes laid out near or on the floor, which makes them easy enough to step over.
"That one might go to the kitchens," Lance notes, pointing to another large-ish pipe. "Or be coming from them, depending on which way you're going."
"And this one heads in the direction of the officers' quarters," you add.
"It does?"
"Yeah, we were fighting in that direction…"
Eventually, the main drain comes to a cistern, which is not exactly dry, but is definitely a long way from the sort of content it would have had when the Memorian Base was in operation. The signs of fighting are renewed, with gashes in the stone walls suggesting that something rather large was lurking in the pit – emphasis on the past tense. The Memorians must have poured spell-fire into the cistern to deal with the problem, because there are more scorch marks along its sides. The air is decidedly more humid in this chamber than it's been elsewhere in the base, and puddles have formed in a few places, where water dripping slowly from the ceiling has built up.
You get the impression that the legion casters vaporized a bunch of water, along with whatever was hiding out in the cistern, and this is just the liquid re-condensing.
"This looks like it was exciting," Lance says, not quite managing to hide his disappointment.
From the sound that comes from over your shoulder, Altria holds similar feelings about having missed all the excitement.
You can understand where the two of them are coming from.
"If it makes you feel any better, you can ask your folks if they'll let you come with me when I take a look at the other base," you offer. "I mean, there probably won't be any more fighting there than there has been here, but maybe some of the Gohma that ran for it will have come back…?"
"That would require them to have made it past Mom," Briar points out, "and then survived in the wild woods for a few months." She pauses. "Actually, no, I could see Gohma managing that, even with the locals. It's just the part about them surviving Mom that I have doubts about."
With Altria still hanging off your back, you have no problem feeling her excitement at the prospect of an off-world excursion. Lance looks similarly eager, whereas Ichirou is already bowing out.
"Not going to show off the scene of your battle?" Suzuka teases.
"I really didn't do that much, and if you want to go out, I know some nicer places…"
Is there anything else you want to do down in this not-actually-a-sewer system?
While poking at the mystical elements of the plumbing has been informative – even if it hasn't revealed anything hugely original – all the evidence of fighting that you've been finding has made it pretty clear that there's not much else to see down here, and even less to do.
Between that and the fact that you'd rather not leave the other guests hanging around waiting for you to show up for too long – aside from your worries about what the Einzbern pair might get up to, Hornfels is on the clock, and you just think you owe the Hakubas better after everything they've helped you with – you figure it's time to head back upstairs.
…but that said, maybe you could take a little detour.
"Uh-oh," Briar sighs.
"Hey, now."
"Shortcuts lead to long delays," Altria says. It sounds like she's quoting someone, and more than that, like someone you've heard or read, but you can't place it. That's going to bug you…
"It's not a shortcut," you reply aloud. "It's just taking advantage of the fact that we're already halfway to the kitchen, and there should be another stairway in the area."
"While I can see what you're thinking," Ichirou says aloud, "I have to say, if it was that easy to get around the base using these tunnels, wouldn't that make them a major weakness in the security?"
"You're not wrong," you admit, as you come back to the intersection you wanted to take. "But I think… yeah, take a look to the sides, there and there?"
Ichirou does so, and is joined by the rest of your group in looking at a recessed slot in the wall, just shy of the corner. Running from floor to ceiling, it's about an eighth of an inch thick and outlined by little raised sections of stone, all of which are matched by another such groove in the opposite wall, and another such pair five feet down the corridor – and more beyond that, and more similarly placed along the length of the maintenance passage you're actually standing in, making the whole lot look like a purely aesthetic design choice, something to break up the monotony of plain stone walls a bit.
But the slots that frame the T-junction seem just a bit deeper than the rest, and when you conjure a simple six-inch wooden stick with the Spell of Prestidigitation, you're able to slide it right into the gap, until your pinched fingers are touching the stone. Even then, there's no hint of resistance ahead of the object, implying that this vertical hole in the wall goes back a fair way. The other side proves similar.
"Huh," Ichirou says, after you've done your little experiment. "So, they had, what, sliding screens or panels of some sort that retracted into the walls?"
"Could be," you agree. "And while a plain old wooden panel isn't going to stop a determined intruder, an enchanted one would be another story."
And you can pick up a faint echo of magical energy from the cracks, which is what drew your attention to them in the first place. It's not an enchantment in and of itself, so the Spell to Analyze Dweomers can't get a clear reading off it, it's just the residual energies of something that WAS enchanted, and slid into those whole, something that bore a mix of Illusion, Conjuration, Transmutation, and Earth Elementalism.
At a guess, you'd say that the panels were hidden via the Illusion Magic – possibly the Spell of Nondetection or an equivalent, it has a bit of that feel to it – and that when deployed, they transformed from thin boards of wood or some other light, conveniently movable material into thick sections of stone, sealing the side-tunnel.
You wonder if you'll find intact versions of these in the Faerie Outpost?
Well, that's for another time. Right now, you head down the passage towards the kitchen.
With those wall-slots having confirmed for you that the Memorians had some magical security mechanisms hidden away down here, you proceed down the side-corridor a little more slowly than you did the main passage, giving yourself enough time to inspect some of the architectural features that you'd previously considered just aesthetic choices.
Were there more of those little concealed niches, and did they contain something more aggressive than a retractable section of wall?
Were some of those small bumps in the ceiling concealed nozzles for gas-traps, or perhaps the point of origin for the arcane equivalent of lasers?
Could there be a sort of hidden closet down here, meant to contain one or more of those security constructs, to be released in case an intruder actually did find their way down here? Or for that matter, could there have been some sort of maintenance-based equivalent to those automatons, deployed periodically to clean, perform routine inspections, and maybe make minor repairs?
So many possibilities.
It's almost a shame that the Memorians were so thorough about yanking or destroying everything, but then again, you suppose it's just as well that you aren't leading your friends and acquaintances on a typical Indiana Jones-style exploration of an ancient ruin.
Even if you were by yourself, there really isn't enough room in these tunnels for a rolling boulder…
You reach the other end of the passage without incident, finding another pair of emptied-out wall-slots, and beyond them, a fair-sized room that combines more of the base's plumbing with signs of having been used for storage – almost certainly for food, given the barrels and rotted bags of who knows what.
"Hello," Briar murmurs, going over to one of the barrels and rapping her knuckles against the wood.
The thump does not echo the way that it would if the container were empty.
Your partner looks up. "What do you think, thousand-year-old wine?"
"Looks like it might be," you agree. You give the barrel a look with your Spell to Analyze Dweomers, but there's no reaction, indicating that it isn't actively enchanted. With that in mind… "We probably don't want to try drinking it, though."
"Oh, definitely not," Lance agrees.
"Mother has said that some wines can keep for twenty years," Altria adds, "but that most are meant to be drunk in five years or less."
And this stuff is fifty to two hundred times older than that. So, yeah, definitely past the best before date.
Although…
"Where does that leave stuff like, oh, a bottle of forty-year-old Scotch?" you wonder. Because while your father drinks a lot less these days, he does still drink on occasion, and there's an unopened bottle of Scotch whiskey that Uncle Rory got him for his last birthday tucked away on one of the high shelves, where Zelda can't get at it even with a chair to stand on.
It's rather less inaccessible to you, of course, but you have promised your parents that you'd stay out of it. So has Briar.
"Spirits and wine age differently, apparently," Lance replies with a shrug, indicating a certain lack of information on, and perhaps interest for, the topic.
Fair enough.
Aside from the long-expired foodstuffs, there's a few doors spread about the room that look like they lead to more storage chambers. There's also another of those easily-climbed staircases awaiting you, going up.
Captain Zaraki's wisdom on the topic of looting items of unknown value comes back to you, and you are mentally measuring up the barrels for the casting of a Spell to Shrink Items when another thought occurs.
What character have you been borrowing the name and face of, again? And what does he espouse is the correct course of action for a historical relic that has no one left to inherit it?
Turning to Lance Pritchard again, you ask, "You know Dr. Megalos pretty well, right?"
He did address the archaeologist as "Uncle" earlier, and after a few startled blinks, the older boy nods. "Yes, why?"
"It's safe to assume that he's talked with you about his work, then?"
"Only every time he's over for dinner," Lance replies wryly. "You have a question about archaeology, I take it?"
"Yeah." You point at the barrels. "From an archaeological standpoint, would it matter if I removed those?"
"Oh, definitely," he says at once. "See, even leaving aside the ethics and morality of looting a ruin… even one that was just recently abandoned and had the owners giving you permission to go through it, and wow, it just hit me that Uncle could write a whole book about that, too. I wonder if he's realized that, yet…?" Lance considers it for a moment before shaking his head, visibly making a mental note to bring it up with his father's associate, and then continuing. "Like I was saying, if you take them as-is, they're just barrels of ancient wine with… hang on a second." He walks over to the nearest barrel, looks it over, and ends up crouching next to it. "Okay, so it does have some labels on it, like Roman barrels. Probably the original barrel-maker's mark, another from the merchant who sold it to the military, and then its inventory number. But who's going to be able to actually identify something that came from a country that isn't even in most of the magical history books, just from seeing the thing?"
Oh, this sounds familiar. "You're saying it would need a paper trail to convince people it was the real deal."
"Most people, yeah," Lance agrees with a nod. "I mean, you could find someone who'd buy it just because it's old and rare and you were charging a lot of money for it – there's always some greedy twit with more money than sense looking to buy historical artifacts, to hear Uncle's rants on the subject – but if you want to talk to universities and museums, you need to be able to prove where and how you got something, who's handled it and how, and that the authorities agree that it is what you claim it is and that you didn't steal it from anybody."
Ah. So from the academic perspective, it would be better if you left the barrels of spoiled wine where they are, so that Dr. Megalos and whichever of Mr. Pritchard's other employees end up helping him can do everything archaeologists are supposed to do, and then offer to shrink and transport the stuff.
And financially speaking, you could probably get more money from the aforementioned "greedy twits" if you had the paperwork proving the provenance of the…
"What's a word for 'wine' that starts with 'p'?" you wonder.
"Posca," Lance says.
"Plonk," Altria replies, in the same moment.
"…I'm sorry, what?"
Lance explains that posca was a Roman drink made by mixing water and wine vinegar – cheap, not particularly good-tasting, and a staple of the legions. He admits that calling it proper wine is a bit of a stretch, but given the context, it does kind of fit.
Altria says that plonk is a British term for cheap wine – something she's overheard, not from her mother, but from some of her father's guests.
…okay, then. Going back to the barrels…
…taking a small one should be fine, right?
Your acquisitive impulses struggle with your respect for the principles of academia for a time, during which you look into the storage chambers adjoining the cellar you're currently in. If there turned out to just be the two barrels you saw coming in, you might have ended up leaving them, but you find several more such containers lined up in one of the other rooms-
*Knock, knock*
-all of which sound like they're about as filled up as the one that Briar rapped her knuckles on.
There's plenty here to serve the needs of archaeology and vinting both; surely, they won't miss one small barrel, taken for purposes of arcane research?
"What would you even DO with old wine?" Lance wonders.
"That depends on the properties it turns out to have," you reply absently, while walking through the storage room that seems to be the ACTUAL wine cellar for the base, comparing sizes and knocking on wood as you go to make sure you don't grab an empty barrel. "Worse comes to worst, I can probably serve it to any Memorians I call up in the future, or some other ghosts."
You do have to wonder what you'll do with the amount of spoiled wine these barrels hold, but then you spot some smaller kegs at the back, which appear to be of a distinctly higher-quality make than the ones you've been looking at.
Better booze meant for the officers? It seems likely.
You shrink and pocket one of those.
Gained Memorian Wine
Having made your claim, and finding nothing else of mystical or monetary value down here besides, you make for the stairs.
"Better get down now, Wart," you advise.
"Are you surrendering?" comes the slightly startled response.
"Never," you reply, "but I'd rather not start Miss Holzknecht asking questions."
"Ah. Very well, then; another time."
And you are shortly down one limpet.
The stars prove to lead to a room behind the kitchen-
?
-where you can hear somebody else moving around before you see them.
"Hello?" you call up.
There is a pause, and then faint footsteps, too light to be Mr. Pritchard with his armor – not that you can see a reason why he'd be poking around in the kitchen, to begin with.
A moment later, Hartwin's red eyes are blinking at you in puzzlement from the other side of the door. The homunculus points down at you wordlessly, then over his shoulder in the general direction of the baths.
The question is plainly written on his face, yet he doesn't voice it. Miss Holzknecht DID say that her bodyguard had been designed to be uninterested in conversation, as opposed to outright incapable, but you're really starting to wonder what it would take to get a word out of him…
"I'll explain in a minute," you reply, as you climb the few remaining steps. "Are the others in the kitchen, or nearby?"
Hartwin nods and gestures for you to follow- no, he's stepping aside for you to lead the way, so he can follow you out.
This guy just does not trust you, does he?
Well, you can't fault him for taking his job seriously…
Sure enough, Sir Pritchard, Miss Holzknecht, Dr. Megalos, Mr. Clarkson, and Ichirou's parents have taken up seats in the dining hall, while Hornfels is back in the open spot that was set aside for him. The knight, the magus, and the archaeologist are engaged in a quiet but spirited discussion – you hear Lance sigh when he catches sight of them – while the Hakubas and Mr. Clarkson are waiting patiently for them to finish or for your group to return.
"And here we are," you state, as you exit the kitchen. "Sorry about the delay, I was checking out the plumbing, and then we found some maintenance tunnels." To Roderick, you add, "Did the Memorians mention cleaning those out to you?"
The knight shakes his head. "Not specifically, no, they just mentioned having to clear out some remaining demon-spawn and traitors. Big fight?"
"There may have been more of those slime-creatures hiding out in the pipes and the water-tanks underneath the baths," you admit. "And something particularly big and nasty seems to have been lairing in the base cistern, or at least one of them, but the legion handled it. Oh, and Dr. Megalos?"
"Yes?"
"We found some old wine barrels under the kitchen. Lance recommended leaving them for study and documentation?"
The archaeologist grins and turns to Lance, nodding. "Good lad."
"Just wine?" Miss Holzknecht interjects, sounding interested. "No kegs of beer, perhaps?"
"Not that I could tell, but thousand-year-old alcohol isn't really one of my fields of study," you answer slowly. "That said, given the Memorians didn't ask for beer to serve at the feast…"
"The men who actually went and got the wine offered to pick up some beer or ale, as well," Fred Clarkson notes. "The Memorians who were present at the time were polite but quite firm in their refusal."
"Not big fans, then."
"Fits with the Roman origins," Dr. Megalos adds.
Miss Holzknecht tsks in annoyance at a missed opportunity.
What's this about beer?
Is there a market for ancient beer recipes you aren't aware of?
"Well, calling it a 'market' might be overly generous," Miss Holzknecht admits. "But the Einzbern main family have been practicing brewing for almost as long as they have Magecraft, or so the story goes. Originally, it was purely for the physical and alchemical applications – anesthetic, disinfectant, solvent, fuel – but, people being people-"
Heads bob all around at that wry remark.
"-they eventually began producing beer and spirits for recreational purposes, and then for sale. Only to select clients, of course, but it is a well-established and profitable sideline for the clan as a whole nonetheless." She shrugs. "Since the main family's Magecraft isn't directly involved in the brewery's operations, branch members like myself are permitted to make use of the facilities for personal projects from time to time."
Ah. "Such as trying to recreate somebody else's brews," you conclude.
Crescentia nods.
Well, you can understand why she might have been disappointed by the lack of any Memorian beer to try and reverse-engineer. Though on that note…
"Would the wine be any use to you for that purpose?" you wonder.
She frowns. "Probably not. Most of the clan's territory is too cold for grapes, so for all the history of brewing, we don't have any real institutional experience with vinting."
And hence, she'd be starting from scratch, not to mention with nothing but a long-spoiled batch of material to work with.
"Speaking of intoxicants," you say then, "how does overindulging in alcohol compare to overdosing on mana restoratives?"
Miss Holzknecht blinks, and you can feel Hartwin staring at you in surprise.
"It was brought to my attention a while back that I have a higher-than-average tolerance for the potential side-effects of restoratives," you admit. "Not that I've ever used them so much as to actually EXPERIENCE said side-effects, but the possibility was there. I've never overindulged in alcohol, either, so I was wondering if there's any overlap between the two?"
"There can be," Miss Holzknecht answers, "but it's not guaranteed. I mean, I have heard stories of people who use alcohol to produce restorative draughts, or individuals and entities" – she doesn't quite glance at Navi or Hornfels, but you can see it takes her an effort – "that are capable of deriving supernatural energy from mundane alcohol, but unless your experience with mana restoratives falls into either category…?"
You shake your head.
"Then there's really no way to be sure if your body will process or react to restoratives in the same way that it would an overindulgence of alcohol, not until you've actually experienced both." She frowns. "Were you never taught this in your magical training?"
"My tutors in supernatural matters have tended towards a certain… playfulness, in their instructional methods," you reply with a mix of amusement and exasperation. Because for all that Briar and Lu-sensei said nothing on the subject, Batreaux and the priests didn't warn you about the possibility of getting drunk on Blue Potions, either. "A number of my contacts among the magic-using community are cut from the same cloth, and as for the remainder, the topic has never really come up."
When you mention "playfulness," Miss Holzknecht glances at the Great Fairy in the room, and then Sir Pritchard. You can just about see the name "Ambrose" written on her features.
She may be drawing some incorrect conclusions about your relationship with the old menace…
] You're fine with it.
That a reasonably well-informed outside observer would consider you to be an associate of Ambrose's is pretty much a given at this point. The old man has demonstrably invested himself in the Drake family, and to a lesser extent, in their immediate circle of acquaintances as well – and here you are, working mage hand-in-armored hand with Mr. Pritchard, who moreover trusts you enough to have brought his son and another kid in his charge along.
There's really no way a wizard would let another spellcaster get so close to someone he was personally involved with, without vetting the new magic-user first, and that goes double for someone of your demonstrated and implied ability.
Call it one-part sensible paranoia, part professional pride, and two parts curiosity on the wizard's side.
That the observer might decide you are a student of Ambrose's is certainly understandable, given what you just said about "playful" tutors, and you spare a moment to consider if there are any risks for you in letting that misunderstanding pass unchallenged.
…
Nothing comes to mind, or at least nothing that being a known associate of the wizard wouldn't already have incurred.
Conversely, if they decide that "Doctor Jones" is a student of Ambrose's – and perhaps of Navi's, as well, given Miss Holzknecht's glance in the Great Fairy's direction – the Einzberns will be looking for information, and potentially making plans, based on that incorrect assumption. It may not make a huge difference, given their awareness that you're using a fake identity, but one more layer of confusion and misdirection between you and a powerful magus lineage that you don't have any real reason to trust is certainly not a bad thing.
And so, you say nothing more on the matter, and instead clear your throat and change the subject.
"So, unless anyone else has any pressing business that needs to be taken care of here and now..."
You trail off as you look around, giving your companions a chance to speak up.
"Less 'business' and more a curiosity," Mrs. Hakuba says into the pause. "What exactly will happen to this place, now that the former occupants have moved on?"
"We told the local government that we were looking for remains of a post-Roman fortress," Dr. Megalos replies, "which was true enough. And, lo and behold, we found a post-Roman fortress, and one in remarkably good condition, at that. The thing we need to do now is identify, catalogue, and either remove or conceal any magical items or architectural features the Memorians left behind, before allowing more mundane experts into the site."
The archaeologist's expression and tone give away nothing of how he feels about deceiving his fellow students and seekers of history, but given Lance's earlier comments, you would guess that his honorary uncle probably isn't overly thrilled with the necessity of keeping up the masquerade.
"It does help that we haven't unearthed any of the actual physical entrances to this place yet," Mr. Pritchard notes. "As long as that access portal through the barracks keeps functioning, we can use it to get people in to do the necessary work and move any items of concern out of the base. A Bounded Field to deflect the attention of non-magical individuals and a few other common-sense security precautions should be enough to keep all of that quiet, don't you think, Miss Holzknecht?"
"It should," the Einzbern representative agrees. "On that note, the Einzbern family has used our contacts in the area to stir up a little academic competition, about who exactly will get to take part in this dig once it expands. That should buy another two or three weeks while the various professors, deans, directors, and donors argue with each other."
Dr. Megalos winces somewhat dramatically, but says aloud, "You didn't really need to do that, Miss. Even with the magical evidence removed, we're still sitting in one of the finds of the decade, if not the century; that argument would have happened regardless."
Crescentia nods. "I concede to your superior knowledge of the subject and the community. But this way, we have a few eyes and ears already on the inside, to keep us appraised of the situation and whether or not we need to further interfere."
Pavlos accepts that graciously enough.
With Mrs. Hakuba's interest addressed – and her seeming satisfied with the answer – and nobody else proving to have anything to say, it's agreed that it's time to leave.
As you leave the dining hall, you spare a moment to glance into the nearby storage areas, but when no magical auras present themselves, you move on.
When you reach the barracks, you find the portal still functional in spite of the breaking of the wards, but a quick inspection with your Spell to Analyze Dweomers shows that it won't remain so for much longer. Whether due to the breaking of the wards triggered by Captain Marcus or a more direct form of sabotage, the gateway is visibly losing power. It's still functional and safe, it's just that the enchantment binding the translocation effect to the stone is coming undone. Give it another day or so, and the magic will basically "fall off" the wall and disperse into the environment.
You report this to Sir Pritchard, who sighs. "Not entirely unexpected, given how thorough our late hosts were about wrecking most of their other artifacts, but annoying all the same. Going to have to hit Ambrose up for a way to walk through walls… unless you can manage something similar?" he adds, looking at you.
You could. The Spell of Stone Shaping would let you open a simple passage through the base's outer stone wall. You might need to re-cast the spell a couple of times, depending on how thick the wall actually is and how much of your command of Earth Magic you're willing to reveal to Miss Holzknecht.
Miss Holzknecht has already seen you summon an unusually strong and skillful Earth Elemental, and moreover, seen you keep that elemental around for a couple of hours. That's VERY powerful Summoning Magic, and demonstrating an only somewhat less advanced grasp of Transformation Magic might be revealing too much of your hand.
But.
While it is fundamentally a Summoning Spell, the Spell to Summon Monsters can also be classified under various elemental and/or aligned schools of magic, depending on what it's used to call forth, and there are variations of the spell that can only call up entities of the appropriate type, sacrificing the sheer versatility of the common form for greater power or greater duration, if not both. In a similar manner, the Spell to Shape Stone can be approached as both "pure" Transformation Magic and as magic of the School of Earth Elementalism.
So really, if you were to use the latter at full strength, you wouldn't be showing off anything unusual for an Earth Elementalist powerful enough to summon someone like Hornfels. And if this helps to mislead the Einzberns in their estimates of just what sort of magic you have up your sleeve, it's an impression worth spreading.
On that note, you spend a couple of minutes working with Dr. Megalos and Hornfels as you determine where in the wall would be the best place to put your improvised door. As you're doing that, Mr. Pritchard takes Lance, Wart, the Priests, Mr. Clarkson, and Navi and Miss Forest out through the portal, just to be on the safe side.
There is a brief staring contest between Miss Holzknecht and Hartwin before the former concedes with a sigh, gives her bodyguard a firm look of warning, and then goes through the enchanted doorway herself, leaving the homunculus to unabashedly observe you.
Once you've got a good spot picked out, the archaeologist excuses himself and hurries through the portal.
…
"Last chance to get out before I potentially break the exit," you warn Hartwin.
The homunculus nods in acknowledgement, but makes no move to depart.
"As long as you're sure," you reply with a shrug, before facing the wall.
Without further delay, you cast the spell, causing the ancient stones of the wall to rattle and shift, as the lingering magic of the now-broken wards on the base fights against you. Because really, if it had been THIS easy to break in or out of a Memorian fortress, the Fae would have done it long before the cultists ever had a chance to become a problem…
Still, for all the mystical impetus a thousand-plus years of operation have imparted, a broken ward is still just that, and not nearly as much trouble as a functional defense would be, especially not for a sorcerer of your particular power and special understanding of Earth Magic.
Slowly, the stones move aside, some of them pivoting on one corner with a suitable tooth-grinding sound of brick and mortar sliding over one another, while others bend like wet clay being worked by unseen hands.
In short order, you have opened a hole about seven feet high, three feet wide… and at least a foot and a half deep, closer to two feet in some places. Even though you weren't holding back, this is rather more stone than you were expecting to be able to move – and from the impression of renewed staring coming from behind you, it's entirely outside of Hartwin's expectations.
Maybe you should have held back a bit, so that your Earth Affinity and Din's blessing yielded a less exceptional result?
That would just be silly.
One more casting is sufficient to fully open the way, after which you step clear of the door, turn to the homunculus, and half-bow as you sweep one hand to the door.
"After you."
Hartwin continues to stare at you for a moment, before nodding slowly and walking through.
Given his demonstrated wariness of you, you decide to let Hartwin get all the way outside and clear of the base's wall before you enter your newly-made door, just so that the homunculus doesn't get jumpy at having you right behind him.
Actually, on that note, you turn to Hornfels. "After you?"
The elemental blinks, eyes your doorway for a moment, and then turns back to you. / It's a bit too small for me, and I would rather not pass through stone with the magic of wards lingering upon it. /
"Unpleasant feeling?"
/ Indeed, / the paladin agrees with a rumbling shudder. / All the more so, given how this place was guarded against the Fae and the natural elements that so readily work with them. /
Ah, yes, that WOULD make it worse for him, wouldn't it?
Well, fortunately, the portal is still there, its operation unaffected by your impromptu renovation of the wall. Hornfels hunkers down, shuffles sideways into the "opening," and is subsequently relocated through, across, and/or beyond the wall.
You've just taken a step into your doorway when a thought occurs that has you backing up and taking a look at the Memorian portal.
"Is there a problem, Dr. Jones?" Mr. Pritchard calls.
"Not a problem, no," you reply. "Just a thought that we should probably take that portal down, to make sure nobody is caught walking through it when the enchantments finally give out."
"…ugh," the knight replies. "I hadn't considered that."
"How bad would that be?" Mrs. Hakuba wonders.
"Have you ever seen Star Trek?" Mr. Pritchard asks her.
"A few times, here and there."
"Have you ever seen one of the episodes where they have a transporter accident?"
"…oh, dear."
That'll be a yes, then.
"Yeah, the good news is that some of the more bizarre stuff that the writers came up with, like spontaneous clones or being shunted into mirror universes, doesn't happen with magic like this – or so Ambrose has assured me a time or three. But materializing inside solid objects or leaving part of yourself behind is a very real possibility. Miss Holzknecht," Roderick says then, "how are you set up for disenchanting objects?"
"It's not my specialty," the lady admits. "I wouldn't normally care to try it on something this powerful, either, but between its age and the breakdown of the arrays having already been triggered… would you object to me calling my other escorts to assist? It'll make things go somewhat quicker."
Also, if you wanted to take a piece of the disenchanted portal with you as a reagent, you can.
She and Hartwin should be able to deal with the outer portal. You'll take care of the inner one.
If it's time she's concerned about, you've got several arcane magic-users here already, a few priests – ah ha ha – and three magical knights, besides. That seems like plenty of spell-power to go about taking down the portal, if nobody minds…?
"I am not sure that we'll be of much help in this," Ginta notes. "We didn't exactly come prepared for any rituals."
"That can be worked around," Miss Holzknecht says thoughtfully. "If I set up the circles correctly, you wouldn't really need to do anything, aside from provide additional reserves of energy. If that would be acceptable to everyone…? Ah, other than yourself, of course, ma'am, sir," she adds quickly, nodding respectfully to Navi and Hornfels.
"Oh?" Navi says.
"I couldn't presume to trouble you, and more to the point, I expect that proper compensation for your services would be well outside my personal means."
"You might be surprised," the Great Fairy says. "But that's a good habit for you to stay in, all the same."
"…I am pleased to hear you say so."
/ Also, if it's just providing energy, I don't mind helping in this instance, / Hornfels adds.
He is, after all, only here as the result of your greatly-extended Spell of Summoning. It costs him literally nothing to lend a rocky hand, or some magical energy.
"…well, then. I shall take you up on that."
While Miss Holzknecht and Hartwin go about setting up a simple ritual circle in the dirt in front of the gate, and then expanding the array to account for the support elements, Mr. Clarkson and Mrs. Hakuba return to the camp, both because they don't really have anything to offer to this endeavor, and also to let Ms. Griffith know what's going on. Dr. Megalos goes with them, but only to fetch a few things from the camp that will help with the set-up.
While they're doing that, you clear out a spot on the floor in front of the inner portal. You customarily perform rituals of this sort by laying down arrays of magical energy, but is that a capability you want to reveal here and now?
Also did you want to include any of the other guests in your circle, or just do it all yourself? This won't really impact the success of the endeavor, but when disenchanting a combined set of items like these portals, balancing the energies involved is helpful, and being able to do that all by yourself would be rather telling, when it comes to the sheer depth of your reserves.
No.
The less of your full capabilities you can give away, the better. And besides, as the two Einzberns have just demonstrated, it doesn't take an overly complicated or expensive spellcasting diagram to handle this procedure.
Granted, you can't exactly carve a ritual array into the stone floor on the inside of the base as easily as they're doing in the dirt outside, but drawing such diagrams using a bit of chalk or charcoal or what have you is another tried and true "field method," and the Spell of Prestidigitation will serve well enough in place of mundane writing material.
At least, it will for the sort of short, relatively harmless ritual you intend to perform. Using something like that as part of a summoning diagram for a Calling Spell, for example, strikes you as… unwise.
Ask for some "help."
In keeping with your preference for subterfuge, it only makes sense to get some (unneeded) assistance, to help obscure the depth of your personal magical reserves.
Since you're taking the portal(s) apart and Hornfels has stated his preference not to pass through the walls of the base, you'll let him stay outside. This is also more convenient when it comes to space; the elemental paladin takes up quite a bit of it, and there's just more room for him outside.
Miss Forest will, naturally, assist you, and it would probably be a bit more comfortable for everyone involved if the Priests work with you instead of an implicitly untrusted stranger. Thinking on that for a moment, you also make room for Walt to join your group, as there is a non-zero chance that the ritual might disrupt the various disguise magics in play, in which case it only makes sense to have a big opaque wall between the Einzberns and the people with faces to hide.
That leaves it at six people on your end, and six on Miss Holzknecht's side. And if you look a little closer, you've also got a spellcaster and their "familiar," a father-and-son pair plus a non-blood relation – once Dr. Megalos gets back, anyway – and one relatively unconnected individual in each group.
There is symmetry.
You spend a few minutes sorting out participant placement with Miss Holzknecht, who is fairly easy to sell on your preferred arrangement when you point out the balance it helps to establish. By the time you have the circles drawn, the archaeologist has returned with a few ritual-implements of his own, which take very little time to incorporate. Mostly, he seems to be placing steel pegs into the soil around his part of Crescentia's array, and running colored string around them, with tags hanging off at certain points. When you look at them, none of the bits are enchanted, but they are magically reactive – focuses and reagents, then.
"One of the things about modern magical archaeology," the man notes as he works, "is that when you're setting up for ritual-work, you have to be able to do so in a way that generates minimal interference with any magic already present in the site, but which also doesn't draw attention from any unaware workers or visitors."
Makes sense.
Once Dr. Megalos is prepared, you duck back inside the ruins with your group, everybody takes their places in the elaborate diagrams, and you begin the disenchantment process.
…
It takes about ten minutes, some of which involves the participants finding the required level of output to match the rest of their group without exhausting anybody, and then a bit more where you and Miss Holzknecht work to find the same balance between your respective parties. Once you have that, though, it goes quickly enough-
*Crack-clunk*
-although not entirely without incident, as part of the frame of the portal you're working on cracks off and falls to the floor.
You keep going, finishing up the breakdown and dispersal of the magical energies, and then formally ending the ritual and releasing your metaphysical hold on the contributed energies, so they can return to the sole control of their respective owners.
Only then – and only after a quick check of your group to make sure all the disguises are still intact, which they are – do you move to investigate the fallen piece of stone, as well as the greater portion of the portal that remains upright.
…
Hm. That's a lot of cracks on the lintel and beams of the "doorway," more than you recall seeing on your previous trips in and out this way. Was the enchantment holding the portal's physical frame together more than you realized, or was there a bit of a temporal backlash when you undid the space-warping effect? Or both, maybe?
Do so. For loot.
Well, regardless, you got an easy reagent out of it.
Gained Memorian Portal Fragment
You spend another minute or so checking on the state of the patch of wall that the portal was built into – or over, or around, depending on how you look at it – but there's no further evidence of damage resulting from your disenchantment ritual. Whether because the magic was anchored specifically to the frame or because the bulk of the wall is just more solidly built, it'll continue to stand.
"All is well, I hope?" Walt asks.
"As well as can be expected," you reply, pocketing your newfound bit of stone.
"So the rest of the wall ISN'T about to collapse?" Ichirou asks.
Everybody in the room looks at him with surprise, then glance nervously at the wall, before turning to you.
"No, we're good," you assure them.
Granted, the wards built into the wall were broken down, too, but that happened before you even got here. If the wall was about to collapse, there'd be signs of it, and there are none of the sort. Being entirely honest, the perimeter defenses wouldn't have placed the sort of stresses upon the stones that the space-time warping of the portal did on its anchoring frame, so the risk of a burst of rapid aging was nil – if that is indeed what happened, there. The stones are undoubtedly less-resilient now than they were with Memorian magic strengthening them, but given that mundane Roman monuments have survived into the modern era just fine, you really don't see a need to worry about the structural integrity of this base.
You know, as long as nobody starts throwing around high explosives, heavy industrial equipment, or the magical equivalents thereof within or near to its walls.
Despite your assurances, there is something of a rush among your companions to get back outside.
Shaking your head, you wait patiently for everyone else to exit before bringing up the rear.
It's just about time for the magic holding Hornfels here to give out, so you go ahead and dismiss him a little early, thanking him for his company and his assistance.
/ It was both a duty and a pleasure to see good souls go safely and gladly to their rest, / the paladin replies. / And the stones were not bad at all. /
And then he departs-
*Hiss*
-leaving only a faint scattering of dust and grit behind.
…
Wait, is that the remains of his "meal"?
…
"Is… is that the elemental's share of the feast?" Miss Holzknecht wonders.
"My thoughts exactly," you state absently.
"May I…?" the lady asks, gesturing to the pile herself.
No. Just… no.
While they do ingest and subsequently digest nourishment – following the most mineral-rich diet it's possible to have, really – Earth Elementals don't share the… unpleasantly squishy aspects of animal biology.
You know this.
You have, to some extent, studied this.
You have experienced this, directly, thanks to your Spell of the Elemental Body.
And you've certainly picked up some less-than-hygienic objects as reagents and research materials before this. Compared to, oh, various giant Fae snake parts or a vial of a friend's blood, something like crushed stone would not threaten to disturb your stomach in the slightest.
Even so, there is something distinctly off-putting about the prospect of digging into the… leavings… of someone that you know, even if it is for the sake of investigating a magical peculiarity.
At the very least, it seems like you should get Hornfels' permission first!
You make a mental note to bring this up with the paladin… at some point.
…as soon as you figure out how to explain yourself without coming across as a creep.
But even so, you would rather she not.
Of course, if YOU aren't going to take any of Hornfels' partially-digested dinner to study, you don't see why anybody else should, either. You're not hugely concerned about the Einzberns being able to use the pulverized bits of rock to affect the paladin – they already have his name, after all, which is plenty to summon or call him, so long as they can match the power and technical requirements – it just feels even more inappropriate for complete strangers to be investigating his… byproducts… without getting so much as a by-your-leave from the big guy.
You explain as much to Miss Holzknecht.
"That is… definitely one way of looking at it," she admits. "But aren't you curious?"
"I am," you admit. "But not so curious that I'm willing to risk annoying someone I'm on good terms with over it, much less a holy warrior that could very literally tear down a mountain, given a bit of time."
"…good point," comes the reply.
It probably helps that you're not getting out any vials or specimen containers, here. You do move a bit closer, but that's because you want to be able to see everything before you cast a quick Prestidigitation to clean it up.
With that out of the way, you head back to the camp.
Is there anything else you want to do while you're here?
No, take the Priests home and move along.
With your business in Germany concluded, at least for the time being, you're content to fetch Mrs. Hakuba from wherever she ended up waiting while the rest of you were taking apart the portals, and escort the family home.
On the way out of the dig site, Miss Holzknecht attempts to engage you and "the Priests" in conversation, inquiring as to your plans for the afternoon and evening. No doubt she's hoping to offer her and her extended family's assistance in finding accommodations, or upgrading existing ones, so as to give her, the homunculi here in the camp, or other Einzbern agents more opportunity to observe and converse with the lot of you.
Ginta seems to recognize the same thing, and politely deflects the offer before it can be made, stating that all of their travel arrangements have already been handled "by Doctor Jones," and that he expects you'll be departing shortly, now that the proceedings are over.
Miss Holzknecht replies that it seems a terrible shame to have travelled "all the way" to Germany, only to spend several hours effectively underground-
"No matter how fascinating the company," she concedes.
-and then simply leave without at least stopping to see some of the sights or avail yourselves of the local hospitality.
"Not to mention how tiring making two trips in the same day can be," Crescentia adds with a sigh.
"Speaking from experience, I see," Briar notes.
"Regrettably so," the lady magus admits. "When I'd originally considered the downsides of becoming a troubleshooter for the family, I hadn't thought that the travel would be a major concern. It's not like I need to go clear to England every time there's a problem, not like when I was attending the Clock Tower, but I failed to consider that whatever distance I might save on during individual outings, I would more than make up for with the number of trips I'd be required to make."
"No sooner do you get done dealing with one problem," Ginta says with a nod, "than the next one crops up on the other side of the neighborhood, or clear across town."
"That," Miss Holzknecht says, pointing at the senior priest. "Exactly that, only in this case, the 'neighborhood' is a good third of Germany, plus not-infrequent trips to Luxembourg, Belgium, northeastern France, Switzerland, and Austria."
Clear evidence, if you needed it, that the lady doesn't have access to the Spell of Teleportation. Then again, given the difference in your respective reserves, knowing that spell might not be as big a help for combatting travel fatigue as one might think. Sure, it would save time and spare her from having to travel by plane, train, or automobile – provided she had enough information on her intended destination, anyway – but the magical fatigue might leave her feeling almost as bad.
And that's assuming there weren't any mishaps along the way, which you can't rule out. Even just winding up in the wrong location could be potentially aggravating, not to mention having to re-cast the spell to get where she really wanted to go. Actual hazardous results, meanwhile… well.
Her gambit to keep you in Germany having failed, Miss Holzknecht goes for a back-up plan – which she even calls such, to your bemusement – asking if there is a number or address through which you can be reached.
Did you want to accept Miss Crescentia Holzknecht's contact information?
It occurs to you that you have a perfectly valid reason to refuse Miss Holzknecht's request, and one that shouldn't even cause her any genuine annoyance.
And so, with a reasonable degree of honesty – though not complete honesty – you tell her that you will have to get back to her about your contact information, because you'll be setting up new quarters and workshop in the very near future.
"Oh! Of course, of course. I understand."
"You have some experience in the matter?" you inquire.
She smiles faintly and nods. "Another consequence of my work. I've never had to build my own workshop from scratch, admittedly, but I have been responsible for overseeing the security, maintenance, renovation, and – in a couple of cases – demolition of some of the facilities the family maintains in different locales."
So she has a decent idea of the sort of planning and effort that goes into that sort of thing.
"I'll make a note and get back to you once my new address is settled and I have time for correspondence," you go on. "In the meantime, if something comes up that requires my attention or participation, I can be reached through the Pritchards, with some delay. Unless you have any objections to that, Sir Roderick?" you add, glancing at the knight.
"None on my end," the big man replies. "At least, not so long as the mail in question doesn't involve anything that would get Ambrose's attention."
Miss Holzknecht does not shudder nervously or sigh in exasperation as she replies, "I believe that can be arranged," but you definitely get the sense that she would be just as happy not to draw the wizard's notice.
Yes.
If not being able to get your contact information disappointed Miss Holzknecht at all, being able to hand over a business card with her own details probably makes up for it.
As you ask the lady for clarification on a few points, you also scan the card closely, your Spell of Mind Blank hiding the effort involved as you check for tracking spells or distinctive magical signatures. You find nothing of either, but even so, you make a mental note to either keep this card on your person indefinitely, or just destroy it after you copy the information to another medium.
It's definitely not the sort of thing you want to leave laying around, on the off-chance that Miss Holzknecht or some other member of her family has a means of magically tracking the card.
It's only paranoia when the other side doesn't have access to mid-tier or greater Divination Magic…
Gained Miss Holzknecht's Contact Information
Demolition, though?
Ambrose and Balthazar have mentioned that magi place a high priority on their workshops. That would be understandable enough for any arcanist, as the workshop is where a lot of the critical research and development of one's magic gets done and recorded, but the aristocratic culture that has grown up around the modern world's premiere organization of Magecraft-users means that magi have a lot of little rules that other traditions wouldn't bother with, the violation of which can range from minor annoyances, easily brushed aside, to the sort of major transgressions that lead to multi-generational family feuds.
Asking too much about another family's workshop(s) might be treading on some of those customs, but speaking as someone with access to spells fully capable of "aggressive renovation" of your average suburban home – and some larger structures, besides – to say nothing of the memories of some of Ganondorf's feats of mass destruction, you must confess to a certain curiosity when the topic comes up.
So you ask, "Dare I ask what led to two entire workshops needing to be condemned?"
"Oh, only the usual foolishness," Miss Holzknecht scoffs. "The first time was due to an older member of a different branch family who'd gotten too focused on his latest line of research. Much as I can understand and empathize with the desire to pursue a promising theory, taking it to the point of hypnotizing yourself to ignore the need for food and sleep, particularly when you're of an advanced age and less than the picture of health to start with, is just asking for something to go wrong. Then there's how first ignoring your attendants when they're just trying to do their jobs and make sure you're alright, and then giving them strict orders that compel them to leave you alone until further notice, is positively daft, not to mention cruel."
You nod slowly, guessing where she's coming from with that last part. Homunculi are created to be aides to their makers, meaning that helping their masters is something even more central to their existence than it would be for another, less artificial sort of familiar. And having said master deny them the opportunity to perform the role for which they were designed and built? Yes, that would be cruel, wouldn't it?
"For better or worse," the lady continues, "once the old fool had blown out one of the walls-"
Ouch.
"-and a piece of the ceiling and floor, the homunculi had the excuse they needed to go in and get him out. They even managed to keep him alive in the process and get his research notes out with minimal smoke-stains or charring, which made it considerably easier to determine just what he'd been up to, where and how it had likely gone wrong, and what our follow-up needed to be. But dealing with the police, the mayor's office, and the damned press did not make for an enjoyable couple of weeks."
"…workshop was somewhere a little too public, huh?" you venture.
"Unfortunately. Credit to the builders, it was originally quite secluded, but that was three centuries ago; the local community had expanded considerably in the interim, and apparently none of the caretakers had ever thought that the surrounding residential neighborhood might pose an issue if there was an accident in the future, simply because it had never been a problem before."
One reason among many why you're putting your new workshop on a demiplane.
"And the other place?" you inquire.
"A caretaker's son thought it would be a fine idea to hold a Halloween party at the 'spooky house in the woods' they were responsible for maintaining," comes the answer. Miss Holzknecht shakes her head. "I will give the boy this much: he'd been raised with the expectation of one day taking over the job from his father; he paid attention to his lessons; and he planned his party out quite thoroughly. He had the homunculi temporarily disable the lethal security measures outside of the workshop proper, ensured that all the valuable or actively hazardous materials were in the storage vaults – and those locked down and concealed – and even paid entirely out of his own funds for decorations, food, and other supplies for the thirty-odd people he invited."
"And the ones that he didn't invite?" Sir Roderick asks, with an air of wry, experienced wisdom.
"That's where it got away from him," Crescentia agrees. "Something like a third of his school turned up, and while the house was built with some allowance for guests and parties, it was never intended to handle that many visitors, and certainly not when all of them were rowdy teenagers. The stress on the flooring, the odd broken window or knocked over piece of furniture, the noise, the handful of unauthorized spellcasters mixed in with the crowd – it all combined to trip one of the Bounded Fields meant to deter violent invaders, the psychological components of which effectively started a riot."
"Any fatalities?" the knight inquires grimly.
"None, which is doubly amazing given how some of the magically-capable guests started shooting at whatever the ward was making them see. There were injuries aplenty, mostly in the nature of bruising, abrasions, and cuts, as well as a great deal of lingering fear and confusion, but I believe the worst off was a young man with a concussion and a dislocated shoulder."
…probably not as bad as being blown up, but still, ouch.
"The mess left by the party itself would have been repairable," Miss Holzknecht admits, "but those young spellcasters I mentioned did quite a bit more damage, of various forms that would have been difficult to explain to the authorities. The young host knew that, and when he found out that the initial medical reports and eyewitness accounts had led the police to suspect someone had brought hallucinogens to the party, and that they were preparing to secure and search the premises, he deliberately started a fire to try and cover up the supernatural damage."
…
"Did it work?" Briar wonders.
"It did," the troubleshooter replies. "Which was the most important thing at that point, and so kept the boy out of the worst trouble he could have gotten himself into."
"But not all of it."
"Oh, not hardly. For starters, the police caught him leaving the burning building…"
Wow. That guy had no luck on that occasion, did he? Or maybe he used it all up making sure nobody died?
Either way, it sounds like a hell of a "trick" to go with the evening's "treat."
In the aftermath of the Party Incident, the young would-be caretaker was, without question, officially out of a future job, not to mention saddled with the bill for the demolition. There was some talk of making him repay the family for the cost of the reconstruction as well, but this was where the boy's original precautions and hasty improvisation came through for him. The fire did successfully remove the evidence of Magecraft before it could be discovered by the police, and while there was some damage to the exterior of the workshop, its solid, magically reinforced and warded construction ensured that the contents remained unharmed by the blaze.
As Miss Holzknecht stated, these were two of the most important things for a magus, and pulling them off under the circumstances – even if they'd largely been of his own making – earned the guy some leniency from his elders.
"It did help that he could attribute some of the fault to his spellcasting guests," the woman adds. "Their use of Mysteries in plain sight of mundane witnesses might be excusable, in light of the effect of the security wards and the general chaos, but their damaging of Einzbern property and subsequent failure to clean up after themselves in either regard was another story. That gave us cause to seek compensation, which eased the young man's personal penalties. He still has a couple of years to go before he's cleared his debt, barring any further errors of judgment, but that's much better than having to spend another decade working at it."
Harsh, but after burning down a building, probably not unfair.
"And it's not as if the incident was entirely downsides for the boy," Miss Holzknecht says next, with some humor. "For all the financial, legal, and familial hardship that followed, he did throw the biggest and most genuinely scary Halloween party any of his peers could remember, and then ended it by being arrested on suspicion of arson. Quite aside from making him a school celebrity, I know he got at least three different requests to help with other events out of that, and there were a couple of young ladies who seemed rather impressed with him, to say nothing of all the other students who just wanted to know more about the homunculi."
There are some chuckles or amused huffs from the rest of your group at that.
Considering how good-looking all the Einzbern homunculi of either gender you've seen have been, you suppose a bunch of teenagers would be interested in getting to know them.
Miss Holzknecht doesn't have much more to say on that topic, which is just as well, since you've made it back to the command tent by then, where Mrs. Hakuba is waiting for the rest of you.
Disguised farewells are made, and while you're a little concerned that Crescentia might make an attempt to follow you to see what sort of magic you use to depart the camp, she rather deliberately refrains.
This has you checking your surroundings for scrying sensors, and then doing so again when you get to the marked-off teleportation area, but there's nothing that you can pick up, nor any homunculi in sight – and they are, as Miss Irina self-deprecatingly noted a while back, not all that great at stealth.
Still…
Maybe you're being paranoid again, but you figure that it's better to be safe than to lead a potential tracker in the general direction of your fellow travelers' home nation – let alone the city where they actually reside – which leads to your decision to take a detour through Wizard Country.
It seems like a good way to shake off any magic eyes that might try to follow you - or more correctly, to follow any of your passengers, given you're under a Spell of Mind Blank and they aren't – and so you let everyone know of your intended stop-over in Wales.
"What time will it be there?" Ginta wonders.
"Wales is only about an hour behind Germany," you reply.
"Ah. Good, then."
Yeah, showing up unannounced is one thing, particularly when you and Briar have something of a standing invitation to stop by the Drake residence when you're in the neighborhood, so to speak. Showing up unannounced at, oh, five in the morning, is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Given that you're heading to Wales and have room for one more passenger thanks to your exceptional Summoning Magic, you consider taking Altria along. After a moment, though, you decide that it's probably better from an information security standpoint for her to stay here, until whatever pre-arranged travel method her family would have worked out in advance can arrive.
As you gather your mana, a somewhat amusing image comes to mind of your outbound party flying past an incoming Ambrose on the Astral Plane, similar to your not-quite head-on collision with the Youkai Academy bus. But that's probably not going to happen.
…
It's not, right?
Your spell takes effect-
?
-and for better or worse, you don't end up playing inter-planar chicken with the wizard, instead simply appearing outside the estate's gate, a little way down the drive to the main road.
"Good morning," one of the guards on watch calls. "Do you folks have an appointment?"
It says something that he's asking this of a bunch of people who just popped out of thin air, while maintaining that not-quite-bored, just-business-as-usual tone of a professional doing a job. Whether it speaks of the quality of the employees or the hijinks Ambrose has subjected them to over time is another question.
"We don't, no," you call back. Not recognizing the man from past visits, you add, "If you could send a message up to the house, and let them know that some of Doctor Jones' deeds, like the incident with the fox, have become a bit more widely known. But aside from that, Germany was lovely, with no sign of Nazis that'd be great."
"I think we can do that," the guard says, after exchanging a look with his partner.
"One question, though," that woman says next. "Why do you look and sound like Harrison Ford?"
"Because I used his likeness for a disguise the last time that I met with most of the people we just came from meeting," you reply honestly enough.
"…so there was precedent," the lady says, nodding. "Fair enough."
"But then why'd you use him the previous time?" her partner wonders, pausing at the door to the guardhouse.
"I mean, it was an adventure in an archaeological dig, so…"
That gets nods from both of them.
While you're waiting for the message to go through, you do some quick scans of the Hakubas and the area around them. No scrying sensors, no tags, nothing at all that seems out of place, and when you ask to be sure, none of them were offered anything by Miss Holzknecht, Hartwin, or – in Mrs. Hakuba's case – the other homunculi in the camp.
That reminds you to take out the card you got, along with one of your notebooks, and quickly copy the information over before putting the book away and burning the card to ash with a cantrip of flame.
You'll take a third opinion from Ambrose, if he offers it, but in your opinion – and with Briar concurring – you seem to be in the clear.
The more you say, the more the guards look at you strangely.
After a few minutes, during which you do your checks of your passengers, the guard re-emerges from the building, accompanied by another co-worker. This one, you note, is carrying the scanning device you confused on your initial visit.
"Someone will be along in a moment," the first guard reports. "If you could step forward, one at a time…?"
The Hakubas obligingly go through the checkpoint, with Ginta taking point. The first time the scanner is swept over him, it beeps in a way that has the operator frowning and checking a read-out, adjusting a control, and then repeating the sweep, which this time gets a happier-sounding noise from the wand. After that, the man nods and waves Ginta along, before moving on to Mrs. Hakuba.
When the first beep is repeated, the wand-waver looks to you – with your arcane robes and admittedly false face – as the most obviously-magical member of the group, and asks, "Did you put everyone under Magic Aura, then?"
"My associate and I are under Mind Blank, actually," you respond, gesturing to Briar. "But our companions are all under Magic Aura, yes, as well as their disguises. There were some Einzberns in the area, if that name means anything to you."
"It doesn't," the operator admits, glancing at his fellows.
The other man is frowning and shaking his head slowly, but the female guard says, "I think I recall it. German Magi, right?"
You nod.
"Explains that, then," the wand-user admits.
Everybody else has gone through the security check, and the guard is staring in bafflement at the results he is – or isn't – getting from you when you hear-
?
-wait, those are hoofbeats.
"Is that a horse?" Miss Suzuka wonders, looking around.
"Sounds like it," you admit, wondering what's going on.
The place isn't about to get invaded again, is it?
And then Lucia Drake appears, mounted atop a reasonably fast-moving horse. The lady of the family is dressed in her own take on an equestrian uniform, with gold-trimmed red top, fancy hat, and boots, sheer white leggings, and a skirt and cape trailing behind.
"Good morning, Dr. Jones!" she calls cheerfully, because of COURSE she does. If it wasn't her doing saying something like that, it would have been the wizard.
Look around warily for armed natives – wait, that's the guards, isn't it?
You quickly look over your shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Ichiro wonders.
"Checking for armed natives," you reply.
Somebody snickers.
"Do the guards not count?" Suzuka asks.
"I do, Miss," the first guard replies with a straight face, "but I fear both of my companions have the misfortune to be English."
That gets him a couple of unamused glances.
Good to know. You'd been about to make that joke; this saves you from having the comedic rug pulled out from under you.
Lucia, meanwhile, has slowed her mount and ridden up to the gate at a walk, looking your group over. "So," she says, coming to a halt with a final *clip-clop* from her mount, "while I do not doubt your ability to disguise a young child as a grown adult of either sex-"
Wise of her.
"-were I to hazard a guess, I would say that you did not, in fact, bring a certain wayward child with you."
"Considering I'm trying to make sure that we've dodged any pursuit by the Einzberns that turned up in the camp," you reply, "it seemed best to leave well enough alone and not disturb whatever arrangements had been made."
Lucia nods. "Thank you for that. Could I trouble you for an account of the day's proceedings? Roddy's people have been keeping us in the loop as best they can, but…"
Yeah, most of them simply weren't present for the main event, and you doubt that Mr. Clarkson would have had time to report everything he saw and heard to Ms. Griffith. Even if he had, it would be missing a few details, like your little excursion through the maintenance tunnels, with Altria and the others tagging along.
You don't see a problem with easing whatever curiosity or concerns Lucia has about today's big event, and quickly summarize Miss Holzknecht's presence and what impact it had on your farewell for the Memorians. It only takes a couple of minutes, and Lucia keeps her following questions brief, so as not to delay you overlong.
She notes that she can always interrogate "the questing knights" in more detail when they return.
While you don't delay too long, what time does pass is enough to make it clear that Ambrose is not going to make an appearance at the gate for whatever reason. Given that, you take Briar's second opinion of your scans – and some helpful sweeps by the guard with the sensor – as sufficient supporting evidence that you really aren't being tracked, and make ready to teleport to Japan.
Once again, you pass through the Tokyo Tower in a hurry and then use a less-powerful, shorter-ranged, and more easily concealed Spell of Teleportation to hop from there to the Hakuba Shrine.
In passing, you note that your Mana Concealment is almost good enough to suppress the energies of a fifth-circle spell with complete reliability. You have to wonder what it'll take to push the skill forward and remove the "almost" from the equation…
Regardless, with the Hakubas returned safely home, you discontinue your spellwork on their persons, letting their regular appearances show once more.
Unless there's anything else you wish to discuss with them at this time you'll be heading home. It's about three in the morning, California time, so you'll likely have to dodge a few demons getting back to the house, unless you'd like to use a short-range Teleport to just go from your landing site to the house, just this once?
Your "Memorian Legion Sorcerer, as played by Harrison Ford" disguise is good enough.
There is enough of a difference between Indiana Jones and another character played by Harrison Ford that you feel comfortable in keeping your current appearance up as you pass through the Tokyo Tower. But you do make a mental note that, if you want to keep your little private joke going, you probably shouldn't use Mr. Ford's likeness again.
…well, maybe one more time. "A character other than Indiana Jones that Harrison Ford actually played" is still reasonably different from your "theoretical appearance of a character played by said actor," and it would make a triad, besides, which has a certain appeal to you.
But definitely not any more than that.
No.
The Hakubas thank you again for the day out, the opportunity to witness the Memorians' passing, and for keeping their identities reasonably secure from the Einzberns.
Not that they actually know very much about the German magi, other than what they picked up today, but "ancient and powerful magus lineage" says plenty all by itself, and it's just as well that the Hakubas don't need to trouble the Shuzens or their allies with a potential information war.
At least not YET. The priests aren't directly involved in your plans for the next Holy Grail War, but it has been shown that they're some of the Shuzens' go-to experts on spiritual matters, which could see them getting pulled into that whole business eventually. If that does prove to be the case, some effort may end up being expended to cover for them – and not only against the Einzberns, but the magus families residing in Fuyuki, as well, as they're a lot closer to home and arguably a bigger potential danger because of it – but better to be able to deal with all of that as part of the collective effort to deal with the Grail War, when you've had more time to prepare for it, than to have to rush to put security measures into place today.
You'd already decided not to skip Leg Day. Leg Night. Whatever.
Before you return home, Briar resumes her normal size and her preferred perch on your shoulder, and you get out your Ring of Invisibility. Only then, while under a short-lived Private Sanctum set up in an out-of-the-way corner of the Hakuba Shrine, do you teleport back to California-
?
-blipping into existence behind the old abandoned convenience store soundlessly and invisibly. You look around slowly, listening intently for any hint of demonic activity, or even for a large animal out walking after midnight, for that matter, but nothing presents itself.
Once you're sure you're alone, you do a few stretches – which is a little awkward in your Memorian Warmage's Robe, but not as much as one might expect, just looking at the outfit – jog out of the parking lot and a short distance along the road to warm up, and then fire up your Body Enhancement technique and start running.
"It's a nice night," you note to Briar at one point.
"Yeah," she replies, before adding, "Corpse-demon at eleven o'clock."
"I cast Scorching Ray!"
The undead parasite does a double-take. "What the-"
*Scree-fwoosh!*
"-HOT, HOT, HO-AAAARRRRGHHHH!"
You pause to check the ash-pile, and discover an intact wallet-
Gained $58
-plus a couple pieces of oddly-shaped metal that you can't identify. They don't look melted – your Scorching Rays aren't THAT hot, and corpse-demons burn up too quickly for this one's death-throes to be responsible – but you aren't sure where they'd have come from.
"…any ideas, Briar?" you venture after a moment.
"I… think those might be dental fillings?"
…
…
About ten minutes and three more vampires after that-
"WHAT IS IT?! WHERE IS IT?!"
"IT'S THE INDEPENDENCE DAY KILLER, RUN FOR YOUR UNLI-AAAARRRRGHHHH!"
"THIS IS COMPLETELY UNFA-AAAARRRRGHHHH!"
Gained $77
-you return home, let yourself in, lock the door, and go back to bed for a while.
Keep them. You have no idea what you'll use them for, but…
It's really not THAT weird to collect a dead vampire's dental fillings, right? You've handled teeth from other monstrous entities in the past – Alboa's venomous fangs come to mind – and this is basically the same thing, isn't it?
"Are you trying to convince me of that, or yourself?" Briar wonders.
Whichever works.
Gained Vampire Fillings
After pocketing the bits of metal, you consider the dust that is all that's left of the vampire. While you could claim it as the "natural" remains of the demon-ridden corpse, the fillings already kind of occupy that space. Yes, they were artificial in origin, but they were part of the original human's body for some time, and then part of the corpse-demon for a time after that, helping the teeth to perform their natural function. It blurs the lines between natural and artificial for the things, and since finding a use for them is going to be tricky enough, you'd rather not risk degrading their worth by taking another reagent from this kill.
You do want to avoid leaving evidence of your little incendiary extermination, though, and so you call up a quick Gust of Wind to thoroughly scatter the ashes. Not only will this make them the next best thing to impossible to see, but their already minor energy will be just as dispersed as their physical mass, making each separated mote of dust far harder to locate or utilize via mystical means, and also allowing the unnatural radiation of the Hellmouth to more quickly and thoroughly contaminate them.
Satisfied, you move on.
…at least until you kill the next three vampires. Those ashes, you have no real problem with sweeping into some of those little Glass Bottles that used to hold Balthazar's potions.
Used Glass Bottles (x3)
Gained Corpse-Demon Dust (x3)
You thoroughly cleaned the Bottles after emptying them of their previous contents, so there won't be any interesting reactions to observe as the residues of demonically-tainted undeath mingle with restorative concoctions.
Kind of a shame, really, but you can always ask some of your sorcerous seniors if they've ever had the opportunity to investigate that sort of thing.
One more Gust of Wind to scatter what's left of those ash-piles, and you return home for what is either a very late or very early nap.
You get up for a light breakfast with the rest of the family a few hours later, and after that, check with Briar to see what, exactly, Miss Holzknecht took out of the collection of reagents, or from elsewhere in the base.
"Actually, aside from some notes she was writing down, the only thing she actually took was that one crystal," Briar replies. "She mentioned it would have been rude of her to have presumed she could take any more than that."
Wait, but then what about the other stuff you noticed was missing?
"Oh, that was everybody else."
…
Wait, EVERYBODY took something?
"I mean, Altria in a room with shiny rocks…"
…
Okay, yes, you can see that – and it's cute – but everybody ELSE, too?
"Well, one guest took a shiny thing, and then a second one did, and since none of it was the sort of stuff you'd be fussed about and I said as much, the rest of them gave into temptation."
The archaeologist, too?
"He admitted that the reagents were going to have to be cleared out, because you just don't find little baskets of gems in mundane Roman legion bases," the fairy replies. Then she giggles. "Mrs. Hakuba made a joke at Ichirou and Suzuka's expense about getting one of the stones mounted on a ring, but there really wasn't anything there with that sort of quality."
Was she joking, or was she serious?
"…six of one, half-dozen of the other," Briar admits.
Ah. Well, your condolences to the young couple, both for having to put up with (prospective) parental pressure and for not finding anything.
You notice that, when talking about what other people took from the reagent storage area, Briar left something out.
"So what did you take?" you ask.
"What makes you think I took anything?"
"Besides the fact that I know you?"
"Yes, besides that."
"Well, you said that everybody else took something after Miss Holzknecht and Altria started it and you confirmed I wouldn't have any objections, so wouldn't it have looked strange and invited questions if you hadn't joined in?"
"It probably would have," your partner agrees. "Which is why I got this!"
And then she pulls out a cloudy, pale green stone about the size of her currently-tiny head.
…
"…so, Arcane Pocket?" you guess.
"Nah," she replies. "Old fairy trick. We have to be able to carry around Rupees and other rewards for helpful people who don't need healing somehow, right?"
…fair enough.
Anyway, the stone is, as she said, nothing to get excited about. While kind of pretty to look at, it's a literal stone, opaque rather than translucent, and its particular hue of green is rather faint – overall, it's not the sort of thing that would be valuable in physical terms. Mystically speaking, it's got a faint aura of… huh. Nature Magic? After a thousand years in the Memorian Base? The base workshop's preservative wards held out really well, at least for whichever shelf-compartment this one was tucked into.
That hint of growing things lingering about the stone explains why Briar would have picked it over the more traditionally appealing sparkly stones that were in the collection.
"So, what are you going to do with that?" you ask.
"No idea!" Briar replies cheerfully. "I suppose I could put it over my fireplace…"
"…there's a fireplace…?"
"It doesn't burn anything, but it has a minor spell to generate light and heat."
Either Kokoa or whoever her folks found to do the work was being thorough with the design of that thing, huh?
Do you have any suggestions for what Briar should do with her claim?
"Da-da-da-daaaa!"
Briar raises her prize a little higher while you provide the traditional accompaniment.
"…Briar."
"Alex."
"I'm having a thought."
"I'm concerned."
"It's about your rock-"
"I am still concerned."
"-and Snappy."
"…eh?" That appears to have caught her by surprise. "What about him?"
"Well, doesn't he require mana to stay healthy?"
You glance over at the pot by your bedroom window, where the Mini Baba is currently deeply asleep, or whatever its equivalent is.
"He could certainly use CLEANER mana than what's locally available," Briar agrees slowly. "What are you suggesting? Planting the rock in the dirt next to him?"
"I was thinking more about making a new pot for him, and inserting the rock into the pot itself, to anchor a spell for encouraging healthier growth."
…
"Tempting," the fairy says, after considering her predatory pet plant again for a moment. "But wasn't your mother worried about Snappy biting people?"
"I did promise her that I'd find a way to make sure he doesn't."
"Yeah, but giving him a healthier supply of mana means he's going to grow bigger, and faster," your partner points out. "Maybe by a lot. And she might not be comfortable with that, even if he was the best leafy boy ever. Plus, don't you still owe me a comfy chair."
"It's on the list," you assure her.
Granted, so is everything AND the kitchen sink – and that's not just you speaking proverbially, some of your plans for your demiplanar workshop have included full residential accommodations. You may not end up going with those, or at least not just YET, but it's worth mentioning.
Anyway, you were only thinking of making Snappy's Pot a very minor magical item, perhaps employing the first-circle Lesser Spell of Plant Growth as its base. That'd be something you could finish working on in a day, if you set aside the time, or a week at the outside if you had to spread things out, and since Briar is a magical being, you could take some very reasonable cost-cutting measures to make the work even easier, and the end result a bit more secure.
Limiting the magic of the pot so that it could only be activated by a fairy or a user of druidic magic, for instance, would handily prevent certain little sisters from messing around with the thing. Or maybe more accurately, making it so that it required daily input from Briar to function correctly…?
Alternately, you suppose you could just make a new pot, so that Snappy will have room to grow, and install the shiny stone into it as a bit of mundane decoration. Its aura wouldn't have more than a mild influence on the Deku Baba's growth that way, but given what Briar said about your mother's concerns, that might not be a bad thing.
If you're going to do this, you might as well make the full effort. Your partner deserves the best, after all, and by proxy, so does her pet bitey plant – or at least "the best" that won't risk Snappy growing up into the sort of menace you'd expect to find lording over the latest incarnation of the Forest Temple or some other arboreal-themed Hyrulean dungeon.
Granted, there's a non-zero chance that he might end up growing that strong all on his own, but that's no reason for you to hyper-accelerate the process. Rather the opposite, really – but just giving the Mini Baba a mystically cleaner environment won't do that, so it's fine.
Really.
Consulting your schedule for the rest of the month, you determine that you might have time to build and empower the pot by the end of summer; it will depend on what features you want to give it. Basing its magic on the Lesser Spell of Plant Growth is a given, but who can activate its magic, how often they'll need to do so, and whether or not there are any other qualities – like, for instance, something akin to an inverted Magic Circle Against Plants, tweaked to prevent Snappy from spreading seeds or pollen and so potentially reproducing beyond your control; or for that matter, a Magic Circle Against Humans, to keep folks out of biting range – those are all another matter.
Of course you could always just cast a few spells on or around Snappy to get those effects, so the extra features aren't really necessary, per se, they would just be somewhat more convenient for you (in the long run) than having to periodically renew the magic. Or you could always add them to the pot later, and just focus on making sure the basic growth function works properly for now.
What's your preference?
Base the Pot on the Lesser Spell of Plant Growth. Limit the Pot to being used by fairies with ki training. Really just Briar. …and maybe her brother the Hyrulean swordsman, but that's definitely it! Probably.
You figure it's best to keep things simple. No extraneous features; no design choices that might compromise the basic functionality you're aiming for; and definitely no mystical equivalent of a light-switch that visiting fairies might be tempted to flick when they realize it's specific to them.
In part, that's for your and Briar's convenience, so that you don't have to keep turning the thing back on, but it's also for Snappy's health. Leaving the Plant Growth effect constantly on just seems like it'll get the best results for him, as opposed to having a "pulse" or aura of growth-inducing energies that only lasts for a few hours a day – much less having silly Little People mucking around with the controls.
But it's also somewhat for the sake of those fairies, since if they realized there was something for them to play with, they'd be hanging around Snappy's pot a lot more often, and the crowding might confuse or upset him, especially if his more comfortable living environment was getting messed up when the fluttery menaces were hanging around.
Or he might just decide to eat them regardless. You HAVE seen the Mini Baba snap at a few insects already, and many fairies aren't that different from bugs when it comes to size and propulsion methods… or attention span… or annoyance value…
There are a lot of commonalities, alright?
Anyway, with your chosen performance level, making Snappy's Magic Pot should take about six days, if you only work on it for an hour at a time. You think you can fit in three, maybe four hours of crafting effort today, provided you've got the necessary materials. Briar's little green stone will help, but going through the rest of your extensive inventory, there's not a whole lot that seems like it would be helpful for the project – or at least not for actually making the Pot itself.
Sure, you'll get some use out of Lu-sensei's Gardening Kit when the time comes to – ahem – transplant Snappy to his new domicile, and you might use some of the Fairy Leaves or Magic Mushrooms as fertilizer. For that matter, you've got some Hyrulean Seeds leftover, which might be useful in giving Snappy some comforting company – at least, you recall Deku Babas using tall grass, bushes, and other large plant growths to try and conceal themselves from their intended prey. Maybe it'll help him relax, or something?
There is a certain amusement to be found in the idea of packing some of the Corpse-Demon Dust you picked up the other night into the clay you'll use for the Pot, but "essence of demonic undead" is pretty strongly against the sort of effect you're aiming for.
…that said, you do have a fairly large supply of conjured Silver Dust. That stuff has purifying properties, which would pair nicely with the enriched micro-environment you're trying to create.
Aside from that, you don't really have anything that feels appropriate for the task, so you decide to make a quick trip to Gen's. You don't recall him having any enchantment-grade flower pots, but that's fine; you can pick up some other stuff, and then stop by Bali Ha'i to ask Kahine if there's some good clay deposits on her island…
Include some Silver Dust in the Magic Pot.
You might as well try it out, if only to see what happens. After all, even with your skills in Conjuration Magic backing it, the conjured Silver Dust wasn't produced via the Spell of True Creation or a similar effect that guarantees it to be just as real as any bit of silver pulled from the ground. Better to find out if the stuff is too "unreal" to serve as a proper crafting reagent now, when working on a minor item like this, where – in the worst-case scenario – having to start over from the beginning wouldn't cost you anything more than a few days, as opposed to some months-long project.
And hey, if it works, you'll have a sparkly pot with a touch of purifying power to it.
Time zones being what they are, you have to wait until after lunch to visit Gen's-
!
-but once you're there, you are surprised to find that your employer-slash-business partner does, in fact, have a few clay pots of suitable size for relatively large plants, and sufficient quality for at least low-end enchantments, tucked away in storage.
"Not a lot of call for these," the old man explains, as the two of you, Briar, and the Shadows dig into the piles of stuff in the basement. "Most magic-users who are serious about growing plants either own land somewhere – be it a backyard garden, a grove, or a whole farm – have the means to make their own pots, or settle for mass-produced modern designs. But there's not no call, either. Every once in a while, someone wants to try their hand at magically caring for a plant for the first time, needs to grow a particular flower for a ritual, or has a mystically charged bonsai that they've been looking after for ages, and which needs replanting."
"Did you ever sell anyone anything for a plant like Snappy?" Briar asks.
"No, giant animated Venus flytraps are definitely a new one on me, at least in real life…"
You inspect the half-dozen pots that you find, ruling out the smaller ones right away – given you'll be sinking the better part of a thousand dollars into making Snappy's new "home," it really doesn't make sense to get him something he'll probably outgrow in a matter of months.
Of course, you may not want to give a Deku Baba the biggest accommodations possible, at least not until you're sure he's sufficiently housebroken to not bite at people and pets. Or at least not in anything more than a playful manner.
With your new purchase, Briar's stone, and the Silver Dust, you have enough reagents to get started on enchanting the pot, and so you return home and head down to your workshop to do some preliminary work…
While done in the typical shape of an inverted, blunt-headed cone, the pot in question is a bit over two feet tall and slightly wider than that at the top, making it large enough that Zelda could stand inside of it. You'd have to take your shoes off, given how the base narrows, and maybe stand on one foot…
Anyway, the thing that makes the pot cost as much as it does is the fact that it was clearly handcrafted, and by somebody who knew what they were doing in mystical terms as well as the mundane. There's no spells bound into the thing and no external magic affecting it – yet – but it registers as very mystically clean, unnaturally so, in fact, a sign that it was made with an eye towards future enchantment.
The fact that it isn't a rounded jar with Hyrulean or Gerudo patterns on it does offend your inherited aesthetic sensibilities somewhat, but aside from that, it's exactly what you need. Sure, it costs twice as much as any of the other pots that seem suitable, but its greater size means that Snappy will take longer to grow to the point where he needs to be re-planted again, meaning you'll get more use out of this model.
Spent $200 of credit
Aside from the large clay pot, you also pick up the various lesser materials you'll need to do your work. While Gen has never made such a thing himself, he recalls purchases various past clients had used for similar jobs, and directs you to them.
"I cannot recall anyone setting out to supercharge the growth of a houseplant," the shopkeeper admits. "Typically, it's wards against sickness, insects, and nosy pets… but then, I suppose your flowery friend can handle the latter on its own already."
"Yup!" Briar agrees.
Spent $350 of credit
Thanking your business partner, you cast a Spell to Shrink an Item on the pot, pocket it, and teleport home.
As an aside, it would be a simple matter to magically apply some color to the pot while you're working on it. Was there a pattern you preferred, or would you like to leave it as plain clay?
Painting predominantly Fae patterns onto the pot would help to reinforce the user-restrictions you mean to imbue into it, and would also give Briar a more direct way to contribute to the process than simply hanging around and being a fairy while you do all the work.
"Help!" Briar melodramatically calls out, to no-one in particular. "Slave-driver! Oppressor of the fairies!"
"Do it for Snappy?" you suggest.
"Emotional blackmailer!"
Likewise, since Farore is the Hyrulean Goddess of Nature, adding her symbol in a few places would help to anchor the Lesser Spell of Plant Growth, and maybe even adjust it a bit towards more favorable results…
I mean, if the pot was in Hyrule, maybe…
Well, maybe another time.
With a design taking shape, you get to work.
In the end, it takes five days for you to complete Snappy's new pot. This is in large part because the conjured silver, while stable enough to be kept in long-term storage, used for mundane purposes, or employed as a material component in regular spellcasting, turns out to be insufficiently "real" in mystical terms to anchor permanent magical effects to items. You had suspected this might be the case, but you confirm it when you come down to your basement workshop on the second day of work, and find the basic enchantments that you laid down the previous day coming "unstuck" from the pot – for lack of a better term.
You end up having to melt down some of the valuable metals you have on-hand for material to shore up and stabilize the work which leaves you in a bit of a sour mood, making it difficult to focus enough to get any more work done that day or the next couple of days after that. In the end, however, you rally and come back to it, getting the remaining crafting work done on the fourth day.
The fifth day finds you and Briar out in the backyard, with a curious Zelda and half-napping Moblin bearing witness as you ceremonially relocate Snappy from his first home to his new one.
…where do you PUT Snappy's new pot, anyway?
Use the Grimstalker's Sword Shards.
Adding bits of Faerie-wrought metal to the work fits with your intention to limit the use of the pot's magic to Briar, and the fact that there is silver in the shards helps link it to the Silver Dust and what work you'd already done.
It's still annoying to have to re-do most of a day's work, but like you thought when you started this impromptu project, better to confirm how useful conjured materials are(n't) in item-crafting when working on something simple and cheap, rather than anything bigger.
Expended Grimstalker's Sword Shards
In your backyard garden.
While putting Snappy out with the other Hyrulean plants does mean Briar won't be able to visit him quite as easily as when he was in your room, it does give the little Deku Baba some of that "familiar" company you'd been considering might be beneficial for him, as well as access to more direct sunlight and somewhat fresher air.
After all, you don't always have your window open, and not even just because you live on the Hellmouth. Even southern California doesn't always have the best weather.
For their part, your parents are a mix of relieved and troubled by your choice to move Snappy out into the yard.
On the one hand, you don't have to haul a bag of dirt into the house to fill the new pot – a task Zelda is very happy to help out with, of course – and you're moving the carnivorous plant somewhere a little farther away from potential targets. These are all good things.
On the other hand, your parents are a little concerned about what may happen if one of your neighbors was to peer into the backyard and spot Snappy moving around under his own power.
They do have a point, as you've gotten a few comments on the existing contents of your garden from the folks next door in either direction. Some have been supportive of your "new hobby," even trading tips or commiserating about the difficulties and the underwhelming results; others have expressed confusion at a few of the weirder types (even if you didn't have any vegetable predators or explosives in the bunch); and there has been an annoying laugh or two.
You assure your folks that Deku Babas are mainly ambush predators, and thus quite capable of fooling casual observers as to just how animated they really are.
This… doesn't entirely reassure them, for some reason.
Anyway, with Zelda's enthusiastic assistance, the big pot is soon filled. The dirt in question is nothing special, you just made a quick trip out of town and scooped some loose soil into a sack, somewhere that didn't have Hellmouth crud clinging to every particle.
Re-planting a Deku Baba is an interesting experience, as no matter how careful you are, attempts to bring tools of any sort near the stem or roots are greeted with defensive posturing or an outright bite. Briar ends up having to talk Snappy into uprooting himself, a process helped along with a bribe of small bits of meat, some fed to him directly, others laid out atop the soil in the new pot just beyond his reach from where you're holding the old pot.
Regardless of the delay, it is eventually done. Snappy wriggles around for a bit, snap-trap mouth shifting slowly from side to side, opening and closing in a manner that doesn't quite qualify as actual biting, but eventually he calms down and seems to settle in.
And then, when Briar actually activates the magic, the Mini Baba downright relaxes, uncurling his fronds, leaning back on his steam, and basically looking about as content as a carnivorous plant creature can.
Gained Snappy's Pot
You catch your parents looking out the dining room windows into the backyard a few times in the days that follow Snappy's relocation to the garden, but their misgivings gradually fade, at least enough for them to stop checking up on the Mini Baba like they expect to find him with a bird or somebody's cat caught in his mouth.
To be fair, that may be a concern in the future, when Snappy is big enough to reasonably prey on such animals. Between you and Briar, you have every confidence that you can get the Deku Baba to refrain from biting people and bigger pets like Moblin, and you could likely condition him to prefer other kinds of meat, but at the end of the day, Snappy is a carnivorous entity of demonic descent that acts according to his instincts.
Even in the best-case scenario, he's probably always going to be tempted to at least "taste" unfamiliar animals.
Not long after re-potting Briar's pet plant, you put a leash on Moblin, disguise yourself as an adult, and coax Moblin into your Mirror Hideaway so that you can head out to Japan for the second scheduled spiritual check-up for him and your sword.
As you pass through the Tokyo Tower again While disguised as the same blind man and dog, but in obvious disguises it occurs to you that if you keep up this monthly schedule for stopping by Urahara's – and you do mean to, not only for the sake of Moblin's spiritual health or your sleeping sword-spirit's development, but also for personal curiosity – then sooner or later, somebody on the Tower's security staff is going to notice the pattern of your Gates and Greater Teleports and take measures to try and catch you.
As for the check-up itself, the exams that Moblin is subjected to are not quite as thorough as the ones from last time. That visit was about establishing baselines, as many of them physical as spiritual, but since your dog's as healthy as always and has not been exposed to new and exotic energy fields in the last month, Urahara sees little need to re-do all the tests. This visit will be more about cataloguing pure spiritual growth and development – or the lack thereof – and then comparing that data to the previous findings, to try and predict long-term outcomes.
Your Blessed Blade is a rather different matter. You did, after all, have it out during your run through the Ring of Trials, and while the physical effects of those fights did not carry over out of the Ring, you can attest that the spiritual ones are a different matter.
As a result, Urahara and Tessai basically re-do their entire previous in-depth examination, looking positively cheerful to have an excuse for it.
"It would have been ideal if we could have examined the sword right before and right after the event," Urahara says, while waving one of his devices along the flat of the Blade. "Well, no. Actually, the ideal would have been to be able to scan the Blade DURING the Trials, but building a scanner with acceptable sensitivity AND sufficient hardiness to survive the sort of fights you've described would be a bit too time-consuming and expensive."
The great downside of scientific progress. It never comes cheap.
The miko who was on duty when you passed through the Tower at this time last month happens to be present again, and stares blankly as you and Moblin walk past the shrine. Briar is once again riding on your shoulder, and thus imperceptible to most.
You pause, adjust your temporary pair of Groucho glasses – complete with dark lenses, as befits the visually-impaired role you are currently playing – and peer uncertainly in the young woman's direction, past the collar of the trench coat and the brim of the fedora that you included with your disguise.
"The tricky part," you advise her in a carrying whisper, "was finding a costume that fit the dog."
Moblin sneezes.
As you walk off, you can hear the kami giggling.
Perhaps it's the old refuge in audacity playing out in your favor, but for all the stares your current outfit attracts, nobody tries to stop you from leaving the Tower this time.
You have to shake your head at that, as while the lack of any delays is convenient for keeping your appointment at Urahara Shop, it doesn't paint the most flattering picture of local security.
Did you overdo it, perhaps? Making yourself appear too obvious, as if you were somebody else's distraction, or maybe just too crazy (in a particular way) to be dangerous? Alternately, could your blatant choice of disguise-atop-disguise be getting regarded as an attempt to lure somebody into starting something, with a higher-ups in some security office radioing their subordinates to leave you alone in favor of getting you out of the Tower and away from the tourists as quickly and quietly as possible?
Well, whatever the case, if the guards get over whatever it is that's keeping them from approaching you on a future visit, you figure you can spare them some time and some answers. You have been causing them some headaches for a while now, even if it was with the consent of the spirit of the Tower; they've earned that much.
However, if the two of them want to observe and perhaps run some Trials, you can schedule something.
You clarify that, with your schedule for the next few months being as packed as it is and having so many demands on your magic, it would be much more convenient – and probably only really possible – for you to add the two of them to some other event where the Ring of Trials was already going to be used, just so you could plan for the power-use and recovery time in advance.
Urahara is fine with that, noting that he'd need at least a few weeks' advance notice to set up anything outside of Karakura, anyway. A few months' delay is just giving him more time to consider the matter and work on whatever he thinks he'll need to take along.
Belatedly, you realize that you have committed the cardinal sin of giving a magic-user time to prepare.
Hopefully this won't blow up in your face. Or… in your Ring, for that matter…
Do you have any questions for the two Shinigami while you're here?
Likely because of how you've been speaking of Rings, Trials, and sentient magical swords, you are reminded of Isshin's encounter with his zanpakuto spirit, courtesy of Sage Elfaron and the Mirror of Shadows. Your Spell of the Dark Self is a direct emulation of the power of the aforementioned Mirror, meaning that it should be entirely possible for you to produce a similar result for any other Shinigami who were willing to let you cast the spell on them.
And while it's difficult to say how much of Isshin's spiritual (re)growth since the Trials was specifically the result of his face-to-face and fist-to-fist meeting with the spirit in the burning bandages, and how much was due to the Trials as a whole, just being able to hash a few things out seemed to do Shinigami and sword-spirit alike some emotional good.
Of course, Urahara and Tessai aren't spiritually weakened and bound the way Isshin was, but maybe it would still benefit them…? You don't really know enough about how Shinigami interact with the spirits of their weapons to say for sure by yourself, so you go ahead and ask the two researchers if they – and their zanpakuto, of course – would be interested in trying to recreate Isshin's experience for themselves.
"That would… not be a good idea, in my case," Urahara replies with a nervous laugh and some unsteady fan-waving.
"…do I want to know?"
"No," the shopkeeper says quickly.
"Yes," his assistant says in the same moment, with a distinct note of amusement.
The two men trade glances.
"No," Urahara repeats.
"Yes," Tessai insists. And then the big man adds, "Or would you rather Yoruichi told him?"
The manager groans and makes a motion as if he'd just been stabbed or shot in the heart.
Mustache quivering in amusement, Tessai turns to you and Briar and explains that it is actually possible for a Shinigami to manifest an avatar for their zanpakuto spirit, provided they can generate and maintain a sufficient flow of spiritual power. There are a number of ways to go about it – cultivated technique, various innate talents, and potentially just raw strength – but the element that is the most essential to the process, as well as one of the more difficult and time-consuming for most people to develop, is a degree of trust and respect between sword and wielder.
"After all," Tessai says, "the discovery of a zanpakuto's name is what allows a Shinigami to utilize their shikai. How much more of the blade's power would one be able to draw out by projecting their avatar?"
Yeah, if nothing else, being able to call up a second pair of hands and eyes is almost always far more useful than not. And if that body comes with innate supernatural powers, as Isshin's zanpakuto spirit seemed to – even if the lingering bindings were getting in the way in that case – the utility would only increase.
Tessai continues that a much younger Urahara came up with a device that does precisely what you are proposing, allowing the Shinigami that utilizes it to create a temporary body for their zanpakuto spirit to inhabit and animate. It was intended to accelerate aspects of training, and it does fulfill that purpose. However…
"'However?'" you and Briar say in unison.
Tessai's mustache once again quivers in amusement. "However, the manager did not consider that his invention would effectively force the zanpakuto spirit to manifest, whether they were willing to or not."
Oh.
"Rather than engendering trust and respect, then, it functioned more to show a lack of such things… which did not go over so well with most of the handful of zanpakuto spirits he was able to test the process on."
Oh, dear.
"His own zanpakuto, in particular, had rather… pointed things to say about 'Rude little boys intruding upon a lady's privacy,' if I remember correctly."
"Yes, yes, mistakes were made and penalties imposed," Urahara interrupts quickly. "But that was a long time ago, things are much better now, and more importantly, I am not about to make the same mistake all over again."
"At least not without a very good reason," Tessai adds.
"You, stop that."
Part of you wants to hear the zanpakuto spirit's take on this matter, just to make sure that Urahara isn't making a unilateral decision.
The rest of you notes that the spirit in question explicitly had the opportunity to make their opinion on forced manifestations clear, and did so, and that Tessai didn't appear remotely surprised or disappointed by Urahara's response to your inquiry. Given that the big man was apparently present to witness whatever chastisement his colleague received, that does make it likely that Urahara is respecting his sword's wishes in the matter, whether or not you can hear anything to that effect.
Besides that, Urahara has also previously told you about jinzen, the Shinigami practice of communing with their swords via meditation, and why it's important to their growth and cultivation of their powers. While he's never come right out and said what rank he achieved in the Soul Society's hierarchy before permanently relocating to Earth, Urahara has implied often enough that he held a Captain's rank, or something equivalent to it, which implies that he'd be very well-practiced in jinzen and most other Shinigami techniques.
So you let that go… but not without asking a tangentially related question.
"Isshin and his sword-spirit seemed not to mind the result of facing the Mirror," you note. "Was that because of their particular circumstances, or are they just like that?"
"Most likely a bit of each," Urahara says. "Shinigami are normally able to commune with their zanpakuto via meditation, and occasionally more conscious methods, but with Isshin's powers having been bound for all those years, he didn't have those options anymore – and while I can't speak to what his sword-spirit's behavior is like under normal circumstances, zanpakuto reflecting their wielder in some manner is considered the norm, and I do know that Isshin was always a little frustrated about having to effectively lock his partner up, even if it was for a good cause. So I could certainly see his zanpakuto being willing to let a forced manifestation pass, just for the sake of actually being able to yell at Isshin again."
"Or punch him in the face," you note.
"He does have that sort of face," Urahara agrees, as if his own shadiness didn't invite the temptation to feed him a knuckle sandwich every so often.
Anyhow, with that question answered, you-
!
-oh, there's a thought.
"Before I go," you say then, "would you gentlemen be at all interested in joining me for a discussion on the matter of Hyrulean sword-spirits, with a couple of individuals knowledgeable in the subject?"
Urahara and Tessai trade glances, and then turn to you.
"We would be delighted to host such a conversation," the shopkeeper assures you.
"Shall I make tea?" Tessai offers.
That's probably not a bad idea, really…
A little while later, you, Briar, and Urahara are sitting around a low table that you temporarily conjured in the warded chamber beneath Urahara Shop, accompanied by Elder Terok and Briar's eldest brother, Robin. Some of the smaller stones scattered about the place have been moved to serve as seats, with cushions provided for those who want them – which is everybody except Terok, really. Tessai is just coming down the elevator with the tea, and Moblin is off digging in the dirt and nosing about for anything interesting.
Once everyone has been served and the little polite exchanges conducted, Elder Terok sets down his teacup, clears his throat, and begins.
"So, sword-spirits," the old Goron priest rumbles. "Not common in Hyrule. Downright obscure, in fact. Item spirits in general are a rarity, really. Mundane objects tend to either not last long enough to accumulate the necessary spiritual energy, or else run afoul of other supernatural forces."
"Monsters?" you guess.
"They certainly contribute," Terok agrees. "Breaking things, corrupting things, EATING things…"
Ah, yes. Like-Likes would be natural predators for item spirits, wouldn't they?
"But it's not just the monsters," the Elder continues. "Spiritually-charged items are valuable for arcanists and priests alike, and plenty of them get used in ways that either exhaust their potential or just alter it in ways that prevent a consciousness from ever forming. And when we craft magical items… well, after all the times the Demon King has made a nuisance of himself, it you DON'T design your work to resist possession, nobody in their right mind is going to trust it. And while demonic or ghostly possession aren't the same thing as spiritual awakening, there are enough similarities – particularly with the latter – to ensure that inherently magical items built with those safeguards rarely wake up under their own power."
…part of you feels like you should apologize to several thousand years' worth of could-have-been tsukumogami, or whatever the Hyrulean equivalent would have been.
The rest of you thinks that Hyrule had enough problems to be getting on with, without hundred-year-old artifacts spontaneously coming to life to add to the mess.
"Still, if the natural process is more or less a non-starter, the artificial method of imbuing an inanimate object with an animating spirit has a fairly well-established history. Armos are sometimes created that way, when they aren't purely mechanical-"
Robin grimaces at that, for some reason.
"-as are some versions of the Iron Knuckle."
When somebody isn't sticking mind-controlled criminals in them, comes the thought from a dark corner of your mind.
What was Robin's reaction about?
"Do you not approve of mechanical Armos, Robin?" you wonder. "Or the other sort?"
"I was never exactly fond of Armos," Briar's biggest brother states. "Too many instances of them hurting people down through the ages."
You nod.
"Of the various approaches to making them, I would say the mechanical one offends me the least – in general."
"And in particular?" Briar presses.
"I've been a little fed up with ALL types of Armos, ever since Gemma's attempt to build one put a hole in my workshop wall," the smith admits sourly.
"Pffthahahaha!" Briar bursts out.
Robin spares his sibling an annoyed glance, but bites back a comment in favor of lifting his teacup again.
"…sibling?" you guess.
"Si-sister!" Briar manages to get out. "O-one of the ones th-that took inspiration from Biggest Brother, here, and d-decided she wanted to grow up enough to make stuff."
Urahara frowns. "Shouldn't that be 'wanted to make stuff when she grew up'?"
"Not with fairies," you, Briar, Robin, and Terok all say at once.
…
…
"Automatons, animated statues, and other such things aside," Elder Terok says then, "attempts to intentionally imbue mobility or awareness into personal equipment are rare in Hyrule's history. Some of it's that wariness of possession, more has to do with the difficulty of the work, and a fair bit is the fact that a weapon or shield capable of guiding itself in combat stops sounding like such a rock-solid idea the first time it drags your arm one way while you're trying to move in the other direction."
"Goddesses help you if you give the thing the ability to talk, sing, or just make noise on demand, and forget to impose some sort of limit on it," Robin adds, shaking his head.
"Oh, yes," Terok grumbles. "Those are some of the special annoyances…"
"…so did it not work properly, or did it work TOO well?"
Robin considers that for a moment, frowning.
"Honestly, a bit of both," he grudgingly admits. "The only real malfunction was the fact that it stopped listening to Gemma's commands; everything else worked pretty well. And the fact that it was running amok, wrecking things and frightening people, IS sort of what an Armos is supposed to do…"
Briar gets her giggling fit under control enough to ask a question of her own. "When did Gemma pick up the skills to animate constructs, anyway?"
"This was her first attempt," Robin replies. "The problem turned out to be that, rather than design, inscribe, and empower the control arrays all by herself, Gemma tried to copy them out of another Armos."
"What, Old Mossy?"
Robin nods.
"But that thing was wrecked in mid-rampage! Wouldn't that mean its arrays would be set to 'fight' or whatever from the beginning?"
Robin nods again.
"Gemma, you IDIOT," Briar groans, facepalming briefly.
"Singing swords are actually a thing?"
"They are," Robin admits. "Of course, there's more than one kind of 'singing' potentially involved. Some of them just make musical sounds when they're swung around, and shut off when sheathed, while others have specific musical powers that the wielder can activate and deactivate as needed; those are generally considered tolerable. But then you have weapons that can actually vocalize, with or without their user's consent, and that's when it starts getting annoying. Especially if the thing decides it doesn't like you."
Terok makes a rumbling sound of agreement. "Never ran into any of those, but…"
The Goron priest explains that, while he's not a weaponsmith or item-crafter himself, one of his closer kin was an apprentice of the line of Biggoron, and had some stories to share about famous, infamous, and downright obscure swords from Hyrule's long history. This is where the greater part of the Elder's familiarity with the subject comes from, but he also picked up a tale or two during his time as a priest – and then a few more after passing on and becoming one of the Goddesses' more direct servants.
While magical musical instruments and magical weapons are both quite common, magical weapons with musical powers – or conversely, instruments sturdy enough to be wielded as weapons – are very unusual in Hyrule. Some of that is pure practicality; it's just much easier to make a magic flute that is simply a really good flute, than it is to create a flute that can also serve as a fighting stick while ALSO retaining the same level of musical performance. There is also the matter of how different forms of music are favored by the Goddesses, meaning that many magical instruments have been created as offerings to them, if not as holy relics from the outset, making them just about the LAST sort of thing you'd want to go around smacking monsters with.
But there have been enough oddballs down through the ages for Hyrule to have its share of musical weapons, and Terok is aware of rumors of a singing sword.
The weapon in question had nothing to do with Link, Zelda, or Ganondorf, which is likely half the reason why you have no information on it. The other half is down to what Robin mentioned about such weapons being annoying to deal with – and this "Sword of Songs," also known as the "Sword of Discord," was very much one of those.
"It's also one of the lesser cautionary tales about intelligent magic items," Terok says. "Nobody DIED because of the silly thing, but there was a fair amount of violence involved, or so the story has it."
It seems clear enough from context.
While they're most commonly found in or near Hyrule's various temples, the assorted variants of the Armos have historically turned up in odd places all over the kingdom. You don't recall ever reading or being told of one in the Lost Woods, and Ganondorf's memories aren't volunteering any information, either, but it's really not surprising that one of the guardian constructs might have ended up in the forest somehow.
And while the specifics of how the Statue got where it is and who was responsible for deactivating it might make for an interesting story, if the thing has been sitting out in the Woods long enough for moss to grow on it – as the name implies – and for relatively mature fairies like Briar and Robin to consider it "old," then its history is unlikely to be particularly relevant to your current agenda.
So you say nothing more about it, as Terok advances the conversation.
Skip it and focus on intelligent items.
Similar to your decision about Old Mossy, you can't really see how rumors of an annoying singing sword would be helpful to you, except perhaps as the instructive warning Elder Terok has already said it to be. "Do not give voice to that which you cannot silence," or something that similarly echoes the old summoner's adage about not calling up what you cannot put down.
Considering that you aren't able to invoke magic via music, and really aren't much of a musician besides, a means of musical melee just doesn't seem like it would be particularly useful for you, and so, again, you let the question pass unasked.
Getting back to the actual subject, Terok previously mentioned how Hyrulean item-crafters tend to shy away from giving awareness or mobility to magic items meant to be worn on the body or wielded by hand, due to how they can conflict with the user's own intentions and abilities. Actual intelligent items can suffer from the same issues, only even more so.
"An intelligent item is nothing less than a person in its own right," the Goron priest says. "A very different kind of person, given they're manufactured and enchanted rather than born and raised, but still a person with opinions, preferences, and goals of their own. It's one thing to have a friend watching your back and occasionally sharing their thoughts, and another thing entirely to have someone with you constantly, dependent on you for the fulfillment of their personal ambitions, for simple mobility." He huffs. "Most people can't really handle the kind of intimacy such a relationship requires to really succeed, particularly when they realize that an intelligent item can fight them for control of their own bodies. For that matter, many item-crafters come to the realization that they would not only be creating a life – their child, even – but also imposing limits on that entity's ability to live. That puts many off the idea."
"But not everyone," Robin continues. "Sometimes you find a smith who already thinks of their creations as their children, or as good as, or a magic-user for whom the opportunity to create a whole consciousness as a test and proof of their skills appeals, or the nasty sorts who see the potential suffering they can create as a selling point. And of course, there are always the rare accidents, although I swear at least half of those are cases of somebody's ghost possessing or empowering the weapon they used in life…"
This understandably catches the interest of the two death gods in the room.
"And on the wielder's side of things," Terok takes over again, "sometimes you do find a person who doesn't mind the constant companionship or the weapon's dependency on them to achieve its desired ends. Some of those find it a fair exchange for whatever abilities the item brings to the table, others have very compatible personalities and goals, and a few are just so strong-willed that they can bend a weapon to their wills regardless of its own wishes. Though I've also heard of the reverse happening, and somehow working out to the satisfaction of both…"
The Dinnite priest shakes his head, clearly not understanding how such an arrangement could prosper.
You can see why he'd feel that way. Mind control is a bit of a murky subject to followers of the Goddess of Power, as while it's certainly a form of personal strength and so seemingly a worthy expression of Din's philosophies, it's also an ability that involves undermining or straight-up removing the free will of another, which is… less worthy. Though it does depend on who you talk to, and the specific cases involved.
Your own use of the Spell to Dominate a Person to remove Knappe Bambietta from the battlefield in Silbern comes to mind.
Either way, the idea that somebody could be content with having their own will shackled to another is downright baffling to your average Dinnite.
"Whatever the motives of their creators and wielders," Terok says then, "a few intelligent magic items have turned up in Hyrule over the ages, and some of those have been sword-spirits, so we aren't entirely unfamiliar with them. Though I will admit that having had a few months to look into the topic was helpful – I would have been repeating half-forgotten rumors and hearsay if we'd sat down to discuss this right after your birthday Trials."
"Never ran into one yourself, then?" you venture.
The Goron shakes his head. "Not while I was alive, no, and only the once that I'm sure of since shuffling off the mortal plane – and that was an emissary from Faerie, rather than a home-grown example." He shrugs. "Not exactly the most reliable reference point."
"Yeah, fair," Briar agrees.
"Reasonable," Robin concurs.
With that, Terok starts to talk specifically about Hyrulean sword-spirits.
The one you already knew about, however little that information actually amounts to, is Ghirahim. He is, or was, one of the oldest examples on record, so much so that Terok has good reason to suspect that said records now survive only in the memories of the Goddesses themselves, their most ancient servants, and in Nayru's celestial libraries – and in the latter case, only way back in the reference stacks. Similar to that Fae weapon Terok just mentioned, the Demon Sword turned Demon Lord is not a great example to use for Hyrulean item spirits, as his origin was not only demonic, but also partly foreign, making him extremely atypical.
Ghirahim's era of activity compounds the issue, as not only was it literally millennia ago, it was in an age when Hyrule technically didn't exist – a thousand-year interregnum between the Demon King Demise's invasion and destruction of the realm overseen by the Goddess Hylia, and the final destruction of Demise and the founding of the kingdom. Bad enough that eras like that are poor on record-keeping in general, due to low populations that are generally more concerned with immediate survival than more ephemeral concerns like keeping accurate historical records, but the widespread dominance of monsters interfered the Goddesses' ability to monitor things. The precise time and circumstances of Ghirahim's awakening are thus unclear.
The other oldest example on record, on the other hand…
"THE MASTER SWORD?!" you and Briar exclaim together.
"Mom didn't mention it to you?" Robin says, swirling tea about in his cup.
"NO, SHE DIDN'T!"
"Ah. Well, in her defense, she didn't know for sure until Koron got in touch to let us know what Elder Terok and Madam Lanora had dug up – and Mom also thought that the sword was only just gaining consciousness for the first time, as a side-effect of Ganon's death and the reunification of the Triforce. She was as surprised as anybody to find out that the blade had been sapient from the start, and that the sense of a stirring spirit she'd picked up on was more like someone turning over in their sleep."
…
Something about that statement REALLY upsets a dark corner of your memories, none of which contain so much as a HINT that the Master Sword was anything other than an annoyingly powerful and painfully sharp holy weapon. Ganondorf got stabbed to death by that thing so many different times – and in different timelines – and yet now Terok and Robin are telling you that it has MORE powers that the Hero wasn't even USING? That the Sword of Evil's Bane coasted through all of those fights while taking a bloody NAP, and it STILL killed y-?!
You close your eyes, let out a breath, and reach for the tea.
This is DEFINITELY an occasion for it.
"…alright there?" Terok asks, as you aggressively sip your tea.
"Mrglmumblefrickingpaininthe-" you grumble aloud. But you also gesture to the Goron priest that you are paying attention, and that he should continue.
The Elder seems a bit unconvinced on that point, but goes ahead.
So, yes, in addition to all of its other known tricks, the Master Sword is also an intelligent weapon. The spirit of the blade is known as Fi, and like Ghirahim, she has the ability to project a humanoid avatar, although unlike the Demon Sword-Lord, that form was only a projection, and not one that made any pretense of being Hylian or any other organic species. Metallic skin and hair, an unmoving face, a distinctly analytical, almost robotic demeanor – while certainly not as ominous or menacing as Ghirahim's "heavy" combat form, the handful of images and descriptions that Terok and Lanora managed to find of Fi made her avatar's inorganic nature pretty clear.
The celestial records also indicated the reason why the sword-spirit has never been known to have made an appearance against Ganondorf or the other periodic menaces to the kingdom, and you have to admit, it's a good one.
Seriously, having the decaying corpse of an ancient Demon King sealed inside you for ten thousand years is the sort of thing that should absolutely wear on a person. You've only had to deal with having the soul of one, for barely a decade at that, and it's still caused you a fair bit of stress…
Granted, it's also had its upsides, but that's a consequence of it being your soul, and actually belonging in your body, whereas the Master Sword is keeping Demise's remains imprisoned. The two situations are passingly similar, but distinctly not the same.
When Terok mentions the recorded fate of your past life's distant predecessor, you catch Urahara glancing at his cane with an expression that even you find indecipherable. It's not that the man's trying to hide his feelings just then, you think, it's that he legitimately has no idea how to respond to what he's been told.
You have to admit to a certain sense of relief about the matter. If the Master Sword had finished... disposing of Demise's remains prior to Link's last confrontation with Ganondorf, there would have been a Demon King-grade prison ready for a new occupant, meaning you might not even BE here... even with Ganon's history of busting out of seals, the prospect of that is disturbing enough that you're just as happy to have dodged the Sword Beam in question.
All in all, Fi is just as bad an example of a typical sword-spirit as Ghirahim. Where the latter originated out of demonic power, the former was the direct creation of the Goddess Hylia, the previous wielder of the Goddess Sword that would be re-forged and empowered to create the Master Sword in the first place. Exactly what went into the making of the original blade wasn't something Terok was able to find information on, and even the accounts of the ancient Hero's quest to strengthen his primary weapon were short on details. It involved mystical fires dedicated to the Golden Goddesses, but beyond that, there's nothing of substance.
Terok is quite certain that absence of information is deliberate.
"The Master Sword is a holy relic, after all," the priest says. "The Goddesses don't want people trying to copy or 'improve' upon it – because sooner or later, somebody would try – and they definitely don't want the Forces of Evil getting insights into how it works. Or at least not as easily as reading a few pages out of an ancient tome would make it."
Yeah, book study is a lot less likely to end with the researcher getting dismembered.
…not that such an outcome is entirely impossible where magical books are involved, but still!
Anyway, with the two big names out of the way, Terok and Robin move on to some (considerably) lesser-known sword-spirits that have turned up in Hyrule over the ages.
The Four Sword, incidentally, is NOT one of them. There has apparently been some confusion about that in certain quarters, historically speaking, due to the weapon's peculiar ability to divide its wielder's essence into four bodies – and WHY, in the names of all things holy and not, would ANYBODY want there to be MORE THAN ONE LINK AT A TIME?
Once again, you take a deep draught of calming tea, as you try not to lose it.
If the priests weren't able to turn up details on the origins of the most famous Hyrulean sword-spirits, it would behoove you to learn more about the lesser-known but also less divinely protected or demonically concealed ones, just so that you have a better idea of what Hyrulean swordsmiths and spellcasters of ages past have done in the field, and what you could reasonably expect to do or have done for your own Blessed Blade.
And so you pay close attention as Terok and Robin talk about some of these items.
One, a weapon of Goron manufacture, was known as "Stonecutter," due to a mix of material hardness and magical enhancements that enabled it to slice through rock – or anything less resilient – without serious issue. Produced by a smith of Biggoron's lineage-
"Not my kinsman," Terok clarifies. "Nor anyone either of us met in life."
-for his Hylian sworn brother, a knight of the realm, the blade was intended for use against Dodongos, Armos, and other well-armored monsters that a wielder lacking the great strength of a Goron might find frustrating to deal with. That said, it did not escape the smith that his creation would be just as effective at cutting down Gorons or armor-clad Hylians, and while he trusted his brother to use it in just cause, he was troubled by what might happen to the weapon in the future, magical items having a well-established history of outliving their original owners.
Not wanting to see his craft turned to evil ends, the smith imbued Stonecutter with a portion of his own spirit and will, and then bound it to its intended owner in a manner not dissimilar to how your sword is linked to you, just with a whole lot less direct divine action. Over the course of many years, the knight's deeds helped to nurture and shape the sleeping spirit, until it finally awoke with a noble will, a discerning eye for the character of people, and the ability to control not only the sharpness of its blade, but also its weight. In the hands of a tested and true wielder, Stonecutter would live up to its name, a weapon light in the hand and yet crushingly heavy on impact, able to slice through stone and rapidly do ruinous damage even to common Hylian steel. For those who had yet to prove themselves, the blade would bite no more fiercely than any other well-made sword – in all honesty, a trait that was as much a safety measure for inexperienced hands as it was a precaution against abuse – and if picked up by a villain or a monster, Stonecutter would be no more than a weirdly-shaped club, one alternately too heavy to lift and too light upon impact to be worth bothering with.
There is a fairly extensive history of known wielders, including six generations of the knight's blood descendants and three more selected heirs, before Stonecutter was lost in battle. It's turned up a time or three since then, most recently in the hands of a warlord whose will was strong enough to dominate the resolute blade and force it to cut down whatever enemy stood before him.
Somewhat ironically, that man died fighting against Ganon's last invasion.
The next sword is of Gerudo origins and goes by "Flame Dancer," evidently in deliberate comparison or challenge to the rare elemental monsters known as Flare Dancers. Befitting its name, most of the weapon's powers involve heat and fire, with it being able to wreathe its blade in flames, set things it strikes on fire – markedly more reliably than typical flaming weapons, Terok mentions, which can be a bit hit-or-miss in that respect – and control nearby mundane flames in a variety of ways. It could also extinguish fires, which is a bit unusual for arms of this type, and a power usually seen in water-aligned weapons instead.
Flame Dancer was created by a Gerudo witch-
You give Terok a concerned look.
"NOT related to those two," he assures you. "We checked several times, to be sure."
-as a gift to her daughter, who preferred the warrior's path to that of the magic-user, though she wasn't without potential for the latter. The blade was intended to be a tool for survival almost as much as it was a weapon, which likely accounts for some of its attested less-than-martial applications, such as the ability to ward its wielder against extremes of temperature, controlling the temperature of its blade precisely enough to keep a whole tent comfortably warm, cook various foods, or boil water, or just putting on a show by creating images out of flame.
Flame Dancer was given intelligence because the witch wanted somebody to watch her girl's back, and the resulting personality evidently considered herself a sister to her original owner, and was remarkably non-pyromaniacal as far as weapons of elemental flame go. While Flame Dancer couldn't create a true physical body the way Ghirahim could, her power to animate flames provided an alternative, one that could combine with her other powers to allow her to actually touch people without harming them.
"The sword appears to have enjoyed that trait considerably, and made extensive use of it," Terok adds.
"…she's a hugger?" Briar guesses.
"So her sister complained, when I managed to speak with her."
Robin then tells you of a third weapon, Wave Rider, which was made in direct response to the existence of Flame Dancer. It would seem that Flame Dancer's mother and maker had a rival, specialized in the wielding of ice-
"ALSO not related."
-who swore that "anything that flame-brained idiot can do, I can do better," and set out to find a dupe to pay for the work. She was in luck, as a Zora patrol ran afoul of the flaming brand and her sister-in-arms, and the survivor the quietly-observing witch was able to fish out of the river afterwards had the means to commission a weapon to counter the new Gerudo threat, a sufficiently prideful, loss-stung, and unsuspicious nature to not think to question how or why a magic-user with the ability to produce such a weapon just happened to turn up in the wake of his rather painful defeat, and insufficient familiarity with the arcane arts to recognize Gerudo witchcraft at work in the weeks that followed.
The witch herself was, naturally, magically disguised the whole time, which may have carried over into Wave Rider's design. Aside from being able to manipulate water, ice, and cold in similar ways as Flame Dancer did fire, the slender duelist's blade could also generate illusions, creating more realistic images than its rival, including a fairly life-like Zoran guise – though this was only usable in the presence of a relatively large amount of free water, being limited to illusions elsewhere.
Flame Dancer, Wave Rider, and their respective partners had a rivalry that lasted about three decades, on and off, with ambushes, traps, schemes, captures, escapes, and plans of revenge aplenty on both sides, before the Gerudo raider suffered a leg injury that finally ended her career as a fighter. The Zora warrior took no pleasure in this, because the injury in question was not of his doing, and had nothing to do with battle, or a theft gone wrong, or even a hunting accident.
"What happened?" you wonder.
"The Gerudo was helping to build a house, and fell off the roof," Robin says.
…
"…that's it?"
"That's it."
As far as origin stories of ancient magical weapons go, the blade's owner suffering a crippling injury after falling off of a roof is certainly a… novel sort of incident to record for posterity. While that unusual quality does tickle your scholarly funny bone a bit, the part of you that's invested in martial arts can't help but feel that a construction accident is no way for a warrior's career to end.
"Was it an evil roof, at least?" you venture. "Or maybe the walls holding it up?"
"…not that I heard?" Robin replies vaguely, glancing at Terok for support.
"The woman barely referenced the incident when I spoke with her," the celestial priest answers with a shrug. "Given how little she seemed to care about it, I would venture not."
Fair enough. Evil architecture is not impossible, by any means, but it's definitely unusual, and for all their conflicts with the rest of Hyrule over the ages, the Gerudo generally don't go in for that sort of thing, not even when they were still loyal to Ganondorf.
Anyway, with her sister forced into retirement, Flame Dancer soon found her way into the hands of one of her nieces, who in turn soon ran into Wave Rider and its wielder, whose superior experience – both in general and with combatting Flame Dancer specifically – allowed them to thoroughly drub the new partners. Neither of the victors were satisfied with this win, however, especially when they found out just WHY their old enemy had stopped appearing on the battlefield, and such was their shared disgust with such a ridiculously mundane conclusion to the rivalry that Zora and sword quit the field, allowing Flame Dancer's young second wielder to return home.
Naturally, this threatened to spark a NEW rivalry, but the longevity of the Zora race meant that Wave Rider's wielder held an insurmountable advantage in skill, and after getting handily defeated a couple more times – and narrowly escaping imprisonment and outright execution – the young Gerudo thought better of continuing the feud. Flame Dancer herself had a different opinion, but wasn't willing to risk her niece's life to continue her quarrel with Wave Rider. The rival weapons thus parted ways.
"What about the witches?" you ask.
"The ice-witch seems to have been satisfied by Wave Rider defeating Flame Dancer," Terok says. "As for the fire-witch, her daughter was more amenable to learning magic once she'd been forced to hang up the sword, and her granddaughter managed to walk away from the feud with her live, so the old woman was pretty happy with the outcome as well. Which, of course, irritated her rival enough to seek ANOTHER way to prove her superiority…"
Ah. So maybe not related to Koume and Kotake, but also not ENTIRELY unlike them.
Whatever their creators subsequently got up to, it didn't involve Flame Dancer and Wave Rider. The two blades would not cross paths again while Wave Rider's original wielder lived, as Flame Dancer refused to risk her sister's descendants, but eventually the Zora grew old, retired, and – many decades later – entrusted his old partner to another. The old quarrel would have been renewed at that point, except that Flame Dancer's latest heir had ventured off to distant lands and not come back. The sword herself didn't re-enter Hyrulean memory for some centuries, by which point Wave Rider had been lost at sea – and when the aquatic sword reappeared, its counterpart was off exploring other lands once more.
The two swords have quite extensive histories at this point, but they move about so much and end up lost often enough that they've rarely encountered each other since. This is despite both of them making some effort to track down the other.
The Goron priest and the Fae smith mention other weapons: Dog Biter, a Kokiri sword imbued with a spirit eager to hunt Moblins or their various cousins; Impara, a Sheikah blade with powers of shadow and subtlety, and a history of working with somewhat dubious partners for the good of the kingdom; and Queensguard, a sword wielded by generations of the Knights of Hyrule in defense of the royal family, serving well against mundane foes and yet seemingly cursed to fall short whenever Ganondorf or another great evil emerges.
Do you have any thoughts or questions about these weapons, before asking about specifics on the Blessed Blade?
You think you'd better ask about one of those weapons, just to be sure.
"Do either of you happen to know what's going on with Queenguard?" you inquire of your two Hyrulean speakers. "I mean, is it actually cursed, does it have a lot of bad luck weighing it or its wielders down, or is it just not powerful enough to deal with Ganondorf's usual nonsense?"
Briar snorts into her tea at that last bit.
"That last one is close, although it's also not the whole story," Terok replies. "Queensguard is actually fairly potent, as these things go – he's no Master Sword, by any means, but he can hold his own against most opponents. The problem is that the blade's creator lived in one of Hyrule's longer-lasting eras of relative peace, and was more concerned with protecting his Queen from the potential threats of the day – which ran more towards political intrigues or the outside chance of war than they did to demonic invasion."
"So Queenguard's just not really built to combat demons?"
The Goron nods. "He's not a holy weapon, several of his powers involve enhancing the defenses of his wielder or someone they're protecting, and he has a healing ability that can only be called on in the presence of a member of the Royal Family – though exactly how close that kinship needs to be is rather vague, as is the full extent of the recovery."
A decent general-purpose weapon for a bodyguard, then, but one that's lacking in the specialized Evil-slaying power and/or sheer brute force necessary to take on Ganondorf's usual horde of unholy nasties.
With the overview of Hyrulean sword-spirits covered, you ask the experts what sort of improvements you could provide to your Blessed Blade when it still hasn't woken up yet, without doing it harm.
Terok and Robin both agree that just improving the basic functionality of the sword as a sword would be quite safe, since you wouldn't be truly adding to the weapon or changing its essential nature, just making it better at doing and being what it already was. That said, they also recommend against trying to perform extensive modifications all in one go, even if it's just boosting the basic "aim better, hit harder, be tougher" enhancement package.
"Any time you imbue magic into a weapon, it needs a while afterwards for everything to settle and stabilize, at least if you want the enhancements to take permanently," Robin says. "The more powerful the weapon was beforehand, or the more complex the additions you made, the longer it takes before you can try again – and you already have me working on giving your sword a degree of shape-shifting."
"How is that going, anyway?" you inquire. "Or is Project Fairy Death Machine still taking up your time?"
"Still working on that, sorry," the elder fairy admits with a grimace, his expression that of a craftsman caught between a paying client and a personal project he really wants to finish. "Cleaning up after Gemma's Armos ran amok slowed things down. Had to put a new wall in…"
"I know your pain, sir," Tessai murmurs.
He isn't looking at Urahara as he speaks, but the shopkeeper coughs and looks away.
Death Machine aside, Robin will definitely have time to attend to your previous request for improving your sword in the coming year, and maybe a bit of that basic enhancement that he and Terok discussed, though that would have to be later in the year. He doesn't recommend trying to make any more adjustments than that, and not just for the sword's sake – you'll need to take some time to get used to having a shape-shifting weapon and the sort of options that unlocks.
It's not just about tactical advantages. You ARE dealing with a sentient sword, here, and historically, would-be wielders who can't use the powers of such weapons effectively earn no respect for their ineptitude.
Upgrade your order from " (Plus) 1 Transformative Blessed Blade" to " (Plus) 2 Transformative Blessed Blade."
You ask Robin if he'd mind you paying him part of the cost for the added work in advance.
"How would you like to cover it?" he replies.
You were thinking in gold-
"Ehhh…"
-although you also came into possession of a number of fairly ordinary magic swords recently. If he'd like to take one of them for personal study and eventual use as a reagent in the upgrading process…? If that's possible, you mean?
"That is definitely a more appealing option," the smith replies. "I won't be able to say for sure how compatible Earth-based enchanting is with my own work until I've had a chance to study it, though."
So, small discount for the opportunity to study local crafting examples, potential large discount if it turns out to be viable material for the upgrade?
"That works for me."
You consider the relatively unremarkable blades you took from Silbern. The best match for your Blessed Blade would be another bastard sword of Hylian steel, but alas, you are fresh out of those. The longsword would normally be your best bet, as its style and dimensions are closest – if still not exact matches – but the fact that it's so physically and mystically stressed might compromise its usefulness as a reagent. With that in mind, the functional arming sword is about as good an option for sacrifice in the forging process, while the stressed arming sword is the least likely to work out.
You may as well give Robin all three weapons. As a practicing smith, there's decent odds that he might see something in them that your less experienced eye didn't notice when you looked them over while sorting through your share of the Silbern loot, magical augmentations or no.
Of course, you don't have all those swords in your pocket at the moment, but that's fine; you can always call Robin later, after fetching them from storage.
You do caution him that a couple of the weapons are worn down, and that you'd been planning on restoring them while studying them yourself – something you haven't had time to get around to yet – before making any other use of them.
"That's fine," Robin agrees. "They'll be more effective as reagents if they're in full working condition, which will save both of us some time having to hunt down other materials. Just let me study them in their current state, first."
"Back at you," you note, because the idea that a Fae smith couldn't fix up a couple of worn-down entry-level weapon enhancements isn't even worth considering.
On a related note, you mention that the swords in question are just a very small part of a very large haul of enchanted items you picked up, with multiple confirmed cases where the enchantments originated from different traditions, and plenty more still in need of study. Just as something for Robin to keep in mind.
With that aside handled, you discuss a few other, longer-term options for the guided development of your personal sword.
As far as the basic enhancements go, Robin figures he could push them to the third tier, although going beyond that is a little iffy. It wouldn't cost any more than the improvement you just paid for, but he would rather not accept any more down-payments, especially not on work he isn't going to be able to get around to for a year or so.
He'd owe you, after all.
You've always had it in mind to make the Blessed Blade into a freeform shapeshifting weapon eventually, because as good a general-purpose sidearm as a sword is, there are situations where other weapons just work better. Simply being able to turn the thing into a knife, for instance, would allow you to carry it on your person, concealed, and draw it quicker than your current set-up, where you need to either summon it from your Arcane Pocket or draw it out manually. Turning it into a spear would be helpful against foes you don't want to get so close to, shifting to a mace would be more effective against most skeletal undead than an edged weapon, and so on.
Robin tells you that advancing the sword's intended shape-shifting power from "hand-and-a-half sword to different sword of comparable size" to "sword to (oddly heavy) baseball bat" is within his skills, and will cost a bit over six hundred Rupees. However, this time you'll HAVE to provide him with blood voluntarily given by a shape-shifter, as successfully instilling the improved Transformative enchantment would be getting into difficult territory for his skills alone, and Robin isn't interested in trying to track down a suitable creature himself.
"Most of the ones I can think of are either monsters, too powerful for me to want to mess with, or both," he says simply.
He'll still count the value of the blood against the cost of the work, so you'd only owe him three hundred, maybe three hundred and twenty Rupees, but still.
Pushing that particular aspect of magic all the way up to free-form shapeshifting is something Robin isn't confident he'd be able to reproduce, even with blood from a powerful shapeshifter or a similarly sympathetic reagent.
Another effect you'd like to add, and one that Terok mentioned when describing Stonecutter, is the simple ability for your sword to hit harder. It's not the flashiest power, by any means, and certainly not the most elegant, but it suits your sensibilities, and it wouldn't require any special thought to use.
Robin can do that, although not cheaply – he says you'd be looking at a thousand-Rupee pricetag, and then some.
Making the Blessed Blade more resistant to rust, wear, and other environmental factors is also doable, although Robin would really rather leave that to be the last property he tries to add to your weapon, because of how much more annoying it is to make further modifications to an impervious weapon. Off the top of his head, nine hundred Rupees.
As for increasing your Blessed Blade's ability to channel your ki or Power, Robin will have to get back to you. Making weapons more compatible with Sword Beams is a well-guarded secret among Hyrulean swordsmiths, and not one that he's been able to master. Expanding that to your more versatile ki techniques is something he has no better than vague ideas on, and Power is just right out.
What DID he end up choosing to use for the Lesser Transformative power, anyway?
Robin blinks at the question, and then clears his throat. "Well, when you mentioned considering asking your friend the blood-drinker for a donation of blood-"
"What's this, now?" Urahara asks, looking at you curiously.
You wave him off as Robin keeps talking.
"-that made me wonder if I could find an Acheman or maybe a young Vire-"
"Seriously?" Briar wonders, even as you allow yourself an expression of surprise.
"-but that turned out to be a wild Cuccoo chase. Not because they're all that rare, even with the efforts the Kingdom has been making to retake territory from the monsters over the last few decades, I just couldn't track down any rumors of a creature that had the right amount of strength, the likely willingness to make a deal, and enough generations between them and their progenitor to count as more mortal than demon-spawn."
Oh, he was looking for a naturalized bat-monster, rather than one of the original bat-demons. Well, then; that's a different matter.
…mostly, anyway.
"What do you mean by 'the right amount of strength'?" Tessai inquires.
"Powerful enough for their blood to retain the necessary potency, but not so strong that I'd have to try and dilute it or worry about side-effects," the smith answers frankly. "That was why I wanted to find a naturalized shape-changer rather than one of the purer strains; less likely for the blood to go up in smoke at any point in the whole process."
A definite downside of working with materials of even vaguely demonic origin.
"Of course, there was also the possibility that one of the stronger Achemen could have tracked a weapon made with their own blood," Robin goes on, "and most adult Vires definitely could have, or at least would have been able to recruit a Wizzrobe or something to do it for them. Hence not wanting to deal with anything OVER a certain level."
"I am relieved to hear that," you admit.
Robin nods.
"But then what did you end up selecting?"
The smith glances away for a moment, muttering, "Chu Jelly."
…
"…I'm sorry, what?"
"Chu. Jelly."
…
"Isn't that stuff edible?" you wonder, prompted by a mix of bestiary-reading, conversation with Briar and your tutors, and vague recollections. "And also a component for some healing Potion recipes?"
"I mean, technically speaking, a LOT of things are edible," Robin says, somewhat evasively. "But the stuff I have sitting in a jar in storage probably doesn't qualify, at least not by the standards of anyone who isn't a Like-Like or something."
"What type of Chu did you harvest it from?"
"I know a family of Hylian alchemists who've been selectively breeding the things for a few generations," comes the explanation. "Partly to study them, partly to get a steady supply of reagents for private use or trade, and partly because they're weird enough to think that slime monsters are cute." Robin shakes his head. "Anyway, they've been at that long enough and with the right conditions that the Chus' demonic essence is thinning out, which foregoes the need for purification, and there's no risk of them trying to track a weapon infused with some of their… substance. And while Chus aren't true shapeshifters, they are amorphous, which makes the right sort of Jelly suitable for catalyzing a minor transformative property."
Fair enough.
Given your plans to build and outfit a new workshop in the coming months, as well as the somewhat longer-term intentions of continuing to bestow assorted magical gifts on your friends, you inquire of Robin what his schedule looks like in the near future.
Robin answers that Project Fairy Death Machine understandably has his focus for at least a few more weeks, maybe until the end of September, if he counts all the tests that he means to put the thing through. He'll also have to take on some actual paying jobs at that point to make up for the cost of some of the materials that went into the Death Machine – the ones other than the various ores and the Heart of the Storm, anyway – which will include that work on the Blessed Blade.
"But if my sword turns into a T-1000 or a Metal Slime because of this," you begin in a warning tone.
"Oh, that could be neat," Briar muses.
…well, she's not wrong. Terminator-style shape-shifting would be a tremendous asset, provided the sword didn't decide to go Skynet on you. Swordnet? Skysword, maybe?
A Metal Slime would be less helpful, unless you needed to fight an unfriendly magic-user, and even then, you'd always be concerned that your "sword" might suddenly decide to run away, as Metal Slimes tend to do.
"Do you think it's actually possible?" Urahara wonders, waving his fan with an amused smile.
Robin blinks at you, at the two of them, and then turns back you, saying, "I have no idea what those are."
Some exposition ensues.
You were not aware that Urahara knew so much about Dragon Quest.
You would like to attend the unveiling of the Fairy Death Machine, if you could… but you have to admit, it's probably for the best that you keep as much distance from the event as possible. However weird space, time, and other dimensions get in the Lost Woods, they ARE still part of Hyrule, and one of the parts that Ganondorf had actually been to in life, at that.
…at least, you think it's the same forest? The Master Sword was originally hidden in the Temple of Time, in the heart of the old Castletown, but over the centuries since then, the forest has spread and, well, moved…
Anyway, the point remains that actually going to Hyrule would be tempting the Curse to act up, which is something you can't really countenance doing – not for a relatively minor matter like this, and especially not when you know Robin already has some concerns about his creation getting taken over or just driven crazy by Evil. And while you could ask if the fairy family would be willing to move the proceedings to one of the parts of Faerie that adjoin the Woods, as a guest, that might be asking a little too much.
Besides, you can always watch the proceedings through a Spell of Scrying. And if something goes wrong that requires your assistance, it'll just be a Gate away… although you might be better served by asking Navi to relocate the Machine to her demiplane or a Trial space or something.
In any case, Robin has no issue with you observing remotely, and promises to let you know the date, once it's been set.
You'll be looking forward to it. You could even invite your friends…
Is there anything else, whether about swords, sword-spirits, or otherwise, that you feel the need to discuss at this time?
Before you finish the meeting and the tea, you inquire of Robin if he has any spare works laying around the shop that would make suitable gifts for any of your friends.
"Not much, no," he replies after a moment's thought. "Or at least, nothing that would be appropriate, whether that's without some modifications or just in general. I mean, as a rule, I don't keep most of my creations around for very long once they're done – I do most of my work on commission, and people are generally happy to take possession of their orders as soon as possible. Plus, having a bunch of unclaimed magic items just sitting there when there's a swarm of fairies around is just asking for them to borrow stuff without remembering to tell you or to return it."
Urahara and Tessai both frown at that specific phrasing. "Is that not stealing?" the big man asks.
"In most cases, no, it really is just my younger siblings or the friends they invite over having short attention spans."
"Or being idiots," Briar adds.
"That, too," Robin admits. "Somebody decides that they want to play Hero's Companion, and of course, they need a whole bunch of magical equipment for the Hero to discover and wield against the Demon King's forces. Normally they'd use toys, shiny rocks, and other odds and ends for that, but when there's half a dozen ACTUAL magic items just laying around gathering dust… well."
Makes sense.
"By 'appropriate,' though," you say then, "do you mean stuff you wouldn't want kids to handle, or things that just wouldn't do them any real good?"
"A bit of both, plus the fact that they'd stand out like sore thumbs in public, if my read on this world's society is correct. Or am I wrong about folks going around openly armed or armored being unusual?"
No, he's got that part right. Granted, you always have your Blessed Blade close at hand, and usually your Warmage's Robe as well, while several of your other friends are also rarely far from their preferred weapons, but that's definitely not how the majority do things.
"That said," the smith goes on, "there are a few things that might be alright. I had an order a while back that called for a set of knives as back-up and close-quarters weapons for general anti-monster work. They're meant to work against Hyrulean monsters, so they might not be completely effective against Earthly demon-spawn, but they should still be better than most blades."
Hm. You should probably test one of those knives against something rather than just buy them sight unseen – that, and get an idea of what they look like, and whether or not some additional enchantment might be necessary to help them pass notice. Hyrulean weapons aren't gaudy or anything, but some of them are decorated, and even the plainest ones follow an aesthetic style very different from most modern Earthly knives.
Robin agrees to bring one of the knives along for a demonstration when you call him to pick up those swords. All you'll need to do is summon a minor demon. Or maybe catch one…?
What happened to the client who commissioned those, anyway?
You suspect you already know what happened, given it's in relation to Hyrule and all, but best to be certain.
"Did he get eaten by something?" you inquire.
"Who?" Robin frowns slightly.
"The client who originally commissioned the knives," you clarify. "Did he get eaten, or did something else happen to keep him from claiming his order?"
"Well, the worms had at him eventually," the smith answers wryly, "but no, he was sensible enough not to order a bunch of monster-killing blades and then go wandering into suspected monster territory before they were finished. Unfortunately, his good judgment didn't extend to that tournament he took part in. As I was told later, he took a couple of hard hits in the joust, one of them to the head, and then refused medical attention before joining the melee – where he got hit in the head again, collapsed on the field, and was trampled a bit for good measure." Robin shakes his head. "That was all the Goddesses wrote for him, neither his heir nor his order had been included in our contract, and nobody was interested in paying for the full batch of knives, though I did manage to sell one of them at the time and a couple more since."
Huh.
Well, you were right about the guy being dead, anyway – it's just about the only reliable way to get out of a deal with a Fae, and even then, it doesn't always work…
Nobody's going to miss a corpse-demon, right?
Bloodrats are so common and despised that nobody is likely to notice one of them going missing, much less care, and while you might have qualms about taking another sort of creature hostage for the purpose of testing a weapon on it, literally soulless and inherently evil undead demonic parasites are about as guilt-free a form of lab rat as you're ever likely to find.
Of course, you aren't about to bring one of the things into your home, which does slightly complicate the issue of acquiring a test subject, but you'll work something out.
Worse comes to worst, you can call Robin up at night, throw on some Illusion Magic, and go for a walk. The Hellmouth will undoubtedly provide.
With all of that out of the way, you turn to Urahara and Tessai and apologize for taking up so much of their time and then not including them in so much of the conversation.
"Don't worry on my account," the shopkeeper assures you. "Hearing about sword-spirits in another world was fascinating."
"And also an excuse to slack off while on the clock," Tessai observes.
"Now, Tessai, you know perfectly well that I don't need an excuse! …but yes. Speaking of, I wonder if we've had any customers since we came down here…?"
Sighing, you thank Terok and Robin for their time and insights, send them home, and then gather up Moblin to make your way back to Sunnydale.